“There’s a little boy on the line now. She’d damn well better.”
Two years old. Taken by a stranger whose hands were wet with Becky’s blood. My God.
“Maureen isn’t the issue, though. South Star is,” Dad said.
“And now are you going to tell us about that?”
“Nonclassified elements.” He poked up the brim of his hat with his index finger. “South Star’s mission was peak soldier performance. Researching ways to keep soldiers operating at top physical and mental levels under extreme conditions.”
“How?”
“Revving them up. Strengthening the immune system, increasing endurance, and reducing the amount of sleep they need. Raising their pain threshold so they could keep going when they’re wounded.”
Jesse swung up the on-ramp onto the 405 and accelerated into the freeway traffic. “So it was about creating über-soldiers.”
“It was about keeping our men and women alive on the battlefield. When you get sleep-deprived, you make mistakes and people can die. But if you eliminate the need for sleep, you can operate twenty-four/seven without losing your edge. You can send fewer soldiers into battle and risk fewer lives.”
“Swayze was engineering insomnia,” Jesse said.
“Essentially.”
“And studying ways to increase pain tolerance?”
He changed lanes. It was archetypal Los Angeles traffic: huge SUVs and BMWs and low-riders jockeying for primacy. Signs said, SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT, but nobody obeyed, because no Angeleno will concede that another driver has a faster car than his. Ever.
“Not pain tolerance,” Dad said, “pain threshold. Stopping soldiers from perceiving pain to begin with.”
“That’s called morphine,” Jesse said.
“You bet. Morphine was a terrific painkiller for riflemen at Gettysburg, and it’s terrific today, and it leaves you with a soldier who’s incoherent and incapacitated. But say you could eliminate the sensation of pain while leaving soldiers clearheaded. What if you could inoculate people against pain beforehand, so soldiers could continue fighting when they’re wounded?”
“South Star was developing a pain vaccine?” I said.
“Yes.”
Jesse shook his head. “Redesigning soldiers to be sleepless and numb. Unbelievable.”
“That’s a cheap crack,” Dad said.
“No, it’s just my experience that those things don’t tend to be so great.”
“It may sound cruel, keeping soldiers on the battlefield when they’re wounded,” Dad said. “But when you’re torn up with shrapnel and fifty miles from a medic, having your comrades evacuate you isn’t compassionate. It’s dangerous and it jeopardizes the mission. If wounded men can defend themselves and help the unit, it’s better all around.”
“Was this vaccine chemical, psychological, what?” I said.
“That was need-to-know. Best guess—neurobiological techniques, cognitive-behavioral psychology, cell regulation . . .” He shrugged. “But I have to presume that whatever South Star was investigating, something went wrong. Very, very wrong.”
Jesse wrung his hand on the wheel. “And instead of a supersoldier, it created a serial killer?”
“Or worse. Both.”
I leaned forward. “I spoke to Valerie Skinner this morning. She doesn’t have cancer. She says something’s digging tunnels in her brain.”
Jesse’s shoulders tightened. “Shit.”
Dad stared at traffic. His face was weather-beaten and his eyes remote.
“You don’t look surprised,” I said.
“I’ve checked into why some of your classmates have died, and Valerie fits a pattern.”
“Whatever this thing is, it causes neurological malfunction, doesn’t it?” I said.
He gave me a dark look. “Hold on. This is hard to hear.”
Sliding the key card into the door, Coyote entered the hotel room and stopped still. Anxiety pulsed beneath his skin. He drew sensory data: sights, sounds, smells. The suitcase stood in the corner, precisely parallel to the edge of the window. The filament ran from the handle of the weapons case to the leg of the desk chair. Nothing had been disturbed.
He closed the door, booted the laptop, turned on the shower, and stripped naked. Time was short. Unease was a metallic taste in his mouth.
The room was secure. But the mission was not.
He had chucked Soccer Mom halfway back to Hollywood, throwing her wig and clothing into a Dumpster. He had sloughed off her anima and returned to himself. He had, per protocol, stopped at an Internet café to check his e-mail and the news feeds before returning to base. When he did, he discovered that several trip wires had been set off.
