Strange Highways (39 page)

“Idiot,” she said angrily.

When she had driven around the bend into a straightaway, she pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

“You okay?” she asked.

Tommy was huddled in one corner of the backseat, with his head pulled turtlelike into the collar of his heavy winter coat. Pale and trembling, he nodded. “Y-yeah. Okay.”

The night seemed strangely still in spite of the softly idling jeep, the thump of windshield wipers, and the wind.

“I’d like to get my hands on that irresponsible jerk.” She struck the dashboard with the flat side of her fist.

“It was a Biolomech car,” Tommy said, referring to the large research firm located on a hundred acres half a mile south of their farm. “I saw the name on the side. `Biolomech.’ “

She took several deep breaths. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m all right. I just … want to get home.”

The storm intensified. They were beneath the snowy equivalent of a waterfall, flakes pouring over them in churning currents.

Back on Black Oak Road, they crawled along at twenty-five miles an hour. Weather conditions wouldn’t permit greater speed.

Two miles farther, at Biolomech Labs, the night was shot full of light. Beyond the nine-foot-high, chain-link fence that ringed the place, sodium-vapor security lamps glowed eerily atop twenty-foot poles, the light diffused by thickly falling snow.

Although the lamps were set at hundred-foot intervals across the expansive grounds that surrounded the single-story offices and research laboratories, they were rarely switched on. Meg had seen them burning on only one other night in the past four years.

The buildings were set back from the road, beyond a screen of trees. Even in good weather and daylight, they were difficult to see, cloistered and mysterious. Currently they were invisible in spite of the hundred or more pools of yellow light that surrounded them.

Pairs of men in heavy coats moved along the perimeter of the property, sweeping flashlights over the fence as if expecting to find a breach, focusing especially on the snow-mantled ground along the chain-link.

“Somebody must’ve tried to break in,” Tommy said.

Biolomech cars and vans were clustered around the main gate. Sputtering red emergency flares flickered and smoked along both shoulders of Black Oak Road, leading to a roadblock at which three men held powerful flashlights. Three other men were armed with shotguns.

“Wow!” Tommy said. “Door-buster riot guns! Something really big must’ve happened.”

Meg braked, stopped, and rolled down her window. Cold wind knifed into the car.

She expected one of the men to approach her. Instead, a guard in boots, gray uniform pants, and a black coat with the Biolomech logo moved toward the jeep from the other side, carrying a long pole at the base of which were attached a pair of angled mirrors and a light. He was accompanied by a much taller man, similarly dressed, who had a shotgun. The shorter guard thrust the lighted mirrors beneath the jeep and squinted at the reflection of the undercarriage that the first mirror threw onto the second.

“They’re looking for bombs!” Tommy said from the rear seat.

“Bombs?” Meg said disbelievingly. “Hardly.”

The man with the mirror moved slowly around the jeep wagon, and his armed companion stayed close at his side. Even in the obscuring snow, Meg could see that their faces were lined with anxiety.

When the pair had circled the jeep, the armed guard waved an all-clear to the other four at the roadblock, and at last one man approached the driver’s window. He wore jeans and a bulky, brown leather flight jacket with sheepskin lining, without a Biolomech patch. A dark blue toboggan cap caked with snow was pulled half over his ears.

He leaned down to the open window. “I’m real sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am.”

He was handsome, with an appealing—but false—smile. His gray-green eyes were disturbingly direct.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Just a security alert,” he said, the words steaming from him in the icy air. “Could I see your driver’s license, please?”

He was evidently a Biolomech employee, not a police officer, but Meg saw no reason to decline to cooperate.

As the man was holding her wallet, studying the license, Tommy said, “Spies try to sneak in there tonight?”

That same insincere smile accompanied the man’s response: “Most likely just a short circuit in the alarm system, son. Nothing here that spies would be interested in.”

