by Dean Koontz
note, that Susan Jagger had been suffering from severe agoraphobia for sixteen months, that her career had been destroyed, that her marriage had fallen apart, and that she was enduring bouts of depression. Her protests that Susan was nevertheless far from suicidal sounded, even to Dusty, like nothing more than sad attempts to protect a good friend’s reputation and to prevent Susan’s memory from being tarnished.
Besides, Martie’s emotional self-reproach, voiced not so much to the police or to Dusty as to herself, made it clear that she was convinced this was suicide. She blamed herself for not being here when Susan needed her, for not calling Susan the previous evening and, perhaps, interrupting her with the razor blade in hand.
Before the authorities arrived, Dusty and Martie had agreed not to mention Susan’s story of a ghostly night visitor who left behind a very unghostly tablespoon or two of biological evidence. Martie thought this tale would only convince the police that Susan was unstable, even flaky, further damaging her reputation.
She also worried that broaching this sensitive subject would lead to questions requiring the revelation of her autophobia. She was loath to expose herself to their gimlet-eyed interrogation and cold psychologizing. She hadn’t harmed Susan, but if she began to expound on her conviction that she had an exceptional potential for violence, the detectives would put a pin in their determination of suicide and would bulldog her for hours until they were certain that her fear of self was as irrational as it seemed to be. And if the stress of all this brought on another panic attack while they were present to witness it, the cops might even decide that she was a danger to herself and to others, committing her against her will to a psychiatric ward for seventy-two hours, which was within their authority.
“I couldn’t tolerate being in a place like that,” Martie had told Dusty before the first police arrived. “Locked up. Watched. I couldn’t handle it.”
“Won’t happen,” he had promised.
He shared her reasons for wanting to keep quiet about Susan’s phantom rapist, but he had another reason, too, which he hadn’t yet disclosed to her. He was convinced, as Martie only wished she were, that Susan had not killed herself, at least not with volition or with awareness of what she was doing. If he revealed this to the police, however, and even made a failed attempt to convince them that here was an extraordinary case involving faceless conspirators and wildly effective techniques of mind control, then he and Martie would be dead, one way or another, before the week was out.
And this was already Wednesday.
Since discovering Dr. Yen Lo in that novel, and especially since discovering the paperback magically returned to his shaky hands after it fell onto the waiting-room floor, Dusty had been burdened by a rapidly growing sense of danger. A clock was ticking. He couldn’t see the clock, couldn’t hear it, but he could feel the reverberation of each hard tick in his bones. Time was running out for him and for Martie. Indeed, with the weight of his fear now grown so great, he was concerned that the cops would detect his anxiety, misunderstand it, and grow suspicious.
Susan’s mother, who lived in Arizona with a new husband, was notified by telephone, as was her father, who lived in Santa Barbara with a new wife. Both were on their way. After the case detective, Lieutenant Bizmet, had quizzed Martie as to the seriousness of the estrangement between Susan and her husband, he called Eric, too, got an answering machine, and left his name, rank, and number, but not any news.
Bizmet, a formidable bulk with buzz-cut blond hair and a stare as direct as a drill bit, was telling Dusty that they were no longer needed here, when Martie was hit by a spasm of autophobia.
Dusty recognized the signs of the seizure. The sudden alarm in her eyes. The pinched expression. Her face a whiter shade of pale.
She dropped to the sofa from which she had just risen, bent forward, hugging herself and rocking, as she had done in the car earlier, shuddering and gasping for breath.
This time, in the company of cops, he wasn’t able to talk her down with reminiscences of their dating days. He could only stand by helplessly, praying that this would not escalate into an all-out panic attack.
To Dusty’s surprise, Lieutenant Bizmet mistook Martie’s autophobic misery for another seizure of grief. He stood looking down at her with evident dismay, awkwardly spoke a few consoling words, and cast a sympathetic expression at Dusty.
Some of the other cops glanced at Martie and then returned to their various tasks and conversations, their bloodhound instinct failing to catch the scent.
“Does she drink?” Bizmet asked Dusty.
“Does she what?” he replied, so tense that he was at first unable to puzzle out the meaning of the word drink, as though it were Swahili. “Oh, drink, yes, a little. Why?”
“Take her to a nice bar, pour a few into her, blur the edge off her nerves.”
“Good advice,” Dusty agreed.
“But not you,” Bizmet amended with a scowl.
Heart leaping, Dusty said, “What?”
“A few drinks for her but just one for you if you’re driving.”
“Sure, of course. Never had a citation. Don’t ever want one.”
Martie rocked, shook, gasped, and had the presence of mind to throw in a few stifled sobs of grief. She shook off the seizure in a minute or two, as she’d done in the car on the way here.
