In Death's Shadow

by Stephen Davidson

  Rendon sighed and started calling the names on his list. They all came from Gaines’s list. All were at risk of dying. There were too many.

  Sixteen

  Harry shook his head and went out the office door, closing it softly behind him. Joey, Susie’s friend, the structural engineer, was away on vacation and wasn’t expected back until the next week. Being friendly with the secretary, Harry learned that Joey was in Jamaica with his wife, that he traveled for the firm, and that the secretary liked Joey, but not his wife, who had been one of those “nudie dancers” in Atlanta.

  Earlier that morning, it had taken thirty phone calls just to find the firm that employed Joey. Savannah was not a small city. Harry had decided to go to the office in person. More information was to be had that way. Telephone interviews were only good if you had no choice or if you were talking to a government official who had no choice but to dance in whatever fire was lit.

  The construction firm turned out to be located not far from the hotel. Harry had talked to the secretary for a good half hour. Her boss had been gone. She told him everything about her life, her lack of boyfriends, the lack of good men—this statement had been accompanied by a several-moment stare—and very little about the business or about Joey.

  Harry left disappointed. He had found out nothing of importance and taken the better part of the morning doing it. There was no time to waste. He had six days before the motorized maniac would strike.

  He hurried down the now crowded streets of downtown Savannah, ignoring the worn signs of the businesses. The idea of seeing Ree again, even if it had only been an hour or two since he left her, excited him.

  When he left, she had been lying in the bed with a contented, small smile on her face. The smile broadened when she looked at him. She had reached up and given him a kiss before she would let him go. She said she was going to take a bath. By now, she should have been out of the bath. He wondered if she would have dressed or if she would be waiting for him in a T-shirt and nothing else. Would she be wondering what was keeping him?

  Not paying attention, he had to excuse himself after he bumped into a woman just leaving one of the stores. She gave him a cold stare and shifted her coat more tightly around her shoulders. He decided he didn’t care what Ree was wearing…or not wearing or what she wanted to do. It didn’t matter; just being with her was all that mattered. He loved her.

  He brushed past the hotel doorman, sped through the lobby, and then had to wait an eternity for the elevator. He paced back and forth among a froth of name-tagged people. When the elevator did arrive, it was loaded with conferees.

  The door almost closed before Harry could force himself into the mass of humanity. He called out his floor number, and a woman punched the button for him. Elbowing his way through, he barely made it out before the door closed on him again.

  The hallway was empty on their floor. He reached the room and then had to fumble in his pockets for the key. Finding it, he opened the door, rushed in, stopped, and felt his heart sink.

  She wasn’t there. A towel was thrown across the toilet in the bathroom. The mirror had large drops of condensation dripping down it. Her pink bag was gone. It had been on top of the bureau. He rushed over and opened the drawers. Her clothes were gone.

  He saw the note on the desk, picked it up, read it, dropped it, and picked it up to read it again. She’d disappeared—again.

  A hard, beating ache formed behind his eyes and was met by another in his stomach. He collapsed into the desk chair. Doubt and depression invaded his mind, sucked the strength from his limbs, and left him limp, sprawling listlessly across the chair. He had been so high, so in love, and now?

  How could she just leave?

  Could it all have been an act? His heart pounded with fear as that dark thought tore through his mind. After all, she had been a dancer, a queen of deception, ruler of the eye. He tensed his fists up into tight balls. He couldn’t believe it. She must have just gone somewhere close. She would contact him soon. She’d said she loved him. She would be back soon.

  The curtains were closed. He watched numbly as the red light signaling a ship passing started to blink. A ferry’s horn blew in the distance. He waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t, though he stared at it, wishing it to sound. Sometime later, he folded up the note and went back down the elevator. He hardly noticed the people around him. His head swirled with pain. He got out of the building elevator, rounded the corner to the parking-deck elevators, and went down to the riverfront. Leaning against the outside door, he opened it and stumbled onto the sidewalk. A man walking past gave Harry a scowl and hurried away.

  On the other side of the street were several park benches that looked out on the river. Harry aimlessly walked across the cobbled street and took a seat. The other side of the river was busy with activity. Several ferries were pulling from their mooring places. Up the river, the new bridge to South Carolina gleamed, its steel arches high above the river. Cars paraded across.

  The water lapped at the stone bank. The air smelled of the candy shop across the street—sweet. Down from the shop was the Irish pub where he had been going to take Ree to dinner that night. He loved the shepherd’s pie.

  How could she have left him like that? The ache in his stomach turned hollow. The burning in his eyes forced him to keep looking up to keep the tears at bay.

  A pigeon landed in front of him and started to peck at a piece of paper. Harry shooed it away. Paper surely was not good for birds. On the river a large piece of wooden flotsam floated past him amid a patch of white foam. The dark wood bobbed, catching patches of light foam and carrying them into the air, where the bubbles burst.

  He took out the note. He crumpled it and started to throw it in the river and then couldn’t. He had nothing else of her. He uncrumpled it and stared at the lines of script.

