True Evil

by Greg Iles

  A small but vocal number of physicians have suggested that simian-related retroviruses like HIV and SV 40 (which has been proved to have contaminated batches of human polio vaccine) were in fact created by the scientists of the Virus Cancer Program. While this is disputed by the medical establishment, government records confirm that tens of thousands of liters of dangerous new viruses were cultured in the bodies of living animals, primarily primates and cats, and that many of these viruses were modified so as to be able to jump species barriers. In 1973, a significant part of the Virus Cancer Project was transferred to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the home of the United States biological warfare effort. No one denies that the VCP involved an active alliance between the NIH, the U.S. Army, and Litton Bionetics….

  “This is it,” said Alex. “Holy shit, this is it!”

  “What are you yelping about?” Will asked, staring hard at her screen.

  “Dr. Tarver lied to me! He told me that VCP stood for Veterans’ Cancer Project. It doesn’t. It stands for a government project that researched the links between viruses and cancer, especially leukemia. It took place during the Vietnam era. And Eldon Tarver worked for them!”

  “Jesus.”

  “He’s killing people,” whispered Alex. “He’s still doing research. Or else he’s using what he learned back then to make money off of Andrew Rusk and his desperate clients.” Her chest swelled with fierce joy. “We’ve got them, Will.”

  “Look!” Will said, gripping her wrist. “Son of a bitch!”

  Alex looked up. The panel truck and the van had disappeared, and the big aluminum door was sliding back down to the concrete slab.

  “You know what I think?” said Alex.

  “What?”

  “Tarver is shutting everything down. I went to his office and declared myself as an FBI agent. I went to his so-called free clinic. I even gave him a list of the murder victims, for God’s sake. Nobody on that list surprised him, either. Christ, I even asked him about the VCP picture! He knows I’m going to figure it out eventually. He’s got to run, Will.” She laid her computer on the backseat and reached for the door handle again. “I’m going down there.”

  “Wait!” cried Will, restraining her. “If you’ve got him nailed with evidence, there’s no point in screwing the pooch by going in without a warrant.”

  “I’m not going into the building.”

  “Be sure, Alex,” he said gravely.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  Will sighed, then opened the glove box and took out his .357 magnum. “I guess.”

  As she got out of the Explorer, Will said, “Wait. The gate’s open, ain’t it? We’re better off driving up to the front door and telling them we’re lost than sneaking in there with guns shoved down our pants.”

  Alex grinned and climbed back into the Explorer. “I knew I brought you for a reason.”

  Will cranked the Ford, pulled across the street, and drove down to the gate of the old bakery. As he slowed down to nose through the fence, Alex dialed John Kaiser’s cell phone.

  “Hey,” said Kaiser. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve cracked it, John! The whole case. You need to check out something called the Virus Cancer Program. It was a big research project in the late sixties and early seventies. It involved cancer, viruses, and biological weapons. Tarver was part of it.”

  “Biological weapons?”

  “Yes. There’s a photo in Tarver’s UMC office of him wearing a lab coat that says VCP. The building behind him has the same acronym.”

  “How did you find out what it stood for?”

  “Google, believe it or not. It was the picture in his office that did it, though. I’d never have known what to look for otherwise. But Tarver lied to me about what the acronym stood for. He tried to make it sound noble.”

  “I’ll get on it. The SAC is still stalling on the search warrant for Tarver’s house. Maybe this will tip the scales.”

  “Even Webb Tyler can’t ignore this. Call me when you get the warrant.”

  Kaiser hung up.

  The Explorer was only twenty yards from the old bakery.

  “Where do you want to go?” asked Will.

  “Those casement windows in front.”

  “They’re blacked out.”

  “Not all of them. Look to the right. A few have been replaced with clear panes.”

  Will swung the wheel, and the Explorer came to rest opposite one of the windows with clear glass.

  “Get out and keep your hand on your pistol,” said Alex.

  “You think they’d try something?”

  “No doubt in my mind. This is a deeply fucked-up individual we’re dealing with.”

