Firechild (35 page)

“Maybe—” She shivered inside. “Maybe I could help you.”

“If you could—” He sagged again, shaking his head. “But the odds would be too ugly. Keri, I couldn’t let you risk it. No reason you should.”

“I—” She had to catch her breath. “I love you, Sax. Reason enough.”

His searching eyes probed so deep that she shuddered again, afraid he had seen the truth. But then his own breath went out, and he reached to pull her body to him. She felt the thudding of his heart and knew he believed her.

That morning at work she called Sam Holiday to report a bug in the new letter-framer software. That phrase was a code signal. He called her to bring the latest printouts to his office. She shut the door behind her and told him about Belcraft’s dream.

“Very little we didn’t already know.” Resting his feet on the cluttered desktop, he blinked at her doubtfully. “The Mexicans found what was left of the jet after our search planes spotted it. Down on a dry desert lake. Two bodies in the wreckage. We’ve got our own agents there. They’ve identified one of the dead as Bard, the missing security man. The other looked Mexican, but it wasn’t Torres. Possibly the unidentified man who kidnapped you.”

He scratched his sandy head.

“No sign of Torres or the creature except the tracks of a vehicle that drove out of the lake, to a highway that has a lot of travel. So far, they’ve got no way to trace the vehicle. It could be anywhere in Mexico by now.”

“A cave,” she said. “In some dry mountain region where juniper grows.”

“Which is nearly anywhere in western Mexico.”

“Belcraft’s hoping for another dream. He says she called because she needs him. He’d do anything to reach her. I told him I’d try to help set up an escape—”

“You did?” He nodded, admiration in his eyes. “You’d go along to kill the creature?”

“Not that.” Soberly, she shook her head. “I’ve done hard things in the line of duty, but I’ve got limits. I couldn’t murder that creature, human or whatever. What I can do—if I do get the breaks—is to guide some professional to finish the job.”

“Maybe—” He took his feet off the desk and sat up to face her. “I see a lot of tricky complications, but nothing else has got us anywhere. Could be—” He nodded slowly, tugging at the lobe of his ear. “Could be our best chance, if I can get the general’s okay on it.”

40

Agent of the

KGB

T
wo days later, Sam Holliday drove Anya to the old college administration building to get the general’s approval. A black sergeant escorted them past the glass-cased athletic trophies into the big-windowed office and left them standing in front of the glass-topped desk. Clegg scowled across it.

“Grant?” His accusing boom startled her. “You are the young woman suspected of complicity in the monster’s escape?”

“I am Keri Grant—”

“Sir!” Sam Holliday was already protesting. “She has been fully cleared.”

“So I’m told.” The deep-sunk eyes pierced her again. “I hope this new scheme is not another such plot, invented to aid another escape.”

She felt herself flushing.

“Ask Captain Holliday.” She let her voice rise. “I’m not here to be accused.”

“Sir, please!” Holiday caught her arm as if to shield her. “They will be under surveillance. Our own hit man in constant contact. I trust Miss Grant. She’s aware of our duty to extirpate this menace to every nation.”

“That is true.” She met the general’s eyes. “I know the mission is uncertain. Unlikely to succeed unless Belcraft gets another vision to guide us to that cave. I suppose there will be danger. But if the creature has to be destroyed to prevent another Enfield, or something worse, I’m willing to face the risks.”

“Sergeant!” He called at the door. “Bring Corporal Harris in.”

“The hit man,” Holliday told her. “You’ll be in touch by radio.”

She decided not to say she knew him. When the black sergeant brought him in, he gave no sign that he knew her. His thick dark hair was bright with oil and combed straight back. The black mirror sunglasses hid his eyes and made his expressionless Indian face an ominous mask. She shrank uneasily from his unreadable stare.

“Mickey Harris, Keri Grant.” Clegg called their names in a loud drumbeat voice. “You may not meet again, but I wanted you to see each other. Captain Holliday will brief you on the mission, but I want you to know its importance. For the safety of the world, that synthetic she-demon has to be destroyed. Understand?”

“I do,” she said.

“Trust me, sir!” Harris came to military attention. “I’ll slaughter the bitch!”

“We’ll trust you for that.”

