Now that she had decided against dying, she would have to figure out how to survive. She had no weapons and she had no idea what kind of weapons he might have. If she broke away from him on foot, she might be hours away from help. She had only one advantage over Babykiller. When he rose from his desk to escort her to the car, she had noticed a decided limp. She could outrun him if she had the chance.
She liked that idea for a minute, before remembering that she would never have the chance to run away from Babykiller. She was bound to him until the end, because he had Cynthia.
She considered his profile. She could see that he knew she was studying him, but he just flicked her a knowing look, then kept his eyes on the road.
She knew his face. There was something about the line of his jaw, the high forehead, the aquiline nose. A deep-buried memory tickled some vestigial part of her brain and all of her oldest defensive reflexes kicked in. She shivered and hunched forward, unconsciously protecting her internal organs. She watched pale gooseflesh erupt over her forearms. Her body remembered something that she didn't. What was it?
He cast another long glance her way. Driving with his left hand, he loosened his tie and pulled it off. After he'd undone his collar button, he shrugged, as if to relax. He rested his right arm across the top of the front seat, almost touching the back of her neck. Then he leaned his upper body toward her, very slightly.
Any other woman would have taken his actions to be a sexual advance, and maybe they were, but she sensed that Babykiller had something else in mind. By exposing his neck, he let her see precisely what he had in mind.
The tracheotomy scar had healed well. It was a neat, pale mark barely distinguishable by untrained eyes. Yes. The age was right. The branch of the military was right. How stupid of her.
“Lieutenant Doe,” she said. “It's been a very long time.”
Tending the patients on the neurological ward had been the hardest part of her time in Vietnam. The guys with head wounds had lain, stiff, with their dilated eyes fixed on the ceiling. The ones with spinal injuries were strapped into the frames that stabilized their ruined vertebrae. She'd spent a lot of time massaging muscles that would never hear from a brain again.
So few of her patients had kept enough consciousness, enough personality, to touch her. She remembered very few of them by name. It was ironic that she had bonded with Lieutenant Doe without ever knowing his name.
The rescue squad had found Lieutenant Doe in the wreckage of a cargo plane, the only survivor. His dog tags had been torn away and destroyed. Every crew member listed in the flight records was dead. Was he a stowaway? He couldn't have told them his name if he had wanted. His injuries left him incapable of speech.
The Air Force checked the records of every man listed as missing-in-action, killed-in-action, or prisoner-of-war, or away-without-leave. If they ever identified Lieutenant Doe, it was later, when Larabeth was recuperating in a hospital bed of her own.
The hospital staff thought he'd been smuggling something, probably drugs. A cargo plane staffed with crooks could move a lot of contraband along with its legitimate goods. Perhaps he had removed his dog tags on purpose, to keep his identity secret from his fellow smugglers.
Larabeth had ignored their suspicions. Lieutenant Doe was special. Unlike most of her patients, he'd had a good shot at getting better. His spinal cord had been battered when the cargo plane went down, but it wasn't severed. He had a tracheotomy, so machines could help him breathe while the swelling went down. That meant he couldn't talk, but Larabeth had talked to him. She had held his hand and told him that he was going to get well.
She had confided in him how much it hurt her to see the soldiers suffer, while she washed his helpless body. Sometimes she had spent her breaks with Lieutenant Doe, just talking. He'd watched her talk and she'd wanted to believe he enjoyed her company, but sometimes she had wondered what was behind those still gray eyes.
Lieutenant Doe was on the ward when she was attacked. She had felt his eyes on her when she lay bleeding on the floor. His impotence was complete. He couldn't help her. He couldn't call for help. The spinal patients hanging from their frames had made enough noise to attract attention, and then she'd been carried away to surgery and to the trauma ward. She'd never seen Lieutenant Doe again and she hadn't thought of him in years. Not until today. And she'd never heard his voice before. Not until a few days ago.