  She got out and walked up to the windows. Each pane was about eight inches square, but the clear ones were too high for her to look through.

  “Can you give me a step up?”

  Will walked over, shoved his pistol into his pants, then bent at the waist and interlocked his fingers. Alex stepped into the resulting cradle, feeling as she had as a little girl when Grace used to boost her up to the lowest branch of the popcorn tree in their backyard. The memory pierced her heart, but she caught hold of the brick sill and pulled herself up to the clear windowpane.

  “What do you see?” Will grunted.

  “Nothing yet.”

  The pane was caked with gunk. She spat on the glass and wiped a circle with her sleeve, then pressed her eye to the glass. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a wall of cages. Dozens of them. And inside each one, a sleeping dog. Small dogs, maybe beagles.

  “You see anything yet?” Will asked. “My back ain’t what it used to be.”

  “Dogs. A bunch of dogs asleep in cages.”

  “That’s what they breed here.”

  “I know but…there’s something odd about it.”

  “What?”

  “They’re asleep.”

  “So?” Will was wheezing now.

  “Well, they can’t all be asleep, can they?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

  Alex almost laughed, but something stopped her. “There must be a hundred of them. A hundred and fifty maybe. They can’t all be asleep.”

  “Maybe they drug them.”

  As Alex peered into the darkened room, the sound of a distant engine reached her, its tone rising steadily. Even before she saw the red van racing down the fenced perimeter, the spark of instinct that had guided her through so many successful hostage negotiations roared to flame.

  “Run!” she shouted, leaping backward out of Will’s hands.

  “What is it?” he gasped, trying to straighten his back and grab his gun at the same time.

  “RUN!” Alex grabbed his arm and started dragging him away from the building.

  “What about my truck?” Will yelled.

  “Leave it!”

  They were thirty feet from the building when a scorching wall of air slapped them to the ground like the hand of God. Alex skidded across the cement, the skin tearing away from her elbows. She screamed for Will, but she heard only a roaring silence.

  It took most of a minute to get her breath back. Then she slowly rolled over and sat up.

  Will was on his knees a few yards away, trying in vain to pull a large splinter of glass out of his back. Behind him, a vast column of black smoke climbed into the sky. All the windows in the front wall were gone. Behind the smoke, Alex saw a blue-white flame that looked more like the glow of a Bunsen burner than a roaring blaze. The heat emanating from the building was almost unbearable. As she struggled to her feet, an inhuman shriek of terror echoed across the empty parking lot. Then a dark simian shape burst from the building, running on all fours, trailing smoke and fire. Alex staggered three steps toward Will, told him to leave the splinter where it was, then fell on her face.

  CHAPTER 47

  Andrew Rusk had taken two Valium, a Lorcet, and a beta-blocker, yet his heart was still pounding. His head was worse. As he stared into his wife’
s vacuous eyes, he felt as though someone had taken hold of his spinal cord where it entered the base of his brain and was trying to yank it out.

  “But I don’t understand,” Lisa said for the eighth time in as many minutes.

  “Those men outside,” Rusk said, pointing to the dark patio windows of the house. “They’re FBI agents.”

  “How do you know that? Maybe they’re IRS or something.”

  “I know because I know.”

  “But I mean Cuba?” Lisa whined.

  “Shhh,” Rusk hissed, squeezing her upper arm. “You have to whisper.”

  She jerked the arm away. “This is the first time you’ve ever mentioned Cuba to me. Why? Don’t you trust me?”

  Rusk squelched a desire to scream, Of course I don’t trust you, you silly bitch!

  Pouting like a child, Lisa retreated to the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her, yoga style. She was wearing biking shorts and a tank top that revealed the usual fleshscape of spectacular cleavage.

  “Cuba?” she said again. “It’s not even American yet, is it?”

  He gaped at her. “American?”

  “I mean, you know, capitalist or whatever.”

