The Disappeared

  Gabe missed his own mother.

  And he wanted to go home, too.

  [121]

  “It's the same scenario,” Childs said, doodling absently on the calendar pad on his desk. There were two other participants in this meeting. One was a muscle man by the name of Mitch. The other man Childs knew only as D.C., though he suspected this man—who had been his primary contact almost since the very beginning—was a man of many names. They were names you didn't want to know, because when you started to know too much about these guys, you made yourself dangerous to them, and dangerous men lived short lives.

  “What about the others?” D.C. asked.

  “What about them?”

  “You tell me. Are they all going to start coming up?”

  “There's no way I can answer that.”

  Mitch stood in the corner, his arms crossed, leaning against the wall. It was the same position he had taken up every time he had been in this room. He coughed into his hand and crossed his arms again, not saying a word. He had said more than enough already, Childs supposed.

  D.C. was perched on the folding table, next to the copy machine. His hands were curled around the edge, elbows locked, knuckles white, and he was swinging his legs through the air as if he were trying to pick up speed. He was not terribly pleased about anything he had heard this afternoon.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I never imagined any of them would wake up,” Childs said.

  “Well, they did. And now we're going to have to figure out what the hell we're going to do with them, aren't we?”

  “All we need is a little time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Six months, eight months, maybe a year. Both boys are beginning to show signs of aging. They'll die naturally if we just wait it out.”

  “I'm sure Mrs. Knight won't mind waiting,” Mitch said.

  “She is a problem, doc. No matter what we do.”

  “I know,” Childs said, leaning back in his chair. He studied the ceiling, which had a dark gouge over the conference table where two years ago the janitor had crushed a spider under the handle of his mop. “We could transfer the kids to another facility until things settle down. Maybe Houston or St. Charles.”

  “The two boys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the sleepers?”

  “We could move them all.”

  “How soon?”

  “It won't be easy, not with the sleepers. They'll need special care. I'd have to make some arrangements.”

  “How soon?”

  “Maybe two weeks.”

  Mitch grunted. “Like I said, I'm sure Mrs. Knight won't mind waiting.”

  “Then for Christ's sake just get rid of her!” Childs said, surprising everyone in the room, including himself. For a moment, his entire body shook. He looked away. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. It's just that...”

  “We can't kill off everyone,” Mitch said.

  “I said I didn't mean it.” He leaned against the desk for support, doing his best to deal with the mix of frustration and guilt roiling up inside him like an angry thunderhead. This had never been the way he had envisioned it. Never. “Amanda Tarkett was more than enough killing for all of us.”

  “She was an accident, you son of a bitch.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” D.C. said. “Let's try to stay on subject, all right? We've already got plenty on our plate here. No need to toss in the playground insults.”

  The pencil Childs had been holding suddenly snapped in half. He stared at the two uneven pieces, the cylinder of graphite exposed beneath jagged yellow edges, then tossed them at the wastepaper basket next to his desk. One piece bounced off the rim and fell silently to the carpet. The other hit home, making a hollow, clanging sound.

  “Done?” D.C. asked.

  “I hate this,” Childs said.

  “I know you do.”

  “It's a fucking nightmare.”

  “So let's see if we can find a way out of it. All right?”

  Childs nodded, wearing the lost and lonely face of a man who wasn't sure of anything anymore.

  [122]

  Teri went into Walt's bedroom after the manila envelope that had arrived in the mail yesterday. It was sitting where she had left it on the bureau, under the dictionary. She pulled it out, thought about the name at the bottom of the letter – Richard Boyle, and thought how much the bastard must have been enjoying himself. Well, he wasn't enjoying himself now, was he? She took a deep breath and held it. For a moment, her encounter with Boyle came back to her again, vivid, so fresh that she could smell the alcohol in the air. She had managed to keep it down for two days now, and she had promised herself not to let it up again until long after Gabe was back home and safe.

  Teri eased the breath out, and forced her attention back to Walt.

  Following the visit to the cemetery, the trip back to the apartment had fallen under the cast of a thick, self-conscious silence. She had witnessed a private moment in the life of a private man, and she had wanted him to know that she understood how difficult his childhood had been. But the moment had never seemed quite appropriate and as soon as they had arrived home, Walt had gone to bed, saying he felt as if he might be coming down with something. He slept through the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening.

  Teri found it a little more difficult to sleep. She busied herself with a casserole for dinner—the recipe had been on the back of an elbow macaroni package—and tried not to give too much thought to what had happened. But she had been doing quite a bit of that lately and it was getting more difficult all the time.

  Now, standing at the bureau, she wondered for the hundredth time if showing Walt the manila envelope would make matters better or worse. The contents included Xerox copies of old newspaper articles taken from several local newspapers. The articles spanned a period of almost twelve years through the late Fifties and early Sixties. Altogether, they went into a detailed account of Walt's childhood – his parents' divorce, how his father had kidnapped him, the towns where they had been spotted, the names they had used, the changes they had made in their appearances. The articles ran all the way through the death of Walt's mother in 1965, and after that they came to an abrupt end.