With Bizmet’s thanks and sympathies, after only one hour in the apartment, they were on their way into a day grown dark.
The afternoon’s bluster had not faded with the early winter twilight. Its cool breath scented with Pacific brine and with the iodine in snarls of seaweed that lay withering on the nearby shore, the wind harried Dusty and Martie, huffing and squealing as though with accusations of cover-up and guilt.
In the chaotic rattle and click of clashing palm fronds, Dusty heard the half-masked, rhythmic ticking of a clock. He heard it, too, in their footsteps on the promenade, in the action of a three-foot-high decorative windmill that stood on the patio of one of the ocean-facing houses that they passed, and between each half of his two-part heartbeat. Time running out.
55
Davy Crockett was bravely defending the Alamo, but not solely with the support of his usual compatriots. This time Davy had the help of Eliot Ness and a considerable force of G-men.
One might expect that submachine guns, had they been available to the stalwart men at the Alamo, would have altered the historical outcome of that battle in 1836. After all, the Gatling gun, which was the first crude version of the machine gun, wouldn’t be invented for another twenty-six years. Indeed, automatic rifles weren’t in use at that time, and the most-advanced weapons in the hands of the combatants were muzzle-loaders.
Unfortunately for the defenders of the Alamo, this time they were under siege by both Mexican soldiers and a bunch of ruthless Prohibition-era gangsters with submachine guns of their own. The combination of Al Capone’s vicious cunning and General Santa Anna’s talent for military strategy might be more than Crockett and Ness could handle.
The doctor briefly considered complicating this epic battle by introducing spacemen and futuristic weapons from his Galaxy Command collection. He resisted this childish temptation, because experience had taught him that the greater number of anachronistic elements he combined on a board, the less satisfying the game. To be engrossing, a play session required him to control his flamboyant imagination and stick strictly to a scenario with one clever but believable concept. Frontiersmen, Mexican soldiers, G-men, gangsters, and spacemen would be just too silly.
Dressed comfortably in black ninja-style pajamas with a scarlet silk belt, barefoot, the doctor slowly circled the board, craftily analyzing the positions of the opposing armies. As he reconnoitered, he rattled a pair of dice in a casting cup.
His immense game board was actually an eight-foot-square table that stood in the center of the room. These sixty-four square feet of terrain could be redesigned for each new game, using his large collection of custom-crafted topographical elem
ents.
The big room, thirty feet square, otherwise contained only an armchair and a small table to hold a telephone and snacks.
Currently, the only illumination came from the down-lights in the ceiling directly over the game board. The rest of the room lay in shadows.
All four walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling display shelves on which were stored hundreds of plastic playsets in their original boxes. Most of the boxes were in mint or near-mint condition, and none could be rated less than excellent. Each set contained all its original complement of figures, buildings, and accessories.
Ahriman acquired only Marx playsets, those produced by Louis Marx during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The miniature figures in these sets were wonderfully detailed, beautifully produced, and sold for hundreds—even thousands—of dollars on the rare-toy market. In addition to the Alamo and Untouchables sets, his collection included Adventures of Robin Hood, American Patrol, Armored Attack, Ben Hur, Battleground, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, Fort Apache, Roy Rogers Rodeo Ranch, Tom Corbett Space Academy, and scores of others, many in duplicate and triplicate, which allowed him to populate the tabletop with a large cast of characters.
This evening, the doctor was in an exceptionally fine mood. The game on the board before him promised to be tremendous fun. Better yet, his other and far bigger game, being played in the world beyond this room, was getting more interesting by the hour.
Mr. Rhodes was reading The Manchurian Candidate. Most likely, Dustin would lack the imagination and the intellect to absorb all the clues in that novel and wouldn’t be able to build upon them enough to understand the web in which he was caught. His prospects of saving himself and his wife were still dismal, though better than they had been before he’d cracked open the book.
Only a hopeless narcissist, megalomaniac, or other psychotic would engage in any sport year after year, if he knew in advance that he would win every time. For the true—and well-balanced—gamesman, an element of doubt, at least a soupçon of suspense, was required to make the game worth playing. He must test his skills and challenge chance, not to be fair to the other players—fairness was for fools—but to keep himself sharp and to ensure amusement.
Always, the doctor salted his scenarios with traps for himself. Often, the traps were not triggered, but the possibility of disaster, when it loomed, was invigorating and kept him nimble. He loved this impish aspect of himself, and he indulged it.
He had, for instance, permitted Susan Jagger to be aware of the semen that he left in her. He could have instructed her to remain oblivious of this distasteful evidence, and she would have blocked it from her mind. By allowing her awareness and by suggesting that she direct her suspicion at her estranged husband, the doctor had established powerful character dynamics, the consequences of which he could not predict. Indeed, this had led to the near thing with the videotape, which was the last development that he could have imagined.
