Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  "I'm Donald Gresham," he said reluctantly, as if making a confession. "We'll go to my office."

  Gresham's office was down a long, dimly lit hall that reminded him of his high school. There were no names on the doors they passed, only numbers on the translucent glass, behind which glowed what Keith took to be desk lamps. The number on Gresham's door was 118.

  "Right here, Mr. Sullivan." Gresham's voice was unaccented, like that of a TV anchorman, but with none of an announcer's depth and resonance. It was high-pitched, and threatened, thought Keith, to break if it became more than soft. "After you." He held the door open, and Keith entered.

  The office was as bland as the hallway, and Keith began to worry that Goncourt Laboratories was not the secret, high-tech lab he had thought it, that instead it was merely what it appeared to be—a shabby, hole-in-the-wall company that kept its head above water by formulating pharmaceutical additives. Either that, or the cover was flawless. He had never seen such a perfect example of lower corporate stage setting and casting.

  "Now," said Gresham, sitting behind his gun metal gray desk while Keith sat in another plastic chair near it, "this resume is up to date, is it?"

  Keith nodded. "Yes sir."

  "It's very impressive. Your education is . . . impeccable." He smiled as if proud of using the word. "And you've worked for some extremely prestigious firms—Wyeth, Rider . . . Tell me, did you know Tom Veasey there?"

  Keith shook his head. "Afraid not. He mustn't have been in bioengineering while I was there."

  Gresham smiled again. "No. I guess he wasn't." The man turned and looked through the venetian blinds out at the ragged lawns. "How about Frank Donovan?"

  Keith didn't answer until Gresham turned back to look at him. "He was in my department. I knew him," Keith said.

  He hoped it would be enough. He had done thorough background on Peter Sullivan, had learned the names of his co-workers and associates. He could not, however, know anything past what was accessible online. He hoped Gresham couldn't either.

  "Well," said Gresham after a moment, letting the previous subject fade, "you're certainly qualified. But tell me, why did you leave Wyeth?"

  "I . . . I guess you'd call it a personality conflict."

  "You were . . . abusive toward a superior?"

  Keith nodded. "I called him a nigger sonofabitch."

  Gresham smiled. If that was all it took to make Gresham smile, Keith thought he was in. "And why did you leave Rider?"

  Keith shrugged. "Pretty much the same thing," he said softly.

  "Only this time I understand it was a gook sonofabitch, correct?"

  "Yeah." Keith allowed himself a smile. "I guess there's a difference there, huh."

  "You don't seem to get along well with minorities, Mr. Sullivan." Keith said nothing. He only looked at Gresham without apology. "I understand there was an altercation at a bar recently. Red's?"

  "Yes. I guess you could call it that."

  "And I also understand that you've been a member of Patriots for a White America?"

  Keith frowned. "How do you know that?"

  "Oh, our personnel inquiries are pretty thorough, Mr. Sullivan. Will you tell me why you're no longer active in the group?"

  Keith smiled bitterly. "I guess I might as well. Looks like I've already blown this anyway." He snorted a laugh. "They were all talk and no action. They would . . . rave and rant and blow off steam, but when it came to actually doing something, something constructive, they'd bail out. There just wasn't any . . ." He waved his hand in the air. ". . . tenacity there. They said things, but they didn't believe them enough to act on them."

  "Act on them. What exactly do you mean?"

  "I mean act. Do something about the way the blacks and the gays and the Jews and the Hispanics are grinding this country to hell." He feigned catching himself, and said more calmly, "Sorry. Nobody wants to hear this."

  "That's right, Mr. Sullivan. A lot of people don't. A lot of people would call you a bigot, even call you insane and dangerous." Gresham took a deep breath. "But there are some who would call you a patriot."

  Keith looked at him, feeling the role, trying to portray caution and a burgeoning hope.

  "Charles Goncourt might call you a patriot." He smiled again, and Keith felt like smiling too, but did not. "But that remains to be seen. I just have one question for you, Mr. Sullivan, before we go and meet Dr. Goncourt. And that is, did you come to Bone by accident? Just cruise in like some Texas gunfighter of old?"

