by Greg Iles
From the beginning, Eldon had demanded his fee in uncut diamonds. Rusk had groused at first, but he soon realized the wisdom of this system of payment. Unlike cash, rough diamonds were immune to both fire and water. They could be buried for years. If they had not been engraved with ID numbers in their source country, they could not be traced. Any cash deposit over $10,000 had to be reported to the IRS, but you could carry $10,000 worth of uncut diamonds in your mouth without detection, and more elsewhere in your body without discomfort. You could hold millions of dollars’ worth in a safe-deposit box, but why risk it? You could bury them in your backyard and no one could ever deny you access to them with a judicial writ. Best of all, when it came time to move them, they looked like rocks. A box of rocks!
Eldon laughed again. He’d built up quite a rock collection over the past five years. Rusk had, too, albeit a smaller one. Rusk had taken his early payments in the form of inclusion in the business deals of his wealthy clients. He’d thought this was a brilliant stroke that could keep him on the legitimate side of the IRS. And he was right, to that extent. Rusk paid taxes on the earnings, and that kept the IRS off his back. It did not, however, make what he had done to earn those profits legal. And as the business connections multiplied, so accrued his traceable connections to a list of murders. And that, Eldon was almost sure, was what had brought Special Agent Alex Morse down on their backs.
Rusk had realized the error of his ways after a couple of years. He, too, had started taking his fee in uncut diamonds. Now and then he accepted a business deal as payment, as with the Fennell deal. But he had quite a box of rocks built up by now, as well. The only question was, where did he keep them? If Eldon could learn the answer to that question, he could make the transition to his next life as a much richer man. He would be a fool not to add Rusk’s stash to his own if he could.
And I can, he thought with satisfaction. Rusk doesn’t have the sand to hold out under duress. All that mountain climbing and skydiving and running marathons won’t add up to five minutes of guts in the face of true pain.
It was time for drastic measures. It was time to call in his markers—all of them. And that meant Edward Biddle. Eldon hadn’t spoken to Biddle in over two years, not since the TransGene man had delivered the gas canisters to him. Biddle seemed to feel that the less he knew, the safer he was. Still, the gas delivery had made one thing clear. Biddle was living up to his promise to “take care of my people.” And “his people” were, of course, the former staff members of the VCP. Not everyone, but the dedicated few who had understood the true relationship between technology and life. Every scientific discovery was a two-edged sword. A scalpel could cut out a patient’s tumor or slit his carotid artery. Morphine could extinguish pain or extinguish life. A viral infection could deliver lifesaving gene therapy or cause a global holocaust. It was the responsibility of some to discover and develop those potentialities; others would make decisions about how to use them. Eldon had always understood his place in this hierarchy, and Edward Biddle had valued him for that.
He flipped through the Rolodex on his desktop—he still preferred it to a computer-based organizer—and found Biddle’s card. Edward Biddle, Vice President, TransGene Corporation. And below that: America Leading the World. Dr. Tarver loved them for that, for having the balls to put it right on the card in the so-called Age of Globalization. But TransGene could say it and dare anyone to gripe about it. Microbiology was one arena in which America had kept its competitive lead. Look at the Koreans and their cloning scam: Our cloning works better because we keep human beings in our labs to babysit the cells every night. Who did they think they were kidding with that warm-and-fuzzy bullshit? Sure enough, the truth had finally come out, as it always did in science. You could bluff for a while, but not forever. And therein lay the cruel beauty of science; there was nothing warm and fuzzy about it. Science was truth. And truth didn’t care a fig for morality. Dr. Tarver dialed the number on Edward Biddle’s card. It rang twice, and then a clipped voice accustomed to command answered.
“This is Biddle.”
“This is Eldon Tarver, General.”
An irony-laced laugh came down the line. “Hello, Doctor. What can I do for you?”
“It’s time for me to relocate.”
A brief pause. “Do you have a destination in mind?”
“I’d like to remain in-country.”
“I see.”
“I’m almost certain to require a new identity.”
“I understand.” Not a moment’s hesitation. A good sign. “I know you’ve been doing research at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I’ve been following that, off and on. It’s interesting stuff, as far as it goes, but I can’t help but feel you’re not making full use of your talents there.”
It was Tarver’s turn to laugh. “The regulations on research are pretty claustrophobic these days. For that reason, I’ve been carrying out some private studies for some time. Five years, to be exact.”
“Interesting. In what area?”
“Very similar to what we were doing at the VCP.”
“Is that so?” Deep interest now.
“Yes, sir. You might say I picked up where we left off. Only this time, I had the equipment I needed.”
“Very interesting.”
“Yes, sir. And, ah, these are not in vitro experiments I’m talking about. These are in vivo studies.”
“Primate studies?” Biddle asked.
“Higher primates, sir. Exclusively.”
“I’m very intrigued, Eldon. I have a feeling your work might dovetail nicely with some things our more adventurous people have been doing at TransGene.”
“Like-minded colleagues would be a nice change.”
“I expect so. What sort of time frame do you have in mind for your relocation?”
“Two or three days, if possible. Maybe sooner.”
