The Gamma Option (22 page)

Godzilla
followed its quarry from Summer onto High Street by way of a short cut across Bay Bank Plaza which sent pedestrians scurrying. To keep close on High Street, Blaine mashed parked cars where space demanded. Whatever time was lost in the effort was made up by the constant weaves the squad car was forced to make to avoid cars. They came at last to Bedford Street and crashed through a sawhorse without seeing the telltale sign:

CLOSED FOR CONSTRUCTION

Construction on a water main had shut down Bedford Street from end to end, but the squad car had already committed. The street was totally torn up; it was an obstacle course of deep holes, sawhorses, and open ditches.

The women’s car took an awful beating, but
Godzilla
negotiated the conditions easily. McCracken felt himself being jolted upward in his seat time and time again, but he was gaining, damn it, he was gaining!

Just a car-length away, he saw the huge blonde lean out the passenger window and fire pistols with both hands.
Godzilla’s
windshield exploded and Blaine ducked low to avoid the spray of glass. The next series of shots clanged off the crusher’s grill and Blaine knew the blonde was now aiming for the tires or the radiator. But the tires were solid all the way through and the radiator reenforced with extra layers of steel.

Feeling confident, Blaine rose just enough to see over the dashboard and jammed
Godzilla
’s
accelerator all the way to the floor. The crusher’s engine roared as it shot forward with a burst of speed that brought its monstrous tires within a yard of the police car. Then an unmarked ditch off to the right caught one of
Godzilla
’s
tires. Blaine felt the sudden drop with a jolt. He gunned the engine but the monster truck was caught at a difficult angle even for the 640-cubic-inch engine to power out of. As the squad car struggled down the rest of Bedford Street, Blaine rocked
Godzilla
between forward and reverse. At last the monster truck jumped free. Blaine gunned the engine and roared the final stretch down Bedford Street to where it ended directly before Lafayette Place. He had either a left or right to take now, and he was certain the women had turned right.

Soon after swinging onto Chauncy Street, he saw the tail of their squad car screech into another right. McCracken sped past traffic, which pulled over in front of him, and followed the women down Summer Street. The traffic was heavy, but by blowing his horn to alert drivers to his presence he succeeded in having enough cars pull over to keep his path cleared.

When he passed between South Station and the Federal Reserve Building, traffic suddenly thinned. He had the squad car dead in his sights. Only a hundred yards separated them, but the women were speeding away from the field, seizing the open stretch down Summer Street for their final escape.

McCracken was fighting with
Godzilla
for more speed when ahead he saw an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer backing slowly across the width of Summer Street. It was obviously having trouble negotiating a delivery slot in a building on his side of the road. The squad car came to a halt behind the eighteen wheeler, trapped once and for all.

Seeing his chance, Blaine darted into the empty lanes of opposing traffic and sped forward. He sideswiped one car and then squeezed between two others. Suddenly the police car was directly before him. He gave
Godzilla
all the gas it would take and felt it shoot forward as though eager for the task ahead.

The monster truck mounted the squad car, and trunk, roof, then hood gave way like plastic. A series of pops followed as jagged metal pressed into the tires and flattened them. The police car sunk even lower.
Godzilla
continued to roll forward.

At last the crusher touched pavement again and Blaine threw
Godzilla
into neutral and jumped down. He reached the driver’s door, ready and eager to deal with the women inside.

A frightened Boston police officer with his face bleeding from a host of cuts gazed up at him in abject terror. And all McCracken could do was melt innocently away, wondering where exactly it had been that he’d lost the women.

Chapter 19

“YOU DON’T MIND ME
saying, Mr. M., you look, ayah, like fucking hell.”

McCracken almost asked the harbormaster, with his sun-wrinkled flesh, sunken eyes, and liver-spotted hands, who was he to judge? But instead he just shrugged and settled farther back on the bench to wait for the ferry to take him across the bay to Great Diamond Island.

“Been a slow night, has it, Abner?”

“Was till near about two hours ago. Someone at the Estates must be having a party I’d say, ayah.”

