Resistant (30 page)

Humphrey had a mixed form of CP resulting in symptoms of both the spastic and athetoid types. Not easy. He endured involuntary movements of his face, arms, legs, and body, difficulty swallowing, drooling, and slurred speech, in addition to having tight muscles, which limited his movement altogether. He credited Cassie with keeping him from wallowing in self-pity.

Cassie knew he was bright and respected him for that. But he had never bothered to try to demonstrate to her just
how
bright. He was embarrassed to show off in that way, and feared he would intimidate her and drive her away. Now, with the newfound help of Lou Welcome, he wouldn’t have to demonstrate his brilliance to anyone. Universal recognition of that was certain to follow when word got out of his achievement and his role in defeating the Doomsday Germ.

Following their morning routine, Humphrey was dressed and at his desk, a specially constructed workstation. While Cassie busied herself with the breakfast dishes, Humphrey used the joystick controls for his computer, which allowed him to search, type, and code with almost the same ease as an able-bodied person. Prior to Lou, Humphrey had used this time each morning to enlarge on his bacteriophage theories and computer models. Now that his lab was about to be functioning, he was instead preparing for the first round of serious, confirmatory experiments—studies that would rapidly lead to the cure for the deadly germ, and the sort of fame that would transcend his disabilities.

Cassie emerged from the kitchen with her denim jacket over her arm, a signal that their time together this morning had come to an end. She was rushing because if Humphrey did not make it to the curb on time, the van would simply leave without him.

“You’ve been extra happy these past few mornings, Humphrey,” she said, her lilting Jamaican accent like a birdsong. She paused at the door, contemplating. Then, with the trace of a smile, she asked, “Mr. Miller, have you got a girlfriend you’re keeping secret from me?”

Humphrey’s smile was ebullient.

“Never compared to you,” he said.

Cassie’s hands went to her hips. She gave him an appraising look, but not because she had any difficulty understanding his speech.

“She better not, mister, or I might get jealous.”

She opened the door and Humphrey, who had glanced away for one last, longing look at the other love of his life, his computer, heard two strange popping sounds. He turned to see Cassie fly backward, feet off the ground, arms beating the air. She landed on her back with crimson welling through two holes punched through her white blouse and into her chest.

With blood beginning to flow onto the floor beside her, a man entered the apartment and softly closed the door behind him. It was only then that Humphrey cried out—a weak, strangled scream. The man was tall and thin, with blond hair and pale eyes as cold as ice. Humphrey, staring down in utter disbelief at the inert body of the woman who loved him more than any other he knew, began to hyperventilate. The tall man gingerly stepped over Cassie, careful to avoid the expanding pool.

“Hello, Miller,” he said. “Sorry if I seem surprised. Nobody told me anything about you being a fucking cripple. My name is Burke, Alexander Burke, and I’m going to take you out of this shithole … now.”

Humphrey’s fear spiked, triggering a chain reaction in his body. His CP symptoms were often affected by his emotions and he had already lost most of what control he maintained over his limbs. His arms and legs jerked chaotically. His facial muscles tensed, distorting his features. His thoughts became a blur.

“Oh, my God,” he finally managed. “Why did you do that?”

Burke looked at him curiously.

“I don’t understand you,” he said, reaching for Humphrey’s motorized wheelchair. Instinctively, Humphrey pulled on the control stick and backed up, but in the small apartment, there was really no place for him to go. Burke, at once bemused and repulsed, watched his efforts. After creating a couple of feet between them, Humphrey pawed at the medical emergency alert device linked around his wrist. The killer moved to stop him, then paused and grinned. His prey, at least for the moment, was helpless. Beside Humphrey, Cassie’s blood glistened on the hardwood floor, and filled the room with a nauseating, coppery smell.

“This must be horrible for you,” Burke said. “Help is just a button push away and yet you can’t even do it. Why in the hell do the Neighbors want you so much anyway?”

He ambled across the room, grasped the emergency bracelet, and ripped it off Humphrey’s wrist with one hard yank.

“Who pays for all this?” he asked, holding up the bracelet, and using it to gesture around the room and down at the lifeless woman on the floor. “Who pays for this whore to come to your apartment and tend to you? Wait, don’t answer that. I already know.”

