The Facts Of Death

by Raymond Benson

  “So how does one become a donor?”

  “There is a rigorous screening process,” Dr. Anderson said. “We only take the best.” She said that with a seductive smile. “You look like you have good genes. Are you serious about applying?”

  Bond laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so. I doubt that I’d meet your requirements.”

  After a moment’s pause, she said, “I don’t know if you’d meet the clinic’s requirements, but you definitely meet mine.”

  Bond had hoped that she might be attracted to him. Throughout his long career as a secret agent, he had often gained the most ground with the enemy by sleeping with them. Seduction was a method used by spies dating all the way back to the time of Cleopatra. James Bond happened to be very good at it.

  “Two o’clock, then.”

  The waiter brought Dr. Anderson her meal, breaking a moment of sexual tension that seemed to have generated from nowhere. She had ordered cheese enchiladas, refried beans, and guacamole.

  “That looks good,” Bond said.

  “I love Tex-Mex,” she said. “As long as there isn’t any meat. I’m strictly a vegetarian.”

  “I’m not sure I could live that way,” Bond said. “I do eat animals.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she said suggestively.

  “Well, look, I think I’ll let you enjoy your meal. I’m going to rejoin my friends over there. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, all right?”

  “I look forward to it, Mr. Bond, but don’t rush off on my account,” she said.

  “Believe me, I’d stay if I could, but I must get back. Have a lovely evening.” He got up and went back to Leiter and Manuela.

  “She swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker,” Bond said. “Charles is in Europe on a business trip for the clinic. So she claims. We’ll find out tomorrow where he is.”

  “Great,” Leiter said. “I thought we’d go take a look at Hutchinson’s house on the way back home. Or are you too tired?”

  “No, no,” Bond said. “I’m getting my second wind. Let’s do it.”

  Alfred Hutchinson’s American home was in a secluded wooded area off the beaten track on the western outskirts of West Lake Hills. The house wasn’t visible from the road, so Manuela had to park out by the mailbox at the entrance to the drive. Bond got out of the car.

  “Give me an hour,” he said.

  “We’ll pick you up back at the top of the road,” Leiter said. “Use the mobile phone if you need us before then.” The car quietly sped away and left Bond standing in the dark. There were no streetlights, and the dense woods blocked all available moonlight. The cicadas were out in force, so he doubted that anyone could hear his footsteps on the dead leaves.

  He slipped on the Q Branch night-vision goggles, which brought the surroundings to life. He could now make out everything clearly.

  Bond crept down the path about a hundred meters and came to the broad ranch house that had a rustic, log cabin feel to it. It was dark and quiet. He paused long enough to open the heel of his right shoe and extract the alarm-sensor nullifier which Major Boothroyd had given him. He turned it on and pointed it at the house. A red light indicated that alarms were indeed set to go off if someone tried to break in. Bond pushed the green button and the red light stopped blinking.

  He moved around to the side of the house, looking for a window that he might open without having to cause any damage. He found a back door. It had a standard lock—no dead bolt—so he thought he could pick it easily. He deactivated the alarms at the back of the house, then removed a wire lockpick from his belt buckle. He worked for two minutes on the lock, and the door swung open.

  The house smelled damp and felt cold, as if it hadn’t been occupied for a while. Bond moved through what was apparently a laundry and utility room into a kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a dining room and a hallway to the rest of the house. He made a quick survey of the living room, then moved down the hall, past two bedrooms, and finally found what he was looking for. He took a deep breath when he saw what had happened.

  Hutchinson’s office had been ransacked. The room was covered in papers and opened manila filing folders. The filing cabinet drawers were left open. A large rolltop desk dominated the room, and it had been broken into as well. Its drawers were out and on the floor, the contents scattered over the gray carpet. A Gateway 2000 IBM-compatible computer sat on the desk.

  Bond carefully stepped through the rubbish, looking for anything of interest. Most of the papers were teaching materials or nonsensitive diplomatic information. Nothing was left in the filing cabinets. Whether or not whoever did this had found what they were looking for was unclear. What could Alfred Hutchinson have been hiding? Was he involved with the Suppliers? Could they be behind the attacks in Greece and Cyprus? Did they kill Alfred Hutchinson?

