The Delta Factor

by Thomas Locke

  When the truck pulled over and stopped, Cliff had gone around to the side, looked up at the round-eyed driver, and said as calmly as his shaking chest would allow, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth, and I’m too tired to lie.”

  “Brother, anybody hard up enough to try and stop a truck with his bare hands deserves a lift,” the driver told him. “Climb on in.”

  The truck had headed north, away from Edenton and his car. Cliff had let himself be dropped off at the Norfolk airport, but not before he had thanked the driver and his partner with solemn handshakes and promises to write and let them know how it all ended up.

  Cliff pulled the car up to the curb, stopped another pedestrian, asked for directions a third time, offered hasty thanks, and roared away. The University of Virginia’s Norfolk campus was a patchwork of buildings spread out over a couple of square miles, with bits and pieces of city life in between. The lab buildings were close to the teaching hospital, that much he had learned from the cop who had given the first set of directions, but only after a cautious inspection of his papers and license.

  Cliff turned the corner, breathed a great gasp of relief when he saw the hospital directly in front of him, then cut it off when he spotted the dark car in front of the red-brick lab building. Cliff squinted, decided that yes, it was definitely an Infiniti. Black. As the car angled to pull into a parking lot, he saw the mangled front bumper. And lo and behold, through the open windows he saw an aquiline-featured foreigner dressed in a cream-colored suit and a very nasty scowl.

  With a war cry that would have made Cochise’s ancestors proud, Cliff slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The big V-8 roared. Tires squealed and burned a neat patch of smoking rubber as Cliff raced the final thirty yards, shouting a wordless scream the entire way.

  He hit the Infiniti with a force that rocked it clear off the two nearside tires.

  Cliff backed up, stopped to catch his breath and inspect the results. Through the open window he saw a dark-haired man slumped over the steering wheel. Blood seeped from a cut on his forehead.

  Cliff looked around, expecting to hear shouts and sirens and racing feet.

  Nothing.

  Nobody on the streets, no heads from windows, no flashing lights. Amazing. Definitely his lucky day.

  Cliff put the Buick into drive, listened as the engine replied with some sounds that had absolutely not been there a minute ago, and drove around the block to find a parking space of his own.

  He got out, locked the door, and inspected a hood that now lurched upward and slightly to the left. He then turned and started toward the cluster of buildings, wondering which one contained the labs, whistling a merry tune.

  * * *

  Deborah dropped her stylus and eased the ache in her shoulders. With the movement came the warning knell. Was it the first? She stopped, held her breath, and did her internal checklist. She could not recall. She had been too wrapped up in her work to notice. Fatigue rolled over her in waves. Bad.

  Her table was strewn with DNA spectroscope readouts and her own calculations. At any other time she would have reveled in the challenge of mathematical biology, but not now.

  There was no longer any room for doubt. Her restructured viroid was not a respecter of species. The instructions that had carried it into the root system of one plant had taken it to the pollen of another. A remarkable feat, one that would excite the entire scientific world.

  A pity it had to be discovered this way.

  The recombinant DNA affected the rapeweed pollen in a way that produced a hallucinogen. It had to be one based upon a complex amino acid chain, one that had the ability to flow through the blood-brain barrier intact. She scanned the long sheets spread out before her, reading them as easily as a composer did a musical score. The signals were there. The supposedly harmless marker molecule connected with the pollen molecular structure in such a way as to send any human who came into contact with it to the far side of the moon.

  There were two big unanswered questions. First, was this effect to be found in every flowering plant, or just rapeweed? She hoped for the latter, but the scarred patch of ground before the Jones’s home, where rosebushes once had flourished, was there to haunt her every time she shut her eyes.

  But it was the second question that really brought out the nightmares: Did the recombinant pollen DNA have the power to self-replicate? Were they going to find an ever-expanding harvest of hallucinogenic plants? Deborah did not think so. The impossibility of self-replication was one of the basic tenets upon which modern microbiology was founded.

  Yet a lab-restructured viroid that was no respecter of species was also totally, utterly new. And this shadow of doubt left her more frightened than she had been since the first dark nights of her impending illness.

  Her colleague Warren chose that moment to enter the room. “How’s it going, Debs?”

  “All right.” Deborah pushed back her chair. She had to go lie down. Suddenly the act of rising seemed a daunting task. She glanced at her watch. Almost five. Eight hours without a break. Very bad.

  Warren moved to the lab’s far corner and busied himself over the coffee machine. “Hey, you’ll never guess who I saw sitting in a car outside the lab.”

  “Who?” She made it to her feet by pressing up with both arms. Then she realized she had left her wheelchair in the jeep. She had felt so good that morning she had seen no need to bring it up. Very, very bad.

  “James Whitehurst.” Warren stirred in a spoonful of sugar. “At least I think it was him.”

  Deborah stood frozen to the spot. “Whitehurst of Pharmacon?”

  “Are there two? I met him at a conference a while back. Sent him my curriculum vitae, thought maybe I could get a step up in the world. Never heard back from him. That’s why I didn’t go over and say hello. Wonder what he wants.” Warren took a noisy sip. “I’m pretty sure it was him.”

