Dr. O

by Robert W. Walker

  "Like you and Oliguerri."

  "Yes."

  "And you never spoke of it to your husband, ever?"

  "Only in the most general terms, and the most glowing. I didn't burden him with the razored side."

  "You told him you named it Pythagoras?"

  "Yes, tried to involve him a bit. We were having difficulties communicating lately, and—"

  "I see."

  Dr. Hogarth returned to the laser itself. "People like me, bacteriologists, microbiologist, we became most important to the project. Without us, it wouldn't come off, and we knew this. We understood the diseases we were going after. We understood cell biology, reproduction, disease. Most people connected with the project were kept in the dark about its ultimate goals, for good reason. Oliguerri and I, along with Carder, were among the few to make waves about the direction the research was suddenly being forced to take, one of a military nature, one of biological warfare."

  "This was work done with NASA?"

  "They were taking the payloads up. The Defense Department got into it afterwards. We tried telling them that countless experiments on disease cures in space are yet to be done, but they took a different view, an industrial application view at first, to do away with waste and toxins we earlier had no idea of what to do with —a true boon, really."

  Robyn put her head in her hands. "But it's all gone sour somehow, don't you see?"

  "Yes... yes, sour, after the tests."

  The tests?"

  "Los Alamos, seemed the proper setting... history, all that"

  "How long ago were these tests done?"

  "Oh, six years, I'd say."

  "Six years?"

  "Yes"

  "About the time Ovierto became a problem for the FBI."

  "I'm not sure about that."

  "But I am." Robyn paced, trying to make the connection. "When you were at Los Alamos, were you secretly brought in, housed, all of you?"

  "Well, yes... all very hush-hush. Didn't see my daughter for almost a year. My husband was ready to divorce me at that point."

  "Ovierto was there.”

  “What?"

  "At Los Alamos. He was there, on hand. Either legitimately or illegitimately, he was part of it. He had to be, don't you see?"

  "Well, now you mention it, there was a surgery, a medical team."

  "Were there any accidents? Anyone hurt?"

  "We... I was never aware of anything of that nature, no. But then..."

  "But what?"

  "We were pretty well confined to one work area. There seemed to be a great deal going on elsewhere, however, but at that time there was no thought of human experimentation."

  Robyn was skeptical. "How sure of that are you now?"

  "I... I don't know."

  "Ovierto may have been more involved than we know."

  "No, I never..."

  "He gained access to the safe house, wired the place... how? He either had a contact among the FBI men or someone in the house."

  "No... you can't think—"

  "I'm just thinking out loud. I didn't know your husband, but Ive seen husbands do worse to their wives than blow them up."

  "He loved Rachel... perhaps not me, but he would not have harmed Rachel."

  "I'm sorry, but I have to think of every possibility."

  "It had to be one of the agents."

  "As well it may have been." Robyn dropped it.

  "Although he was acting rather... strangely."

  Robyn said, "We'd best get some rest." She took the notes stolen from Oliguerri's lab, folded them up once more, and readied for bed. She waited until Elena Hogarth went into the shower before she hid the papers. No sense taking any chances. She found a drawer, placing the notes beneath it in the rear. When Dr. Hogarth finished showering, Robyn went in, taking her gun with her, ever cautious. When she looked back, she found that mother and daughter were asleep in the big bed, the child having stirred in the interim. For a brief moment, Robyn stared at the scene of mother and daughter wrapped around one another.

  She'd found her bag in the trunk of the FBI car, but Hogarth and the child had no clothing whatever with them. She had invited Elena Hogarth to fish through for anything she thought might be comfortable for the child to sleep in, and anything she, herself, might use, either tonight or in the morning. Dr. Hogarth had graciously thanked her.

  Robyn grabbed some sleepwear herself and returned to the bathroom. Leaving the door ajar, she quickly showered. Under the soothing stream of the hot shower, she wondered where Ovierto was at this moment and where Thorpe might be. Other than the fact that Ovierto was still at large, they knew nothing, and it wasn't an enviable position to be in. On the other hand, calling in to Thorpe could tip Ovierto off to their whereabouts. The man was a cunning demon, after all.