Steam filled the bathroom. He stepped into the shower and the hot water began rinsing away the stench of the she-horse. Not cooked flesh, but the true stench of Becky O’Keefe, the odor of corpulence, of milk and meat and moistness.
The e-mail was bad, the phone call worse. His contacts had given him trigger phrases. South Star. Explosion. Details of his project were beginning to seep out—backstory, as they called it in Hollywood. Granted, his mission had become high-profile, thanks to the news jackals. But the trigger phrases should not have seeped into the knowledge stream.
There was a leak.
He soaped up and scrubbed. Removing trace evidence from his body was crucial. He had to avoid arrest: Arrest would derail the project. However, if it came to that, trace would be irrelevant. If the mission failed, he would suicide himself and take his captors with him. He ran the soap over his hair, lathering his scalp. The stench of the horse ran down the drain.
There was a leak. He needed to plug it.
He slid the soap over his body, suppressing the urge to linger. Things were unfinished. The trip wires had prevented him from completing his work. The child remained.
He had much to do. He ran through the list in his head. Becky’s car? Nobody was going to find it yet. He had given himself sufficient time.
The data? He would upload and cross-reference as soon as he finished washing.
The mother? The shower needled his chest and abdomen. He ran the soap across the raised tracks of the scar. And in a circle over his belly, feeling flat, smooth skin.
The mother, Becky the Mare, was drained of blood and stiff with rigor. She was gone.
The child?
Coyote circled the soap around his belly again and again. Steam cocooned him. The soap dropped from his slippery fingers. His hand continued circling his navel.
Cold water blurted through the showerhead. Coyote blinked. Feeling the sensation of skin rubbing skin, he looked down. His hand was circling his umbilicus. His fingertips were wrinkled. How long had he been here?
He slammed the showerhead sideways and shut off the water. He had things to take care of. Wrapping a towel around his waist, he stalked out to the bedroom, running once more through his list.
The car. The data. The mother.
The mother, the mother, something went with the mother.
No—the mother went. The mother was gone. That was the truth of the world. Hollywood, outside his window, was where his mother had gone.
Stay here, K. I’ll be back tonight
. In that hot, bright apartment near the hills. But she never came back. He waited, and he burrowed into a corner of the apartment in a nest made of her clothes, until the building super found him and called Social Services. But her going was her gift to him. It forced him to learn how to struggle and fight. Need built strength. Lack built strength. He had been more than ready for boot camp, for everything the army threw at him, for China Lake and the agencies he later served.
And now he was on his own again. Disavowed.
He rubbed the scar and picked up his amulet from the desk. The two were halves of a whole. The scar was born from the shrapnel in the amulet, as Coyote was born from South Star.
He felt a need growing, a thirst to latch on and nourish himself. A sound rose from deep in his throat.
He had a list, a schedule, but he was going to have to adjust it. He had to find the source of the leak. And he knew where to start looking.
He gazed out the window at the crawling gleam of Los Angeles. The craving to draw sustenance intensified, the desire to eat and eat and nourish himself until he was gorged. He threw the towel in the corner. Tossing the suitcase on the bed, he began to dress.
The car. The data. The mother.
And now, a leak. He had to take steps.
He pulled on a T-shirt and khakis, a button-down shirt and baseball cap. Mr. Hollywood Nebbish would serve today.
He was forgetting something. He could taste it on the air. Something about a child. A child seeking closeness to the mother. Becky’s child? He paused. The thought eluded him. Slamming the suitcase, he turned to go.
13
The blue-green Santa Monica mountains cut the horizon ahead. Jesse closed on a gasoline tanker, doing eighty-five. Dad’s voice was flat.
“Three deaths are particularly suspicious. Phoebe Chadwick, Linda Garcia, and Shannon Gruber. In order: alcohol, anorexia, and pneumonia. All of them atypical cases.”
“Define atypical,” I said.
“Phoebe was a party girl who stumbled off a curb during spring break and got hit by a bus. She’d had a couple of drinks, but according to the toxicology report she wasn’t drunk. Turns out she’d been having tremors, her reflexes had gone haywire, and she was slurring her speech. She also thought light sockets could talk and that Katie Couric was stalking her.”
