Death Watch

by Elizabeth Forrest

  He’s been out of town since Ibie keeled over, trying to avoid speculation he might run to replace old Walker. Sounds like a setup to me. It smells. I haven’t been able to trace back where the buzz started. Anyway, it’s our man who starts fires.” Dolan paused. “Do you think it’s Mr. Blue?”

  Carter took a deep breath. His rib cage answered with stabbing pains and he threw a forearm across his diaphragm, hugging himself for comfort. He remembered the fireman’s hoist, the carry which had boosted him up and then thrown him halfway across the room. The assailant had to have been Herbert Dudley. “If it was, he’s been awfully busy tonight. He has McKenzie.”

  “Jesus. When?”

  “Just now.” Carter told him a little about the assault at the shelter and why he had Mac at his place. “He broke in, trashed me, and took her. I was just getting ready to send the county mounties to Craig’s place.” He took another experimental breath, sucked in the pain.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Help me to think. If Dudley has her....” Carter stopped in mid-sentence. Mac had said that Susan Craig would never let her go. If Dudley was out and operating, it was likely on the doctor’s behest. Dudley took her for Craig.

  “Carter?” Concern was in Dolan’s usually breezy tone.

  “Yeah. I’m here. Listen, if Dudley’s on a rampage, it’s because the doctor set it up. Find the doctor, and we’ll find McKenzie.” But where? His thoughts felt as scrambled as his insides.

  “She won’t go back to Mount Mercy. And there’s nothing left but ashes at the other two locations.”

  He couldn’t focus. “I can’t think. Listen, Dolan, before I forget, there’s a good chance she tried to waste Ibie Walker. I want you to call whoever is in charge of that investigation, and make sure they know he’s still a target. She might send somebody.”

  “What’s the connection? That’s pretty far out in left field.”

  “McKenzie saw the good doctor more than hesitate to revive Walker after he collapsed in her lab. As far as motive, it could be payback for Walker’s interference on the Fernandina project—”

  Fernandina, a hospital, dormant and still. Quiet. Layers of floors, above and below the surface. It wouldn’t be a refuge too long, but if all Craig wanted to do was to gather her resources and beat an organized retreat.... “Shit,” blurted Carter.

  “What?”

  “I think that’s where she might be.”

  “The old hospital.”

  “That’s the one. Call Moreno. Call or fax Sofer and Franklin. If Susan Craig is there, Dudley may not be far behind. I don’t want any loose cannons barging in there.”

  Dolan said worriedly, “You’re going to need some serious firepower.”

  “You just make sure the troops aren’t far behind me.” He hung up before Dolan could answer.

  Carter retraced his steps across the room to the bedroom closet. There, from the back of the top shelf, he retrieved his .38. He hadn’t bothered getting a permit for it here. Georg Bauer’s trail had grown cold long before. He slipped it from its holster. The gun smelled faintly of the last oiling he’d given it. He loaded it, and dropped extra ammo in his pocket.

  Programmed to kill or not, he’d bet the .38 could drop Dudley in his tracks.

  If Carter could see him coming.

  If Susan Craig had ever developed her program on architectural imaging, and if Dudley carried that around in his head, he might be facing a killing machine who knew all the loopholes. All the ins and outs of the mazelike building. All Carter had were his hazy memories of years gone by when he’d written a series of stories there.

  He could hope they’d underestimated him, and he’d overestimated them.

  He could hope McKenzie was still alive.

  Dolan put his TV on mute and dialed Moreno’s number. He got the voice mail for the department. He almost hung up, knowing Moreno probably would not check the mailbox before morning, but he stayed on the line and left the officer a detailed message that made as much sense as he could collect out of what Carter had told him. He put an urgent flag on it. He also put in a call to Moreno’s pager and left the department’s own voice mail number on the beeper’s message system. Maybe that would do some good.

  Then he went to his computer and booted up his fax-modem program and composed a like message for the Bureau. When it came time to transmit, the software hung up, signaling him the transmission couldn’t go through.

  FBI traffic, coming in at night. Dolan bit his lip. He instructed the program to keep trying transmission, recycling automatically. It was all he could do. When he called, he got a polite recorded message informing him of Bureau hours.

  He had only one other person he could try. He pulled up Joyce Tompkins’ pager number and dialed it. She would be madder than a wet hen, but Dolan didn’t think he had much choice. He sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and waited for callbacks.

  Otherwise, Carter was going in alone.

  All the coffee in the world couldn’t help Sofer combat his jet lag. His body seemed determined to maintain E. S. T. even though his mind had to work three hours later. It was hell in the early mornings and late evenings. So was the heat and smog. He trailed after Franklin, his suit smelling faintly of smoke and char. The call for the CyberImago fire had taken him out of a late dinner and the greasy super taco he held in one hand did not promise a satisfactory substitute.

  Franklin sat down at his desk and eyed the clutter as Sofer wearily lowered himself into a chair. Franklin said, for about the twelfth time that week, “You know, if you like Mexican food, this is the town to get it in, not that fast food crap—”

  “I know, I know,” Sofer muttered around the taco. His teeth chomped down, squirting hot sauce and melted cheese into his mouth.

