by Ben Bova
* * *
JERRY HIGHTOWER WAS in Minneapolis, talking with a former student of Abramson’s, when his phone buzzed. He ignored the call, not willing to interrupt his interview with the scientist. Not that he got much out of it. Yes, the man knew Professor Abramson. He was even fairly current on what Abramson had been working on.
“Telomerase,” said the redheaded geneticist. “He’s done some truly startling work with lab mice, you know.”
Hightower nodded. “He’s a fugitive now. He’s been charged with kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping! Professor Abramson?”
Making a reassuring gesture with both his big hands, Hightower explained, “It’s a family matter. He’s taken his granddaughter away from the kid’s parents, without their permission. Now we’ve got to find them.”
The scientist looked puzzled. “That doesn’t sound like Professor Abramson.”
“His granddaughter is dying from cancer. The professor thinks he can save her, but nobody else agrees with him—including the child’s parents.”
“I see. Well, he hasn’t contacted me recently. I haven’t seen him since the Triple-A-Ess national conference, in October. Or was it November?”
“Do you have any idea of where he might have gone, who he might turn to?”
The scientist shook his head. Hightower realized he wasn’t going to get anything more from the man, whether he knew Abramson’s whereabouts or not.
He rose from the bare wooden chair he’d been sitting on, pulled one of his cards from his wallet, and handed it to the scientist.
“If you hear from him, let me know. The man’s a wanted fugitive.”
“Sure,” said the scientist. “Of course.”
Fat chance, Hightower thought.
In the taxi headed for the airport and his next interview, Hightower pulled out his cell phone and checked his messages. Quenton Fisk. He grunted with surprise.
* * *
FISK WAS WALKING a quartet of potential investors out of his office when his assistant stepped beside him and said, almost in a whisper, “Agent Hightower is calling, sir.”
Fisk nodded to her, then said to the departing men, “Thanks so much for coming by. I’m sure we’re going to make an indecent profit on this deal.”
They laughed and nodded agreement. Fisk went back to his desk and picked up his phone.
“Agent Hightower,” he said pleasantly. “Good of you to return my call.” To himself, he added, Four hours after I called you.
No video, Fisk realized. From the sounds coming through the phone, Hightower must be in a car, he thought.
Hightower’s deep voice rumbled. “You said you have some information about Professor Abramson.”
“Yes,” Fisk replied, leaning back in his desk chair and loosening his tie with his free hand. “It’s almost embarrassing, actually.”
Hightower said nothing.
“You see, a friend of mine has been hosting Abramson at his home for the past couple of weeks. I just heard about it today.”
He waited for Hightower’s response but heard nothing except the traffic noise.
“He’s been in Louisiana, at Nottaway Plantation, just outside of Baton Rouge.”
“You say he has been there?”
Fisk felt uncomfortable, as if the FBI agent knew he wasn’t telling the entire truth. He wished he could see the man’s face, but then realized that maybe it was better that Hightower couldn’t see his.
“Yes, he’s gone.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Apparently there was some sort of scuffle. Abramson took off with his granddaughter and her doctor. He headed for the airport, I believe.”
Another stretch of silence. Fisk squirmed uncomfortably, waiting for the agent to say something, anything.
Finally, “Nottaway Plantation, you said.”
“Yes. In Louisiana.”
“I’ll have to go there and talk to your friend. What’s his name?”
“Lorenzo Merriwether. I’ll tell him to cooperate with you fully.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My assistant can give you directions. I’ll tell Merriwether that you’re coming and he’s to cooperate with you fully.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“You’re entirely welcome,” Fisk said, struggling to keep his self-control, to keep from babbling.
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Fisk hung up after passing Hightower on to his assistant. Then he punched his speed-dial key and hit Merriwether’s number. We’ve got to get our stories straight, he told himself. Lonzo’s got to tell the same tale to Hightower that I just did.
Oregon
LUKE GLANCED AT the clock on the airport terminal’s wall for the tenth time in the past two minutes. Angela sat between him and Tamara, a soft blue blanket wrapped over her clothes, fully awake and staring with her owlish eyes at the people striding through the busy terminal.
“Shannon said she’d have a car out here in less than an hour,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
Luke had called Shannon Bartram from a pay phone in the airport terminal. She sounded totally surprised that he was in Portland, but once Luke explained about Angela she had immediately agreed to let him use her laboratory facilities to treat the child.
“It’s been just about an hour since you called her,” Tamara said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Angela.
Tamara asked, “Can you walk?”
Angela shot a disapproving frown from her old woman’s face. “Sure I can walk.”
The three of them got to their feet; Luke removed the blanket while Tamara held Angela’s frail right arm.
“The ladies’ room is right over there,” Tamara said to the child, pointing. “Just lean on me.”
“Okay.”
Luke watched them go, haltingly, painfully slowly. Tamara bent slightly to keep an arm around Angela’s shoulders. People stared and moved out of their way to allow them to pass.
Where the hell is Shannon? Luke asked himself again. She should be here by now. Then he realized that she’d have to park her car and make her way through the terminal to find him.
