by Susan Dunlap
“My business is with the Tchernak Detective Agency. As a reputable information service, I would never give out requested data to a competing detective.”
She could see the blowsy woman plopping a bonbon between her over-red lips. “Tchernak’s not going to be calling you. He’s in a cage in a deputy’s car right now. And if you don’t tell me about Grady Hummacher’s flights, Tchernak’ll be there for a long time.”
“Yeah, sure. Like I’d believe you.”
“You think I’d lie? The sheriff found him standing over Hummacher’s corpse,” she lied.
A sharp rap on the door shook her. “Hey, hurry up in there!”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“What was that?” Persis demanded.
“The sheriff. I don’t have much time, and Tchernak’s got less, so give.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell you. But, for you there’s no cut rate. This time of night it’s double-time.”
If she hadn’t been so pressed, Kiernan would have laughed. “What carrier did Hummacher fly to Panama and back on?”
“Isn’t one.”
“Isn’t a commercial flight?”
“No, there isn’t …” Persis paused as if she knew how infuriating that was. “Not one carrier, but two. I checked both commercial flights for both days. Hummacher wasn’t on either. Only other one going from Las Vegas to Panama City was chartered to Nihonco Oil.”
Kiernan nodded. So her guess had been right. Grady had been in bed, or at least on charter, with Nihonco.
“Come on in there!” Fox called before the requisite pounding.
“Just a sec, Sheriff.” She shifted even farther away from the door and lowered her voice. “Persis, what about a Sheriff Fox from Gattozzi?”
“No request on him.”
Of course not. Five minutes ago Tchernak hadn’t laid eyes on Fox. “Fox, sheriff in Gattozzi, that’s whose custody we’re in. If you don’t hear from us in a day, call my lawyer.”
“Hey, I’m a data service, not a servant.”
She said the magic words, “Tchernak is in danger,” and pushed Off. Her cell phone wasn’t the best, but it was the smallest. Even so, sticking it between her breasts created a telltale bulge—another misfortune of the small—and it was damned uncomfortable. Under her left arm, inside her bra wasn’t much of an improvement, but not much was better than none. From force of habit she rechecked the entire tiny bathroom, under the sink, behind the waste can, but there was nothing likely to be useful.
Easing the door open, she glanced out, half expecting to walk into Fox’s pounding fist. But the man was true to his word. He was not on guard inches away. She couldn’t see him at all. It was his voice she heard.
“You expect me to believe you didn’t see anyone go into that motel room?” he was demanding of Faye in the same “Hurry up” tone.
“Think what you like.” Faye wasn’t having any of that. “I had a bunch of teenagers in here, some I know, some I didn’t. No way was I taking my eyes off them. You blink and you haven’t got a catsup bottle left. Aliens could have landed in the parking lot and they wouldn’t have drawn me out of here.”
“No one else came in or out of the parking lot all that time?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Stop screwing with me, Faye.”
Kiernan expected her to snap back at him, but the voice she heard held a high quiver and the answer was disconcertingly quick. “There were cars, three of them. Didn’t arrive together. I didn’t see who was in them. Just cars.” Had Fox threatened her?
Kiernan pressed her back against the wall and inched forward.
“Make?”
“Barracuda. A miracle it was still running. Didn’t sound like that miracle would last. Then there was a pickup—”
“You recognize either one?”
There was a silent beat before Faye said no. Surely he noted the hesitation. Faye sounded just like the kids at St. Brendan’s who didn’t want to get their palms rapped with a ruler. If she could only observe their conversation …Kiernan edged to the corner, bent down to a level Fox wouldn’t be watching for, and peered around. All she could see was the counter. Two vehicles? If Adcock flew up from Las Vegas, he’d have borrowed a car. It could be either, but odds were on the pickup.
“Third?”
“New. Foreign-looking. I’m not up on those. Whatever, I haven’t seen it around here.”
Had to be Louisa Larson, she thought. Tchernak said the woman doctor had a BMW.
“Any of them go to the motel room?”