Biolomech was involved in recombinant-DNA research and the application of their discoveries to commercial enterprises. Meg knew that in recent years genetic engineering had produced a man-made virus that threw off pure insulin as a waste product, a multitude of wonder drugs, and other blessings. She also knew that the same science could engender biological weapons—new diseases as deadly as nuclear bombs—but she always avoided pondering the frightening possibility that Biolomech, half a mile overland from their house, might be engaged in such dangerous work. In fact, a few years ago rumors had surfaced that Biolomech had landed a major defense contract, but the company had assured the county that it would never perform research related to bacteriological warfare. Yet their fence and security system seemed more formidable than necessary for a commercial facility limited to benign projects.

Blinking snow off his lashes, the man in the sheepskin-lined jacket said, “You live near here, Mrs. Lassiter?”

“Cascade Farm,” she said. “About a mile down the road.”

He passed her wallet back through the window.

From the backseat, Tommy said, “Mister, do you think terrorists with bombs are maybe gonna drive in there and blow the place up or something?”

“Bombs? Whatever gave you that idea, son?”

“The mirrors on the pole,” Tommy said.

“Ah! Well, that’s just part of our standard procedure in a security alert. Like I said, it’s probably a false alarm. Short circuit, something like that.” To Meg he said, “Sorry for the trouble, Mrs. Lassiter.”

As the man stepped back from the station wagon, Meg glanced past him at the guards with shotguns and at more distant figures combing the eerily lighted grounds. These men did not believe that they were investigating a false alarm. Their anxiety and tension were visible not only in the faces of those nearby but in the way that all of them stood and moved in the blizzard-shot night.

She rolled up the window and put the car in gear.

As she pulled forward, Tommy said, “You think he was lying?”

“It’s none of our business, honey.”

“Terrorists or spies,” Tommy said with the enthusiasm for a good crisis that only young boys could muster.

They passed the northernmost end of Biolomech’s land. The sodium-vapor security lights receded into the gloom behind them, while the night and snow closed in from all sides.

More leafless oaks thrust spiky arms over the lane. Among their thick trunks, the jeep headlights stirred brief-lived, leaping shadows.

Two minutes later, Meg turned left off the county route into their quarter-mile driveway. She was relieved to be home.

Cascade Farm—named after three generations of the Cascade family who once lived there—was a ten-acre spread in semirural Connecticut. It was not a working farm any more. She and Jim had bought the place four years ago, after he had sold his share in the New York ad agency that he’d founded with two partners. The farm was to have been the start of a new life, where he could pursue his dream of being a writer of more than ad copy, and where Meg could enjoy an art studio more spacious and in a more serene environment than anything she could have had in the city.

Before he died, Jim had written two moderately successful suspense novels at Cascade Farm. There also, Meg found new directions for her art: first a brighter tone than she previously had employed; then after Jim’s death, a style so brooding and grim that the gallery handling her work in New York had suggested a return to the brighter style if she hoped to continue to sell.

The two-story fieldstone house stood a hundred yards in front of the barn. It had eight rooms plus a spacious kitchen with modern appliances, two baths, two fireplaces, and front and back porches for sitting and rocking on summer evenings.

Even in this stormy darkness, its scalloped eaves bedecked with ice, battered by wind, and lashed by whips of snow, with not a single front window warmed by a lamp’s glow, the house looked cozy and welcoming in the headlights.

“Home,” she said with relief. “Spaghetti for dinner?”

“Make a lot so I can have cold leftovers for breakfast.”

“Yuck.”

“Cold spaghetti makes a
great
breakfast.”

“You’re a demented child.” She pulled alongside the house, stopped next to the rear porch, and helped him out of the wagon. “Leave your crutches. Lean on me,” she said over the whistling-hooting wind. The crutches would be of no use on snow-covered ground. “I’ll bring them in after I put the jeep in the garage.”

If the heavy cast had not encased his right leg from toes to above the knee, she might have been able to carry him. Instead he leaned on her and hopped on his good leg.

She had left a light in the kitchen for Doofus, their four-year-old black Labrador. The frost-rimed windows shimmered with that amber glow, and the porch was vaguely illuminated by it.