He sat down again. And realized that he didn’t have to use the men’s room. Hell, he thought, I haven’t peed since we were in the plane, more than three hours ago. That’s a new record, I think.
A short, blocky Hispanic-looking man in a dark suit walked by, bearing a small sign that read ABRAMSON.
Luke jumped to his feet. “Hey, that’s me!” he called.
The man peered at Luke’s face. “You look younger than your picture.”
“You’re from Bartram Labs?”
“Yes, sure. Mrs. B. herself sent me to pick you up. She said you had a woman and a kid with you.” The driver was young, with a full head of dark hair and a thick mustache.
“They’re in the ladies’ room.”
“Hah. Women.”
Once Angela and Tamara reappeared, the driver led them through the terminal toward the exit that led to the roadway.
“I thought you’d be over in the luggage pickup area,” he said to Luke. “That’s where we usually meet our passengers.”
“Oh.”
With a laugh, the driver said, “Good thing you’re in the general aviation terminal. If you came in on one of the airlines I’d have had to call for a posse to find you.”
“Yeah,” Luke said, “good thing.” He was watching Angela. The child seemed to be walking all right, although very slowly, hesitantly, as if she couldn’t quite trust her own legs.
They waited just inside an exit door while the driver went out into the chilly gray afternoon and retrieved his car from the parking lot.
“How do you feel, Angel?” Luke asked.
“Okay,” she replied shakily. Pointing to the row of chairs farther inside the terminal, she asked, “Could I sit down over there?”
“Sure, sure. Tamara will go with you. I’ll wait here for
the car.”
The car came at last: a spacious, comfortable silver-gray Infiniti sedan. In less than a quarter hour they were speeding up the highway that ran along the Columbia River.
Even in the gray, misty day the valley looked beautiful, with green hills and the majestically flowing river, broad and smooth. They passed a fountain spraying water high into the air on the other side of the river. The sun broke through the overcast, and suddenly a rainbow arched brightly before their delighted eyes.
“Look!” Angela cried.
Tamara said, “Rainbows are supposed to bring good luck.”
Luke had never heard that one before, but he hoped she was right.
The sedan turned onto a side road that climbed up into the hills. Perched on top of the highest hill in the area sat the cluster of square white concrete buildings that was the Bartram Research Laboratories.
As they rolled up the driveway to the main building, Luke saw that Shannon Bartram was standing at the entrance, waiting for them.
* * *
SHANNON BARTRAM HAD been one of Luke’s graduate students, more than fifteen years earlier. The daughter of a Wyoming cattle rancher, she had surprised herself in undergraduate school by falling in love with biochemistry. She had thought she’d put in the four years of college that her father insisted on, then return to ranch life in Wyoming.
But one of her professors changed all that. Luke Abramson’s undergraduate course in biochemistry opened her eyes to a fascinating new world filled with possibilities she had never before dreamed of.
When she graduated, she convinced her somewhat dubious father to allow her to go on to graduate school. She became one of Professor Abramson’s grad students. She had not only fallen in love with biochemistry, she had fallen in love with Luke Abramson.
He was more than thirty years her senior, and happily married. To him, she was merely another bright young kid, a willing pair of hands to work in his laboratory for the usual grad student’s pittance. She never let the professor know her inner feelings, never came on to him the way some of the other young women did. Not that it did them any good; the professor was blind to their advances.
Shannon never returned to Wyoming to live. Once she got her PhD she moved to California and won a position with a start-up biotech company. She spent Christmases and holidays with her father, of course. But she married Carter Bartram, the dynamic young CEO of a rapidly growing biotech firm.
She still kept in touch with Professor Abramson, distantly, professionally. She met him at scientific conferences, and once in Washington, D.C., where he won an award for his groundbreaking research.
When Abramson’s wife died of cancer, Shannon was tempted to fly to Massachusetts. Instead, she sent a sympathy card and a large donation to the National Cancer Society. Then her husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It took several years, and they tried every treatment known to science, but in the end the cancer killed him.
Shannon used the money she inherited to build the Bartram Research Laboratories, on a hilltop in her late husband’s native Oregon. By now she was a handsome woman in her late forties, with a generous figure and short-cropped hair that was kept golden blond by her stylists. She dressed well. She personally directed the work of the Bartram Labs, following the published research of Professor Abramson and other leaders in various fields of biochemistry.
And now Luke Abramson was stepping out of the sedan she had sent to fetch him. She stood on the top step of the main entrance to her laboratory facility, resisting the urge to rush down and greet him.
Luke looked trim and fit. His hair seemed darker than she remembered it. He looked almost like the man she had fallen so girlishly in love with, all those years ago.
Then she saw Luke help a little girl out of the car. And behind the child came a slim young woman with high cheekbones and glossy dark shoulder-length hair.
Nottaway Plantation
JERRY HIGHTOWER FELT tired. And exasperated. The story that Lorenzo Merriwether was telling smelled like a dead prairie dog to him, but he couldn’t shake the man out of it.
