Dark Matter (30 page)

"Run!" I shouted to Rachel.

Geli dropped her radio, whipped up an automatic pistol, and aimed down at me.

A woman beside her screamed. As others joined the panic, Geli darted onto a staircase that curved down to the main floor. I slid my hand behind me, toward the gun at the small of my back.

"Don't!" Geli shouted, moving quickly down the stairs. "I'm not going to fire!

The order to kill you came from Godin! Godin's lost his mind!"

She stopped three-quarters of the way down the steps, holding her pistol in a two-handed combat stance.

"If that's true, put down your gun!"

She didn't.

Why hasn't she shot me? I wondered. Then I knew. Rachel was far enough away that if Geli shot me out of hand, she might escape with the terrified mob.

"Drop your gun, Doctor!" Geli yelled, continuing down the stairs. "Drop it now and lie prone on the floor! I won't fire!"

She couldn't miss from where she was. I dropped my gun on the gleaming floor.

Her eyes flashed with satisfaction.

The crowd reacted to this disturbance like an ant colony perceiving danger in its midst. Waves of panic radiated into preoccupied travelers farther from the center, creating a cyclone of people rushing for the exits. Police stationed there would have to battle their way here foot by foot.

"Get over here, Dr. Weiss!" Geli shouted.

"David?" Rachel called tentatively.

Geli's automatic had a silencer on its barrel. "Run!" I screamed. "Get out of here!"

Geli shifted her aim toward Rachel. I lunged up the steps. My hands closed around her wrists as the gun spit a round past me. The fury in her face told me she'd missed.

Geli drove a knee into my stomach, knocking the wind from my lungs. I wrenched at her bones like a man trying to break green sticks. She threw herself backward and spun, flipping me onto the steps with her sitting on top of me. I fought to keep her gun pointed away from me, but she had the leverage on her side. The silencer inched steadily toward my face. Geli's scar went white as the strain of combat filled her cheeks with blood.

"Let go of the gun!" screamed a female voice. "Both of you! Let go and stand up!"

Ten feet away, Rachel stood with both hands clenched around my revolver, her eyes wide with terror.

"Put down that weapon!" Geli yelled. "You're interfering with a federal officer in performance of her duty!"

"Shoot her!" I shouted, trying to rip the gun from Geli's grasp. "She killed Fielding! Shoot!"

Geli slammed the point of her elbow into my solar plexus, and the silencer jammed into my cheek. An explosion rang my eardrums like gongs, and something wet spattered my face. Geli's blazing eyes seemed to fill my vision, but then a river of blood flooded down her shirtfront.

I grabbed her gun and rolled her off me.

Rachel was still aiming the smoking revolver and shaking like an epileptic.

The bullet had hit Geli in the neck, but she'd managed to stuff her fingers into the wound to stop the bleeding. Never had I seen such rage in human eyes.

I grabbed Rachel's wrist and ran back toward the main hall. As we rounded the corner, Geli's voice echoed though the hundred-foot-high chamber: "You're dead, Tennant! You're fucking dead!"

I sprinted toward the B. Dalton store at the end of the mall. Cases of books were bulky and heavy. That meant a loading dock.

Customers scrambled out of our way as I hustled Rachel into the stockroom of the bookstore. The tile floor was piled with boxes, and sure enough, there was a loading bay with a motorized door to handle deliveries. I hit a red button on the wall, and the door began to rise.

Sunlight flooded into the room. I lowered Rachel to the cement of the loading bay, then jumped off myself. A delivery truck was parked at the entrance to the bay, and two men stood talking beside its cab. As we ran up the incline, I saw a white Toyota Corolla parked by the truck. Its driver's door was open, but no one was inside.

I aimed my revolver at the two men, then jerked it toward the Toyota. "I need that car!"

The truck driver held up his hands, but the other man looked at the Toyota.

"That's my car."

"Give me the keys!"

The man looked blank.

"Give him your damn keys!" said the truck driver.

"They're in it."

