The God Project

by John Saul

  “Sally—” Steve moved toward her, but she backed away.

  “Don’t touch me,” she whispered. It was all catching up with her now, all the anger, all the hurt, all the boiling emotions she’d been holding in check for so long. “Don’t put your arms around me and tell me you love me and that you’ll make me well again.” Her voice began to rise as her self-control slipped away. “Don’t tell me that, Steve. It’s a lie. It’s all lies. Everything that man has told you is a lie!” She wheeled around to face Wiseman, her expression a mask of fury. “What have you done to us?” she shrieked. “What have you done to us and to our children?” She hurled herself on Wiseman, her fists pounding against his chest. “How many of us were there? Five? Ten? A hundred? How many dead babies? How many little boys gone? How many? And why? God damn you! Why?”

  The last of her energy drained, she collapsed to the floor, her screams giving way to sobs. Lucy Corliss crouched beside her, stroking her gently, but her eyes, as they fastened on Wiseman, reflected a cold fury that seemed to cut through to the old doctor’s soul.

  “I don’t understand—” he began.

  “Don’t tell us that” Lucy cut him off. “Sally isn’t crazy. None of us is. We’re tired because we’ve been up all night trying to figure out what you’ve been doing. But we’re not crazy.”

  “I?” Wiseman asked, his voice hollow. “What I’ve been doing?”

  Before anyone could say anything else, Jason came into the room, rubbing sleep from his eyes. At the sight of his father and Dr. Wiseman, he hesitated a moment, his eyes confused, then made up his mind. “I don’t want to go to that hospital,” he cried. “There’s nothing wrong with me, and I don’t want to go!” He ran to his mother.

  Though she was still huddled on the floor, Sally gathered him into her protective arms. She peered up at Lucy with frightened eyes. “Don’t let them take us away, Lucy. Please don’t let them take us away.”

  As he watched his wife and son on the floor Steve felt himself begin to come apart. He sank into a chair, his face pale, his hands working helplessly. There before him were the two people he loved best in the world, and they were terrified of him. His eyes searched the room, looking for help, and finally came to rest on Mark Malone.

  “I—I—” His voice faltered, then fell silent.

  Arthur Wiseman’s eyes, too, turned to Malone. “What’s going on, Mark?”

  Malone coldly eyed the older doctor. “You don’t know?”

  Wiseman lowered himself uncertainly into a chair. “All I know is that for ten days I’ve watched one of my favorite patients change from a normal, level-headed, charming woman, into—” He gestured toward Sally, was silent for a moment, then continued. “And now she accuses me of things I can’t even imagine. Dead babies? Missing boys? What is she talking about?”

  Malone walked to the coffee table and picked up a sheaf of papers. “Maybe you’d better take a look at these.” He offered them to Wiseman, who made no move to take them.

  “What are they?”

  “Records. Correlations. Data that Sally took out of the computer last night”.

  Wiseman frowned. “The hospital computer? She had no right—”

  “I authorized it,” Malone told him. “I’m a doctor, remember? Not that I give a damn right now who had the right to do what. The only thing that matters is what’s here and what it means.”

  When Wiseman still hesitated, Malone’s voice grew cold. “We’re not crazy, Arthur. And it’s not just us. It’s Jim Corliss and Carl Bronski too. And unless you have an explanation for what’s here, I don’t mind telling you that I’ll see to it you’re barred from practice, stripped of your license, and put in prison for the rest of your life. I don’t know if I can prove it, Arthur, but all this looks to me like the closest thing I’ve ever seen to mass murder. I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t know why, but I know it’s all here.”

  His hands trembling, Wiseman reached out to take the sheaf of papers from Malone. When he spoke, his voice shook. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mark. Believe me, I don’t.”

  “Then you’d better read those,” Malone replied. “If you have any questions, I’ll try to help you out. Sally’s taken me through them so many times, I think I know the correlations by heart. And frankly, I don’t think she’s in any condition to start over with you.”

  Steeling himself, Wiseman began reading the sheets of correlations.

