Death Dream (47 page)

But he could not. Doc was fighting to save his own life, Dan knew, and he could not go against the man who had been so much of a father to him.

"It's your decision, Dorothy," Doc said, his voice low but edged with steel.

She nodded so slightly that Dan was not sure until she whispered, "I understand. Go ahead."

"Do you want to leave, take a break?" Appleton asked.

"No. I want to be with him."

With trembling hands Dan popped open the little computer and moved to the right side of the bed. Narlikar sighed like a man who wished he were someplace else.

Appleton stayed beside Dorothy.

Bending over Ralph's madly contorted face, Dan said softly, "Ralph, can you hear me? It's Dan Santorini."

Martinez mumbled something unintelligible. Dan winced at his odor. Beneath the hospital antiseptics and the crisp smell of freshly bleached sheets was the cloying stench of death.

"I've got a computer here," Dan said, putting the notebook machine on the bed. "You know how to use a keyboard, don't you?"

Martinez might have tried to nod. His right eye seemed to focus on Dan's face.

"We need to know what happened in the simulator, Ralph. You're the only one who can tell us what happened to you."

Another mumble. This one ended in a gargling cough.

"He should be resting!" Narlikar hissed.

Ignoring the physician, Dan took Ralph's right hand and placed the fingers on the keyboard. The colonel's hand felt cold, lifeless.

"You're on the keyboard, Ralph. can you feel the keys? Type a "yes" for me if you can." For agonizing moments the hand did not move. Then slowly, as if with enormous effort, his index finger moved across the keys:

UES

Dan glanced up at Appleton and Dorothy, across the bed. "Close enough," he said. Looking down at Martinez again he said, "Good, Ralph. Good."

The finger typed, LOV YOU DOR she fell to her knees and put her face next to her husband's. "I love you too,
querido
. I love you!"

He could not turn his head but his eye swung toward her. Slowly his fingers moved across the keyboard.

PLS DON CRY

One of the machines behind the bed changed the tone of its monitoring hum. Dan looked up and saw that Ralph's heart rate had quickened. Is that good or bad? he wondered. Narlikar did not seem to notice it.

"Ralph," he said swiftly, "can you tell us what happened to you in the simulation? Anything at all. What happened?"

MY FAULT

"What does he mean?" Appleton whispered, staring at the letters glowing on the little screen.

"Was it a normal mission?" Dan asked. "Did the stimulation go the way we programmed it?"

Y/N

"Yes or no?"

BOTH

"I don't understand," Dan said. "How could that be?"

JAVE

"Say again." Dan unconsciously lapsed into the clipped jargon of the fliers.

JACE

"Jace was a thousand miles away, Ralph."

No response. The monitoring machines were all running at a higher pitch. Narlikar was looking at the worriedly. "We must stop," he said.

But Dan went on. "Ralph, tell us what happened to you. We've got to know what happened."

JACE

"Jace couldn't have had anything to do with it."

JACE DID THIS TI ME

"It must stop!" Narlikar insisted. "It must stop now!"

The monitors were all screeching thin high-pitched wails of danger. Dan saw the jagged peaks and valleys of the display screens smoothing, flattening into pencil-thin straight lines. Narlikar punched the red emergency button on the bedside console.

"Get out!" he screeched. "Clear the area!"

Dan took the computer with him and followed Doc Appleton, who was holding Dorothy by the shoulders and helping her through the doorway as a team of grim-faced medics barged past them pushing a cart full of emergency equipment.

They stood outside the cubicle, surrounded by the intensive care ward's semicircle of desks and monitoring screens. The two nurses on duty gave .them unhappy glances but said nothing. For fifteen minutes they waited in morbid silence while the emergency team surrounded Ralph's bed, shouting, flailing at his dying body. Dan felt as if he were underwater trying to hold his breath for fear of drowning. Another pair of green-suited medics raced into Ralph's cubicle. Another ten minutes went by.

Then Narlikar came out, ash-gray, exhausted. "There was nothing we could do," said the physician. His face hardened as he turned to Dan. "Your interrogation was too much for him."

