Strangers by Dean Koontz
along. He and Dom went outside again to move all the vehicles around back.
In the kitchen, Ned and Sandy had nearly finished preparing and packaging the sandwiches that everyone would be issued for dinner.
Now they had only to wait for Faye and Ginger.
The snow flurries intermittently surrendered to furious but short-lived squalls. The day dimmed. By two-forty, the squalls turned to steady snow that, in spite of a complete cessation of wind, reduced visibility to a few hundred feet. Out on the barrens, the camouflaged observers were probably picking up their gear and moving closer to the motel.
Jack checked his watch more frequently. He knew time was running out. But he had no way of knowing how fast it might be running out.
While Lieutenant Horner repaired the sabotaged polygraph in the security office, Falkirk lectured the Depository’s chief of security and his assistant—Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms—letting them know they were on his list of possible traitors. He made two enemies, but that didn’t matter. He did not want them to like him—only to respect and fear him.
He had not yet finished chewing out Fugata and Helms when General Alvarado arrived. The general was a lardass with a pot gut, fingers like sausages, and jowls. He stormed into the security office in a red-faced outrage, having just heard the bad news from Dr. Miles Bennell: “Is it true, Colonel Falkirk? By God, is it true? Have you actually taken control of VIGILANT and made prisoners of us all?”
Sternly but in a tone that could not be construed as disrespectful, Leland informed Alvarado that he had the authority to include the secret program in the security computer and to activate it at his discretion. Alvarado demanded to know whose authority, and Leland said, “General Maxwell D. Riddenhour, Chief of Staff of the Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” Alvarado said he knew perfectly well who Riddenhour was, but he did not believe that the colonel’s mentor in this matter was the Chief of Staff himself. “Sir, why don’t you call him and ask?” Leland suggested. He took a card out of his wallet and gave it to Alvarado. “That’s General Riddenhour’s number.”
“I have the Staff HQ number,” Alvarado said scornfully.
“Sir, that’s not Staff HQ. That’s General Riddenhour’s unlisted home line. If he’s not in his office, he’d want you to contact him on the unlisted phone. After all, this is a deadly serious matter, sir.”
Burning a brighter red, Alvarado stalked out, the card pinched between thumb and forefinger and held away from his side as if it were an offensive object. He was back in fifteen minutes, no longer flushed but pale. “All right, Colonel, you have the authority you claim. So ... I guess you’re in command of Thunder Hill for the time being.”
“Not at all, sir,” Leland said. “You’re still the CO.”
“But if I’m a prisoner—”
Leland interrupted. “Sir, your orders take precedence as long as they don’t directly conflict with my authority to guarantee that no dangerous persons—no dangerous creatures—escape from Thunder Hill.”
Alvarado shook his head in amazement. “According to Miles Bennell, you have this crazy idea that we’re all ... some kind of monsters.” The general had used the most melodramatic word he could think of, with the intent of belittling Leland’s position.
“Sir; as you know, one or more people in this facility attempted, by indirection, to bring some of the witnesses back to the Tranquility, evidently with the hope that the witnesses will remember what they’ve been made to forget and will create a media circus that’ll force us to reveal what we’ve hidden. Now, these traitors are probably just well-intentioned men, most likely members of Bennell’s staff, who simply believe the public should be informed. But the possibility also exists that they’ve got other and darker motives.”
“Monsters,” Alvarado repeated sourly.
When the polygraph was repaired, Leland charged Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms with interrogating everyone in Thunder Hill who had knowledge of the special secret harbored there for more than eighteen months. “If you screw up again,” Leland warned them, “I’ll have your heads.” If they failed again to find the man who’d sent the Polaroids to the witnesses, he would view their failure as one more bit of evidence that rot had spread widely through the Thunder Hill staff, and that it was not ordinary human corruption but the result of an extraordinary and terrifying infection. Their failure would cost them their lives.
At one-forty-five, Leland and Lieutenant Horner returned to Shenkfield, leaving the Depository’s entire staff locked deep in the bosom of the earth. Upon his return to his windowless office in that other underground facility, the colonel received several doses of bad news, all courtesy of Foster Polnichev, the head of the Chicago office of the FBI.