I pulled Rachel around to the passenger door and put her inside, then scrambled into the driver's seat and started the engine. The owner of the car yelled something, but his words were lost in the roar as I sped away. Forward momentum slammed my door, and it took all my self-control to slow down. I'd have to drive at normal speed to get us clear of the station, then ditch the car to get clear of the city.

"Oh, God," Rachel said, her face white.

Wailing sirens were converging on Union Station.

I stood behind Rachel at the food court at JFK airport in New York, watching her for signs of a breakdown. She was wearing a blue dress, part of a new wardrobe she'd bought in New Jersey, but the dress did nothing to mask her pale skin and hollow eyes. Shooting Geli Bauer had rattled her badly, and though news reports had revealed that the "federal officer" shot at Union Station had survived, Rachel had remained shaky throughout the drive to New York.

I would never have got her out of Washington without help. After ditching the Toyota five blocks from Union Station, I hailed a taxi and had it carry us back over the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia, to an upscale shopping center.

There I called the phone number that had led to the cafe rendezvous with Mary Venable. I told the woman who answered that Dr. Rachel Weiss was in mortal danger and desperately needed help. Forty-five minutes later, a woman in a blue Toyota Camry picked us up and took us back into Washington, to a private residence on the south side.

The house was a sanctuary run by the feminist group that provided new identities for battered women on the run with their children. We were installed in a bedroom at the back of the safe house, and after a brief wait, Mary Venable arrived. She questioned Rachel at length—she didn't seem to trust me—then made arrangements for a car we could use to drive to New York the following day. She told us to leave it in the long-term lot at JFK, where it would be picked up by one of their New York "sisters."

There was a television in the bedroom, and the Union Station shooting was all over the news. The temporary closing of the station seemed to have caused as much of an uproar as the gunfire. Early reports speculated that a bomb threat had forced evacuation of the station, but by the late-news broadcast, the story had changed. D.C. police sources had leaked that a potential presidential assassin had been tracked to the station. My name wasn't given, but the anchor said that the woman who had done the shooting in the station, formerly believed to be my captive, was now believed to be my accomplice.

We slept little, and by morning The Washington Post had my name and photograph. In the article, a Secret Service spokesman characterized me as an idealistic physician who had snapped after years of grief over the tragic loss of my family. Driven by paranoid delusions, I had threatened the president's life, and my appearance in Washington with a gun proved how dangerous I was.

The identity of my female accomplice remained "unknown," but several witnesses had seen her fire the shot that downed the federal officer. What frightened me most was that the article's closing comment came from Ewan McCaskell, the president's chief of staff, who had been reached in China:

"Dr. Tennant actually met the president in the Oval Office on one occasion,"

McCaskell said. "The president admired his book on medical ethics. He regrets that this noted physician has apparently suffered some sort of psychotic break, and hopes Dr. Tennant can receive treatment before something tragic happens."

I worried that Mary Venable would see the story and turn me in, but an hour later she dropped off our new passports, two Virginia driver's licenses, and the keys to our "borrowed" car. She had seen the article, but her loyalty to Rachel was stronger than her belief in media stories. I lost no time in getting on I-95, headed for New York.

Having my name and face broadcast nationwide only strengthened my resolve to leave the country. The NSA believed I was planning to meet the president in Washington tomorrow, so leaving the country was the last thing they would expect me to do. Going through JFK airport would be risky, but if we made it, we would be far safer than in the United States.

Rachel hardly spoke during the first leg of the drive, and nothing I said seemed to register. By the time we reached New Jersey, she'd regained enough of herself to go into a mall with a list of clothing sizes and outfit us for our trip. Other than that, we stopped only for gasoline, and I never got out of the car. Just before we reached New York, Rachel telephoned Adam Stern and gave him a cover story I'd scripted to explain the doctor's third-party reservations for us.

With the Easter crowds, Stern had been forced to book us on a midnight El Al flight, which worried me quite a bit. I wore a Yankees cap into JFK, praying that my "six-foot white guy" looks were generic enough not to attract attention. Things went surprisingly well at the El Al ticket counter, but I did most of the talking. My worry was the informal security interview.