A brief pause. “That’s certainly possible. You and I should speak face-to-face. If I flew down in the next couple of days, could we meet?”
Eldon smiled with satisfaction. Biddle had taken the bait. Now he need only set the hook, and that he would do face-to-face. “Absolutely, sir.”
“Good. I’ll call you later.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You, too, Eldon. It’s good to be working with you again.”
“You, too.”
Dr. Tarver hung up, then logged into his anonymous e-mail account and sent Rusk a copy of their CHEAP VIAGRA! CHEAP! spam. In it, below the ad pitch, he inserted the line Satisfy the youngest CHICKs! The word chick in all caps meant that Rusk should meet him tomorrow at the Chickamauga Hunting Club rather than the Annandale Golf Club. It was Dr. Tarver’s version of Reynolds Wrap in a window: his crisis code.
After logging out of the account, he removed Biddle’s card from his Rolodex and put it in his pocket. Then he folded the faxed pages that Neville Byrd had sent him and slid them into the same pocket. His whole future in a single pocket. Only one threat to that future existed: Andrew Rusk. Without Rusk, Alex Morse could not connect Eldon Tarver to any crime. And by tomorrow night—if Biddle lived up to Eldon’s expectations—Rusk would be dead, and his cache of diamonds would be part of Eldon Tarver’s unreported-asset portfolio. Eldon stood and went into the hall, then locked his office and walked down the corridor to see the chief of Oncology.
CHAPTER 37
Alex was alone as she rode the elevator to the fifth floor of the University Medical Center, her excitement at the possibility of John Kaiser’s help exploded by Chris’s news that he’d probably been injected with something during the night. Since Kaiser was still an hour south of Jackson, and since UMC was practically across the street from the Cabot Lodge, she’d decided to visit her mother.
When the elevator doors opened, she walked down to the adult oncology wing: not a place of gladness, despite the efforts of families and nurses to nurture a hopeful atmosphere. Alex was thankful that the pediatric cases had their own hospital; she might not have
been able to endure them in her present emotional state.
She found her mother much as she had left her two days ago. Her liver was larger, her skin yellower, her kidneys deader, her belly more bloated. Her ovarian cancer had proved atypical, invading areas and organs usually spared by that disease—yet still she clung to life. To life, but not to consciousness, thank God.
Alex sat beside her, holding the limp and sweaty hand, trying to fight off waves of despair. At times like this, it seemed there was no happiness in the world. If there was, it was unknowing: the happiness of children who had not yet learned what lay behind the masks of the adults they saw each day and night. The people Alex knew seemed bent on destroying whatever happiness they might have found, as though unable to tolerate the hell of living with what they’d once thought they wanted. She wondered if human beings had ever been meant to attain the things they desired. Of course, that question presupposed some divine intent inherent in the world, whereas most of the evidence she had seen contradicted this idea. She hoped that if the day ever came that she found a man who loved her as she dreamed of being loved, she would be content to love him in return. She believed she would, if only because she had lost so much, and so young. Unlike most people she’d encountered, Alex knew in her bones that existence was terribly fragile, a flickering flame that could be extinguished at any moment without cause or justice.
She checked her watch. Chris would arrive soon, and Kaiser not long after. She squeezed her mother’s hand, then wrote a brief note for the nurses to read to her later. Dear Mom, I was here. I love you. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much. I’m close by, and I’ll be back soon. I love you. Alexandra.
“Alexandra,” she said, getting up and walking into the hall. Never in her life had she felt like an Alexandra, yet Margaret Morse had spent most of her life trying to force her daughter to become one. Girlie outfits, pink hair ribbons, debutante balls, sorority recommendations…Christ.
Alex stepped aside for a group of white-coated doctors walking together. Most looked five years younger than she was. Interns. A couple of the women were staring at her face. They were curious about the scars, and they were probably wondering how they would deal with something like that. They saw people with infirmities and afflictions every day, but most of that they shut out by force of will, aided by the separation implicit in a wide age difference. But when they saw her, a woman like them—even prettier than they were—disfigured by fate, it scared them.
When Alex reached the elevator, she found a man already waiting in front of it. She stood behind his big white coat, waiting for the car to come. Hospital smells permeated the air: alcohol, harsh disinfectant, God knew what else. There were highly resistant bacteria on every surface in this place, waiting to find some portal into a warm, wet body so that they could multiply into the millions, then billions, until they had wiped out the host that nourished them for their brief stay on earth—
A bell dinged softly.
Alex walked into the elevator behind the white-coated man. Another white coat was waiting inside, both members of the same exclusive club, the world within the world of the hospital, inhuman humans with faces whose smiles never quite reached their eyes, who dealt each day with death and thus denied it with twice the fervor of average citizens. The man already on board the elevator backed away from the larger newcomer and stood in the car’s right rear corner. The big man took the left corner. By unwritten law, Alex took one of the remaining corners—right front, near the buttons—and stood facing the door.
The elevator smelled new, and its doors were polished until reflective. In the blurred reflection, Alex saw that the big man had a beard, and also a flaming birthmark above it. It must be bad, she thought, to show even in the dim reflection.
