In Death's Shadow

by Stephen Davidson

  A low whir announced the presence of their captor. Harry twisted around to see a small, bent man approaching in a motorized wheelchair. With a mop of gray hair, the man’s face was narrow, and the muscles contorted. His head was held slightly to the side. He wheeled around using a closed and gnarled fist to control the movements of the chair. He stopped beside the fireplace, some ten feet in front of them.

  “You can’t just—” Harry stopped at the feel of a gun barrel pressed against the back of his head.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to,” a hoarse voice commanded behind them. The pistol was pulled away, but Harry had the feeling it was only inches away.

  “Thank you,” the man in the wheelchair said. “This will go much faster if I may simply talk. I regret the necessity of bringing you here at gunpoint, but there seemed no other options. Up until recently, you have been tightly followed, and that will soon begin again. Harry Adams and Kara-Lee Andrews, may I welcome you to my home. Daren, please get them some wine. I know they must feel stressed from their recent experience.”

  There was a slight noise from behind them as the shorter of the two guards trotted over to a cabinet and then returned with two glasses. He gave the glasses to Ree and Harry and then poured the wine.

  “Cheers,” said the man in the wheelchair, though he held no glass, and his look was not friendly.

  Harry looked at the wine dubiously. Ree held her glass in her lap. Her face and body were rigid.

  “Don’t worry. There’s nothing in it. You two are much more useful alive than dead, at least for the moment.”

  “That’s nice,” Harry said and fidgeted. He stared at the deep red of the wine and swirled it. What the hell was going on? Who was this man? Did he control the people who had been following them, or was there more than one group involved? Harry suppressed a groan.

  The man shrugged, a painful-looking movement with his drawn-up shoulder. “I just need to ask you some questions. If you answer honestly, you will be released.”

  Ree put her glass of wine on the floor beside her feet as if ready to kick it at the man.

  “Kara-Lee, what do you know of Susie’s work with Denny Felder? Work on computers.”

  “Nothing. I didn’t know she knew anything about them.”

  “Oh, I think you’re right there. She was no computer expert. But she worked with Felder on several projects, and we believe she was on the payroll of a computer-programming firm. The one that Felder worked for.”

  “I didn’t know anything about that,” Ree said.

  The man studied her for a moment. “Did she take any time off lately, like the last month or so?”

  Ree hesitated a moment. “In the last month? Yeah, she took a long weekend last month at the end.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She said she was going up to the mountains with Denny.”

  “Hmmm. She didn’t. She was seen in New York.”

  Harry couldn’t hold his impatience any longer. “What is this about? You can’t just take us off the street at gunpoint and start questioning us.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “I can and have. Nor will you go to the police. Given your…situation, I doubt you would anyway, but if you should become foolish, let me tell you that there are witnesses to me being elsewhere, right now. Respected witnesses. As for what it’s about—some property of a company that I work with was stolen. We believe that your Susie and this Felder were involved. Felder has been killed. Your Kara-Lee is the only source of information on Susie who is left alive, at least, that we know of.

  “If you wish to live, I suggest you sit back and relax and let her answer my questions.”

  Harry heard the man behind him move closer. Harry sat back, though his heart pounded.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the wheelchair-bound man, his glance settling on the man behind Harry for a moment. “As I was saying, Kara-Lee, do you know of anywhere Susie might have hidden something valuable?”

  “No, unless it was in the apartment,” she said.

  “Not there. It’s been thoroughly searched by my own men and others, though what they want exactly, I don’t know.” The man motioned with his fisted hand. A piece of paper and a pen were produced and handed to Ree. “Write down the names of all her friends. Do not leave any out, even if they were only acquaintances.”

  Kara-Lee began writing names in her neat print. When she finished, she handed it to the guard behind her. He took it to the gray-haired man. It was a half page long.

  “This could be helpful. You see, I must find what has been stolen. I’ll give you a week. Find out where it is.” He handed Harry a card with a number on it. “Call me. If you lie to me, you both will be brought in, and the truth will be beaten and drugged out of you. Then you will be killed.”

  He put a fist to the controls, and the chair spun to the side. “Sorry you didn’t enjoy the wine. Actually, a quite good vintage for that house.”

  Twelve

  Andrews had led his tails on a merry chase until he lost them—all three. With multiple one-way streets, downtown Atlanta gave him the advantage. That had been the beginning of the day, before the sun rose. Sure that he was no longer being followed, he’d first gone to the home of the dead advertising executive, Elaine Gaines. There, he searched and found what he wanted. Then, it was to a cheap motel where he registered under an assumed name. From the sparsely furnished room, he called Rendon. That was a risk, but it seemed worth it. A virus that suddenly struck and killed, not behaving like most viruses; a virus that appeared to have been spread by an impossible vector did not sound a natural event.

  Was Ferenzi right? Was this the work of terrorists, or was the idea that kept nagging at the back of his own mind correct? Had the agency made a mistake?