“Yow.”
Jesse flipped a look in his wing mirror and yanked the pickup into the fast lane to pass the tanker.
“Wilshire exit’s only half a mile ahead,” I said.
“I see it. You can stop clawing my shoulder.”
He swung the truck back across four lanes of traffic, swerved onto the off-ramp, and braked sharply around the corner onto Wilshire Boulevard.
Dad braced himself against his door. “And Linda Garcia, her anorexia came on like a fever and destroyed her in the space of months. Her father says it burned her from the inside out. By the time he carried her into the hospital she weighed sixty-nine pounds.”
“Damn.” I tried not to picture that. “And Shannon? Her obit reads pneumonia following a long illness, and Mom said aggressive breast cancer ran in her family.”
“It wasn’t cancer. They don’t know what it was.”
“How—”
He turned sharply. “I’ve spoken to all their parents in the past thirty-six hours. People I served with, worked side by side with, every one of whom has buried a child.”
My gaze broke from his.
Jesse beat the light at Sepulveda and we passed the Federal Building, towering on its lonely plot like a pillar of salt. Dad’s voice dropped back to flat calm.
“Shannon’s life turned into one solid panic attack. Her folks found her hiding in a closet wrapped in wet towels because she was terrified of dust mites. They nearly had her committed, until a psychiatrist shot her full of Thorazine and strapped her down so they could MRI her. They found massive abnormalities in her thalamus.”
“A brain tumor?” Jesse said.
“Growths and degeneration. That part of her brain just”—he raised his hands, gesturing hopelessness—“disintegrated.”
“Jesus.”
We rolled through Westwood Village. Jesse glanced around. This was his old stomping ground, from his years at UCLA law school. Off to the left I glimpsed the Medical Center through the semibohemian mishmash of falafel stands and movie theaters and crapola vendors that edged the campus.
Jesse shifted his shoulders. “Pain is nothing but a perception in the brain,” he said. “Eliminate the perception and you eliminate the pain. You can do that by disconnecting part of the body from the central nervous system, or you can do it by altering brain chemistry.” His voice was dry as sand. “Figure a vaccine would go for the second option.”
I thought of Valerie’s unsteadiness, memory problems, and paranoia. And of Ceci Lezak being given a postmortem skull X-ray in Wally’s dentist’s chair.
“Who else, Dad?”
“Some deaths are outside the pattern. A couple of kids, pretty clear their deaths were alcohol- or drug-related.”
“Chad Reynolds dying of exposure out in the desert,” I said. “Tommy told me animals got to his body, but there was enough of him left for the coroner to find barbiturates in his system. And Billy D’Amato—the crash site reeked of whiskey.”
“And Ted Horowitz.” He shook his head. “Pure tragedy, walking headfirst into that propeller.”
Jesse hadn’t heard about that. His grip on the throttle wavered. “Christ.”
“I know the CAG on the
Nimitz
—the officer responsible for carrier air operations. They investigated that accident six ways from Sunday. Teddy was a popular crewman, and folks were looking for any way to explain what happened without blaming him. But he plain blew it.”
My head began aching again. The day was flashy. Cars were streaks of shine passing on Wilshire, and trees waved dollar-green in the breeze. Around us office towers and penthouse apartments appeared. The boulevard curved, rolling like a river between rising cliffs.
“Then there’s Dana West,” Dad said.
“The hospital fire?”
“It was arson.”
“Holy hell. How do you know that?”
“I called in a favor and—”
His cell phone rang. He excused himself and answered, speaking tersely and taking out a pen to write something on the back of an envelope.
My stomach was roiling. I pressed a hand against it. Nothing but a spark, and this little thing was already igniting my life physically and spiritually. Jesse pulled into the right lane. His hair fell over his collar. I wanted to push it aside and kiss him behind the ear and tell him the news before I burst into tears or flames. He stopped for a red light.
I double-checked the address of Primacon Labs. “Two more blocks.”
Dad hung up.
Jesse turned to him. “If Dana West was murdered, then—”