“About my payoff—”

“My staff will set up your guarantees.” The general turned from Harris to face her. “Anonymous private sources are putting up rewards. Five million each, payable upon due proof of success.” He scowled again at Harris. “But if you fail—”

His heavy voice fell.

“Don’t fail!”

He beckoned the sergeant to show them out. Later, alone with Holliday, she protested bitterly.

“Why that—that slimy cockroach! That’s what the other guards call him. I see why. Those black mirrors! And the knife he wears under his shirt—I know weapons, and I could see the bulge of it. The way he looked at me! Thinking how he’d love to cut my body up. Made my flesh creep!”

“His special hobby.” Holliday made a face. “So it seems. Cutting women up. Young women when he can catch them young. Takes his time, like a very sadistic cat. There’s something else in this FBI report. Something so gruesome it’s hard to believe. New testimony from a Mexican source that he used to suck their blood while they were dying.”

“Clegg—” She shivered. “Does Clegg know that?”

“He’s seen the reports. Of course the guy was never convicted of anything. Skipped out of Mexico and left the border to get away from the rumors. The FBI has turned up evidence to nail him, so I’m told. That’s what got him the assignment. The general wants that creature hunted down and killed. He’s convinced that Harris has the special expertise the job calls for.”

Silent for a moment, lips drawn tight, Holliday added: “I didn’t want to wish him on you. The general’s choice.”

That night she left her car with the trunk unlocked under Belcraft’s third-story window in the residence hall. Their plans were complete. The escape vehicle was to be waiting at a rest stop on the Maxon highway. Harris would be parked where he could watch and follow. Holliday had arranged funds and travel documents.

Too tense to eat, she and Belcraft skipped the mess hall dinner. He drank two beers and she had a Perrier at the club. They danced a few times to the jukebox and went back to his room to wait for a cold front forecast to arrive at ten. It came late. Midnight had passed before the sudden rainstorm struck. The phone range. Belcraft answered.

“The Maxon police,” he told her. “Fire at your apartment.”

“Our cue,” she told him. “Let’s go.”

The residence hall had been reserved for women students, the visiting hours evidently too strict to suit them. Belcraft had found a well-worn rope ladder in the closet. Opening the window into a gust of rain, he rolled it out. She ran down the stairs, told the guard huddled in the doorway that her place was on fire, and darted past him into the driving rain.

A lightning flash showed her the ladder swaying in the wind, Belcraft scrambling into the trunk. She slammed the lid on him and drove into the street through drumming hail. The guard at the gate listened with a half-restrained leer to the story that her place was on fire, but he let her go on.

They were out of the storm before she reached a rest stop. The escape car was a small brown Buick, left standing by a picnic table. She parked beside it and let Belcraft out of the trunk. He gave her a delighted kiss, and they scrambled into the Buick. She drove them away, toward Maxon and Mexico.

The rearview mirror showed her the lights of another car, following toward the highway at a cautious distance. Recalling Mickey Harris, his dark, high-cheeked face and those dark mirror-lenses and the ominous bulge of his hidden blade, she couldn’t help shivering.

She lost him when she could in the traffic on the interstate. Their reservations had been made in different motels. She didn’t see his car again, but now and then she picked out others, driven, she felt sure, by agents of the CIA. Every night she got away from Belcraft long enough to file a new report on the tiny radio hidden in a jar of face cream.

They crossed at Ojinaga and drove south across Chihuahua. The Mexican authorities had been alerted to search for Alphamega. Police roadblocks stopped them several times to ask their business. Belcraft always said he was looking for a cousin who had brought a map and come to find the lost
Dos Cabezas
mine. The officers grinned and warned them to watch for
bandidos
in the hills.

For her, the drive was a bittersweet adventure. Mexico was new to her. She loved its stark majesties of mountain and desert. More than ever, she loved the days and nights with Belcraft. Yet she suffered an always keener dread of the coming moment when he must learn how she had betrayed him.

He was pushing hard. They took turns at the wheel. He hated to stop at all until a time came when he felt uncertain which way to go without another guiding dream. Even when she reminded him that sleep might invite another vision, he said he was too tense to relax. When she kissed him, with her promise to help with that, they stopped at a dingy little inn that called itself La Fonda Eldorado. In the creaky bed, he seemed reluctant at first, but her old skills soon aroused him. His sudden passion lifted her into ecstasy again.

