Vitals Read online

  Marquez had thought of everything. A second set of plates in the trunk, and the car was registered in Nevada.

  We took a chance and visited Tammy in the hospital. Four new bodyguards watched us enter the door to her room. No police protection.

  She was groggy but she could talk. “Tell Dr. Goncourt he kills good people,” she said, and stroked my hand. “He killed my man. He killed my son.”

  Then she gave us the keys to Joe’s kingdom. Bank-account numbers and passwords that Marquez had made her memorize. Security codes to lockboxes in seven cities, with phone numbers where we could hide out if things got impossible on the street.

  And the crown jewels: maps and key codes for sections of the Lemuria and the Goncourt estate on Lee Stocking Island. She did not know whether the key codes were current.

  I hated to abandon Tammy, but there was nothing we could do for her. We had work to finish.

  I had changed my mind during the gunship slaughter. The cowardly masters pulled puppet strings, but the puppets had fucked up. The masters were vulnerable. And they had killed a whole lot of innocents. They had tried to kill a pregnant woman.

  Janie would never let me into our heavenly condo if I didn’t do something to square that angle.

  We drove to San Jose and stored Rob’s samples in an office he had rented with Rudy Banning, half repository for Rudy’s crazy piles of research and half makeshift lab. Rob had kept paying the rent even after Marquez lent him his basement.

  It was a kind of safe house, just in case.

  There, he worked feverishly for several days, then gave us the latest version of his vaccine. While he worked, I made a phone call.

  I was eager to fight, but if I could arrange for some special help, I thought we’d have a better chance.

  New York became Rob’s holy grail. I swear he acted as if we were going to visit a shrine. I thought we were too obvious, too open. He did not care. “I need to get some specimens,” he had said. “I can put it all together if I just get a few specimens.”

  We must have looked like two bums in a bad New York comedy.

  Rob suddenly pulled up short in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at clouds dropping specks of rain, then fixed his eyes on me.

  “Are you all right?” he asked with real concern. “It’s a witch’s brew, I know it is. I didn’t have time. I need those last few surface proteins. I can make antisense RNA and block the gene expression—”

  “Hold it.” I pulled him up close. Our suitcases bumped. A dark green Ford Crown Victoria, no marks, passed us for the third time. An old guy wearing a brown-leather bomber jacket hung his arm out the window and watched us. He caught my eye and nodded amiably, then motioned for the driver to pull over.

  Rob and I stood like two jacklighted deer.

  The guy in the bomber’s jacket stepped out on the curb and waved his arm. “Damn it, Ben, get over here!” he shouted. “We’re your ride.”

  Rob shivered. I thought he might pass out. I squinted at the man. “Stuart?” I called, and smiled. I immediately straightened my face. No reason to smile, no reason to trust anyone.

  “Yeah, get in,” Stuart said.

  “Who’s that?” Rob asked, ready to bolt.

  “Some of my spook friends. We have a last-resort help line with an answering machine. I didn’t think anybody would believe me. If you’re crazy, you’re on your own.”

  Rob followed a few steps behind as I approached the car. Stuart Garvey had been in the CIA before retiring in the early eighties. I hadn’t seen him in person since 1985, at an old spook reunion, but he was part of the Tom-Tom club. He had been the second man I had fired off my question to, back in El Cajon, the one who had not replied—and the last person I had thought might meet us in New York.

  “You need transportation, don’t you?” Stuart asked casually, and opened up the rear door. He eyeballed Rob critically. “Your friend could take a header, he doesn’t get to sit down.”

  “I’m fine,” Rob said. I doubt anyone believed him.

  We got into the backseat and Stuart introduced us to the driver. “You remember Norton, don’t you?”

  I did, vaguely, from sessions at the Marine base in Quantico. Norton Crenshaw, younger than Stuart, in his sixties and quite heavy even in his younger years. We had called him Melon. He wore a windbreaker and a faded E.T. cap. “I’m a silent partner,” Norton said with an easy smile. His face was pleasant but I remembered he enjoyed being trained to kill.

