Unacceptable Risk (42 page)

When she turned around, she had to think a moment where the road was and then realized she could just listen for the next car. She stood and waited. Nothing came, or at least she heard nothing, until she heard a snapping of branches off behind a thicket of trees.

This was a lonely winter road.

Listening again for cars, she still heard nothing. It could be anything in the forest, she told herself. She reached in her purse and removed the Desert Eagle .357 magnum semiautomatic that Sam had given her to supplement the less potent, but much more compact, SIG Sauer P232 that she still had in the car. Pointing the big gun in the direction of the sounds, she began backing toward the highway. Maybe the stream drowned out the road noise. Then she considered. On one side of her, she had a stream, on the other a road. It should ensure that she wouldn't get lost. Or would it? The road had been making a giant U of sorts and wasn't running straight; so if she missed the U, she would actually be walking parallel to the earlier stretch.

Looking back toward what she supposed was the location of the road, she didn't see any parting of the bushes to indicate where she might have come. Unfortunately, she had walked through something of an open forest and paid little attention to landmarks. Again there was movement in among a thicket of trees. Fear surged through her and she turned and began to trot. She thought of Gaudet and imagined his cold eyes as he watched his men torture the Matses girls and realized she could have been followed from as far back as Los Angeles.

She began to run even as she told herself that if Gaudet was here and armed, he would have confronted her. After maybe a hundred feet she heard the whisper of a car, breathed a quiet sigh of relief, and vowed to tell no one. There didn't seem to be anyone following. Perhaps her fear had been silly.

She emerged on the road, jogged to her car, and drove on, the mountains becoming progressively steeper and the deep canyons deeper. Rocks left scars down the hillside where they flowed like rivers and abutments had been constructed to keep them off the road. Often they failed and she had to be careful, lest she high center the rental car on a boulder. Again Grady felt small in this mammoth-size wilderness.

She used her odometer to find the wide spot in the road where, according to the realtor, the trail to Michael's house began. Jill had been smart about discerning how to find the place. Since it had just sold, Jill knew that the real estate community would have some vague idea or description of how it might be found. And they did. They said if you kept going two hundred yards past a mile marker on the highway paralleling the Salmon, you could look down the cliffs and see the cabin. At the trailhead there was nothing but a forest and a slight incline that obviously led to much steeper terrain. Slowly she drove up the deserted two-lane road and was struck with the grandeur of the walls of rock and the velvet of great forests that rose into the clouds and looked as if conjured by one of the turn-of-the-century landscape artists she had studied in art history class.

When she came to the next wide spot in the road, she got out into the chill of the mountain air and looked over the side. Almost straight down a thousand feet she saw a large, cascading river intersected by a smaller one known as the Wintoon River. Where the Wintoon River emptied into the larger Salmon, a series of magnificent cascades churned white. In the whole of the giant canyon there seemed one level spot and that was on the far side of the Salmon, at the confluence with the Wintoon. It was a plateau a slight distance above both rivers, tiny, mostly wooded, and utterly isolated. On the large bench of land stood two cabins, one fairly large with a gray plume of smoke and a light in the window that created a sense of humanity in the valley.

Looking through her binoculars, she saw various works of stone about the place. They resembled walls and wall segments and cone-shaped structures that she couldn't quite figure out. Who would have built these rock creations? Why would they bother? Grady could make out two rock piles that appeared to be small fortifications of a sort and it seemed as though she could make out a man inside one of them, for there was the barrel of what looked to be a large gun, judging from its location and the posture of it.

Ah. Of course. Sam's men.

Gaudet had the point of the knife under her chin and Benoit was backed into a corner. Her mind struggled to remember all that Spring had said. Everything was starting to be a jumble in her mind.

"Hold still or you'll be cut. Making a deal makes me hungry for Benoit. Somewhere beneath this sanctimonious bullshit that you seem to have picked up in prison, there is the old Benoit, my playmate, and I am going to find her."

"But, like I said, it's—"

"I don't care."

He pulled a condom out of his pocket and stuck it in his teeth.

"Let me unzip the dress, you can cut the rest," Benoit said. He let her turn around and then he slid the zipper down. She was near panic. Sam had come up with real blood from a blood bank and she had used a speculum to pour it inside herself before inserting a tampon. When she removed the tampon in her charade with Gaudet, she lost all the blood. If Gaudet discovered she was lying, he might kill her. The French might or might not require her release before they closed the escrow in forty-eight hours.

"I am going to use the restroom."

"That's not necessary. I like what you have on, having selected it myself."

"No, I mean I really have to go to the bathroom."

"Hurry up."

She went in the bathroom and closed the door. She was shaking. They were on the twentieth floor and escaping out the window was not possible. Besides which, she didn't yet have enough information. She turned and looked, not knowing what she was looking for; then something struck her— the makeup in the drawer provided by Gaudet. She pulled it out. There was red fingernail polish. Mixing it with water, she created a solution that looked like menstrual blood. She turned on the water and began filling the tub. It took her only seconds to strip and climb in as it slowly filled. She poured the fingernail solution between her legs creating tendrils of red in the water. Then she lay back with her eyes closed.

"What's going on?" Gaudet opened the door without knocking and came and sat on the edge of the tub.

"The presentation isn't bad. I always loved you nude."

"Have you seen the Loire Valley?"

"Of course."

