The panelists’ predictions were not upbeat. The consensus was that Homo sapiens was in for some hard years. Man had so plundered and fouled the planet during the century now ending that the only real hope for the future seemed to lie in a quick and substantial reduction in the human population. The betting of the panel was that the early decades of the next century would witness a kind of apocalypse in slow motion, in which crime, disease, war, starvation, and environmental catastrophes would proliferate to such a degree that the human species, like an insect that had exceeded the carrying capacity of its habitat, might experience a massive dieback. Estimates of the size of the decline varied among the panel members from twenty to sixty percent of the earth’s present population.
“That’s a lot of funerals,” Lexy said. “I should tell my broker to get me into mortuary stock.”
Anne didn’t laugh. There was so little good news these days. It was depressing to be reminded of the state of the world into which her daughter was about to be born.
The litany of horrors was lengthy. The TV panelists unburdened themselves like prosecution witnesses testifying to the criminal depredations of the human race. The evidence of guilt they presented was overwhelming.
“God, what a bummer,” Lexy mumbled. She flicked through the channels again, and left the set tuned to the station broadcasting the European parties. “Might as well get drunk—what do you say?”
Anne rubbed her stomach. “Not supposed to.”
“One little drink won’t hurt. Especially at this late date. Come on.
The hotel’s left us a whole case of Dom Perignon. A whole case! How many chances are you going to get to celebrate the beginning of a new millennium?”
Lexy went to the refrigerator in the suite’s small kitchen and returned with a bottle and two champagne glasses. She popped the cork expertly and tipped the fizzing liquid into the glasses.
“Here’s to that baby of yours, Genevieve Alexandra Stewart,” Lexy said, holding up her glass. “May she be as sweet and beautiful as her mother, and as big a smartass as me.” Lexy drained her glass and refilled it. “How did you settle on the name Genevieve, by the way?”
“She was the patron saint of Paris. And I’ve always loved the sound of the name. I’m not sure why, but it makes me think of beauty and strength. I knew that if I had a girl she’d have to be a Genevieve.”
Anne took a tentative sip of champagne and then suddenly stopped, as if she had heard something. A look of absolute astonishment transformed her features. She put her glass down, sat up, and leaned forward. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
Lexy jumped up. “What? What’s the matter?”
“My water just broke!”
At 10:45 P.M. Heinz Hoffmann wheeled the rented van into the hospital parking lot and parked it next to the new wing that housed Dr. Harold Goth’s laboratory.
Hoffmann and his two partners, Dolf Greiner and Ernst Feldmann, had been in Coronado for three days, casing the hospital and working out a plan of attack.
Greiner, sitting on the passenger side, rolled down his window.
It was a cloudless night, with no moon. The breeze off the ocean was damp and a little chilly. Light blazed from the windows of Goth’s wing.
Feldmann, sitting in the middle, bent his head forward to peer out the windshield. “The stupid pig is still working in there,” he said. “On New Year’s Eve.”
Hoffmann looked at his watch. “We’ll just have to wait.”
“What if he doesn’t leave?”
“He’s got to leave sometime.”
Dalton Stewart pushed his way through the crowd toward one of the bars.
Hundreds of guests in formal evening dress milled about, shrieking and laughing and bumping into one another.
The decibel level, building steadily since the early evening, was Juplter s Laugnher ù l inching into the red zone. The orchestra, set up on a low stage at the far end of the palace’s gigantic ballroom, was playing something, but Stewart couldn’t hear a note. The thirty-foot-high ceilings and marble walls echoed and amplified every noise into a smothering, cacophonous din. He wished he had brought ear plugs.
Famous faces seemed to beam at Stewart from every direction
—ambassadors, American congressmen and senators, movie stars, European royalty, jet-setters. Stewart was amazed that President Despres could command such a glittering attendance.
After a long wait amid a forest of outstretched arms and beseeching voices, Stewart rescued a scotch and soda from an overworked bartender at one of the dozens of bars scattered about the rooms of the main floor. Coddling the drink close to his chest, he maneuvered back through the crush of bodies, nodding and grinning absently as he went.
He pushed open one of the French doors at the far end of the ballroom and stepped outside onto a large stone terrace.
From this side of the palace, the view was breathtaking. Across an immense sweep of lawn, the Caribbean sparkled darkly under the stars.
A warm, soft breeze rustled the neat rows of palms that formed a border between the lawn and beach.
In less than one hour a new millennium would begin. It had been talked about so much in the past weeks and months, and examined so exhaustively by the media, that Stewart was heartily sick of the whole subject. Technically, the third millennium didn’t begin until the following year, 2001; but nobody was paying much attention to that inconvenient little detail. The human race was celebrating the event tonight. It was certain to be the biggest drunken hinge in human history.
Religious fanatics were predicting much bigger things, of course. Many believed that at midnight the heavens would be rent asunder and the entire earth engulfed in the fires of Armageddon.