First, Sharkle was dead out in Evanston, Illinois, which should have been good news, but he had taken his sister, brother-in-law, and an entire SWAT team with him. The siege of Sharkle’s house had become national news due to the extreme violence of its conclusion. The blood-hungry media would be focused on O’Bannon Lane until endless rehashing of the story drained it of thrills. Worse, among Sharkle’s mad ravings, there had been enough truth to lead a perceptive and aggressive reporter to Nevada, to the Tranquility, and perhaps all the way to Thunder Hill.
Worst of all, Foster Polnichev reported that “something almost ... well ... supernatural is happening here.” A stabbing and shooting in an Uptown apartment, involving a family named Mendoza, had caused such a sensation within the city’s police department that newspaper reporters and television crews had virtually set siege to the tenement house hours ago. Evidently, Winton Tolk, the officer whose life had been saved by Brendan Cronin, had brought a stabbed child back from near-death.
Incredibly, Brendan Cronin had passed his own amazing talents to Tolk. But what else had he passed on to the black policeman? There might be only a wondrous new power in Winton Tolk ... or something dark and dangerous, alive and inhuman, living within the cop.
The worst possible scenario was, after all, unfolding. Leland was half-sick with apprehension as he listened to Polnichev.
According to the FBI agent, Tolk was giving no interviews to the press and was, in fact, now in seclusion in his own house, where another mob of reporters had gathered. Sooner or later, however, Tolk would agree to speak with the press, and he would mention Brendan Cronin, and from there they would eventually find the link to the Halbourg girl.
The Halbourg girl. That was another nightmare. Upon receiving this morning’s news of Tolk’s unexpected healing powers, Polnichev had gone to the Halbourgs’ home to determine if Emmy had acquired unusual powers subsequent to her own miraculous recovery. What he found there beggared description, and he immediately isolated the entire Halbourg family from the press and public before their secret was discovered. Now all five Halbourgs were in an FBI safe-house, under the watchful eyes of six agents who’d been informed only that the family was as much to be feared as protected and that no agent was to be alone with any member of the family at any time. If the Halbourgs made threatening or unusual moves, they would all be killed instantly:
“But I think it’s all pointless now,” Polnichev said on the phone from Chicago. “I think we’ve lost control of it. It’s spread, and we’ve no hope of containing it again. So we might as well call an end to the cover-up, go public.”
“Are you mad?” Leland demanded.
“If it’s come to the point where we have to kill people, lots of people, like the Halbourgs and the Tolks and all the witnesses there in Nevada, in order just to keep the story contained, then the cost of containment has gotten too damn high.”
Leland Falkirk was furious. “You’ve lost sight of what’s at stake here. My God, man, we’re no longer merely trying to keep the news from the public. That’s almost immaterial now. Now, we’re trying to protect our entire species from obliteration. If we go public, and if then we decide to use violence to contain the infection, every goddamn politician and bleeding-heart will be second-gues
“But I think what’s being proven here is that the danger isn’t that great,” Polnichev said. “Sure, I’ve told the men guarding the Halbourgs to regard them as a threat, but I don’t really believe they’re a danger to us. That little Emmy ... she’s a darling, not a monster. I don’t know how the power got in Cronin or how he conveyed it to the girl, but I’m almost willing to bet my life that the power is the only thing inside the child. The only thing inside any of them. If you could meet Emmy and watch her, Colonel! She’s a delight. All evidence points to the fact that we should regard what’s happening as the greatest event in the history of mankind.”
“Of course,” Leland said coldly, “that’s what an enemy like this would want us to believe. If we can be convinced that accommodation and surrender are a great blessing, we’ll be conquered without a fight,”
“But Colonel, if Cronin and Corvaisis and Tolk and Emmy have been infected, if they’re no longer human, or at least no longer like you and me, they wouldn’t advertise by performing miraculous cures and feats of telekinesis. They’d keep their amazing abilities secret in order to spread their infection to more people without detection.”
Leland was unmoved by that argument. “We don’t know exactly how this thing works. Maybe a person, once infected, surrenders control to the parasite, becomes a slave. Or to answer the point you’ve just made, maybe the relationship between the host and parasite is benign, mutually supportive—and maybe the host doesn’t even know the parasite is inside him, which would explain why the Halbourg girl and the others don’t know where their power comes from. But in either case, that person is no longer strictly human. And in my estimation, Polnichev, that person can no longer be trusted. Not an inch. Now, for God’s sake, you’ve got to take the entire Tolk family into custody, too. Isolate them at once.”