  She wondered how much Thorpe knew about Pythagoras. She had played dumb, acting the good soldier who just follows the dictates of her superiors, not caring to know the particulars of Pythagoras. If she chose to be in the dark about what the governmental scientists were working on and what seemed to be driving Ovierto to murder upon murder, then she'd have to be rudely awakened. However unlikely it seemed, Thorpe had genuinely detached Ovierto from Pythagoras. Why? Didn't she see the connection? Or was she too close to the trees?

  And what about the government's plans for Pythagoras? Could they be every bit as sinister as those of Dr. Ovierto in the end? Robyn had been disappointed by her government before, but this... this could go far beyond disappointment.

  In any event, according to Hogarth, Oliguerri's final written words were worth a great deal to the authorities, far more than a human life or two.

  Robyn returned from her shower refreshed but agitated by her thoughts. She lay down on the bed and felt every muscle weighted down with fatigue and draining tension. Sleep, if it came at all, would be a mixed bag of anxiety and wonder.

  "What've I gotten myself into?" she asked the silent room.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The following morning they were out before dawn, continuing on the Interstate only briefly before Robyn decided to veer off for the old Pacific Coast Highway. She'd always wanted to see it, and besides, Thorpe would be looking for them everywhere, making the Interstate dangerous for them. She still wasn't certain that she wanted to be found, not just yet, anyway.

  Ovierto's communication had told her one thing, that the evil genius had escaped capture once again. Had he been calling from his hideaway, or a car, or his plane? He obviously had a fortune to squander in his quest for Pythagoras. To some degree, she felt com-forted knowing there was a reason, after all, for the man's madness, his obsession, that it was not just a deranged fixation on driving Donna Thorpe as mad as he was.

  She switched on the radio in order to learn what she could from the calls. Every law enforcement agency in the West was alerted to the car, down to the license plates, and so too, then, was Dr. Ovierto.

  "We have to ditch this car, get something else," Robyn told her charges.

  "Why are we hiding from Thorpe?"

  "Thorpe is not your... Thorpe draws Ovierto."

  She had almost said that Thorpe had used them all to bait Ovierto in Seattle.

  "If we could get to an airport, fly out," suggested Hogarth.

  "All the airports will have men looking for us, two women traveling with a child, but if we did it separately... maybe. Where would you like to go?"

  "Vermont."

  "What's in Vermont? Relatives? Relatives are not good. Ovierto, Thorpe... both will know about any relatives."

  "Friends I haven't seen in years."

  "You don't mind endangering—"

  "Well, what else can I do?"

  "We can go back to Seattle, make a deal with Thorpe."

  "What kind of deal?"

  "We've got to get Ovierto off your trail. We've got to set up a decoy operation. I'm a decoy cop. With the right makeup, I could look like you. We can leave a crumb-trail to me for Ovierto to follow while you and
Mindy can be properly relocated. No more playing tag with this monster."

  "What makes you think Donna Thorpe will be willing to do it your way?"

  "It's the only way she's going to find you."

  She pulled over beside the road to take in the view of the Pacific. She'd never seen it up close like this before, so much peaceful water at the surface, teeming with unrest and frenzied feeding below. She had stepped from the car, taking the keys with her, to view the panoramic sight before her. The child got out to stretch, followed by Elena Hogarth with a resigned look on her face.

  "All right, but Thorpe will want the papers, too. You know that."

  "Yes, I know. I also know that they're not safe on me or you. At least she can place several concrete walls between that information and Ovierto."

  "And you... it places you in great danger to impersonate me."

  "That's my job... besides, just standing here be-side you places me in as much danger. I think for your sake... for the child's sake, we have no other choice but to follow the FBI program. But there won't be any deal unless we get real assurances from Thorpe that it'll be done speedily and properly, so that you will re-main safe. I'm beginning to think that means without computers." She thought of what Thorpe had said about Ovierto's computer. She wondered now if she was in his files.