Stewart thought the idea of the world coming to a fiery end precisely at midnight quite laughable. But he felt a sense of foreboding nevertheless. It was a vague, unfocused anxiety—a fear, not of Armageddon, but of some undefined lesser catastrophe. He supposed it was related to Anne’s pregnancy and the impending birth of their baby girl, Genevieve. So much was riding on that event.
But the worry seemed both more diffuse and more profound.
It wasn’t just the baby that brought on this peculiar sense of dread.
It was the future. He feared that events might somehow overwhelm him, and cost him that energetic, driving, comfortable sense of certainty and self-confidence that had powered his success in life.
His mind kept slipping back to another New Year’s many years ago, when he was sixteen. Why the men who came for his father had picked the last day of the year had something to do with the statute of limitations. At least that’s the way his uncle Frank explained it to him much later.
His life had been so protected up to that day that he hadn’t known what real misfortune was. It only made the anger, shame, and grief all the more intense.
The men were U.S. marshals. They handcuffed his father in front of him and his mother and took him away. His father returned home that same evening, after his lawyer had posted bail for him, but the event had already altered the family’s fate irretrievably.
There was a big New Year’s party that night, and Dalton had the prettiest date—Charlotte Kinsolving, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the town’s richest family. Charlotte had promised to give him something “special” that night. He had no doubt what that something was going to be. News of his father’s arrest had already spread, however, and Charlotte was not allowed to go out with him that night—or any night after that. Dalton stole a bottle of scotch from the liquor cabinet, jumped into his new Corvette—a present from Mom and Dad for his sixteenth birthday—and drove around aimlessly all night long, getting drunk and contemplating suicide.
The months that followed were an ugly blur. His father was fired from the stock brokerage house where he had worked for twenty years. Under pressure, he made a deal with the prosecutors. He pled guilty to three counts of stock fraud and one count of insider trading. In return for giving evidence and later testifying
against several other brokers, he was fined five million dollars and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. Many former clients of the firm sued him as well, and the Stewart family, once rich and respected, was suddenly bankrupt and disgraced.
Along with his beautiful, rich girlfriend, Dalton lost his cherished Corvette, his male friends, and everything else that meant anything to him. The family could no longer afford the country club where for years Dalton had swum, played tennis, and partied. The Stewart cook was let go, and so was the maid. Most humiliating of all, Dalton was forced to quit the posh private boarding school he had been attending for two years and enroll in the local public high school.
The family was socially ostracized. During the good times, they had made the serious social error of letting their wealth go to their heads. When the bad times struck, there was no sympathy from anybody, absolutely none. Even the people Dalton had assumed were old family friends refused to stick by them. And those who had not been friends relished the Stewarts’ fall from wealth and privilege with gleeful satisfaction. Shopkeepers and other service people, whom the Stewarts had long treated with condescension, saw the chance to get even and took advantage of it.
Their credit was cut off, and wherever they went they were treated as pariahs. The family’s fall from grace was so shatteringly complete that Dalton never fully recovered from it.
The family house and all the furnishings were sold to satisfy lawsuits.
His mother obtained a divorce, and Dalton was sent to live with his uncle. So deep was Dalton’s sense of betrayal that he never once visited his father during his years in prison; and he saw him only once after he was released. His father committed suicide three years later.
He was fifty years old.
Dalton’s mother, still attractive at forty, married the lawyer she had hired for her divorce and moved with him to the state of Washington, where his family owned land. Dalton and his younger sister went with them. Dalton’s stepfather helped put him through college and business school, but they didn’t get along very well, and as soon as Dalton was able, he moved out.
New Year’s Eve, 1969. It was burned into his soul.
All these years later he could still not think back on that time without a feeling of sick terror in the bottom of his stomach. No matter that he was a hundred times richer than his father had ever been.
At the beginning of each year he projected that if he could increase his wealth by another ten or more million dollars in the next twelve months, he would at last put the fear of repeating his father’s disastrous collapse behind him forever. But the fear persisted anyway, driving him to enrich himself further—driving him to take the kind of legal and financial risks that kept his empire vulnerable to exactly the kind of fate that had ruined his father.
Dalton Stewart saw the irony, of course. The harder he strove to escape the trauma of his past, the closer it seemed to loom.
A sudden amplification of voices and music from inside snapped him out of his reverie. He turned to see one of the French doors open and a woman step through and walk toward him in the dim light. She was wearing a floor-length white gown that clung suggestively to her lithe frame. Her ash-blond hair was swept back in a regal style.
He had seen her in the hall earlier in the evening and had been quite puzzled by her presence. He had not yet spoken to her.
“So there you are, Herr Stewart,” the baroness called. “I have been looking all over for you.”
“What is he doing in there?” Feldmann demanded, his eyes nervously scanning the windows of Goth’s lab. “It’s New Year’s.
Why doesn’t he go home?”
Greiner turned to Hoffmann, the driver. “How long’s the plane going to wait?”
“Until two.”
“Shit,” Feldmann moaned. “We’ll never make it. It’s eleventhirty now.
Traffic is already horrible. It’ll take us over an hour just to get to the fucking landing strip.”