  Keith gave his head a sharp shake. "No."

  "Then did you come here because of Goncourt Laboratories? Because you wanted a job here? Or for some other reason?"

  "Because . . ." He licked his lips. "Because of some other reason."

  "Something you heard about.”

  “Yeah."

  "And you thought maybe this might be the . . . place that you had heard about."

  "Yeah."

  "And what do you think now?"

  "I think maybe I'm right."

  "And how did you decide on us?"

  "I'm pretty good with computers. I narrowed it down to certain parameters." He shrugged. "You were the company that fit them best. So I took a chance. That you were the ones with . . . with the lab."

  Gresham nodded. "You took a chance telling me that too. But if you hadn't, if you'd have lied to me . . . well, we wouldn't have believed you. It would have been too great a coincidence. You know that scene from Casablanca? `Of all the laboratories in all the world, you walked into mine?' Something like that? No, we wouldn't have believed you."

  The silence was long, and Keith finally broke it, asked the question he knew Gresham wanted to hear. "And then what?"

  Gresham tried to purse his thin lips. "Then we'd have had to kill Peter Sullivan."

  It was a dramatic curtain line, but Keith felt good knowing that he could have offered a better. He could have told Mr. Gresham that Pan had already beaten him to it.

  Chapter 21

  Gresham led Keith out of his office and down the hall. After traversing several cross-corridors, they came to an oak paneled door whose ornateness looked out of place in the otherwise purely functional environment. Gresham knocked.

  "Come . . ."

  The voice sounded strong even through the heavy door, and the word remained eerily suspended in the air, fading only when Gresham opened the door and walked through. Keith followed. "Mr. Sullivan," he said, "this is Dr. Charles Goncourt."

  Goncourt did not rise from behind his massive desk. Keith guessed that he was as small as Gresham was, and seemed old beyond his years. His hair was as white and smooth as paper, and his eyes glared out from pouches of flesh so seamed with wrinkles that Keith thought at first they were scarred. His features were thin and sharp and furrowed, like a knife scratched by frequent and careless use. His suit coat was well tailored, his shirt front smooth and clean, his tie subdued and knotted perfectly. A tiny, enameled American flag glimmered on his lapel.

  "Come in, Mr. Sullivan. Sit, please. Donald, you may stay." In the same room, Goncourt's voice was even stronger. Its long, Texan drawl filled the large office, and seemed to hang in the air as it had in the hall. When Keith looked at the little, wizened man from which the voice came, he nearly laughed at the incongruity, but instead turned it into a grateful smile.

  He sat in the chair Goncourt had indicated. No plastic seat here, but leather and wood. The office was fin de siècle elegant, and Keith wondered if Goncourt had another, public office, artlessly decorated in corporate tack.

  "So, Mr. Sullivan," said Goncourt, "you want to work for us. In bioengineering, eh?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Interesting field. A lot's being done there." It wasn't a smile Goncourt gave, but a wolfish grimace that seemed to painfully cramp his face. "A lot's being done here. But I imagine you already suspect that."

  "I've heard . . . rumors."

  "Why don't you tell Donald and me . . . exactly what rumors. And then we'll know why you came to us
."

  Keith licked his lips. "I heard . . . certain things. People saying that there was special research being done here—"

  Goncourt interrupted with an impatient, guttural snarl so surprising that Keith didn't have to feign being startled. "I'm old and getting older, Mr. Sullivan. So spare me the time and the bullshit and get on with it. You're already in the crap so deep that being subtle's not going to save your sorry ass if we decide you're full of it. Now talk."

  "I . . . all right, I heard that you develop . . . viral strains here. Mutate them to affect only certain genetic types. Or subjects who would be susceptible to certain methods of infection."

  "Genetic types. Like which?"

  "Blacks, Jews, Hispanics . . ."

  "And the methods of infection?"

  "IV drug users, gay men, maybe other sexual contact.”

  “And you believed there's a place like that. And you think you found us, huh? Tracked us down."

