I, Richard

by Elizabeth George

  “To stop him from what?”

  “Contributing to the exposé. Eric was blowing the whistle on Biosyn. He was scared shitless to do it—we both were scared shitless—but he'd made up his mind. I smuggled out a sample of Exantrum one night—and I can't even tell you how freaked out I was to get close to the stuff without a safety suit on—and I gave it to Eric. He was set to meet with the journalists, to hand it over so they could get it tested for themselves in Atlanta, and then… This was three weeks ago. I guess he might've met with them but he didn't say and then he was dead. There hasn't been even a sign at Biosyn that anything's the least bit wrong, so I started to think Eric never made contact and I wanted to get the name of the journalist myself to find out. That's what I was looking for at your house. The name of the journalist. Either that or the Exantrum. Because if he didn't make contact, I've got to get that stuff back into a controlled environment. Fast.”

  Charlie stared at the woman. She couldn't digest the information she was being given quickly enough to make a coherent reply.

  “I can see he didn't tell you any of this. He must've wanted to protect you. I admire that. It was decent of him. Typical, too. He was a great guy. But I wish he'd confided in you because then at least we'd know what we were dealing with here. We could set our minds at rest. As it is… Either that stuff's out there waiting to wreak havoc on the state of California or it's safe at the Centers for Disease Control. But in either case, I need to know.”

  The Centers for Disease Control. “What is it?” Charlie asked, and the words sounded hollow to her ears and dry in her throat. “I thought Biosyn made pharmaceuticals. Cancer drugs. Medication for asthma and arthritis. Maybe sleeping pills and antide-pressants.”

  “Sure. That's part of it. That's Division I. But Division II is where the real money is, where Eric and I worked, where Ex-antrum is.”

  “What is it?” Charlie repeated, dread rising up in her throat like bile.

  Sharon looked around. She said, “We need to order something. If we don't and if someone sees us here, it's going to look suspicious. We've got to get a waitress's attention.”

  They managed to do so, each of them asking for scones and tea which both of them knew they would not touch. When their order came, Sharon poured from the pot and said, “Exantrum is Cabot's key to immortality. It's a virus. It was discovered in standing water in a cave… this was about two years ago. A hiker went inside a cave in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A hot day. He finds a pool of water. He splashes himself on the face with it. He's dead in twenty-one days. Hemorrhagic fever. The doctors in North Carolina don't know where the virus came from but it looks enough like Ebola to make people freak. Atlanta gets onto it and everyone starts tracing where this guy has been, who he's seen, what he's been up to. They're looking at his associates through a microscope, they're looking at his passport to see if he's been out of the country, they're looking at his family to see which of them might've passed something on from someone else. They can't figure it out. Cabot follows all this but does his own detective work because he thinks this is something different from Ebola and what he's wanted from the day he graduated from UCLA is to have a name that gets associated with something that changes the world, like Jonas Salk or Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. He's probably thinking cure at first, but the government comes calling once Cabot has the stuff isolated and it gets twisted into disease. Uncle Sam'll pay big bucks for a weapon like Exantrum. You put it into water, you drink it, you splash it onto your face and it gets into your eyes, you let it touch a hangnail, you get it in your nose, you have a scratch on your body, you step in it, you breathe it… take your choice. It doesn't matter how you come into contact with it because the end's the same. You die. It's for biological warfare. For use against the Iraqis if they get out of line. Or the Chinese if they start shaking their sabers. Or the North Koreans. Cabot stands to make a fortune from it, and Eric was going to let the world know.” Sharon looked at her teacup and turned it in its saucer. She finished with, “He was a really good man. A decent good man. I only wish I'd had his courage. But the truth of the matter is I don't. So I need to get the Exantrum back to the lab if Eric hadn't made contact with the journalist yet.”

  “He…he wouldn't have kept it at our house, though,” Charlie said, because she wanted desperately to believe it. “Not if it's as dangerous as you say it is. He wouldn't have kept it at home, would he?”