Dorothy half-collapsed in Appleton's arms, sobbing.

Dan stood there. Narlikar, the two desk-bound nurses, even Doc Appleton all stared at him accusingly. But in his hand he held the open computer and its screen still read JACE DID THIS TI ME.

CHAPTER 36

"Somebody's following me," said Luke Peterson" He was driving his Cutlass through the Friday afternoon traffic on Interstate 4 with one hand, his other holding the cellular phone clamped to his ear.

"Following you? Are you certain?" The cold voice of the Inquisitor sounded more incredulous than alarmed.

"I know when I'm being followed," Peterson said, glaring into his rear-view mirror. "It's a bronze Dodge Intrepid and it's been tailing me since this morning. Everywhere I go, it's right behind me."

"They're not very good if they let you spot them"

"I think they want me to know they're watching me."

The Inquisitor fell silent for a moment. "We've been checking out this man Smith. He's not FBI."

"These aren't FBI men," Peterson said. "I know the local feds."

"They could have brought agents in from Washington—"

Unconsciously Peterson shook his head. "They don't behave tike FBI. Not the same MO."

"Can you see their license number?"

"No, they're behind me," Peterson answered with some irritation. "But it's a rental, I can tell you that much."

A long silence while he weaved one-handed through the four lanes of heavy traffic. He cut in front of a station wagon full of kids; the woman driving it blared her horn angrily at him.

"Well," Peterson demanded, "What do you want me to do?"

"Do nothing," came the response. "Stay away from Santorini for the time being—"

"That's easy. He's gone back to Dayton. "

"And his family?"

"They're still here."

"You've tapped their phone?"

The Intrepid slid in behind him. Faintly he heard the station wagon's horn blasting again.

"Nothing so crude as tapping," Peterson answered. "I just pick up their phone conversations remotely with the ELINT gear. But I've got to be within a block of their house to do it."

"Let it go for now. I can get someone else to monitor their phone."

"And what do I do?"

"Nothing. Not until I find out exactly who this man smith is and who is following you."

"I don't like this. He must have some pretty strong friends back in Washington," Peterson said.

"We have friends in the capital, also," said the Inquisitor. "Powerful friends."

"So I'll just spend the weekend taking life easy and hoping these guys behind me aren't licensed to kill, is that it?"

"Don't be melodramatic."

"You're not the one being followed. And don't think diplomatic immunity is going to help you if they put the screws to me. I'm no hero."

"I can take care of the situation, don't worry."

"I'm already worried."

"You just take the weekend off and spend the time thinking of a way to deliver Santorini."

"From Dayton?"

"No, he will be back. We checked into the situation there. He will most likely return this evening."

They've got contacts inside the Air Force
, Peterson thought.
Impressive. Maybe he really can take care of the men following me. If he feels it's in his own best interest. The main thing is to keep him from throwing me to the wolves.

"Once Santorini has settled down once again, you must find a way to get him to me."

"Not while I'm being tailed."

"Of course not. I will take care of that part of it."

Peterson had always known that the kind of games he played could occasionally get rough. But as he glanced in his rear-view again at the big bronze Intrepid planted on his tail he worried that this time he would be the one on the receiving end.
Plenty of cubes in that engine; they'll be able to outrun me even if she's not souped up. And all I've got to give them is the Inquisitor's name and phone number. One lousy contact. His name's probably a phony and he'll leave the country the instant he realizes I've been grabbed.

He clicked the phone back into its holder and reached into his jacket pocket for a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his brow and bald pate.
What other cards do I have?
he asked himself.
If they grab me, what can I offer them?

Not a damned thing. He found himself hoping that the Inquisitor would not be able to peel the tail off him and would call the whole operation off. Not even the amount of money they were paying him was worth this kind of risk. A guy could wind up dead in a game like this. A nice convenient car wreck or maybe a heart attack or a fatal stabbing by muggers. Peterson felt scared.
Best thing to do is call the whole thing off.

But he knew the Inquisitor wouldn't do that. He wanted Damon Santorini and he always got what he wanted.

