The Delta Factor (29 page)

“Feel?” Harvey Cofield chuffed, his lungs working overtime. Getting hit on the head, kidnapped, dragged through a field, now running back to a truck. And the Indian wanted to know how he felt?

Cochise flung open the passenger door, pushed and shoved Harvey inside, started to retie his wrists to the strap, when suddenly his stare went all distant. “Uh-oh.”

Cofield watched in utter astonishment as the Indian let his wrists go free, slammed the passenger door, and staggered around the truck as though trying to run through quicksand. Cochise pulled open his own door, sprawled in, reached, fumbled and managed to close his door. His breath came in deep moaning grunts. Harvey Cofield opened his mouth to ask what the heck was going on, when suddenly his eyes started seeing colors he didn't even know existed.

Then his whole world took a very sharp turning to the left.

20

Luis de Cunhor leaned one elbow on the sill, all four of the car's windows open to catch the cool sea breeze. He read and reread the slip of paper, then searched the map, neither his eyes nor his mind truly focusing on the matter at hand.

He examined the paper once more, trying to see beyond the handwritten words to the implications of what he was reading. His mind came up blank.

The message had been passed on by the secretary of the scientist on their payroll, the man now touring the Alps. The message itself was perfectly clear. It simply said, “The woman doctor is in Norfolk, at the University of Virginia lab.”

What was baffling was that the message had come from the Padron.

The
Padron
.

Luis turned the page over, as though underneath might be written how the Padron, seated behind his desk four thousand miles away in Sao Paulo, had come to know where the woman doctor was located.

Or how he had come to know of the woman doctor at all.

Still, orders were orders, especially if they came from the Padron. Luis checked the map once more and drove on. Indeed, the Padron was a remarkable man.

Cliff took the Norfolk streets like an Indy racer headed for the checkered flag.

The only car Hertz had available was a full-sized Buick at some astronomical cost per day. He slid his credit card over without protest, figuring that it couldn't put him much further in the hole than he already was. The clerk showed a little hesitation, which was understandable, seeing as how he was about to lease a twenty-five-thousand-dollar car to a guy dressed mostly in leaves and dirt and sweat. But the card appeared okay, and the driver's license showed a normal guy in a suit, and Cliff came up with a semi-believable story about being in a rush on a construction job, so he passed the keys over with the papers. Cliff was out the door before the clerk could ask if he needed a map.

The path of Cochise's had proven to be the five longest miles in Cliff's entire life.

The forest had shut out all hint of breeze. The air had been so humid and fetid with rotting brush that each breath was a desperate search for oxygen. He had arrived at the highway covered in the results of having tripped over five or six or maybe seven roots—he had lost count. On legs that had long since gone rubbery, he had walked to the dead center of the highway and stood there with arms over his head. Hit me or give me a lift, he had thought as the truck roared up with bellowing horn, it's your choice.

When the truck pulled over and stopped, Cliff had gone around to the side, looked up at the round-eyed driver, and said as calmly as his shaking chest would allow, “You wouldn't believe me if I told you the truth, and I'm too tired to lie.”

“Brother, anybody hard up enough to try and stop a truck with his bare hands deserves a lift,” the driver told him. “Climb on in.”

The truck had headed north, away from Edenton and his car. Cliff had let himself be dropped off at the Norfolk airport, but not before he had thanked the driver and his partner with solemn handshakes and promises to write and let them know how it all ended up.

Cliff pulled the car up to the curb, stopped another pedestrian, asked for directions a third time, offered hasty thanks, and roared away. The University of Virginia's Norfolk campus was a patchwork of buildings spread out over a couple of square miles, with bits and pieces of city life in between. The lab buildings were close to the teaching hospital, that much he had learned from the cop who had given the first set of directions, but only after a cautious inspection of his papers and license.

