Tom Hyman (18 page)

But the worry seemed both more diffuse and more profound.

It wasn’t just the baby that brought on this peculiar sense of dread.

It was the future. He feared that events might somehow overwhelm him, and cost him that energetic, driving, comfortable sense of certainty and self-confidence that had powered his success in life.

His mind kept slipping back to another New Year’s many years ago, when he was sixteen. Why the men who came for his father had picked the last day of the year had something to do with the statute of limitations. At least that’s the way his uncle Frank explained it to him much later.

His life had been so protected up to that day that he hadn’t known what real misfortune was. It only made the anger, shame, and grief all the more intense.

The men were U.S. marshals. They handcuffed his father in front of him and his mother and took him away. His father returned home that same evening, after his lawyer had posted bail for him, but the event had already altered the family’s fate irretrievably.

There was a big New Year’s party that night, and Dalton had the prettiest date—Charlotte Kinsolving, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the town’s richest family. Charlotte had promised to give him something “special” that night. He had no doubt what that something was going to be. News of his father’s arrest had already spread, however, and Charlotte was not allowed to go out with him that night—or any night after that. Dalton stole a bottle of scotch from the liquor cabinet, jumped into his new Corvette—a present from Mom and Dad for his sixteenth birthday—and drove around aimlessly all night long, getting drunk and contemplating suicide.

The months that followed were an ugly blur. His father was fired from the stock brokerage house where he had worked for twenty years. Under pressure, he made a deal with the prosecutors. He pled guilty to three counts of stock fraud and one count of insider trading. In return for giving evidence and later testifying against several other brokers, he was fined five million dollars and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. Many former clients of the firm sued him as well, and the Stewart family, once rich and respected, was suddenly bankrupt and disgraced.

Along with his beautiful, rich girlfriend, Dalton lost his cherished Corvette, his male friends, and everything else that meant anything to him. The family could no longer afford the country club where for years Dalton had swum, played tennis, and partied. The Stewart cook was let go, and so was the maid. Most humiliating of all, Dalton was forced to quit the posh private boarding school he had been attending for two years and enroll in the local public high school.

The family was socially ostracized. During the good times, they had made the serious social error of letting their wealth go to their heads. When the bad times struck, there was no sympathy from anybody, absolutely none. Even the people Dalton had assumed were old family friends refused to stick by them. And those who had not been friends relished the Stewarts’ fall from wealth and privilege with gleeful satisfaction. Shopkeepers and other service people, whom the Stewarts had long treated with condescension, saw the chance to get even and took advantage of it.

Their credit was cut off, and wherever they went they were treated as pariahs. The family’s fall from grace was so shatteringly complete that Dalton never fully recovered from it.

The family house and all the furnishings were sold to satisfy lawsuits.

His mother obtained a divorce, and Dalton was sent to live with his uncle. So deep was Dalton’s sense of betrayal that he never once visited his father during his years in prison; and he saw him only once after he was released. His father committed suicide three years later.

He was fifty years old.

Dalton’s mother, still attractive at forty, married the lawyer she had hired for her divorce and moved with him to the state of Washington, where his family owned land. Dalton and his younger sister went with them. Dalton’s stepfather helped put him through college and business school, but they didn’t get along very well, and as soon as Dalton was able, he moved out.

New Year’s Eve, 1969. It was burned into his soul.

All these years later he could still not think back on that time without a feeling of sick terror in the bottom of his stomach. No matter that he was a hundred times richer than his father had ever been.

At the beginning of each year he projected that if he could increase his wealth by another ten or more million dollars in the next twelve months, he would at last put the fear of repeating his father’s disastrous collapse behind him forever. But the fear persisted anyway, driving him to enrich himself further—driving him to take the kind of legal and financial risks that kept his empire vulnerable to exactly the kind of fate that had ruined his father.

Dalton Stewart saw the irony, of course. The harder he strove to escape the trauma of his past, the closer it seemed to loom.

