He knew he looked too young to be a DSA agent; he was cursed with a frustratingly fresh, open face. And he was less aggressive in his questioning than he should be. But this time, he was sure the problem was not his baby face or slightly hesitant manner. Instead, he was greeted with doubt because of his muddy shoes, which he had cleaned with paper towels but which remained smeary-looking. And because of his trouser legs: Having gotten wet, the material had dried baggy and wrinkled. You could not be taken seriously, be respected, or become a legend if you looked as if you'd just slopped pigs.
An hour after dawn, at the third hospital, Desert General, he hit pay dirt in spite of his sartorial inadequacies. Sarah Kiel had been admitted for treatment during the night. She was still a patient.
The head nurse, Alma Dunn, was a sturdy white-haired woman of about fifty-five, unimpressed with Peake's credentials and incapable of being intimidated. After checking on Sarah Kiel, she returned to the nurses' station, where she'd made Peake wait, and she said, “The poor girl's still sleeping. She was… sedated only a few hours ago, so I don't expect she'll be awake for another few hours.”
“Wake her, please. This is an urgent national security matter.”
“I'll do no such thing,” Nurse Dunn said. “The girl was hurt. She needs her rest. You'll have to wait.”
“Then I'll wait in her room.”
Nurse Dunn's jaw muscles bulged, and her merry blue eyes turned cold. “You certainly will not. You'll wait in the visitors' lounge.”
Peake knew he would get nowhere with Alma Dunn because she looked like Jane Marple, Agatha Christie's indomitable amateur detective, and no one who looked like Miss Marple would be intimidated. “Listen, if you're going to be uncooperative, I'll have to talk to your superior.”
“That's fine with me,” she said, glancing down disapprovingly at his shoes. “I'll get Dr. Werfell.”
* * *
Beneath the earth in Riverside, Anson Sharp slept for one hour on the Ultrasuede sofa in Vincent Baresco's office, showered in the small adjacent bathroom, and changed into a fresh suit of clothes from the suitcase that he had kept with him on every leg of his zigzagging route through southern California the previous night. He was blessed with the ability to fall asleep at will in a minute or less, without fail, and to feel rested and alert after only a nap. He could sleep anywhere he chose, regardless of background noise. He believed this ability was just one more proof that he was destined to climb to the top, where he longed to be, proof that he was superior to other men.
Refreshed, he made a few calls, speaking with agents guarding the Geneplan partners and research chiefs at various points in three counties. He also received reports from other men at the Geneplan offices in Newport Beach, Eric Leben's house in Villa Park, and Mrs. Leben's place in Placentia.
From the agents guarding Baresco at the U.S. Marine Air Station in El Toro, Sharp learned that Ben Shadway had taken a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum off the scientist in the Geneplan office last night, and that the revolver could not be located anywhere in that building. Shadway had not left it behind, had not disposed of it in a nearby trash container or hallway, but apparently had chosen to hold on to it. Furthermore, agents in Placentia reported that a.32-caliber semiautomatic pistol, registered to Rachael Leben, could be found nowhere in her house, and the assumption was that she was carrying it, though she did not possess a permit to carry.
Sharp was delighted to learn that both Shadway and the woman were armed, for that contributed to the justification of an arrest warrant. And when he cornered them, he could shoot them down and claim, with a measure of credibility, that they had opened fire on him first.
* * *
As Jerry Peake waited at the nurses' station for Alma Dunn to return with Dr. Werfell, the hospital came alive for the day. The empty halls grew busy with nurses conveying medicines to patients, with orderlies transporting patients in wheelchairs and on gurneys to various departments and operating theaters, and with a few doctors making very early rounds. The pervading scent of pine disinfectant was increasingly overlaid with others — alcohol, clove oil, urine, vomit — as if the busily scurrying staff had stirred stagnant odors out of every corner of the building.
In ten minutes, Nurse Dunn returned with a tall man in a white lab coat. He had handsome hawkish features, thick salt-and-pepper hair, and a neat mustache. He seemed familiar, though Peake was not sure why. Alma Dunn introduced him as Dr. Hans Werfell, supervising physician of the morning shift.
Looking down at Peake's muddy shoes and badly wrinkled trousers, Dr. Werfell said, “Miss Kiel's physical condition is not grave by any means, and I suppose she'll be out of here today or tomorrow. But she suffered severe emotional trauma, so she needs to be allowed to rest when she can. And right now she's resting, sound asleep.”
Stop looking at my shoes, damn you, Peake thought. He said, “Doctor, I understand your concern for the patient, but this is an urgent matter of national security.”
Finally raising his gaze from Peake's shoes, Werfell frowned skeptically and said, “What on earth could a sixteen-year-old girl have to do with national security?”
“That's classified, strictly classified,” Peake said, trying to pull his baby face into a suitably serious and imposing expression that would convince Werfell of the gravity of the situation and gain his cooperation.
