The Delta Factor (28 page)

But he did, both because it was Deborah who did the asking, and because Cliff also valued her friendship and tried to be worthy of it. Such a man was rare.

And now, because of these friends, he was laying aside the ingrained habits of a lifetime. He was becoming
involved
.

That, too, was a considerable mystery.

Cliff awoke to the sweaty heat of a sultry summer afternoon. He glanced at his watch and groaned. Only one thirty. He would never have believed that time could move so slowly. The day was only half over, and it had already lasted several weeks.

He struggled upright and slid from the hammock. He pulled off the mosquito netting and grabbed for his shirt. Despite spraying himself every hour, the little suckers had taken a liking to him that was distinctly one-sided.

Something jangled at the very back recesses of his brain. A hint of a dream. Some trace of a secret whispered while he had slept. Cliff felt a distinct unease tugging at his mind and decided maybe a coffee would help him think.

He lit the Coleman stove, poured water from a canteen, and set the pot on the flame. He sat and waited and looked around.

Katydids sang their serenade to the heat and the sun and the still-flowing waters. Butterflies flitted between cypress trees blanketed with Spanish moss. Eagles and egrets circled in the patch of sky above his clearing, a sky of endless, aching blue. His ears rang from the accustomed noises of men and cities that were no longer there.

When the water boiled, he mixed in coffee crystals and condensed milk, turned off the stove, then went to the water's edge and hunkered down. Somewhere beyond the creek's nearest bend a fish splashed. The noise was a clashing cymbal in his quiet world.

He sipped, breathed loudly just to hear himself, sipped again.

Deborah. The worry had something to do with her. But why? She was up in Norfolk, safely stowed away in a university lab. Nobody knew she was there but him and Cochise.

He stopped in mid-sip. He had told Ralph on the phone. Yes. He remembered it now. Ralph had asked what he would be doing, and he had told him. But what was the matter with that? Ralph was trustworthy.

Cliff was suddenly on his feet without realizing he had stood up. Sandra. He did not know why, but his mind screamed danger at the thought. Sandra. Ralph had spoken to her earlier; he had obtained the Pharmacon number and the advice to seek him there. Sandra. Ralph had said he was going to be too busy to take care of Cliff's request to look into these Edenton problems himself. What if he gave the duty to her?

Who else would she tell?

Cliff dumped his coffee, gathered his scattered belongings into his shoulder bag, scribbled a note in case Cochise returned early, and started down the path.

Cochise pulled his truck up behind Blair's car, cut off the engine, and walked over. “This the place?”

“Just up around this next corner.” She looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to do this alone?”

“What, you figure this little fellow's gonna give me a hard time?” Cochise grinned down at her. “You be sure and keep your window rolled up tight, missy. Gotta be one of us with a head clear enough to drive.”

“If it goes according to plan,” she amended.

“It's a good idea,” Cochise replied. “Best I've heard. You just stay well back, so if anything does go wrong, our buddy up ahead won't have anybody to blame but me.”

“And Debs,” she added worriedly. “He's going to immediately assume she had something to do with it.”

“From the sounds of things, Debs is already up to her neck in hot water. Another coupla drops won't make much difference.”

Blair nodded. “That's what I thought. I really wanted to do something to help out.”

He patted the top of her car. “It's a good idea, and I'm right glad you trusted me with it.”

“You be careful,” she replied.

“Hunker down low when you see me coming back,” Cochise said, and started back for his truck. “In case he decides to come quiet. Which I doubt, given everything I've heard about this turkey.”

Harvey Cofield was as furious as he had ever been in his entire life.

He spent his Sunday afternoon as he did almost every week, mowing his lawn with his top-of-the-line Toro riding mower, then pulling his big Merc 500 SEL from the garage and getting out his bag of cloths and waxes and sprays and chrome polish. His house was quieter than usual. His wife had become fed up with his tirades against fate and Whitehurst and the Pharmacon board and had gone to see her sister. Good riddance.