"In the summer, when I was a girl, I went there to my grandfather's place. The flowers were amazing in their variety with marvelous colors and so many translucent, delicate petals. I remember particularly the beautiful blues. There were trees a thousand years old, and there were creeks and the river, and grass as green as Ireland, and butterflies. Even the snakes were beautiful and it was so peaceful in the buzz of the hot afternoons, everything seemed at rest and in its place, and there was no discord. Can you think of a place like that for you?"

"It's pure illusion. The frogs eat the bugs, and the birds eat the frogs, and the foxes eat the birds, and the men hunt the foxes down with hounds, and the dogs tear them to pieces while their hearts still beat, and the men laugh and feel strong. I don't live in illusions." "But the flowers are beautiful."

"They are deceptions. Flowers persuade bees to fuck and men use them to persuade women to spread their legs and incur the misery of childbirth. That is all they are good for." "Tell me about your mother."

"My mother and father died when I was young and probably never gave a shit about me anyway. I think my mother was an adulterous bitch and my father well on his way to being a drunk. I have no soft memories. I am a realist. As a young man I drove away my boss's competitors in the laundry business with my fists. Then I killed my boss and took his business. That was about as good as anything I ever felt." "I have some good memories and I want at least a few people to be grateful that I lived."

"I want to make bad days for others before they make bad days for me. Now how can I take you in a bathtub?"

Unable to think of anything else, she slipped away into her
we pac maw,
and after sometime she heard him say "shit" and leave.

Gaudet had left the hotel by the time she dressed. Trotsky and the guards had replaced him in her room.

"He wants you when he gets back," Trotsky said. "If I were you, I'd stop toying with him."

Later, when the maid came, Trotsky disappeared into Gaudet's room. The two guards remained while the woman cleaned. All of a sudden, Benoit was shocked to see a hand emerge from under a linen drape covering the side of the cart. It waved. Glancing at the guards, she could tell that one was absorbed with his sporting magazine and another with pornography. She rose and walked to the desk, picked up a pad of message paper and a pen. One of the guards looked at her and at the paper. She ignored him. Promptly she wrote the following:

Escrow closes at 4:00 P.M.. Cordyceps in three days. French believe five. Gaudet's men to release vector with fake police helicopters. NY, Chicago, Wash., LA. Computer virus at same time.

Then she walked past the cart back to the desk, dropping the paper on the floor. The cart stood between the paper and the two guards. In a flash the hand snatched the paper and dropped another on the floor. When she went to the desk, she picked up the TV remote, turned, and dropped it by the cart, scooping up the paper when she knelt.

Do you want out?
it read.

Trotsky walked into the room. "Gaudet wants you now."

"You're just in time. We should be getting the e-mailed closing statement any moment."

"Never mind that. We're leaving." He shooed the maid and her cart out into the hall. "The escrow closed. You think we would sit around waiting for an e-mail? Devan has been on the phone with Credit Suisse. We're out of here. Now."

Trotsky grabbed her arm and rushed her into Gaudet's room. They put her in a trunk and two big men wheeled her out.

Baptiste was sweating as he stared at the screen. Escrow was to close in minutes. The admiral had retired to his office to await Baptiste's call. Apparently he couldn't wait because Gaudet's phone buzzed and the electronic readout indicated it was the admiral.

"Just about to close," Baptiste said.

"The scientists are screaming that they didn't have adequate time to verify Chaperone. Raval's lab notes don't reveal the source of the Chaperone molecule. Apparently, Northern Lights kept that a secret. Bowden's journal shows a salamander discovery of all things and Gaudet says the Chaperone molecule came from this salamander. I'm sure he's relying on Benoit. Apparently, Raval told Bowden and Benoit which of his submissions yielded the molecule, but we have nothing in writing from Bowden. There is a lot of puzzlement among the scientists," the admiral concluded.

"Well, it's too late to worry about it now. E-mail just arrived this second; it's closed."

"It's done then."

"Yes. Our money is gone and we have the goods."

"But verification of Chaperone's nowhere in sight. It could take days, or if we have shitty luck, it could take weeks! This thing is like a runaway train. We just better be right" The admiral slammed a fist into his open hand.

"Benoit is betting her pardon on it," Baptiste insisted.

"We've got to inform the Americans in enough time," the admiral said.

"It's five days. Let's warn them in four or sooner if we can verify that we have Chaperone. By that time we may know for sure."

"What if we find out tomorrow that we don't have it?

Then what?"

"We still have a card to play with Gaudet and Benoit. We tell the U.S. about Cordyceps immediately if Gaudet and Benoit don't get us Chaperone."

"But then maybe Gaudet pulls the trigger early anyway," the admiral said.

"Maybe he does. But we lose all of our leverage with Gaudet once we tell the U.S. All hell will break loose and he'll know we've told them."

"So, it's really a matter of French national security that we verify Chaperone before sharing our theories with the Americans, and that's all they are ... theories ... about Cordyceps."

"Exactly," Baptiste agreed.

"When, ah ... the financial arrangements ... Gaudet's, I mean—"

"Of course if the Americans stop Cordyceps as they surely will, there won't be much of a drop in the market. I guess maybe just a small drop because of the scare," Baptiste said.

"Maybe no drop if the Americans stop it completely."

"Absolutely. No question. We're working hard to verify that Cordyceps is real and to determine how the plan would be carried out. So far, I must admit, we have been unable to gather any information on that aspect"