Dean Koontz - City of Night

In times of personal crisis, people turned to their priests, pastors, and rabbis. Victor would have realized that much valuable information might be learned in a confessional or during a citizen’s most private talks with his spiritual adviser.

Besides, having his soulless creations delivering sermons and celebrating Mass would strike Victor as delicious mockery.

Even one as big and as menacing in appearance as Deucalion could expect a sympathetic ear from clergymen, whether they were real or imposters. They would be accustomed to offering comfort to society’s outsiders and would receive him with less suspicion and alarm than others might.

Because the primary denomination in New Orleans was Catholicism, he would start with that faith. He had many churches from which to choose. In one of them he might find a priest who, by identifying Victor’s center of operations, would betray his maker as daily he mocked God.

The security room in the Hands of Mercy featured a wall of high-definition monitors providing such clear images of the hallways and rooms of the immense facility that they appeared to be almost three-dimensional.

Victor didn’t believe that his people had any right to privacy. Or to life, for that matter.

None of them had any rights whatsoever. They had their mission, which was the fulfillment of his vision for a new world, and they had their duties, and they had what privileges he allowed. No rights.

Werner, security chief at the Hands of Mercy, was such a solid block of muscle that even a concrete floor ought to have sagged under him. Yet he never lifted weights, never exercised. His perfected metabolism maintained his brute physical form in ideal condition, almost regardless of what he ate.

He had a problem with snot, but they were working on that.

Once in a while — not all the time, not even frequently, but nonetheless often enough to be an annoyance — the mucous membranes in his sinuses produced mucus at a prodigious rate. On those occasions, Werner often went through three boxes of Kleenex per hour.

Victor could have terminated Werner, dispatched his cadaver to the landfill, and installed Werner Two in the post of security chief. But these snot attacks baffled and intrigued him. He preferred to keep Werner in place, study his seizures, and gradually tinker with his physiology to resolve the problem.

Standing beside a currently snotless Werner in the security room, Victor watched a bank of monitors on which surveillance tapes revealed the route Randal Six had taken to escape the building.

Absolute power requires absolute adaptability.

Every setback must be viewed as an opportunity, a chance to learn. Victor’s visionary work could not be shaken by challenges but must always be strengthened by them.

Some days were more marked by challenges than others. This appeared to be one of them.

The body of Detective Jonathan Harker waited in the dissection room, as yet unexamined. Already the body of William, the butler, was en route.

Victor was not concerned. He was exhilarated.

He was so exhilarated that he could feel the internal carotid arteries throbbing in his neck, the external carotids throbbing in his temples, and his jaw muscles already aching from his clenched-teeth anticipation of meeting these infuriating challenges.

Randal Six, engineered in the tanks to be a severe autistic, intensely agoraphobic, had nevertheless managed to leave his billet. He had followed a series of hallways to the elevators.

“What is he doing?” Victor asked.

By his question, he referred to the video that revealed Randal proceeding along a corridor in a peculiar, hesitant, herky-jerky fashion. Sometimes he took a few steps sideways, studying the floor intently, before he proceeded forward again, but then he stepped sideways to the right.

“Sir, he looks as if he’s learning a dance step,” said Werner.

“What dance step?”

“I don’t know what dance step, sir. My education is largely in surveillance and extreme violent combat. I didn’t learn no dance.”

“ Any dance,” Victor corrected. “Why would Randal want to dance?”

“People do.”

“He’s not people.”

“No, sir, he’s not.”

“I didn’t design him with the desire to dance. He isn’t dancing. It looks more as if he’s trying to avoid stepping on something.”

“Yes, sir. The cracks.”

“What cracks?”

“The cracks between the floor tiles.”

When the escapee passed directly under a camera, Werner’s observation proved to be correct. Step by step, Randal had been painstakingly careful to place each foot inside one of the twelve-inch-square vinyl tiles.

“That’s obsessive-compulsive behavior,” Victor said, “which is consistent with the developmental flaws I gave him.”

Randal passed out of the view field of one camera, appeared on another. He boarded an elevator. He went down to the bottom floor of the hospital.

“No one made any attempt to stop him, Werner.”

“No, sir. Our assignment is to prevent unauthorized entrance. We were never told we should be concerned about anyone leaving without authorization. None of the staff, none of the newly made would ever leave here without your permission.”

“Randal did.”

Frowning, Werner said, “It isn’t possible to disobey you, sir.”

On the bottom floor, Randal avoided cracks and reached the file room. He concealed himself among the metal cabinets.

Most of the New Race who were created in Mercy were eventually infiltrated into the city’s population. Some, however, like Randal, were experimental, and Victor intended them for termination when he had concluded the experiment of which each was the subject. Randal had never been meant for the world beyond these walls.

Werner fast-forwarded the surveillance tape until Victor himself appeared, entering the file room by way of the secret tunnel that connected the former hospital to the parking garage of the building next door.

“He’s renegade,” Victor said grimly. “He hid from me.”

“It isn’t possible to disobey you, sir.”

“He obviously knew he was forbidden to leave.”

“But it isn’t possible to disobey you, sir.”

“Shut up, Werner.”

“Yes, sir.”

After Victor passed through the file room into the lower floor of Mercy, Randal Six emerged from concealment and went to the exit door. He entered the lock code and proceeded into the tunnel.

“How did he know the code?” Victor wondered.

Hitching and twitching, Randal followed the tunnel to the door at the farther end, where again he entered the lock code.

“How did he know? ”

“Permission to speak, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“When he was hiding in the file room, he heard the tone of each digit you pressed on the keypad before you entered from the tunnel.”

“You mean, heard it through the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Every number has a different tone,” Victor said.

“He would’ve had to learn beforehand what number each tone represented.”

On the surveillance tape, Randal entered the empty storeroom in the building next door. After some hesitation, he went from there into the parking garage.

The final camera captured Randal as he haltingly ascended the garage ramp. His face was carved by anxiety, but somehow he overcame his agoraphobia and ventured into a world he found threatening and overwhelming in scale.

“Mr. Helios, sir, I suggest that our security protocols be revised and our electronic systems modified to prevent unauthorized exit as well as unauthorized entrance.”

“Do it,” Victor said.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve got to find him,” Victor said more to himself than to Werner. “He left with some specific intention. A destination. He’s so developmentally disabled, so narrowly focused, he could only have accomplished this if some desperate need drove him.”