Whitehurst. Thinking the name had him polishing with maniacal frenzy, rubbing hard enough to threaten the paint. The man had ordered him,
ordered
him, to stay behind in this podunk town. When it was he, Harvey Cofield, who was the company's director of research, personally responsible, in a way, for discovering the drug in the first place. So while Whitehurst schmoozed with the board and the other bigwigs in Washington, he, Harvey Cofield, was imprisoned down here in the middle of nowhere.

It was an outrage.

To rub salt in the open wound, Whitehurst had phoned that morning. The man had sounded like a loon. He had claimed to be in Norfolk, and he wanted Cofield to check up on some nonsense about Givens and her sidekick, that character from the FDA. Cofield had given as good as he got, asking how the weather was up on Capitol Hill, saying he'd be simply delighted to help out, soon as he himself got back from being wined and dined with the bigwigs. Whitehurst had breathed heavy for a couple of seconds, then slammed down the phone. No question about it, the guy was coming unglued.

Cofield was so wrapped up in his own rage he did not hear the newcomer walk up, did not notice anything until a voice two octaves below double-bass rumbled, “How's it going, Doc?”

He spun around, and the sight was so startling he backed up until he was jammed up tight against the car door. At first he thought a tree had moved in on his driveway. Then the man shifted so that the sun was not in Harvey's eyes, and he could see it was Deborah's assistant. That Indian. The one with the funny nickname. “Cochise! You almost gave me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that.”

“Sorry about that,” the big man said. “Awful quiet around here.”

“My wife's away.” Cofield had to squint to see Cochise's face. He hated how the man stood so close, forcing him to look up, accenting how much bigger he was than Cofield. “Look, could you back up a little? You're crowding my personal space.”

“Right.” The man did not move. “Wasn't sure we'd find you home. How come you're not up in Washington?”

“I wasn't—” Cofield shut it off. “What kind of question is that? My comings and goings are none of your business.”

“You know, my pappy used to say there wasn't much of anything a good dose of a two-by-four wouldn't cure.” The Indian lifted his head, squinted, and searched the empty sky. “Yessir, good length of two-by-four is a country boy's best friend. Why, it'll even cure a mule of a case of the stubborns.” He hefted an invisible baseball bat. “All you got to do is apply it judiciously between the mule's eyes.”

Cochise dropped his arms and stared down on the little man. “Way I see it, we got two ways to handle this. The easy way, and the hard way.”

Cofield rammed the polishing rag into Cochise's chest, trying to push him away. It was like trying to shift a house. “You better watch your step, mister, or you're gonna wind up in all kinds of trouble.”

“The hard way. Shoulda known.” Cochise raised one mallet-sized fist and cold-cocked the doctor on one temple. Cofield crumpled like a puppet. Cochise swung him up easily with one arm and started for the truck, said softly to the slumbering man, “Time to get a move on, Doc. We got us a rendezvous with destiny.”

19

When Harvey Cofield came to, he thought at first he was still dreaming. Which was understandable, considering that his hands appeared tied to the safety strap of a truck being driven by a giant, hairless bear. But the thundering of his head helped clear his vision, and he eventually realized he had been kidnapped by Deborah Givens' lab technician.

When he could shape the words, he asked, “Where are you taking me?”

“Not far,” the Indian replied, not turning from the road. “How's the head?”

“Hurts.”

“Got some aspirin in the glove box. Lemme make this turn and I'll fish you out a couple.” He swung them onto a small side road, stopped, reached over. “Sorry about all this inconvenience, Doc, but it ain't been all that easy to get you suits to see reason.”

“What are you talking about?” Harvey Cofield watched the Indian pluck two tablets from a tin, slip them between Harvey's lips, then hold a canteen up for him to drink. Harvey took in too much water, had it shoot up his nose; he snorted, choked, almost lost the aspirin down his windpipe.

“Slow down, Doc. Ain't in that much of a hurry.”

The second time went better. When he had drunk his fill, he gasped, “You can have my car, take it, I'll report it stolen, I won't say—”

“Calm down, Doc. It ain't nothing like that. You're not being kidnapped.”

Harvey Cofield glanced at his wrists, which were expertly tied with nonslip nylon cord. “I'm not?”

