Vitals (29 page)

I asked him what he was talking about.

"Silk," he said.

"They've stomped us so far," I said. We stepped off the Amtrak, crossed the platform, and hauled our two bags--LA thrift-store cheapies--up the stairs to Pennsylvania Avenue. I looked for a taxi.

"Don't take a cab that's waiting," Rob said. "Don't take a cab if they seem to be looking for us. In fact, let's walk a few blocks."

It was a sensible precaution. "You sure you're okay?"

Rob was pastier than ever and unsteady on his feet. "We're two-footed lab rats," he murmured, weaving through the crowds, trying to avoid any physical contact. "I'm okay. Just walk, all right?" This, in reaction to my trying to carry his suitcase. "I've got it, really," he insisted. "God, I feel so stupid. I thought there were limits. I should have read your books more closely."

"You should rest. We'll sit in a hotel lobby, have some bottled water."

"Did you hear? Someone's spiking bottled water all over the three boroughs."

"Yeah, but it's ammonia and bleach," I said. "Garden-variety sicko."

"How do we know it isn't a cover?"

24!

I shook my head. We didn't. We didn't know anything. We had been working and traveling for a week. We were half-dead from exhaustion, Rob's left arm was bandaged from a flying splinter, I had cuts on my scalp--covered by a baseball cap.

I looked up at the Empire State Building. Still impressive, still New York. I had a sudden shivering sense of place. This was the real world; out west it was twilight crazy-time, bug fuck nonsense.

But bug fuck kills. We had been the lucky ones.

The basement had partially fallen in, trapping Rob and me for a while. Tammy crawled out through a hole in the floor. We heard her walking overhead, shouting, then another round of cannon fire.

While I pulled aside rubble and used a two-by-four to prop up a piece of floor blocking the exit, Rob grabbed an ice chest from under a fallen beam and went through what was left of the lab. He filled the chest with jars and little plastic dishes.

We found Tammy bleeding and screaming and walking around the front yard, stretching out a mangled hand. I did what I could, holding pressure points, scrounging through a first-aid kit to put together a bandage.

Rob searched through the leaning walls and collapsed rooms and found Marquez in the shambles of the den. There was blood and glass and broken model airplanes all over and Elvis had very obviously left the building.

The dogs in the kennels had fallen silent, lying on their tummies, ears laid back, eyes big.

The house was burning fiercely. There wasn't much time.

Police cars, ambulances started rolling in. We helped Tammy get to the paramedics and decided we couldn't do any more there. We rode the elevator down to the second house, which had only been lightly damaged. There we found a red Mercedes S320 with the

key in the ignition. The garage door opened and we departed the scene before fire trucks and other vehicles could block off the lower streets.

Marquez had thought of everything. A second set of plates in the trunk, and the car was registered in Nevada.

We took a chance and visited Tammy in the hospital. Four new bodyguards watched us enter the door to her room. No police protection.

She was groggy but she could talk. "Tell Dr. Goncourt he kills good people," she said, and stroked my hand. "He killed my man. He killed my son."

Then she gave us the keys to Joe's kingdom. Bank-account numbers and passwords that Marquez had made her memorize. Security codes to lock boxes in seven cities, with phone numbers where we could hide out if things got impossible on the street.

And the crown jewels: maps and key codes for sections of the Letnuna and the Goncourt estate on Lee Stocking Island. She did not know whether the key codes were current.

I hated to abandon Tammy, but there was nothing we could do for her. We had work to finish.

I had changed my mind during the gunship slaughter. The cowardly masters pulled puppet strings, but the puppets had fucked up. The masters were vulnerable. And they had killed a whole lot of innocents. They had tried to kill a pregnant woman.

Janie would never let me into our heavenly condo if I didn't do something to square that angle.

We drove to San Jose and stored Rob's samples in an office he had rented with Rudy Banning, half repository for Rudy's crazy piles of research and half makeshift lab. Rob had kept paying the rent even after Marquez lent him his basement.

It was a kind of safe house, just in case.

There, he worked feverishly for several days, then gave us the latest version of his vaccine. While he worked, I made a phone call.

I was eager to fight, but if I could arrange for some special help, I thought we'd have a better chance.

New York became Rob's holy grail. I swear he acted as if we were going to visit a shrine. I thought we were too obvious, too open. He did not care. "I need to get some specimens," he had said. "I can put it all together if I just get a few specimens."

