Perilous Panacea (25 page)

Beecher’s push knocked Curt off balance. Curt’s right knee connected with Maxwell’s jaw.

Maxwell’s head snapped back, and he lost his grip.

Curt landed on top of Maxwell and rolled off. He levered himself up, kicked at Maxwell’s vast stomach, and then crunched through the glass shards after Beecher.

Out in the brightly lit hall, Surling was almost at the green EXIT door. Beecher trailed ten feet back, gun in one hand while his other hand fumbled inside his jacket pocket.

Curt followed on Beecher’s heels.

Surling reached the green door and jerked at the handle.

Beecher stopped, screwed something on the gun, and aimed it at Surling.

Curt rushed toward Beecher; his only chance was to hit him and make him miss.

Thuck! Thuck!

As Curt approached Beecher, he caught sight of Surling.

Surling’s head snapped back. He thrashed the air with both hands, like a drowning man about to go down. Slowly, he doubled up and pitched forward, his head crashing into the half-open green door.

Curt smashed into Beecher’s back and bounced off, his momentum driving Beecher forward.

Beecher stopped, pivoted around, and faced Curt.

Curt lowered his shoulder and charged.

Like a bullfighter without a cape, Beecher sidestepped. “You son of a bitch, I’ll get you for this.” As Curt stumbled by him, Beecher kicked Curt’s right thigh. “If Applenu didn’t need you, I’d give you what Surling got!”

Beecher’s kick sent Curt reeling, but he recovered his balance. When he turned to rush Beecher again, he stared into the muzzle of the gun.

Beecher waggled the silencer-lengthened pistol like a scolding finger waved at a naughty child. “Don’t tempt me, asshole.”

Breathing hard, Curt rubbed his aching thigh. He started to slump to the floor, then remembered Surling.

Surling lay on his right side, his left knee pulled toward his chest, still trying to run away. The back of his bald head glowed with reflected light. A rapidly enlarging reddish-brown circle on the lower back of his khaki shirt gleamed moist like spilled coffee. A smaller circle grew on the right shoulder.

Gently, Curt held his head and eased him onto his back. His light-blue eyes, wide open, stared at the ceiling, and blood oozed around the left eye and drained into the upturned socket to form a total eclipse. His glasses, the left lens shattered, hung from his right ear down the front of his face and glistened below his nose like snot blown out but not free. With his lips slightly parted, he appeared ready to speak.

Curt cleared his throat of the congestion that pressured his chest and pushed up into his throat. “Bob.”

“Get your ass up, Reedan,” Beecher growled from behind.

Curt searched Surling’s limp wrist for life. “It’s beating! There’s a pulse.” His pulse was weak, but present, constant, like the ticking of a watch. He twisted around to look up at Beecher. “He’s alive. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”

Beecher kneed Curt in the right kidney.

Curt lurched forward onto his knees; he dropped the wrist and grabbed his back. “He’s alive.”

“Get your ass up.”

Another knee from Beecher, and Curt crumbled forward and braced himself on the floor to keep from sprawling on top of Surling. He grabbed his back, and with great effort, he struggled to his feet, swallowing hard to choke back the vomit that stewed in the back of his throat.

Beecher grabbed Curt’s shoulder, twisted him around, and shoved him toward his quarters. “No way is he alive.”

Curt tried to go around Beecher to get back to Surling. “I felt a pulse. Bob!”

Beecher blocked his way, his gun shoved into Curt’s stomach, his left hand probing gently at the back of his head. “That’s it, Reedan. Now turn your ass around and get in that room.”

Curt hesitated, and the gun penetrated further into his gut, stirring the nausea. He stepped back to relieve the pressure, his eyes never leaving Surling’s face.

Beecher backed up until he stood over Surling. “He’s done.” He raised his gun.

“Hey!”

Thuck! Thuck!

Surling’s body twitched slightly.

Before Curt could move, Beecher swung the gun around and pointed it at Curt’s chest.

“You killed him.”

Surling’s expression hadn’t changed. Two intersecting circular stains now raced across the front of his khaki shirt, heading for an intersection.

“Get back in there, Reedan. Now.”

He swallowed hard and slowly turned. Now what? Curt wondered. Maybe it was time to say the hell with it. Just take out after him and force him to use his gun one more time. Use it now, instead of two days from now. It’ll all come out the same.

Beecher shoved him forward just as Maxwell stumbled into the hall, holding his stomach, blood coursing down his face from a gash above his left eye. A painted clown: one side of his face painted red with blood, the other side white. Blood polka dotted the left side of his short-sleeve white shirt. He shuffled across the hall into the change room.

“I said get your ass in there,” Beecher said.

Curt cleared his throat and swallowed. He looked back at Surling one more time, as his last words hammered around inside his brain: “Nothing matters.”

