Mutant (5 page)

Morgan remained silent, barely controlling his own fury at once more being stuck with having to mollify the madman he’d be meeting in a few days halfway around the world.

“Have a nice trip,” said the voice before leaving Morgan listening to a dead line.

In New York City the man who’d been talking with Bob Morgan reclined in his high-backed chair and stretched the tension out of his neck and legs. As he stared at the Manhattan skyline, the nearby World Trade Towers reflected so many of the surrounding lights that they resembled a pair of obelisks made of stars. “Another of your bungled schemes,” he muttered, eyeing the twin structures.

He absently pressed his hands together in front of his mouth and tapped his lower lip with his index finger. Anyone who saw him might have thought he was about to pray. Instead he murmured a parting thought to the client—one which he would never dare say to his face. “Thanks to me, asshole, by this time next year, you will have brought the United States to its knees.”

The time crawled by. She hadn’t even dared lift her head for a peek through the spruce branches when she heard the chatter of her group leaving. Someone might glimpse the whiteness of her face in the shadows. Minutes later, the growl of the chartered bus that had brought them filled the night as it drove away. Morgan must have assumed I called a cab, she thought idly.

She listened as the remaining staff departed in smaller groups. More noises came from the vicinity of the parking lot—doors slamming, car motors roaring to life, and tires crunching on gravel. Soon those sounds also faded into the night.

Only the soothing rush of the wind through the branches around her remained. From time to time a few cars passed on the road in front. A train rumbled by in the distance. She once made out the faint cries of a distant owl. Otherwise, the countryside surrounding the isolated facility had fallen quiet.

Time to move, she told herself, stretching her legs and rolling the kinks out of her neck. Groaning as her limbs protested, she crawled out from cover and, crouching low, headed for the shadows along the perimeter of the spacious grounds. Once there she began collecting the specimens she wanted, getting on her hands and knees and using a penlight she’d brought. She first checked for an area of grass that hadn’t gone dormant yet. Luckily for her, it had been mild through most of November, and a lot of the lawn remained green.

In the midst of cutting the roots out of a tiny divot with her scissors, she heard several vehicles approaching in the distance. Thinking they’d simply drive on by as had the previous bits of traffic, she paid them no heed.

Suddenly the beams of their headlights cut a swath through the darkness where she’d been working, and, glancing up, she saw two minivans swing into the parking area under the yellow glare of the lot’s sodium lamps. “What the hell!” she muttered, snapping off her penlight and throwing herself once more on the ground.

Not daring to lift her head—again for fear someone might see the white of her face—she listened intently as the two motors cut off, doors clicked or slid open, and the sound of men’s voices accompanied by the crunch of their shoes carried across the crisp night air. Oh, God, she thought, there’s a lot of them.

She desperately wanted to risk a look. But could she get away with it? Though it was darker here than near the front, she lay on open ground. If any of these new arrivals took a glance in her direction and came close enough, they’d see her easily. Even her breath, rising like a white plume in the frosty temperature, might give her away.

Covering her face with her gloved hands, she peeked through her fingers and saw about a dozen figures walking across the lot toward the front gate. Six were dressed in civilian clothes, while the others wore peaked caps and the gray uniforms often adopted by private security firms. These men, she saw with alarm, carried sidearms in holsters. “Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed softly, having expected to encounter nothing more out here than the pair of aging watchmen she’d seen when she first entered the front gate.

She had to find better cover. Jamming the sample she’d just cut into one of her tubes and securing it in her purse, she got to her hands and knees. Damned if she’d forgo her samples from near the base of the walls, she thought, and, crouched low as before, sprinted toward the rear of the building, where it seemed darkest. She took a bead on the vents she could see silhouetted against the night sky as she ran. Grabbing at branches and shrubs on the way, she resigned herself to the fact that whatever vegetation she broke off on the run would have to serve as the remainder of her midrange specimens.

Rounding the corner and huddling against the back wall, she peered out again toward the gate. Two of the uniformed men had taken up position there. Two more seemed to be starting on a tour around the inside of the fence. The final pair were accompanying the men in casual dress as they walked toward the front entrance.

Sullivan ducked down amid the shrubbery lining the foundation of the building. Hunched over her penlight, she hurriedly stuffed the vegetation she’d picked up on the fly into appropriately labeled tubes and then hastily turned her attention to the greenery around her, grasping boughs of cedar between her fingers and sliding the fronds into containers marked SHORT-RANGE. As she worked, she kept taking hasty glances over her shoulder to where the two guards patrolling the perimeter would appear once they got this far. Seeing nothing, she listened for their voices, but only the steady sigh of the wind through a grove of pine trees off to her right filled her ears.