  “Hell no. That's why when I showed up, I was looking for the journalist's name, not the virus. He would've put the virus somewhere safe till he had a meeting time and a place to hand it over. And if he did put it somewhere safe, I need to know where it is. Or I need to confirm that it's in Atlanta which I can only do by talking to the journalist that Eric was talking to.”

  Charlie heard the words but she was thinking of other things: what Terry had said about midlife crisis and what Linda had told her about Eric's last visit to the bank. She was thinking of all that money in the vault, the search of her house, and the expression on her husband's face when she had penitently related her suspicions about the love affair which he'd never had. Especially this last, Charlie considered. And the horrible possibilities it presented.

  “How did you smuggle Exantrum out of Biosyn?” she asked Sharon Pasternak, steeling herself to hear the answer.

  “I put the safe suit on and transferred it into a cough syrup bottle,” Sharon told her. “It was risky as hell, but believe me if I'd been caught leaving with anything besides that bottle, it would've been the end of me.”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “I do see that.” And more, in fact. What she saw with absolute clarity at last was the end of Charlie Lawton.

  She went to the mission. She said to Sharon, “I'll go to the bank and check our safe-deposit box. Eric may have put the bottle in there.”

  Sharon was grateful. She said, “That would be a godsend. But if it is there, for God's sake don't open it whatever you do. Try not to touch it, even. Just call me. Here. Let me give you my home number. And leave a message, okay? Say you're from Sav-on, just in case Cabot's bugged my phone. Say, ‘Your medication's arrived,' and I'll know what you mean and I'll come to your house. Okay? Got it?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said faintly. “Sav-on. I've got it.”

  “Good.”

  And so they parted, Sharon zooming off in the direction of Dana Point and Charlie walking not to her car in the city parking structure but rather around the block and down the street to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

  She made her way along the uneven path within the mission walls, between the misshapen cacti and the thirsty poppies. She wandered mostly, not caring about her destination because her destination didn't matter any longer. She ended up in the narrow chapel built three centuries earlier by the hands of the California Indians and under the direction of that single-minded taskmaster, Junípero Serra.

  The light inside was muted… or perhaps, she thought, it was her vision which might be going to fail her along with the rest of her body now. Perhaps that was another effect of exposure to Exantrum—loss of vision—or perhaps she had been suffering from that loss from the moment she'd begun to believe that her husband was having an affair.

  How clear it all was now. How neatly Terry Stewart's description of male midlife crisis fit in with what Eric Lawton had done. How obvious were the reasons why Eric manufactured not only his present but his past. How easy it was to understand why he'd become estranged from his first wife, from his daughter, and from the rest of a family who no doubt knew exactly what he did for a living. Better to pretend one had no family, better to act the part of injured party, better to anything than to live openly as a scientist who made his salary developing weapons of death. And not weapons for war to be used by the military on opposing troops but weapons to decimate innocent civilians or, in the hands of someone else—a terrorist, for instance—to bring an entire population to its knees.

  Charlie knew two things at the end of her conversation with Sharon Pasternak:
She knew that Eric—who had talked about not living in this area much longer, who had talked about fast cars and offshore banking and racing in the America's Cup—had not made contact with any journalist and had never intended to do so. He had done what she'd first thought he'd done: He had sold a substance from Biosyn. It just hadn't been the cure for AIDS or cancer or anything else that she'd assumed when she'd seen the money. Whether that made him a bad man, a misguided man, a greedy man, or the devil himself was of no consequence to Charlie. Because Eric Lawton was also a dead man and she finally knew the reason for that as well.

  She worked her way into one of the hard-backed pews. She sat. There was a kneeler that she could have used to pray from, but she was beyond casting petitions heavenward. There was no help—divine or otherwise—for what ailed her. This was something Eric had known the moment she confessed to him the depth to which her suspicions about him had taken her. And she'd had to confess—had felt the need to confess—once he'd come home triumphant from “the biggest sale in my whole career, Char, wait'll you hear about the bonus, how does a cruise sound to you for a celebration? Or even a complete lifestyle change? We can have that now. We can have it all. Hell, I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately.”

