Authors: Ben Bova
I found the city of Stillwater at last and, after a couple of wrong turns on its quiet streets, located the Stillwater Inn. It was a lovely, graceful place, kept up as it must have looked in its prime a century ago. As I parked the car in the unattended lot alongside the inn's white clapboard side wall, I started thinking again.
I hadn't pulled any rank at the airports, just used my regular personal charge card to get the airline tickets and the rental card. No fanfare, no Washington connection. But no cover-up, either. Wyatt, or somebody else, could track me down easily enough if he wanted to. But so far, I hadn't called attention to myself.
I checked in at the hotel, paid cash in advance, ate dinner in their Bavarian-styled paneled dining room, had a drink in the coziest little bar I'd ever seen, and then went to my room. Despite all my suspicions and fears, I slept very soundly. I don't even remember dreaming, although I woke up the next morning at dawn's first light, soaked with sweat and very shaky.
CHAPTER SIX
North Lake Research Laboratories was perched on a bluff overlooking the St. Croix, about a half-hour's drive above Stillwater. There were no road signs showing the way, and nobody at the hotel had seemed to know anything about the lab. I had to find the local fire station and ask the old man who was washing down the town's shiny new pumper. Firemen always know what's where, and the quickest way to get there.
From the highway you could see the lab buildings, low and dun gray, hugging the top of the bluff. Midcentury cement and glass architecture, Saarinen by way of Frank Lloyd Wright. My rented car climbed the switch-backed driveway slowly; battery was running down. There was a riotwire fence around the lab enclosure, with a sturdy-looking gate blocking the driveway and a sturdier-looking guard posted in a little phone booth of a sentry box alongside the gate.
I pulled up and he came out, leaned his face down to my window.
"Yessir, what can I do for you?" Very polite. He had an automatic pistol holstered at his hip.
"I'm here to see Mr. McMurtrie and Dr. Klienerman," I said.
The names seemed unfamiliar to him. He looked politely puzzled.
"Dr. Klienerman's from Walter Reed Hospital. Mr. McMurtrie's from the White House."
"Oh . . . yes . . ."
"My name's Albano," I said, before he could ask. "Meric Albano." I fished out my ID, the one with the Presidential Seal on it.
He started to whistle, impressed, but caught himself. "Just one moment, Mr. Albano. I'll phone the reception lobby."
He did that, came back still looking puzzled, but opened the gate and waved me on. I drove up another half-mile of blacktop, pulled up on a graveled parking area, and walked from the car to the reception lobby. There were fewer than a dozen cars in the parking lot; either their staff was incredibly small or there was another parking lot for employees tucked off in the back somewhere.
Or the employees live here,
said something in my head. Nonsense, I thought.
The reception lobby was equally quiet. Nobody there at all. A curved desk with all the paraphernalia of a busy receptionist: phones, picture screens, computer access keyboard, plush little wheeled chair. The lobby was paneled in warm woods, furnished with leather couches and chairs. There were even fresh flowers in vases on both low-slung wood slab tables. But no people.
A door in the wood paneling opened and a smiling, tall, handsomely dressed man came out. About my age, maybe a few years older. The suave public relations type: touch of gray at the temples, precise manner of speech, self-confident stride. A very
careful
man. The ideal pickpocket.
"Mr. Albano," he said in a well-modulated voice that was somewhere between a confidential whisper and a throaty tenor. "We
are
honored."
My estimation of him went up. Scratch pickpocket. He was a confidence man.
I let him shake my hand. He had a very firm, manly grip.
"My name is Peter Thornton. I'm Dr. Peña's assistant—"
"Dr. Peña?"
He almost looked hurt. "The director of this organization. Dr. Alfonso Peña. Surely Dr. Klienerman has explained—"
I cut him off with a nod. He was pumping me, and I decided to be the pumper, not the pumpee.
"Where is Dr. Peña? I'd like to see him. I don't have much time, you understand."
"Of course. Of course. But the gate guard said you were asking for Dr. Klienerman and Mr. McMurtrie."