Among other traps in this game was The Manchurian Candidate. He had given the paperback to Martie, instructing her to forget from whom she had received it. He implanted the notion that during each of Susan’s sessions, Martie was reading a little of the novel, though she was actually reading none at all, and he inadequately supported this suggestion by seeding in her a few sentences of an improbably general nature, which she could use to describe the story if Susan or anyone else asked her about it. If Martie’s feeble, wooden description of the book had puzzled Susan, perhaps she might have delved into it, discovering connections to her real-life dilemma. Martie herself was not strictly forbidden from reading the novel, only discouraged from doing so, and eventually she might overcome that discouragement when Ahriman least expected. Instead, for whatever reason, Mr. Rhodes had gone fishing in this fiction.
Where does fiction end and reality begin? That is the essence of the game.
As the doctor circled the big table, wondering whether Crockett or Capone would be victorious, his black ninja pajamas rustled with silken sibilance. Rattle-rattle, the dice in the cup.
If asked, the interior designers would say that the theme was contemporary bistro, Italian modern. They wouldn’t be lying, or necessarily disingenuous, but their answer would be beside the point. All this glossy dark wood and black marble, all these sleek polished surfaces, the vulviform amber-onyx sconces, the long back-bar mural of a Rousseau-like jungle with vegetation more lush than any in reality and with mysterious feline eyes peering from between rain-jeweled leaves—all this spoke to one theme and one theme only: sex.
Half the place was a restaurant, the other half a bar, connected by a massive archway flanked by mahogany columns on marble plinths. This early in the evening, with workers just getting out of offices, the bar was crowded with affluent young singles on the prowl more aggressively than any jungle cats, but the dining room wasn’t yet busy.
The hostess seated Dusty and Martie in a booth with such high backs on its leather seats that it was virtually a private space, open on only one side to the room.
Martie was uneasy about being in such a public place, chancing utter mortification if she were stricken by an all-stops-pulled panic attack. She drew strength from the fact that her recent seizures, since leaving Dr. Ahriman’s office, had been comparatively mild and of brief duration.
In spite of the risk of humiliation, she would rather eat here than in the shelter of her kitchen. She was reluctant to go home, where the untidied wreckage in the garage would remind her of her demented, manic determination to rid her house of potential weapons.
More daunting than the garage or other reminders of her loss of control, the answering machine waited in her study. On it, as sure as Halloween came in October, was a message from Susan, dating to the previous evening.
Duty and honor would not permit Martie to erase the tape without hearing it, nor was she able to allow herself to delegate that grim responsibility to Dusty. She owed Susan this personal attention.
Before she would be able to listen to that beloved voice and be prepared to bear the greater guilt that it would surely induce, she needed to polish up her courage. And wash down some fortitude.
As law-abiding citizens, they followed Lieutenant Bizmet’s advice: a bottle of Heineken for Dusty, Sierra Nevada for Martie.
With her first chug of beer, she chased a Valium, in spite of the warning on the pharmacy bottle, which cautioned about mixing benzodiazepines and alcohol.
Live hard, die young. Or die young anyway. Those seemed to be the choices facing them.
“If only I’d called her back last night,” Martie said.
“You weren’t in any condition to call her. You couldn’t have helped her anyway.”
“Maybe, if I’d heard it in her voice, I could have gotten help for her.”
“It wouldn’t have been in her voice. Not what you mean, not some worse note of depression, not suicidal despair.”
“We’ll never know,” she said bleakly.
“I know, all right,” Dusty insisted. “You wouldn’t have heard suicidal despair because she didn’t commit suicide.”
Ness was already dead, an early casualty, a devastation to the defenders of the Alamo!
The noble lawman had been killed by a paper clip.
The doctor removed the little plastic cadaver from the board.
To determine which game piece in which army would open fire next, and to decide what weapon would be used, Ahriman employed a complex formula with calculations that derived from the roll of the dice and a blind draw from a deck of playing cards.
The only weapons were a paper clip fired from a rubber band and a marble shot with a snap of the thumb. Of course, these two simple devices could symbolize many dreadful deaths: by arrow, by gun, by cannonade, by bowie knife, by a hatchet in the face….
Regrettably, it was not in the nature of plastic-toy figures to commit suicide, and it would be an unconscionable insult to America and its people to suggest that men like Davy Crockett and Eliot Ness were even capable of consideri
ng self-destruction. These board games, therefore, lacked that intriguing dimension.
In the bigger game, where plastic was flesh and blood was real, another suicide would have to be engineered soon. Skeet had to go.