  She'd known then that her fears had been groundless, that there was no other woman in his life. And, knowing this and seeking absolution for her sin of doubting him, she'd told him the truth.

  “Char, God, we went through this once already, didn't we? I'm not having an affair!” He'd said it all with an earnestness that, combined with the joy with which he'd told her about his impending good fortune, had made it impossible to disbelieve him. “You're the only one… You've always been the only one. How could you think anything else? I know I've been preoccupied. And in and out at weird hours. And taking phone calls and disappearing. But that all was because of this deal and you can't ever think… Hell, never, Char. You're the reason I've been doing all this. So that we can have a better life. For us. For our kids. Something more than suburbia. You deserve it. I deserve it. And now that this deal I've been concentrating on at work has gone through… I haven't wanted to talk about it because I didn't want to jinx it. I never thought it'd get you all upset. Come here, Char. Hell. God. I'm sorry, babe.”

  And she'd known from the sound of his voice that he meant it. And from the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes, she'd drawn the comfort that told her her fears were groundless. So she'd given herself up to his love that evening and later, at dawn, she'd confessed the rest of her sins. She owed him that confession, she thought. Only by telling him how low she had sunk would she be able to forgive herself.

  “I finally stopped it all when I spilled medicine all over the floor in your bathroom.” She laughed at herself and at all of her fears, groundless now. “It was like I regained consciousness all of a sudden, standing in a pool of Robitussin.”

  He smiled and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Robitussin? Char. What were you up to?”

  “Insanity,” she said. “I was so sure. I thought, ‘There's got to be evidence somewhere. Of something.' So I was searching through everything. Even your medicine cabinet. I broke that bottle of cough syrup on your bathroom floor. I'm sorry.”

  He continued to smile but in Charlie's mind's eye—now, in the chapel in San Juan Capistrano—she could see how fixed that smile had become. She could see how he'd attempted to clarify what she was telling him.

  “There wasn't cough syrup in my bathroom, Char. You must've been in—”

  “You've probably forgotten it. The label was old. It's actually just as well it got thrown out. Don't they say medicine over six months old isn't right to take?”

  Had his lips looked stiff? Had that smile stayed fixed? He said, “Yeah, I think they do say that.”

  “Sorry I broke it, though.”

  Had he averted his eyes, then? “How'd you clean it up?”

  “On my hands and knees, doing penance.”

  Had he laughed? Weakly or otherwise? “Well, I hope you wore rubber gloves, at least.”

  “Nope. I didn't want anything to get in the way of me and my sin. Why? Was it not really cough syrup? Have you been disguising poison in a medicine bottle just in case you decide to off your wife?” And she'd tickled him to force him to answer. And they'd laughed and begun to make love again.

  He hadn't been able to.

  “Getting old,” he said. “Everything goes to hell after forty. Sorry.”

  And it had got worse from there. He'd been gone more; he'd become preoccupied once again—more than ever this time—he'd closeted himself away and spent hours on the phone; he'd invested days, it seemed, on the Internet “doing research,” he'd told her when she asked him. Finally, when the phone had rung one evening, she'd overheard him say, “Look, I can't make it tonight, all right? My wife's not well,” and she'd suffered a rebirth of all her suspicions.

  It was two days later that he'd come home from work and found her under a blanket on the sofa, dozing off a combination of headache and muscle pain that she'd assumed she'd brought on herself with a lengthy hike on the slopes of Saddleback Mountain. She'd been asleep and hadn't awakened upon his entry. Only when he dropped to his knees beside the couch did she stir with a start.

  “What is it?” he'd asked her. Was it fear in his voice and not concern as she'd thought at the time? “Char, what's wrong?”

  “Achy all over,” she replied. “Too much exercise today. Got a headache, too.”

  “I'm going to make you some soup,” he told her.

