The Facts Of Death

by Raymond Benson

  The truck was gaining. A shotgun blast rang out behind him, but from too far back for the shot to be effective.

  Bond felt his heart stop as he rounded a blind curve to see two oncoming cars—one in his lane! Its driver had been foolishly attempting to pass the other car and was two seconds away from colliding with the motorcycle!

  Bond swerved to the right and the Kawasaki shot off the road into the woods. The terrain went into a dangerous incline, and 007 held on for dear life as the cycle plummeted down—remarkably, staying upright on its wheels. He dodged trees the best he could, but a branch hit him in the face and shoulder, nearly knocking him off the vehicle. The incline got worse and Bond realized that at any moment the cycle would lose its traction and they would begin to fall down what was to become a sheer cliff. He attempted to brake, but that only caused the Kawasaki to skid. Gravity took over, and the motorcycle fell sideways down the side of the mountain. Bond jumped and tried to grab hold of a tree, but he missed. He started rolling down the side of the cliff behind the cycle, unable to stop. He fell hard against a large rock, getting the breath knocked out of him, but he continued to plummet downward.

  The incline ended abruptly at a sharp cliff edge. The Kawasaki sailed over the cliff into the air. Bond rolled and exerted a superhuman effort to grasp a tree branch that extended out over the cliff. He hung there, gasping for air.

  Twenty-five feet below him was Farm Road 2222. He was hanging over the highway. The cycle had crashed onto the road and lay there beneath him. He could probably drop down and roll without injuring himself any more than he already had. For the moment, he held on to the tree branch and caught his breath. His face and shoulder were in great pain, and his right side was injured. He was afraid he might have broken a rib.

  Then the pickup truck came barreling down the road below him. The driver didn’t see the wreckage of the Kawasaki in time. He plowed into it, causing the pickup to swerve into the lane directly beneath Bond; 007 let go of the branch and dropped into the bed of the truck. The Ford kept going and got back into its lane. The passenger, the blond cowboy, had a pistol of some kind. He leaned out of the window and shot back at Bond, but he was in an awkward position and couldn’t hold the gun steady. Bond removed his Walther PPK from its holster and blasted a hole in the back windshield of the truck. The blond cowboy caught the slug in the face.

  Bond moved up to the driver’s side of the truck, stuck his arm through the broken windshield, and put the Walther to Jack Herman’s head.

  “Stop the bloody truck,” he commanded.

  Herman nodded, but kept driving.

  “I said stop it, or I’ll make you stop it,” Bond said.

  There was traffic behind the truck, and more was beginning to appear in the oncoming lane.

  “I can’t stop it here! Let me pull over up ahead where there’s an extra lane,” the cowboy pleaded.

  “Just make sure you do.”

  Instead of slowing down, though, Jack Herman floored the pedal and swerved the truck into the slow-traffic lane. To the right of the truck was a serious cliff—it made the one Bond tumbled down seem like a sand dune. Christ! Bond thought. The bastard intended to kill them both rather than be arrested!

  Bond pulled his arm out of the broken windshield and jumped over the side of the truck just as the Ford careened over the guardrail. He hit the pavement hard and rolled with the impact. The pickup seemed to sail through the air in slow motion. He heard Jack Herman scream, and then the truck disappeared from view. Bond heard the impact a second later as the truck smashed into the side of the cliff and exploded.

  He pulled himself off the road and limped to the side. The truck was aflame and was continuing to roll down the cliff into the darkness below.

  Bond examined his body. His forehead and the left side of his face were scraped badly and bleeding. His shoulder hurt like hell, but nothing seemed out of joint. His right side was the worst. He had experienced broken ribs before, and this sensation was aggravatingly similar. It was a miracle he could walk away from what had just happened.

  Bond found his Walther lying nearby and holstered it. He reached into his pocket and found that Leiter’s cell phone was smashed. Cars were zooming past him, unaware of the fireball at the base of the cliff to their right. Bond limped along the road, heading east back toward town. No one stopped to see if he needed help, and he wasn’t about to hitchhike.