“It does, Bob,” Curt mumbled. “It has to.”

Beecher tapped the gun on Curt’s shoulder and signaled for him to turn around and face him. He held the gun in his right hand while he probed the back of his head with a handkerchief in his left hand. He studied the blood-spotted handkerchief. “If anything like this happens again.” He stopped to breathe, short quick rasps through his open mouth, like a winded dog. “If you even look like you’re going to make a break for it, you’re not only going to get it, but your wife’s going to get another visit. And this time we won’t just fuck the bitch.” As if to summon more words, he waved the lengthened gun barrel like a baton. “Yeah, we fucked the cunt. We gave her what you haven’t given her enough of.”

Curt lunged forward, his fists ready. “Like hell you will.”

Beecher stepped back, his face reddening, the gun still pointed forward. “Just don’t tempt me.”

Curt stopped and stepped back. No chance this time. There’d be a time to settle scores, soon enough. He turned and limped toward his quarters, his thigh aching from the kick, but his knee came out okay, despite the twisting Maxwell gave it.

Up ahead, Maxwell slouched in the entrance to the change room, watching, a white towel pressed to the left side of his head covering his eye. He shuffled toward Curt to block his way. They stared at each other, Maxwell’s head cocked sideways to glare up at Curt with his good eye.

“I’d like nothing better than to get another shot at her,” Maxwell yelled. “Next time I’ll fuck her until her cunt’s hamburger.”

Curt started around him, but Maxwell scooted sideways to keep in front of Curt. He pulled the red-splotched towel from his face, leaving Curt to stare at blood oozing from a cut and rolling down his forehead. Without warning, Maxwell’s fist smashed into the left side of Curt’s jaw, spinning him around. Curt grabbed hold of the wall as it sailed by, a shower of blood from Maxwell’s forehead sprinkling Curt’s khaki pants and shoes. He choked back the vomit that seeped into his mouth.

Maxwell swung again, but Curt covered up, the blow bouncing off of his elbow.

Beecher grabbed Maxwell’s shoulder. “We’ll have time for that later.”

- - - - -

Curt lay on his back and stared into the darkness, his body rigid with a tenseness that could not be drained. Across the room, the refrigerator hummed incessantly. His jaw and thigh ached. His brain ached with the memory of events of the past hour. Should they have tried it? If they intend to kill him when they’re through with him, what would they do with Lori? She had seen some of them. What would they do with Beth?

He searched his mind for good memories to induce relaxation and ease himself into sleep. One memory—one he wanted to forget—crowded out all others: the night before Beth’s birth. That night found him filled with tension produced by weeks of eighteen-hour days as he pushed to wrap up his PhD thesis.

On top of it all, Lori, two weeks overdue and climbing the walls of their one-bedroom apartment, ambushed him when he came home.

“Let’s do something; I’ve got to get out of here,” she said.

“I’ve got to go back to the lab. Once I finish the thesis, we’ll have time for other things.”

He capitulated: dinner at Legal Seafood in Cambridge and a movie with a metallurgical title, “The Tin Men,” about two aluminum-siding salesmen. In the cool darkness of the theatre, his head spun with differential equations, a Bessel function solution he’d been wrestling with for days. Were the boundary conditions correct? Did they fit the problem?

Suddenly, he became aware of Lori holding his hand with both of hers, her swollen breasts pressing against his arm. He grew hard immediately. It dawned on him how long it had been. He caressed her swollen breasts, locked away in a tight bra beneath the sleeveless dress. His hand slid across her rock-hard stomach. Momentarily startled by the unexpected bumps and perturbations on the smooth surface of her abdomen, his computer-connected mind veered off in pursuit of the application of fractals to the mapping of the surface perturbations. Technical thoughts quickly vanished as his hand struggled to get between her legs. He wanted her. All those times he could have and didn’t. Why now when he couldn’t have her? He worked his hand up under her dress.

She pushed him away, but he grabbed her hand and coaxed it down between his legs. He glanced around the theater, unzipped, and his rock-hard penis jumped out as if spring loaded.

“Curt, don’t.”

“Do me. I need you.”

“What?” She giggled, tentatively skimming her fingers across him, and then snapping her hand back. “Curt.” Giggling, she glanced around. “Watch the movie.”

Later, standing in the shower, his soapy hands accomplished the hand job Lori wouldn’t carry out in the theater, relieving some of his pressure. What were his thoughts? Thoughts of that hard bumpy stomach he hadn’t really felt all those months as Beth grew within his reach? Thoughts of missed dinners? Missed conversations? No, just the thought of sex interspersed with calculations and finishing his goddamn thesis.

Three hours later, Lori woke him from a deep sleep and told him the pains had started. Throughout the day in the hospital and over the next few weeks as Lori recovered, his conscience nagged him for what he did in the shower. To some extent, it still nagged.