Blaine forced his shoulders upright at that. “Lots of people make the trip over?”

“Near ’bout a dozen, ten anyway,” the harbormaster replied. His faced angled in its typical quizzical expression. “Funny thing now that I think about it, they were all men. Three cars, three or four to a car.”

“Shit,” McCracken said, standing up.

“Huh?”

“How long ago, Abner?”

“Couple hours, like I said.”

“How long exactly?”

The harbormaster scratched at a wrinkled, sunken eye with a finger blackened with dirt. “Five runs back. Say two-and-a-half hours.” His eyes bulged suddenly. “Hold on. You’re gettin’ that look you had when you made that man drive his car into the bay. Took me a half day to dredge it out. Don’t make me do that with three cars, not three cars, please!”

“Don’t worry, Abner, I’m not in the mood.”

Blaine’s mind was working fast. After abandoning
Godzilla,
he had stolen a car from the Boston Aquarium parking lot and driven straight through to Maine. He arrived at the harbor two hours past sunset, which would have given the women plenty of time to have arranged for a team to be waiting at his island condominium. They would have expected him to head back home under the circumstances. The only anomaly was that they hadn’t left any of their number here at the harbor. Then again, if they tried for him here and missed, he was gone. If they went for him on the island, their chances would be better and his opportunity for escape far worse. Should have been more careful with Abner, though, maybe sent the cars over one or two at a time to avoid suspicion. They’d learn their lesson when he didn’t show up.

“Still got that double-barrel twelve gauge, Abner?” he asked the harbormaster.

“Mr. M., you promised you wouldn’t—”

“I’m not gonna use it on them, Abner. I just need a little insurance. Like to borrow it, if I could.”

The old man eased himself behind the counter and drew the iron relic out. “Take care of it now. It belonged to my daddy.”

“Which makes it older than you.”

“Ayah. Considerably.”

“Terrific.”

Abner handed it over. “Tip you gave me last Christmas more ’an entitles you to the favor, but if you’re in trouble, Mr. M., seems a mite better to sit here awhile and think it out, I’d say.”

“No can do, Abner,” Blaine said, already making his way for the door.

“Got someplace you gotta be?”

“Just going to visit a friend.”

McCracken made sure to announce his presence on Johnny Wareagle’s land by breaking selected trip wires in a pattern that could only be purposeful. The last thing he wanted to chance after coming this far was an arrow from one of Johnny’s many bows.

“How unnecessary, Blainey,” Wareagle said after McCracken stepped through a door that had already been opened for him.

“Good evening to you, too, Indian. Suppose you were expecting me.”

“For several days now. The disruption of your manitou is brighter than a beacon. I could feel you drawing closer and closer, almost since the very time we parted ten days ago.”

“I’ve seen plenty of the world,” Blaine told him, “some of which hasn’t been seen by anyone for over forty-five years.”

Wareagle looked at him more closely.

“It’s a long story, Indian. And right now I’ve got to tell the last part of it to someone else. Let’s take a ride.”

McCracken filled Johnny in on everything that had occurred over the past ten days, from the details of Matthew’s kidnapping to his travels to Japan by way of Israel and then, literally, into the Pacific Ocean. The Indian had been concerned by the cryptic message received the week before with instructions of what to do in the event of Blaine’s death. He claimed he paid it little heed since he knew McCracken would be returning.

“I guess what it comes down to, Indian,” Blaine said at the end, “is that the world has never mattered less to me. It’s just one life I’m out to save this time, and if I can’t get the boy out of this alive, then stopping Rasin won’t mean shit.”

“But you would try anyway, even if not for the boy.”

“A couple of years ago for sure. Today I don’t know. What all this has shown me is whatever I’ve felt I’ve been lacking these last few months is purely a state of mind.”

“Everything is a state of mind, Blainey, and that state of mind affects our state of being as well. When there is harmony between them, we are content with our lives. When one is out of balance, we search blindly for that which can be found only inside ourselves.”

“Should I take that to heart?”

“The boy became the stitching which rejoined your two states together. That is what has changed in you these past months, but even I did not realize it clearly until now.”

