by Dean Koontz
“The brink.”
“What brink?”
“Jane Hawk.”
“She’s a brink? She’s not a brink. She’s a dumb bitch who’s been damn lucky.”
“She could be a brink,” Jergen insists. “We’ve been racing after her full tilt for so long, we could suddenly find ourselves airborne with a long drop and nothing below but rocks.”
Radley Dubose doesn’t bother to reduce speed when he looks away from the road and pulls his sunglasses down his nose with one finger and peers at Jergen over the frames. “You’re too young to be going through a midlife crisis, Cubby.”
“I have a bad feeling.”
“Well, I have a good feeling.”
“I’ve never had a bad feeling like this before.”
Dubose repositions his sunglasses and looks at the road again and says, “Maybe you need testosterone shots.”
This is when Dubose receives a call from the Desert Flora Study Group. The Valleywide Waste Management truck—and probably Arlen Hosteen with it—has been spotted by the Airbus crew conducting low-altitude surveillance. The truck plowed into a house approximately one and a half miles from the VelociRaptor’s current position. FBI agents—Arcadians, of course—are already on the scene.
6
TRAVIS HAD BEEN HUDDLED ON the floor behind the driver’s seat, below window level. At his mother’s instruction, he now sat on the seat long enough to thrust his legs into a roomy gray duffel bag she provided, pulled it up to his shoulders as if it were a sleeping bag, and then returned to the floor, where he curled in the fetal position. Head toward the front of the vehicle, back to the port-side door, he faced the transmission hump that separated his half of the backseat from Cornell’s. He was small enough to fit nicely in that footwell.
Jane leaned through the open door and kissed his cheek. She pulled the duffel bag over his head and partly closed the drawcords at the top, leaving a large enough opening for air to enter.
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
“I’m good.”
The gray bag was emblazoned with a red cross in a white circle.
“Now, you’re just bandages, honey, lots of bandages and medical supplies. If we’re stopped, you don’t move.”
From within the duffel, he said, “Not a finger.”
“You’re a brave boy.”
“I’m an FBI kid.”
When Jane looked up from the Red Cross bag, she met Cornell Jasperson’s stare. His eyes glistened with torment.
He whispered too softly for Travis to hear, “I won’t let him die, won’t let him, won’t let him.”
The white plastic zip-ties around his wrists and ankles had been cut and mended with white tape. They looked secure, but they could be pulled apart with ease.
“Just play it like I explained,” she whispered, “and we’ll all make it.”
When she closed the door, she realized that, in the imploded house, still alive in the cab of the truck, the driver continued to pump the accelerator with demonic insistence. The engine roared and an underlying shrill grinding noise might have been the front axle spinning relentlessly against the joists that had not yet given way. If he was one of the adjusted people, something had gone so wrong with his nanoweb control mechanism that he was now perhaps as much of a machine as was the truck he had once commanded, stuck in gear and unable to shift himself into neutral.
She hurried around to the front passenger seat, where Luther had propped the fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun on its butt plate, barrel against the dashboard. She stood it between her legs, keeping it upright by pincering it with her knees, and pulled the door shut.
As they drove past the destroyed residence, the mounded wreckage abruptly cratered as apparently the joists succumbed. The basement swallowed the truck along with a few tons of debris, and the ruins disgorged a thick gray plume. The only portion of the structure remaining upright was a six-foot-wide section of stuccoed wall with a glassless centered window offering a view of churning dust, like a cenotaph standing as a memorial to a lost civilization.
In the backseat, Cornell said, “Good-bye, little blue house.”
Twenty yards north of the ruins, a Lexus SUV was parked aslant the shoulder of the road, its back end on the pavement, the driver’s door standing open. There appeared to be a dead man slumped in the front passenger seat.
“What’s this?” Luther wondered.
Jane figured that the man who had broken down the front door, before the arrival of the garbage truck, had driven the Lexus. Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you…whisper inside head?
To Luther, she said, “I’ll explain later. If I can. Just get us the hell out of here.”