  Stuart took us to a quiet diner where the owner knew him. We passed through an airport-style metal detector just inside the front door. Stuart held out his arms and pirouetted through. The machine gave a small wheep—just change and keys. The rest of us passed with as little fuss. The owner, a small Asian man, wrinkled and solemn, gave us a booth way in the back.

  Stuart and I went to the men’s room. He glanced at me over the marble divider between two urinals. His flow got going quick and easy, mine took a while; that meant he thought he had the upper hand. “Do you know what you’re into here?” he asked quietly, shaking himself and zipping up.

  “Hell, no,” I said.

  “That’s all you have to say?” Stuart washed his hands first in the sink. Toy-dolly strawberry smell wafted up from the basin. He wrinkled his nose.

  “Convenient to check us for guns going in,” I said.

  “Yeah. Mr. Chung’s had some problems with punks packing heat, as the old cliché has it. Do you know all there is to know about Dr. Cousins?”

  “You tell me,” I said, washing my hands next. He rattled down a length of cotton towel and wiped vigorously.

  “The wind is up. Shit is flying loose that we thought we’d glued down forty years ago. Dr. Cousins is right at the eye of the storm.”

  He pushed through the swinging door and left me standing in the rest room. My bush-sense was ringing some bad bells.

  Back in the booth, Rob picked at his pastrami on rye with a fork and hadn’t touched his glass of iced tea. His look suggested he did not want to either eat or drink there. “How did you know which train we’d be on?” Rob was asking as I rejoined the group.

  Stuart tapped his temple with his middle finger. “Once a spook,” he said. “Where are you staying?”

  “We’re not,” I said. “We want to visit a building and get the hell out of here.”

  “Which building?” Stuart asked.

  Rob looked at me for advice. I nodded. “The Jenner Building,” he said, and showed them the address on a slip of paper.

  “Christ.” Stuart lowered his voice and leaned over the table. “Anthrax Central? It’s closed. They can’t even tear the bastard down, it’s so contaminated.”

  I could not tell what Stuart was up to. Then it dawned on me. Chemical and Bacteriological Warfare had been Stuart’s specialty. “That’s right,” I said. “You covered CBW way back when.”

  “There’s no anthrax,” Rob said. “It’s just a cover.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Stuart said. He was playing with Rob and I did not enjoy it, but I needed to learn which way the water was going to rush when the dam burst, which would be soon.

  Stuart and Norton had known all along where we were going. They were still on active duty. They had been assigned to find us.

  “It’s not anthrax,” Rob insisted. His brow was covered with sweat. He jerked his head and looked at me. “We should take a cab.”

  “Your friend’s not feeling well,” Stuart stated categorically.

  “I’m fine,” Rob said.

  “He knows what he’s talking about,” I said defensively. “Now, Stuart, explain.”

  “Ben, how could you let yourself get involved in this? You of all people. You don’t know jack about CBW. Being kind to stray puppies?”

  “When someone’s trying to kick the shit out of them,” I said. Norton snorted and tapped his lip with a pudgy finger.

  Stuart made a sour face. “The hell with waiting,” he said. “Finished?”

  Rob wa
ved a dismissive hand over the sandwich. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Let’s help you do this thing.”

  We went back to the car. Norton whistled a jaunty little tune as he started the motor. Rob looked worse than ever.

  “Manhattan used to be a hotbed for biological research, a lot of it secret,” Stuart said as we drove through the crowded, rainy streets. I touched the left-rear door handle. It flopped back and forth, attached to nothing important.

  “They put up three special buildings here, beginning in the late 1930s. The most modern laboratories of their day. Some of them housed researchers working to cure smallpox, malaria, polio. They used the best isolation procedures available. Even so, it’s a miracle something didn’t escape and kill thousands. Maybe millions. The last building was finished and occupied in 1954.” He pointed up the street. “It housed Silk until the early sixties.”

  Rob leaned forward, his cheeks pinking. “What do you know about Silk?”