“Behind the counter here I can’t see the door. Maybe they all went in. All I can tell you for sure is the next time I saw the new car, the foreign model, it was at the edge of the pavement and a woman was throwing her guts up. If you think vomit’s evidence, help yourself.”
“Hey, don’t you …” Fox paused as if he heard the hysteria in his own voice. “Never mind,” he muttered.
Kiernan glanced from Faye to Fox, hoping to spot the reason for her fear. All she got was one sturdy woman with windblown hair and a weather-lined face, and big twitchy bear of a guy.
Kiernan stepped around the corner. “Faye, what order did those cars arrive in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think!”
“What difference does it make?” Faye demanded. “Maybe the first one killed him and one of the others threw up at the sight. Maybe the first two saw the third coming and left. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I don’t know.”
“The teenagers?”
“Honey, for them the world ends at their elbows. Nothing outside this glass was going to get their attention unless it was another teenager.”
Fox nodded toward the door.
“What do you think happened, Sheriff?” Faye asked.
“You said Hummacher had a couple of Mex kids with him. Maybe they got fed up being hauled around, or that foreign fever of theirs drove them crazy.” He shrugged. “Shot ’im.”
“And walked out into the desert you just warned me against?” Kiernan demanded. “And they’re not Mexican, they’re Panamanian!”
“Whatever.”
“They walked off, sick as they are?” Kiernan demanded.
“I’ll take responsibility for them.”
“And for Faye if she starts feeling feverish? And the maids who picked up their sheets?”
“Enough! Come on! In the car!”
She shot a glance at Faye as Fox shoved her though the door. The worried look on the woman’s face assured her this incident wouldn’t be forgotten soon.
She climbed into the cage. The seats were stiff with cold and the fear-drenched sweat of every prisoner who had ever been tossed in there. Like the boys would be when Fox caught up with them. Sick and terrified, if they weren’t already dead. If they took their “foreign fever” to the grave the only civic reaction would be relief. A shiver shot down her spine. She pressed against the seat back, but there was no warmth there. The boys. Deaf and mute from an impoverished land, she knew what that meant. Without language, without the understanding of how society works, even their own society. Life constantly overwhelming, odds stacked sky-high against them. And then dragged into a foreign country. The awful aloneness of it overwhelmed her.
Turning to the window, she spotted Tchernak in the back of the last car, too far away to signal. The heater was off, and she looked longingly at her bloodied jacket before tossing it onto the floor. In the space between the motel and the cafe she could make out a line to the east. The black was lightening to dark gray. In an hour it would be dawn. She couldn’t stop the shaking and she knew, as she had rarely known before, that sunup would bring nothing but a lack of cover.
It was fifteen minutes later when Fox climbed into the driver’s seat, swung the car around, and pulled out onto the highway heading north. She looked out the rear window for Tchernak’s deputy’s car. The road was empty. There could be reasons for the delay in bringing him to the station, but she didn’t bother
guessing at them. She leaned her head against the cold seat and prepared herself for the Gattozzi jail forty-five minutes straight ahead.
Ten minutes down the road, Fox turned off.
CHAPTER 46
“WHERE ARE YOU TAKING me?” Kiernan demanded from the back of the sheriff’s car. The road was paved, but the desert sand and scree had almost covered it. In the dawning light it was a pale streak on the harsh desert floor. To the sides there was nothing but dirt and short, wiry tumbleweed.
“Fox, where are we going?” Kiernan waited through only a moment of his silence before whipping off her belt and clattering the buckle against the mesh.
“Hey, cut that out!”
“Where, Fox?”
“Okay, okay. You’ll know soon enough. See that sign way up ahead?”
NO ADMITTANCE UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES TURN BACK, it announced in bold print. In smaller letters beneath, it read U.S. NAVAL FACILITY. No guard station or gate reinforced the sign. “The Admiralty of the Sands? Is that it?”
Fox started to speak, and caught himself.
“You, Fox, are you the captain of the dinghy?”
“It’s smart-asses like you that cause problems.” It sounded lame when he said it, and Kiernan suspected he had censored himself mid thought.