  Two hours later, Bond saw a small bar called the Watering Hole off the road to the right. A sign on the door warned, “Don’t Mess with Texas.” He stumbled inside and surveyed the place. A saloon would have been a more appropriate description, as it was full of an odd mixture of cowboys and long-haired biker types. The jukebox was blaring one of George Jones’s more famous beer-drinking songs at an extraordinary volume. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at Bond. A pool player in the middle of a shot scratched the table as he looked up and saw the battered figure in the doorway.

  Bond ignored them all and went straight to the bar.

  “Whiskey,” he ordered. “A double.”

  The bartender didn’t say a word and poured him two glasses of Johnny Walker. “Have a double double, mister. What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing much,” he replied. “Just fell off a cliff.”

  Bond drank one glass quickly and felt the warmth invigorate him.

  He closed his eyes tightly, then coughed. Considering that he was still suffering from jet lag and fighting a cold, it was a wonder that the ordeal he had just been through didn’t kill him. He was exhausted.

  He drank the other glass of whiskey, then asked to use a phone. The bartender pointed him to the pay phone, then said, “Nah, forget it. Here, use mine.” He placed a phone on the bar and let Bond call Felix Leiter for free.

  The old adage that Texans were genuinely friendly people was apparently true. Most of them, anyway.

  NINE

  THE SPERM BANK

  THE MYSTERIOUS MALADY THAT STRUCK LOS ANGELES HAD ATTRACTED THE attention of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. A special investigative team arrived to find that fifty-two people had died from what was being called “Williams’s disease,” named after the man who had the first known case. Health officials in the city were opposed to making a public announcement for fear of creating a panic. The team from Atlanta began the tedious task of locating anyone who may have been in contact with the victims in the last twenty-four hours of their lives. At this point, no one could discern where the disease came from or how it worked. Preliminary tests revealed that the virus died shortly after its host did, leaving biochemists without a sample to study.

  In Tokyo, things were worse. The death toll had risen to seventy. In twenty-four hours, the disease would surface in New York City and London, leaving in its wake a total of twelve people dead in one day.

  Bond slept late to allow his body to recover from the previous evening’s exertions. Manuela had examined him thoroughly—she turned out to be a qualified registered nurse as well as a damned good investigator—and had determined there were no broken ribs. Bond had one hell of a bruise, though, and his side was quite tender. His forehead and cheek had been scraped, but that would heal quickly. The left shoulder had been knocked out of joint, but wasn’t completely dislocated. Manuela performed a bit of chiropractic therapy and got it back in place.

  Since he was unable to say exactly where he had been the night before, after lunch Manuela and Leiter took Bond back over Farm Road 2222, past the bar where they had picked him up. He recognized the City Park Road turnoff, so it was only a small matter of time before they found the mansion in the hills. Leiter said he’d work on finding out who lived there, while 007 kept his two o’clock appointment at ReproCare. Bond’s revelation of seeing Charles Hutchinson in the house was most interesting. Manuela had gone to Hutchinson’s apartment in the Hyde Park area and learned from the manager that the young man had vacated it. The manager was very angry, because Hutchinson had broken a lease and
taken off without a month’s notice. Movers had taken away his things yesterday. The manager had not seen Charles Hutchinson personally, but received word of his departure from a lawyer. Manuela impressed the manager with her FBI credentials and gained access to the empty apartment, and also saw the letter from the lawyer. An hour later, she had confirmed that the lawyer didn’t exist.

  Either Charles Hutchinson was in with the bad guys or he was a prisoner being held at the mansion against his will.

  Before they took Bond into town, Leiter gave him another cell phone. “Let’s not break this one, it’s the last spare I’ve got,” he said.

  “You’re beginning to sound like an armorer I know in London,” Bond replied.

