Dean Koontz - Night Chills

“I’m all right.” He was numb.

“There’s a toilet at the end of the hail, to your left.”

“I’m okay, Sam.”

“You look—”

“I killed men in the war. Killed men over in Asia. Remember?”

“This is different. I understand that. In the war it’s always with rifles or grenades or mortars. It’s never from three feet with a handgun.”

“I’m fine. Believe me. Just fine.” He went to the door, pushed past Sam, stumbled into the corridor as if he had tripped, turned left, ran to the washroom, and threw up.

Scuttling sideways like a hermit crab, the Webley ready in his right hand, Klinger reached the western flank of the municipal building and found that the lawn there was littered with glass. He hadn’t made a sound on his run from the shrubbery. Now, pieces of glass snapped and crunched under his shoes, and he cursed silently. One of the windows in the police chief’s office was broken, and a few of the slats in the Venetian blind were bent out of shape, providing a convenient peephole for his reconnaissance work.

As he was rising up to have a look inside — cautious as a suspicious mouse sniffing the cheese in the trap — two shots exploded virtually in front of his face. He froze — then realized that he hadn’t been seen, that no one was firing at him.

Through the twisted slats of the blind, he could see two-thirds of Thorp’s starkly furnished and somewhat sterile office:

gray-blue walls, a pair of three-drawer filing cabinets, an oak work table, a bulletin board with an aluminum frame, bookshelves, most of a massive metal desk— And Salsbury.

Dead. Very dead.

Where was Sam Edison? And the other one, Annendale? And the woman, the little girl?

There appeared to be no one in the room except Salsbury. Salsbury’s corpse.

Suddenly afraid of losing track of Edison and Annendale, afraid that they might somehow get away or sneak around behind him, afraid of being outmaneuvered, Klinger turned from the windows. He loped to the end of the lawn, then across the

parking lot and the alleyway. He hid behind the hedge again, where he commanded a good view of the back door of the municipal building.

When he came out of the washroom, Sam was waiting in the corridor for him.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“It’s rough.”

“It’ll get worse.”

“That it will.”

“Christ.”

“What did you learn from Salsbury? Who were those men in the helicopter?”

Leaning against the wall, Paul said, “His partners. One of them was H. Leonard Dawson.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“The other one is a general. United States Army. His name’s Ernst Klinger.”

Scowling, Sam said, “Then this is a government project?”

“Surprisingly, no. Just Salsbury, Dawson, and Klinger. A bit of private enterprise.” Paul took three minutes to outline what he had learned about the field test and the conspiracy behind

it.

Sam’s scowl disappeared. He risked a slight smile. “Then we have a chance of stopping it right here, for good.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s just a simple four-part problem,” Sam said. He held up one finger. “Kill Dawson.” Two fingers. “Kill Ernst Klinger.” Three fingers. “Destroy the data in the computer at the house in Greenwich.” Four fingers. “Then use the key-lock code to restructure the memories of everyone in town who’s seen or heard anything, to cover up every last trace of this field test.”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound so simple to me.”

For the moment at least, positive thinking was the only sort of thinking that- interested Sam. “It can be done. First.

where did Dawson and Klinger go when they left here?”

“To the logging camp.”

“Why?”

Quoting Salsbury, he told Sam about Dawson’s plan to organize a search in the mountains. “But he and Klinger won’t be at the camp now. They intended to fall back to the mill and establish a sort of field headquarters there once the manhunt was underway. There are about eighty or ninety men working on the night and graveyard shifts up there. Dawson wants to post a dozen of them as guards around the mill and pack the rest of them off to join the search beyond the logging camp.

“Any guards he posts are worthless,” Sam said. “We’ll use the code phrase to get past them. We’ll move in on Dawson and Klinger before they know what’s happened.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Of course it is.”

“But what about the computer in Greenwich?”

“We can deal with that later,” Sam said.

“How do we get to it?”

“Didn’t you say Dawson’s household staff is programmed?”

“According to Salsbury.”

“Then we can get to the computer.”

“And the cover-up here?”

“We’ll manage.”

“How?”

“That’s the least of our problems.”

“You’re so goddamned optimistic.”

“I’ve got to be. So do you.”

Paul pushed away from the wall. “All right. But Jenny and Rya must have heard the shots. They’ll be worried. Before we go to the mill, we should stop back at the church and fill them in, let them know where we all stand.”

Sam nodded. “Lead the way.”

about — Salsbury?”

Later.

They left by the rear door and started across the parking lot toward the alley.

After a few steps Paul said, “Wait.”

Sam stopped, turned back.

“We don’t have to sneak around the long way,” Paul said. “We’re in control of the town now.”

“Good point.”

They circled around the municipal building and went out to East Main Street.

11:45 P.M.

Klinger stood in the velvety darkness, two-thirds of the way up the bell tower stairs, listening. Voices drifted down from above: two men, a woman, a child. Edison. And Jenny Edison. Annendale and his daughter…

He now knew what was happening in Black River, what the carnage at Thorp’s office signified. He knew the extent of these people’s knowledge of the field test and of all the working, planning, and scheming that lay behind the field test — and he was shocked.

Because of what he had heard, he knew that they were motivated to resist, at least in part, for altruistic reasons. He didn’t understand that. He could easily have understood them if they had wanted to seize the power of the subliminals for their own. But altruism. That had always seemed foolish to him. He had decided a long time ago that men who eschewed power were far more dangerous and deadly than those who pursued it, if only because they were so difficult to fathom, so unpredictable.

However, he also knew that these people could be stopped. The field test wasn’t an unmitigated disaster; not yet. They weren’t going to win as easily as they thought. They hadn’t yet brought him or Dawson to ruin. The project could be saved.

Overhead, they finished discussing their plans. They said good-by to one another and told one another to be careful and wished one another luck and hugged and kissed and said they would pray for one another and said that they really had to get on with it.

In the perfect darkness, without a flashlight or even a match to show them the way, out of sight around two or three bends in the long spiral staircase, Sam Edison and Paul Annendale started down the narrow, creaking steps.

Klinger’s own hurried descent was masked by the noise that the two men made above him.

He paused in the whispery, echo-filled nave of the church, where the walls and the altar and the pews were no more than adumbrated by the meager nocturnal storm light that shone through the arched windows. He wasn’t certain what he should do next.