Devoted - Dean Koontz Page 0,28

words of the audio: “—in the crash of a helicopter owned by the company.”

Then his dad’s face was gone, and more tragedies were cited until the site greeting came to an end. The screen went black, and then three words appeared in white block letters: Enter Your Password.

Of course Woody hadn’t been a user of whatever services were being offered. Therefore, he didn’t have a password.

He had exited the site.

He’d sat staring at his blank computer screen for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Thinking.

Eventually, with pen in hand and tablet ready, he had spoofed through the Alexander Gordius account and again entered the forty-six-character email address.

Tragedy.

The montage of images and audio began to play once more. As the newsreaders and others spoke of the deaths, Woody jotted down the names of the victims.

He was prepared for the photo of his dad. As before, the still shot was followed by video of the smoldering helicopter. “Jason Bookman, right hand to Parable founder, Dorian Purcell, and his pilot died today in the crash of a helicopter owned by the company.”

At the end of this introduction, the screen again instructed Enter Your Password.

Woody had exited the Dark Web site, backed out of the computer system that included the Alexander Gordius email archives, raveled backward through his spoof chain to quiet Pinehaven, this house, this room, and switched off his computer.

That had been months earlier. Since then, he diligently researched the circumstances of the forty-one deaths that had been referenced in the video introduction to the website.

If any of the accidents seemed suspicious to the authorities, none had been reassessed as anything else.

The suicides were confirmed as suicides by medical examiners in the various cities where they had occurred.

None of the gang shootings and terrorist acts had resulted in the arrest of perpetrators.

Certain subtle patterns in these events were apparent perhaps only to an obsessed high-functioning autistic boy with an IQ of 186, who had thousands of hours to devote to such an investigation. Of the forty-one deaths reported, only two others seemed to have ties to Dorian Purcell.

Which meant nothing more than that Purcell wasn’t the exclusive user of this Dark Web service.

The site was not a statement about the fragility of life. It wasn’t a memorial, an internet wailing wall against which to lament the role of tragedy in the human experience.

Week by week, month by month, Woody had gathered compelling circumstantial evidence that Tragedy was a murder-for-hire operation.

He had been careful not to return to Tragedy, for fear that they might have a way to detect repeated visits that did not result in the input of a password. He’d prowled through Dorian Purcell’s email archives both under the billionaire’s name and the Gordius identity, but he had not been able to ferret out any password related to the Dark Web site.

Now it was a fateful Wednesday, exactly 164 weeks after Jason Bookman died, sixty weeks to the day since Woodrow Bookman began his investigation. One hundred sixty-four minus sixty equaled the number of pages in “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil,” though he hadn’t crafted it to achieve that length. Mere coincidence. Or a consequence of mysterious algorithms by which the universe functioned.

Woody planned to present the document to his mother in the morning. First, however, he intended to return to the Dark Web to confirm that the wicked site was still in operation and that its introductory video remained as it had been months earlier.

As before, he spoofed through several telecom exchanges before invading the Refine computer by the back door that he had long ago established. He used the Alexander Gordius email account to enter the forty-six characters in the Dark Web address.

Black screen, white letters: Tragedy.

His vision blurred with tears when he saw his father’s face.

For the most part, he hid his grief from his mother. On those occasions when she caught him in his anguish, Woody smiled or even laughed. She asked if they were happy tears, and he nodded, yes.

When he saw her crying, her tears embarrassed him, because he knew they weren’t happy tears, also because he felt he should do something to comfort her. But he was who he was—Woody the Mess—and there wasn’t anything he could do, so his embarrassment grew into mortification. He didn’t want his tears to mortify his mother.

The video ended, and the screen presented him with the command: Enter Your Password.

He stared at the three words, wondering how much you