  He'd gone into the kitchen and banged about. Ten minutes later, he brought a tray into the living room where she lay.

  “Sweet,” she murmured. “But I can get up. I can eat with you.”

  “I'm not eating,” he said. “Not right now. You stay put.” And he'd lovingly and gently fed tomato soup to her a slow and patient spoonful at a time. He'd even wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. And when she'd laughed a little and said, “Really, Eric, I'm all right,” he hadn't made a reply.

  Because he'd known, Charlie thought. The process had begun.

  First the sudden onset marked by headache and muscle pain. A slight fever to accompany them. Chills and an inability to eat hard upon the heels of the fever.

  And after that? What she'd marked as mourning first and denial second, both of them made manifest in her body: sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. But she hadn't been reacting to her husband's death. She'd been reacting to what he'd done in his life. Or what he'd tried to do and what he would have done had she not broken the bottle in which the virus was sealed before he had the chance to give it to its purchaser.

  How torn he must have been, she realized. There he was: caught in the middle of something gone terribly wrong, the best-laid plans come to nothing. With nothing to give in exchange for the down payment he'd received for the Exantrum, with a wife fatally exposed to the virus he himself had stolen. And knowing that that wife was going to die, as surely as he must have known thousands—millions—of others would have died had fate, in the person of Charlie's jealousy, not stepped in to prevent that from occurring.

  He'd fed her the soup and studied her face as if such a study would allow him to take the image of her into the grave and beyond. When she was finished eating, when she could swallow no more, he put the spoon in the bowl and the bowl on the tray. He'd leaned forward and kissed Charlie on the forehead. He'd adjusted the covers up to her chin.

  “Remember, I'll always love you,” he'd said.

  “Why're you telling me that? Like that?”

  “Just remember.”

  He'd taken the tray from the room. She heard the sound of it being set on the counter in the kitchen. A moment later he returned and sat opposite her, in an easy chair, with a pillow behind his head.

  “Do you remember?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “What I said. Remember. I'll always love you, Char.”

  Before she could respond, he took the revolver from
within his jacket. He put the barrel in his mouth, and he blew off the back of his head.

  So this, Charlie thought, was what it felt like to know you were going to die. This sense of drifting. No panic as she'd once thought she might panic if handed a death sentence like pancreatic cancer. But instead a numbness and a going through the motions: getting up from the pew in the mission chapel, approaching the altar, pausing at a statue of a yellow-and-green-robed saint to light a candle, then standing deep in the sanctuary and knowing there was nothing to ask God for or about any longer.

  What had Eric thought? she wondered. There he was at forty-two. Had he thought, This is it, this is all there is to my life unless I take this one chance to change it all, to have more, to be more, to ride the wave of opportunity that I see rising in front of me and to discover upon what shore that wave will deposit me? If I only take a risk, that's all, one little risk. And really, not much of a risk at all if I play it right and figure the angles: Involve Sharon Pasternak in scoring the virus so if anyone's caught smuggling it out of Biosyn, it'll be Sharon and not me. Play the part of whistle-blower so Sharon will think I've got a selfless goal in mind. Make contact with an interested party but make sure I set the whole deal up so that there's a down payment first, some lag time second to make my plans to escape should my contact try to eliminate me, and then a second meeting to hand over the Exantrum followed by a hasty exit and a flight to…where? Tahiti, Belize, south of France, Greece. It didn't matter. What mattered was that “the rest of my life” would have new meaning to Eric, more meaning than a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a tattoo on his arm had been able to give him.

  “Eric, Eric,” Charlie whispered. Where, when, and why had he gone so wrong?

  She didn't know. She didn't know him. She wasn't sure if she even knew herself.

  She left the chapel and made her way back to her car in the city parking structure next to the train station. She climbed inside, feeling weary now, feeling as if the virus inside her were a presence she could actually sense in her veins. And it was there. She knew that without checking into a hospital or traveling out to Biosyn to offer herself to Dr. Cabot as proof that his weapon of war was as efficacious as he had hoped.