  Elena Hogarth stared now at the sea. She then said, "I believe I can trust you. All right, we do it your way."

  "Frankly, it'll look a lot better on my record, bringing you in, than if we were hauled back, me in cuffs."

  Robyn began to notice the low hum of the airplane in the distance, but her eyes fell on Mindy, who was rummaging about the woods here overlooking the beach and asking if she couldn't go down onto the sand.

  "No... be careful there, Mindy... Mindy," Dr. Hogarth was saying when Robyn realized that the plane was flying straight in at them. She didn't know a great deal about private planes, but it looked like a Beech craft, a sleek, bright dart coming at them.

  "Get down! Get down!" she shouted and leaped to the earth at once, seeing Hogarth cover the child with her body. Gunfire rained down, barely missing them as the plane pulled up.

  Mindy was screaming from beneath her mother. Elena was hit. Robyn stood and fired every round in her gun at the disappearing plane, placing two bullets in the wing section before it was out of range. She then rushed to Hogarth and the kid, seeing the blood. Hogarth was alive but nearly unconscious.

  The plane was banking in the near distance, preparing to come around again.

  "In the car! Get in the car, Mindy!" said Robyn, trying to cope with Elena.

  "No, no!" shouted the girl.

  "Get in!"

  The girl instead helped her get her mother to the car. Robyn said, "We've got to get out of here!"

  She then rushed around to the wheel and realized that the keys were missing. She saw them lying in the dirt in front of the car where she had dove earlier. Overhead the plane was coming in low again.

  She punched the radio, calling for assistance, telling anyone listening who they were and that they were under fire from Ovierto's plane. She then ran around to the other side and grabbed Elena up in her arms, shouting for Mindy to run as far from the automobile as possible. "Hurry, hurry!"

  A line of fire began at the ridge and cut through the car as they leaped into the brush amid trees, an explosion from the vehicle rocking them, sending flames into the pine needles where they lay. The car exploded a second time, sending up a choking gas cloud.

  "The papers," moaned Elena.

  "I have them."

  The plane moved off again. With no place to land, with trees all around, Ovierto must be stymied, unable to see them where they hid but pleased with his pyrotechnical display. Robyn said over and over to herself, "Come on back, you bastard, come on back" as she re-loaded her .38, her heart pounding. Ovierto gave it up and did not return.

  Seattle's seaport was a bustling place in the city, where merchants and customers met below the watchful bows and sterns of enormous freighters. Tug boats sounded and moved about the harbors like terriers while clouds of seagulls and pelicans followed the fishing boats as if guiding their direction. The place was busy with people as well, from the tourists to the dock officials and seamen coming and going. It was a little corner of the city where privacy could be had amid the noise. Drugs were sold straight off the ships, and raids had netted whole bundles of hashish coming in under various ingenious disguises, along with cocaine and other illegal narcotics. Amid the scars of the older section of the docks an old freighter stood twenty-nine feet high beside the pier. Moored from stem to stern with four lines, the Zimbabwe Jewel, though rusted red with age, appeared to be winning the tug of war with the dock trying to hold her. She'd one day take the moorings away with her through sheer and constant friction between the two, as the water gently rocked the lumbering monster. From all that anyone could see, the old freighter was a long way from her home port of Rhodesia. But recently, there'd been some scuttle but about the pier that she'd gotten new owners, and that she was now registered with the Port of Seattle by a man named Bateman.

  Inside the rusting tub, all was still and silent, save for her ropes and creaking bulkheads and the hummed tune of the insane man who had bought her and would come and go from her on occasion without ever having been seen. No one knew what the future held for the unlucky Zimbabwe Jewel.

  Dr. Maurice Ovierto had made a substantial cash down payment on the ship, using it as his dumping ground. Three Seattle citizens were taking up space in it now, their bodies beginning to annoy him with the stench. They'd all had their throats surgically removed for the apples he had wanted so to send to Thorpe. Thorpe was such a fool, he thought; she didn't know how deep was his reason for driving her mad. After all these years, she still hadn't put it together with her father. What did he have to do, spell it out for the bitch?