Blaine felt himself nodding. “It was like an emptiness. I felt it go away that day I spent with him in London, and even when those women kidnapped him the emptiness didn’t return.”

“Because in either case the boy supplied you with purpose. Through all our years in the hellfire and beyond, purpose is what maintained harmony in the triangle of your mind, body, and spirit. The betrayals—and your acceptance of them—stole that purpose away and cast you on your own, where you had to create your own purpose. Sometimes the justifications came up short. You became an orphan of your own lost emotions. But then you saw yourself in the boy and that changed everything.”

“He’s mine, Johnny. In this whole crazy life I’ve led he’s all I’ve got that’s really mine.”

Wareagle looked at him from the driver’s seat of the Jeep slicing through the night. “No, Blainey, he is but another object to pursue in striving to find meaning and purpose in your life. You said so yourself. Think of the original hellfire that first brought us together. We were not concerned with victory as much as continuation. One mission mattered most in that it set the stage for another. They called it the Phoenix Project after a bird who rose from its own ashes, in the hope that our war effort could do the same. But as we strove toward this end, our own spirits were being reduced to ashes.”

“So what are you telling me, to stop reaching, to stop striving?”

“I am telling you nothing, Blainey, except that if it hadn’t been the boy, it would have been something else. That is neither good nor bad, just what is necessary for your existence. That is what you must understand.”

“Let’s make a phone call,” McCracken said as a gas station appeared before them.

Hank Belgrade was less than happy to hear from him. “My phone may be tapped,” the State and Defense Department liaison told him. “Keep talking at your own risk.”

“Now that’s no way to greet an old friend, Hank.”

“Look who’s talking. When we met in Washington, you could have told me you’d been flagged.”

“Flagged? Again? What color this time?”

“You mean you didn’t know? Christ … The code is blue.”

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for. I’m used to red.”

“Wait a minute, you really didn’t know about this?”

“First I’ve heard of it. Who’s after me?”

“Can’t tell for sure but I’m proceeding on the notion that they know about our meeting and are just playing it cool in the hope that we do lunch in the near future.”

“Only if you’re buying.”

“They don’t know about the material I furnished you on the
Indianapolis.
That’s something anyway.”

“Do they know about Boston, Hank?”

“What about Boston?”

“I met with Bart Joyce, who had a chance to be most enlightening before a pair of ladies eliminated his need for a government pension.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“Watch “Headline News” at the top of the hour to hear all about it.”

Belgrade hesitated. “You didn’t call me to discuss my viewing habits.”

“Nope. See, there’s another favor I need… .”

“You gonna put my kids through college if they boot me out of government service?”

“By the time they find out they’ll be patting me on the back again and you, too.”

“What is it this time?”

“An extension of our original discussion. Something else was indeed loaded on board the
Indianapolis,
cannisters marked with the Greek letter gamma. Bart Joyce saw them being loaded. A rather interesting gent was supervising the work who happened to be an ex-Nazi scientist named Bechman.”

“Wait a minute, MacNuts, you’re talking way out of my league now. Ex-Nazis working for our government? Why don’t you call your friends at the Gap?”

“I don’t have their number handy. Besides, I don’t feel like breaking anyone new into this story. Somebody’s after me, remember?”

“But you don’t know who or why.”

“Well, I’ve got a couple ideas… .”

“You want me to find out what happened to Bechman?”

“At least what he may have been working on in our behalf during those last days of the war.”

“This stuff may be buried too deep for me to dig up.”

“I’ve got faith in your ability to shovel.”

“Yeah, well, you never were much of a judge of character.” Belgrade paused. “I know you’re on the trail of something big here, MacNuts, and that’s good enough for me. But it would make my life a little easier if you gave me some reason to share your concern.”

“No sweat, Hank. See, it goes like this. If what Joyce said is true, then I’ve got to figure we loaded this gamma secret weapon with the full intention of using it on the Japanese either in addition to or instead of the A-bombs. Only something stopped us. And something led to a decision to sink the
Indianapolis
and cut our losses.”