Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

Out beyond the bluff’s edge, the search chopper was parallel with them, moving slowly northward. The pilots’ attention remained focused on the beach below.

Mark led them past an enormous swimming pool. The oil-black water glimmered with fluid arabesques of silver, as though schools of strange fish with luminous scales were swimming just beneath the surface.

They were still passing the pool when Rose stumbled. She almost fell hut regained her balance. She halted, swaying.

‘Are you all right?’ Joe asked worriedly.

‘Yes, fine, I’ll be okay,’ she said, but her voice was thin, and she still appeared to be unsteady.

‘How badly were you hurt back there?’ Joe pressed as Mark and Joshua gathered around.

‘Just knocked on my ass,’ she said. ‘Bruised a little.’

‘Rose—’

‘I’m okay, Joe. It’s just all this running, all those damn stairs up from the beach. I guess I’m not in as good a shape as I should be.’

Joshua was talking sotto voce on the cell phone again.

‘Let’s go,’ Rose said. ‘Come on, come on, let’s go.’

Beyond the bluff, above the beach, the helicopter was almost past the estate.

Mark led the way again, and Rose followed with renewed energy. They dashed under the roof of the arched loggia against the rear wall, where they were no longer in any danger of being spotted by the chopper pilots, and then to the corner of the house.

As they moved single-file along the side of the mansion on a walkway that serpentined through a small grove of shaggy-barked melaleucas, they were abruptly pinned in the bright beam of a big flashlight. Blocking the path ahead of them, a watchman said, ‘Hey, who the hell are—’

Acting without hesitation, Mark began to move even as the beam flicked on. The stranger was still speaking when Mark collided with him. The two men grunted from the impact.

The flashlight flew against the trunk of a melaleuca, rebounded onto the walkway, and spun on the stone, making shadows whirl like a pack of tail-chasing dogs.

Mark swivelled the startled watchman around, put a hammerlock on him, bum-rushed him off the sidewalk and through bordering flower beds, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard that the nearby windows rattled.

Scooping up the flashlight, Joshua directed it on the action, and Joe saw that they had been challenged by an overweight, uniformed security guard of about fifty-five. Mark pressed him to his knees and kept a hand on the back of his head to force his face down and away from them, so he couldn’t describe them later.

‘He’s not armed,’ Mark informed Joshua.

‘Bastards,’ the watchman said bitterly.

‘Ankle holster?’ Joshua wondered.

‘Not that either.’

The watchman said, ‘Stupid owners are pacifists or some damn thing. Won’t have a gun on the place, even for me. So now here I am.’

‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ Mark said, pulling him backwards from the house and forcing him to sit on the ground with his back against the trunk of a melaleuca.

‘You don’t scare me,’ the watchman said, but he sounded scared.

‘Dogs?’ Mark demanded.

‘Everywhere,’ the guard said. ‘Dobermans.’

‘He’s lying,’ Mark said confidently.

Even Joe could hear the bluff in the watchman’s voice. Joshua gave the flashlight to Joe and said, ‘Keep it pointed at the ground.’ Then he produced handcuffs from a fanny pack.

Mark directed the guard to reach in back of himself and clasp his hands behind the tree. The trunk was only about ten inches in diameter, so the guard didn’t have to contort himself, and Joshua snapped the cuffs on his wrists.

‘The cops are on the way,’ the watchman gloated.

‘No doubt riding Dobermans,’ Mark said.

‘Bastard,’ said the watchman.

From his fanny pack, Mark withdrew a tightly rolled Ace bandage. ‘Bite on this,’ he told the guard.

‘Bite on this,’ the guard said, indulging in one last bleat of hopeless bravado, and then he did as he was told.

Three times, Joshua wound electrician’s tape around the guard’s head and across his mouth, fixing the Ace bandage firmly in place.

From the watchman’s belt, Mark unclipped what appeared to be a remote control. ‘This open the driveway gate?’

Through his gag, the watchman snarled something obscene, which issued as a meaningless mumble.

‘Probably the gate.’

To the guard, Joshua said, ‘Just relax. Don’t chafe your wrists. We’re not robbing the place. We’re really not. We’re only passing through.’

Mark said, ‘When we’ve been gone half an hour, we’ll call the cops so they can come and release you.’

‘Better get a dog,’ Joshua advised.

Taking the watchman’s flashlight, Mark led them toward the front of the house.

The confrontation had occurred and been successfully resolved, with aplomb and with as little injury to the watchman as possible, in slightly more than one minute. Whoever these guys were, Joe was glad that they were on his side.

The estate occupied at least three acres. The huge house was set two hundred feet back from the front property wall at the street.

In the eye of the wide, looping driveway was a four-tier marble fountain: four broad scalloped bowls, each supported by three leaping dolphins, bowls and dolphins diminishing in scale as they ascended. The bowls were full of water, but the pump was silent, and there were no spouts or cascades.

‘We’ll wait here,’ Mark said, leading them to the dolphins.

The dolphins and bowls rose out of a pool with a two-foot-high wall finished with a broad cap of limestone. Rose sat on the edge — and then so did Joe and Mark.

Taking the remote control they had gotten from the watchman, Joshua walked along the driveway toward the entrance gate, talking on the cellular phone as he went.

Dogs of warm Santa Ana wind chased cat-quick leaves and curls of papery melaleuca bark along the blacktop.

‘How do you even know about me?’ Rose asked Mark.

‘When any enterprise is launched with a one-billion-dollar trust fund, like ours,’ Mark said, ‘it sure doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Besides, computers and data technology are what we’re about.’

‘What enterprise?’ Joe asked.

The answer was the same mystifying response that Joshua had given on the beach, ‘In finna face.’

‘And what’s that mean?’

‘Later, Joe,’ Rose promised. ‘Go on, Mark.’

‘Well, so, from day one, we’ve had the funds to try to keep track of all promising research in every discipline, worldwide, that could conceivably lead to the epiphany we expect.’

‘Maybe so,’ Rose said, ‘but you people have been around two years, while the largest part of my research for the past seven years has been conducted under the tightest imaginable security.’

‘Doctor, you showed enormous promise in your field until you were about thirty-seven — and then suddenly your work appeared to come almost to a complete halt except for a minor paper published here or there from time to time. You were a Niagara of creativity — and then went dry overnight.’

‘And that indicates what to you?’

‘It’s the signature pattern of a scientist who’s been co-opted by the defence establishment or some other branch of government with sufficient power to enforce a total information blackout. So when we see something like that, we start trying to find out exactly where you’re at work. Finally we located you at Teknologik, but not at any of their well-known and accessible facilities. A deep subterranean, biologically secure complex near Manassas, Virginia. Something called “Project Ninety-nine.”

While he listened intently to the conversation, Joe watched as, out at the end of the long driveway, the ornate electric gate rolled aside.