“As I told you, Colonel, journalists surround the Tolk house. If I go in there with agents and take the Tolks into custody in front of a score of reporters, our cover-up is blown. And although I no longer believe in the cover-up, I’m not going to sabotage it. I know my duty.”
“You’ve at least got agents watching the house?”
“Yes.”
“What about the Mendozas? If Tolk infected the boy the way Cronin apparently infected him ...”
“We’re watching the Mendozas,” Polnichev said. “Again, we can’t make a bold move because of the reporters.”
The other problem was Father Stefan Wycazik. The priest had been to the Mendozas’ apartment and then to the Halbourg house before Foster Polnichev had known what was going on at either location. Later, an FBI agent had seen Wycazik at barricades near the Sharkle house in Evanston, at the very moment when Sharkle had detonated his bomb. But no one knew where he had gone; no one had seen him in almost six hours. “Obviously he’s putting it together, piece by piece. One more reason to call off the cover-up and go public, before we’re all caught in the act anyway.”
Leland Falkirk suddenly felt that everything was flying apart, out of control, and he had trouble breathing, for he had dedicated his life to the philosophy and principles of control, unremitting iron control in all things. Control was what mattered more than anything else. First came self-control. You had to learn to exert unfaltering control over your desires and ignoble impulses, or otherwise you risked destruction by one vice or another: alcohol, drugs, sex. He had learned that much from his ultra-religious parents, who had begun drumming the lesson into him before he was even old enough to understand what they were saying. And you also had to control your intellectual processes; you had to force yourself to rely always on logic and reason, for it was human nature to drift into superstition, into patterns of behavior based on irrational assumptions. That was a lesson he had learned in spite of his parents, from attending Pentecostal services with them and watching in shock and fear as they fell to the floor of the church or revival tent, where they screamed and thrashed in wild abandon, transported by what they claimed was the spirit of God—though it was actually just hysterical Holy Rollerism. You had to control your fear, too, or you could not hold on to sanity for long. He had taught himself to conquer his fear of his parents, who had routinely beat and punished him while claiming it was for his own good because the devil was in him and must be driven out. One way of learning to control fear was by subjecting yourself to pain and thereby increasing your tolerance for it, because you couldn’t be afraid of anything if you were sure you could bear the pain it might cause you. Control. Leland Falkirk controlled himself, his life, his men, and any assignment that he was given, but now he felt control of this situation slipping quickly out of his grasp, and he was closer to panic than he had been in more than forty years.
“Polnichev,” he said, “I’m going to hang up, but you stand by your phone. My man will set up a scrambled conference call between me, you, your director, Riddenhour in Washington, and our White House contact. We’re going to agree on a tough policy and the best way of implementing it. Damned if I’ll let you gutless wonders fall apart on this. We’ll keep control. We’re going to eradicate the infected people if that’s necessary, even if some of them are cute little girls and priests, and we’re going to save our asses. By God, I’m going to make sure we do!”
When Faye and Ginger returned from Elko at two-forty-five in the motel van, the green-brown car followed them down the exit ramp from 1-80. Ginger was half-convinced it would swing into the motel lot and park beside them, but it stopped along the county road, a hundred feet short of the Tranquility, and waited in the slanting snowfall.
Faye parked in front of the motel office door, and Dom and Ernie came out to help them unload the purchases they had made in Elko: ski suits, ski masks, boots, and insulated gloves for those who didn’t already have them, based on sizes everyone had provided last night; two new semiautomatic .20-gauge shotguns; ammunition for those weapons and the others; backpacks, flashlights, two compasses, a small acetylene torch with two bottles of gas, and a number of other items.
Ernie embraced Faye, and Dom embraced Ginger. Simultaneously, both men said, “I was worried about you.” And Ginger heard herself saying, “I was worried about you, too,” even as Faye said it. Ernie and Faye kissed. With snowflakes frosting his eyebrows and melting into jeweled beads of water on his lashes, Dom lowered his face to Ginger’s, and they kissed, too—a sweet, warm, lingering kiss. Somehow, it was as right for her and Dom to greet each other in such a fashion as it was for Faye and Ernie, husband and wife. That rightness was part of everything Ginger had felt for him since arriving in Elko two days ago.