  What a nightmare, Teri thought.

  How could a father do such a thing to his son?

  There was one additional item in the envelope, this from only a few years ago. It was a Xerox copy of the minutes of a Board of Supervisor's meeting dated March 13, 1991. Under the subheading Personnel Matters was a short one-sentence statement highlighted in yellow. It read: With the recommendation of the Police Commission, the employment of Detective Walter L. Travis shall be terminated with full disability pay as of the last day of the last pay period of this month.

  He hadn't quit the department.

  They had asked him to leave.

  [123]

  “No,” Walt said, standing at the living room window, looking out across the valley. A thin band of twilight colors edged the distant mountain tops. A few more minutes and nightfall would own the sky. “I didn't quit. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but it's not the kind of thing a person likes to slip into the conversation.”

  Teri listened, suddenly hating herself for having put him in this position.

  “And yes, I had some psychological problems.”

  “I don't care about that. I just want you to know that I understand.”

  “Really? Then you're doing better than I am, because I don't think I understand.”

  “It must have been hell – what you're father did to you.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “The past haunts us all,” Teri said.

  He turned away from the last sliver of sunset, his face expressionless. “I suppose you would know that better than most, after everything you've been through.”

  “I was just worried about you,” she said.

  “No need. I'm all right.”

  “Guess I should ha
ve known that.”

  Walt's face was drawn, though he managed to find room for a slightly self-conscious smile. It wasn't the tragic smile Teri had half-expected to see. Instead, it was a break in the ice that had seemed to form between them earlier in the day.

  “Yes, you should have,” he said.

  Teri managed a smile of her own. “Friends?”

  “Friends.”

  [124]

  “What we need to do is get the two kids moved out of here as soon as possible. If the Knight woman starts nosing around—and I think we all know she's going to do just that—then we damn well better not have her kid in the basement, yelling for his mommy.”

  “We can move them into a motel in the morning,” Mitch said.

  “And then move them out to Houston from there,” Childs suggested.

  D.C. studied the doc, looking for anything that might indicate what was really going on inside the man's head. He had watched Childs swing from one mood to another like a chimpanzee trying to find a vine that might support him. The man had finally gotten himself under control again, but as far as D.C. was concerned he was running out of vines.

  “How long will it take?”

  “To get them to Houston?”

  “Yes,” he said sharply. “To get them to... Houston.”

  “The same day, if there's a flight going out.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Childs nodded.

  “Then why don't we do that.”

  “What about the others?” Mitch asked.

  “Well, since we can't move them all—”

  “How about a little sleight of hand,” Childs said. “We could leave them right where they are. No one's likely to stumble across them in the basement, anyway. But if we fix up the first floor... maybe move some equipment down, bring in some monkeys and rats, pay a few indigents to let us draw blood, that kind of thing... maybe that's all we would need to put her off for another week or so.”

  “Might work,” D.C. said. He pulled a single cigarette out of a pocket and as he sat there thinking, he fingered the cigarette across the back of his hand and back. Between the Knight woman and the kids waking up—not to mention the pressure from Webster—he had already decided that things had gotten too far out of hand. The question was: what should he do about it?

  Somewhere down the road—not far down the road, either—they were going to have to shut this thing down. All of it. The operations in Houston and St. Charles and Reston. The operation here. It was his guess that the only person in this room who didn't understand that was Childs.

  “It would probably take two, maybe three days at the most to get it set up,” Childs said. “And it would buy us enough time to work out a more permanent solution.”

  “All right, then why don't we give it a try?”

  [125]

  Outside the grounds of the Devol Research Institute, Walt pulled the Sunbird off the road and into the shadows. He looked across the seat at Teri and raised his eyebrows questioningly. “You sure you want to do this tonight?”

  “I want my son.”

  “I know you do. But that's not what I asked you.”

  “Yes, tonight. I want him tonight. No more waiting. They've had him long enough. I'm not letting them have him another moment.”

  “Another day or two and we'd have a much better idea—”

  “Tonight,” she said firmly.

  “All right.” He leaned back and brought the blueprints out from behind the passenger seat. He slid the rubber bands off each end, unrolled the plans, and used his flashlight as a weight to pin the top against the dashboard. “Let's take a look at these. How about a little light?”

  Teri took the flashlight out of her backpack, turned it on and held it over the plans.