Where have they gone? she wondered, turning her attention to the roots and storing the last of her samples back in her purse. Still on her hands and knees, she crept to the corner of the building and again looked around it.

The darkness here made it easy to see the front and side of the property where the ambient light penetrated even farther in from the parking lot than she’d initially realized. Apart from where shrubs and trees obscured her view, she could readily make out most of the fence in that section, and the guards were nowhere to be seen. Had they doubled back? It became vital that she learn where they were before she made a run for it. She’d already decided it best to try and get over the fence to the rear of the building where the shadows were deepest.

The distant sound of men laughing behind her sent Sullivan diving for cover again, this time pressed against the building’s foundation, between it and the low row of evergreens where she’d just been taking cuttings. Once more, she covered her face with gloved hands and peeked out between her fingers. They
had
doubled back, following the fence around in the other direction. To her horror, she saw the two guards make a ninety-degree left turn and start directly toward where she lay.

Christ! Have they seen me? she thought in panic. Instantly she imagined the headlines if she were caught. CELEBRITY GENETICIST BUSTED FOR TRESPASSING!

Then she remembered that these men were armed. They wouldn’t kill her in cold blood, she reassured herself. But guards with guns might pull them if they were startled by someone in the shadows. “Oh, boy,” she whispered under her breath, wondering for a second if it wouldn’t be better to call out and surrender before anything disastrous happened by accident. A second later, she changed her mind. No, goddamn it. That would let Agrenomics and Morgan, the smug bastard, off the hook. Let his guards find her if they could. She was staying put! Besides, they’d not likely shoot if they tripped over her first.

Besides, she’d arranged for a diversionary action in the parking lot to kick in at eight P.M., in case she hadn’t made it back by then to the car waiting for her at a rendezvous point. She took a quick glance at the luminous dial on her watch. It read 7:57. Just hold tight, she told herself, hoping that with a little luck she could still get out of there undetected with her samples intact.

She began to make out snippets of the men’s conversation as they drew closer.

“. . . when do the weekly pickups start? . . .”

“. . . apparently early in the new year . . .”

“. . . always the same day? . . .”

They were already walking along the rear wall, still about twenty yards from where she lay. Silhouetted by the ambient light behind them, they were otherwise in complete darkness. She figured that in twenty seconds they’d be stepping on her head. She’d barely started to slither backwards when suddenly they stopped and began inspecting something on the building. By now they were close enough that she could hear every word.

“. . . they’re going to show us how to work these hoses. Morgan doesn’t want the train guys handling the stuff.”

“Are you sure it’ll be safe?”

“With what we’ll be wearing it will be.”

One of them struck a match, and a gold portrait of his face flared out of the darkness. His skin was deeply pockmarked, its tiny craters cast in flickering round shadows. Like a moonscape, she thought, transfixed by the sight of him. The space between his dark eyes furrowed as he cupped his hands around the flame and drew two quick puffs on the cigarette jutting at an angle from his lips. Then the apparition vanished.

They’d barely resumed their inspection of whatever they were looking at when a burst of static sounded. The one with the cigarette grabbed a walkie-talkie from his belt. “What’s up?” he asked.

Through sputters of interference came the reply. “We’ve got a pair of kids just pulled into the parking lot and started necking. It’s probably nothing, but you better be nearby, in case.”

“Roger. We’re on our way.”

The pair took off at a run the way they’d come, turning the corner and passing out of sight seconds later.

Sullivan grinned broadly, knowing that the “kids” were Lisa, her seventeen-year-old daughter, with Abe, the girl’s latest beau. She quickly got to her feet, but before running toward the back fence, she stepped along the wall to see what the two men had been looking at. Using her penlight, she could see a huge control panel fitted with dials and levers. Emanating from its center, a heavy-duty hose about six inches in diameter with metal rings on the end hung suspended in an overhead harness. The whole apparatus looked as if it could be pulled away from the back of the building.

It must be removable so that the hose can reach whatever it connects with, thought Sullivan.

Puzzled, but anxious to get out of there, she snapped off her light and started feeling her way in the dark toward the back fence. She hadn’t gone a few yards when she tripped over something hard and went down heavily on her hands and knees. The stinging in her palms and the throb in her patellae brought tears to her eyes, but she managed to stifle her urge to cry out. She’d landed in what felt like gravel and, feeling around for her light, found herself on wooden ties between a set of rails.