"She popped in here today looking for m make like it was nothing special but I can tell when somebody's pissed off."

Dan's on his way home, Susan said to herself as she hung up the phone. At least that's something, she thought. His voice had sounded so down on the phone, so utterly exhausted, that she hadn't had the heart to ask him any details about what had happened. Ralph Martinez was dead and her husband was coming back to her. That was all that really mattered. For the moment.

As she went back to her desk in the kitchen alcove Susan glanced out the bay window at Angela, running across the lawn of stiff Bermuda grass with a handful of neighborhood kids. That's the way children should play, she told herself. out in the open air and sunshine, running and laughing. Not locked up in some VR booth with electronic LSD pumping into their brains.

Still, she worried about fire ants and sunburn and a thousand other dangers that the world could throw at a twelve-year-old girl.

Phil was sitting on the kitchen floor happily banging on a pair of lids from Susan's pots. Surrounded by a month's income-worth of toys, he still preferred the shiny noisy lids.
Boys
, thought Susan. Before long he'll be outside too, playing baseball and skinning his knees and getting into fistfights with his friends. The baby was showing increasing signs of rambunctiousness. A month ago he had been content to spend half the afternoon in his playpen.
Now he wants to get out and explore. They don't stay babies for long.

But as she sat in the little secretary's chair in front of her computer, Susan's seething anger rose up again. Dan had driven his own car to the airport to meet the Air Force jet that Dr. Appleton had sent. He would drive himself home when the plane returned him to Kissimmee. Out and back in the same day. At least he did not have to stay in Dayton overnight again.

Susan had been glad to see him go. The smoldering rage she felt about Muncrief and Vickie lying to them, tampering with the school games, assaulting Angela's mind and then blandly insisting that nothing of the sort tad taken place, that hot wrath of hers blistered Dan too. It wasn't his fault, she knew that, but still it infuriated her that he could not accept what seemed so obvious to her.

"They're trying to rape your daughter!" she had raged at rim the night before.

"Sue, for chrissake, stop exaggerating!"

"Rape her mind."

"Maybe so," Dan had answered. "When I come back we'll get to the bottom of this. I'll find out what's going on and then we'll know who's doing what to whom. But until we have some real proof you can't go barging around making wild accusations."

They had argued half the night, Susan getting angrier and more frantic while Dan struggled to stay calm and under control. His asthma started, the way it always did when he was faced with a crisis, and Dan had spent the remaining hours until dawn sitting up in bed, wheezing, struggling to breathe. which just made Susan angrier at Kyle and Vickie and Dan and herself.

Her first instinct, after Dan had left the house that morning, haggard and tight-lipped, was to go down to the lab and face Vickie in her own den. But the offices were closed for the Thanksgiving weekend and when she tried to phone Vickie's apartment all she got was a stupid answering machine. So Susan spent her Friday morning setting up the key-word list Dan would need to search the files she had pulled on Jace's information requests, fuming inwardly. Ever since lunch, though, she had been trying to ferret out more information about the VR games in the ParaReality programs.

To no avail. Yes, there were back-ups to each of the fourteen school games on file. But she could not access them from her home computer.

Still Susan worked at it doggedly, trying to crack the security codes that guarded the games and their back-ups. She glanced at the window every now and then, though, and saw that Angela was still playing with the neighbor's kids. Philip was happily clanging away a few feet from her. She looked up at the kitchen clock and saw that Dan's plane would be leaving Wright-Patterson in less than an hour. If it took off on time.

"I'll take Dorothy home," said Dr Appleton.

Dan had just hung up after calling Sue from one of the pay phones lining the wall of the hospital corridor.

Appleton looked grim, but he no longer had the defeated, hang-dog look he had worn a few days earlier.

"Maybe I should," Dan said.

"No," Doc answered firmly. "You go home to your wife. I'll take care of Dorothy. It's my responsibility."

Dan heard the unspoken words:
I may have helped you to kill her husband but I'm not going to let you destroy your marriage.

"Does she have any relatives in the area?" Dan asked.

"I don't think so. She told me some friends are coming over to stay with her tonight."