  Across the street and a quarter of a block down, two men sat in a gray van. While one of them stared through a pair of binoculars and read off license plate numbers, the other took notes. When he had dictated the letters and numbers of all five cars that were parked in Lucy’s driveway and on the street in front of her house, Ernie Morantz put the glasses away. “I don’t like it.”

  “What’s not to like?” Victor Kaplan asked in reply. “It’s just another job.”

  “Taking out a nine-year-old kid isn’t what I call just another job,” Morantz said. His face settled into what Kaplan had long ago come to think of as “the mule face,” as in “as stubborn as a …”

  “Orders are orders,” he reminded his partner.

  “And I’ve never disobeyed one yet,” Morantz snapped. “But terrorists and traitors are one thing. Even picking up illegal aliens. But what’s this kid done? They don’t think he’s going to leave a bomb at Logan Airport, do they? Or is that the new thing? Foreign governments subverting the schoolboys of America? Come off it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kaplan insisted. “We’ve got our orders.”

  “But nobody told us we’d be walking into a mob scene. And here come some more.” The two men fell silent as they watched a sixth car pull up in front of Lucy Corliss’s house. Two men and a boy got out, and Morantz, who was once more using his field glasses, spoke quietly. “That’s the kid. Shit, he can’t be more than four-and-a-half feet tall, and he looks just like any other kid. Wonder who the two other guys are?”

  Kaplan took the glasses and watched until all three had disappeared into the house. “One’s a cop,” he said softly. “The one who was on the right. The other’s probably the kid’s dad.”

  “Yeah,” Morantz grunted. He started the engine, slipped the van into gear, and cruised slowly past the house.

  “Where we going?” Kaplan asked.

  “Coffee. And you’re going to call Carmody and tell him this job isn’t going to be all that easy. It’s one thing to bust in on a woman, all by herself, and grab her kid. I’m not saying I like it, mind you, but at least it’s possible. This is different, and I want to know what Carmody wants. You see a Ho-Jo on the way in?”

  A few minutes later they slid into an orange Naugahyde booth, ordered, then Morantz adjourned to the men’s room while Kaplan made the phone call. When he returned to the table, Morante found himself still alone, so he passed the time fiddling with a puzzle that had apparently been left by the management for just such an occasion. At the next table a little boy, no more than six years old, had solved the puzzle and was gleefully explaining it to his sister. Morante strained to hear what the boy was saying, but by the time Kaplan returned, he still had gotten nowhere. “Well?”

  The look on Kaplan’s face told most of the story. “It’s getting worse. Carmody’s running a check on all the cars to find out who’s in the house. Then hell make a decision about beefing up the team. We’re to call him back in fifteen minutes, and hell let us know what’s happening.”

  “Shit,” Morante said softly. He picked up the puzzle, which involved some pegs and a triangular board. “Try this,” he said, shoving it across to Kaplan. Kaplan stared at the gadget for a minute, studied the directions, then tentatively began jumping the pegs over each other, removing each one he jumped. When he was done, there were three pegs left, and no legitimate way of getting to them.

  “So?” he said.

  “So the kid in the next booth just solved it. And I bet that kid we’re supposed to grab could do it too.”

&nbs
p; Kaplan frowned. “I don’t get it, Ernie. What’s this puzzle got to do with anything?”

  Ernie Morantz stretched, then slouched deep into the booth “I don’t know,” he said. “But it just seems to me that there’s something wrong. Kids these days are brighter than adults. They can do things and understand things that don’t make any sense to us at all. So what’s this Corliss kid done that’s so horrible? Hell, I bet Carmody himself doesn’t know. But I ask you, does it make any sense that you and I, who were trained to believe in apple pie, motherhood, and the U.S. of A. are now being asked to grab a little American kid and take him out and drown hün? I understand commies, and I understand traitors, and I hate them. But I don’t hate kids. I don’t understand them, but I don’t hate them. In fact, I love them. And I’ll tell you, Vic—it rubs me the wrong way to be told to go out and kill a little kid.”