“Well, not like you think. This is an act of pure desperation.” He put the truck back into gear and started off. “I was told a lot of other stuff I was supposed to say, but I forgot most of it. Sorry.”

“Who told you? Deborah Givens? She's in on this?”

“Naw, not really. She'd have blown her stack if I'd told her about this, so I didn't.”

Harvey Cofield tucked his head down and wiped his sweating face with his shoulder. He watched the Indian turn off onto an even smaller country lane, one lined by nothing but forest and fields. His gut clenched with the thought that this was it, the end, the final journey. “Hey, look, I'm a reasonable man. If Debs wants something, why doesn't she just ask?”

“She did. But like I said, she's not in on this.”

“More lab space, machinery, her own executive office, more staff . . .” Harvey realized he was babbling, didn't care, just couldn't see beyond the thought that the end was drawing near. “Anything. I'll get her the world on a string. Just look, let me go, okay? I've got a lot left I need to do.” His tone rose a full octave as Cochise pulled off the road, turned the truck around, parked, and cut off the motor. “I'm a rich man, well, not rich rich, but not bad off . . . look, whatever she's paying you to do this, I'll make it better.”

Cochise climbed from the cab, shut his door, walked around, opened the passenger's side, and stepped back as Cofield tried to connect with a kick. “Enough of that.” The big man did not seem the least bit put out. “This is all gonna be over soon.”

“No, look, stop, don't.”

Cochise released Cofield from the strap but kept his hands tied. The big man plucked Cofield from the cab and set him down on the pavement, one massive hand keeping an iron grip on his upper arm. “Walk.”

“I'll double it,” Cofield said, half walking, half letting himself be dragged down the road. “Whatever it is she's paying, I'll double. No, triple. There's a safe in my closet behind a false wall. Full of stuff. Cash, jewelry, my wife's crazy for jewelry. Fortune in there. Bonds. Take it all. It's yours. Just please, don't, no, I don't—”

Cochise stopped and shook the smaller man so hard his teeth rattled. “Will you just stop?” When he was sure Cofield was listening, he went on, “All we're gonna do is go up around this bend, walk one time through this field, go back to the car, and wait a while.”

Harvey Cofield found himself hard put not to snuffle. If the Indian hadn't held him up he would have collapsed into a weak little puddle on the empty road. Where was a cop when he needed one? “Please, Mister Cochise, I never meant you any—”

“Listen up, Doc. You remember the warnings Debs kept trying to tell you folks about?” He shook the little man, gentler this time. “Remember? The rapeweed? Remember her trying to get you folks to come out and see for yourself?”

A single ray of hope split the night of terror in Harvey Cofield's mind. “Rapeweed?”

“The rapeweed, Doc. It changed. Remember Debs telling you that?”

The ray of light and hope and safety grew stronger. “That's all this is about? Rapeweed?”

Cochise turned and dragged the little man on down the road. “Let's go, Doc. You'll see for yourself what it's about soon enough.”

He shuffled on alongside Cochise. Off the road, across the burned-out rubble, into the golden rapeweed. Joining hundreds and hundreds of other people, nobody paying any attention to the giant Indian dragging a man with his hands tied in front of him. Harvey Cofield's mind had trouble taking it all in, the scene was so bizarre. Musicians playing stuff he had never heard of before, never imagined as music, but who knew what kids liked these days? Except they weren't all kids. A lot of older people, dancing and racing and laughing and just walking around, eyes wide open but not really focusing on anything he could see. People shouting sounds at the sky, as though talking with invisible beings in some alien tongue. A forest of tents and campers and flags and more people out beyond the fields.

“Okay, that's enough.” Cochise led Harvey Cofield back out of the rapeweed, across the burned expanse, onto the road, hurrying now, hustling toward the truck.

Despite himself, Harvey Cofield was curious. “What's going on back there?”

“No time, no time.” Cochise was almost running. “Pick it up, Doc, we gotta get back to the truck before it hits.”

“What hits?” He was puffing hard, trying to keep up with the Indian's long strides.

“Debs doesn't know how long it takes to grab hold.” The Indian grunted as they rounded the curve and the truck came into view. “You feel anything yet?”