Cliff turned the corner, breathed a great gasp of relief when he saw the hospital directly in front of him, then cut it off when he spotted the dark car in front of the red-brick lab building. Cliff squinted, decided that yes, it was definitely an Infiniti. Black. As the car angled to pull into a parking lot, he saw the mangled front bumper. And lo and behold, through the open windows he saw an aquiline-featured foreigner dressed in a cream-colored suit and a very nasty scowl.

With a war cry that would have made Cochise's ancestors proud, Cliff slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The big V-8 roared. Tires squealed and burned a neat patch of smoking rubber as Cliff raced the final thirty yards, shouting a wordless scream the entire way.

He hit the Infiniti with a force that rocked it clear off the two nearside tires.

Cliff backed up, stopped to catch his breath and inspect the results. Through the open window he saw a dark-haired man slumped over the steering wheel. Blood seeped from a cut on his forehead.

Cliff looked around, expecting to hear shouts and sirens and racing feet.

Nothing.

Nobody on the streets, no heads from windows, no flashing lights. Amazing. Definitely his lucky day.

Cliff put the Buick into drive, listened as the engine replied with some sounds that had absolutely not been there a minute ago, and drove around the block to find a parking space of his own.

He got out, locked the door, and inspected a hood that now lurched upward and slightly to the left. He then turned and started toward the cluster of buildings, wondering which one contained the labs, whistling a merry tune.

Deborah dropped her stylus and eased the ache in her shoulders. With the movement came the warning knell. Was it the first? She stopped, held her breath, and did her internal checklist. She could not recall. She had been too wrapped up in her work to notice. Fatigue rolled over her in waves. Bad.

Her table was strewn with DNA spectroscope readouts and her own calculations. At any other time she would have reveled in the challenge of mathematical biology, but not now.

There was no longer any room for doubt. Her restructured viroid was not a respecter of species. The instructions that had carried it into the root system of one plant had taken it to the pollen of another. A remarkable feat, one that would excite the entire scientific world.

A pity it had to be discovered this way.

The recombinant DNA affected the rapeweed pollen in a way that produced a hallucinogen. It had to be one based upon a complex amino acid chain, one that had the ability to flow through the blood-brain barrier intact. She scanned the long sheets spread out before her, reading them as easily as a composer did a musical score. The signals were there. The supposedly harmless marker molecule connected with the pollen molecular structure in such a way as to send any human who came into contact with it to the far side of the moon.

There were two big unanswered questions. First, was this effect to be found in every flowering plant, or just rapeweed? She hoped for the latter, but the scarred patch of ground before the Jones's home, where rosebushes once had flourished, was there to haunt her every time she shut her eyes.

But it was the second question that really brought out the nightmares: Did the recombinant pollen DNA have the power to self-replicate? Were they going to find an ever-expanding harvest of hallucinogenic plants? Deborah did not think so. The impossibility of self-replication was one of the basic tenets upon which modern microbiology was founded.

Yet a lab-restructured viroid that was no respecter of species was also totally, utterly new. And this shadow of doubt left her more frightened than she had been since the first dark nights of her impending illness.

Her colleague Warren chose that moment to enter the room. “How's it going, Debs?”

“All right.” Deborah pushed back her chair. She had to go lie down. Suddenly the act of rising seemed a daunting task. She glanced at her watch. Almost five. Eight hours without a break. Very bad.

Warren moved to the lab's far corner and busied himself over the coffee machine. “Hey, you'll never guess who I saw sitting in a car outside the lab.”

“Who?” She made it to her feet by pressing up with both arms. Then she realized she had left her wheelchair in the jeep. She had felt so good that morning she had seen no need to bring it up. Very, very bad.

“James Whitehurst.” Warren stirred in a spoonful of sugar. “At least I think it was him.”

Deborah stood frozen to the spot. “Whitehurst of Pharmacon?”

“Are there two? I met him at a conference a while back. Sent him my curriculum vitae, thought maybe I could get a step up in the world. Never heard back from him. That's why I didn't go over and say hello. Wonder what he wants.” Warren took a noisy sip. “I'm pretty sure it was him.”