  “So what does all that mean?” Kaplan asked.

  There was a long silence. Ernie Morantz shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Vic. I just don’t know. I guess it means I’ll wait and see what Carmody wants. But I can tell you, if he wants us to go into that house like a SWAT team after the S.L.A., he’s got the wrong man. I’m not sure I could do it.”

  “But you’re not sure you couldn’t either.”

  Morantz drained his coffee, then slid out of the booth. As he tossed some change on the table, he shook his head sadly. “No, I guess I’m not. Come on, let’s go call Carmody and get the bad news.”

  The news, when they got it three minutes later, was as bad as either of them had expected.

  Chapter 28

  ARTHUR WISEMAN, his complexion drained of all color and his hands trembling, silently squared the stack of documents and placed them neatly in the center of Lucy Corliss’s coffee table. Finally his eyes began wandering over the room, pausing for a moment on each of the faces that were watching him, pausing almost as if he were seeking refuge, then, seeing none, moving on. At last his eyes came to rest on Sally Montgomery.

  “There is no question about these statistics? No possibility of a mistake?”

  “None worth talking about,” Sally said, composed now.

  “I suppose not,” Wiseman said almost to himself. “I can remember too much of it all—”

  “Then you did know,” Sally flared.

  Wiseman stared at her with eyes that had suddenly aged. “No,” he said softly. “I should have, but I didn’t You have to understand—all this happened over so many years. What I remember are incidents. The babies—the ones that died. We don’t forget them, you know. We learn to deal with the things that happen to children, we even learn to accept their deaths. But we don’t forget.” His eyes moved away from Sally, moved to the coffee table where, on the top of the stack, the list of children in Group Twenty-one lay. Once again he scanned the names. “They’re my children. All of them.”

  Sally bit her lip. “Julie wasn’t your child. She was my child. Mine and Steve’s.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way—”

  “What are they doing?” Sally demanded. “What is CHILD doing?”

  “Sally, I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve known me. Can you really believe that I would know about some sort of conspiracy and remain silent?”

  But Sally was implacable. “Then why does it all come back to you?”

  Wiseman shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea.” He picked up the medical records and began going through them. Suddenly, he looked up. “What about the chromosome analyses?”

  Malone frowned. “What about them?”

  Wiseman handed him the medical records of the children in Group Twenty-one, his expression uncertain. “I order a chromosome analysis on a child only if there’s reason to suspect a problem. And even then, I have to rely on the specialists to identify a defect in a particular chromosome and analyze it.”

  “So?”

  “So, the records of all those children in Group Twenty-one indicate that a complete chromosome analysis was done, but there were no indications of any abnormalities.”

  Malone’s eyes fixed on the older man. “Then who ordered the analyses? And why?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know—”

  “Don’t you?” Malone challenged, his voice icy. He turned to the others. “It’s the obstetrician who orders tests like these. They’re usually done prenatally, when there’s a suspected problem with the fetus. But with all these children, there were no apparent problems, none whatsoever. Until they were born, and began dying.” He turned back to Wiseman. “So my question, Arthur, is, who ordered these tests, and what were they looking for?” Without waiting for the old doctor to answer, Malone plunged on. “I think the first part of the answer is clear: You were the obstetrician for all of these children. But what were you looking for? Is there something genetically abnormal about these children that isn’t reflected in the chromosome analyses?”

  Wiseman seemed to sink deeper into his chair, and the records he was holding fluttered to the floor. “My God,” he breathed. “What you’re suggesting is monstrous.”

  “What’s happened is monstrous,” Malone countered, his voice suddenly level. “I’m sure you never expected anyone to find it. Not you, or anyone at CHILD. But Sally found it, Arthur. And if she could find it, others can too. So it’s going to come out We’re going to find out what you did to these children’s genes.”

  “No!” Wiseman protested. “I did nothing to these children. Whatever’s wrong with them, it had to start with their parents. It had to!” But before he could go on, the front door suddenly flew open and Bandy Corliss burst into the room, followed by his father and Carl Bronski.