  Lisa’s primary virtue was physical beauty combined with a ravenous libido. Rusk still had difficulty with the idea that someone of middling intelligence could experience truly intense passion, but he’d finally accepted it, based on empirical evidence. Maybe it was a vanity of intellectuals to believe that dumb people couldn’t enjoy sex to the degree that smart people did. But maybe they did. Maybe they enjoyed it more. Still, Rusk doubted it. At bottom, he figured Lisa was some kind of prodigy, an idiot savant of sexual technique. And that was fine for the bedroom and minor social intercourse. But when it came to actual thought, not to mention decision making, it made things difficult.

  He knelt before the couch and took Lisa’s hand. He had to be patient. He had to convince her. Because there were no more options. They had to get out of the country, and fast. Thora Shepard was lying under a painter’s drop cloth in the back of his Cayenne. If one of the FBI agents outside bent the law and broke into the locked garage, it was all over.

  Rusk had tried to shut out his memories of the afternoon, but he couldn’t do it. After the first euphoric moments of triumph, he had looked down at Thora’s shattered skull with horror—but he hadn’t frozen. Extreme sports had taught him one indelible lesson: hesitation killed. Knowing that Ponytail would return any moment, he’d rolled Thora into the drop cloth, then carried her featherweight body through the metal studs to a distant office in the construction area. There he’d found a gift from God: a sixty-five-gallon trash can on wheels, with the brand name MIGHT AS WELL imprinted on the lid. Thora fit easily into the can, which he’d rolled straight to the parking garage. He transferred Thora to the back of his Cayenne, and then—after returning the trash can to a different side of the fifteenth floor—he’d returned to his office as though nothing had happened.

  But something had happened. And since that murderous minute, he’d felt his time as a free man draining away like blood from a severed vein. He had an escape plan, but to initiate it he’d first have to break free of FBI surveillance. He did not know how to do that. He still held out hope that Dr. Tarver would save them—if Tarver had not already bolted. The doctor had requested an emergency rendezvous at Chickamauga via e-mail, but Rusk had been unable to keep it without dragging the FBI along with him. Nearly frantic, he’d gone to a friend’s office in the tower and sent Tarver an e-mail summarizing every threat arrayed against them, in the hope that Tarver could somehow cut through the closing net. But if Tarver didn’t contact him soon, Rusk was going to have to take drastic measures. Like calling his father. He dreaded the thought, but at this point—without Dr. Tarver’s help—it would take the legendary clout and connections of A.J. Rusk to save him.

  “Lisa, honey,” he said softly. “We’re only talking about a few months in Cuba. I’ve arranged for us to live on a beautiful yacht right in the marina. Guys like Sinatra paid through the nose to hang out there with Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Yeah, like in the Dark Ages.”

  Lisa was twenty-nine years old. “Castro’s history, babe. He’s going to die any day now. He may already be dead, in fact.”

  She looked skeptical. “Didn’t JFK try to assassinate him like a bunch of times, and he couldn’t do it?”

  Rusk wanted to kill Oliver Stone. “That doesn’t matter, honey. As soon as the heat is off, we’ll move to Costa Rica under different names. And Costa Rica is a goddamn paradise.”

  “But I like my name.”

  Rusk squeezed her hand. “Think of it this way: With the name you’ve got, you’re worth about five million bucks. Under your new name, you’re worth twenty. That’s a big difference.”

  This got her attention. “Twenty million dollars?”

  He nodded with the gravity such an amount demanded. He could see the wheels clicking behind her gorgeous green eyes. Despite the pounding at the base of his skull, he managed a smile. “That’s Hollywood money, babe.”

  “But why can’t we go to Costa Rica now?” she asked in a girlish voice.

  He forced himself not to scream. “Because it’s not safe. We have to let the FBI check Costa Rica and find nothing. Then we can go there.”

  “What have you done, Andy? You said it was some kind of tax thing. How pissed off can the government be about that?”

  What have I done? I killed a woman who looked a lot like you, only better. And if you keep this up, I might just kill you, too. He glanced worriedly at the dark windows. “You don’t understand these things, Lisa. The simple truth is, we don’t have a choice.”