When everything had been unloaded from the van and stashed in the Blocks’ apartment, all ten members of the Tranquility family adjourned to the diner. Jack, Ernie, Dom, Ned, and Faye brought guns.
As she pulled some chairs up to the table where Brendan and Dom had tested their powers last night, Ginger noticed that the priest regarded the weapons with a mixture of displeasure and fear, that he seemed far less optimistic than yesterday, when his discovery of his amazing gift had sent his spirit soaring. “No dream last night,” he explained when she asked the reason for his grim mood. “No golden light, no voice calling to me. You know, Ginger, I told myself all along that I didn’t believe I was being called here by God. But deep down that is what I believed. Father Wycazik was right: There was always a core of faith in me. Recently, I’ve been edging back to an acceptance of God. Not only acceptance: I need Him again. But now ... no dream, no golden light ... as if God’s abandoned me.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Ginger said, taking his hand as if she could absorb his distress by osmosis and leave him feeling better. “If you believe in God, He never abandons you. Right? You can abandon God, but never the other way around. He always forgives, always loves. Isn’t that what you tell a parishioner?”
Brendan smiled wanly. “Sounds like you went to seminary .”
She said, “The dream was probably just a
The priest’s face brightened a little.
They took up seats around the table.
With dismay, Ginger saw that Marcie’s condition had worsened since last night. The girl sat with her head bent, face half-hidden by her thick black hair staring at her tiny hands, which lay limply in her lap. She mumbled: “Moon, moon, the moon, moon....” She was in all-out pursuit of those memories of July 6, which remained teasingly on the edge of her awareness and which, by their tantalizing inaccessibility, had drawn her into obsessive contemplation of their half-glimpsed forms.
“She’ll come out of it,” Ginger told Jorja, knowing how empty and foolish the statement was, yet unable to think of anything else to say.
“Yes,” Jorja said, apparently not finding it empty or foolish but reassuring. “She has to come out of it. She has to.”
Jack and Ned stood the plywood panel against the door and braced it with a table again, assuring freedom from eavesdroppers.
Quickly, Faye and Ginger told of their visit to the Jamisons’ ranch and of being followed by the two men in the Plymouth. Ernie and Dom had been followed, too.
This news made Jack edgy. “If they’re coming out in the open to keep tabs on us, that means they’re almost ready to grab us again.”
Ned Sarver said, “Maybe I’d just better stand watch, make sure nobody’s moving in on us already.” Jack agreed, and Ned went to the door and put one eye against the narrow crack between the plywood and the door frame, looking out at the snow-swept parking lot.
At Jack’s request, Dom and Ernie explained what they had found on their tour of the Thunder Hill Depository’s perimeter fence.
Jack listened carefully, asking a number of questions for which Ginger could not always discern the purpose. Were any thin bare wires woven through the chainlink fence? What were the fenceposts like? Finally, he asked, “No guard dogs or men on patrol?”
Dom said, “No. There’d have been prints in the snow along the fence. Must be heavy electronic security. I’d hoped we’d be able to get on the grounds—but not after I got a close-up view of the place.”
“Oh, we’ll get on the grounds all right,” Jack said. “The tricky part will be getting inside the Depository itself.”
Dom and Ernie looked at him with such astonishment that Ginger knew Thunder Hill must have looked formidable, indeed.
“Get inside?” Dom said.
“No can do,” Ernie said.
“If they rely on multiple electronic systems for the perimeter security,” Jack said, “they’ll very likely also rely on electronics at the main entrance. That’s the way it is these days. Everyone’s dazzled by high-tech. Oh, sure, Thunder Hill will have a guard at the front gate, but he’ll be so used to depending on computers, video cameras, and other gadgets that he’ll be lax. So we might be able to surprise him, get by him. Once inside, though, I don’t know how far we can go or what we might be able to get a peek at before we’re nailed.”
Ginger said, “But how can you be so sure—”
“For eight years,” Jack reminded her, “getting into and back out of difficult places was my line of work. And it was the government that originally trained me, so I know their routines and tricks.” He winked his misaligned eye. “I have some tricks of my own.”
Jorja spoke up, obviously more than a little distressed: “But you’ve as much as said you’ll be caught in there.”
“Oh, yes,” Jack said.
