True Evil (54 page)

"I don't give a shit." Alex reached for her door handle.

Will caught hold of her wrist. "Hold on, now. Let's don't get you in worse trouble than you're already in."

She pulled her arm free. "The bastards have already fired me. What else can they do?"

Will lowered his head and looked at her with seven decades of accumulated wisdom. "Well, honey, there's fired, and then there's
fired
fired. You just got off the phone with a special agent of the FBI. If you were
fired
fired, he wouldn't be talking to you at all."

Alex forced herself to sit back in the Explorer, anger boiling in her gut. Immediately after Grace's death, she had felt she was at a great disadvantage in her quest, but not powerless. She may have acted irresponsibly, but at least she'd been doing
something.
Now she was being restrained by the possibility that the agency that should have been investigating all along might finally get off its ass and do something.

She grabbed her computer from the floor and took it out of hibernation yet again. This time her toolbar showed a three-bar data connection. She'd already searched the names Eldon Tarver and Noel D. Traver so many times in the past few hours that her eyes blurred when she looked at the Google search page.

"I'm missing something," she said.

Will grunted.

She checked MSN Messenger, but Jamie wasn't logged on.

"What did Kaiser tell you?" Will asked.

"Not much." She thought back to Kaiser's brief biography of Eldon Tarver. "He said there was a gap in the years when Tarver was in college or grad school. During Vietnam, I guess. When did the Vietnam War end?"

"They scraped the last chopper off the roof of the embassy in '75, but for all practical purposes, the big show was over by '73."

Vietnam…

"Late Vietnam," Alex murmured.

"What?"

"Something Dr. Tarver said to me in his office. It was about a research project he worked on…something about combat veterans and cancer." She closed her eyes and saw the photograph on Tarver's office wall again, the black-and-white snapshot of the blonde bookended by Tarver and the military officer. "VCP," she said, scrunching her eyelids tight. "Those letters were embroidered on Tarver's lab coat. Also painted on the building behind him."

"What are you talking about?" asked Will.

"An acronym," she said, suddenly recalling Tarver's explanation. "The Veterans' Cancer Project."

Alex typed "Veterans' Cancer Project" into the Google search field. Google returned over 8 million links, but not one in the first fifty referred to a formally named Veterans' Cancer Project. Most of the links led to sites dealing with various types of cancer in Gulf War or Vietnam veterans. But the Vietnam links dealt almost exclusively with Agent Orange, which Tarver had said his group had not looked into.

"There's not a Veterans' Cancer Program," she said, puzzled. "Or at least it wasn't a big enough deal for anyone to remember it."

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "But Veterans' Cancer Project isn't what I saw," she thought aloud. "I saw
VCP.
"

She typed "VCP" into the search field and hit ENTER. What appeared was a plethora of results related only by their sharing the same acronym. Next she typed "VCP" plus "cancer." The first few hits concerned a research project in India. But the fifth started her pulse racing. The first words following the acronym were
Special
Virus
Cancer Program
—not
Veterans',
as Tarver had claimed—which the link description defined as a scientific program that had begun in 1964, consumed 10 percent of the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute for some years, then was renamed the Virus Cancer Program in 1973. Alex bit her bottom lip, clicked the link, and began to read.

The VCP was a massive research effort involving some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States, all probing the possible viral origins of cancer, particularly leukemia….

"My God," Alex breathed.

"What is it?" asked Will.

"Wait," she said, reading as fast as she could.

A small but vocal number of physicians have suggested that simian-related retroviruses like HIV and SV 40 (which has been proved to have contaminated batches of human polio vaccine) were in fact created by the scientists of the Virus Cancer Program. While this is disputed by the medical establishment, government records confirm that tens of thousands of liters of dangerous new viruses were cultured in the bodies of living animals, primarily primates and cats, and that many of these viruses were modified so as to be able to jump species barriers. In 1973, a significant part of the Virus Cancer Project was transferred to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the home of the United States biological warfare effort. No one denies that the VCP involved an active alliance between the NIH, the U.S. Army, and Litton Bionetics….