  Senator William P. Thorpe, who had secretly spear-headed Pythagoras and who had contacted his old school chum, Dr. Louis Rosenthaler, who in turn had called on Dr. Maurice Ovierto to set up a surgery and medical facility at Los Alamos for the government, a very special, high-priority event to test the results of certain lasers on human disease organisms. Ovierto had always had a touch of madness in him. He believed it was genetically transmitted, along with his other condition, a metabolic disease due to disordered hemoglobin synthesis called porphyria. It ran in families, and it caused him episodic abdominal cramps and pain, as well as changes in the skin, neuritis, and mental changes. He knew of the various drugs and foods that could trigger an attack of the disease, the same which had caused the madness of George the III of England. With the laser, he had taken a calculated risk. The result was the man he was today. He owed it all to Thorpe's father, in a way....

  He had set up several radios in the old ship, a police band, as well as a ham radio and a simple AM/FM for local news. He also had a small TV in his captain's quarters here. He'd brought in a bucket of chicken and on his return had found rats feeding on the remains of his last meal —as if they hadn't enough to feed on in the ship.

  Since Pythagoras's early stages of development, six years before, he had had more attacks than ever, and their duration was longer. But he knew that in the six years since the failed experiments and mistakes at Los Alamos the scientists responsible for Pythagoras had continued to work on the problems and resolve them. He knew that his own disorder, as well as countless others, could be cured, and he knew that a world riddled with genetic disorders would pay dearly for Pythagoras, perhaps even his price.

  His disease made him sensitive to light. His skin would bubble from it at times, when the porphyrin hormones were running high in his liver. The hormones had caused coma in him, hallucinations, nerve damage, seizures, and difficulty breathing. Before the experiment he had been able to live with the toxic levels, but he'd believed in the project and so subjected himself to the effects of the laser. Rather than reduce the power of the crippling disorder, it had doubled it. What o
ther effects the laser had on him, on his brain, he could only guess at, but he believed it had made of him a cold, sociopathic creature capable of feeling nothing for his own victims. Or was it all an excuse he cared to feed himself so that he might do whatever he wished to whomever he wished and not feel a thing?

  Either way, Thorpe was at fault, along with all the scientists behind the creation of Pythagoras. Now they must either deal with him or die. He'd gone to great lengths to bring Thorpe to her knees, and perhaps she was ready to bargain.

  He looked out a porthole to see a tug passing by. All looked peaceful from where he sat. He was unsure if he had been successful in killing Hogarth and the others, but he was fairly sure that he had. It would send a clear message to Thorpe, finding the child's charred bones amid the wreckage.

  He thought of sitting across a table from Thorpe, answering her questions, answering all the questions that troubled her sleep, all the whys that she seemed incapable of seeing on her own. And he knew she was no dummy, despite his rage toward her and his desire to hurt her as her father had hurt him.

  As for her father, there'd been no way to get at him. He'd died of a sudden heart attack long before. But Rosenthal, now there was a man on whom he had been able to wreak his revenge in full. He'd left Rosen-thal a crippled madman.

  Rosenthal was here in Seattle, in an asylum. Thorpe knew this much, and she had had the asylum watched, but now, with Hogarth gone, she'd pull back her forces and he'd go find Rosenthal and tell him how he could get his mind back.

  As for Randall Hogarth, he'd gotten what he de-served. Ovierto had met him soon after the Hogarths had arrived in the city, convincing him that with Pythagoras in their hands they could rule the medical world together, that he, Ovierto, would need a spokes-man and a front runner so that he might remain a silent partner in the multi-billion dollar scheme that could lead to universal domination. Hogarth's morals and his "philosophy" had never been so tested before. He did exactly as he was told, but he never knew what hit him. He'd thought he and the girl would escape death. They would step out of the house at nightfall to gaze at the stars, at a safe distance from his doomed wife. But Ovierto had seen a different scenario unfolding; his mind spurring him on to do what his hand itched to do, he had seen it played out and surprised everyone, including Randall. He had obliterated Thorpe's oh-so-careful hideaway.