  The building was three stories plus a basement. There was an open receptionist's area when you first went through the front door and two elevators off to the left. Only one of the elevators went down to the basement level. Upstairs appeared to be mostly office space, including a myriad of small cubicles, a couple of conference rooms, and a huge open area that was labeled “The Lab.” The intended use of the basement appeared less certain. Labeled as “Storage,” it appeared to be well wired, with an unusual array of electrical outlets. At the back of the building, sat a loading dock, and next to that, a set of glass double doors. The only other way in or out besides an upstairs window would be what looked to be an emergency exit, next to the only staircase in the building.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “My best guess would be—if they have him, they have him in the basement.”

  “How do we get down there?”

  Walt pointed to the back of the building, at the emergency exit. “See the stairwell? That's the only way down unless you want to walk through the front door and try the elevator.”

  “And what if he isn't in the basement?”

  “Then I guess we'll take a walk upstairs.”

  [126]

  Childs had found his way back to the lab, glad to be out of the presence of his quote—associates—unquote. It wasn't that he didn't like them; he had never actually liked them. And he had never actually doubted that their feeling for him was mutual. But sometimes when people were forced together in a common goal—or what might appear to be a common goal—it was necessary for the personalities involved to overlook some of the petty quirks of the other group members. And yes, it sounded like a group therapy session, but that was the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. You learned to tolerate your differences.

  He pulled out the most recent sample of liver cells taken from the two boys. The first sample belonged to Gabriel Knight. He placed it into the specimen chamber of the electron microscope, positioned it, and turned to the control panel. When he finally brought up the visual, he compared it to a visual display of the cells taken when the Knight boy had still been comatose. There was a marked difference. The mitochondria, which had been round and smooth and resembled the basic form of a grape while the boy was comatose, now looked something more like a raisin. It was shriveled and misshapen. And instead of dividing every five to six days, it teased you, threatening to divide but never quite getting around to it.

  There was no denying the evidence. Somehow, through an interaction that Childs still did not fully comprehend, the AA103 had served to keep the Knight boy both comatose and ageless for a good number of years. But suddenly, without an obvious trigger, that causatum had mysteriously shut down. More than that, it appeared the process had actually reversed itself. The body was making up for lost time, so to speak. It was aging at such an alarming rate that before long the boy's physical maturation might very well overtake his chronological maturation. And after that...

  Death, Childs thought glumly.

  He pulled out the liver cell sample of the Breswick boy, and exchanged it in the specimen chamber. It was mostly a matter of confirming what he already knew at this point. He had given some thought to the possibility that the DOD might be interested in this new wrinkle, this premature aging. But in his heart, he knew that was more dream than reality. It didn't take a genius to realize that things were rapidly drawing to a close around here.

  D.C. wasn't the kind of man who would tell him that, of course. He wasn't the kind of man who would even hint at it. But the writing on the wall was an easy read. Too many things were beginning to go wrong. It was easier—and probably smarter in the long run—to shut things down before they got too far out of hand.

  Childs positioned the specimen, and turned his attention to the control panel. It was frightening how quickly everything had seemed to spin out of control. A lifetime of work was on the line and they were ready to scrap it. Just like that. No second thoughts. No regrets.

  What an ungodly waste, he thought.

  [127]

  They had made their way around the perimeter of the Institute property, staying close to the fence where the shadows were darkest. There was a sliver of moon out tonight, just enough to cast a
grayish tint over the landscape. It was that grayish tint that served as their eyes.

  At the back of the building, they kept low and moved along the line of shrubbery until the last twenty or thirty feet, where they were forced to scamper across an opening. Walt held Teri's hand all the way. They reached the emergency exit door, Teri breathing hard on one side, Walt scanning their surroundings on the other.

  “So far so good,” she said.

  “That was the easy part.” He grinned at her, thoroughly enjoying himself.

  “Great. Now you tell me.”

  It was a matter of picking the lock next, and it took him less than thirty seconds to do it. She watched him, amazed at how simple he made it look. The lock popped. He turned the knob slowly, then opened the door a crack and waited.

  “What—”

  “Shhh.” He waited for another five count, then motioned her on through, and entered right behind her. Inside, a short hallway faced them. At the far end, the darkness was spotted by a couple of overnight lights in the receptionist's area. Off to the right, just as the blueprints had shown, was the stairway that was supposed to take them down to the basement. What the blueprints hadn't shown was the locked door that blocked access to the stairway.

  “Christ!” Walt ran the palm of his hand over the surface and Teri could see that the door was made of metal. It was painted an ugly navy gray that contrasted sharply with the large black lettering. The lettering said, simply enough: STAIRWAY.

  “Can't you pick it?”

  “Yeah, but it's a mortise lock. It'll take a little longer to play around with the cylinder.”

  “I'll cancel our dinner reservations.”

  “You do that.”

  It didn't take as long as Walt had led her to believe. Maybe a minute-and-a-half. Two minutes at the most. He worked with it intensely, then suddenly whispered, “Got it!” and fought a moment longer before Teri heard the dead bolt slide back from the strike plate. The door swung out.