"That's right. I'm part of the investigating team. We've got to make certain that we can handle the media from a knowledgeable basis."
"Oh, yes, certainly. That is important, isn't it?"
"Right." But we hadn't moved a centimeter from where I'd been standing all along. The door to the laboratory proper was still behind Thornton, and he was making no effort to take me through.
"This is a
very
unfortunate business," he said, lowering his voice even more.
"Yes. Now where're Klienerman and McMurtrie? And I also—"
"Dr. Klienerman left last night," Thornton said, giving me a
you should have known that
look. "He and Mr. McMurtrie went together."
"Last night?"
"By chartered plane. General Halliday insisted."
"General Halliday?" The President's father.
"Yes. They should be in Aspen by now."
Damn!
That was one of the troubles with skulking off on your own. You got out of touch with everybody else. I decided to take the offensive.
"I should have been notified," I said sternly.
His eyebrows rose in alarm. "We didn't know. They didn't inform me—"
I shook my head. "There's no excuse for this kind of screw-up. I know it isn't your fault personally, but. . ."
He made a gesture that was almost like hand-wringing.
"Well," I said, "as long as I'm here, I want to meet Dr. Peña. And I'll need to see the bodies, of course. The
bodies
are still here, aren't they?"
"Oh, yes! They've been subjected to extensive postmortem examinations, you realize . . . but they're here."
"Let's get with it, then."
I had him on the run. He ushered me through the door and into the main building of the laboratory. We walked through miles of corridors, down stairs, through plastic-roofed ramps that connected different buildings. I got completely lost; I couldn't have found the lobby again without a troop of Boy Scouts to lead me.
We passed a strange conglomeration of sights. At first we were in an office area, obviously administrative. Rugs on the floors, neat little names and titles on the doors. Secretaries' desks placed in alcoves along the corridors. Then we stepped through one of those rampways into a different building. Here I saw workshops and what looked like chemistry laboratories: lots of glassware and bubblings and people in white smocks. Then a computer complex: more white-smocked people, but younger, mostly, and surrounded by head-high consoles with winking lights and view-screens flashing green-glowing numbers and symbols.
Then we passed more offices, but here there were no doors, no names, no titles. The men and women inside these cubbyholes looked like researchers to me. They were scribbling equations on chalkboards or punching computer keyboards or talking animatedly with each other in words that were English but not the English language.
As we were going down a clanging flight of metal stairs, deeper into the basement levels underneath the surface building, it finally hit home in my brain that North Lake Research Laboratories was not a medical institution. It had nothing to do with medicine at all, from the looks of it.
"What's the major area of research here?" I asked Thornton.
"Em . . . biomedical," he said.
"Biomedical?"
"Well . . . mostly biochemistry. Very advanced, of course." He produced a chuckle that was supposed to put me off my guard. "I'll tell you something. I've got a doctorate in molecular biochemistry, and I don't understand half of what these bright young people are doing nowadays."
"That far out, eh?"
I was about to ask him who paid for all these bright young people and their far-out research. But we had come to the bottom of the stairwell. There was nothing there except a blank cul-de-sac, about four paces long, with cement walls and an unmarked steel door at its end.
Thornton, looking suddenly grim, fingered the buttons of the combination lock set into the wall next to the door. It swung open and we stepped through.
This area looked medical. A large room, with pastel green walls. No windows, of course, this far underground. Glareless, pitiless overhead lights. Cold. Like a morgue, only colder. Two reliable tables in the center of the room, each bearing a body totally covered with a green sheet. Nineteen dozen different kinds of gadgets arrayed around the bodies: oscilloscopes, trays of surgical instruments, heart-lung pumps, lots of other things I didn't recognize right off.
I found myself swallowing hard. Despite the cold of the room, the stench of death was here. I went to the tables. Thornton didn't try to stop me, but I could hear his footsteps on the cold cement floor, right behind me. I stopped at the first table. So did he. I lifted a corner of the sheet.
James J. Halliday stared blankly at me. Christ, it looked
exactly
like him!