"This is it," said Alex. "Holy shit, this is it!"

"What are you yelping about?" Will asked, staring hard at her screen.

"Dr. Tarver lied to me! He told me that VCP stood for Veterans' Cancer Project. It doesn't. It stands for a government project that researched the links between viruses and cancer, especially leukemia. It took place during the Vietnam era. And Eldon Tarver worked for them!"

"Jesus."

"He's killing people," whispered Alex. "He's
still doing research.
Or else he's using what he learned back then to make money off of Andrew Rusk and his desperate clients." Her chest swelled with fierce joy. "We've
got
them, Will."

"Look!" Will said, gripping her wrist. "Son of a bitch!"

Alex looked up. The panel truck and the van had disappeared, and the big aluminum door was sliding back down to the concrete slab.

"You know what I think?" said Alex.

"What?"

"Tarver is shutting everything down. I went to his office and declared myself as an FBI agent. I went to his so-called free clinic. I even gave him a list of the murder victims, for God's sake. Nobody on that list surprised him, either. Christ, I even asked him about the VCP picture! He
knows
I'm going to figure it out eventually. He's got to run, Will." She laid her computer on the backseat and reached for the door handle again. "I'm going down there."

"Wait!" cried Will, restraining her. "If you've got him nailed with evidence, there's no point in screwing the pooch by going in without a warrant."

"I'm not going into the building."

"Be sure, Alex," he said gravely.

"Are you coming or not?"

Will sighed, then opened the glove box and took out his .357 magnum. "I guess."

As she got out of the Explorer, Will said, "Wait. The gate's open, ain't it? We're better off driving up to the front door and telling them we're lost than sneaking in there with guns shoved down our pants."

Alex grinned and climbed back into the Explorer. "I knew I brought you for a reason."

Will cranked the Ford, pulled across the street, and drove down to the gate of the old bakery. As he slowed down to nose through the fence, Alex dialed John Kaiser's cell phone.

"Hey," said Kaiser. "What's up?"

"I've cracked it, John! The whole case. You need to check out something called the Virus Cancer Program. It was a big research project in the late sixties and early seventies. It involved cancer, viruses, and biological weapons. Tarver was part of it."

"Biological weapons?"

"Yes. There's a photo in Tarver's UMC office of him wearing a lab coat that says VCP. The building behind him has the same acronym."

"How did you find out what it stood for?"

"Google, believe it or not. It was the picture in his office that did it, though. I'd never have known what to look for otherwise. But Tarver lied to me about what the acronym stood for. He tried to make it sound noble."

"I'll get on it. The SAC is still stalling on the search warrant for Tarver's house. Maybe this will tip the scales."

"Even Webb Tyler can't ignore this. Call me when you get the warrant."

Kaiser hung up.

The Explorer was only twenty yards from the old bakery.

"Where do you want to go?" asked Will.

"Those casement windows in front."

"They're blacked out."

"Not all of them. Look to the right. A few have been replaced with clear panes."

Will swung the wheel, and the Explorer came to rest opposite one of the windows with clear glass.

"Get out and keep your hand on your pistol," said Alex.

"You think they'd try something?"

"No doubt in my mind. This is a deeply fucked-up individual we're dealing with."

She got out and walked up to the windows. Each pane was about eight inches square, but the clear ones were too high for her to look through.

"Can you give me a step up?"

Will walked over, shoved his pistol into his pants, then bent at the waist and interlocked his fingers. Alex stepped into the resulting cradle, feeling as she had as a little girl when Grace used to boost her up to the lowest branch of the popcorn tree in their backyard. The memory pierced her heart, but she caught hold of the brick sill and pulled herself up to the clear windowpane.

"What do you see?" Will grunted.

"Nothing yet."

The pane was caked with gunk. She spat on the glass and wiped a circle with her sleeve, then pressed her eye to the glass. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a wall of cages. Dozens of them. And inside each one, a sleeping dog. Small dogs, maybe beagles.

