Dillard handed Kat a blanket and she placed it over him but kept him lying down in the aisle.
“I’ve got to get back to flying the plane. Is everything under control back here?” Dillard asked.
Both doctors nodded, and so he stepped back into the cockpit, stuffing Fowler’s gun into his waistband.
Kat put her arms around Angus and squeezed him tight. “My little superhero,” she said, while he grinned with pride over her shoulder at the others. “You flew through the air like Superman!”
Kevin reached over and patted Angus’s head. “I think we should rename the big guy Superdog.”
* * *
On their final approach to Grand Cayman Airport four hours later, Dillard radioed in that they had a medical emergency and had an ambulance waiting for their landing.
After Fowler was loaded and transported to the local hospital, the group gathered around the plane. “What the heck are we going to do now?” Kat asked. “When Fowler goes into his hypermetabolic state, it’s going to scare the hell out of the doctors taking care of him.”
“Not to worry,” Dillard said, calm as always. “When planning the trip, I rented us a large four-bedroom condo on the beach about a mile from the town. I also reserved us a large SUV to get around the island in. Let’s give the docs a couple of hours to get Fowler stabilized, and then we’ll go rescue him from them and take him to our place.”
“What makes you think they’ll just let us take him out of the hospital?” Sheila asked.
Dillard grinned and pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. “Human nature,” he answered. “Now, get those passports out that my man sent to you, ’cause we have to go through Customs.”
He held up Fowler’s wallet. “I took this from Fowler. I’ll show it to Customs and explain that he’s on the way to a hospital. Shouldn’t be a problem. The Caymans have so many tourists they don’t check too closely.”
Kat took her passport out, but before handing it to Dillard she took another peek at it. “I still can’t get used to this picture you took of me for the passport. I look so young!”
* * *
The group took turns watching Fowler throughout the night, bathing him with tepid water when his temperature raged, covering him with blankets when he shook like he was freezing to death.
By the next morning, all of his hair had fallen out, and he had a fine black stubble growing in its place.
Dillard had gone to the nearest supermarket and stocked up on plenty of eggs, bacon, sausage, hamburger, potatoes, and steaks. He knew from experience that Fowler would be starving when he awoke the next morning, as would the rest of the group, whose metabolisms still hadn’t quite gotten back to normal yet.
By nine o’clock the next day, Stone had fixed the largest breakfast he’d ever seen, and the whole group, including Fowler, was making it disappear like ice on a noonday sidewalk in Houston in July.
He laughed when he went into the dining room and saw all of them still in their pajamas with heads down concentrating on putting as much food away as they could as fast as they could.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you people were hungry,” he joked.
Kevin glanced up. “Are there any more pancakes, Jordan?”
He shook his head. “Nope, Fowler just ate the last three, and he’s not even out of bed yet.”
* * *
By the next day, Fowler joined them for breakfast in the dining room. When he entered the room and everyone looked up at him, he held out his arms and said, “What the hell happened, and why did you do this to me?”
“You had a cardiac event on the airplane,” Sheila said. “You were moments away from dying, and the only way we knew to treat you was to give you a dose of our formula.”
“And it saved your life,” Dillard added.
Fowler glanced down at his new, slimmer body. He looked at least twenty years younger and much healthier, with a complexion free of the red, blotchy spots that had covered it a few days before. His paunch was gone, and he’d lost at least thirty pounds.
“How are you feeling?” Sheila asked, getting up and motioning him to take her seat at the table.
“Why . . . why, I feel wonderful,” he said, amazement in his voice.
Stone brought him a plate with a couple of pancakes and some scrambled eggs and sausage and placed it before him.
He looked at the food and then up at the group. “I’m starving.”
“That’s part of the process,” Sheila explained. “Your basal metabolism is vastly speeded up. That’s why you’ve burned off all of your excess weight.”
He picked up the silverware and dug into his breakfast, eating like he’d been starved for days.
Burton, a sour expression on his face, asked, “Just why did you go rogue, Fowler, and try to come after us?”
Fowler set the silverware down for a moment and had the grace to look embarrassed. “A lot of things, I guess. I’d been passed over for a promotion, I was about to be mandatorily retired from the only job I’ve ever loved, and my wife just left me.” He looked over at Burton, pain in his eyes. “She called me a loser when she left.” He sighed. “I guess part of it was that I just wanted to prove to her that I could do something. . . important.”
“And get rich in the process?” Dillard added, though not unkindly.
Fowler shrugged. “That was part of it, of course, but I think mainly I just wanted to be a ‘big’ man, both to my wife and to my coworkers at the Bureau.”
“What are you going to do now?” Kevin asked.
“I . . . I don’t really know. All I’ve ever been was an investigator. The Bureau was my life.”
Dillard sighed and leaned back in his chair, studying Fowler for a moment. “Well, you certainly can’t go back to your old life, Fowler, not looking like this. It would raise far too many questions.”
Fowler nodded and went back to picking at his food. “That’s for sure.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a small business that could maybe use some help. One of my contacts could get you a new identity, and we’ll even get you a private investigator’s license. If I can’t keep you busy, I have some friends in the business who can throw some work your way. What do you say?”
He looked up. “You’d do that for me, after what I tried to do to you?”
Dillard shrugged. “It’s not charity, Fowler. I know the FBI, and a man doesn’t rise to the level of special agent in charge without having some serious chops. Don’t worry, you’ll more than earn whatever I pay you.”
“So, what now?”
“Now I’ll take some pictures of you and get them sent to the man who creates identities for me, and he’ll also get you a new passport and driver’s license and a couple of credit cards. Then, when we get those, you can go back to Houston and start work, if you think you’re up to it.”