“What … what … do you want?”

Humphrey continued to quake.

Burke ignored the question, quite possibly because he could not understand it.

“Where is your family?” he demanded. “How come they don’t take care of you? Wait, don’t answer that. It’s because it’s easier for Uncle Sam to foot the bill, that’s why. Fucking leeches. Entitlement. That’s what’s made such a mess of this country. Your mother boozed or smoked or drugged or all three when she was pregnant with you, and we all end up paying for it for as long as you live. Trillions of dollars. That’s what your entitlement programs cost the rest of us. Trillions!”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? Is that what you said? Hey, I understood what you said. Okay. I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to get your materials related to the Janus bacteria together so you can make us an antibiotic that works. Our scientists and our laboratory are waiting for you.”

“No … I don’t know…”

Burke slapped him violently across the face. Bright blood began coursing from one nostril over his lip and into his mouth. Grabbing one handle and the control stick of his wheelchair, Burke drove him over to his computer. There was a large gym bag nearby. The killer, virtually out of patience and composure, emptied the clothing from the bag, swept up the mass of papers and articles covering the cluttered desk surface, and jammed everything into it. Then he pulled open the drawers and a file cabinet, and did the same. The bag was bulging by the time he finished.

“Okay, what do you want to print out from that computer? I have the address of our scientist in case you just want to send it. You had better get everything you need, because if you screw this up and don’t make the antibiotic we need, you’re going to die, one tiny piece at a time. And I tell you, I’m going to love doing it. Understand? I said,
do … you … understand
?”

Burke raised his hand menacingly and seemed about to swing when he spotted a joystick near the computer and slid it over. Normally, Humphrey could maneuver the device with ease and some speed. This time however, he fumbled with it. The smell of Cassie’s clotting blood made it difficult to concentrate, and in addition he was having no luck at all processing who could possibly have sent for him this way. At that moment, he felt Burke’s hand on the back of his neck. A burning, electric pain shot across his shoulders and down his spine. His vision went white.

“I can press on this nerve even harder if you’d like,” Burke said. “You won’t ever pass out. Never ever. Trust me on that.”

Humphrey had been verbally abused for much of his life, but this was the first time anyone had purposely inflicted physical pain on him. He feared this man more than he had ever feared anything or anyone.

In truth, there was little in his electronic files that he did not know virtually by heart, but what little control he might have over whatever was in store for him depended on no one seeing what was in those files. He had a backup system, but the only hard copy at the moment he had given away to his new lab assistant.

Carefully, he wrapped his hand around the joystick and launched a special program he had designed to protect his work from being pirated—a program he called Kill Switch. His program would delete not only all the files from his computer, but from the backups for those files as well. If he ever had to use Kill Switch, he would rely on his memory.

It took just three seconds.

With Burke watching, Humphrey pressed a sequence of keys and the computer monitor flashed and flickered as though it had been powered off and quickly turned back on. Sensing trouble, Burke bent over and stared at the screen. Items he had noted on the electronic desktop had suddenly vanished.

“What did you just do?” he demanded.

Humphrey’s speech, rapid and legitimately frightened, was muddled beyond the killer’s ability to understand. Barely able to control his movements, Humphrey used his joystick to bring up a blank text document into which he typed:

kill application all data deleted forever gone from backup servers too GO FUCK YOURSELF!

“You stupid, crippled jerk!”

Violently, Burke tipped over the surprisingly heavy wheelchair, groaning at the effort and sending Humphrey sprawling through the half-clotted pool of blood and into Cassie’s body. For a minute, he let him lie there, a hermit crab ripped from its shell.

“Now,” he said after regaining a modicum of composure, “you’re going to learn a little of what happens to people who fuck with me.”

Burke set the toe of his boot across the fingers of Humphrey’s left hand, stood on it with all his weight, and held it there.

“From what I’ve been told, you’re a very brilliant scientist. But you’re also very stupid. I have orders to bring you back to the lab at Red Cliff, but I wasn’t instructed to bring back all of your fingers.”