  Wrapped in plastic in his coat pocket was a small sample of something that had been in a large baggie in Gaines’s home. It looked like cocaine. Andrews had used gloves and handled the substance with care. There was no telling if it was the virus, and if it was, how it would be spread. He needed a lab.

  Before leaving the motel, he carefully listed in his mind all the names of the people he could trust and work with—people no longer associated with the agency and often not friendly to it.

  A half hour and a call from a pay telephone later, he was riding to a small cafe in Buckhead where he would meet a man he’d worked with ten years ago. A man who now headed security for an international firm headquartered in Atlanta.

  The bus took its time. It was only half full. Few traveled to Buckhead from downtown at two in the afternoon. Everyone who did wore coats against the chill February wind. Andrews didn’t have one and felt conspicuous. Still, when he got out into the sunshine, he felt warmed. He walked several blocks before circling back to his destination. He saw no one.

  Entering the cafe, he surveyed the few customers and took a seat near the back and on the side wall. The waitress wore a short skirt, fishnet hose, and couldn’t have been more than twenty. Her glance looked wary. She took his order, set the table for two, and was gone with an incongruous girlish grin. Warner Robb entered about ten minutes later and looked warily around the room before going any farther.

  The former agent was a hefty man whose muscle had turned to fat around his stomach. He had large shoulders and a jutting angular chin. He greeted Andrews with a handshake.

  “It’s been too long, Will. Now, what’s this that I can help you with?”

  The man had always been somewhat direct. Andrews eyed the people at the seat nearest them and leaned forward. “I’m working on a project. Top secret. No inside knowledge. I need some help getting a substance analyzed, and it has an element of risk. The stuff could be deadly and could spread. It may contain a virus.”

  Robb’s eyebrows raised. “What do you think it is?”

  “I—we—believe that it is cocaine with a virus impregnated in t
he drug.”

  “The virus?”

  “Unknown.”

  The large man shrugged. “I’ve got connections in the pharmaceutical business. I can probably verify that it’s cocaine, but wouldn’t it be difficult to identify an unknown virus?”

  “Just find out if it’s cocaine, and that will be a big help. Have them return any portion they don’t use,” Andrews said.

  “OK, buddy. So how’s business with the agency?”

  They talked and ate for the next hour. Andrews carefully watched the time. He had another call to make. Where had Dr. Hollinghurst gone, and what had he done? The call had to be discreet. He’d thought of the Russians and ruled them out. The way things were going, they could have been in on it. Then, he considered the Israelis and chose them. They kept track of American projects. They might keep their mouths shut.

  If the agency found out, it wouldn’t just be Ferenzi Andrews had to escape; it would be the agency itself.

  He looked behind him, scanning the milling shoppers before he got on another bus and headed to the motel. The agency did not think kindly of those who disobeyed orders. More than one had suffered accidents.

  Rendon looked at the key dubiously. He’d received it from the police after Elaine Gaines’s parents had called them and given permission. He felt like he was breaking in. Still, they’d decided it was best not to involve the police at this point. There was no known crime.

  Behind Rendon, Cougher was fidgeting. “C’mon, let’s go. We haven’t got all day, and this is more than likely a wild goose chase anyway. More police work than ours.”

  Cougher had not been quite convinced after hearing of Rendon’s mysterious caller. He still wasn’t. Rendon turned the key, and they walked into a dark living room. To the side were stairs. A dining area and kitchen could be seen through the back of the living room. The furniture was all glass and metal.

  Rendon switched on a light, went to the couch, sat down, and began thumbing through the mail. Cougher disappeared into the kitchen.

  The mail was mostly bills and magazines. One of the bills had a colorful self-address. It was from the Silver Legged Lady Spa. Rendon studied it a moment. That had been where Gaines had died. He put it back on the pile.

  Finding nothing of significance in the mail, Rendon sifted through the rest of the living room to no avail. What he wanted was to find a quantity of a drug and a mailing list. He did not really expect to find anything downstairs; still he dreaded going upstairs to the dead woman’s bedroom. He felt it was violating some unwritten code. Cougher came back from the kitchen empty handed. They both trudged up the stairs.

  There were two bedrooms. One had been turned into an office, and before Cougher could get to it, Rendon had slipped into that room. Grumbling, Cougher went into the bedroom.

  The computer was an old clone. The hard-disk directory showed nothing of interest. Rendon began going through the diskettes. Most had files for a word processor, and he opened them, but still found nothing. Oddly, one of the diskettes had no label and apparently nothing on it, yet it was in the middle of the stack of data diskettes. The remaining blank diskettes were in a box on another shelf. The woman seemed otherwise to have been neat and organized.

  Rendon put the unlabeled disk aside and kept going through the rest. Nothing relevant. It appeared Gaines had been doing some of her work at home. The files were often labeled by companies and contained advertising copy. He recognized some of the verbiage.

  Picking up the odd diskette, he went into the bedroom and found Cougher scowling.

  “Here, help me with this,” Cougher said.