She got to her feet and, limping at first, followed the tracks to the fence. Though a locked steel gate blocked the exit, there was enough clearance between it and the roadbed to let her easily slip under.

Her eyes well used to the dark by now, she could see that the tracks curved left before she lost sight of them in the blackness. Straight ahead she could make out what looked like massive greenhouses, a half dozen of them, each at least a hundred yards long. Curious, she started toward them, but came up to yet another chain-link fence, this one twenty feet high with a big curl of razor wire along the top—the kind they erect around prisons.

“Well, well, Mr. Morgan,” she muttered, standing there and peering in at the darkened glass structures, “what does your garden grow?” As if reluctant to answer, the wind whistled evasively through the diamond-shaped wires blocking her way.

As she hurried across the neighboring fields back to the highway, she grew increasingly curious about what she’d seen and overheard. Why would a pure research facility such as Agrenomics need to make bulk shipments by train once a week? A place like that usually exported the innovative ideas and techniques required to create new lines of genetically modified organisms, not the products themselves.

And why so many greenhouses? Of course, they’d need somewhere they could transplant their modified plants after getting them started in the lab, in order to grow them big enough to obtain their sample seed. But they had
acres
of land under glass back there. To mass-produce new seed lines in a greenhouse, not at a farm, seemed strange.

And why were they hiring men with guns to protect whatever they were doing? She knew that the ongoing crusade by her and others for tighter regulations made companies like Agrenomics nervous. And they had cause to be worried, she thought with satisfaction, hugging her purse to her with its hard-won specimens as she crossed a particularly uneven patch of ground covered with a bristly stubble of wild grasses.

Yet somehow, naively perhaps, she hadn’t expected guns.

Chapter 3

His endotracheal tube came out the next morning.

He got the answers to his questions a few hours later.

That’s when the chief of cardiology dropped by to inform him personally that Steele had obstructed the left anterior descending branch of his coronary artery, the supplier of blood to the entire front of his heart.

This came as no surprise. He knew it to be the site most commonly associated with ischemia, or loss of circulation, in a large enough area of cardiac muscle to induce ventricular fibrillation—the state where the chambers stop pumping and the entire organ becomes a quivering useless mass.

“But the balloon restored your perfusion quickly enough that it minimized the permanent damage, Richard, and your all-important ejection fraction remains near normal. You certainly picked the best spot possible to arrest,” the old man assured him.

Yeah, right, thought Steele. How clever of me.

“Such a good outcome is the result of our getting to you so fast, made possible of course by Dr. Betty Clarke’s being so on the ball.”

“Betty who?”

“Your resident, man! The one who resuscitated you and saved your life in the first place.”

Steele spent the rest of the day hurtling between memories and dreams, and they were all of Luana.

Just like at home, he thought. Except here he couldn’t get up and brace himself with a cigarette or knock back one of the increasingly large nightcaps he’d resorted to ever since her death. Instead, he had to lie inside the curtains of that cubicle, enduring his grief without the usual diversions, until the sense of confinement left him feeling suffocated and his heart doing sprint trials, setting off all the alarms again.

The nurses ran in and once more sedated him past remembering, but this time he ended up in a nightmare. Dreaming that he was spread out and shackled, he became a specimen on a slide, squirming under the glare of some unknown inquisitor who tried to dissect him with questions.

Will you stop running now?

I can’t.

Don’t you realize you nearly died?

Of course.

You could still be out of time, yet you care so little
for Chet?

He woke up screaming and pulling on his IV lines while struggling to get out of bed.

When they brought out the restraining belts and threatened to tie him down, he determined simply to stay awake. Sitting there alone, unable to escape his thoughts, for the first time in his life he felt that there might never again be a tomorrow for him. “Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered nervously, wanting to take stock, yet having lost faith long ago in the powers of introspection. After all, as a doctor he grasped from the beginning what had happened to him since Luana died.
Prolonged grief reaction
read the official diagnosis, except naming it and reading about it had never once stopped him from being in its grip for the last eighteen months. Even when he understood, with counseling, that it wasn’t so much the grief, but rather
“a sustained, panic-ridden obsession to
escape the process altogether”
that was at the root of his problem, he simply refined his avoidance techniques. Working extra shifts in ER had been his greatest diversion. Then, while trying to kid himself that he’d covered up the problem and that no one would notice, he declared himself cured and dropped out of therapy.