  Whitehurst. Deborah felt faint tremors run through her limbs. Everything was falling into place. The man who had stalked her house had gray hair. Of course. Whitehurst saw the Echin drug breakthrough as his key to the boardroom. He would do anything to hold on to that.

  Anything.

  Deborah started for the door, her feet shuffling noisily across the floor. “Could you give me a hand, Warren?”

  His back was to her. “Sure thing, Debs, just let me make a quick call, okay?”

  “Warren,” she said, then stopped. He was already on the phone. She reached for the door.

  She had to find a place to hide.

  * * *

  James Whitehurst tried to look at it like a trip to the dentist, painful but unavoidable. Down deep, however, he found the whole affair utterly despicable.

  Having to deal with riffraff such as this man beside him, a dead-eyed lout with white-blond hair and pupils of palest blue, one shade away from a true albino. A gun for hire. To be forced to stoop to such things. Whitehurst climbed the laboratory stairs, fighting down his anger at Owen MacKenzie, at Pharmacon, at fate, but not at Givens. No, that anger he wanted to let burn like a white-hot flame. It was the only way he could keep going. And he had to. Doing what lay ahead was his only way to get what he deserved. Though it left him sweaty palmed and queasy, Whitehurst kept climbing the stairs. At least he wouldn’t be the one to pull the trigger.

  Whitehurst stopped before the door the receptionist had directed him to, and motioned for his heavy-lidded companion to wait. He raised his hand to knock on the door, when a soft moan sounded from farther down the corridor.

  * * *

  It was worse this time than it ever had been before. The warning tingle in her head had grown to an angry buzz, sort of a cross between a berserk electric razor and a beehive on the rampage.

  Then the socks appeared on her ankles.

  That was how somebody in the support group had described it. Deborah had only gone three times before tiring of all the pain and anger and fear. Maybe it helped the others to lay it all out over and over and over aro
und the room, but not her. She had enough trouble dealing with her own distress, much less that of two dozen others.

  The socks. The socks started unrolling up her legs, like somebody was dipping her limbs in novocaine. She stumbled over to the side wall and let herself slip down to the floor. Already she had lost her feet.

  It was up above her knees now, and at midthigh the new fear emerged. What if it didn’t stop? What if it kept creeping right on up, farther and farther to her neckline? She knew it was a possibility. She even knew the name for it. Chronic progressive, it was called. The form of disease that turned a living, breathing, feeling, shouting, lusting human being into a prisoner, trapped inside a body that no longer moved upon command. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for a lifetime.

  Deborah breathed a soft moan, almost delirious with relief when the numbness stopped and held, claiming only her legs.

  Then she heard the footsteps walk toward her, and she held her breath. But the footsteps continued their quiet careful approach.

  Until two pairs of legs came into view.

  21

  “It’s too quiet,” Cochise announced.

  “Quiet’s fine with me,” Cliff replied, climbing the stairs beside him. “Quiet’s great.”

  Cliff had been halfway across the broad lawn when a blaring horn had turned him around. Blair had flung her car into a free space, waved him over, grinned from ear to ear when Cliff’s jaw hit his chest at the sight of Cofield sitting there beside her.

  Cochise had untangled himself from the backseat and swiftly explained how the research director had been persuaded to see the light. Cofield had just sat there, still shaky from the experience and afraid the three-headed purple people eater was going to swoop down again and carry him off for good.

  But Cliff had managed to give almost as good as he got. He had taken Blair and Cochise by the mangled Infiniti, shown off his handiwork, bragged a little over how not everybody could have done such a job—see that, hit him dead center, look at how that door’s bent, it almost makes it halfway across the front seat. Cochise had asked, if Cliff had done such a great job, then where was the guy. Cliff had replied by pointing at the hospital and suggesting that a stroll through the emergency room might reveal a foreigner with a leaky head.

  Then they had sent Blair back to baby-sit their semi-reformed research director and gone off to find Deborah Givens.

  Cochise stopped him with an upraised arm the size of a tree branch. “This place is quiet like before a big storm.”

  But Cliff was still too high from his meeting with the Infiniti to care. “I got it now. This is another Indian thing, right?”

  Cochise shook his head, his eyes staring hard up ahead, as though trying to see around corners. “I just got the feeling this place is waiting for an explosion to go off.”

  “So let’s go see,” Cliff said, climbing the final stairs. “What lab did she say, two-oh-one, is that right?”

  They stopped before the door and knocked. A muffled voice answered from inside. Cliff opened the door, shook his head as Cochise hung back, scanning the hall. “Afternoon. Is Dr. Givens around?”

  “Just stepped out.” The guy made more noise sipping from his cup than Cliff would have thought possible. “You from Pharmacon?”

  “Sort of. Do you know where she went?”

  “She’ll be back. Can’t have gone far, her purse is still here.” Another slurp. “I thought you were probably from her lab. I saw James Whitehurst down there a minute ago, didn’t I?”

  The pieces fell into place with an almost audible click-click-click. “What?”

  “Whitehurst. Did you come up with him?”

  “Whitehurst is here?” Cliff wheeled around, ready to shout for Cochise, when a scream floated up through the open window.