They were sitting in Merriwether’s so-called library. It looked more like a picture gallery to Hightower. The owner of Nottaway Plantation was trying to look relaxed, but Hightower sensed an inner tension. Merriwether was wearing a soft maroon velour pullover shirt over a pair of chinos. And an osteopathic white plastic collar around his neck.
For the tenth time, Hightower asked, “How did Abramson come to this place? You said you’d never met him before he arrived at your door.”
Merriwether had a phony smile painted on his face as he leaned back in the wing chair he was sitting on and crossed his long legs carefully. Hightower thought the man was stalling for time to think up an answer.
“So?” he prodded.
“A friend phoned me and asked me to take him in.”
“A friend? Who?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Would you rather be arrested for obstructing an investigation?” Hightower said it softly, gently, almost as if he were asking about the weather. But the threat was there.
Merriwether’s smile dimmed a fraction. “Look. My friend heard that Abramson was traveling with his sick granddaughter and needed a place to stay for a week or so. That’s all there is to it.”
“How’d your friend know Abramson?”
Merriwether spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “Don’t ask me.”
Hightower stared at the man for several moments. Pointless, he told himself. This guy has his story down pat and he’s not going to budge from it.
“All right,” he said, trying to switch from bad cop to good cop. “Why did Abramson leave and where did he go?”
“Something spooked him. Maybe he was afraid to stay in one place for too long. Maybe he was afraid you’d catch up with him.”
Smart, Hightower thought. Put the blame on me.
Pointing at the collar, he asked, “Does your neck injury have anything to do with his leaving?”
Merriwether chuckled faintly. “This? This comes from playing basketball with kids twenty years younger than me.”
“Where’d Abramson go?”
“Don’t know. He and the woman doctor with him were clever enough to do their talking out on the verandas of their rooms, where we couldn’t pick up their voices.”
“You mean you had their rooms bugged?”
Suddenly uncomfortable, Merriwether nodded mutely. And winced at the motion.
“Why?”
“All the guest rooms are bugged. It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”
“Like a Peeping Tom.”
“Listening, not peeping.”
“And you don’t want to tell me who your friend is, the one who asked you take Abramson in?”
“Rather not.”
“Then let me have the CDs from your bugs.” Before Merriwether could object, Hightower went on. “Maybe the tech guys at our lab can get more out of them than you can.”
“Maybe they can,” Merriwether agreed. Reluctantly.
* * *
HIGHTOWER FELT DEAD beat as he drove through the gathering darkness of night, down Interstate 10 toward New Orleans, skirting the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. He’d started the day in Minneapolis, had to switch planes twice before finally landing at Baton Rouge for his frustrating late-afternoon interview with Merriwether, and now was heading for the FBI office in New Orleans.
Sleep can wait, he told himself. Dinner can wait. The CDs in his jacket pocket might be important. He’d phoned the New Orleans office and alerted them that he was coming in with evidence that had to be examined immediately. The clerk he talked to complained that it was almost quitting time for the lab, but Hightower promised to get overtime pay for whoever checked out the CDs. The clerk agreed to find a technician who would wait up all night if he had to, under those terms.
It was well past eight P.M. by the time he parked in the fenced-in lot behind the bank building that housed the FBI offi
ce. Hightower’s last meal had been the miserly snacks offered on the last leg of his flight from Minneapolis, early in the afternoon. He felt hungry, tired, and angry at himself for not being able to shake the real story out of Merriwether. There’s more going on here than a runaway grandfather, he realized.
At the root of it all was a sick eight-year-old child, probably scared half to death, far from her mother and father. Hightower thought of his own nieces and how frightened they would be under the same circumstances.
If the New Orleans office can’t find anything on the CDs, I’ll have to send them to Washington. I’ll find a motel after I drop these discs off at the local office.
He’d heard tales in his childhood of Navaho warriors of old and their initiation rites, enduring hunger, thirst, privation in the burning sun of the desert. All I’ve got to do is postpone dinner for a few hours. And then get some sleep. It’s been a long day.
* * *
LORENZO MERRIWETHER SAT on the cushioned sofa in his living room, his long arms stretched across the sofa’s back, his longer legs propped up on the glass-topped coffee table. The collar chafed his neck, and the mint julep on the coffee table didn’t seem to be helping any.
Quenton Fisk’s chiseled features glared at him from the display screen above the fireplace. Merriwether wished he were watching the Chicago Bulls game, but he realized with an inward sigh that business had to come before pleasure—even when he had a fair-sized bet riding on his former team.
“And you gave him the CDs?” Fisk asked, like a district attorney grilling a hostile witness. He was in his shirtsleeves and a set of dead black suspenders.
Keeping himself from shrugging because of his neck, Merriwether said, “Wasn’t much else I could do. I kept your name out of it, though, just like you said.”
“Those CDs are my … eh, your property. He had no right to take them.”
“You try saying no to the FBI.”
His stern expression relaxing a little, Fisk mused, “Well, maybe he can get something out of them that we can’t.”
“Maybe.”