  "I know that you specialize in genetically engineering pharmaceuticals that could only be acquired very expensively from natural sources. So you've got the people who could do that kind of work. I also know that your production is far less than your incoming materials would indicate. It doesn't tally. So it's safe to assume that you do a lot more research than it appears at first glance."

  Goncourt looked at Keith for a long time. "Well, you appear to be a pretty damn clever fella, Mr. Sullivan. And tell me, what biological sins would you lay at our research doorstep?"

  "I heard," said Keith carefully, "that the AIDS virus came out of here."

  The two men said nothing, and Keith elaborated on his theme in an attempt to swell them with the self-importance of their legend.

  "I also heard that it goes back farther than that, and that maybe the lab is descended from a long line of scientists who studied—and spread—diseases, plagues, that it might even go back to the middle ages, to the Knights Templar, and that they were responsible for spreading bubonic plague in the belief that it would infect only Jews and Saracens."

  "You'll forgive me, Mr. Sullivan," said Goncourt, "but that sounds like so much fantastic horseshit to me. Right, Donald?"

  "Right, sir." They were the first words Gresham had uttered in a long time.

  Goncourt nodded in agreement, then leaned over the desk toward Keith. "You heard crap, son. There are no Knights Templar in laboratories anywhere. And I'll tell you something else. No single person or group of people developed the AIDS virus. It sprang up on its own, like a plague from God. From everything our research indicates, it came out of the filth of darkest Africa, the same place that spawned the black human filth that's helping to ruin our great nation today." Goncourt snorted in derision. "To believe that somebody invented it—hell, that somebody would have been capable of coming up with such a divine visitation that targets two of the most vile groups of people around—your homos and your junkies—well, it's just not to be believed. Nobody could come up with something that perfect. No, that's the kind of horseshit you read in tabloids and those flying saucer stories."

  Goncourt squinted his eyes so that they nearly vanished in the pockets of dry skin. "But once God gives you a gift, it's a piss-poor excuse for a man who doesn't use it."

  Keith allowed himself a little smile. "Then it's true? Are you mutating the virus?" He tried to indicate excitement, barely restrained. "I heard about an airborne strain, a plague that—"

  "Hold on," Goncourt said. "That excites you? The idea of a virus that could spread through respiration? That could kill whole races of people? Men, women, children, just because they happen to be a certain color?"

  Keith made his face grow stern. "Sometimes tough questions call for tough answers. Sometimes, when everything else fails, you have to go down some pretty bloody roads." The context was different, but the words were the code that Keith had lived by, and he in no way had to pretend that he meant them. "Yes sir. Tell you the truth, it does excite me. It sounds to me like some magnificent dream."

  Goncourt nodded, and his painful smile reasserted itself on his thin, white lips. When he spoke, the words were quieter, haunting. "It excites me too, son. Maybe together we can make our dream real." He drew a deep breath, and the smile blew off his face. "Just one little thing first. A little test."

  Oh Jesus, Keith thought. This is where he could blow it. He knew a great deal about biochemistry on paper, and had audited several college classes in which he had done lab work. But that was different from actually working in a gene-splicing situation. Being thrown into such circumstances, in spite of his inherited credentials, could topple his plot.

  Then he told himself to relax. He knew that the actual lab work of genetic engineering was extremely time-consuming, and that knowledge and experience of it could not be proved in an hour, or even a day. He felt prepared to deal with anything of a short-term nature that Charles Goncourt could throw at him, be it assaying for DNA polymerase or purifying a bacteriophage. So he was surprised at the old man's question.

  "Are you skilled in the use of firearms, Mr. Sullivan?"

  "Well, I did serve in Vietnam." Keith paused for a moment, then gave an uncomfortable chuckle. "And I hunted with my dad when I was a kid."

  "All right," said Goncourt. "Not that it really matters." He nodded to Gresham. "Donald?"

  Gresham stood up and went around Goncourt's desk and behind the old man's chair. He reached behind the wooden posts with both hands and lifted handles into place with a soft click. The chair had been so well disguised that Keith had not realized it was a wheelchair.