He finally stepped back and crossed to the tiny kitchen, returning with a large carving knife. Careful to avoid the blood, he got down on one knee and pressed the tip of the knife into the knuckle of one of Humphrey’s injured fingers.

“One little push, and you’ll never use this finger to pick your nose again.”

“P-please stop!”

“Now listen and listen good. I know scientists. Scientists don’t ever leave themselves without a copy of their data somewhere. You have to have a backup. You have one, don’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.

The knife point pierced the skin and entered the knuckle.

Humphrey, screaming without sound, managed a nod.

“Good,” Burke said, twisting the blade. “Okay, this is it. Tell me where you keep the backup or you are minus one finger. And I’ll still have nine to play with. Understand?” A nod. “Ready to cooperate and not do anything else stupid?”

“Y-yes.”

Burke pulled the wheelchair upright, lifted his prey off the ground, and dropped him like a rag doll into the seat. Humphrey’s teeth snapped closed on the side of his tongue. Blood frothed out the corner of his mouth. Burke pushed the bloody apparition to his computer and again shoved the joystick at him.

“Okay, where is the backup copy?” Burke asked.

Humphrey, spitting blood onto his shirtsleeve, fumbled with the joystick, but finally, the letters appeared on the screen.

There is no data backup.

Burke put the knife to Humphrey’s wounded knuckle once more.

“I told you not to mess with me! There is a backup somewhere. Now, where is it? This is your last chance before pieces of you begin to fly. And do it fast. I’m running out of time.”

Humphrey’s hands were shaking too much to type.

“Please, take knife away,” he said.

Burke did not oblige.

“Jesus. I can barely understand a word you’re saying. Just nod. Is this guy in Atlanta?… Good. Can you tell me where?… You don’t know? Okay, type what you do know. Remember. One lie and that finger goes, and I’m gonna love doing it.… Hospital. He’s at the hospital? The one you work at?… Excellent. If he’s there, I can find him. If he’s not, this knife and I are going to pay you another visit. Now, once more, type out his name.… Good. Now, grab anything you need because you won’t be coming back here for a long time. And don’t think for an instant that this Dr. Lou Welcome won’t turn your work over to me. Unless he’s as badly deformed as you are, he’ll have plenty of fingers for me to work on.”

CHAPTER 38

           When it comes to commitment, you are either fully engaged or not, for there is no gray area. Half measures will avail us nothing.

        
—LANCASTER R. HILL,
100 Neighbors
, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1939

His ringing cell phone roused Vaill from a dreamless sleep. Even before answering it, he began testing himself. Stiff sheets, unfamiliar mattress, LG TV propped up on the dresser at the foot of the bed. He was in a hotel—a Marriott in downtown Atlanta. The room curtains were like lead shields, and if the sun had already come up, it was impossible to tell. The ringing continued. Vaill fumbled for the phone, knocking over his bottle of Tylenol. His voice was sleep-drenched.

“Yeah, Vaill here.”

“Tim, it’s Chuck.”

Vaill brightened.

“Hey, buddy, what’s going on? What time is it?”

“Sorry to wake you, sleeping beauty. I actually thought you’d already be gone. It’s eight-thirty.”

“Shit.”

Vaill sat up and felt a twinge behind his eyes, but nothing materialized. He had planned to get Welcome to the Richard B. Russell Federal Building and the district court magistrate judge before nine. Now he’d be hard-pressed to make it there by ten. No big deal, he supposed.

“Don’t worry about it,” McCall said. “It’s probably just as well if Welcome’s not moved around too much.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I just got a call from the team Snyder sent over with a warrant to Miller’s apartment. They found the place trashed, and a dead body in a pool of clotted blood in the middle of the floor. Humphrey’s gone. The guys are knocking on doors now, but so far no one saw or heard anything. The victim’s name is Cassie Bayard. She works for a company that provides home health services. Took two in the chest from close range.”

Burke!

“Shit,” Vaill muttered again. “What’s the T.O.D.?”

“The police forensic guys checked body temperature and stiffness of the corpse and put the T.O.D. between five-thirty and seven-thirty this morning, but the pathologist should be able to narrow that down even more.”