  Bond went to the computer and booted it up. After a minute, the familiar Windows 95 desktop glowed on the monitor. Bond clicked on the “My Computer” icon and perused the names of file folders on the hard drive. A personal folder called “My Data” was the only thing that wasn’t a part of any normal system. Inside that folder were a couple of internal folders, one labeled “Teaching,” and one labeled “Ambassador.” Bond clicked on the “Ambassador” folder and found about four dozen files of various subjects. They all seemed innocuous and useless. The “Teaching” folder also contained nothing of interest.

  Bond was about to perform a search for the word “Suppliers” on all the files when he heard a car door slam outside. He froze. Another door slammed. Someone was out in front.

  He quickly shut down the computer. The front door of the house opened and he heard a man’s voice say, “Hey, the alarm’s turned off.”

  A woman said, “That’s weird. I could have sworn I turned it back on when I left.”

  “You’ve left it off before.”

  “I know. Come on, let’s hurry. It’s in the office.”

  Whoever it was, they were walking down the hallway straight for Bond!

  EIGHT

  MANSION ON THE HILL

  THERE WAS NO TIME TO LEAVE THE ROOM. BOND LEAPED ACROSS THE FLOOR to the empty filing cabinets. He gently pushed one away from the wall and squeezed in behind it. From here, he had a narrow view of the desk and the computer terminal. He held his breath and waited.

  The man and woman entered the office and flicked on the lights. The shock of illumination nearly blinded Bond. He switched off the night-vision goggles but kept them on.

  “Place is still a mess,” the man said.

  “What did you expect? The maid to clean up after us?” the woman said sarcastically. Bond thought he knew the voice. He noted that the couple knew about the condition of the room before entering.

  She stepped over the debris and went to the computer on the desk. Bond could see her back now, and he wasn’t surprised to see the business suit and long blond hair. Dr. Ashley Anderson booted up the computer and then sat down in the office chair on wheels. The man came into view and stood at her side, looking at the monitor. It was the cowboy, Jack Herman.

  “How do you know how to find it on that thing?” Herman asked.

  “Haven’t you ever used a computer, Jack?” she asked. “You can ask it to find any file that’s on the hard drive.”

  “Is it there?”

  “Hold your horses. I’m looking.”

  The cowboy shrugged and moved away from the desk. He started kicking some of the debris. Bond was afraid he might wander over to his side of the room. If he looked too closely, he would see Bond hiding behind the filing cabinet. Bond leaned back against the wall, now unable to see anything in the office. He listened and waited. The cowboy’s boots were shuffling the papers on the floor. The sound was coming closer. He was just feet away from Bond.

  “Would you stop that noise?” Dr. Anderson commanded. “It’s annoying.”

  “Sorry,” the cowboy said, and sauntered back to the desk. “I just don’t understand why we’re doing this. Who is this guy, anyway? What does he h
ave to do with the Suppliers?”

  “Don’t worry about it and just do what you’re told, Jack.”

  The cowboy grunted. “Found it yet?”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “It’s not here. The file must have been deleted. Listen, I’ve got to get to the clinic. Remember the man I introduced you to the other day?”

  “You mean that guy from Greece?”

  “Yes. He’s out at the mansion. I need you to go there and let him know we couldn’t find the file. Would you do that?”

  “I was going over there anyway. Shut that thing down and let’s go,” Herman said.

  She turned off the computer; then they switched off the lights and left the room.

  “Reactivate that alarm, would you?” Dr. Anderson said.

  Bond waited a moment, until he heard their footsteps at the front door. He slipped out from behind the cabinet and reactivated his goggles. He quickly moved to the back of the house, used the sensor nullifier on the alarm once again, and went out of the door he had come in by. As quietly as possible, he moved over the crackling dead leaves to the front of the house.

  Dr. Ashley Anderson was getting into a pink Porsche. The cowboy was inside a beat-up Ford F-150 pickup truck. Tied down in the back of the truck was a Kawasaki Enduro motorcycle. Dr. Anderson drove off down the path out of the property. The cowboy started the pickup.