Of course, the doctor in him continued to understand. He’d launched on a fool’s strategy, he knew—
“serving
only to prolong the patient’s agony, leaving him trapped
forever in the very grief he runs from”
the textbooks had assured him. But like a junkie fleeing before the fearful horrors of withdrawal, he couldn’t stop. As a result, he robbed his work of the joy it had once held for him, turning it instead into a mind-numbing ordeal that left him exhausted and barely able to feel anything at day’s end—at least nothing he couldn’t dispatch with a tumblerful of scotch or a dozen cigarettes. When a nurse took him aside one morning and advised him to get some help, warning him that they all could smell the liquor on his breath when he came to work in the morning, he switched to vodka, a less detectable beverage.

Not that he’d ever gotten outright drunk. Nor did his drinking ever compromise a patient’s safety, thank God. But through it all, he committed an equally unforgivable betrayal, at least by his own judgment. He ran from Chet at a time when the boy needed him most.

“Physician, heal thyself,” he repeated through clenched teeth, a familiar bitter loathing settling in his heart, which no cardiologist could heal.

Steele woke that evening to see Chet sitting in a chair that hadn’t been there earlier. The boy balanced a book on one knee while using the other to support the three-ring binder he wrote in.

Doing his homework, thought Steele. Keeping his eyes half closed, he continued to study his son who so resembled Luana. All the nights he’d looked into the boy’s room at home and seen him concentrating on the ritual task flashed through his mind, stretching back to Chet’s first days of school, and becoming a yardstick of times past. To it, collages of other memories from the boy’s childhood tethered themselves and swirled around in circles, until the spin of images compressed all he’d lost with Luana and could still lose with Chet into a single dizzying panoramic sweep. It caused him to break out in a sweat. Shouldn’t I have gone through this when I was dying? he wondered, trying to chase the past from his head. But the presence of his son made that impossible.

Though Chet had gone through a few early growth spurts, he still seemed little in some ways—his curly black hair, so like hers, was no less resistant to a brush now than it had been when she’d been there to groom it for him. He also had the same complexion as his mother—one that appeared to change with the light— delicate as porcelain in winter while robust with the sun’s gold during summer. But the similarities of their eyes always struck him the most. The curves of their brows and the rich brown of their pupils had been such a close match that at times he could swear he saw her looking at him through Chet.

“Hi, son,” he said quietly.

The boy started. For an instant his face actually showed a flash of pleasure at the sound of his father’s voice. The look quickly vanished, replaced by the scowl of resentment that had become his more natural expression. “Hi, Dad,” he replied, the words given out like quick nervous chirps.

“I’m happy to see you here,” continued Steele.

Silence.

“What time is it?” In the clockless world of CCU—the cardiac care unit—it could have been three A.M., for all Steele knew.

“About seven.”

“Where’s Martha?”

“Downstairs, having a bite in the cafeteria.”

Martha McDonald was their live-in housekeeper. She’d been helping to take care of Chet in one way or another ever since his birth. When Luana died, neither Chet nor Steele would have survived without her.

“Have you eaten?”

“Not yet. I’ll get something after she’s finished.”

“It’s late for your supper, isn’t it?”

The boy shrugged and returned to his books.

What is he feeling? Steele wondered. Afraid that I’m going to die on him just like his mother? Of course he is. Christ, I almost left him an orphan. And like father, like son, he’s still just as torn up inside about her death as I am. After all, he’s a child. How could he feel otherwise? Wake up,
Daddy
!

As he focused on what to say that would comfort Chet’s present fears, an old unwelcome puzzle rolled through his head. What if
I
had coped better before, during, and after Luana’s death? Might Chet find it less painful by now? Had I sentenced my own son to a prolonged grief as well?

“You know, Chet, my heart is probably going to be all right,” he said hesitantly, not at all certain he’d be able to reassure him about anything anymore.

The boy didn’t look up, but his pen paused in midstroke.

He’s interested, thought Steele, hoping that this time he’d say the right words. “In fact, I’ll be coming home in about ten days.”

“Mom came home, too,” he answered glumly, still staring at the page of his notebook.

Steele swallowed once or twice as he tried to think up a reply. After a few seconds he settled on what he thought would most directly address Chet’s anxiety. “My heart attack isn’t like Mom’s cancer. I
can
get completely better. And who knows, if you and Martha nag me enough about diet and exercise, I might end up healthier than ever.”

Chet winced as if he’d been poked in a still-fresh bruise. Flushing with anger, he threw down his books and leaped from the chair. “You lied to me about Mom. You told me she’d be okay, too. Why should I believe you now? And what makes you think I even care if you’re going to be all right or not?”