They headed north on the leg of County Highway S3 that was called Borrego Springs Road.
7
ALTHOUGH HE WAS EXPECTING THE call, Bernie Riggowitz startled and almost dropped the phone when it rang. He said only, “Yes.”
To allow for an array of scenarios, they had prearranged four possible sites for a rendezvous, each identified only by a number.
Jane said, “One,” which meant she and Luther and Travis were en route in the Suburban with no one wounded and with every reason to believe they could get back to the parking lot, just outside of the campground gate, where they had parted earlier.
Because of the bizarre attack on Holden Hammersmith and the shooting that had left a dead man on the pool deck, Bernie was nervous about remaining at this facility for the fifteen or twenty minutes Luther might require for the drive from the southern end of the valley.
On the other hand, no one was answering 911 calls, suggesting local law enforcement must be either overwhelmed by events that Bernie could only imagine or compromised by the marshaled forces searching for Jane. If no one was dispatching ambulances or patrol cars, the RV park most likely wouldn’t be acrawl with police anytime soon.
In answer to her “One,” he said, “One,” and pressed END.
The call had been so short that the carrier-wave fishermen aboard the trolling airplane could not have had time to lock on either phone’s signal and track it to source.
Nevertheless, Bernie got out of the driver’s seat and stepped into the living room and put the burner on the floor and used a hammer to smash it, as Jane had instructed.
On terminating the call, she would have thrown her phone out the window of the Suburban.
They could no longer communicate. But come good luck or bad, they would not need to speak again until they were face-to-face.
8
DUBOSE DRIVES NORTH ON THE leg of County Highway S3 called Yanqui Pass Road, turns south on Borrego Springs Road, and after half a mile slows to look at the Lexus in which a corpse slumps in the passenger seat. He parks in front of the abandoned SUV.
Carter Jergen doesn’t want to join in his partner’s inspection of the Lexus. He wants to live and let live, or rather live and let the dead be dead. However, he doesn’t want to be told again that he needs testosterone shots.
Even with his newfound awareness of his mortality, he still needs Radley Dubose’s approval. This need is sick, and Jergen knows it’s sick, but it’s powerful. Dubose is a West Virginia hillbilly with the thinnest patina of sophistication acquired at a second-rate Ivy League school, a lousy dresser, a noisy eater, a mannerless rube who speaks competent French, yes, but with embarrassing pretension. Nonetheless, Dubose is cool. There’s no getting around it. He’s a self-possessed, imperturbable, totally cool dude. Cool has been a goal of Carter Jergen’s since middle school, but he’s made little progress toward coolness. Here he sits in an outfit that would meet with the approval of the best fashion magazine in the world, GQ, a few thousand dollars’ worth of clothes. He also wears a GraffStar Eclipse ultra-slim lightweight titanium wristwatch, and yet he knows in his heart that he is not in the least cool. In fact, when he looks at
the GraffStar Eclipse to see what hour it is, as this might be the hour when he dies, he is mortified that he can’t tell the time. The watch has an entirely black face, black hands, and black check marks instead of numbers, and at the moment, anyway, he might as well be looking into a collapsed star, into a black hole, strapped to his wrist. Dubose wears a Timex, or something even cheesier, with a plain white face and numbers, but Jergen is too embarrassed to ask him the time.
At the Lexus, Dubose opens the passenger door to have a closer look at the deceased, while Jergen stands at the driver’s door, pinching his nose against the stench. The dead man has voided his bowels and bladder, and his ears are full of blood.
“One of the fifty we brain-screwed last night,” Dubose says. “Name’s Nelson Luft.”
Dubose is at all times au courant with details like the names of the plebs, the rabble, the nobodies with whom they are currently involved. To Carter Jergen, this has always seemed to be proof that the big man lacks a well-honed mind that can focus on what’s most important. But now even this seems cool, evidence that Dubose can take in the whole picture while remaining focused on salient issues.