A sudden amplification of voices and music from inside snapped him out of his reverie. He turned to see one of the French doors open and a woman step through and walk toward him in the dim light. She was wearing a floor-length white gown that clung suggestively to her lithe frame. Her ash-blond hair was swept back in a regal style.

He had seen her in the hall earlier in the evening and had been quite puzzled by her presence. He had not yet spoken to her.

“So there you are, Herr Stewart,” the baroness called. “I have been looking all over for you.”

“What is he doing in there?” Feldmann demanded, his eyes nervously scanning the windows of Goth’s lab. “It’s New Year’s.

Why doesn’t he go home?”

Greiner turned to Hoffmann, the driver. “How long’s the plane going to wait?”

“Until two.”

“Shit,” Feldmann moaned. “We’ll never make it. It’s eleventhirty now.

Traffic is already horrible. It’ll take us over an hour just to get to the fucking landing strip.”

“We can always leave tomorrow,” Hoffmann said.

“After we blow up his lab?”

Hoffmann thought about it. “Okay, then. Let’s go now.”

“He’s still in there!” Feldmann moaned.

“We have pistols and masks. We’ll just hold him up, get the disk from him, then get the hell out.”

“What about my explosives?” Greiner demanded.

“How fast can you set them?”

“I need at least ten minutes.”

“Okay. We’ll take Goth with us, then. Dump him at the airport.”

Lexy went immediately into action. A driver was posted on duty around the clock for Anne, but no one at the desk could locate him.

Finally, with the help of a bellboy, Lexy got Anne down to the lobby and settled into a chair.

Then, with the bellboy and one of the night clerks, she spent fifteen minutes frantically scouring the hotel in search of the driver. The night clerk finally located him at one of the hotel bars.

He was hopelessly drunk.

He insisted he could drive, but Lexy disagreed. She was so furious at him that she cuffed him on the side of the head and knocked him right off his bar stool, much to the amusement of the other patrons.

Lexy bellowed at the night clerk to telephone Dalton Stewart at the National Palace. She then ran downstairs to the hotel garage, located the Stewart limousine, jumped behind the wheel, and gunned it around to the hotel’s front entrance.

The night clerk and a bellboy helped Anne out from the lobby and into the back of the limo. The night clerk said he couldn’t get through to anyone at the National Palace.

“Keep trying,” Lexy ordered.

The hospital was only ten blocks from the hotel, but the situation outside was chaotic. A multiple-car accident two blocks away had snarled traffic through the whole center of the city, and drunken pedestrians were spilling onto the streets in growing numbers.

Lexy sat in the driver’s seat of the enormous vehicle, glancing nervously back and forth from the scene out in the street to Anne, lying across the limo’s backseat cushions. “Are you okay, Annie?”

“I’m okay,” Anne reassured her.

“No labor yet?”

“Just beginning. Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ve got plenty of time.”

Lexy looked out the windshield and shook her head. “Jesus and Mary.

We’ll need it.”

Hundreds of stalled motorists were leaning on their horns. An ambulance and two Seguridad police jeeps, their sirens blaring and lights flashing, were trying to work their way through, with no success. People were everywhere—running, dancing, singing, screaming.

On top of the deafening chorus of automobile horns and sirens, thousands of radios had been turned up to full volume all across the city. The crackle of the static sounded like flames from a burning building, and the music hammered the eardrums.

Occasional bursts of gunfire and the hollow thock of bottles smashing against the pavement punctuated the wild cacophony.

It was part celebration and part riot.

Five minutes passed . . . ten minutes . . . twenty. No movement.

Lexy tried to back up, but the limo was blocked from behind by a long line of vehicles. In her frustration, she began pounding on the car horn like everybody else.

Anne tried to calm her, but Lexy was gripped with a determination too powerful to be denied. She opened the car door. “Be right back!” she yelled. She ran down the line of idling vehicles until she found a motorcycle. She gave the motorcyclist’s shirt a hard tug. He jerked his head around in surprise.

“Want to make a fast hundred bucks?” she yelled.