“And those boys; they weren’t goading anyone. They were minding their own business. Aliens, without any language at all, minding their own business was all they could do. Why did you bring them here?”
“I didn’t say I did.”
“Why here, Fox!”
“Because, goddammit, we can’t have aliens bringing foreign plagues on our people. If you’re bleeding out from God knows what, this is the one place around here where they know about those microbes.” He slowed at a kiosk long enough for the uniformed man to recognize him.
“Morning, Captain.”
“Captain! Are you on duty here?” she demanded, but Fox busied himself with the dance of greetings before stepping on the gas. “You’re on duty at this secret installation and you’re pretending to be the county sheriff?”
“I am the sheriff.”
“Sheriff reporting to whom? What are you, Fox, a spy, spying on your own people? Making sure they don’t get wind of the nuclear waste here and kick up a fuss about deadly poisons in their ground?” Jeff Tremaine, with all his environmental connections, must have been the primo pain. But the boys, how did they fit it?
Of course nuclear-waste burial was only a theory. This place could house Intelligence or anything else.
The road ran so straight, Fox could have taken a nap at the wheel. After another ten minutes he turned left, following the arrow pointing to BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL AGENT DETECTION SYSTEM FACILITY.
“Detection!” Kiernan cried. “What are you detecting? Incoming warheads? I don’t think so. So, what, Fox?” Before he could speak, she knew the answer. “Oh no. Germ warfare. This is a secret germ-warfare lab. You’re creating—”
“We are not! Terrorists all around the world are creating viruses that can wipe out a city. At B-CADS we’re not creating, we are defending.”
She had read about these installations in newspapers and magazines. “You’re running experiments to identify these deadly germs—”
“Something wrong with that?” He twisted sharply right, glaring over his shoulder. The car jerked right and he had to yank the wheel to pull out of it. “You want us to sit on our hands till some nut sets off sarin in our subways like they did in Tokyo?”
“I want you to be up-front about what you’re doing and not blame the virus you caused on illegal aliens.”
“Right, and …Forget it. You’ll have plenty of time to think your radical thoughts. This the kind of stuff you and Tremaine bitched about out there in San Francisco?” He let a moment pass before saying, so softly she had to strain to hear, “In your kind of work I’ll bet you could be gone a long time before anyone worried.”
“Fox,” she said just as softly, “do you get a medal for bringing them two live cases of hemorrhagic fever to dissect?”
Her fingers were in the mesh, her mouth inches from his ear. She could have screamed till his ears rang, and she would have felt better doing it. And the boys would still be dying. Dying for the greater glory of research, where guinea pigs were more valued than human beings with no commercial value. She hadn’t seen the boys, but she understood isolation and alienness, she who had spent most of her life apart from those around her. She had never had best friends. Her lovers had shared turbulent passions, never companionship. The closest friend she had was Tchernak, and when all this was over, he could be dead. If these boys had each other, she envied them.
And if Fox and his crew let them die? Or worse yet, let one of them die … ?
“Goddamn you!” she screamed.
Fox tensed. “Sit back and shut up!” he screamed back.
His reaction wasn’t enough. Nothing he could do would be enough. Even if he produced the boys in perfect health, it wouldn’t make up for the arrogant servants of the people who used the people in the name of research, justified it in the name of the greater good, and denied any of it ever existed. She could have smacked him all the way to Vegas and it wouldn’t have been enough.
Kiernan stared at the distant sky as stripes of morning gold faded to yellow, to beige, and into pale blue. It all looked so normal.
To the east she spotted green, intense green. It had to be the park Grady and Irene and the boys had been headed to last week.
“What’s that?”
Fox kept his eyes straight ahead.
“To the right, that green area? It’s what, about two city blocks wide? Is it some secret R and R spot for the Great Sand Admirals? Bunch of palm trees, some hibiscus, bread-fruit, a big blue pool for the landlocked admirals to float around in with—what—battleships carrying rum drinks with umbrellas? Is that where the taxpayers’ money is going?”