  “A lot more than Rudy Banning,” Stuart said. “My last job was to help get Rudy discredited. Wasn’t hard. The man’s a loon.”

  “I thought you retired in the eighties,” I said to Stuart.

  Stuart stared out the window, annoyed by so many pointless words floating through the air. You learn nothing from a spook by watching his eyes, but this time he wanted me to see how he felt: impatient. “Ben, this is not for you. You should have smelled it early on and jumped clear.”

  Rob looked around like a neck-jerking pigeon at the rest of us in the big old Crown Victoria. “I wasn’t nearly paranoid enough, was I?”

  The car slid into a loading zone across the street from a large, gray, stone-fronted cube, wet with steady drizzle.

  “Here we are,” Norton announced. He reached under the dash and handed Stuart something I could not see. I was pretty sure it was a gun.

  The lower floors had no windows and the entrance doors had been boarded over, with boards nailed over the boards. Graffiti covered it at ground level, protecting the building with an air of disuse like a fence made of spray paint.

  “Prime real estate,” Stuart said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Stuart, why are you here, and what do you know?”

  “I’ll tell it straight, Ben, for old time’s sake,” Stuart said.

  Norton gave him a disapproving glance, then lifted his hands, so be it. “Nobody will believe it, of course,” Norton said. “It’s crazy shit. Like Area 51.”

  “Retirement sucks,” Stuart said. He lifted the pistol into our view. A SIG-Sauer, I couldn’t tell the model number, but it was dark and shiny, strictly new-millennium government issue. “After the end of the Cold War, the best of the old guard were called back to put the whole espionage thing on a new footing. Industrial, corporate.”

  “They didn’t ask me,” I said.

  “Right,” Stuart said.

  “We’re fried,” Rob said, and held up his hands like a bad guy giving up to the sheriff.

  “Shut up,” Stuart told him. “You’re responsible for a lot of hard work coming to grief.”

  I put a hand on Rob’s arm: maintain.

  “I worked Silk in the late fifties and early sixties, as a youngster,” Stuart said. “I heard things in the briefings you wouldn’t believe. OSS and MI6 had tracked them intermittently through the forties. Nobody knows the real history of the war. But that was before my time. I do know that Silk started cooperating with us in the late forties. They saw the approach of Stalin’s final madness, and, over three years, they dismantled their operations in the Soviet Union, sabotaged their stockpiles and labs, and disassociated themselves from the next generation of biowar researchers. It was all very ingenious. Essentially, to the Russians after Stalin, Silk became a bunch of crackpot has-beens, on a par with Lysenko.

  “In 1953, when I was still a kid, we were ordered to help them find a safe zone in the United States. They had peculiar needs. So we outbid some drug companies and bought Anthrax Central before it was finished.” He pointed to the gray cube across the street. “We handed it over to Silk in exchange for certain activities in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and China. Political sculpture, it was called. I took over the day-to-day operations in 1961. It was a funny relationship. Half the time, they didn’t do what we wanted them to. I always thought they were working other streets, maybe financial, in Europe or in China, even in Russia again, but that was outside our scope. The Agency told me to let it go, so I let it go. Hands off, don’t provoke them, those were our prime instructions.”

  “You were afraid,” Rob said.

  “You bet your ass we were afraid. The more I knew, the less I slept nights. I’m pretty sure they called the shots from the very beginning. Nobody knew who they were running—in the State Department, the FBI, the military. The Oval Office. Even the Agency. Whenever we tried to authorize countermeasures, we were squelched at a very high level. In 1970, I was assigned elsewhere. Silk went offshore, to the Bahamas, and stopped its activities. I had a long and easier career and retired. The Soviet Union fell apart. Happy days. Then I got word I was needed again. Surprise, Silk had actually come to us with a proposal. They wanted a new and safer haven in a changing world. Someone decided that American industry could benefit from what Silk knew. Contracts were drawn up. I helped make sure the secrets were kept, even when some folks were eager to tell all. That was when I was ordered to discredit Banning.”