  It was now or never. Keeping low, Bond ran and climbed onto the back of the pickup truck just as it was leaving. He slipped over the tailgate and flattened himself on the bed of the truck. The cowboy drove out onto the street and followed the Porsche. Bond was unable to watch where the track was going because he had to stay down. He removed the goggles and tightened the strap so that they clung to his neck. Luckily the cowboy was alone in the cab. Bond could see a shotgun propped up on a rack behind him.

  The two vehicles separated when they reached Bee Caves Road. The Porsche turned left and headed toward Austin. The pickup turned right and went west out toward the hills. It eventually reached Loop 360, also known as the Capital of Texas Highway, and turned right.

  While officially still in Travis County, this was the country. A half moon shone through a dark cloudy sky, casting a soft glow on the rolling hills. Most of the autumn leaves had fallen, giving the trees a skeletal, ghostly appearance. The wide road curved up and around the cliffs, every now and then passing side roads leading into the darkness. After nearly twelve minutes, the track turned off the highway and headed west again on Farm Road 2222, a somewhat treacherous highway that led to Lake Travis. The cowboy drove recklessly, taking the curves too sharply. All Bond could see, though, was the sheer cliff towering above him on one side of the truck, and the night sky on the other.

  Soon the track turned left onto City Park Road, an uphill winding two-lane road. Raising himself slightly, he could see the vast city lights spread out to the east of the truck. He would have liked to be able to remember the route they had taken, but he was a stranger and totally lost.

  The truck finally stopped on a gravel road that sliced through some dense trees. Bond pressed himself against the side of the truck bed, hoping that the cowboy wouldn’t look in the back when he got out of the vehicle. The door opened and Bond heard the boots stomp down onto the gravel. The door slammed shut, and the footsteps moved away from the truck.

  Bond peered over the edge of the truck bed and saw a mansion designed to look like an ancient Greek temple. The cowboy was walking toward an archway at the front of the house. Old-fashioned gas pole lamps were positioned around the mansion, and there were even caryatids sculpted along the perimeter of the roof, matching those that still remained on the Erechtheion of the Acropolis in Athens. Full-size statues of Greek gods and heroes were scattered around the front lawn. The place was decidedly sinister, and it was obvious that this was its owner’s intention.

  As soon as Jack Herman was out of sight, Bond leaped over the tailgate and hugged the back end of the truck. After making sure no one was outside the house, he ran to the side of the building. The front of the house was well lit, but luckily the sides were not. He crept up to a large window and looked inside.

  The cowboy was greeting a large, swarthy man dressed in a black turtleneck cotton shirt and black trousers. He had black curly hair, a black beard and mustache, and black eyebrows. The size of the man was extraordinary. Jack Herman was a big guy with plenty of muscle, but the swarthy man was even larger—obviously a bodybuilder with the biceps to prove it. He probably weighed 250 pounds or more, but there wasn’t an ounce of fat on his body. He had no neck, just a large block of a head sitting on a wall of shoulders.

  Another man dressed as a cowboy appeared next to the bodybuilder and shook hands with Jack Herman. He was tall and blond, another roughneck type who seemed to be part of the same team as Herman. The bodybuilder, in contrast, looked out of place with his swarthy Mediterranean features. Bond recalled Jack Herman saying that the man was Greek.

  The three figures moved from the entry hall into a living room which matched the ancient Greek design theme of the house. The floor was made of marble. The furniture was a chic wooden fake antique, and a collection of swords, shields, and maces adorned the stone walls. Bond moved along the side of the house to the next window and looked in. The three men joined another man sitting in an armchair. He was much younger, probably in his twenties. He was a good-looking fellow with brown hair and blue eyes, dressed sharply in a tweed jacket and dark trousers. Bond recognized him from the file photos. He was Charles Hutchinson.

