Strangers (28 page)

He paced around the house, carrying the note, thinking. Eventually he came to a front window from which he could see his curbside mailbox—a brick column with a metal receptacle mortared into it—standing in the bluish fall of light from a mercury-vapor streetlamp.

Because he kept the post office drawer in town, the only mail he got at home was that addressed to “Occupant” and occasional cards or letters from friends who had both his mailing and street address but who sometimes forgot that all correspondence was to go to the former. Standing at the window, staring at the curbside receptacle, Dom realized that he had not picked up today’s delivery.

He went outside, down the front walk to the street, and used a key to unlock the receptacle. Except for the breeze that rustled the trees, the night was quiet. The wind carried the scent of the sea, and the air was chilly. The overhead mercury-vapor lamp was sufficiently bright for Dom to identify the mail as he withdrew it from the box: six advertising flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards…and a plain white business-size envelope with no return address.

Excited, fearful, he hurried back into the house, to his study, tearing open the white envelope and extracting a single sheet of paper as he went. At his desk, he unfolded the letter.

No other words could have shocked him as badly as those. He felt as if he had fallen into the White Rabbit’s hole and was tumbling down into a fantastic realm where logic and reason no longer applied.

The moon. This was
impossible.
No one knew he had awakened from bad dreams with those words on his lips, repeating them in panic: “The moon, moon….” And no one knew that, while sleepwalking, he had typed those words on the Displaywriter. He’d told neither Parker nor Cobletz, because those incidents had transpired after he’d begun drug therapy and after the drugs seemed to be working, and he had not wanted to appear to be slipping backward. Besides, although those two words filled him with dread, he did not understand their significance. He did not know
why
they had the power to raise gooseflesh, and he instinctively felt that it was unwise to mention this development to anyone until he had gotten a better handle on it. He had been afraid Cobletz would conclude that the drugs were not helping him and would discontinue them in favor of psychotherapy—and Dom had
needed
the drugs.

The moon.

No one knew, damn it. No one but…Dom himself.

In the streetlamp’s dim glow, he had not checked for a postmark. Now, he saw that its point of origin was not a mystery, as was the case with the letter that had come this morning. It was clearly stamped
NEW YORK, N.Y.,
and dated December 18. Wednesday of last week.

He almost laughed out loud. He was not insane, after all. He was not
sending these cryptic messages to himself—could not
possibly
be sending them—because he had been in Laguna last week. Three thousand miles separated him from the mailbox in which this—and undoubtedly the other—strange message had first been deposited.

But who had sent him the notes—and why? Who in New York could know that he was sleepwalking…or that he had repeatedly typed “the moon” on his word processor? A thousand questions crowded Dom Corvaisis’ mind, and he had no answers to any of them. Worse, at the moment, he could see no way even to
seek
answers. The situation was so bizarre that there was no logical direction for his inquiries to take.

For two months, he had thought that his sleepwalking was the strangest and most frightening thing that had ever happened—or ever would happen—to him. But whatever lay behind the somnambulism must be even stranger and more frightening than the nightwalking itself.

He recalled the first message he had left for himself on the word processor:
I’m scared.
What
had
he been hiding from in closets? When he had started to nail the windows shut while sound asleep, what had he hoped to keep out of his house?

Dom saw now that his sleepwalking had not been caused by stress. He was not suffering anxiety attacks because he feared the success or failure of his first novel. It was nothing as mundane as that.

Something else. Something very strange and terrible.

What did he know in his sleep that he did not know when awake?

6

New Haven County, Connecticut

The sky had cleared before nightfall, but the moon had not yet risen. The stars shed little light upon the cold earth.

With his back against a boulder, Jack Twist sat in the snow atop a knoll, at the edge of pines, waiting for the Guardmaster armored truck to appear. Only three weeks after personally netting more than a million dollars from the mafia warehouse job, he was already setting up another heist. He was wearing boots, gloves, and a white ski suit, with the hood over his head and tied securely under his chin. Three hundred yards behind him and to the southwest, beyond the small woods, the darkness was relieved by the light of a housing development; however, Jack waited in utter blackness, his breath steaming.

In front of him, two miles of night-clad fields lay northeast, barren but for a few widely spaced trees and some winter-stripped brush. In the distance beyond the emptiness, there were electronics plants, then shopping
centers, then residential neighborhoods, none of which was visible from Jack’s position, though their existence was indicated by the glow of electric lights on the horizon.

At the far edge of the fields, headlights appeared over a low rise. Raising a pair of night binoculars, Jack focused on the approaching vehicle, which was following the two-lane county road that bisected the fields. In spite of the leftward cast of his left eye, Jack had superb vision, and with the help of the night binoculars, he ascertained that the vehicle was not the Guardmaster truck, therefore of no consequence to him. He lowered the glasses.

In his solitude upon the snowy knoll, he thought back to another time and a warmer place, to a humid night in a Central American jungle, when he had studied a nocturnal landscape with binoculars just like these. Then, he had been searching anxiously for hostile troops that had been stalking and encircling him and his buddies….

•

His platoon—twenty highly trained Rangers under the leadership of Lieutenant Rafe Eikhorn, with Jack as second in command—had crossed the border illegally and gone fifteen miles inside the enemy state without being detected. Their presence could have been construed as an act of war; therefore, they wore camouflage suits stripped of rank and service markings, and they carried no identification.

Their target was a nasty little “re-education” camp, cynically named the Institute of Brotherhood, where a thousand Miskito Indians were imprisoned by the People’s Army. Two weeks earlier, courageous Catholic priests had led another fifteen hundred Indians through the jungles and out of the country before they could be imprisoned, too. Those clergymen had brought word that the Indians at the Institute would be murdered and buried in mass graves if not rescued within the month.