Initially, when the doctor had conceived this game, he believed that Holden “Skeet” Caulfield would be the star player, neck deep in the slaughter, come the final bloodbath. His face first on all the news programs. His screwy name immortalized in criminal legend, as infamous as Charles Manson.
Perhaps because his brain had been scorched with so many drugs since childhood, Skeet proved to be a poor subject for programming. His powers of concentration—even when in a hypnotic state!—were not good, and he had difficulty subconsciously retaining the rudimentary code lines of his psychological conditioning. Instead of the usual three programming sessions, the doctor had needed to devote six to Skeet, and subsequently the need had arisen for a few shorter—but unprecedented—repair sessions in which deteriorating aspects of his program were reinstalled.
Occasionally, Skeet even surrendered himself for control after hearing only Dr. Yen Lo, the activating name, and Ahriman didn’t need to lead him through the haiku. The security risk posed by this easy access was intolerable.
Sooner rather than later, Skeet would have to take a paper clip, figuratively speaking. He should have died Tuesday morning. Later this evening, for sure.
The dice tumbled to a nine. The deck of cards gave up a queen of diamonds.
Swiftly calculating, Ahriman determined that the next shot would come from a figure positioned at the southwest corner of the Alamo roof: one of Eliot Ness’ loyal subordinates. No doubt, the grieving G-man would be hot for vengeance. His weapon was a marble, which had greater lethal potential than a mere paper clip, and with the benefit of his high vantage point, he might be able to deliver extreme woe to the surrounding Mexican soldiers and to the gangland scumbags who would rue the day they agreed to do Al Capone’s dirty work.
“She didn’t commit suicide,” Dusty repeated, speaking softly, leaning forward conspiratorially in the booth, even though the roar of voices from the bar prevented anyone from eavesdropping.
The certainty in his voice left Martie speechless. Slashed wrists. No indications of a struggle. A suicide note in Susan’s handwriting. The determination of self-destruction was irrefutable.
Dusty held up his right hand, and with each point he made, he let a finger spring from his clenched fist. “One—yesterday at New Life, Skeet was activated by the name Dr. Yen Lo and then together we stumbled to the haiku that allowed me to access his subconscious for programming.”
“Programming,” she said doubtfully. “This is still so hard to believe.”
“Programming is how I see it. He was waiting for instructions. Missions, he called them. Two—when I became frustrated with him and told him he should give me a break and just go to sleep, he went out instantly. He obeyed what seemed like an impossible order. I mean, how can you drop off to sleep in a blink, at will? Three—earlier yesterday, when he was going to jump off the roof, he said someone had told him to jump.”
“Yeah, the angel of death.”
“Granted, he was whacked on something. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some truth in what he said. Four—in The Manchurian Candidate, the brainwashed soldier is capable of committing murder on the direction of his controller, then forgetting every detail of what he’s done, but, get this, he’ll also follow instructions to kill himself if necessary.”
“It’s just a thriller.”
“Yeah, I know. The writing’s good. The plot is entertaining, and the characters are colorful. You’re enjoying it.”
Because she had no answer to that, Martie drank more beer.
General Santa Anna was dead, and history was being rewritten. Al Capone must now assume command of the combined forces of Mexico and the Chicago underworld.
The goody-two-shoes bunch defending the Alamo had better not start celebrating just yet. Santa Anna was a formidable strategist; but Capone had him beat for sheer ruthlessness.
Once, the real Capone, not this plastic figure, had tortured a snitch with a hand drill. He locked the guy’s head in a machine-shop vice, and with henchmen holding the turn-coat’s arms and legs, old Al had personally cranked the drill handle, driving a diamond-tipped bit through the terrified man’s forehead.
Once, the doctor had killed a woman with a drill, but it had been a Black Decker power model.
Dusty said, “Condon’s book is fiction, sure, but you get a sense that the psychological-control techniques described in it are based on sound research, that what he proposes as fiction was pretty much possible even at that time. And Martie, the book is set almost fifty years in the past. Before we had jet airliners.”
“Before we went to the moon.”
“Yeah. Before we had cell phones, microwave ovens, and fat-free potato chips with a diarrhea warning on the bag. Just imagine what specialists in mind control might be able to do now, with unlimited resources and no conscience.” He paused for Heineken. Then: “Five—Dr. Ahriman said it was incredible that both you and Susan should be stricken with such extreme phobias. He—”
“You know, he’s probably right that mine is related to Susan’s, that it comes from my sense of failure to help her, from my—”
Dusty shook his head and folded his fingers into a fist again. “Or your phobia and hers were implanted, programmed into you as part of an experiment or for some other reason that makes no damn sense.”
“But Dr. Ahriman never even suggested—”