  Franklin picked a slip off his desk. He looked up, California crow’s-feet deepening around his eyes. “Better hurry. We’ve got another call to make.”

  Sofer’s free hand went automatically to his tie. “I smell like Smoky the Bear. Should I change jackets?”

  “Don’t think so. This time Susan Craig’s home address burned down. Arson investigators are doing some preliminary work.”

  “It’s after midnight!”

  Franklin put up an eyebrow. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Only because the very, very wicked won’t let them.” Sofer stuffed the rest of his taco into his mouth, mopped up the overflowing juices with a napkin, and followed Franklin back out of the office.

  Behind them, as the door closed, a single phone began to ring. The automatic phone system cycled it quickly into the phone mail, and Agent Franklin’s mailbox got ready to record a message.

  “Hello. I—I don’t know if I’m speaking to the right agent or not, so I’m trusting that this gets passed along properly. I can’t leave my name, but I will leave a pager number—702-5555—and someone needs to call me back. I need to talk to an agent about Dr. Susan Craig. I have reason to believe she may have ordered a hit on Los Angeles Councilman Ibie Walker, and she’s trying to blackmail me, as well. Please contact me as soon as possible.”

  The line went dead after a last, quavering word from Stephen Hotchkiss.

  Carter turned off the car lights and pulled in quietly, gliding to a stop. He ached and put his hand to his rib cage again. That sweet, coppery smell was thick in the car. He pulled his hand back wet and warm.

  “What the—” He cracked the car door, letting the light come on, and looked at his fingers.

  Blood.

  He’d been stabbed and hadn’t even known it. He skewed around on the seat, swinging his feet outside to the ground, leaned back and pulled up his shirt. Nothing too gory, though the sight of the entry wound made him queasy for a moment. He reached up to his left shoulder and ripped the sleeve down after three or four very vigorous tugs, made a compress, and tucked it inside his shirt.

  Dudley had been going for a fatal wound. He’d missed—God knew why—then Carter smiled grimly. God bless those cr
ooked ribs. The knife blade must have slid off them. He was losing blood, but not too rapidly. The compress would have to do.

  He retucked his shirt tightly and gathered his thoughts again. Chain-link fencing ran all around the hospital site, though he could see it had been breached in several places. Wild thistles pushed their way up through asphalt, dark purple in the late evening. Lights gleamed from the hospital building, though anyone could tell the building was abandoned. Power had been maintained to keep it from becoming a ghost town, a shooting gallery. At one time, a janitor had even lived in Fernandina, though Carter had no idea if anyone did now. The lights were sporadic and insufficient. Inside, the building would be creaking, dirty, aged, disrupted by the earthquake and abandonment. Still, there were four floors up and two, no, three, Carter corrected himself, three floors down. The surgical theaters and the morgue made for two. File storage and utilities the other one. The floors below were basements in the foundation, basically, not the full size of the stories above although Fernandina was a small facility by anyone’s standards.

  Mac could be anywhere.

  He wanted to wait for reinforcements. Every painful breath told him he should.

  But he didn’t dare.

  He got out of the car and shut the door quietly. He slipped a hand to the small of his back, checking his belt holster and the .38. He was no Lone Ranger, but he could not wait.

  Chapter 36

  Flash. Looking into a face in which nothing was human except the general outlines, a death mask with eyes that watched her avidly.

  Mac came awake with a jolting dread. Her head pounded with a sickly sweet smell and her tongue felt like cotton. Where was Carter? Where was she? She remembered being caught up, of trying to kick free. A man had burst into the apartment, throwing Carter aside like a broken toy, and snatched her up. She had fought, uselessly. Then a rag was pressed to her face, and she had tried not to breathe, but she had to, sending her into a dizzying drop, a downward spiral which seemed never to end, a dreamless unconsciousness.

  Her lips tasted horrible. She choked as she tried to lick them clean. Gagging, she nearly fell over, slipping against soft cloth bonds which held her to a chair. The chair scrapped against the linoleum flooring as she managed to right herself. Alone. No sign, human or inhuman, of her captor.

  The long, thin room—no, she told herself. A corridor. The corridor was lit in a golden, sepia manner, almost adequate to see, but not quite. The linoleum under her feet was an anonymous brown speckle, heavily waxed over the years, until it had a patina almost as golden as the illumination around her. Her neck felt too weak to hold her head up, so she stared at the flooring.

  Remembered it. She’d seen flooring like it before. Was she somewhere she knew?

  Mac lifted her chin. Beige baseboards ran a foot or more up the walls, like splash guards or chair rails, then the walls were an indifferent ivory color. The hallway was not totally empty. Here and there an old wooden desk might be pushed against the side, a chair or two sitting beside it. It reminded her for a moment of an old school, when the janitors used to push the furniture into the corridors so they could clean the classrooms. But it had been a long time since any student had been here, if this had been a school.