“But then what’s the point of going in?” Jorja asked.
He had it all planned out, and Ginger listened at first in utter bafflement and then with growing admiration for his sense of strategy.
Jack laid out the details of his plan as if it were a foregone conclusion that the other nine members of the group would agree to do precisely what he told them, regardless of the risks involved. He employed every trick of coercion and leadership that he knew, not because he was unwilling to consider alternatives to his strategy or modifications of it, but because there simply was no time to explore other courses of action. His intellect and his instinct had the same message for him: Time is running out. So he explained to the rest of the Tranquility family that:
Within the next hour, everyone—except Dom, Ned, and Jack himself—would pile in the Cherokee, leave overland from the rear of the motel, and drive into Elko by a roundabout route, thereby slipping the waiting tails. In Elko the group would split up. Ernie, Faye, and Ginger would drive the Cherokee north to Twin Falls, Idaho, then to Pocatello. From there they would arrange to fly to Boston, where they would stay with Ginger’s friends, the Hannabys. They should get to Boston late Thursday or early Friday. Immediately upon their arrival, they would tell the Hannabys every detail of what they had discovered. Then, within an hour or two, Ginger would call together as many of her colleagues at Boston Memorial as possible, and she and the Blocks would tell those physicians what had been done to a lot of innocent people in Nevada two summers ago. Meanwhile, George and Rita Hannaby would contact influential friends and arrange meetings at which Ginger and the Blocks could spread their tale. Only then would Ginger, Faye, and Ernie go to the press. And only after they had gone to the press would they go to the police with a statement contesting the heretofore accepted wisdom that Pablo Jackson had been murdered by an ordinary burglar eight days ago.
“The trick,” Jack said, “is to get your story into wide circulation among some important people, so if you have an ‘accident’ before you’ve convinced the press to take up your cause, there will be a whole lot of powerful folks demanding to know who killed you and why. That’s the special value you have for us now, Ginger—your associations with a spectrum of important people in one of the country’s most influential cities. If you can electrify those people with your story, you’ll be creating an imposing group of advocates. Just remember, when you get back there, you’re going to have to move fast, before the conspirators discover you’ve gone home and decide to grab you or blow you away.”
Outside, the wind suddenly rose, keening at the plywood-covered windows. Good. If the storm worsened, cutting visibility farther, they would have a better chance of slipping away from the motel unobserved.
“After Ginger, Faye, and Ernie leave Elko in the Cherokee, heading up toward Pocatello,” Jack said, using a tone of voice that implied these steps were not suggestions but immutable necessities, “you other four—Brendan, Sandy, Jorja, and Marcie—will go to the local Jeep dealership and buy another four-wheel-drive vehicle with cash that I’ll give you before you leave the Tranquility. Immediately after signing the papers, you’ll head out of Elko in a different direction from Ginger and the Blocks—east toward Salt Lake City, Utah. The snow will slow you down, of course, but you should be able to reach Salt Lake, get a flight out as soon as the storm subsides, and be in Chicago by Thursday afternoon or evening.” He turned to the priest. “Brendan, when you touch down at O’Hare, you’ll contact your rector, this Father Wycazik you’ve told us about. He must use his pull to arrange an immediate, emergency meeting with whoever’s head of the Chicago Archdiocese.”
“Richard Cardinal O’Callahan,” Brendan said. “But I don’t know if even Father Wycazik could arrange an immediate meeting with him.”
“He has to,” Jack said firmly. “Brendan, you’ve got to move fast, just as Ginger will be moving fast in Boston. We’ve got to assume our enemies will be quick about spotting you when you turn up in Chicago. Anyway, at the meeting with Cardinal O’Callahan, you and Jorja and Sandy will explain what’s happened in Elko County—and Brendan, you’ll give a demonstration of your newly discovered telekinetic ability. Pull out all the stops, okay? Do cardinals wear pants under their robes?”
Brendan blinked in surprise. “Wha
“Then I want you to scare the pants off your Cardinal O’Callahan. Give him a show that’ll let him know he’s part of the biggest story since they found the stone rolled away from the mouth of that tomb two thousand years ago. And I don’t mean to be blasphemous, Brendan. I really think it is the biggest story since.”
“So do I,” Brendan said. Though he had been glum all morning, he seemed to