The elevator stopped on the third floor, and the man directly behind her walked out. As the doors closed, Alex backed into the spot that he’d occupied. The man with the birthmark looked over and nodded, but instead of looking away afterward, he continued to study her. This broke one of the unwritten laws, but Alex figured that her scars had drawn his attention—his professional attention.
“Shotgun?” asked the man, touching his own cheek.
She colored deeply. He was the first one to guess right. Some doctors knew that her particular kind of scarring was caused by gunshot, but since so much of the mess had been made by flying glass, most guessed wrong. Maybe he was a trauma surgeon.
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I can relate to having people stare at your face.”
Alex stared back. The big, bearded man was about sixty, with a deep voice that had probably reassured ten thousand patients over the years. “Is that a birthmark?”
He smiled. “Not technically. It’s an arteriovenous anomaly. It’s not bad when you’re born, but when you hit puberty, it suddenly explodes into this.”
Alex started to ask a question, but as though reading her mind, the stranger said, “Surgery often makes it worse. I don’t want to risk that.”
She nodded. He wasn’t handsome, but he would certainly have been decent-looking without that awful web of indigo and scarlet on his left cheek.
The bell dinged again.
“Good afternoon,” said the man, then he walked out.
Alex stood there in a trance, thinking of the day at the bank, of the flying glass she had seen only as flashes of light, and of James Broadbent lying on the floor with his chest smashed into something his wife would weep to see—
“Miss?”
The man with the birthmark was back; he was holding the door open with his elbow. “This is the lobby.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. Thank you.”
He nodded and waited until she had cleared the doors to let them go. “Tough night?”
“My mother is dying.”
Genuine sympathy furrowed his brow. “You got on at Oncology. Is it cancer?”
Alex nodded. “Ovarian.”
The man shook his head like a consoling priest. “A terrible disease. I hope she doesn’t suffer too much.”
“I think she already has.”
He sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. Will you be all right?”
“Yes. I’m right over at the Cabot Lodge.”
He smiled. “Good. They know how to take care of people over there.”
“Yes. Thank you, again.”
“Anytime.”
The man gave her a small wave, then walked down a hall that led deep into the bowels of the hospital. The floor had colored lines painted on it. Red lines and green lines and yellow lines and even black ones. Alex wondered whether, if you knew all the color codes, you might guess your prognosis by where you were sent. Probably not. The yellow line might take you to McDonald’s, for all she knew. There was a McDonald’s in the hospital somewhere.
As she hitched her purse over her shoulder and walked out into the dusk, her cell phone chirped. It was a text message from John Kaiser: I’m at Gallman, MS. 25 mins away. See u soon. She needed to hurry. Will Kilmer was supposed to meet her in the lobby of the Cabot Lodge with an unregistered gun. She wanted to hide it upstairs before Kaiser arrived. He wouldn’t like the idea of her carrying while suspended. Even if he understood, it would make his position more difficult. Alex caught sight of her car across the huge parking lot and started running.
Eldon Tarver stood at the window of the second-floor doctors’ lounge and watched Special Agent Morse jog across the parking lot. She ran with purpose, her head well forward like a sprinter’s, not like the hobbyists he saw jogging all the time. As he stared, he felt a near-euphoric sense of triumph flowing through him.
“She doesn’t know me,” he said softly. “She was three feet away…she looked right into my face, she heard my voice…and she didn’t recognize me.” The fact that his beard hid the wound she’d given him undoubtedly helped.
“Are you talking to me?” asked a female resident sitting on the couch behind him.
“No.”
&nbs
p; He heard the girl shift on the couch. She was probably pissed off that he was here. The slut had probably told some attending to meet her for a quick fuck, and now he’d screwed up their plans. Eldon felt so invulnerable in this moment that he considered locking the door and bending her over the counter of the little kitchenette, showing her what penetration really was—
Take it easy, said his inner censor. Everything is falling your way.
And it was. First Neville Byrd had discovered the EX NIHILO site, and now Alex Morse had walked right into his hands. She’d even given him the name of her hotel! Eldon didn’t believe in fate, but it was hard not to see Jungian patterns in all this.
Of course, it was also possible that Morse was deeper than he’d been led to believe. Rusk’s judgment could not be trusted, and Morse had risen to stardom in the FBI. That she’d disobeyed orders was more a recommendation than a black mark to Dr. Tarver, especially in a rulebound bureaucracy like the FBI.
Yes, he decided, their whole conversation could have been a performance. And even if it wasn’t—even if Morse really had no idea who he was—could he take the chance that he was wrong? His policy had always been zero risk, and that policy had served him well. He had been committing felonies almost daily for five years, some of them capital crimes, yet he was not in jail.
It was time to call Biddle back.
CHAPTER 38
Alex had to park a hundred yards from the lobby of the Cabot Lodge. When she trudged through the double doors to check in, she saw Chris sitting in a chair against the wall to her right. His head was bent over his knees, and he was rubbing his temples like a man with a migraine. She walked over and crouched beside him.