“No point waking her, anyway,” Werfell said. “She'd still be under the influence of the sedative, not in any condition to give accurate answers to your questions.”
“Couldn't you give her something to counteract the drug?”
With only a frown, Werfell registered severe disapproval. “Mr. Peake, this is a hospital. We exist to help people get well. We wouldn't be helping Miss Kiel to get well if we pumped her full of drugs for no other purpose than to counteract other drugs and please an impatient government agent.”
Peake felt his face flush. “I wasn't suggesting you violate medical principles.”
“Good.” Werfell's patrician face and manner were not conducive to debate. “Then you'll wait until she wakes naturally.”
Frustrated, still trying to think why Werfell looked familiar, Peake said, “But we think she can tell us where to find someone whom we desperately must find.”
“Well, I'm sure she'll cooperate when she's awake and alert.”
“And when will that be, Doctor?”
“Oh, I imagine… another four hours, maybe longer.”
“What? Why that long?”
“The night physician gave her a very mild sedative, which didn't suit her, and when he refused to give her anything stronger, she took one of her own.”
“One of her own?”
“We didn't realize until later that she had drugs in her purse: a few Benzedrine tablets wrapped in one small packet of foil—”
“Bennies, uppers?”
“Yes. And a few tranquilizers in another packet, and a couple of sedatives. Hers was much stronger than the one we gave her, so she's pretty deep under at the moment. We've confiscated her remaining drugs, of course.”
Peake said, “I'll wait in her room.”
“No,” Werfell said.
“Then I'll wait just outside her room.”
“I'm afraid not.”
“Then I'll wait right here.”
“You'll be in the way here,” Werfell said. “You'll wait in the visitors' lounge, and we'll call you when Miss Kiel is awake.”
“I'll wait here,” Peake insisted, scrunching his baby face into the sternest, toughest, most hard-boiled look he could manage.
“The visitors' lounge,” Werfell said ominously. “And if you do not proceed there immediately, I'll have hospital security men escort you.”
Peake hesitated, wishing to God he could be more aggressive. “All right, but you damn well better call me the minute she wakes up.”
Furious, he turned from Werfell and stalked down the hall in search of the visitors' lounge, too embarrassed to ask where it was. When he glanced
back at Werfell, who was now in deep conversation with another physician, he realized the doctor was a dead ringer for Dashiell Hammett, the formidable Pinkerton detective and mystery novelist, which was why he had looked familiar to a dedicated reader like Peake. No wonder Werfell had such a tremendous air of authority. Dashiell Hammett, for God's sake. Peake felt a little better about having deferred to him.
* * *
They slept another two hours, woke within moments of each other, and made love again in the motel bed. For Rachael, it was even better this time than it had been before: slower, sweeter, with an even more graceful and fulfilling rhythm. She was sinewy, supple, taut, and she took enormous and intense pleasure in her superb physical condition, drew satisfaction from each flexing and gentle thrusting and soft lazy grinding of her body, not merely the usual pleasure of male and female organs mating, but the more subtle thrill of muscle and tendon and bone functioning with the perfect oiled smoothness that, like nothing else, made her feel young, healthy, alive.
With her special gift for fully experiencing the moment, she let her hands roam over Benny's body, marveling over his leanness, testing the rock-hard muscles of his shoulders and arms, kneading the bunched muscles of his back, glorying in the silken smoothness of his skin, the rocking motion of his hips against hers, pelvis to pelvis, the hot touch of his hands, the branding heat of his lips upon her cheeks, her mouth, her throat, her breasts.
Until this interlude with Benny, Rachael had not made love in almost fifteen months. And never in her life had she made love like this: never this good, this tender or exciting, never this satisfying. She felt as if she had been half dead heretofore and this was the hour of her resurrection.
Finally spent, they lay in each other's arms for a while, silent, at peace, but the soft afterglow of lovemaking slowly gave way to a curious disquiet. At first she was not certain what disturbed her, but soon she recognized it as that rare and peculiar feeling that someone had just walked over her grave, an irrational but convincingly instinctive sensation that brought a vague chill to her bare flesh and a colder shiver to her spine.
She looked at Benny's gentle smile, studied every much-loved line of his face, stared into his eyes — and had the shocking, unshakable feeling that she was going to lose him.
She tried to tell herself that her sudden apprehension was1 the understandable reaction of a thirty-year-old woman who, having made one bad marriage, had at last miraculously found the right man. Call it the I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome. When life finally hands us a beautiful bouquet of flowers, we usually peer cautiously among the petals in expectation of a bee. Superstition — evinced especially in a distrust of good fortune — was perhaps the very core of human nature, and it was natural for her to fear losing him.
That was what she tried to tell herself, but she knew her sudden terror was something more than superstition, something darker. The chill along her spine deepened until she felt as if each vertebra had been transformed into a lump of ice. The cool breath that had touched her skin now penetrated deeper, down toward her bones.