The Miskitos were a fiercely proud breed with a rich culture that they refused to forsake for the anti-ethnic, collectivist philosophy of the country’s latest leaders. The Indians’ continued loyalty to their own traditions would ensure their extermination, for the ruling council did not hesitate to call up the firing squads to solidify its power.

Nevertheless, twenty Rangers in mufti would not have been committed to such a dangerous raid merely to save Miskitos. Both left-and right-wing dictatorial regimes routinely slaughtered their citizenry in every corner of the world, and the United States did not—could not—prevent those state-sanctioned murders. But in addition to the Indians at the Institute, there were eleven others whose rescue, along with the Indians, made the risky operation worthwhile.

Those eleven were former revolutionaries who had fought the just war against the now-deposed right-wing dictator, but who had refused to remain silent when their revolution had been betrayed by totalitarians of the left. Undoubtedly, those eleven possessed valuable information. The opportunity to debrief them was more important than saving the lives of a thousand Indians—at least as far as Washington was concerned.

Undetected, Jack’s platoon reached the Institute of Brotherhood in a farming district at the edge of the jungle. It was a concentration camp in all but name, a place of barbed-wire fences and guard towers. Two buildings stood outside the fenced perimeter of the camp: a two-story concrete-block structure from which the government administered the district, and a dilapidated wooden barracks housing sixty troops.

Shortly after midnight, the platoon of Rangers stealthily took up positions and launched a rocket attack on the barracks and the concrete building. The initial artillery barrages were followed by hand-to-hand combat. Half an hour after the last shot was fired, the Indians and other prisoners—as jubilant a group as Jack had ever seen—were formed into a column and moved out toward the border, fifteen miles away.

Two Rangers had been killed. Three were wounded.

As first in command of the platoon, Rafe Eikhorn led the exodus and oversaw security along the column’s flanks, while Jack stayed behind with three men to be sure the last of the prisoners got out of the camp in orderly fashion. It was also his responsibility to gather up files relating to the interrogation, torture, and murder of Indians and district peasants. By the time he and his three men left the Institute of Brotherhood, they were two miles behind the last of the Miskitos.

Though Jack and his men made good time, they never caught up with their platoon and were still miles from the Honduran border when, at dawn, hostile army helicopters, like giant black wasps, came in low over the trees and began off-loading enemy troops wherever a clearing could be found. The other Rangers and all the Indians reached freedom, but Jack and his three men were captured and transported to a facility similar to the Institute of Brotherhood. However, the place was so much worse than the concentration camp that it had no official existence. The ruling council did not admit that such a hellhole existed in the new workers’ paradise—or that monstrous inquisitions were conducted within its walls. In true Orwellian tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers had no name, it did not exist.

Within those nameless walls, in cells without numbers, Jack Twist and the three other Rangers were subjected to psychological and physical torture, relentless humiliation and degradation, controlled starvation, and constant threats of death. One of the four died. One went mad. Only
Jack and his closest friend, Oscar Weston, held on to both life and sanity during the eleven and a half months of their incarceration….

•

Now, eight years later, leaning against a boulder atop a knoll in Connecticut, waiting for the Guardmaster truck, Jack heard sounds and detected odors which were not of this wind-swept winter night. The hard footfalls of jackboots on concrete corridors. The stench from the overflowing slops bucket, which was the cell’s only toilet. The pathetic cry of some poor bastard being taken from his cell to another session with interrogators.

Jack took deep breaths of the clean, cold Connecticut air. He was seldom troubled by bad memories of that time and nameless place. He was more often haunted by what had happened to him
after
his escape—and by what had happened to his Jenny in his absence. It was not his suffering in Central America that turned him against society; rather, subsequent events were what had soured him.

He saw other headlights out on the black fields and raised his night binoculars. It was the Guardmaster armored transport.

He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty-eight. It was right on schedule, as it had been every night for a week. Even with the holiday tomorrow, the truck kept to its route. Guardmaster Security was nothing if not reliable.

On the ground beside Jack was an attaché case. He lifted the lid. The blue numerals of a digital scanner were locked on the Guardmaster’s open radio link to the company dispatcher. Even with his state-of-the-art equipment, he had needed three nights to discover the truck’s frequency. He turned the volume dial on his own receiver. Static crackled, hissed. Then he was rewarded by a routine exchange between the driver and the distant dispatcher.

“Three-oh-one,” the dispatcher said.

“Reindeer,” the driver said.

“Rudolph,” the dispatcher said.

“Rooftop,” the driver said.

The hiss and crackle of static settled in once more.

The dispatcher had opened the exchange with the truck’s number, and the rest of it had been the day’s code which served as confirmation that 301 was on schedule and in no trouble of any kind.

Jack switched off his receiver. The lighted dials went dark.

The armored transport passed less than two hundred feet from his position on the knoll, and he turned to watch its dwindling taillights.

He was confident of Guardmaster 301’s schedule now, and he would not be returning to these fields until the night of the stickup, which was
tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 11. Meanwhile, there was a great deal more planning to be done.

Ordinarily, planning a job was nearly as exciting and satisfying as the actual commission of the crime. But as he left the knoll and headed toward the houses to the southwest, where he had parked his car on a quiet street, he felt no elation, no thrill. He was losing the ability to take delight in even the
contemplation
of a crime.

He was changing. And he did not know why.

As he drew near the first houses to the southwest of the knoll, he became aware that the night had grown brighter. He looked up. The moon swelled fat on the horizon, so huge it seemed to be crashing to earth, an illusion of enormousness created by the odd perspective of the early stages of the satellite’s ascension. He stopped abruptly and stood with his head tilted back, staring up at the luminous lunar surface. A chill seized him, an inner iciness unrelated to the winter cold.