  Stuart leaned his head to one side and massaged his neck. “They worked out a deal—not me, personally, you understand. It was a good deal, as far as it went. Now it’s falling apart, and it looks like Dr. Cousins here is responsible.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Rob said. He grabbed his door handle, discovered what I already knew, then pounded the armrest and slumped back in his seat. He focused on Stuart. “You helped them go after AY3000 and me, too?” Rob took on the look of someone realizing he has been gut shot. “Have you gone after my brother?”

  Stuart shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t want to know. But it’s obvious you’ve pissed off someone who should never have been pissed off. And that makes a lot more work for the rest of us.”

  “This stinks, Stuart,” I said. “What if you just let us walk away? The Tom-Tom club knows.”

  Stuart looked peeved. “You wanted to come here, Ben. We brought you here. We’ve done everything you asked, right?” The rain on the side window drew sliding beads of shadow over his face. “Nobody in the Tom-Tom will believe you. You were never the brightest member. You were a grunt in the bush, Ben.”

  It was an old slur. What do you get from a grunt in the bush? A pile of shit.

  “Fuck you,” I said to Stuart. To Norton, “You too.”

  Stuart let me see that his eyes could go cold if he wanted them to. “The dead don’t fuck. They are beyond fucking and being fucked with. I don’t know what they’re going to tell you. Believe me. But I suggest you listen close. It may be your only way out of this mess. You, too, Dr. Cousins. You sure look like hell.”

  The car pulled around to a broad alley behind the building. Norton squeezed out and opened my door. He, too, held a pistol, another SIG-Sauer. Stuart opened Rob’s door.

  Guttering streams fell in a thin curtain from the parapet at the top of the square gray mass. A big steel door covered with graffiti—eyeballs, grasping hands with thick splintered fingernails, thorn crowns on bleeding heads—opened to receive us.

  “I thought it was shut down,” Rob said. I could see the last of his starch going. “We were going to break in and get some samples.”

  “Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” Stuart said.

  Two earnest, tired-looking young men with short hair, wearing wrinkled business suits that had been sweated in for hours, stepped out of the shadows inside the door and stood at parade rest, waiting.

  The building’s breath smelled dry and warm and clean.

  The young agents greeted Stuart and Norton. Stuart whispered something to the one
on the left. Norton walked right on through.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Rob entered Anthrax Central. I followed, looking for places to duck, pull things down, get some confusion going. There wasn’t much. We walked over a concrete floor. The concrete walls had been painted gray and red, and a raised loading platform crossed the rear. Big glass tanks filled with murky water stood along one side of the platform. It could have been a receiving area for a big metropolitan aquarium, but the tanks didn’t seem to have any fish, just lumpy shadows like coral and pipes going in and out at the top.

  Two boys and two girls, late teens, dressed in denim overalls, supple as sea lions and alert as terriers, emerged from the shadows between the water tanks. They squatted on the edge of the platform as if waiting for a rock concert to begin.

  “We stay here until the caretaker arrives,” Norton said.

  “I wouldn’t go any farther without an escort for all the sin in Singapore,” Stuart said, and winked at me as if we were still buddies.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little gray wisp emerge from the dark between the tanks. It walked with a quick, shuffling step along the platform. I craned my neck. At first I thought it was an old man, head small and wrinkled, eyes large, frame shrunken, walking along the upper ramp, skirting the aquariums. But something about the way the wisp moved, a sway of the shoulders with each step, made me think again about its sex.

  Rob watched with feverish interest.

  “There she is,” Stuart said.

  “That’s the caretaker?” I asked.

  Stuart nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He did not look happy to see her.

  The caretaker wore a calf-length black shift and a cloth cap like the ones they give newborns. The kids stood out of the way as the specter passed. She nodded to all and patted a slender boy of sixteen or seventeen on the head, folding her lips into a ghost of affection.

  She glided down a flight of steel steps in a blur of tiny feet.