  The big man blew into the room, scaring the guy at the desk so badly he poured coffee down his lab coat. Cochise held one woman’s shoe in his hand. He pushed Cliff away from the window, craned, searched, pointed, shouted, “There!”

  Cliff left the room a half step behind Cochise, caught up with him on the stairs by jumping the banister’s curve, led by two strides when he slammed through the front doors. He took all eight entrance stairs in one bound, spotted Blair pointing across the lawn to where Deborah was being bundled toward a car, and roared.

  * * *

  Whitehurst thrust his face within inches of hers. “Take a last long look at the real world, Doctor. The one you scientists never get around to understanding.”

  The blond guy carried her with the ease of one whose muscles did not bulge. Her hands were tied, her mouth stuffed with Whitehurst’s handkerchief. They had taken the stairs with caution, Whitehurst up ahead to make sure the coast was clear. But it was summer, and the weekend, and the place was almost deserted. They scampered under the receptionist’s window and through the doors, made another check, then hustled across the lawn.

  But the need for speed did not stop Whitehurst from railing at her. “I can buy brains like you on every street corner,” he rasped. “All I have to do is snap my fingers and say the magic words, sterile lab, and they’re mine. You all are.”

  The blond man was more frightening because of his silence. His eyes scattered everywhere, checking in all directions, watching for the first sign of danger, paying Whitehurst’s tirade no mind at all as he hustled her across the lawn.

  “You people hide in your ultraclean little rooms because you’re terrified of real life.” Whitehurst’s words tumbled out in the effort of trying to speak and jog at the same time. “There’s a basic rule of real life you never bothered to learn, doctor scientist lady. You take care of business. You do whatever works. You deal with what’s there. And if anybody gets in your line of fire, hey, there aren’t any white flags in the real world.”

  He stopped by the car and caught his breath and fumbled for his keys. “So you can just kiss—”

  “Heellllp!” The scream was so high as to sound disembodied. “Clifff! Cochiiisse! Poollliiice!”

  Whitehurst whirled about, and was shocked into a moment’s stillness by the sight of Blair Collins jumping up and down and pointing in their direction.

  The roar behind them galvanized the blond man into action even before the sound had registered in Deborah’s ears. He slammed her into Whitehurst so fast and so hard it knocked them both to the ground. Then he turned and made two blades of his hands.

  * * *

  Cliff saw the man turn and crouch and raise his hands like he knew what he was doing. But Cliff was too fired up with too much anger to stop. He put his head down and charged.

  But the man was no longer there.

  Then Cliff was flying through the air, his right arm flailing at an uncertain angle.

  And then he hit. Hard.

  “That’s one of them!” Whitehurst’s voice was almost incoherent. “Do it!”

  The blond hair was a white frame for eyes that held no expression, no feeling, no concern whatsoever as they appeared over him, the fist cocked back for the final blow.

  Then the blond man simply disappeared.

  There was a moment of shouting and feet scuffling and a whanging sound of something being rammed repeatedly into the side of a car. Then a pair of figures were suddenly laid out beside him, resembling a pile of wadded up clothes more than James Whitehurst and a blond man.

  Then the sky was replaced by a very big man, who puffed, “That sure was dumb.”

  Cliff tried to rise, found his arm wasn’t responding to orders. “I think I’m hurt.”

  “Did you study to get that dumb, or does it come natural?”

  The pain hit him then. “I think I’m hurt bad.”

  “Serves you right.”

  The Indian was replaced by a very pale Blair, who cradled his face in two very cool hands and asked, “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere, but mostly my arm.”

  She ran fingers over his neck and spine, then turned to Cochise and said, “Lift him gently, and let’s g
et him over to the hospital.”

  “Let me bind up the riffraff here.” Cochise picked up Whitehurst and the blond man by one heel each, and dragged them off across the lawn.

  Cliff swiveled his head, found Deborah leaning up against the side of the car. “You okay?”

  “Never been better.” She looked from one to another and said, “I’m not going to try and thank any of you.”

  Cliff managed a smile. “Oh, go ahead.”

  Then the Indian was back, sliding his hands under him, scooping him up. And with the motion came the pain, a great roaring wave of it that came crashing down on his head, blacking out all light, all sound, all thought.

  22

  Deborah found herself unable to pay attention to what the minister was saying.

  Sunlight played through the old church’s side windows, making golden pillars in which dust motes danced and flickered like tiny angels. The minister’s words washed over and through her, lighting her up inside, even though she was unable to focus, concentrate, use her special talent to delve and seek and understand. No, today the effort was too great, her happiness too strong. It was enough to sit and rest and be home.

  The news conference had blown away like smoke in the wind, along with Congressman Larson’s noisy threats. Ralph Summers had moved into high gear after they had found him late Sunday evening, sat him down, and gone through the entire story. Harvey Cofield had contributed little except confirmation that yes, the rapeweed pollen had been genetically altered, and yes, he did agree with Deborah’s assessment that the cause was the recombinant DNA, and yes, Whitehurst and an accomplice were in custody in Norfolk. The calls and discussions had carried on long into the night, while Deborah dozed in Summers’ guestroom.