A laugh so spontaneous bubbled out of Fox that Kiernan shivered. “Ah, so it’s ridiculous to even think of picnicking there? Why is that, Fox?”
This time he was better controlled.
Kiernan shifted forward to the edge of the seat. Fingers in the mesh, mouth inches from Fox’s ear, she said, “Don’t bother to answer, Fox, I’ll do your part.
“Me: ‘What is that park? Not a good spot for a country picnic ground.’
“You: ‘No, ma’am, I reckon it’s not.’ You don’t mind talking like a sheriff, do you, Fox? ‘It’d be much too dangerous out there this close to the germ-warfare detection facility.’
“‘Why, Fox? What do they do here?’
“‘Just what it says, little lady. They run tests to see if they can detect viral and bacterial agents.’
“‘What kind of tests? Specifically what land would affect that park?’
“‘Ah, very perceptive question.’
“‘Thank you, Fox. So you mean they do aerial testing? They shoot dangerous, potentially deadly bacteria into the air and then detect … ? See if they can detect it?’
“‘Very—’”
She stared out at the green square of park and thought of the farmers half a century earlier walking around on their land many miles to the east of here, milking their cows, unaware that they were downwind of a nuclear testing ground, drinking the milk and dying. But open air testing was a thing of the past—or so people assumed. Locals like Jeff Tremaine might be suspicious. But Grady Hummacher, who was off exploring for oil most of the time, wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Here in this park—it had to be the place Faye talked about, the park Grady Hummacher took the boys—those two homesick boys would have run toward the first green trees and underbrush they had seen since they were hustled out of Panama. They probably thought they were in heaven, not a hellish outdoor laboratory where they breathed in deadly biological agents.
The game was over, her taunting tone gone, as she said, “Oh shit, Fox. You shoot microbes into the air, microbes for which you have no treatment and you hope—if y
ou even care—that the microbes don’t land on anyone downwind. That’s right, isn’t it?” She banged both hands against the mesh. “That’s right! And if someone happens to be in that park—”
“That park’s off-limits. There are signs all over the place. And it’s not a park, it’s a testing environment. The only way you know it exists is if you work here.”
“There was never any Panamanian virus, was there? The threat wasn’t from dreaded aliens, the virus came from our own government. And so you carried off the dead woman’s body—”
“To protect American citizens from disease—”
“To protect your secret project.” The woman, Irene, was dead and her body removed from the mortuary. Grady Hummacher was dead. And now all that threatened that secret was the boys. Had Grady been shot while trying to protect them? She could see Fox, gun aimed, demanding the boys. She could see his finger squeezing the trigger. He’d signal his deputies to move the boys …
The swollen, bloody faces of the dying African patients rushed back into her mind. It was years later and she could still see each face, faces she had seen only once, to whom she had never spoken nor could have called by name. But these boys—a squeak startled her, and she realized it had come from her own mouth. How long had it been since their exposure? A little over a week? If they’d had Lassa, they’d be dead by now, or almost. Irene had already been dead for days.
Why weren’t they dead? Were they just genetically lucky? Had they somehow avoided the exposure she’d had? Only to be nabbed by Fox and his cronies?
But the sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t have touched the boys, not with their fevers and bleeding faces. Suited, masked naval personnel would have done it. As soon as Fox had seen the inside of the motel room, he’d backed out. And sent Jeff Tremaine in.
And if the navy had taken the boys, she realized, they would have seized Grady Hummacher’s body too.
“Fox, you don’t have those boys, do you?”
“Not yet. We’re counting on you to help us.”
“Help you how?”
He didn’t answer.
In the distance behind a denser, higher fence, a low, square building squatted in the surrounding dirt. She squinted to see the dark slits that broke up the tan facade. Windows? And the hollow in the middle—was that the entryway? The place looked like a space station on Mars. For all the chance of escaping, it might well have been. Despite the sun outside, Kiernan felt a chill colder than any during the night, and she didn’t need Tchernak to tell her about her dire prospects. Military might and self-righteousness were a deadly combination.