I let the sheet drop from my fingers and went to the other table. This time Thornton stayed where he was. I lifted the second sheet. The same face stared at me. The same sandy hair, the same blue eyes, the same jaw, the lips that could grin so boyishly, the broad forehead, the thin slightly beaked nose.
"I wouldn't pull the sheet any further back," Thornton's voice came from behind me, "unless you've had some surgical experience. It . . . isn't pretty."
I placed the sheet gently back on the cold face. Dammit, there were tears in my eyes. It took me a minute before I could turn back and face Thornton again.
"What were the results of the autopsies?" I asked. "What killed them?"
Thornton looked uncomfortable. "I believe Dr. Peña should discuss that with you."
"All right," I said. "Where is he?"
"He's coming down to meet you. He should have been here by now." Thornton glanced at his wrist watch.
The cold was seeping into me. "Look, couldn't we—"
"Dr. Peña is a very frail man," Thornton told me, and for the first time since I'd met him in the lobby, I got the feeling he was saying something that he really meant. "He's nearing ninety years of age. He drives himself much too hard. I hope you won't . . . say anything that will upset him."
I stared at Thornton. The life of the President of the United States was being threatened. Hell—one of those bodies could just as easily
be
James J. Halliday. And he was worried about his boss's frailties.
There wasn't time for me to answer him, though. Through a second door, one set farther back in the room than the one we had used, Dr. Peña came riding in on an electrically powered wheelchair.
He looked older than any human being I had ever seen; even Robert Wyatt would have looked coltish beside him. His face was nothing more than a death mask with incredibly lined skin stretched over the fragile bones. His head was hairless, eyes half-closed. He reminded me of the mummified remains of pharaohs; not a drop of juices left in him. He was wrapped in a heavy robe that bulged and bulked oddly. And then I saw all the cardiac and renal equipment loaded on the back rack of the wheelchair, and realized that below the neck he was probably more machine than flesh. His hands were covered with barely discernible thin plastic surgeon's gloves. It gave his long, bony fingers and the liver-spotted, tendon-ridged backs of his hands a queer filmy sheen.
His voice surprised me. It was strong, confident, alert; not at all the thin, quavering piping I had expected.
"You're the President's press secretary, are you?"
"And you're Dr. Peña," I said.
He fingered the control buttons set into the wheelchair's armrest and rolled up to me fast enough to make me involuntarily step back a pace.
"I'm a busy man, Mr. Albano. As you might suspect from looking at me, time is a very precious commodity to me. Why are you taking up my time?"
I almost grinned at him. Frail old man, my ass.
"I'm part of the team investigating . . ." I was momentarily at a loss for how to phrase it. I gestured toward the shrouded bodies.
He glowered at me. "I've already told Klienerman and that Secret Service man everything I've found out. Ask them about it."
"I will. But while we're both here, I'd like to get your opinions firsthand."
"Waste of time," he snapped.
"Why?"
"Because I have no opinions!"
"Suppose I asked you if the man sitting in the White House this morning is actually James J. Halliday?"
His breath caught on that one.
I stepped closer to him. "Is one of those . . . corpses . . . the President?"
He glanced at Thornton, then back to me. "I can only tell you that each of those corpses looks exactly like the President. Same height, same weight. Same fingerprints, retinal patterns, earlobe structure, cephalic index. Every physical determinant I have measured is precisely the same as the records Dr. Klienerman gave me for the President."
"Fingerprints," I echoed.
"Everything," he repeated. "They are physically identical to each other and to the President. They are not machines, not automata or plastic creations. They are completely human, as human as you or I.
More
human than I am, considering . . ."
"Who could produce such exact duplicates?"
Dr. Peña was silent on that one.
"Well. . . what killed them?" I asked.
His head sank onto his chest. His eyes closed.
Thornton stepped between us. "I told you not to tax him too far."
But Peña waved a feeble hand. "No . . . it is all right. I'm perfectly capable of . . . answering him."
"You should be resting," Thornton insisted.
"What killed them?" I asked again.
He gave a one-gasp laugh, a nasty accusative little snort. "What killed them? A very good question. An excellent question."