At the door, Tommy rested against the wall of the house while Meg disengaged the lock. When she stepped into the kitchen, the big dog did not rush at her, wagging his tail with excitement, as she expected. Instead he slunk forward with his tail between his legs, his head down, clearly happy to see her but rolling his eyes warily as if expecting an angry cat to streak at him suddenly from one corner or another.

She pushed the door shut behind them and helped Tommy to a chair at the kitchen table. Then she took off her boots and stood them on a rag rug in the corner by the door.

Doofus was shivering, as though cold. But the oil furnace was on, and the place was warm. The dog made an odd, mewling sound.

“What’s the matter, Doofus?” she asked. “What’ve you been up to? Knock over a lamp? Huh? Chew up a sofa cushion?”

“Ah, he’s a good pooch,” Tommy said. “If he knocked over a lamp, he’ll pay for it. Won’t you, Doofus?”

The dog wagged his tail but only tentatively. He glanced nervously at Meg, then looked back toward the dining room—as if someone lurked there, someone he feared too much to confront.

Sudden apprehension clutched Meg.

2

BEN PARNELL LEFT THE ROADBLOCK NEAR THE MAIN GATE AND DROVE his Chevy Blazer to lab number three, the building deepest in the Biolomech complex. Snow melted off his toboggan cap and trickled under the collar of his sheepskin-lined flight jacket.

All across the grounds, anxious searchers moved cautiously through the sulfur-yellow glow of the security lamps. In deference to the stinging wind, they hunched their shoulders and held their heads low, which made them appear less than human, demonic.

In a strange way he was glad that the crisis had arisen. If he hadn’t been there, he would have been at home, alone, pretending to read, or pretending to watch television, but brooding about Melissa, his much-loved daughter, who was gone, lost to cancer. And if he could have avoided brooding about Melissa, he would have brooded instead about Leah, his wife, who had also been lost to …

Lost to what?

He still did not fully understand why their marriage had ended after the ordeal with Melissa was over. As far as Ben could see, the only thing that had come between him and Leah had been her grief, which had been so great and dark and heavy that she had no longer been capable of harboring any other emotion, not even love for him. Maybe the seeds of divorce had been there for a long time, sprouting only after Melissa succumbed, but he had loved Leah; he still loved her, not passionately any more, but in the melancholy way that a man could love a dream of happiness even knowing that the dream could never come true. That’s what Leah had become during the past year: not even a memory, painful or otherwise, but a dream, and not even a dream of what might be but of what could never be.

He parked the Blazer in front of lab three, a windowless single-story structure that resembled a bunker. He went to the steel door, inserted his plastic ID card in the slot, reclaimed the card when the light above the entrance changed from red to green, and stepped past that barrier as it slid open with a hiss.

He was in a vestibule that resembled the air lock of a spaceship. The outer door hissed shut behind him, and he stood before the inner door, stripping off his gloves while he was scanned by a security camera. A foot-square wall panel slid open, revealing a lighted screen painted with the blue outline of a right hand. Ben matched his hand to the outline, and the computer scanned his fingerprints. Seconds later, when his identity was confirmed, the inner door slid open, and he went into the main hall, off which led other halls, labs, and offices.

Minutes ago Dr. John Acuff, head of Project Blackberry, had returned to Biolomech in response to the crisis. Now Ben located Acuff in the east-wing corridor where he was conferring urgently with three researchers, two men and a woman, who were working on Blackberry.

As Ben approached, he saw that Acuff was half sick with fear. The director of the project—stocky, balding, with a salt-and-pepper beard—was neither absentminded nor coldly analytic, in no way a stereotypical man of science, and in fact he possessed a splendid sense of humor. There was usually a merry, positively Clausian twinkle in his eyes. No twinkle tonight, however. And no smile.

“Ben! Have you found our rats?”

“Not a trace. I want to talk to you, get some idea where they might go.”

Acuff put one hand against his forehead as if checking for a fever. “We’ve
got
to get them, Ben. And quick. If we don’t recover them tonight … Jesus, the possible consequences … it’s the end of everything.”

3

THE DOG TRIED TO GROWL AT WHOEVER WAS IN THE DARKNESS BEYOND the archway, but the growl softened into another whine.