Dean Koontz - Dragonfly

“Will Peyser be alone?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes. He has no children. His wife died four months ago, so he shouldn't have a girl friend.”

Buell stroked his chin with his long, pale fingers. He had a musician's hands, and he was fairly good on the piano. “Then I can leave one man here with the woman. Two of us can deal with Peyser.”

“When you've had time to wrap things up in Maryland Park, I'll give you a call there. I want to know which names on that list were strangers to both Altmüller and Peyser.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'll have additional instructions for you when you're finished at Mr. Peyser's place.”

“Fine.”

“Wait there for my call.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Spokesman hung up.

Putting the receiver back on the hook, Buell turned and looked at the woman.

She stared through him.

To the agent who wore eyeglasses, Buell said, “Jerry, you stay here with Miss Eaton. Jim and I have another job to take care of. It's just over in Maryland Park, We shouldn't be gone very long. When we get back we'll deal with her.”

Jerry took off his raincoat and tossed it onto the kitchen counter. “She's so pretty. I wish she hadn't been here.”

The smallest man said, “ How do we deal with her?”

“The boss says to take her back to her apartment and make it look like some burglarkilled her.” Buell watched her eyes and saw no spark of fear.

“Sounds reasonable,” Jerry said.

Buell smiled. He had a sharp, saturnine face as pale as dusting powder. “I have a better idea.”

“What's that?”

“We take her back to her apartment, just like the boss says. But we don't make it look like the work of a burglar.” Buell paused to see if she was listening. She gave him no sign. “We make it look like the work of a rapist.”

Emotion, like dark fish in a gelid sea, flickered deep in the woman's eyes.

Buell knew that look, that well-concealed but still-visible terror. He had seen it in the eyes of countless women — and men — when he'd been a rifleman in Vietnam years and years ago.

“Good idea,” Jerry said, grinning.

The smallest man agreed.

On the morning of his twenty-first birthday, Chai Po-han soared up through the familiar nightmare. In his dream he lay upon a padded table in a room with an extremely low ceiling. Every aspect of the room was white: chalky white, star-white, so fiercely white that the eye rebelled at the sight. The eye — affronted by this unnatural, unbroken, flat and glaring whiteness — attempted to peer through the ceiling, walls and floor as if, after all, they were merely constructed of veined alabaster. But the eye could not deceive itself. And what sort of place was so inhumanly white and sterile? Instantly he knew that he had died and that now he was stretched out upon a table in some celestial morgue, beyond the veil of life. Soon the gods would come to dissect his soul and judge its worthiness. His Communistic soul. His atheistic soul. Why in the name of all his ancestors had his people — and he himself — embraced Maoism? Opiate of the masses: what folly! There were gods, ultimate beings who urinated on the soul of the dead Chairman. And when the dissection was completed, when the gods saw the worm of atheism curled within his heart, Chai Po-han would suffer eternal torture. Pages from the Quotations of Chairman Mao would be ground up and mixed with dung, and he would be forced to dine on this mixture for the rest of tune. To sharpen his humiliation, he would find the dung always tasted better than the other half of his menu. Or perhaps he would be reincarnated first as a slug, then as a cockroach, then as a snake… And now, in the ethereal silence, the gods came: men in green gowns, green surgical masks, and green caps, men like linen dragons. They circled him. He saw one of them raise a scalpel. White light winked along the cutting edge. In a moment the dissection would begin. His dead flesh would part bloodlessly, and his stilled heart would open to reveal the worm of faithlessness. Then: one form of damnation or the other, no question about it. And the scalpel rose, descended, touched his translucent skin and grew through it like a thorn through a rose petal…

Chai Po-han sat up on his meager straw mattress, a scream caught like bloody phlegm in the back of his throat. Then he heard the soft, furtive rustling of sleeping men turning on their straw beds on all sides of him, and he realized where he was: the agricultural commune in the cursed Province of Kweichow, well north of the minor city of Ssunan. He swallowed the scream and felt it slide thickly down his throat.

Lying back, closing his eyes, he tried to recover his breath and slow his heartbeat.

The night wind rattled the glass in the warped window frames of the long stablelike building.

Why, he asked the darkness, was he plaqued with this hideous, repeating nightmare?

The wind abruptly gentled down, and the window glass stopped rattling — as if the darkness were saying that it did not want to talk with him.

Was the cause of his bad dream to be found in his visit to the United States? The dream had begun immediately after that, around the middle of February, and it had been replayed nearly every night since then. In that land of unproscribed churches and cathedrals and synagogues and temples, had he begun to doubt the Maoist creed of godlessness which had freed China and made it great? No. Most certainly not. Surely a lifetime of atheism could not be cast off after one brief encounter with those who were religious. Such faith was not a bacterium that could infect a man once he had but taken a few breaths of tainted air.

But how else was he to explain this dream which he threw out each morning and which returned like a boomerang each night?

He got up and dressed in the coarsely woven gray pajama-suit which had been folded at the head of his bed, on top of the thatched box that contained his personal belongings. Although there was little light in the communal sleeping quarters, Chai made his way into the central aisle without stepping on anyone, and he walked to the far end of the building where there were several windows flanking the main entrance.

The glass was discolored and flecked with imperfections, but it was clean; and he was able to look down through the foothills to the River Wu which shimmered in the waning moonlight. A thin, pale yellow line edged the horizon: dawn was not far off.

How would he celebrate this anniversary of his birth? he wondered. Working in the terraced rice paddies? Or perhaps he would be assigned to the construction crew that was erecting — laboriously and solely by manual labor — new dormitories, barns, machinery sheds, and grain storage silos.

What a stifling place this is! What a hole!

Just months ago, during his visit to the West, he had spoken to American and French journalists who had been to China and who praised the communes. They had all seen Liu Ling Commune in Shensi and were impressed. Chai was proud of his people and had talked about Liu Ling as if he had been there. He had explained about the Chairman's enormous program which moved millions of young people to the countryside every year in order to keep them from becoming bourgeois, in order to have them “revolutionized” by the peasants, in order to have them completely “reeducated” as they could be only by sharing the simple life of the countryside. He had been so eloquent. At the time, however, he had not known that Liu Ling was a showplace, an atypical unit of the system, highly polished for the benefit of foreign newsmen and diplomats. Now, a veteran of the Ssunan Commune, Chai understood that those foreign journalists had been deceived, that he had been deceived, that most of the communes were slave labor camps where the inmates remained for the most part voluntarily because they had been made to believe that they were not slaves but heroes who were shaping the future of China.