  Bond couldn’t hear what the men were saying, but inside the room Jack Herman was shaking his head at the European. Bond figured that the cowboy was breaking the bad news that they didn’t find whatever it was Ashley Anderson was looking for on Alfred Hutchinson’s computer. Charles Hutchinson stood up, an expression of uncertainty and fear on his face. The swarthy bodybuilder turned and gave Charles a glare that Greeks would have called “the evil eye.” Charles was distressed, and he attempted to say something. The Greek backhanded Charles, who fell to the floor. The two cowboys just stood there and grinned. The bodybuilder dismissed them and they left the room.

  After a moment, Charles pulled himself up off the floor and rubbed his chin in humiliation. He sat on the wooden armchair he had been in before and stared straight ahead. The bodybuilder said something to him, then walked out of the room.

  Bond could hear the two cowboys leave by the front door. He crouched down into the shadows and watched as the two men proceeded to open the tailgate and remove the Kawasaki from its cradle. After five agonizing minutes, the men got the cycle out of the truck and wheeled it onto the gravel driveway in front of the house, out of Bond’s line of sight. He stood up again and looked in the window. Charles was still sitting there, looking glum.

  Bond moved down to the next window in line. The bodybuilder was sitting at a desk, typing on a computer terminal with one finger. His hands were so large that his fingers were easily the size of cigars.

  The room was a small office with some modern furnishings. Bond was particularly struck by the strange flag on the wall above the desk. It was roughly four feet square and it pictured an equilateral triangle made of ten red dots on a black background. There were four dots along the bottom, then three, with two on top of those, then one—much like the setup of bowling pins seen from above. A large mirror was on the opposite wall, and Bond was fortunately at just the right angle so that he could see the bodybuilder’s back and the computer monitor in the mirror. It was too far away to read what was on the screen, but Bond could glean that the man was on-line, talking “live” with someone over the Internet. He knew this because lines of text appeared at the bottom of the screen, and then the bodybuilder would type with one finger and hit the return key. New lines of text would appear, followed by another set of lines.

  The sound of one of the cowboys kick-starting the motorcycle came from the front of the house. One of them yelled, “Yee-ha!” The machine sat there idling, and every now and t
hen the engine would rev up. It was quite loud.

  It wasn’t half as loud as the sudden dog bark that Bond heard a few yards away from him. The noise had attracted the attention of a Doberman that had been at the back of the house. She was fullgrown, black as coal, and had fierce eyes that practically glowed in the dark. She growled and barked again at Bond, ready to pounce if he so much as twitched.

  He knew he couldn’t wait for her barking to bring out the men, so he braced himself for the attack and faced the dog. She leaped at him, teeth bared. Bond deftly rolled onto his back as the dog made contact and at the same time he grabbed her neck. In a maneuver that could only be equaled by circus acrobats and other Double-O agents, Bond used the dog’s forward momentum to pull her over his body and into the glass window. The Doberman shattered the pane, howling. That set off the alarms.

  Without hesitation, Bond got to his feet and ran to the front of the house. The dog would certainly jump back through the window in pursuit. The two cowboys were frozen in stunned amazement at the sudden flurry of activity. Jack Herman was standing by the motorcycle, and the blond fellow was sitting on it. Bond made a running jump and kicked Jack Herman in the face, knocking him to the ground. He then swung his leg around and caught the other man on the chest, knocking him off the Kawasaki. Bond caught the cycle before it fell on its side, and jumped on. He revved it up and took off down the gravel path.

  “Hey!” he heard one of the cowboys shout, followed by the barking of the Doberman, hot in pursuit.

  The Kawasaki KDX200 is a bike specifically made for heavy-duty off-road riding. Its single-cylinder two-stroke motor is fast and tractable. Ideal for heading into rough country, its dogleg control levers are covered with plastic handguards. Bond was extremely lucky that it had been made “available” to him!

  He sped out of the gravel drive and onto City Park Road. In no time he was doing seventy miles per hour, which was particularly precarious on the winding, two-lane road. He had left the dog in the dust, but the Ford pickup was not far behind. With one hand, Bond slipped on the night-vision goggles again and cut off the lights on the bike. He then increased his speed to eighty and leaned into the motorcycle. Becoming one with the machine, he cut through the air and concentrated on curves in the road. There were very few oncoming vehicles.