  She gave him a long stare, surprising in its coldness. “Maybe you don’t have a choice. But I haven’t done anything. I can stay right here until it’s safe in Costa Rica. Then I can join you there.”

  Rusk stared, incredulous. She sounded just like Thora Shepard! “You’d stay here without me?”

  “I don’t want to. You’re the one making this happen, Andy, not me.”

  She’s right, he thought. Cuba had seemed such a cool idea when Tarver suggested it five years ago. It was one of the last mysterious places on earth, the last commie outpost save China. And it had that Hemingway glamour. What more macho retreat could there be? The fucking Cold War was still going on there, for God’s sake. But then Castro got sick. Nobody knew what was really going on. And forty-eight hours after having his umbilical to Dr. Tarver cut, Rusk thought the prospect of living in postcommunist chaos sounded dicey. Lisa certainly wanted no part of it. Maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all.

  “I can’t do it, Andy,” she said with sudden conviction. “I promise I’ll come to Costa Rica when you get there. But I don’t want to leave my mom and my friends to go to Cuba.”

  “Baby…once we get there, you’ll see how great it is. Now go upstairs and pack the absolute minimum you need to leave the country. One suitcase, okay? One.”

  Instead of obeying, Lisa set her jaw and spoke through clenched teeth. “I said—I’m—not—going. You can’t make me. And if you try, I’ll file for divorce.”

  For the second time today, Rusk was stunned speechless. Lisa had to be bluffing. He’d written an ironclad prenup. If she divorced him, she’d get almost nothing. Well…that wasn’t exactly true anymore. Over the past three years, he had found it advantageous to transfer some considerable assets into her name. It had made a lot of sense at the time. But now…now he saw himself as a sucker, like one of his pathetic clients. Before he realized what he was doing, he had slid his right hand up to her throat.

  “One more inch and I’ll scream,” she said evenly. “And when those FBI guys bust in here, I’ll tell them about every tax scam and swindle you ever pulled.”

  Rusk stood and backed away from his wife. Who the hell was this woman? And why in God’s name had he married her?

  It doesn’t matter, he told himself. To hell with her. As long as I get out o
f the country, it doesn’t matter what she does. She can have a few million. There’s plenty more for me. If only Tarver would show the fuck up….

  He walked toward the central hallway, meaning to check his e-mail on the computer in his study, but as soon as he entered the hall, he saw a massive shape silhouetted by the light spilling from the study.

  “Hello, Andrew,” said Dr. Tarver. “It’s pretty crowded outside. Did you give up on me?”

  Rusk couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he heard the cool amusement in that voice. Nothing rattled this guy. “How the hell did you get through those FBI agents?”

  Soft laughter from the shadow. “I’m a country boy at heart, Andrew. Remember when I shot the Ghost?”

  Hell, yeah, Rusk thought, recalling the legendary buck with a flush of admiration. “You really pissed off the old-timers that day.”

  Dr. Tarver unslung a large backpack from his shoulder and dropped it on the ground with a heavy rustle.

  “Can we get out?” Rusk asked, trying to sound calm. “I mean, have you got something figured?”

  “Have you ever known me not to have things figured, Andrew?”

  Rusk shook his head. This was true, though he couldn’t remember them ever being in this kind of spot before.

  “I appreciated this afternoon’s e-mail about Alexandra Morse. I’d suspected that she was acting on her own, but I had no idea that the Bureau was going to terminate her. Most convenient.”

  As Rusk puzzled over this, Dr. Tarver turned toward the study. “Call Lisa in here, Andrew. We need to get started.”

  Rusk started to ask why the study, but then he realized it was because the room had no exterior windows. He looked over his shoulder. “Lisa? Come here.”

  “You come here,” came the petulant reply.

  “Lisa. We’ve got company.”

  “Company? Oh, all right. I’m coming.”

  With Dr. Tarver’s miraculous arrival, Rusk felt the pleasant return of male superiority. Meaning to say something witty, he turned back toward the doctor and saw the pistol rise as Tarver shot him in the chest.

  Alex struggled up out of a dark sea into piercing white light.