Breathless by Dean Koontz Page B

failed him.
    To ensure that his enemy could not get in with a key, Henry braced the kitchen door with a dinette chair. He used another chair to prevent the front door from being opened.
    Henry thought of himself as a monster of limitless cruelty and perfect self-interest, whose absolute amorality ensured that he would reliably do the best thing for himself without hesitation. Now he reluctantly recognized that he could nevertheless make mistakes.
    For one thing, he had equipped his Land Rover with a roadside-assistance and anti-theft service. Via satellite, it allowed real-time conversations in the event of breakdowns, accidents, and other emergencies. His primary purpose when having the service installed was to receive reliable advice about the best restaurants and the finest hotels wherever he happened to be at mealtime during his leisurely drive west.
    In his Washington circles were people who could secretly hack into the satellite-service computers and follow him by the signal from the transponder that had been installed in the Land Rover as part of the package.
    He purchased the Rover using fake ID and paid for it with a wire transfer from a bank in Bermuda, which itself received the funds from the account of a fabric-design firm in France, which was only a shell corporation acting on behalf of a nonexistent textile mill in the Philippines, which was owned by a wealthy Hong Kong man who could never be questioned or subpoenaed to testify in court because he was a figment of Henry’s imagination.
    Evidently, using a homeless bum as proxy, he should have instead bought a used and spavined SUV for cash and should have driven west in rattletrap style, dressed in the tacky garb of a typical middle-class tourist, subsisting on Twinkies and Big Macs and mystery-meat tacos, sleeping in cheap motels where he was at risk of death either from swarms of mutant bedbugs or from exposure to such tasteless decor that it could inspire a weak cerebral artery to pop.
    Never in a millennium would anyone in his Washington circles have thought to look for him—or for anyone of their acquaintance—in such a vehicle or in such déclassé establishments. They had all benefited from the same quality education, and they shared a set of standards by which they lived, and they expected of one another adherence to those standards.
    Being one of the anointed elite meant
belonging
, meant freedom from self-doubt, meant always knowing what you thought and what you should think, meant
comfort
. But now Henry realized that it also meant being so intellectually cozy that you could not easilythink out of the box. He thought he had risen above the past by freeing his inner beast from all restraint, yet he had planned his flight from D.C. in these dangerous times much as he might have planned a motor trip to the Hamptons in the old days when the world had not yet begun to slide into an abyss.
    The tormentor clearly retained the ability to think outside the box. This sonofabitch wanted something more than the money and the farm, and he sought what he wanted with a strategy and tactics that left Henry confused and off balance.
    Henry needed to be more mentally nimble. He must strive to expect the unexpected. To think the unthinkable.
    After taking a trash bag from a box of them in a kitchen drawer, Henry returned to the bedroom. He put the blood-soaked leather gloves in the bag and placed the bag on the armchair.
    As he removed the bloody chenille spread from the bed and set it aside to be laundered, he reminded himself that survival required mental nimbleness. Expect the unexpected. Think the unthinkable. He tried to think of something unthinkable so that he could consider it.
    But as a monster in the making, he found nothing unthinkable, no motive or action shocking or even alien. Limits and transgressions had no meaning for him.
    Then into his mind’s eye came the image of his twin brother taking a bullet in the face. He saw the event as it had been. Then