She turned from him, swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, naked and shivering.
Benny said, “Rachael?”
“Let's get moving,” she said anxiously, heading toward the bathroom through the golden light and palm shadows that came through the single, undraped window.
“What's wrong?” he asked.
“We're sitting ducks here. Or might be. We've got to keep moving. We've got to keep on the offensive. We've got to find him before he finds us — or before anyone else finds us.”
Benny got out of bed, stepped between her and the bathroom door, put his hands on her shoulders. “Everything's going to be all right.”
“Don't say that.”
“But it will.”
“Don't tempt fate.”
“We're strong together,” he said. “Nothing's stronger.”
“Don't,” she insisted, putting a hand to his lips to silence him. “Please. I… I couldn't bear losing you.”
“You won't lose me,” he said.
But when she looked at him, she had the terrible feeling that he was already lost, that death was very near to him, inevitable.
The I-don't-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome.
Or maybe a genuine premonition.
She had no way of knowing which it was.
* * *
The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting nowhere.
The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan's underground labs in Riverside, compressing the window-less rooms, until he felt as if he were being slowly crushed. He could not abide failure; he was a winner, always a winner, superior to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.
Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place that the walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and Sharp was getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their knowledge of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret even from the DSA. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend Leben would be seen as Sharp's personal failure, for he had identified himself too closely with the operation in expectation of taking full credit for its success.
Then he got a break. Jerry Peake called to report that Sarah Kiel, Eric Leben's underage mistress, had been located in a Palm Springs hospital. “But the damn medical staff,” Peake explained in his earnest but frustratingly wimpy manner, “isn't cooperative.”
Sometimes Anson Sharp wondered if the advantages of surrounding himself with weaker — and therefore unthreatening — young agents were outweighed by the disadvantage of their inefficiency. Certainly none of them would pose a danger to him once he had ascended to the director's chair, but neither were they likely to do anything on their own hook that would reflect positively on him as their mentor.
Sharp said, “I'll be there before she shakes off the sedative.”
The investigation at the Geneplan labs could proceed without him for a while. The researchers and technicians had arrived for the day and had been sent home with orders not to report back until notified. Defense Security Agency computer mavens were seeking the Wildcard files hidden in the Geneplan data banks, but their work was so highly specialized that Sharp could neither supervise nor understand it.
He made a few telephone calls to several federal agencies in Washington, seeking — and obtaining — information about Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell that might give him leverage with them, then boarded his waiting chopper and flew back across the desert to Palm Springs, pleased to be on the move again.
* * *
Rachael and Benny taxied to the Palm Springs airport, rented a clean new Ford from Hertz, and drove back into town in time to be the first customers at a clothing store that opened at nine-thirty. She bought tan jeans, a pale yellow blouse, thick white tube socks, and Adidas jogging shoes. Benny chose blue jeans, a white shirt, tube socks, and similar shoes, and they changed out of their badly rumpled clothes in the public rest rooms of a service station at the north end of Palm Canyon Drive. Unwilling to waste time stopping for breakfast, partly because they were afraid of being spotted, they grabbed Egg McMuffins and coffee at McDonald's, and ate as they drove.
Rachael had infected Benny with her premonition of oncoming death and her sudden — almost clairvoyant — sense that time was running out, which had first struck her at the motel, just after they had made love for the second time. Benny had attempted to reassure her, calm her, but instead he had grown more uneasy by the minute. They were like two animals independently an
d instinctively perceiving the advance of a terrible storm.
Wishing they could have gone back for her red Mercedes, which would have made better time than the rental Ford, Rachael slumped in the passenger's seat and nibbled at her take-out breakfast without enthusiasm, while Benny drove north on State Route 111, then west on Interstate 10. Although he squeezed as much speed out of the Ford as anyone could have, handling it with that startling combination of recklessness and ease that was so out of character for a real-estate salesman, they would not reach Eric's cabin, above Lake Arrowhead, until almost one o'clock in the afternoon.
She hoped to God that would be soon enough.
And she tried not to think about what Eric might be like when — and if — they found him.
18
ZOMBIE BLUES
The dark rage passed, and Eric Leben regained his senses — such as they were — in the debris-strewn bedroom of the cabin, where he had smashed nearly everything he could get his hands on. A hard, sharp pain pounded through his head, and a duller pain throbbed in all of his muscles. His joints felt swollen and stiff. His eyes were grainy, watery, hot. His teeth ached, and his mouth tasted of ashes.
Following each fit of mindless fury, Eric found himself, as now, in a gray mood, in a gray world, where colors were washed out, where sounds were muted, where the edges of objects were fuzzy, and where every light, regardless of the strength of its source, was murky and too thin to sufficiently illuminate anything. It was as if the fury had drained him, and as if he had been forced to power down until he could replenish his reserves of energy. He moved sluggishly, somewhat clumsily, and he had difficulty thinking clearly.
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