"You see anything yet?" Will asked. "My back ain't what it used to be."

"Dogs. A bunch of dogs asleep in cages."

"That's what they breed here."

"I know but…there's something odd about it."

"What?"

"They're asleep."

"So?" Will was wheezing now.

"Well, they can't all be asleep, can they?"

"Haven't you ever heard, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie'?"

Alex almost laughed, but something stopped her. "There must be a hundred of them. A hundred and fifty maybe. They can't
all
be asleep."

"Maybe they drug them."

As Alex peered into the darkened room, the sound of a distant engine reached her, its tone rising steadily. Even before she saw the red van racing down the fenced perimeter, the spark of instinct that had guided her through so many successful hostage negotiations roared to flame.

"Run!"
she shouted, leaping backward out of Will's hands.

"What is it?" he gasped, trying to straighten his back and grab his gun at the same time.

"RUN!"
Alex grabbed his arm and started dragging him away from the building.

"What about my truck?" Will yelled.

"Leave it!"

They were thirty feet from the building when a scorching wall of air slapped them to the ground like the hand of God. Alex skidded across the cement, the skin tearing away from her elbows. She screamed for Will, but she heard only a roaring silence.

It took most of a minute to get her breath back. Then she slowly rolled over and sat up.

Will was on his knees a few yards away, trying in vain to pull a large splinter of glass out of his back. Behind him, a vast column of black smoke climbed into the sky. All the windows in the front wall were gone. Behind the smoke, Alex saw a blue-white flame that looked more like the glow of a Bunsen burner than a roaring blaze. The heat emanating from the building was almost unbearable. As she struggled to her feet, an inhuman shriek of terror echoed across the empty parking lot. Then a dark simian shape burst from the building, running on all fours, trailing smoke and fire. Alex staggered three steps toward Will, told him to leave the splinter where it was, then fell on her face.

CHAPTER 47

Andrew Rusk had taken two Valium, a Lorcet, and a beta-blocker, yet his heart was still pounding. His head was worse. As he stared into his wife's vacuous eyes, he felt as though someone had taken hold of his spinal cord where it entered the base of his brain and was trying to yank it out.

"But I don't
understand,
" Lisa said for the eighth time in as many minutes.

"Those men outside," Rusk said, pointing to the dark patio windows of the house. "They're FBI agents."

"How do you know that? Maybe they're IRS or something."

"I know because I know."

"But I mean
Cuba
?" Lisa whined.

"Shhh,"
Rusk hissed, squeezing her upper arm. "You have to whisper."

She jerked the arm away. "This is the first time you've ever mentioned Cuba to me. Why? Don't you trust me?"

Rusk squelched a desire to scream,
Of course I don't trust you, you silly bitch!

Pouting like a child, Lisa retreated to the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her, yoga style. She was wearing biking shorts and a tank top that revealed the usual fleshscape of spectacular cleavage.

"Cuba?" she said again. "It's not even American yet, is it?"

He gaped at her.
"American?"

"I mean, you know, capitalist or whatever."

Lisa's primary virtue was physical beauty combined with a ravenous libido. Rusk still had difficulty with the idea that someone of middling intelligence could experience truly intense passion, but he'd finally accepted it, based on empirical evidence. Maybe it was a vanity of intellectuals to believe that dumb people couldn't enjoy sex to the degree that smart people did. But maybe they did. Maybe they enjoyed it
more.
Still, Rusk doubted it. At bottom, he figured Lisa was some kind of prodigy, an idiot savant of sexual technique. And that was fine for the bedroom and minor social intercourse. But when it came to actual
thought,
not to mention decision making, it made things difficult.

He knelt before the couch and took Lisa's hand. He had to be patient. He had to convince her. Because there were no more options. They had to get out of the country, and fast. Thora Shepard was lying under a painter's drop cloth in the back of his Cayenne. If one of the FBI agents outside bent the law and broke into the locked garage, it was all over.