  And now, as Gresham rolled the chair around the side of the desk, Keith learned something else he had not known before. Charles Goncourt's legs ended at mid-thigh. "My badge of courage," the old man said. "It happened in Germany. I was nineteen. Do you have any idea what it's like for a nineteen-year-old boy to lose his legs?"

  Keith shook his head. "No sir. I've got to admit I don't.”

  “But you were in Vietnam."

  "Yes sir, but I was lucky. I saw boys get hurt bad, I saw their pain, but that doesn't mean I knew what it was like. From their point of view."

  Goncourt looked at him for such a long time that Keith did not have to feign discomfort. "That's a damn good answer.

  Because you can't know. Not until it happens to you." He gave a nod to Gresham, and they left the room.

  They went down several short hallways, then descended in a service elevator. Keith estimated that they were four stories beneath ground level when the doors opened. They stepped out, and Keith followed as Gresham pushed Charles Goncourt down a wide hall, which ended at a cement block wall. Gresham took a small remote control from his jacket pocket, pointed it toward a spot on the wall ten feet up, and pressed a button. The wall slid aside. Keith had noticed the indentation, but expressed surprise nevertheless.

  "Secret panels," he said admiringly. "Pretty neat."

  "This is only the beginning," said Gresham proudly. They went through the opening, and the wall closed behind them.

  As they approached a wide double-door, Goncourt spoke again. "Did you ever kill anyone while you were in Vietnam?"

  "Not to my knowledge, sir. Never close up enough that I knew it."

  The doors opened to some unseen electric eye, and they entered near the front of what Keith took to be a small lecture hall. To his left was a small curtained stage, and to his right were half a dozen rows of seats with ten seats per row. Over half the seats were filled with people in white lab coats, and Keith saw Bob Hastings, Al Freeman, and Ted Horst in the third row. Hastings grinned at him, but the other two men showed no recognition. There were a few other men Keith had seen at Red's Tavern, but had never met.

  Gresham turned Goncourt's chair toward the assembled men. "Good morning, gentlemen," Goncourt said. "Thank you for interrupting your important work to welcome a new candidate who wishes to assist us in our research. Every one of you knows that in order to work in our secret facility, a man must be more than talented, more than skill
ed, more than brilliant. He must be dedicated. Dedicated to a cause which others might find reprehensible. But those of us here know that there is only one way for the white Christian race to survive, and here we are struggling to develop the means to that end. Thanks to your dedication, we are approaching that goal.

  "And now here is a man, Peter Sullivan, who would join us, and who we feel is qualified. He has the mind, he has the desire." Goncourt turned his cold eyes on Keith. "But does he have the dedication? Does he have the loyalty? Does he have the will? There is one final test to take before joining us, Mr. Sullivan. Every man here took it, and every man here passed. And every man who passed watches every new man—witnesses, you might say. There is no ceremony, no oath to swear. Simply one act. One simple act which binds us together forever."

  He nodded to Gresham, who stepped up onto the small stage and drew back the curtain. Behind it was Harrison, the black man Keith had beaten at Red's two weeks before. He was tied securely to a chair, and his mouth was gagged. His eyes were open, however, and looked at the men, at Goncourt, at Keith, with terror, as if he knew that, no matter what else happened, he would die very soon.

  "I believe you know this nigger."

  Keith turned and looked at Goncourt. The old man was grinning, and a thin trickle of saliva touched a chalky corner of his mouth. Keith surmised that this was as close to sexual excitement as Goncourt ever got.

  "We've met, but we ain't howdied," Keith said.

  Goncourt gave a gargle of phlegm that seemed intended as a laugh. "Well, you can howdy now. And then you can say goodbye. Steve?"

  A man in the first row got up, took a Colt .38 revolver from a holster, and held it out to Keith, who looked at it but didn't take it.

  "Go ahead, Mr. Sullivan," said Goncourt. "There's one bullet in it, just one. But that's all you'll need. You cock the pistol, it'll come under the hammer."

  "You want me to kill this man?"

  "Mr. Sullivan, if we're successful in doing what we want to do here, niggers will fall like sprayed fruit flies, and it won't be an easy death. You don't shoot him, all you do is make it tougher on him down the road."