Steele found the hurt in his son’s glare so penetrating that for an instant he thought he saw Luana reproaching him from the grave. “Chet, come here, please,” he commanded quietly.

The boy looked uneasy, but his expression softened, and he stepped tentatively forward.

When he got close enough, Steele took him by the hand and said, “How about giving your daddy a hug.”

Chet hesitated and then leaned over, his hands awkward as he slipped them around his father’s shoulders.

Steele gently wrapped his son in his arms and held him. He felt Chet initially stiffen and then relax. “I love you, Chet,” he whispered. “I swear I’m going to get out of here, and I promise you I’ll be your daddy again.”

Chet said nothing; neither did he relax his hold.

Perhaps it’s a start, Steele thought.

Having spent a lifetime sentencing others to the consequences of illness, he didn’t take well to being sentenced himself.

“No ER work for at least six months,” declared the same chief of cardiology who’d previously been so enthused about the success of the angioplasty, “and then we’ll see.”

“Sitting on my can for six months?” Steele protested incredulously. “That’ll kill me! How about three?”

“You know the rules governing the return to normal activity as well as I do, Doctor.”

“Those are guidelines, dammit! Meant to
guide
doctors in their clinical decision making, not bind them.”

“And they’ve done exactly that, Richard. Guided
me
, the doctor, in making my decision about
you
, the patient. And that still makes them rules as far as you’re concerned.”

“But you yourself said that I had ‘such a good outcome.’ Doesn’t that give me an edge?”

“Of course, your smoking days are over,” continued the older man, overruling Steele’s objections by ignoring them totally. “The nurses will provide you with printed matter on diet, exercise, and a schedule regarding the resumption of regular physical exertion. As for sex, nothing for three months; then you can gently begin relations again.”

I’ll let my hand know, Steele nearly quipped, growing increasingly peeved at the lecture.

“How’s Chet doing?” he asked Martha on the eve of his going home. She’d brought in the clothing he’d need. Chet himself had stopped visiting him as soon as he’d transferred from CCU to a regular room—nearly a week ago.

“How do you think?” replied the lithe sexagenarian. “He’s mad at you for making him afraid that you’ll die, and he’s mad at you for still making him care if you do. And, of course, those feelings are all mixed up with the usual need of a thirteen-year-old to have his old man around so he can defy the hell out of him.”

Steele found himself grinning at the feisty white-haired woman who’d never failed to be blunt with him when it came to harsh truths or his needing a kick in the ass. Nor had the fact that he didn’t have the sense or courage to listen lately deter her any. In an odd way he took her harassing him as a comforting vote of confidence—her way of saying that she still believed he could stop being such a jerk and get on with his life.

A widow, Martha had no children, and when Luana had become ill she offered to expand her housekeeping by moving in to help care for her. Just weeks before her death six months later, Luana, her bright eyes glittering from the depths of hollow sockets, informed Steele that Martha would be staying on permanently. Steele, barely able to care for himself at that point, gratefully surrendered to the arrangement.

Cringing at the memory of his wife’s features on that dreadful morning, he forcefully sustained a happy face. “Gee, Martha. Don’t start going easy on me now,” he replied with a weak chuckle.

“Now that’s something I haven’t seen in a while,” she told him, pointing to his smile as her own flint-gray eyes softened. “It’s a pathetic little bitty thing, but better than nothing. Make sure you don’t forget to bring it home with you.”

The sound of the phone brought him out of a deep sleep.

“I told you she’d be trouble!” he heard Morgan declare excitedly at the other end of the line.

“Who?”

“Sullivan! I think she’s been poking around the place.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A couple of kids parked in the lot the night of the press conference, apparently to smooch. One of the guards took down the plate number when he shooed them off. He passed it on a few days later to a friend who’s a cop and asked him to trace it when he could, just to be on the safe side. It turned out to be Sullivan’s car. The head of security called me just now after he got the match. I figure those kids were waiting for her, maybe creating a diversion with the guards to let her get away. Why else would they be in our neck of the woods?”

“Are you sure she left the building that afternoon?”

“Absolutely. I called the day shift, and the guards at the door told me that they signed her out. But no one at the gate remembers a solitary woman leaving early. She may have hid out on the grounds in the dark.”

“Is there any way she could have sneaked back into the building?”

“No. Of that we’re sure. The electronics in there make it safer than a bank vault. But she could have been outside on her own for hours.”