Whitehurst. Deborah felt faint tremors run through her limbs. Everything was falling into place. The man who had stalked her house had gray hair. Of course. Whitehurst saw the Echin drug breakthrough as his key to the boardroom. He would do anything to hold on to that.

Anything.

Deborah started for the door, her feet shuffling noisily across the floor. “Could you give me a hand, Warren?”

His back was to her. “Sure thing, Debs, just let me make a quick call, okay?”

“Warren,” she said, then stopped. He was already on the phone. She reached for the door.

She had to find a place to hide.

James Whitehurst tried to look at it like a trip to the dentist, painful but unavoidable. Down deep, however, he found the whole affair utterly despicable.

Having to deal with riffraff such as this man beside him, a dead-eyed lout with white-blond hair and pupils of palest blue, one shade away from a true albino. A gun for hire. To be forced to stoop to such things. Whitehurst climbed the laboratory stairs, fighting down his anger at Owen MacKenzie, at Pharmacon, at fate, but not at Givens. No, that anger he wanted to let burn like a white-hot flame. It was the only way he could keep going. And he had to. Doing what lay ahead was his only way to get what he deserved. Though it left him sweaty palmed and queasy, Whitehurst kept climbing the stairs. At least he wouldn't be the one to pull the trigger.

Whitehurst stopped before the door the receptionist had directed him to, and motioned for his heavy-lidded companion to wait. He raised his hand to knock on the door, when a soft moan sounded from farther down the corridor.

It was worse this time than it ever had been before. The warning tingle in her head had grown to an angry buzz, sort of a cross between a berserk electric razor and a beehive on the rampage.

Then the socks appeared on her ankles.

That was how somebody in the support group had described it. Deborah had only gone three times before tiring of all the pain and anger and fear. Maybe it helped the others to lay it all out over and over and over around the room, but not her. She had enough trouble dealing with her own distress, much less that of two dozen others.

The socks. The socks started unrolling up her legs, like somebody was dipping her limbs in novocaine. She stumbled over to the side wall and let herself slip down to the floor. Already she had lost her feet.

It was up above her knees now, and at midthigh the new fear emerged. What if it didn't stop? What if it kept creeping right on up, farther and farther to her neckline? She knew it was a possibility. She even knew the name for it. Chronic progressive, it was called. The form of disease that turned a living, breathing, feeling, shouting, lusting human being into a prisoner, trapped inside a body that no longer moved upon command. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for a lifetime.

Deborah breathed a soft moan, almost delirious with relief when the numbness stopped and held, claiming only her legs.

Then she heard the footsteps walk toward her, and she held her breath. But the footsteps continued their quiet careful approach.

Until two pairs of legs came into view.

21

“It's too quiet,” Cochise announced.

“Quiet's fine with me,” Cliff replied, climbing the stairs beside him. “Quiet's great.”

Cliff had been halfway across the broad lawn when a blaring horn had turned him around. Blair had flung her car into a free space, waved him over, grinned from ear to ear when Cliff's jaw hit his chest at the sight of Cofield sitting there beside her.

Cochise had untangled himself from the backseat and swiftly explained how the research director had been persuaded to see the light. Cofield had just sat there, still shaky from the experience and afraid the three-headed purple people eater was going to swoop down again and carry him off for good.

But Cliff had managed to give almost as good as he got. He had taken Blair and Cochise by the mangled Infiniti, shown off his handiwork, bragged a little over how not everybody could have done such a job—see that, hit him dead center, look at how that door's bent, it almost makes it halfway across the front seat. Cochise had asked, if Cliff had done such a great job, then where was the guy. Cliff had replied by pointing at the hospital and suggesting that a stroll through the emergency room might reveal a foreigner with a leaky head.

Then they had sent Blair back to baby-sit their semi-reformed research director and gone off to find Deborah Givens.

Cochise stopped him with an upraised arm the size of a tree branch. “This place is quiet like before a big storm.”

But Cliff was still too high from his meeting with the Infiniti to care. “I got it now. This is another Indian thing, right?”