  It was written in that same neat, small-figured scrawl that her first note to him had been written in, the note he’d found that morning after he had seen her at the club and Susie had died. Except now, the curves in her letters seemed more jagged. It seemed years ago he’d found that first note. He hadn’t even known her name.

  Was she one of those people who started to get scared when they got too close to people?

  He shook his head. He didn’t think she was. Rather, it seemed she was scared until she did get close.

  One of the ferries trundled out of the little corral that served as a dock and started chugging downstream. Harry read the note again and noticed for the first time that she had signed it, “Lee Abu.”

  He frowned and looked at it again. Why would she do that? The ferry tooted its horn. Down the river came a massive tanker, its rusted sides towering over Harry. Lee Abu wasn’t her name. Her real name was Kara-Lee Andrews, though she preferred Ree or Kara-Ree to Lee. Her father had called her Ree. She knew he knew that. Was it a message?

  He hurried back to the room and studied the contents carefully. His clean clothes were there, but not the dirty ones. Why, if she were disappearing, would she take his dirty clothes?

  The towel in the bathroom was not hung up on the rack; instead it was draped across the toilet. He couldn’t remember her ever doing that before. She always hung them up. One of her razors was still lying beside the bath along with a can of shaving cream. The water had not been drained from the bathtub.

  The bed gave slightly underneath him as he sat down and squeezed his eyes closed. The only way this made sense was if someone had taken her. She had been in the bath, and kidnappers had broken into the room.

  He opened his eyes and went back to the door. There was no sign of forced entry. Either it was the police, someone who knew how to break into a room without a key, or someone she knew.

  The police would have to have been told that she was at the hotel. Who would have told them? Joey’s secretary or her boss? Or could the boss have sent someone over to get Ree while Harry was talki
ng to the secretary? Was that why the secretary had been so willing to talk? But Harry hadn’t mentioned where they were staying. How could they have checked every hotel in Savannah in that little time? Possible, he guessed, but it didn’t feel right. The secretary had seemed very real in her desire to gossip and flirt. Still, Harry could have been getting too close, and they decided to take action. Where could they have taken Ree? How could he get her back?

  Or was it one of the groups that had been following them? Perhaps the wheelchair maniac’s people had followed them and watched Harry try to make contact. They might have figured that something was going on that they needed to know—that Ree had not told them everything. Harry shivered as he thought of the maniac’s threats. Or maybe it was some of the people that used to work for Felder. They had tried before to take her. In that case, she would be taken to Atlanta, if she was still alive. Ruling out the people in Savannah, based on his strong feeling that the secretary had not been covering anything that had to do with Harry or Ree, Harry packed his clothes into the plastic dry-cleaning bag that was folded on top of the spare blankets, went downstairs to the desk, and checked out. He asked if there were any messages for him. The answer was negative. They wanted to know if anything had been wrong with his room. He replied that he’d had a suddenly called business meeting he had to go to. The cashier nodded knowingly.

  Moments later, Harry drove from the parking deck, bumped over the cobblestones and up to the main street. He would go to Atlanta and make his plans on the way. Joey wasn’t here anyway. There was little chance the wheelchair maniac would tell him anything, even if the man was in town. Whatever progress was to be made would have to be made in Atlanta, and whoever held Ree had to be connected to the missing or copied data files.

  He drove fast, trying to ignore the feeling of despair that kept trying to creep into his mind. He would start by contacting Rendon to see what progress had been made on the disease. Susie had died of it, but what other connection there was, Harry could not guess.

  It seemed all too tenuous a lead. At this point, it was the only one he had. He pushed down harder on the accelerator.

  Andrews felt depressed, lethargic, as if there were a whirlwind inside him sucking up emotions, energy, even thought—a deep, cratered pit of blackness where nothing stirred. He lay on the bed, his stockinged feet stretched out before him. There was a hole in the right sock. His big toe stuck out.

  Lee, his brother’s wife, had always told him he needed to get married, to have someone take care of him. It had been a joke between them. They’d laughed many a time about what woman would have him.

  That is, before she’d been raped and forced to watch her husband die. There’d been nothing left after that. She never recovered. Andrews scowled at the toe emerging from the blue sock.

  It was better not to have a wife in this business. Then no innocents were hurt. The pain of his brother’s death stabbed deep inside him. He’d never forgiven himself.

  Innocents hurt? His brother had not been with the agency. He’d been with State. Unknowingly, he’d occasionally carried a message with him when he went on vacation to the coast. It was a message that Andrews sent in the form of a gift to a supposed girlfriend. It had seemed exceedingly safe.

  It had been one of those messages and a terrorist group’s unthinkable ability to trace it that had led to his brother’s death. His brother had never known the reason he was killed. He could never have suspected that his own brother had been the one to sign his death warrant.

  Andrews sat up and let his legs drape over the side of the bed. How could he, a man who had involved his own family, innocents, to the point of death and insanity—how could he condemn the agency for what they were doing?