And now he sat beside her. His body had healed better than she could have hoped. What had happened to his soul?
* * *
Cynthia kneeled in the dirt of a bluff rising high over a fast-moving creek. She dabbed gently at the blood on her fellow prisoner's shoulder, trying to get a better look at his wound. In retrospect, their escape attempt had been ill-conceived. They had dashed into the woods, only a few hundred feet ahead of trained soldiers armed with automatic weapons. Those guys could have peppered the air with enough lead to bring down trees. If they had, there would have been nothing left of her and Jackson Sellers (whoever he was) but scattered bloody pieces.
She understood now why they had limited themselves to the single shot that had pierced Mr. Sellers' shoulder and broken his collarbone in the process. They were apparently under orders to keep her alive, no matter what. She had no idea when she became so important.
She was enjoying the fruits of her importance at the moment. The terrorists' leader, a scar-faced beast known as One-Eye, had ordered one of his underlings to take the wounded prisoner into the woods and shoot him with his own gun. She had begged and pleaded, even thrown her body across his semi-conscious form and One-Eye had relented.
“He can live. For now.”
After One-Eye commuted the death sentence, she demanded BioHeal's first aid kit. She knew its contents; she had written the health and safety plan. She knew that it was intended to treat poison ivy and muscle strains, not gunshot wounds. Still, she'd been able to clean the wound and she had bandages and a sling ready to use once she got the bleeding stopped.
She'd been talking nonsense to her patient, discussing the heat and bemoaning the humidity, just to keep him conscious, but she wanted to talk about other things. Their guard had moved a few steps away. He was still within point-blank gunshot range, but he was just out of earshot, if she whispered.
She wanted to know what he knew about their captors. Knowing who they were and what they wanted wouldn't help her situation much, but she was curious. Besides, even if it was callous and selfish, she wasn't about to let this man die while he was keeping secrets she had a right to hear.
“So, Mr. Sellers, tell me how you know my mother,” she said.
He lay still and spoke without opening his eyes. “It's not Sellers. It's Hatten. J.D. Hatten. And I'm not an environmental technician. I'm a private detective.”
“Nice to meet you, but I didn't ask for another one of your aliases. I asked how you knew my mother.”
“Well, the alias was her idea.”
She kept dabbing blood, repeating, “I asked about my mother.”
“How do I know your mother? I think that falls under the heading of things she should tell you herself.”
Taking another tack, she asked, “Who are these thugs trying to kill us? And how did you get advance warning about the attack?”
J.D. opened one eye to make sure their guard still couldn't hear. “Your mother's been getting calls from a lunatic named Babykiller. He threatened her, he threatened you, he threatened all of Washington and South Carolina.” He stopped to draw a ragged breath. The words were coming slower, but he seemed to have a lot to say before….while he was still able.
"I'm certain he was behind the Hanford bombing and these guys are surely his personal terrorists. The FBI wasn't much help, so we took matters into our own hands. Things went wrong and here youo and I are.”
“My mother hired you to risk your life this way?”
“For information on your mother, you'll have to talk with your mother.” His voice was fading and his lips were goi
ng blue. Anyone could see that he was going into shock.
Wishing for a blanket, she remembered that she was wearing excess clothing. Slipping off her protective jumpsuit and spreading it over him, she said, “Pardon me if I have a hard time picturing my mother spending big bucks on private eyes. I always thought of her as a sad-eyed waif who gave her baby away because she had no other choice.”
J.D. didn't speak for awhile, and it was just as well. Their guard had noticed her covering J.D. with her jumpsuit and was coming to see what his prisoners were up to.
Cynthia was watching the thug approach and she nearly missed J.D.'s final quiet words on the subject of her mother. “You're wrong. Your mother is not spending big bucks on a private eye. I'm doing this for free. No, not for free. For love.”
He closed his eyes. Except for the quiet sound of J.D.'s breathing, Cynthia was alone with her captors.
