This book is dedicated to Leason and Marlene Pomeroy, affectionately known as the fireball and the firecracker, who are a wondrous delight.
Author’s Note
In the previous Jane Hawk novel, The Crooked Staircase, and again in The Forbidden Door I have rescheduled the annual blooming of the Anza-Borrego Desert to a later date in the spring. Thousands of tourists come to Borrego Springs to see this spectacular display; they would have been a serious complication to Jane’s rescue operation, which was already difficult enough.
Carter Jergen, a character in this novel, has an acerbic view of Borrego Springs and environs that I do not share. I would like to visit again someday without having to don a disguise.
To keep the story moving, I have taken certain liberties with vehicle maintenance and other procedures at the bus stations in Houston and Beaumont, Texas.
In part 5, chapter 6, Minette Butterworth, an English teacher, is reduced to a subhuman condition. During this scene, through her mind pass words that mean nothing to her, though once they had meant a great deal: first, “meaningless as wind in dry grass or rat’s feet over broken glass”; then “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” These are lines from “The Hollow Men” and “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot.
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Dean Koontz
THE NIGHT WINDOW
1
THE TRIPLE-PANE FLOOR-TO-CEILING WINDOWS of Hollister’s study frame the rising plain to the west, the foothills, and the distant Rocky Mountains that were long ago born from the earth in cataclysm, now dark and majestic against a sullen sky. It is a view to match the man who stands at this wall of glass. The word cataclysm is a synonym for disaster or upheaval but also for revolution, and he is the leader of the greatest revolution in history. The greatest and the last. The end of history is near, after which his vision of a pacified world will endure forever.
Meanwhile, there are mundane tasks to perform, obligations to address. For one thing, there is someone who needs to be killed.
In about two hours, when a late-season storm descends on these high plains east of Denver, the hunt will begin, and one of two men will die at the hand of the other, a fact that Wainwright Warwick Hollister finds neither exhilarating nor frightening. Of profound importance to Hollister is that he avoid the character weaknesses of his father, Orenthal Hollister, and at all times comport himself in a more formidable and responsible manner than had his old man. Among other things, this means that when someone needs to be eliminated, the killing can’t always be done by a hireling. If a man is too finicky to get blood on his hands once in a while, or if he lacks the courage to put himself at physical risk, then he can’t claim to be a leader in this world of wolves, nor even a member of the pack, but is instead only a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
The hunt will occur here, on Crystal Creek Ranch, Hollister’s nine-thousand-acre spread, unto itself a world of pine forests and rolling meadows. The chase will not be fair, because Hollister does not believe in fairness, which exists nowhere either in nature or in the human sphere. Fairness is an illusion of the weak and ignorant; it is the insincere promise made by those who manipulate the masses for gain.
The quarry, however, will have a chance to survive. A very slim one, but a chance. Although Hollister’s father, Orenthal, had been a powerful man physically as well as financially, his heart had been that of a coward. If ever he had decided that he couldn’t farm out all the violence required for the furtherance of his business, if he’d seen the moral need for every prince to be also a warrior, he wouldn’t have given the quarry any chance whatsoever. The hunt would have been an empty ritual with only one possible end: the triumph of Orenthal and the death of his prey.
Now the security system, which always knows Hollister’s location in this forty-six-thousand-square-foot residence, speaks in a soft, feminine voice. “Mr. Thomas Buckle has arrived in the library.”
Thomas Buckle is a houseguest from Los Angeles. The sole passenger on Hollister’s Gulfstream V, he had landed at 10:00 this morning on the Crystal Creek Ranch’s six-thousand-foot airstrip, had been driven 1.6 miles from the hangar to the main house in a Rolls Royce Phantom, and had been settled in a guest suite on the main floor.
He will most likely be dead by dawn.
The house is a sleek, ultramodern masterpiece of native stone, glass, and stainless steel, with floors of limestone on which ornately figured antique Persian carpets float like lush warm islands on a cold pale sea.
The library contains twenty-five thousand volumes that Hollister inherited from his father. The old man was a lifelong reader of novels. But his son has no use for fiction. Wainwright Warwick Hollister is a realist from his epidermis to his marrow. Orenthal also read many works of philosophy, forever searching for the meaning of life. His son has no use for philosophy because he already knows the two words that give life its meaning: money and power. Only money and power can defend against the chaos of this world and ensure a life of pleasure. Those people whom he can’t buy, Hollister can destroy. People are tools, unless they decline to be used, whereupon they become merely obstructions that must be broken and quickly swept aside—or eliminated entirely.
With no need for his father’s books, he had considered donating the collection to a charity or university but instead moved them to this place as a reminder of the old man’s fatal weakness.
Now, as Hollister enters the library, Thomas Buckle turns from the shelves and says, “What a magnificent collection. First editions of everything from Bradbury to Wolfe. Hammett and Hemingway. Stark and Steinbeck. Such eclectic taste.”
Buckle is twenty-six, handsome enough to be an actor, though he dreams of a career as a famous film director. He has already made two low-budget movies acclaimed by some critics, but box-office success has eluded him. He is at a crucial juncture, an ambitious young man of considerable talent whose philosophy and vision are at odds with the common wisdom that currently prevails in Hollywood, which he has begun to discover will limit his opportunities.
He has come here in response to a personal phone call from Wainwright Hollister, who expressed admiration for the young man’s work and a desire to discuss a business proposal involving film production. This is a lie. However, as people are tools, so lies are nothing more than the various grips that one must apply to make them perform as wanted.
Upon the director’s arrival, Hollister had briefly greeted him, so that now there is no need for the formalities of introduction. A smile is all he requires when he says, “Perhaps you would like to select one of these novels that’s never been filmed and make it our first project together.”