“We can always leave tomorrow,” Hoffmann said.
“After we blow up his lab?”
Hoffmann thought about it. “Okay, then. Let’s go now.”
“He’s still in there!” Feldmann moaned.
“We have pistols and masks. We’ll just hold him up, get the disk from him, then get the hell out.”
“What about my explosives?” Greiner demanded.
“How fast can you set them?”
“I need at least ten minutes.”
“Okay. We’ll take Goth with us, then. Dump him at the airport.”
Lexy went immediately into action. A driver was posted on duty around the clock for Anne, but no one at the desk could locate him.
Finally, with the help of a bellboy, Lexy got Anne down to the lobby and settled into a chair.
Then, with the bellboy and one of the night clerks, she spent fifteen minutes frantically scouring the hotel in search of the driver. The night clerk finally located him at one of the hotel bars.
He was hopelessly drunk.
He insisted he could drive, but Lexy disagreed. She was so furious at him that she cuffed him on the side of the head and knocked him right off his bar stool, much to the amusement of the other patrons.
Lexy bellowed at the night clerk to telephone Dalton Stewart at the National Palace. She then ran downstairs to the hotel garage, located the Stewart limousine, jumped behind the wheel, and gunned it around to the hotel’s front entrance.
The night clerk and a bellboy helped Anne out from the lobby and into the back of the limo. The night clerk said he couldn’t get through to anyone at the National Palace.
“Keep trying,” Lexy ordered.
The hospital was only ten blocks from the hotel, but the situation outside was chaotic. A multiple-car accident two blocks away had snarled traffic through the whole center of the city, and drunken pedestrians were spilling onto the streets in growing numbers.
Lexy sat in the driver’s seat of the enormous vehicle, glancing nervously back and forth from the scene out in the street to Anne, lying across the limo’s backseat cushions. “Are you okay, Annie?”
“I’m okay,” Anne reassured her.
“No labor yet?”
“Just beginning. Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ve got plenty of time.”
Lexy looked out the windshield and shook her head. “Jesus and Mary.
We’ll need it.”
Hundreds of stalled motorists were leaning on their horns. An ambulance and two Seguridad police jeeps, their sirens blaring and lights flashing, were trying to work their way through, with no success. People were everywhere—running, dancing, singing, screaming.
On top of the deafening chorus of automobile horns and sirens, thousands of radios had been turned up to full volume all across the city. The crackle of the static sounded like flames from a burning building, and the music hammered the eardrums.
Occasional bursts of gunfire and the hollow thock of bottles smashing against the pavement punctuated the wild cacophony.
It was part celebration and part riot.
Five minutes passed . . . ten minutes . . . twenty. No movement.
Lexy tried to back up, but the limo was blocked from behind by a long line of vehicles. In her frustration, she began pounding on the car horn like everybody else.
Anne tried to calm her, but Lexy was gripped with a determination too powerful to be denied. She opened the car door. “Be right back!” she yelled. She ran down the line of idling vehicles until she found a motorcycle. She gave the motorcyclist’s shirt a hard tug. He jerked his head around in surprise.
“Want to make a fast hundred bucks?” she yelled.
“What? ” She jabbed her finger back in the direction of the Mercedes.
“Back there! Pregnant woman!” She pointed up the street ahead.
“Hospital! Emergency!”
After a few more minutes of desperate hand gestures and pleading, Lexy got her message across. The man turned his motorcycle around and walked it between t
he cars back to the Mercedes.
They helped Anne out of the backseat and got her positioned astride the bike.
“How’s it feel?” Lexy hollered.
Anne shook her head: very uncomfortable. The motorcycle’s owner suggested she try sitting with both legs on one side. They helped her maneuver one leg around. That was better. The driver climbed on in front of her.
“Hold on to him for dear life!” Lexy yelled. “I’ll run! Catch up to you at the hospital!”
“What about the limo?”
“The hell with it!”
Anne clutched the driver’s shoulders from behind. He kicked the machine into gear and they started off, weaving unsteadily through the narrow spaces between the lines of stalled vehicles.
Lexy trotted along in front of them, praying to herself that this was all going to work out somehow.
Between the gridlock of cars and the crush of pedestrians out on the street, the motorcycle did little better than a fast crawl.
They covered the ten blocks to the hospital in about fifteen minutes.
Lexy, her adrenaline pumping furiously, kept getting ahead of them and then backtracking to urge them on.
Lexy ran into the hospital first, commandeered an orderly and a wheelchair, and dashed back outside just as Anne and the motorcycle were pulling up to the front entrance.
They transferred Anne into the chair and the orderly wheeled her inside. Lexy turned to look for the Good Samaritan with the motorcycle. He was already coasting down the drive, revving the throttle on the handlebars.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Come back here! I owe you a hundred bucks!”
He waved a hand, kicked the machine into gear, and wheeled off into the din of people and traffic. I Lexy jogged back into the hospital. Anne was sitting in the wheelchair just inside the lobby entrance.
Tom Hyman Page 14