  Cee had said everything was being done that could be done. Andrews himself had sent a portion of the drug over to the doctor at the CDC before taking off for Washington. By now, the CDC would at least have analyzed it and found the virus.

  And the CDC had the list, too. Theoretically, they knew everyone who might have been exposed to it, assuming there had only been one leak. The agency did not have an antidote. Who better than the CDC to come up with one, to prevent further deaths?

  It was obvious from what Cee had said that the agency did not believe there was any terrorist involvement, but they were more than content to let Ferenzi act like there was and use this Abu woman to prove it. The woman would probably die.

  If she was not a terrorist, and she couldn’t be or the agency would know it, Ferenzi could hardly let her live. She would be sacrificed to keep the agency and the country itself out of the picture, to make Ferenzi rich. Who could say how innocent she was or wasn’t—a nude dancer, a stripper?

  Cee was right in saying that the consequences of the truth being known would be catastrophic.

  Andrews reached down and pulled the sock over the toe. It popped back out. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the backboard. He, a man who had sacrificed his own brother, was now one of the few people who knew the truth of this virus and could tell it.

  It was the peak of irony. It had been his hatred of these decisions that had led the agency to send him out to pasture. A potential million people on one side and two or three individuals on the other: which side weighs the more? The answer seemed devastatingly simple. Why didn’t it make him feel better? He wondered again about the Abu woman and then put her out of his mind. She was a stripper, probably into drugs, prostitution. He could not afford such treacherous thoughts.

  Ice rattled down in the machine on the wall outside Andrews’s room. He picked up the note from the CDC doctor and then put it back on the table.

  Leaving a few of his belongings in the room, he packed the rest and headed out the door. He would not return the call, but he would keep the room. If more messages came in, then he’d decide what to do. For now, he’d find another motel room, much the same as this one. He’d keep an eye on the media.

  Gym bag in his hand, he walked up Peachtree Street to the long concrete stake that marked the bus stop. He waited there with a small crowd of Atlantans. He wondered if any of them had enjoyed the peculiar and deadly pleasures of that batch of pure cocaine or if the Abu woman had tried it with her roommate. If so, she was probably already condemned no matter what was done. That thought made him feel better.

  When a woman in the group waiting for the bus sneezed, he moved farther away.

  A white-coated man brushed by Rendon and strode into one of the curtained-off cubicles. From the room came the sound of a monitor’s high-pitched alarm. Over the PA came a code-blue announcement. His heart sinking, Rendon walked to the side of the hallway. A team of doctors and nurses sped past in practiced order, pushing and shoving a cardiac-arrest cart. The thing looked no different than a large, red mechanic’s cart except for the electronic monitor and defibrillator mounted to the top. The air had a slight tinge of antiseptic to it. It was a smell Rendon remembered well. The area was kept neat, with needles, tubing, and bags of clear IV fluids shelved in orderly fashion—easy to reach. Even this emergency did not result in mayhem. People moved in distinct and set patterns, a dance well choreographed and practiced.

  It had been a while. Too many years since his residency for him to want to go diving into that room and that adrenaline-rushing action. Besides, his adrenaline was already pumping. If only the patient he sought was not the one who had just arrested.

  A check with a busy nurse who hardly looked up to acknowledge his presence revealed that the patient Rendon wanted had been moved to 3NCCU, which was apparently on the third floor. The nurse was not very helpful. Rendon decided the next time he went to a hospital, he’d put a stethoscope around his neck and wear scrubs. He’d get a better reception.

  Having the permission of the attending physician, he walked past the volunteer at the CCU control desk without even showing ID. He just walked by as if he belonged there. Inside the CCU, all the rooms radiated ou
t from the central hub, which was the nursing desk. The desk itself was a rectangle the inside of which was filled with telephones, charts, and one bank of monitors. A pleasant-looking, blond nurse sat behind the desk talking on the phone. She gave Rendon a sharp look, and putting the caller on hold, she placed her hand over the receiver.

  Caught by her glance and then a police-like stare that said, “Come over here or else,” he went over to the desk.

  It took his ID and five minutes’ worth of explaining to convince her that he had permission to visit the patient. Finally, she glared at him and acquiesced, going back to her phone conversation.

  Outside the patient’s room, he donned infection-control garb. His heart was pounding with excitement by the time he reached for the door. This man could provide the verification the CDC needed. The patient was alive and had every known symptom of the virus. He was the first living case that was known. His name was on Gaines’s list.

  Cool, scentless air met him as he entered the room. Light blues dominated the color scheme of the walls. A fat, clear tube emerged from the man’s mouth and then connected to the ventilator. Another smaller tube ran into his arm. Wires emerged from everywhere and went to a set of monitors behind the bed. The monitor beeped steadily. Rendon scanned the graphs and readouts. Once reassured, he sat down and said the man’s name, hoping he would respond, if just to open his eyes.