“His partner is Henry Lorimar. Henry must be somewhere near.” Moving toward the house, Dubose draws his pistol, suggesting that Henry is another Ramsey Corrigan. “Hackles up, Cubby.”
9
TRAVIS IN THE DUFFEL. CORNELL playing prisoner. Luther pushing the Suburban past the speed limit, relying on the lettered doors and roof to grant them safe passage, the pale desert burning away toward stark mountains in every direction, and an eerie sense of something unseen falling toward them at high speed…
Never in her life had Jane bought a lottery ticket or put a coin in a slot machine. She possessed an intuitive awareness of the odds of success and failure in any undertaking, and the odds for a gambler were terrible. If she had to be in the game, she wanted to be the one who stacked the deck or replaced the regulation ivories with a pair of loaded dice. For any operation like this, she thought it out ahead, went over it at least a hundred times in her mind. Once she was on the ground and everyone was in play, she relied equally on training and intuition, and she remained keen for any advantage that might present itself.
Yet she never dared to be certain of the plan’s efficacy while it was unfolding. The more distance they put between themselves and Cornell’s property and the closer they drew to Bernie and the motor home, the greater her tension grew.
She wasn’t superstitious. A broken mirror, a black cat crossing her path, spilled salt—nothing of that nature could ever disquiet her. However, although this world was beautiful beyond reckoning, it was also a dark world. Evil conspired in every corner, in sunshine and in shadow, and only a fool thought otherwise.
So much was at stake for her now, not only her own life but that of her child and those of her friends. For the moment, the personal took priority over the mere fate of humanity and the loss of its free will. She wished that she’d taken an acid reducer. Her hands were cold. Icy. Her chest felt tight. She had lost so much. Luther had lost more. Cornell was rich, but he’d lost the greater part of an ordinary life even before he’d been born. They were not going to lose anything more. This was a dark world, yes, but they were not going to allow the darkness to swallow them. Screw that.
As they approached a crossroad, Luther braked for three black Jeep Grand Cherokees, all arrayed with rooftop lightbars, all with sirens wailing, as they raced from east to west, one behind the other.
Jane read the shields on the doors of the Cherokees: “Homeland Security.”
Luther drove through the intersection in the wake of the Jeeps, and less than half a mile later they came upon an overturned Toyota pickup blackened by a recent fire. The driver had not gotten out alive. Two minutes later, they arrived at a deconstructed motorcycle and the grisly remains of its rider. And then a battered Mini Cooper hung up on the trunk of a cleaved but still standing oak tree.
“WTF?” Luther wondered.
When they discovered a red Honda lying on its flank and smashed roof-first into a retaining wall, as if it had been squashed by an army tank, Jane put both hands on the automatic shotgun that was braced between her knees.
Provided by her source in Reseda, the weapon was a slick knockoff of the Auto Assault-12 that had been developed in the United States. This one had been manufactured without license in Iran. Thirty-eight inches long, including a thirteen-inch barrel. The thirty-two-round drum magazine would empty in six seconds on full auto. Heavy. About fifteen pounds when fully loaded with 12-gauge shells. This one was loaded with slugs instead of buckshot. It fired from a locked breech and looked like a hard gun to manage, though it was in fact sweet. The weapon’s gas-operated system absorbed 80 percent of the recoil, and a spring pared off another 10 percent, so the kickback was a small fraction of that from an ordinary 12-gauge.
They were maybe ten minutes from the RV park where Bernie waited.
10
MAYBE HENRY LORIMAR IS PROWLING around, alive and demented, reduced to a reptile consciousness, but Jergen hopes the brain-screwed pleb is dead in the demolished house.
He and Dubose circle the structure, looking for indications, signs, manifestations, stains on the fabric of normalcy—the usual bullshit stuff. But it seems to Jergen that there is no smallest swatch of clean normalcy, that the fabric is stained from end to end, that everything they see is a sign. And what every sign seems to portend is death.