We must have looked like two bums in a bad New York comedy.

Rob suddenly pulled up short in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at clouds dropping specks of rain, then fixed his eyes on me.

"Are you all right?" he asked with real concern. "It's a witch's brew, I know it is. I didn't have time. I need those last few surface proteins. I can make anti sense RNA and block the gene expression--"

"Hold it." I pulled him up close. Our suitcases bumped. A dark green Ford Crown Victoria, no marks, passed us for the third time. An old guy wearing a brown-leather bomber jacket hung his arm out the window and watched us. He caught my eye and nodded amiably, then motioned for the driver to pull over.

Rob and I stood like two jack lighted deer.

The guy in the bomber's jacket stepped out on the curb and waved his arm. "Damn it, Ben, get over here!" he shouted. "We're your ride."

Rob shivered. I thought he might pass out. I squinted at the man. "Stuart?" I called, and smiled. I immediately straightened my face. No reason to smile, no reason to trust anyone.

"Yeah, get in," Stuart said.

"Who's that?" Rob asked, ready to bolt.

"Some of my spook friends. We have a last-resort help line with an answering machine. I didn't think anybody would believe me. If you're crazy, you're on your own."

Rob followed a few steps behind as I approached the car. Stuart Garvey had been in the CIA before retiring in the early eighties. I hadn't seen him in person since 1985, at an old spook reunion, but he was part of the Tom-Tom club. He had been the second man I had fired off my question to, back in El Cajon, the one who had not replied--and the last person I had thought might meet us in New York. 11

"You need transportation, don't you?" Stuart asked casually, and opened up the rear door. He eyeballed Rob critically. "Your friend could take a header, he doesn't get to sit down."

"I'm fine," Rob said. I doubt anyone believed him.

We got into the backseat and Stuart introduced us to the driver. "You remember Norton, don't you?"

I did, vaguely, from sessions at the Marine base in Quantico. Norton Crenshaw, younger than Stuart, in his sixties and quite heavy even in his younger years. We had called him Melon. He wore a windbreaker and a faded ET. cap. "I'm a silent partner" Norton said with an easy smile. His face was pleasant but I remembered he enjoyed being trained to kill.

Stuart took us to a quiet diner where the owner knew him. We passed through an airport-style metal detector just inside the front door. Stuart held out his arms and pirouetted through. The machine gave a small wheep--just change and keys. The rest of us passed with as little fuss. The owner, a small Asian man, wrinkled and solemn, gave us a booth way in the back.

Stuart and I went to the men's room. He glanced at me over the marble divider between two urinals. His flow got going quick and easy, mine took a while; that meant he thought he had the upper hand. "Do you know what you're into here?" he asked quietly, shaking himself and zipping up.

"Hell, no," I said.

"That's all you have to say?" Stuart washed his hands first in the sink. Toy-dolly strawberry smell wafted up from the basin. He wrinkled his nose.

"Convenient to check us for guns going in," I said.

"Yeah. Mr. Chung's had some problems with punks packing heat, as the old cliche has it. Do you know all there is to know about Dr. Cousins?"

"You tell me," I said, washing my hands next. He rattled down a length of cotton towel and wiped vigorously.

"The wind is up. Shit is flying loose that we thought we'd glued down forty years ago. Dr. Cousins is right at the eye of the storm."

He-pushed through the swinging door and left me standing in the rest room. My bush-sense was ringing some bad bells.

Back in the booth, Rob picked at his pastrami on rye with a fork and hadn't touched his glass of iced tea. His look suggested he did not want to either eat or drink there. "How did you know which train we'd be on?" Rob was asking as I rejoined the group.

Stuart tapped his temple with his middle finger. "Once a spook," he said. "Where are you staying?"

"We're not," I said. "We want to visit a building and get the hell out of here."

"Which building?" Stuart asked.

Rob looked at me for advice. I nodded. "The Jenner Building," he said, and showed them the address on a slip of paper.

"Christ." Stuart lowered his voice and leaned over the table. "Anthrax Central? It's closed. They can't even tear the bastard down, it's so contaminated."

I could not tell what Stuart was up to. Then it dawned on me. Chemical and Bacteriological Warfare had been Stuart's specialty. "That's right," I said. "You covered CBW way back when."

