“Velma!” Zwaan said with sharp urgency as he drew the right conclusion. “The woman! Watch the –”
For a month the year before, in her previous life as a doting wife and social climber, Paige had joined her trendy friends in shooting lessons invariably followed by catty cafe au lait sessions. She remembered enough not to panic. She pulled the gun clear and reached around Slater, shooting upward from his hip, trusting that the instructors hadn’t lied about point-and-shoot from close range.
Velma’s eyes widened as she tried to react, but Paige had already pulled the trigger. The pistol barked. Velma spun back as if kicked by an invisible horse.
Slater pushed off his good foot, diving for Velma’s gun arm.
Del did the same in the opposite direction, ramming his bulk forward to wrap his arms around Zwaan’s waist. Del’s weight slammed Zwaan into the wall.
Slater had managed to land across Velma’s arm, was reaching for the gun in her hand. But he found no resistance. The bullet had pulverized Velma’s shoulder, shattering the arm socket.
Zwaan brought a giant fist down on the back of Del’s neck.
Slater rolled to his feet, Velma’s gun in his hand, his shirt soaked with her blood while Velma writhed in silent agony.
Roaring and straightening his knees, Del tried to lift Zwaan off the ground. Zwaan punched downward again.
The professor had managed to get the ax in his hands, but stared helplessly at the two giant gladiators. Paige, too, held her weapon, unable to pull the trigger on Zwaan.
Slater understood why. He hesitated with Velma’s gun for the same reason.
The fighters were whirling, tumbling, shifting, and sliding, making Zwaan an impossible target.
“Del!” Slater yelled. “Back off! Back off!”
The blood lust of rage had taken both giants, and they fought and cursed, oblivious to their spectators. Zwaan managed to wrap his arms around Del. The bandage of Zwaan’s injured hand was sodden with blood.
Slater joined Paige. He found himself panting with the adrenaline coursing through his body. “If he drops Del, don’t hesitate. Fire to kill. Fire until he drops.”
Zwaan tightened his bear hug on Del, then with a surge of line-backer power, churned his legs and kept charging. Del was fighting just to stay on his feet, and for a moment, was weightless. Zwaan’s charge slammed Del back into a closed door, smashing the door off the hinges. They both fell into the room.
Slater tugged on Paige’s arm, pulling her to the doorway.
Then he stopped.
Because the hallway was so institutionally unvarying, he hadn’t recognized their location. At least not until he saw the inside of this room.
The glass aquariums.
“Del!” he shouted again. “Let go!”
Both giants were rising, still held together by rage. Neither could punch, and they wrestled and pulled, hoping to knock the other down. Del brought a massive arm around, catching Zwaan under the chin with a clothesline blow. Zwaan staggered back, almost caught his balance, then tripped against a table edge.
He fell backward on the table, with Del pouncing his full weight on top of him. The table tilted beneath them, sending them sliding down into the legs of the table beside it. Aquariums from both tables crashed to the ground, sending clouds of sand upward in soft mushrooms.
A furball of tarantulas from the first aquarium fell onto their bodies.
Both men roared insane fury.
Slater saw scurrying dark shapes and the pale flash of timber rattlesnakes.
Slater didn’t hesitate. He backed Paige and the professor into the hallway.
Incredibly, the roaring inside grew in volume, a bellowing of bull elephants.
A scorpion skittered into the hallway. Slater crunched it dead with the heel of his shoe.
A rattlesnake moved toward them with sidewinding precision. Slater had barely begun to lift his gun when the snake’s head disappeared in a spray of blood. He’d barely registered the connection between that sight and the sound of the pistol firing when Paige’s voice penetrated his stunned fascination.
“I detest snakes,” she said, her voice calm.
Before Slater could reply, Zwaan fell face forward through the doorway, his massive body covering the writhing rope of the headless snake. Del staggered into sight. He dropped to grind his knee into the back of Zwaan’s neck.
With both hands, Del held a large rock from one of the glass aquariums above Zwaan’s head. The edge of the rock already held a sheen of red.
Zwaan didn’t move.
For a long moment, Del remained poised to slam his crude weapon downward. In the horrible silence, Del focused only on Zwaan, the two of them gladiators, sculpted in the final breath of battle.
Then Del realized Zwaan was dead. He let the rock roll from his fingers onto the floor.
Del swayed as he fought to get to his feet. He stumbled over the unconscious Velma, and his erratic movement took him to the far wall, where he fell, slumping down.
“You were with my wife?” he gasped to Paige.
Paige moved to join Del. She kneeled beside him, watched as his neck, blue-red, swelled visibly.
“Yes, I was with her.”
She gently reached for Del’s neck. He groaned and pushed her hand away. “I won’t live,” he said. “I know it. Critters were like a bee’s nest. I been bit a dozen places.”
His breathing grew shallower and faster.
“She alive?"
Paige nodded yes.
“Hurt?”
She shook her head no.
“I knew she was telling them everything I did,” Del said. Now tears fell from his eyes. “A few times I told her things no one else could know, and spooksville was there. Like a test she failed.”