  ReproCare was located on Thirty-eighth Street in an office park near the large medical center that serviced much of north central Austin. A glass door carried the inscription “ReproCare—Infertility Therapy, CryoCenter.”

  Manuela and Leiter dropped Bond off and he went inside. The waiting room was small but typical of a doctor’s office. An attractive young nurse with a Dictaphone headset in her ears was typing inside the reception office. She looked up at Bond and smiled broadly.

  “May I help you?” she asked in a thick Texas accent.

  “Uhm, yes, I have a two o’clock appointment with Dr. Anderson? The name is Bond. James Bond.”

  The nurse consulted her book. “Oh yeah, I have a note here. She’s been detained for a while. But she wanted you to fill out all these forms, and when you’re done someone’ll take you back to a room for your first specimen.”

  “My first specimen?”

  “You’re here as a donor applicant, aren’t you?” She smiled knowingly, quite used to having to deal with men who were embarrassed by what they had come to do.

  It wasn’t exactly what Bond had in mind, but he went along with it. “Right.”

  “Read the instructions on the forms and that’ll explain what’ll happen today. The doctor will talk to you beforehand, so don’t worry.”

  Bond took the clipboard from the nurse and sat down in the waiting room. The forms numbered about ten pages, front and back. The cover sheet explained that donors needed to be over the age of eighteen and must go through an intensive screening procedure that included completion of a medical and genetic history questionnaire, a personal interview by the laboratory supervisor and complete semen analysis, a physical examination by a physician and testing for major infectious diseases. The first step to being accepted as a donor was to complete the questionnaire. If the applicant met the requirement of sexual abstinence for at least forty-eight hours prior to visiting the clinic, a first semen specimen would be taken after a brief interview. All information about the donors was kept completely confidential.

  The questionnaire was very thorough. It asked about the applicant’s medical and ethnic history. There were questions about personal interests and hobbies. Lifestyle and behavioral questions took up a large portion of the document. There were queries on nearly every disease known to man, sexual preferences, current and past medications and surgeries. Bond figured that the clinic had extremely high standards and that nearly everything in the questionnaire must be answered satisfactorily. He chuckled as he pondered that it was probably more difficult to be accepted as a semen donor than it was to become an agent with SIS.

  It took him nearly an hour to fill out the forms. He falsified much of the information, but for his own amusement he attempted to remember all of the various injuries and hospitalizations he had sustained during his illustrious career. He handed the forms back to the nurse, who told him to have a seat and that someone would be with him in a moment. Ten minutes later, a man wearing a white lab coat opened the door to the back and said, “Mr. Bond?”

  Bond stood up. The man held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Dr. Tom Zielinski.” They shook hands. “Come on back,” he said.

  They went into a small office. “Have a seat,” Dr. Zielinski said.

  “Where’s Dr. Anderson?” Bond asked. “I think I was supposed to see her.”

  “She had an emergency or something, I’m not quite sure. Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you.” Dr. Zielinski was of medium build and looked to be in his late thirties.

  Bond really didn’t want to go through with this. He wanted to talk to Ashley Anderson and see what he could get out of her, but perhaps if he played along with these people he could find a way to have a look around.

  “I’ve gone over your questionnaire briefly, Mr. Bond,” the doctor said. “We’ll have to look at it more thoroughly, of course, but on first glance it looks very good. It says here your father was Scottish and your mother was Swiss?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You wrote that their deaths were accidental. Can you be more specific?”

  “It was a mountain-climbing accident. They died together.”

  “I see. I’m sorry,” the doctor said with no emotion. He scribbled on the form. “How old were you at the time?”

  “Eleven. I went to live with an aunt. She was very doting.”

  “I see. I’m sorry.” He turned the pages and landed on the hospitalizations section. His eyes grew wide. “Well, you’ve sure been hospitalized a lot! This is pretty remarkable. What kind of work did you say you were in?” He looked back on the front page. “Oh, here it is. Civil servant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s a civil servant?”