Fowler got a determined look on his face. “Just try me.”
He suddenly got up from the table and looked a little embarrassed. “I think I’ve sweat so much I must smell like a goat. Is it all right if I go take a shower and change my clothes?”
“Sure, some of my new ones will fit you,” Burton said. “Go start the shower and I’ll bring you some clothes in a few minutes.”
After he’d left, Kat put her hand on Dillard’s. “That was very nice of you, Jack.”
He grinned. “What else could I do with him sitting there looking like a lost puppy?”
When he heard the word puppy, Angus barked and stood up on his hind legs.
Stone tossed him a small piece of bacon, and he settled back into his bed, munching happily. “Some much-deserved pork for Superdog!”
“Now, on a more serious note,” Dillard said, “we need to sit down and plan our next moves. It’ll only be a couple of days before Ashby is on the mend from his use of your formula, and I expect he’ll start to move heaven and earth to find us, so we need to be dug in somewhere where he won’t think to look.”
“
You’re still sure he’ll come after us?” Kat asked.
Dillard shrugged. “He’s got to. We’re the only ones who know that the old J.P. Ashby is not dead and that whoever inherits his fortune has got to be the new Ashby, no matter what name he is going by. He cannot afford to let us live.”
“By now our money should be settled into our own personal accounts,” Kevin said. “Each of us needs to decide where to send it from there. We can look over the list of countries with friendly anonymous banks and talk about which of them has the best policies for us to make use of.”
He glanced over at Dillard. “Jack, you need to be in on this, too, so you can decide where you want us to send your fees.”
“As soon as I get Fowler’s pictures taken and get his info sent off to my forger, we’ll sit down and you can go over my choices with me. At first blush, I think the Caymans would be good, ’cause I can make it down here in my plane in one jump if I need to move some funds around without anyone knowing it, but we’ll discuss it more fully later.”
* * *
Two hours later, Dillard had finished his business with Fowler and the man was taking a nap, still somewhat exhausted from his transformation.
The group gathered around the dining room table, and Kevin went over the various international banks that would be suitable for them to use to park their huge fortunes.
Kat and Kevin decided on a bank in Lichtenstein, having decided that they would spend a year traveling throughout Europe before deciding what to do with the rest of their lives.
Watching them, Stone smiled at the way they continually held hands, as if they couldn’t get enough of touching each other.
Burton and Sheila picked the island of Grenada, mainly because it was remote enough from the States so they’d be hard to find, and because it had a medical school that taught in English and was accredited by the United States in case they ever wanted to return there to practice.
Dillard decided on the Caymans, even though their banks weren’t quite as secure from the United States government oversight as some of the other countries. He didn’t plan to raise any flags to give Uncle Sam a reason to target his accounts.
Stone picked a bank in the Antilles Islands, because Kevin said there would be no problem with him getting wire transfers through the Caymans and then back into America to fund his upcoming research projects.
They decided it would probably be safe to spend a couple of days lying around the beautiful Cayman beaches and enjoying each other’s company in the various nightspots before they all went their separate ways, never to be together again.
Fowler, once he had fully recovered from his transformation, proved to be a nice man whose company they all enjoyed. He even regaled them with some funny stories from his many years with the FBI, and he and Dillard found they had very compatible personalities. Dillard was actually looking forward to working with his new hire.
On the third day of what they’d begun to call their “final vacation,” they were watching CNN on TV while sitting around drinking Red Stripe beer, an island favorite, when a report came on about a suspicious death in Maine. The serious-faced announcer stated that a remote cabin in southern Maine had burned to the ground, and the two victims were the notorious oil magnate, John Palmer Ashby, and his personal physician, Dr. Thomas Alexander, a heart doctor from Houston, Texas, who was reportedly on vacation with the oilman.
Dillard shook his head. “That is just too good to be true, guys. I think this must be a scheme Ashby cooked up to disappear and come back as someone else.”
Fowler got up from the table. “I’ll call the Houston office and see if I can find out what the heck is going on. They don’t know that I’m gonna be gone for good yet, so I’ll find out who is in charge of the investigation up in Maine and reach out using my FBI credentials. It won’t be too suspicious since until recently we had an open investigation into Ashby.”
He came back into the room twenty minutes later. “I have what I think is really good news for you guys.”
“What?” Dillard asked, sitting on the edge of his chair.
“They are absolutely sure one of the victims is John Ashby. They’ve got a positive DNA match on the remains, and his chief of security stated that Ashby’s doctor, this Alexander person, had warned him several times about not smoking his cigars while he had his oxygen tank going, but he said Ashby never listened. They are fairly sure the oxygen tank blew up, causing a fire that killed both men.”
“What about the other body?” Kevin asked, his voice hoarse.
“They assume it is Dr. Alexander, based on the testimony of a Matt Dodson, the chief of security, who said the two men were together when the fire broke out, but they can’t be sure ’cause the second body was burned too badly to even get a DNA match.”
Kevin sat back and blew out the breath he’d been holding, relief evident on his face. He now knew his uncle was safe. He was much too smart to sit there while Ashby smoked a cigar with his oxygen going.
Dillard looked around at the group. “That is super news, guys. Now I think we can safely go about our business without having to constantly be looking back over our shoulders.”
Kevin stood up and held up his bottle of beer. “In that case, I propose a toast.”
When the others all held up their beers, he added, “To the Phoenix Group, survivors all.”
The others repeated, “To the Phoenix Group, survivors all.”
“I further propose that once a year, on the anniversary of this day of our freedom from worry, we meet back here on the Grand Cayman Islands and have a reunion.”
“Hear, hear!” the group chanted, and all drank to the toast while Angus barked excitedly.
Dust to Dust Page 35