According to Stern, at some point before you boarded an El Al plane, one or two plain-clothes security officers would strike up a conversation with you, to get a feel for your intentions. There was no way we would get through that without Rachel handling some of the talking.

"The chicken with broccoli looks good," I said, pointing through a glass screen in front of the Chinese food counter. "What do you think?"

"Fine," Rachel said in a dead voice.

I touched her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

She didn't answer.

I stepped in front of her and ordered two chicken and broccoli plates. As I paid, I heard a man's voice behind me.

"Hi, there. We were in line with you at the El Al counter. You going over for Western Holy Week?"

"Uh . . . no," Rachel replied.

I glanced back and saw two dark-skinned men of medium height standing behind us. They had quick eyes and easy smiles. They looked like brothers.

"Visiting family then?" said the second man, who wore a gold chain around his neck.

"No," Rachel said awkwardly. "It's a private matter. A health problem."

Concerned looks. "Oh. Sorry to pry."

They're looking for terrorists, I told myself. Not presidential assassins. I turned around and nodded to the two men.

The silence was uncomfortable, but suddenly Rachel straightened up and came to life. "I guess it's nothing to be embarrassed about," she said. "My OB-GYN is sending me over. I was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It's advanced, but he has a friend at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. There's a clinical trial for culturing your own T cells and reinjecting them to fight the tumors.

My doctor's an old friend. He made all the arrangements for us, thank God.

Planes, the hotel, all of it." She put her hand over her heart. "I'm sorry to run on. It's just the first ray of hope I've had, and it feels better to talk about it."

"Quite all right," said the man wearing the chain. "I'm sure you'll do very well. The doctors at Hadassah are the best in the world."

"The trial looks very promising," I chimed in, not wanting to appear awkward.

"The lead researcher did his training at Sloan-Kettering."

"You sound like a doctor yourself," said the shorter man, and I lost any remaining doubt that they were El Al security. Suddenly all I could think about was the $16,000 in cash in the money belts concealed beneath our clothes.

"Food, mister," snapped one of the Chinese clerks.

"Thank you," I said, glancing back at the plates. "Yes, I'm an internist."

"You know about arthritis?" asked the shorter man. "They tell me I got psoriatic arthritis. You know about that?"

Answer him? I wondered. Act arrogant? "Well, there are five types. Some are relatively mild, others crippling."

"What's the bad kind?" "Arthritis mutilans."

The man grinned happily. "That's not me, thank God. I got something about phalanges."

"Distal interphalangeal predominant." I lifted his hands and looked at his fingernails, which showed marked pitting. "It could be a lot worse."

He pulled back his hand. "Good, good. Well, enjoy your food." "Good luck at Hadassah," said the one wearing the chain. "You're going to the right place for a cure."

I put both plates on a tray and carried it to a vacant table. Rachel followed me, looking shell-shocked. I glanced back at the food counter and saw the two men walk away without ordering. "You did great," I said softly. "Academy Award caliber." "Survival," she said, taking her seat. "Everybody has it in them.

You told me that in North Carolina, and I didn't believe you. Now I know better."

I picked up my fork. "There's no point feeling guilty about it."

"They'd already talked to Adam. That's the feeling I got."

"No doubt. He must have given them the same story. If we make it onto the plane without being arrested, I'm going to send that guy a case of champagne."

Rachel closed her eyes. "Are we going to make it?" "Yes. Just keep it together for another half hour."

The 747 was crowded despite being a late flight, but we were insulated from our nearest neighbors by two empty seats and an aisle, and that gave us some privacy. I sat by the window with my Yankees cap on, taking care not to make eye contact with anyone as I retrieved two blankets and covered us both to the neck.

We sat at the gate for what seemed like two hours, but it was only forty minutes by my watch. While passengers around us talked excitedly about their upcoming visit to the Holy Land, Rachel and I pretended to sleep, holding hands under the blanket. At last the El Al jetliner taxied out onto the runway and lumbered into the night sky.

"Thank God," she whispered as the wheels lifted off the concrete.

We would have to clear security at Tel Aviv in eleven hours, but making it into the air was half the battle, and I tried to focus on that small victory.