His hands began to jerk spasmodically. Paige reached for one, pressed it between her hands. She curled her fingers around his giant hand. It was much harder to watch him die than it had been to pull the trigger on Velma.
“What I got to know is...” he coughed. “Why’d she do it?”
A scorpion crawled from his shirt pocket toward his opposite shoulder. Paige swallowed a scream. He wanted her attention, not her fear. The scorpion disappeared beneath his shirt collar. He neither noticed nor cared.
“Was it the photos?” His insistence was barely audible. “They show her what I did in Nam?”
Louise had frozen every time Paige had ventured into personal questions about her husband. The only thing she’d said was a bitter remark about marrying someone who’d turned out to be a stranger. Maybe she did know about Vietnam, whatever it was that had happened there.
“Come on,” Del begged. He was squeezing her hands so hard it hurt. “She know about Nam?"
“No,” Paige lied. “She told me they promised to kill you if she didn’t help.”
Del smiled with his eyes closed. “She took the heat for me.”
His grip softened, then his hands fell away completely.
Chapter 14
Monday, May 27
Slater used the rubber tip of his cane to press the cracked yellow plastic of the doorbell. Paige, beside him in the shade of the distinguished brick residence, stared straight at the door, composing herself.
Slater pressed twice more. Eventfully, approaching footsteps from inside greeted his patience.
“He’ll see us through the peephole,” Paige whispered. “He won’t open the door.”
“I believe you’re wrong. He’ll be curious.”
Twenty seconds later, the unlatching of a security chain proved Slater right. The door swung open.
“My, my. Both of you here in Chicago,” Prof. Josef Van Klees said. “By the grim expressions on your faces you could pass for the caped avengers Batman and Robin Hood. I’m trembling with fear.”
He smiled arrogance. “Of course, Mr. Ellis, your face is much worse than grim. Zwaan obviously managed to punish you a great deal before his inopportune death.”
Slater pushed his way pas
t Van Klees, limping badly as he leaned on his cane. Paige followed without hesitation.
“Oh, please,” Van Klees mocked them. “Step inside. I’ll just shut the door and make it nice and cozy for your elaborate plans for justice. Amuse me, will you, and begin with a phrase like ‘the game’s over.’”
Van Klees passed them and entered a Victorian-style sitting room.
“Brandy?” he called. “The dinner hour does approach.”
Slater and Paige followed the sound of his voice. Slater didn’t like it that Van Klees had taken control of the situation. When they arrived, Van Klees was already holding a large, bulbed glass in his palm, swirling the brandy to warm it.
“Well?” Van Klees arched his eyebrow. He’d framed himself between two dark-hued Dutch Master oil paintings. In his brown cashmere sweater and blue slacks every inch the elegant, composed gentleman.
Slater merely leaned on his cane and stared. Paige crossed her arms.
“You’re probably disappointed I show so little surprise and fear,” Van Klees said. “You wanted me to gasp and ask how you managed to find me.”
“Why?” Slater asked. “All those kids. Why?”
Van Klees sipped at his brandy. “Don’t be so crude. Play this out a little.”
“I feel very crude,” Slater said. “I’d like to kill you with my bare hands.”
“Will something so Neanderthal impress you, Paige?” Van Klees’s eyes glinted with amusement. “I thought you preferred to be fooled by Italian suits and obscenely large bank accounts.”
“Obscene is an appropriate word to describe you,” she said, voice even.
Van Klees sighed theatrically. It was obvious he enjoyed the scene. “I’ll play it your way. How did you Find me?"
“My husband’s computer disks,” Paige said. “South Carolina. We picked them up this morning.”
“You knew where they were all along? I applaud you for your will power. My military connections assured me the chemicals I used during your interrogation –”
“I found them where Darby told me he’d left them.”
“Really?”
“Slater asked me again about the letter I read before the package was stolen – that was your doing, wasn’t it?”
Van Klees merely smiled.
“Darby had referred to our honeymoon,” Paige said.
“How nice,” Van Klees said without meaning it.
Silence.
“Come, come,” Van Klees said after several more sips of brandy. “Don’t you realize how this works? You tell me your secrets, I tell you my secrets, and we wrap it up with a showdown where I kill you both.”
“Tell him, Paige,” Slater said. “He’s trying to pretend it doesn’t matter, but it’s driving him nuts that he didn’t anticipate every detail.”
“Slater thought it was a strange comment. So I told him about the first night of our honeymoon at a beach resort in South Carolina,” Paige said in calm, precise tones. “And how we’d found an oak tree with a little hollow at the base of a branch. We each wrote a love letter and, without reading the other’s, sealed them in plastic and placed the letters inside. We vowed to return on our twenty-fifth anniversary and open the letters and read them to each other over glasses of champagne.”
“Touching, although, of course, Darby is much too dead to make his rendezvous,” Van Klees said. He shrugged for Paige’s benefit. “Don’t worry, my dear, he disappointed me too. I’d almost begun to trust him as he helped me build my small conglomerate of corporations. But, Paige, he had you fooled for years, too, didn’t he?”
Paige looked down at the floor.