Afterward, lying relaxed beside him, she had to fight an overwhelming wave of regret. Sick with it, she wanted to tell him what she was, to warn him of Harris on their trail, but the time for that was too long gone. Even if he forgave her, even if he forgot his insane obsession with Alphamega, they could never hope to get away together to any sort of happiness.

His dream did come. Before dawn, she woke with the light in her eyes to find him out of the bed, pulling on his clothes.

“Baby, I’ve got it!” He pulled her against him, and she felt his rapid heart. “She found me! From somewhere very high. As if she were somehow lost from her body and searching for it from far out in space.

“I felt her touch Panchito. Begging him to help her show me the road he’d followed to the mine—it’s no cave at all, but another abandoned mine called
La Madre de Oro.
To get there, we drive on south through the next town and turn right up a canyon just beyond a bridge. It’s not all that far. And Meg—Meg’s still alive!”

“Darling, I’m so glad!”

She managed to whisper the words. Promising to hurry, she carried the jar of face cream into the bathroom to file her radio report while he was loading the car and cleaning the windshield. Day was breaking before they passed the next town. The bridge was where it should have been, but they had to backtrack and search the rock slope beyond a weed-grown ditch before he found the road.

It looked seldom used, though he was cheered to find fresh car tracks in a patch of sand. Floods had slashed it with deep washes, never repaired. In a mudhole at the bottom of a gully, he hit something that burst a tire. He had to unload the trunk to get at the spare.

Before he had finished the change, a black van came up behind, looming suddenly over the gully’s edge and plunging down the rocky slope, horn blaring. It jolted past too fast, splashing him with mud. He glimpsed the driver, a heavy man with sleek black hair and mirror-glinting sunglasses, turning his head to grin at Anya. Showering him with gravel, the van roared up the farther slope and vanished over the rim.

Wiping at the mud on his face, he peered at Anya.

“Who could that be?”

“Quién sabe?
as the Mexicans say.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

He stowed the jack and the damaged tire. Reloading their luggage, he slipped on a muddy rock. Her toilet kit fell and came open. The cream jar struck the rock and shattered. She was scrambling to recover it, but he had found the radio.

“What’s this thing?”

She stumbled away from him, trying to say she didn’t know.

“I’m afraid I do.” His white face quivered. “I think it explains that car that just ran past us and a lot of things I’ve been too blind to wonder about. I’m afraid it tells me what you are.”

“It’s hard to say it, Sax.” She nodded slowly, hands raised to defend herself. “But I’m an agent of the KGB.”

41

Merchant of

Terror

W
alking stiffly, as if his joints hurt, Clegg moved to lock the office door and swung heavily back to frown at Tim. There were no chairs in front of the desk, and they stood silent for a moment, face to face on the empty floor. Clegg’s deep-sunk eyes were darkly rimmed; Tim thought he looked suddenly worn and old.

“Son—” His raspy voice caught. “Son, you have disappointed me.”

“Sir, you have sometimes disappointed me.”

“If I have—” Clegg’s big hands swung forward and dropped again, a gesture of defeat. “I blame myself.” His voice had fallen to a ragged whisper. “There are things it kills me to remember. Things I can’t explain, because I couldn’t help them. I know I’ve hurt you. Your mother and your sister, even more than you.”

Tim saw the shine of tears in his eyes.

“But I did love you—” He drew a raspy breath and tried to raise his voice. “Believe me, Tim! I loved you and I loved them. I’ve suffered for the times I lost control. For times when I let my own demon seize me.” His heavy fists knotted. “I’ve lived in hell.” His hands came open again, to reach out imploringly. “Believe me, son, I always tried to atone.”

“You’re hard—” Tim had to catch his own breath before he could go on. “Hard to love, though I’ve tried. That’s why I left a good business job to come back here to work for you.” He breathed again, and pulled himself straighter. “No matter. That’s all past. I see no need to talk about it now. Mother and Ellen are dead. I’ve grown up. I try to forget.”