  “I found it,” Randy crowed. “I found the house!”

  Lucy’s eyes went immediately to Jim, who nodded. “We stopped at City Hall,” he said. “The place is owned by Paul Randolph.”

  Wiseman frowned. “Paul Randolph is executive director of CHILD.”

  “Right,” Bronski said. He looked curiously at Wiseman and Steve Montgomery, guessing immediately who they were. “What are you two doing here?”

  Malone explained to them what had happened. “We still don’t know how it was done,” he finished. “For that matter, we don’t even know exactly what was done to these children’s genes. But you can bet that somehow they’ve been altered.”

  “Can we find out what they did?” Sally asked.

  Malone shrugged. “It depends on you. If the information’s in the computer, you’re the only one of us that can fish it out.”

  Sally started to speak, but Bronski took over. “Then that’ll be your job, Sally. I want you to go to the hospital with Mark and start working with that computer.” His eyes shifted over to Wiseman. “And I want you to go with them, is that clear?”

  Wiseman, his face haggard, made a gesture with a trembling hand. “Of course,” he mumbled. “Anything …”

  “The house,” Bronski went on. “I can get a search warrant for it by telephone. We think it’s empty, but I want to go in. And I’d like to take Randy with me.”

  “No!”

  “Lucy, there’s no other way,” Jim said.

  “There must be, or you wouldn’t have come back here,” Lucy snapped. “You’d have just gone ahead and done whatever you thought you had to do.”

  Now Carl Bronski spoke again. “Lucy, that isn’t it at all. We came back here because Jim wouldn’t agree to taking Randy in unless you agreed too.”

  “Which I don’t,” Lucy said.

  Jim Corliss sat on the sofa and drew Lucy down next to him. “Honey, you’ve got to—” Seeing the stony look in her eyes, he broke off and started over. “Of course, you don’t have to let Randy go. But without Randy, there’s not much point in Carl even going in there. As far as we could tell from outside, the place is empty. Carl’s excuse for getting a search warrant is that he needs to verify Randy’s story of what’s inside that house, and that means Randy has to show him.”

  Lucy, too exha
usted to think it all through, turned to Sally for advice.

  “If it was Jason, I’d feel the same way you feel,” Sally told her. “But still, if CHILD was using that house for something—”

  Lucy took a deep breath and stood up. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right. We have to know what was going on out there.” As Carl Bronski picked up the phone, dialed, then began speaking quietly to the judge at the other end, Lucy turned back to Jim. “You’ll be careful?”

  “Lucy, you have to believe that I’d never let anything happen to Randy.”

  “Something’s already happened to him,” Lucy whispered. She reached out and touched his arm. “But it’s not just Randy,” she said, her voice suddenly shy. “You be careful, too. I—well, I feel as though I just found you again, and I don’t think I could stand to lose you now. Im going to need help from now on, Jim.”

  “And you’re going to have it,” Jim promised.

  The small group began to break up. Mark Malone packed the computer printouts into his briefcase, then led an ashen-faced and silent Arthur Wiseman out of the house.

  Sally and Steve Montgomery left to take Jason to his grandmother’s, where he would stay while his parents went to the hospital to work with Mark Malone.

  Carl Bronski, with Jim and Randy Corliss, prepared to return to Paul Randolph’s estate.

  And then, as they were about to depart, Lucy suddenly stood up. “I’m going with you,” she told Jim. “I can’t stay here by myself—I’ll go crazy.”

  Jim started to protest, but Lucy touched his arm. “I have to go, Jim,” she said softly. “I have to be with Randy, and with you.”

  Their eyes met, and a gentle smile came over Jim’s face. “Wherever I go, you go?” he asked.

  Lucy hesitated only a moment, then nodded. “From now on.”

  The Montgomerys drove slowly through the streets of Eastbury, Steve at the wheel, Sally sitting silently next to him, Jason in the back. Jason, too, was uncharacteristically silent, but his parents were too deeply involved in their own thoughts to notice.