* * *
J.D. found the ground to be comfortable—a little too cool, a little too hard for his battered body, but definitely better than standing up. Better even than sitting down. If he could just lie still, his heart might be able to get some blood to his brain. Then the nausea and the dizziness and the just plain weird feeling in his head might settle down.
He'd been seeing black spots in front of his eyes for a while, but they were starting to run together now. He was pretty sure that the person talking to him, stroking his brow, holding his good hand, was Cynthia, but she looked like Larabeth and sounded like her and he was too weak to concentrate on the face above him.
Whoever it was, Cynthia or Larabeth, should leave him and save herself. It would be okay to leave him here. The bad guys might not even notice him and, even if they did, they were probably used to corpses. That was his plan. If the bad guys came, he would just lie real still and pretend to be dead.
* * *
One-Eye only disobeyed orders when he had good reason and, technically, he hadn't disobeyed any orders yet. It hadn't taken him long to determine who his male prisoner was. Somehow, the New Orleans-dwelling detective that the boss wanted dead had found his way to the swampy woods of South Carolina.
A quick call to Gerald confirmed his suspicions. One-Eye had no qualms about killing either of his prisoners, but his instructions were clear. The man must die, but the woman must be delivered alive and unharmed or One-Eye would pay with his own life.
The situation presented One-Eye with an interesting hostage-management problem. In his experience, it was often necessary to use pain to control prisoners, but he wasn't allowed to harm the woman. She seemed sharp enough to figure out, sooner or later, that she paid no price for her disobedience.
In this case, keeping the man alive, but only temporarily, seemed to One-Eye to be the best course of action. Keeping a spare hostage gave him the means to keep the woman in line, without hurting her directly. If she misbehaved, her fellow prisoner suffered another gunshot wound to another expendable body part. A knee. A hand. Whatever.
Then, when the man's usefulness had played itself out, One-Eye would have him killed. Because One-Eye only disobeyed orders when he had good reason.
Chapter 25
Babykiller steered the car down a neatly kept gravel road and parked. Larabeth had steeled herself for a showdown in a secluded clearing deep in the Carolina flatwoods. She was ready for hand-to-hand combat with a homicidal maniac. She was not prepared for him to welcome her as a houseguest.
“Dear Larabeth,” he said, “I have waited so long for you to come to me. My home is ready for you. All my homes are ready for you.” He beckoned for her to join him on one of the terraces jutting from the side of the massive house.
Larabeth's eyes were drawn downward, where the house descended, level by level, into a huge natural depression. Its wings and porches and balconies grew out of the sloping soil like mushrooms from a rotting tree trunk. There was no sign of human life. Was she truly alone with a babykiller?
He was standing so close, peering so deeply into her eyes. He seemed to be ferreting out her thoughts and perhaps he was, because he answered them. “We're finally alone. I sent the help away for the evening. It's been so long since we were alone together. Actually, we were never really alone in the hospital ward, but I pretended we were. Since I couldn't move my head, I couldn't look at the other patients, so I imagined them away. You were the only person I could see so, to me, you were the only person in the room. In the world.”
“You did have other nurses.”
“Shut up.” His harsh words dropped into the soft, tree-covered valley below them. There wasn't even an echo. He took a single breath and resumed talking with the exaggerated calm he always used with her. “I have so few good memories. Don't taint them.”
He took her elbow and guided her into the house. “We've lost so many years of happiness together. I have no ambitions for the rest of my life beyond domestic bliss with you.”
Regardless of his ambitions, Babykiller's house seemed remarkably blissless. The expensive carpet beneath her feet was a moldy shade of brown. Strolling slowly with Babykiller down a long hall, she noticed a complete lack of windows in the rooms on her right. Each room on her left was lit by a sliding glass door that occupied an entire wall. The asymmetric design was necessary for a building sunk so deep into the side of a steep hill, but she knew this house would be hell for a claustrophobe.