Was Lori afraid that night? Afraid of what she faced: labor pains, becoming a mother? Now, I think of that, five years after the fact.

Across the room, the refrigerator finally clicked off.

Curt flipped sideways on the cot, remembering Lori’s hard stomach and swollen breasts. His left hand slipped between his legs. “Lori.”

The future included all the things he’d been missing, always there within his reach. There would be a future for them. He’d see to that.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Applenu reached for his wine glass, hesitated, then jerked his hand back, aware of his wooziness and the effort needed to keep his mind focused. He again fixed his attention on Atkinson’s voice, which seemed to flow from the far corner of the room, rather than from across the table. This was the closest he had ever come to being drunk, he thought, although maybe he was drunk, since he lacked a previous drunken experience for comparison. If only Sherbani could see him now—his good Muslim gone bad.

The evening began with a couple of scotch and sodas, followed by the steak and cabernet sauvignon Atkinson brought. They talked, catching up on where they had been and where they were going. Atkinson did most of the talking, describing what he had been doing since the reported death of Austin and the unreported death of Hearn. Although the shaved head, black beard, and brown-tinted contact lenses changed his appearance dramatically, his enthusiasm remained at full throttle.

He described his present work as strategist for the project. In that position, he claimed responsibility for the leaks to the press and the car bomb in Chicago. He expressed confidence that those actions had deflected the FBI’s investigation far from where the two of them now sat. In addition, he supervised the machining in a Buffalo machine shop of bomb-mechanism parts that were on their way to Iran, and he was now busy planning the shipment of the machined nuclear materials.

“There will be more leaks,” Atkinson said, smoothing his beard. He described how he placed trap door and Trojan horse programs in the DOE and FBI computers. In due time, those hacking devices were discovered and removed. However, Austin had set it up so that when they were discovered and/or removed, they activated new Trojan horse and trap door programs.

Atkinson sipped wine. “Once we find out they’ve got information on us that they want to keep quiet, we leak it. That shakes up their whole system, because it sends them off looking for internal leaks. We’re also talking to Senator Hughson, which screws them up even more.”

Applenu updated Atkinson on his progress in machining the nuclear material and how it would only be a week or two before the job was finished.

After dinner, Applenu’s cell phone rang

“We completed your task,” Beecher said.

Applenu knew he meant Surling. “It wasn’t my task. It was yours and Lormes’s. I told Lormes what I wanted to do.”

“And he told you we didn’t have a bloody choice. The reason I called was to tell you it was messier than we wanted it to be. Reedan saw the finish, and I called to warn you so you can be ready for whatever he might try tomorrow.”

Applenu saw Atkinson watching from across the table. “You were supposed to take him out…”

“Things don’t always work the way they are supposed to,” Beecher said. “He ran, and there wasn’t any other choice. Just be ready for Reedan tomorrow.” He hung up.

“Is something wrong?” Atkinson asked.

Applenu eyed his wine glass but refrained from picking it up. “It was Lormes’s man Beecher. They killed Surling tonight. He tried to escape, and they evidently shot him in front of Reedan.”

“Those things happen,” Atkinson said.

“Why couldn’t we turn them loose? They don’t know where we are.”

“You know better than that. They can give the police descriptions of you and everyone else they saw. It will be okay,” Atkinson said as he smiled and lifted his wine glass. “I want to propose a toast: To you, old chap, for a great job on the project. Sherbani and I are pleased with your work up to now.”

Applenu smiled, picked up his glass, raised it, and sipped.

“There is one problem, however. Our boss is beginning to have doubts about your loyalty to your homeland.”

“I’m doing the job he hired me to do.”

Atkinson’s smile drained from his face. “We don’t trust you any more.”

“You don’t trust me? Why not?”

“For starters, it was that comment you made in New York about wanting to sabotage the project.”

“You brought that up.”

“I brought it up as a test. You flunked. And now there’s the issue of your family. We want to know where you moved them.”

“What are you talking about? My parents are in Amsterdam.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You moved them. It was a slick job, and we still haven’t figured out how you did it. Was it the painters? You also moved your aunt and uncle out of Birmingham.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I said don’t bullshit me. Sherbani and I need to feel we can trust you to carry out this job.”

“And to do that, you’re telling me you need to hold me and my family hostage? I’m here to tell you my family is out of this game. I am still here, and I will finish the job as promised.”

Atkinson reached for the wine bottle and drained it into his glass. “Sherbani wanted me to bring Mr. Lormes and some of his colleagues with me to talk to you. Maybe he was right.”

“Does this mean I’m going to wind up like Surling and Reedan after I finish the job?”

Atkinson raised his glass toward Applenu, his California smile in place. “I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that, old chap. Cheers.”