"There's no anthrax," Rob said. "It's just a cover."

"That's not what I heard," Stuart said. He was playing with Rob and I did not enjoy it, but I needed to learn which way the water was going to rush when the dam burst, which would be soon.

Stuart and Norton had known all along where we were going. They were still on active duty. They had been assigned to find us.

I 50

"It's not anthrax," Rob insisted. His brow was covered with sweat. He jerked his head and looked at me. "We should take a cab."

"Your friend's not feeling well," Stuart stated categorically.

"I'm fine," Rob said.

"He knows what he's talking about," I said defensively. "Now, Stuart, explain."

"Ben, how could you let yourself get involved in this? You of all people. You don't know jack about CBW. Being kind to stray puppies?"

"When someone's trying to kick the shit out of them," I said. Norton snorted and tapped his lip with a pudgy ringer.

Stuart made a sour face. "The hell with waiting," he said. "Finished?"

Rob waved a dismissive hand over the sandwich. "I'm not hungry."

"Let's help you do this thing."

We went back to the car. Norton whistled a jaunty little tune as he started the motor. Rob looked worse than ever.

"Manhattan used to be a hotbed for biological research, a lot of it secret," Stuart said as we drove through the crowded, rainy streets. I touched the left-rear door handle. It flopped back and forth, attached to nothing important.

"They put up three special buildings here, beginning in the late 1930s. The most modern laboratories of their day. Some of them housed researchers working to cure smallpox, malaria, polio. They used the best isolation procedures available. Even so, it's a miracle something didn't escape and kill thousands. Maybe millions. The last building was finished and occupied in 1954." He pointed up the street. "It housed Silk until the early sixties."

Rob leaned forward, his cheeks pinking. "What do you know about Silk?"

"A lot more than Rudy Banning," Stuart said. "My last job was to help get Rudy discredited. Wasn't hard. The man's a loon."

"I thought you retired in the eighties," I said to Stuart.

Stuart stared out the window, annoyed by so many pointless words floating through the air. You learn nothing from a spook by

watching his eyes, but this time he wanted me to see how he felt: impatient. "Ben, this is not for you. You should have smelled it early on and jumped clear."

Rob looked around like a neck-jerking pigeon at the rest of us in the big old Crown Victoria. "I wasn't nearly paranoid enough, was I?"

The car slid into a loading zone across the street from a large, gray, stone-fronted cube, wet with steady drizzle. "Here we are," Norton announced. He reached under the dash and handed Stuart something I could not see. I was pretty sure it was a gun.

The lower floors had no windows and the entrance doors had been boarded over, with boards nailed over the boards. Graffiti covered it at ground level, protecting the building with an air of disuse like a fence made of spray paint.

"Prime real estate," Stuart said. "Doesn't that tell you something?"

"Stuart, why are you here, and what do you know?"

"I'll tell it straight, Ben, for old time's sake," Stuart said.

Norton gave him a disapproving glance, then lifted his hands, so be it. "Nobody will believe it, of course," Norton said. "It's crazy shit. Like Area 51."

"Retirement sucks," Stuart said. He lifted the pistol into our view. A SIG-Sauer, I couldn't tell the model number, but it was dark and shiny, strictly new-millennium government issue. "After the end of the Cold War, the best of the old guard were called back to put the whole espionage thing on a new footing. Industrial, corporate."

"They didn't ask me," I said.

"Right," Stuart said.

"We're fried," Rob said, and held up his hands like a bad guy giving up to the sheriff.

"Shut up," Stuart told him. "You're responsible for a lot of hard work coming to grief."

I put a hand on Rob's arm: maintain.

"I worked Silk in the late fifties and early sixties, as a youngster," Stuart said. "I heard things in the briefings you wouldn't believe.

OSS

and MI6 had tracked them intermittently through the forties. Nobody knows the real history of the war. But that was before my time. I do know that Silk started cooperating with us in the late forties. They saw the approach of Stalin's final madness, and, over three years, they dismantled their operations in the Soviet Union, sabotaged their stockpiles and labs, and disassociated themselves from the next generation I of bio war researchers. It was all very ingenious. Essentially, to the Russians after Stalin, Silk became a bunch of crackpot has-be ens on a par ' with Lysenko.