  “I worked for the British government.”

  “I see.” He added, “I’m sorry,” out of habit, then cleared his throat, embarrassed. “And you’ll be in this country for a while?”

  “I’m now a permanent resident,” Bond lied.

  Zielinski nodded, still staring at the form. “This is quite a medical history. Broken finger … second-degree burns … barracuda bite? … hospitalization for nerve poisoning … bullet wounds … you have a pin in your ankle … and severe depression?”

  “That was due to my wife dying.”

  “I see. I’m sorry.” He continued scanning the document. “Knife wounds … concussion … electric burns … What’s this here about trauma to your testicles?”

  “That happened a long time ago.”

  “What was it?”

  Bond shifted uncomfortably. “I was kicked in a fight,” he lied again. The memory of Le Chiffre’s carpet beater was all too vivid.

  “I see. I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “But you’ve never had any problems with ejaculation since then?”

  Bond smiled wryly. “None.”

  The doctor scribbled something on the form and then explained that the specimen taken today would be analyzed for the number and motility of sperm cells and other qualities. If Bond passed the first test he would come in for a complete physical, blood work, and another specimen. He then asked Bond why he wanted to become a semen donor. Bond sincerely told the doctor that he would gain satisfaction if he could provide help to a couple who couldn’t have a child on their own.

  Satisfied with his patient, Dr. Zielinski led Bond down a hall and through a door to another section of the building. There were four closed doors in the hallway, each with a sliding sign that could be set to “Occupied” or “Vacant.” Dr. Zielinski opened one and led Bond into a small room that looked more like a bedroom than an examination room. There was a vinyl couch, a table, a sink, a television, and a VCR. On top of the table were empty specimen containers, a box of tissues, and a towel. There were some X-rated videotapes on the VCR and a few men’s magazines in a rack by the table. There were no windows, and the door locked from the inside. A phone was attached to the wall.

  The doctor said, “You’ll need to wash your hands with soap and water before beginning. Please collect a specimen without using lubricants or condoms. They’re toxic to sperm. Label the specimen with your name, the time, and hours of abstinence since your last ejaculation. Take your time. You can lock the door for privacy. When you’re done, just put the specimen in this incubator.” He pointed to
a small white machine on the table. “It’ll keep the temperature of the sperm stable until it’s ready to process. If you need anything, just dial ‘O’ on the phone. Okay?”

  “Fine,” Bond said.

  The doctor shook his hand and said, “I probably won’t see you again today. I have to go freeze some sperm.”

  “I see,” said Bond. As soon as the doctor shut the door and left him alone, Bond added, “I’m sorry.”

  He waited five minutes, then opened the door. There was no one in the hall. Bond slipped out of the room and went farther down the hallway to a door marked “Personnel Only.” He opened it quietly and glanced inside. It was another hallway with offices, and it was empty. He carefully closed the door behind him and walked purposefully down the hall. Some of the office doors were open. Unnoticed, he saw doctors and technicians busy with paperwork or microscopes. At the end of the hall was a large metal door. A keycard was needed to gain access. Bond presumed it was where they kept the tanks that stored the frozen sperm. He wanted to know if ReproCare kept anything else in there as well.

  The outer door opened and he heard voices. Bond ducked into the nearest office and flattened himself against the wall. He closed the door slowly but kept it ajar. As the voices approached his end of the hall, he recognized Ashley Anderson’s Texas accent.

  “Your plane gets into Heathrow at eight forty-five tomorrow morning,” she was saying. “Your connection leaves at noon, so you’ve got a bit of time.”

  Dr. Anderson and her male companion stopped just outside the office. Through the crack of the open door, Bond could see her use a keycard to open the unmarked metal door. She replaced the keycard in her lab coat pocket, and then held the door open for her companion, Charles Hutchinson. She followed him inside the inner sanctum and closed the door.