Dean Koontz - False Memory

No humbug politicians to answer to. Just some good guys, doing good stuff, for a good tomorrow, which makes it unlikely anyone would take a really close look at them. Hell, whatever they’re doing in that place, I’m sure most of them believe they’re good guys saving the world.”

“But you don’t.”

“Because of what Ahriman did to my folks and because he was in so tight with this place. But most people around here, they don’t think about the institute. It’s not important to them. Or if they do think about it, they just have this sort of fuzzy-warm feeling.”

“Who are Bellon and Tockland?” Martie asked.

“Kornell Bellon, Nathaniel Tockland. Two bigwigs in the world of psychology, professors once. The place was their idea. Bellon died a few years ago. Tockland’s seventy-nine, retired, married to this knockout-looking, smart, funny lady — a rich heiress, too! — about fifty years younger. If you met the two of them, you’d never in this life figure out what she sees in him, because he's as humorless and dull and ugly as he is old.”

Martie’s eyes met Dusty’s. “Haiku.”

“Or something like.”

Chase said, “Anyway, I thought you ought to see this. Because somehow, I don’t know, but somehow it explains Antiman. And it gives you a better idea what you’re up against.”

In spite of its Wrightian influence, the institute nevertheless looked as though it would be better suited to its environment if it were situated high in the Carpathians, just down the road from the castle of Baron von Frankenstein, wreathed ever in mists and struck with regularity by great bolts of lightning that sustained rather than damaged it.

Following a fine lunch, Dr. Ahriman had intended to swing by the Rhodeses’ residence and have a look at what the fire had wrought. Now that Skeet and the reincarnation of Inspector Clouseau were on his tail, taking that scenic route seemed unwise.

Anyway, his day was not entirely given to leisure, and he did have a patient scheduled this afternoon. He drove directly, though sedately, to his offices in Fashion Island.

He pretended to be unaware of the pickup as it parked in the same lot, two rows back from his Mercedes.

His suite on the fourteenth floor was ocean-facing, but he went first to the offices of an ear-nose-and-throat specialist on the east side of the building. The waiting room featured windows that looked down on the parking lot.

The receptionist, busy with typing, never looked up as Ahriman went to the window, no doubt assuming he was just another patient who would have to wait with the rest of the runny-nosed, red-eyed, raspy-throated, forlorn bunch sitting in uncomfortable chairs and reading ancient, bacteria-infested magazines.

He spotted his Mercedes and quickly located the beige pickup with the white camper shell. The intrepid duo had gotten out of the truck. They were stretching their legs, rolling their shoulders, getting a breath of fresh air, obviously prepared to wait until their quarry reappeared.

Good.

Arriving at his suite, the doctor asked his secretary, Jennifer, if she had enjoyed her sandwich of tofu cheese and bean sprouts on rye crackers, which was her Thursday lunch. When he was assured that it had been delicious — she was a health-food nut, no doubt born with less than half the usual number of taste buds — he spent a few minutes pretending to be interested in the nutritional imperative of taking huge regular supplements of ginko biloba, and then closeted himself in his office.

He phoned Cedric Hawthorne, his house manager, and requested that the least conspicuous car in his street-rod collection — a 1959 Chevrolet El Camino — be left in the parking lot of the building next door to the one in which the doctor had his offices. The keys were to be placed in a magnetic box under the right rear fender. Cedric’s wife could follow in another car and return him to the house.

“Oh, and bring a ski mask,” the doctor added. “Leave it under the driver's seat.”

Cedric did not ask why a ski mask was wanted. It was not his job to pose questions. He was too well trained for that. Very well trained. “Yes, certainly, sir, one ski mask.”

The doctor already had a handgun.

He had arrived at a strategy.

The game pieces were now all in place.

Soon, playtime.

The ranch house featured time-worn Mexican-paver floors and ceilings of exposed vigas separating inlays of aspen latillas. In the main rooms, aromatic fires — subtly scented by pine cones and by a few cedar splits — crackled in sensuously sculpted adobe fireplaces. Except for the upholstered armchairs and sofas, the tables and chairs and cabinets were mostly WPA-era pieces, reminiscent of Stickley furniture, and everywhere underfoot were fine Navajo rugs — except in the room where the deaths had occurred.

No fire burned here. All but one piece of the furniture had been removed and sold. The floor was bare.

Thin gray light pierced the curtainless window, and a chill radiated from the walls. Now and then, in her peripheral vision, Martie thought she saw the gray light bend around something, as if strangely deflected by the soundless passage of a nearly transparent figure, but when she looked directly, nothing was there; the light was hard and unbent. And yet, here, it was easy to believe in unseen presences.

In the center of the room stood a wooden chair with a spindle back, no padding on the flat seat. Perhapsithad been selected for the degree of discomfort that it ensured. Some monks believed that the ability to focus for meditation and prayer was diminished by comfort.

“I sit here a few times each week,” said Bernardo Pastore, “for ten or fifteen minutes usually… but sometimes for hours.”

His voice was thick and slightly slurred. Words were marbles in his mouth, but he patiently polished them and got them out.

Dusty held the tape recorder with the built-in microphone turned toward the rancher, to be sure that his awkward speech was clearly captured.

The right half of Bernardo Pastore’s rebuilt face was incapable of expression, the nerves irreparably damaged. His right jaw and part of his chin had been put back together with metal plates, wire, surgical screws, silicone parts, and bone grafts. The result was reasonably functional but not an aesthetic triumph.

“For the first year,” Bernardo said, “I spent a lot of time in that chair just trying to understand how such a thing could be, how it could happen.”

When he had hurried into this room in response to the gunfire that had killed his sleeping son, Bernardo had been hit by two rounds fired at close range by his wife, Fiona. The first had torn through his right shoulder, and the second had shattered his jaw.

“After a while there seemed to be no sense trying to understand. If it wasn’t black magic, it was as good as. These days, I sit here just thinking about them, letting them know I love them, letting her know I don’t blame her, that I know what she did was as big a mystery to her as it is to me. ‘Cause I think that’s true. It must be true.”

His survival, surgeons claimed, was against all odds. The high-powered round that shattered his jaw had been miraculously deflected upward and back by the mandible, had traveled along the mastoid, and had exited his face above the zygomatic arch, without damaging the external carotid artery in the temple, which would have led to death long before medical assistance arrived.

“She loved Dion as much as I did, and all those accusations she made in her note, the things she said I’d done to her and Dion, they were untrue. And even if I’d done those things, and even if she had been suicidal, she wasn’t the kind of woman to kill a child, her own child or any other.”