“What? ” She jabbed her finger back in the direction of the Mercedes.

“Back there! Pregnant woman!” She pointed up the street ahead.

“Hospital! Emergency!”

After a few more minutes of desperate hand gestures and pleading, Lexy got her message across. The man turned his motorcycle around and walked it between the cars back to the Mercedes.

They helped Anne out of the backseat and got her positioned astride the bike.

“How’s it feel?” Lexy hollered.

Anne shook her head: very uncomfortable. The motorcycle’s owner suggested she try sitting with both legs on one side. They helped her maneuver one leg around. That was better. The driver climbed on in front of her.

“Hold on to him for dear life!” Lexy yelled. “I’ll run! Catch up to you at the hospital!”

“What about the limo?”

“The hell with it!”

Anne clutched the driver’s shoulders from behind. He kicked the machine into gear and they started off, weaving unsteadily through the narrow spaces between the lines of stalled vehicles.

Lexy trotted along in front of them, praying to herself that this was all going to work out somehow.

Between the gridlock of cars and the crush of pedestrians out on the street, the motorcycle did little better than a fast crawl.

They covered the ten blocks to the hospital in about fifteen minutes.

Lexy, her adrenaline pumping furiously, kept getting ahead of them and then backtracking to urge them on.

Lexy ran into the hospital first, commandeered an orderly and a wheelchair, and dashed back outside just as Anne and the motorcycle were pulling up to the front entrance.

They transferred Anne into the chair and the orderly wheeled her inside. Lexy turned to look for the Good Samaritan with the motorcycle. He was already coasting down the drive, revving the throttle on the handlebars.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Come back here! I owe you a hundred bucks!”

He waved a hand, kicked the machine into gear, and wheeled off into the din of people and traffic. I Lexy jogged back into the hospital. Anne was sitting in the wheelchair just inside the lobby entrance.

“Where’d the orderly go?” Lexy demanded.

“He wants to take me up to the maternity ward. I told him to call Dr.

Goth first.”

“Fuck Dr. Goth—we’re getting you to maternity right away!”

Lexy wheeled Anne off in the direction of the elevator bank.

From his chair in the hospital’s main waiting room, Joseph Cooper had a narrow view of the shallow foyer and the locked door at the end of it that led into Goth’s new wing. He had been sitting there, on and off, for five hours, waiting for Goth to leave.

Suddenly the door opened and Goth came hurrying out.

Thank God. Finally.

Cooper waited until Goth was in the lobby; then he stood up and walked quickly to the door. He punched in a five-digit number in the electronic keypad on the door frame and pushed the door open. He had learned the combination by videotaping Goth and his assistants punching in the numbers over a period of several days.

The lights were on. Goth was coming back. Shit. He’d have to hurry.

Cooper trotted down the corridor to the laboratory and began looking around. He knew that Goth kept a copy—maybe the only copy—of the program in an attache case that he always carried with him when he arrived and departed each day.

He spotted the case sitting next to a computer on a counter top. He opened it. No cartridge disk inside. He looked at the computer. It was on. The screen was filled with data.

He saw the RCD plugged into its bay in the front of the computer. He turned the machine off and was about to extract the disk when he heard voices. He ducked into a small lavatory off the lab and shut the door.

Before Lexy and Anne reached the elevator bank Goth appeared, a sticklike figure in a lab jacket with a fringe of gray hair trotting toward them, waving his arms wildly over his head. “Over here!” he yelled.

He took over the wheelchair from Lexy and wheeled Anne down the hall at a fast trot. Lexy ran behind him. Hospital ctfffrc Ctf f. wtfhinl:r the frntif nrffeccif,n with hemused

Goth led them into the locked wing of the hospital that housed his lab and clinic.

“This isn’t the maternity ward,” Lexy objected, as they raced down the clinic’s deserted corridor.

“We have a special room for her,” Goth explained. “Right in here.”

Halfway down the corridor Goth stopped, opened a door, flicked on a light, and wheeled Anne inside. The room was large and decorated like a bedroom.