The Face. Dean Koontz

of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.

      He picked up his shopping bag—which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network—and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.

      Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.

      One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.

      To the music of splash and splatter—and thinly spread Pearl Jam—Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.

      The hall serving the men’s and women’s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.

      From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician’s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.

      He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn’t need to apply additional tape.

      From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.

      Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.

      The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.

      Corky’s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.

      Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he’d not been captured on videotape near the crime.

      The L-shaped corridor serving the restrooms led to the second-floor mall promenade, which was under constant security surveillance. Previously, Corky had scoped out the positions of the cameras that covered the approaches to the lavatory hallway.

      Departing now, he casually averted his face from those lenses. Keeping his head down, he quickly blended into the crowd of shoppers.

      When security guards later reviewed the tapes, they might focus on Corky as having entered and departed the lavatory corridor in the approximate time frame of the vandalism. But they would not be able to obtain a useful image of his face.

      He had intentionally worn nondescript clothes, the better to fade into the rabble. On videotapes recorded elsewhere in the mall, he wouldn’t be easily identifiable as the same man who had visited the restroom just prior to the flood.

      A gorgeous excess of spangled and frosted holiday decorations further compromised the usefulness of the cameras, infringing upon the established angles of view.

      The winter-wonderland theme avoided both direct and symbolic references to Christmas: no angels, no mangers, no images of Santa Claus, no busy elves, no reindeer, no traditional ornaments—and no festive lengths of colored lights, only tiny white twinkle bulbs. Festoons of plastic and shiny aluminum-foil icicles, measured in miles, glimmered everywhere. Thousands of large, sequined Styrofoam snowflakes hung on strings from the ceiling. In the central rotunda, ten life-size ice skaters, all mechanical figures moving on tracks, glided around a fake frozen pond in an elaborate re-creation of a winter landscape complete with snowmen, snow forts, robot children threatening one another with plastic snowballs, and animated figures of polar bears in comical poses.

      Corky Laputa was enchanted by the pure, blissful vacuousness of it all.

      On the first escalator to the ground floor, on the second to the garage, he brooded over a few details of his scheme to kill Rolf Reynerd. Both as he had shopped and as he had enjoyed his destructive escapades in the mall, Corky had carefully laid a bold and simple plan for murder.

      He was a natural-born multitasker.

      To those who had never studied political strategy and who also lacked a solid grounding in philosophy, Corky’s capers in the men’s room might have seemed at best to be childish larks. A society could seldom be brought down solely by acts of violence, however, and every thoughtful anarchist must be dedicated to his mission every minute of the day, wreaking havoc by actions both small and large.

      Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.

      If somehow Corky could have carried the black plague without risking his own life, he would have enthusiastically passed that disease to everyone he met by way of sneezes, coughs, touches, and kisses. If sometimes all he could do was flush a cherry bomb down a public toilet, he would advance chaos by that tiny increment while he awaited opportunities to do greater damage.

      In the garage, when he reached his BMW, he shrugged out of his sports coat. Before settling behind the steering wheel, he donned the yellow slicker once more. He put the droopy yellow rain hat on the front passenger’s seat, within easy reach.

      Besides providing superb protection in even a hard-driving rain, the slicker was the ideal gear in which to commit homicide. Blood could be easily washed off the shiny vinyl surface, leaving no stain.

      According to the Bible, to every season there is a purpose, a time to kill and a time to heal.

      Not much of a healer, Corky believed there was a time to kill and a time not to kill. The time to kill had arrived.

      Corky’s death list contained more than one name, and Reynerd was not at the top. Anarchy could be a demanding faith.

       CHAPTER 18

      FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS and wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.

      The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.

      If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.

      For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.

      Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.

      He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.

      He might as well die here, die now.

      Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece