In their daily working relationship, Julio always had been in the superior position, of course, deciding how to proceed at nearly every step of a homicide investigation, but his control was never blatant or obvious, which made all the difference. Reese would not have cared if Julio's dominance had been obvious; he did not mind deferring to Julio because in some ways Julio was the quicker and smarter of the two.
But Julio, having been born and raised in Mexico, having come to the States and made good, had a reverence and a passion for democracy, not only for democracy in the political arena but for democracy in all things, even in one-to-one relationships. He could assume the mantle of leadership and dominance if it were conveyed by mutual unspoken consent; but if his role were made overt, he would not be able to fulfill it, and the partnership would suffer.
“I'm in,” Reese repeated, rinsing their coffee cups in the sink. “We're just two cops on sick leave. So let's go recuperate together.”
21
ARROWHEAD
The sporting-goods store was near the lake. It was built in the form of a large log cabin, and a rustic wooden sign advertised bait, tackle, boat rentals, sporting goods. A Coors sign was in one window, a Miller Lite sign in another. Three cars, two pickup trucks, and one Jeep stood in the sunny part of the parking lot, the early-afternoon sun glinting off their chrome and silvering their windows.
“Guns,” Ben said when he saw the place. “They might sell guns.”
“We have guns,” Rachael said.
Ben drove to the back of the lot, off the macadamed area, onto gravel that crunched under the tires, then through a thick carpet of pine needles, finally parking in the concealing shade of one of the massive evergreens that encircled the property. He saw a slice of the lake beyond the trees, a few boats on the sun-dappled water, and a far shore rising up into steep wooded slopes.
“Your thirty-two isn't exactly a peashooter, but it's not particularly formidable, either,” Ben told her as he switched off the engine. “The.357 I took off Baresco is better, next thing to a cannon, in fact, but a shotgun would be perfect.”
“Shotgun? Sounds like overkill.”
“I always prefer to go for overkill when I'm tracking down a walking dead man,” Ben said, trying to make a joke of it but failing. Rachael's already haunted eyes were touched by a new bleak tint, and she shivered.
“Hey,” he said, “it'll be all right.”
They got out of the rental car and stood for a moment, breathing in the clean, sweet mountain air. The day was warm and undisturbed by even the mildest breeze. The trees stood motionless and silent, as if their boughs had turned to stone. No cars passed on the road, and no other people were in sight. No birds flew or sang. The stillness was deep, perfect, preternatural.
Ben sensed something ominous in the stillness. It almost seemed to be an omen, a warning to turn back from the high vastness of the mountains and retreat to more civilized places, where there was noise and movement and other people to turn to for help in an emergency.
Apparently stricken by the same uneasy feeling that gripped Ben, Rachael said, “Maybe this is nuts. Maybe we should just get out of here, go away somewhere.”
“And wait for Eric to recover from his injuries?”
“Maybe he won't recover enough to function well.”
“But if he does, he'll come looking for you.”
She sighed, nodded.
They crossed the parking lot and went into the store, hoping to buy a shotgun and some ammunition.
* * *
Something strange was happening to Eric, stranger even than his return from the dead. It started as another headache, one of the many intense migraines that had come and gone since his resurrection, and he did not immediately realize there was a difference about this one, a weirdness. He just squinted his eyes to block out some of the light that irritated him, and refused to succumb to the unrelenting and debilitating throbbing that filled his skull.
He pulled an armchair in front of the living-room window and took up a vigil, looking down through the sloping forest, along the dirt road that led up from the more heavily populated foothills nearer the lake. If enemies came for him, they would follow the lane at least part of the way up the slope before sneaking into the woods. As soon as he saw where they left the road, he would slip out of the cabin by the back door, move around through the trees, creep in behind the intruders, and take them by surprise.
He had hoped that the pounding in his head would subside a bit when he sat down and leaned back in the big comfortable chair. But it was getting much worse than anything he had experienced previously. He felt almost as if his skull were… soft as clay… and as if it were being hammered into a new shape by every fierce throb. He clenched his jaws tighter, determined to weather this new adversity.
Perhaps the headache was made worse by the concentration required to study the tree-shadowed road for advancing enemies. If it became unbearable, he would have to lie down, though he was loath to leave his post. He sensed danger approaching.
He kept the ax and the two knives on the floor beside the chair. Each time he glanced down at those sharp blades, he felt not only reassured but strangely exultant. When he put his fingertips to the handle of the ax, a dark and almost erotic thrill coursed through him.
Let them come, he thought. I'll show them Eric Leben is still a man to be reckoned with. Let them come.
Though he still had difficulty understanding who might be seeking him, he somehow knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Then names popped into his mind: Baresco, Seitz, Geffels, Knowls, Lewis. Yes, of course, his partners in Geneplan. They would know what he'd done. They would decide that he had to be found quickly and terminated in order to protect the secret of Wildcard. But they were not the only men he had to fear. There were others… shadowy figures he could not recall, men with more power than the partners in Geneplan.
For a moment he felt that he was about to break through a wall of mist into a clear place. He was on the verge of achieving a clarity of thought and a fullness of memory that he had not known since rising from the gurney in the morgue. He held his breath and leaned forward in his chair with tremulous anticipation. He almost had it, all of it: the identity of the other pursuers, the meaning of the mice, the meaning of the hideous image of the crucified woman that kept recurring to him…
Then the unremitting pain in his head knocked him back from the brink of enlightenment, into the mist again. Muddy currents invaded the clearing stream of his thoughts, and in a moment all was clouded as before. He let out a thin cry of frustration.
Outside, in the forest, movement caught his attention. Squinting his hot watery eyes, Eric slid forward to the chair's edge, leaned toward the large window, peered intently at the tree-covered slope and the shadow-dappled dirt lane. No one there. The movement was simply the work of a sudden breeze that had finally broken the summer stillness. Bushes stirred, and the evergreen boughs lifted slightly, drooped, lifted, drooped, as if the trees were fanning themselves.
He was about to ease farther back in the chair when a scintillant blast of pain, shooting across his forehead, virtually threw him back. For a moment he was in such horrendous agony that he could not move or cry out or breathe. When at last breath could be drawn, he screamed, though by then it was a scream of anger rather than pain, for the pain went as abruptly as it had come.
Afraid that the bright explosion of pain had signified a sudden turn for the worse, perhaps even a coming apart of his broken skull, Eric raised one shaky hand to his head. First he touched his damaged right ear, which had nearly been torn off yesterday morning but which was now firmly attached, lumpish and unusually gristly to the touch but no longer drooping and raw.
How could he heal so fast? The process was supposed to take a few weeks, not a few hours.
He slowly slipped his fingers upward and gingerly explored the deep depression along the right side of his skull, where he had made contact with the garbage truck. The depression was sti
ll there. But not as deep as he remembered it. And the concavity was solid. It had been slightly mushy before. Like bruised and rotting fruit. But no longer. He felt no tenderness in the flesh, either. Emboldened, he pressed his fingers harder into the wound, massaged, probed from one end of the indentation to the other, and everywhere he encountered healthy flesh and a firm shell of bone. The cracked and splintered skull had already knit up in less than a day, and the holes had filled in with new bone, which was flat-out impossible, damn it, impossible, but that was what had happened. The wound was healed, and his brain tissue was once more protected by a casing of unbroken bone.
He sat stupefied, unable to comprehend. He remembered that his genes had been edited to enhance the healing process and to promote cell rejuvenation, but damned if he remembered that it was supposed to happen this fast. Grievous wounds closing in mere hours? Flesh, arteries, and veins reconstituted at an almost visible rate? Extensive bone re-formation completed in less than a day? Christ, not even the most malignant cancer cells in their most furious stages of unchecked reproduction could match that pace!
For a moment he was exhilarated, certain that his experiment had proved a far greater success than he had hoped. Then he realized that his thoughts were still confused, that his memory was still tattered, even though his brain tissue must have healed as thoroughly as his skull had done. Did that mean that his intellect and clarity of mind would never be fully restored, even if his tissues were repaired? That prospect frightened him, especially as he again saw his uncle Barry Hampstead, long dead, standing over in the corner, beside a crackling pillar of shadowfire.
Perhaps, though he had come back from the land of the dead, he would always remain, in part, a dead man, regardless of his miraculous new genetic structure.
No. He did not want to believe that, for it would mean that all his labors, plans, and risks were for nothing.
In the corner, Uncle Barry grinned and said, “Come kiss me, Eric. Come show me that you love me.”
Perhaps death was more than the cessation of physical and mental activity. Perhaps some other quality was lost… a quality of spirit that could not be reanimated as successfully as flesh and blood and brain activity.
Almost of its own volition, his questing hand moved tremblingly from the side of his head to his brow, where the recent explosion of pain had been centered. He felt something odd. Something wrong. His forehead was no longer a smooth plate of bone. It was lumpy, knotted. Strange excrescences had arisen in an apparently random pattern.
He heard a mewling sound of pure terror, and at first he did not realize that he had made the noise himself.
The bone over each eye was far thicker than it should have been.
And a smooth knot of bone, almost an inch high, had appeared at his right temple.
How? My God, how?
As he explored the upper portion of his face in the manner of a blind man seeking an impression of a stranger's appearance, crystals of icy dread formed in him.
A narrow gnarled ridge of bone had appeared down the center of his forehead, extending to the bridge of his nose.
He felt thick, pulsing arteries along his hairline, where there should have been no such vessels.
He could not stop mewling, and hot tears sprang to his eyes.
Even in his clouded mind, the terrifying truth of the situation was evident. Technically, his genetically modified body had been killed by his brutal encounter with the garbage truck, but life of a kind had been maintained on a cellular level, and his edited genes, functioning on a mere trickle of life force, had sent urgent signals through his cooling tissues to command the amazingly rapid production of all substances needed for regeneration and rejuvenation. And now that repairs had been made, his altered genes were not switching off the frantic growth. Something was wrong. The genetic switches were staying open. His body was frenetically adding bone and flesh and blood, and though the new tissues were probably perfectly healthy, the process had become something like a cancer, though the rate of growth far outstripped that of even the most virulent cancer cells.
His body was re-forming itself.
But into what?
His heart was hammering, and he had broken into a cold sweat.
He pushed up from the armchair. He had to get to a mirror. He had to see his face.
He did not want to see it, was repelled by the thought of what he would find, was scared of discovering a grotesquely alien reflection in the mirror, but at the same time he urgently had to know what he was becoming.
* * *
In the sporting-goods store by the lake, Ben chose a Remington semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun with a five-round magazine. Properly handled, it could be a devastating weapon — and he knew how to handle it. He picked up two boxes of shells for the shotgun, plus one box of ammunition for the Smith & Wesson.357 Combat Magnum that he had taken off Baresco, and another box for Rachael's.32-caliber pistol.
They looked as if they were preparing for war.
Although no permit or waiting period was required when purchasing a shotgun — as was the case with a handgun — Ben had to fill out a form, divulging his name, address, and Social Security number, then provide the clerk with proof of identity, preferably a California driver's license with a laminated photograph. While Ben stood at the yellow Formica counter with Rachael, completing the form, the clerk—"Call me Sam,” he'd said, when he had shown them the shop's gun selection — excused himself and went to the north end of the room to assist a group of fishermen who had questions about several fly rods.
The second clerk was with another customer at the south end of the long room, carefully explaining the differences among types of sleeping bags.
Behind the counter, on a wall shelf, beside a large display of cellophane-wrapped packages of beef jerky, stood a radio tuned to a Los Angeles AM station. While Ben and Rachael had selected a shotgun and ammunition, only pop music and commercials had issued from the radio. But now the twelve-thirty news report was under way, and suddenly Ben heard his own name, and Rachael's, coming over the airwaves.
“… Shadway and Rachael Leben on a federal warrant. Mrs. Leben is the wife of the wealthy entrepreneur Eric Leben, who was killed in a traffic accident yesterday. According to a Justice Department spokesman, Shadway and Mrs. Leben are wanted in connection with the theft of highly sensitive, top-secret research files from several Geneplan Corporation projects funded by the Department of Defense, as well as for suspicion of murder in the case of two Palm Springs police officers killed last night in a brutal machine-gun attack.”
Rachael heard it too. “That's crazy!”
Putting one hand on her arm to quiet her, Ben glanced nervously at the two clerks, who were still busy elsewhere in the store, talking to other customers. The last thing Ben wanted was to draw their attention to the news report. The clerk named Sam had already seen Ben's driver's license before pulling a firearms information form from the file. He knew Ben's name, and if he heard it on the radio, he was almost certain to react to it.
Protestations of innocence would be of no use. Sam would call the cops. He might even have a gun behind the counter, under the cash register, and might try to use it to keep Ben and Rachael there until the police arrived, and Ben did not want to have to take a gun away from him and maybe hurt him in the process.
“Jarrod McClain, director of the Defense Security Agency, who is coordinating the investigation and the manhunt for Shadway and Mrs. Leben, issued a statement to the press in Washington within the past hour, calling the case 'a matter of grave concern that can reasonably be described as a national security crisis.' ”
Sam, over in the fishing-gear department, laughed at something a customer said — and started back toward the cash register. One of the fishermen was coming with him. They were talking animatedly, so if the news report was registering with them, it was getting through, at best, on only a subconscious level. But if they stopped talking before the report concluded…
“Though ass
erting that Shadway and Mrs. Leben have seriously damaged their country's security, neither McClain nor the Justice Department spokesman would specify the nature of the research being done by Geneplan for the Pentagon.” ”
The two approaching men were twenty feet away, still discussing the merits of various brands of fly rods and spinning reels.
Rachael was staring at them apprehensively, and Ben bumped lightly against her to distract her, lest her expression alert them to the significance of the news on the radio.
“… recombinant' DNA as Geneplan's sole business …”
Sam rounded the end of the sales counter. The customer's course paralleled that of the clerk, and they continued talking across the yellow Formica as they approached Rachael and Ben.
“Photographs and descriptions of Benjamin Shadway and Rachael Leben have gone out to all police agencies in California and most of the Southwest, along with a federal advisory that the fugitives are armed and dangerous.”
Sam and the fisherman reached the cash register, where Ben turned his attention back to the government form.
The newscaster had moved on to another story.
Ben was startled and delighted to hear Rachael launch smoothly into a line of bubbly patter, engaging the fisherman's attention. The guy was tall, burly, in his fifties, wearing a black T-shirt that exposed his beefy arms, both of which featured elaborate blue-and-red tattoos. Rachael professed to be simply fascinated by tattoos, and the angler, like most men, was flattered and pleased by the gushy attention of a beautiful young woman. Anyone listening to Rachael's charming and slightly witless chatter — for she assumed the attitude of a California beach girl airhead — would never have suspected that she had just listened to a radio reporter describe her as a fugitive wanted for murder.
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