“See if I miss anything,” Slater said. “As John Hammond, you used the International World Relief Committee for legitimate access to Third World countries. You needed a way to steal women without having troublesome questions raised.”
Van Klees poured himself another shot of brandy. “Simplicity is beauty, is it not? The confusion in refugee camps made it extremely easy. And who was around to complain, even if they could find someone to listen to their complaints?”
“As Jack Tansworth,” Slater continued, “you ran an extremely profitable genetics corporation. It made some astounding breakthroughs, based on some of your less public research in Los Alamos.”
“It was a nice circle, actually,” Van Klees said. “The better TechnoGen performed, the more money I could pour into my little Institute, and the more money I invested in the Institute, the better my returns from TechnoGen. That corporation also gave me a legitimate way to purchase some of the biological materials I needed.”
“He’s boasting, Paige,” Slater said. “Like he’s been keeping all of this so secret for so long, he’s grateful to Finally have an audience to appreciate it.”
“My true genius was dealing with the military,” Van Klees said. He reached with his free hand and patted himself on the back. “You have to understand the system. It’s a setup where no one questions their superiors. The perfect pyramid. All I needed to do was reach a couple guys at the top. Do you have any idea how much money Washington wastes on projects it can only track through paperwork?”
“Fifty-five million a year in your direction,” Slater said, “It’s all in the disks.”
“Roughly the amount the military spends each year on toilet paper. Get a couple of good old boys who see something in it for themselves, and with their connections they can siphon money anywhere. Jack Tansworth promised them the perfect retirement. In return, they built me an underground Institute. The pyramid again. Everyone believes the guys at the top, right down to a faked radiation disaster. The generals never even had to show up. They didn’t want to. They just wanted results. The soldiers had no idea what they were guarding. And if anyone checked really close, they’d find five levels of a legitimate top-secret genetics project had been funded. Only the sixth floor would never be suspected or found.”
“The sixth floor. A place to raise babies and kill them.”
Van Klees laughed. “Your moral outrage is amusing. Don’t forget the organ harvesting. It was a wonderful little side venture I stumbled across as I looked for ways to dispose of some of the more troublesome women. Imagine my delight when I discovered the average refugee was worth so much in body parts. Ten refugees added a million dollars in gross revenue. There was some trouble in setting up a delivery network, of course, but the military was invaluable there. It helped that there already was an extensive black market across the world.”
“Why?” Slater asked again. “All those kids. Why?”
“You poor man,” Van I
Van Klees drained the last of his brandy. His voice hardened. “Money?. I couldn’t think of anything less challenging than to accumulate money. Everything I did with real estate as John Hammond showed that. No, true genius lies in how you use money to achieve your goals.”
He paused. Madness began to shine from his eyes as his voice grew stronger to match his sudden, terse pacing. “My goal? It so far exceeds any milestone in the history of mankind that in comparison, Christopher Columbus will be a boy who played on the beach and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon will seem like a baby learning to walk.”
He grinned, stretching the skin of his face tight across his bones. “Most delightful of all, I’ll be around to enjoy my own legend and accolades.”
He stopped his passionate monologue and frowned, as if unable to comprehend that Paige and Slater were not appreciative.
“Fools,” he said, “my gift to myself and to mankind shall be nothing less than immortality.”
“Even if immortality were possible,” Slater said after an incredulous pause, “I’d like to point out it’s a little late for your project. You might remember the televi
sion newscasts late yesterday and today'
How every major network calls this the story of the century? All the headlines about an FBI search for the mystery man behind it?”
Van Klees furrowed his brow in a gentlemanly fashion and touched his chin thoughtfully with his index finger. “Which proves my point exactly about fools. Did you read the editorial in USA Today? The moron compared my genetics research to Icarus, with no concept at all of where I am headed.
“Were headed,” Slater said. “It’s over. Your wings are torched.”
“I will admit you have delayed my goal somewhat,” Van Klees said. “But immortality is still easily within my grasp.”
He pointed at two wicker chairs. “Sit. I’m sure you’ll want to know how.”
Neither Paige nor Slater moved.
“You asked me why,” Van Klees said with sudden impatience.
“You’ve come this far; don’t quit on me now. Become my audience, and I’ll tell you why.”
Slater shuffled to a chair. He waited until Paige was seated until he lowered himself.
“No brandy?” Van Klees asked, charming warmth in his voice again.
“Why the kids?” Slater asked.
“Paige,” Van Klees said, “surely, you don’t find someone this tedious to be attractive.”
“He doesn’t kill boys and store them in bottles,” she replied. “I like that in a man.”
Van Klees exhaled another theatrical sigh. He poured himself another brandy, admired the golden liquid briefly, sipped, and began to lecture them as if they were undergrads.
“DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. Strands of chromosomes that program every cell in your body. You start as a one-celled embryo, and these strands replicate again and again as your cells divide and copy themselves into the trillions, each with the original blueprint. And we’ve long had the technology to cut and paste these chromosomes. Cross species? Goats with sheep heads is old news. Cloning? Frogs, cattle, it’s been done. What was needed was someone with the vision and guts to apply this to humans.”
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