  Rendon slipped the diskette into his coat pocket and helped Cougher lift up the mattress. There was nothing under it except wadded up tissues. Under the bed itself was a vibrator. Rendon’s cheeks burned. They had to search, but…

  An hour later, they still had turned up nothing, and disgusted with the waste of time, they headed back to the police station to return the keys. It wasn’t until they were back at the health department that Rendon realized he had the blank diskette in his pocket. Curious, he put it in his computer and, using a utilities program, searched it for hidden files.

  He found one. He couldn’t read it. There was a message on his voicemail from the games committee. They wanted to know what progress had been made.

  Harry stared at Ree and watched her face tense, her eyes looking up and to the left.

  “No, that’s what he said. Susie went to New York, and they were working on something to do with the computer company that Denny worked for,” she said.

  “OK, then. From that,” he said, “it would seem that Susie was hooked up in some scam they ran on Mr. Maniac, our man in the wheelchair.” Harry said the words lightly, but there had been a while when he wondered if they were going to get out of that house alive.

  They had. The chauffeur drove them to the door of the hotel and let them out with a bow as if they had been honored guests instead of prisoners.

  Harry continued talking, though it was as much thinking aloud as anything. “But that doesn’t jive. It made better sense when we thought it was drugs Susie and Denny were running.”

  He scowled. Behind Ree and through the window of their room, he could see a shrimp boat pulling up to a dock. It was only afternoon. A police car drove by the hotel.

  “Maybe they stole information,” Ree said.

  “Yeah, possible. And if Felder is dead, then maybe we don’t have to worry about anybody coming after you except the maniac’s men, and—shit—whoever killed Felder and whoever it was that was watching from the next room in Jesup. And we’ve got seven days…Christ.”

  The room grew silent.

  “You could just leave me here, Harry. This isn’t your problem,” Ree said.

  He studied her. She gazed back, her face as soft as her words had been said.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  She leaned over and took his hands in hers. “Thank you, sweet.” She raised one of his hands to her mouth and kissed the tips of his fingers. Then, she put his hand back on the table but kept her gaze leveled at his.

  For a moment, he did not speak, just enjoyed the memory of the touch of her lips to his fingers. “All right. We still need to figure out something to do.”

  She nodded, her expression becoming serious.

  “I guess the first thing is to find out more about the maniac. If he owns property here, somebody at the paper probably knows about him. I’ll call and set up to meet one of their reporters, maybe society page.”

  She nodded again.

  After a number of tries, Harry reached the features writer. After introducing himself and making up a story about writing vacation pieces for his own paper, the local reporter agreed to meet Harry in the bar downstairs. All during the phone conversations, Ree stared at him, and when he left to go downstairs to the bar, her gaze followed him until the room door closed. Her eyes were very dark. Harry found pleasure in the feel of that look.

  He had the bar to himself. It had a small counter on one end and then a series of chairs set vaguely as if the inhabitants, if there ever were any, were going to watch the big-screen television on the other end.

  Harry settled himself at one of the tables, ordered a gin and tonic, and began to think strategy. Trouble was, all he could think of was the way Ree kept staring at him. He was startled when a pleasant, mouse-haired, and round-faced woman sat down next to him and extended her hand.

  “You’re going to do a story about Saint Mary’s?”

  “Yeah, well, I was thinking about it. Get a write-off on the trip, and this hotel is interesting. I guess it’s mostly used by people going over to Cumberland Island, but it wouldn’t be a bad place just to go to…nice view.”

  “It is pretty here. Now the business is all with the navy ba
se. The town used to be tiny. Quaint.”

  “Right. I was down here a couple of years ago. When I came this time, I got lost in all the construction.”

  The woman laughed. “That’s everybody’s story, even if you live down here.” She leaned forward, resting her breasts on the table suggestively. “What is it you wanted to know?”

  Harry ignored the suggestion as best as he could. “Are there any interesting people living around here? I thought I might give it kind of a people angle. You know, artist colony at the beach…millionaire’s hideout.”

  “There are some artist types, but mostly it’s just submarine people and their support staff.”

  “No big, mysterious houses out on the swamps?”

  “You mean, like drug dealers?”

  “Whoever.”

  “There’s plenty of drugs come through here. There’s just too many miles of coast to patrol.”

  “Anything else?”

  She twisted up her mouth. “Well, there is Dr. Fast.”

  Harry worked to keep the interest off his face and his breath controlled. “Who is he?”

  “I just did a story on him,” the woman said. “He came down here and built a huge mansion out in the marshes. He’s one of those new type of chemists who do their work on the computer, not in the test tube.” She shivered. “He’s kinda weird too, living out there all alone. He’s got a helipad that he uses to get back to the Brunswick airport, so you never know whether he’ll be there or not. And the men looking after him look like the security for the president. I could probably get you an interview with him, but sometimes it takes weeks.”

  “Nah, I don’t have much time. Who does he work for? I could probably check when I get back in Atlanta.”

  “Oh, a company named Ordor Chemicals, though I think he was working on superconductors when I interviewed him.”