“Where’s the FBI?” Dubose wonders. “According to the pilot, he overflew an FBI Suburban here just minutes ago.”
“Maybe they weren’t ready to dig through the ruins. Dangerous work. What for, anyway? Who cares if Arlen Hosteen is dead in his garbage truck?”
In such situations, it is never clear if Dubose is considering anything Jergen says. The big man affects that profound-pondering expression that suggests Jergen is a feeble version of Dr. Watson with little to offer.
“And why,” Dubose broods, “did Hosteen come here of all places? What drew him?”
“Maybe he just didn’t like the color of the stucco.”
“What drew Henry Lorimar here?”
Behind the imploded garage, Dubose becomes fascinated with a garden hose. Between the threaded fitting at the end of the hose and the nozzle is one of those one-quart-bottle attachments that allows the water spray to be mixed with lawn fertilizer, pesticide, or other substances. Another bottle lies discarded and empty. The pea gravel is wet in places, not yet dried by the fierce afternoon sun.
“What the hell were they doing here?” Dubose wonders, pinching his chin with thumb and forefinger to convey a meditative mood.
Vague impressions in the thick carpet of pea gravel lead Jergen to risk an observation that might be worthy of mockery. “They aren’t clear, but aren’t these tire tracks?”
Studying the pebbled desert landscaping, Dubose says, “Could these be tire tracks? But from what vehicle? The FBI’s? What were they doing with the hose?”
“Washing the Suburban?” Jergen ventures.
“The entire valley’s descending into chaos, these brain-screwed freaks on a killing spree everywhere, and a couple agents decide to wash their wheels? I don’t think so, my friend, though I understand how deeply you Harvard men are into waxed and shiny transportation.”
Frowning, Dubose crouches and plucks from the gravel a lump of pasty-white substance that he works between thumb and forefinger. He sniffs the material.
Carter Jergen surveys their surroundings for any sign of Henry Lorimar or some other hapless specimen exemplifying the heretofore unanticipated dangers of the direct interfacing of the human brain with a computer.
“Chalky,” Dubose says of the pasty white stuff. “Smells maybe a little like paint.”
11
WITH ITS MASSES OF WITCHY gray hair and its wet breath, the storm seems to pursue the Rhino GX no
rth from the Gulf of Mexico, blasting bedevilments of wind-driven rain against the tailgate, howling curses at the side windows.
By now the average tropical depression would have exhausted its pyrotechnics; but this is weather as stage setting, and the Unknown Playwright employs it lavishly. As Egon Gottfrey at last arrives in Conroe and wends his way to the northeast perimeter of the city, the storm stabs the darkening day with dagger after dagger, and all the works of man and nature leap, leap, leap in stroboscopic terror.
This neighborhood of handsome houses features multi-acre lots on low rolling hills. In the eerie rapture of lashing silvery rain beribboned with serpentine fog and flickering with the goblin light of the tortured heavens, tall pine trees stand in groups as though they are sentinels on the watch for otherworldly threats that the storm might blow in from some parallel universe.
Egon Gottfrey drives past the target house, circles the block. He parks three doors south and across the street from the residence. A two-story brick beauty painted white. Set well back from the quiet street. Black shutters framing the windows. Four broad front steps leading up to a portico with six columns. In the dismal day, warm amber light is welcoming in several windows.
The wind fails, and now the downpour continues strictly on the vertical.
The Rhino stands under the boughs of an enormous pine, in front of vacant acreage. Gottfrey douses the headlights and switches off the wipers. But to maintain the air-conditioning, he doesn’t kill the engine. The vehicle’s windows are darkly tinted, and the day is too warm for his presence to be betrayed by exhaust vapor. In such a fierce storm, perhaps not even a single soul will be out walking and curious enough to wonder if the idling engine might suggest that someone is conducting surveillance.
On the passenger seat is the Medexpress carrier. The digital readout shows the interior temperature is forty-five degrees, more than cool enough to ensure that the ampules containing the control mechanisms will be effective when injected.