  At the joints where one intersection met another, the plaster was heavily cracked, crevices zigzagging their way from ceiling to bottom. Lights overhead were caged in thick, wire covers. Desiccated insect forms dotted the inside of the lights. Had she been left to die, alone and caged as they had been?

  Mac twisted her wrists, felt the soft cloths which held her give. She pulled more vigorously, then stopped as she heard a heavy door open.

  Susan Craig and a man came into the corridor. He walked with an easy athletic grace, his shoulders wide inside the dark sweat suit. His head seemed malformed, and it wasn’t until he turned to look at her that she could see he wore one of the virtual reality helmets, modified, its visor covering his face. The shiny ebony surface gleamed, reflecting her shocked face back at her, but she could still see through its translucent shield to his hard eyes that watched her back. Hungry eyes. Eyes without a shred of sanity or compassion.

  A tiny sound escaped her as he reached up and pulled the garish-looking mask off. Behind it, the face was hard as stone, and warped, as if it had been misshaped. As if someone had taken his face between the palms of gigantic hands and squeezed it under tremendous pressure, offsetting it. A delicate, fine-lined scar ran along the brow, across the temple, and disappeared into the hairline. He had been a handsome man once. It was the eyes which made her look away. Mac could not meet the terrible expression in their depths.

  Even as she took a shuddering breath to steel herself, she felt something more. She could hear the sleeping man stirring.

  As much as she feared Susan Craig and the man with her, Mac was more afraid of what she sensed but could not see.

  The sleeping man. He did not stand before her, but his presence filled the air as powerfully as if he did. What was he, what could he be, that she feared him more than she did the two in front of her, the two she could see, the two she knew existed?

  The unmasked man plucked at the doctor’s elbow to gain her attention. “She’s awake,” he said flatly.

  Susan turned around. “Good. We’ve no time to waste.” She pushed her light blonde hair away from her face in a strangely feminine gesture, smiling, though her blue eyes stayed as chill as always. She drew near.

  “Who is he?” Mac asked.

  Susan looked over her shoulder. “Not that it will matter, but this is Herbert Dudley. The papers have been speculating about him lately. They sometimes call him Mr. Blue.”

  That would have scared her enough, but she knew that what she dreaded meeting was even more terrible. This was flesh and blood. The other defied her comprehension.

  “No,” Mac returned. “Not him. The sleeping man.”

  Dudley went incredibly pale and stepped back against the corridor wall in retreat. Susan’s eyebrows flew up, a genuine expression of surprise on her face, and then she composed herself.

  “You have depths,” she answered, “I hadn’t suspected.”

  “She can’t know.” His mouth worked a moment before Dudley got the words out.

  “Of course she can. That’s why I kept her alive.” Susan pushed her sleeves up. “Aren’t you going to ask how you got here, McKenzie? Or what we did with Carter Wyndall?”

  At the newsman’s name, the big man let out a short laugh. Her chest tightened, but she would not let them see her respond. She could still smell his scent on her skin, feel his warm hand on her shape, share the look in his gentle eyes.

  Nothing like the eyes watching her now.

  Mac stared back levelly.

  “No? Well, we haven’t time for small talk anyway.” She said to Dudley, “Boot up the computer. Load the main program. I want the master matrix brought up.”

  He had not yet fully regained his color, and it seemed to McKenzie that the big man paled even more. He hesitated.

  “Do it.”

  Dudley, holding his helmet by a strap, went back inside the doorway they’d just come out.

  She walked around behind Mac and unlocked the chair’s casters with a kick of her toe. “You asked about the sleeping man,” Craig told her, as she wheeled the chair down the corridor. “You share Dudley’s nickname for him. Did he tell or did you sense it? Dudley has a special relationship with him, but nothing, I suspect, like yours will be. You have a gift, McKenzie, of being able to interface reality with virtual reality. I found it when I was going over the empirical data of your spatial scans.”

  “Virtual reality is just, and only that,” Craig continued. “To be sure, the animation and graphic imagery has improved by leaps and bounds. With certain hallucinogenic drugs and subliminal cues, you’ll even swear you can smell and touch and taste what your eyes are watching, what your ears are hearing. But you can’t. No matter how much you might wish to, because it isn’t real. It is a dream world
which we can train you, to a certain extent, to manipulate. We can use it for therapy and diagnosis, for recreation, for mind expansion, behavior modification—” Susan Craig broke off. She turned the chair sharply into a doorway. “The applications are almost endless.”

  “But we cannot blend it into reality. One leaves this world to enter the other. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, but there is a threshold which exists.”

  “But I can do something you can’t.”

  “Indeed.” Susan leaned down. The room they entered was, or had been, an office. It was empty now. Old, brittle, yellowed paper drifted across the floor like autumn leaves, skittering away from Dudley’s steps as he came back toward them. Battered and rusting old file cabinets sagged against the wall. In its midst, several newer chairs and a computer setup seemed jarringly out of place. A second, spartan monitor and phone line ruled a smaller desk.