He steered her into a small den, located (of course) on the windowless, airless side of the house. It was carpeted with the same awful brown stuff and the walls were paneled in dark wood.
“I've been dreaming of this moment,” Babykiller said, “wondering what happy couples do to unwind at the end of a long working day. I considered sex, but that was too obvious. Then it came to me. Happy couples, all around the world, watch television together. And I have provided such fascinating programming for the world's viewing pleasure.”
He seated Larabeth on a cozy leather loveseat, positioned himself uncomfortably close to her, and started channel surfing. CNN had scrapped its regular schedule to devote full-time coverage to the standoff at the Savannah River Site. Headline News was broadcasting continuous updates on the situation at the Hanford Site.
The news from Hanford was repetitive. Two people were dead: the pilot and the security guard who tried to stop him. The fire was under control and there was little remaining danger of an uncontrolled nuclear event, or so the government said.
“Listen to our benevolent government,” he sneered. “I'd like to broadcast a counterpoint to their soothing nonsense. I'd remind the public about the good old days of nuclear research, when the government warned the Kodak factory of nuclear releases at Oak Ridge, because Kodak complained that the nasty radiation fogged its film. Did they ever warn the ordinary humans living nearby? Why should they? The poor suckers had no clout.”
“I've heard that,” Larabeth murmured.
“You don't have much to say, darling.”
“The last time I spoke, you told me to shut up. So I did.”
“It's been so long since I've had a woman in my life. I've forgotten how sensitive they can be. I'll try to be more gentle.”
Larabeth looked at Babykiller. He had kidnapped her, taken her daughter hostage, laid a death sentence on her lover, and staged full-scale disasters at two nuclear facilities, all within the past twenty-four hours. And now he was promising to be more gentle. Telling him what she thought of him would be counterproductive, so she watched television as if her life depended on it, because it probably did.
He flipped over to the broadcast from the Savannah River Site. The General was blathering about the Second Amendment and the Internal Revenue Service and personal sovereignty.
“This clown is a useful tool, but he does grow tiresome,” Babykiller commented. “We should be thinking about dinner—”
Babykiller stopped talking. He was momentarily riveted to the screen. Then he started to laugh.
“Did you see the General check his watch and glance down the road? The pimply-faced
ninny. Even I'll admit that not all federal agents are incompetent. One of them is watching, right now, noticing that nervous glance, and picking up a phone. Within minutes, the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation will know that the General is expecting the Cavalry to come riding, bugles blaring, over the hill.”
“I don't get the joke.”
“The Cavalry's not coming. I'm not sending them. I can't wait to watch the showdown when the government realizes the General can't back up his threats. The FBI will probably blow up the Savannah River Plant themselves, trying to recapture it.”
Larabeth knew that, by agreeing to go with Babykiller, she had bought Cynthia nothing but time. She hadn't even been able to do that much for J.D. Now her daughter sat in the fields of Armageddon, waiting for the final battle to begin.
She was trembling from fear, shock, anger—she couldn't tell the difference any more—but she tried to still herself. Babykiller had his arm around her and it was a poor time to show weakness.
* * *
Immediately after the Army of the Resurrection took the Savannah River Site, the General demanded a television crew and access to America's airwaves. He posed in front of the south gate of the Savannah River Site and began talking to his fellow Americans. After he'd been talking awhile, Chao quietly returned to the van housing his command office.
If the General had possessed a gram of common sense, he would have insisted that Chao stay with him at all times, but the General was stupid. And he was busy telling America about the Army of the Resurrection and about its grievances with the federal government.
Chao reviewed videotapes of the convoy that had carried the Army and its hostages onto the site. The tapes confirmed his earlier observations. The trucks had been primarily loaded with personnel, each one carrying an assault rifle. There was certainly enough room in the trucks for small volumes of explosives, but nobody had driven a U-Haul full of ANFO past him. If they were planning the kind of large-scale destruction the world had just seen in Oklahoma City, they would be using other means.
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