“All right, so I was an idiot.” Art refused the offer of another drink. “I can admit that, and it doesn’t help me. Here’s my problem: I don’t know if Seth and Oliver Guest are dead or alive. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what they’re doing. What I do know is that Seth has my address. He got that, and the location of my house, from one of the maps I had. I want to go to my place and find out if they’re already there. If they’re not, I’ll stay in my house—”
“Terrible idea,” Ed said, and Joe nodded agreement. “Suppose Oliver Guest has done away with friend Seth,” Ed continued, “and he arrives in the middle of the night. Don’t you think, to make sure you don’t cause trouble, he’d decide it’s simplest to blow you and your whole house away?”
“He has no way to do that.” But Art knew that was a poor assumption. He didn’t know what Guest might be able to do. Or Seth, for that matter.
“You check the place,” Ed went on, “and you keep it under observation. But you don’t leave yourself a sitting duck.”
“But I have to stay—”
“Here. You and Dana have to stay here.”
“No. I don’t want you involved. It could put you in danger.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come here at all.” Ed stood up. “Let’s go over to your place, see what’s happening there. Joe?”
“What do you think? Rifles?”
“I guess so. Shotguns have too much spread. Semiautomatics, I’d say.” Ed turned to Art. “See, we don’t want to spoil your need to look brave and manly to your girlfriend. You can go up to your house by yourself. But we’ll keep you covered.”
“What about Dana?”
“She’ll stay here, of course, safe with Helen.”
“You think so?” Art stood up also. “Fine. I’m going to let the two of you explain that to her.”
The approach to Art’s cabin revealed no sign of a wheeled vehicle and no footsteps. The ground was drying, but any car or a person of normal weight would have broken through the thin crust of dried mud.
That was only partial reassurance. You could get to the building a hundred different ways, straight across the fields and up the hill, or down from the mountain park. Art walked cautiously toward his own front door. He had left it just a couple of weeks ago, two weeks going on years.
Dana was not with him. To Art’s great irritation, when Ed and Joe suggested that she stay behind with Helen, she had meekly agreed. She had also stuck her tongue out at him.
The door looked exactly as it ought to, locked and with the little red tag on the left side in the I am out position. Art didn’t have his keys. They were in a toolbox on the tractor he had ridden south, which was now God-knows-where. He stooped down to retrieve the spare from under the foot-scraper, aware as he straightened up that two rifles were lined up on the house. He suspected that they were aimed at the door, which meant right at his back.
He breathed deep, inserted the key into the lock, and pushed the door open. Everything seemed exactly the way that he had left it — even the plate and dirty coffee cup on the table. He took a step inside.
All quiet.
He turned and waved. Joe walked slowly toward the house, his finger on the rifle’s trigger and the safety off. Ed came along thirty steps behind, covering him.
There were few places where anyone or anything could hide. Inside a minute, Art could nod and say with confidence, “I’m sure. They haven’t been here yet.”
“So what do we do now?” Ed asked. He held the gun easily, a man who often carried his rifle or shotgun hour after hour, ready to aim and shoot and kill game that might be gone and out of sight in a fraction of a second. Joe was outside again, standing watch.
“Well, I wish you’d done it before you came in.” Art looked at the trail of mud that the other two had carried in on their boots. “I’ll have to clean this mess up.
But one thing I’m not going to do is lock the place. I don’t want my door smashed in.”
“It’s nice to see you have your priorities in order. You don’t mind being turned into chopped chicken liver, so long as your house stays intact and the floor’s not dirty.”
“I think that you two should go back home, Ed. I’ll stay and keep an eye on this place.”
“Very rational. So you stay here how long. And you eat when? And you sleep when? And when it rains like mad or gets freezing cold, you do what? You sure as hell can’t stay inside this house and wait for Frank and Drac to arrive.”
“I don’t want you and Joe, or Dana or Helen or Anne-Marie, exposed to danger.”
“I see no reason why we should be. Seth Parsigian knows about this place, but he doesn’t know where me and Joe live. He doesn’t even know we exist. He’s not going to do a local home survey when he gets here, he has other things on his mind.”
Art hesitated. What Ed said seemed to make sense, even though he was, in his wife’s words, a drunken Irish sot, and in his best friend Joe’s words, as witless and confused as a freshly fucked owl.
“We can’t just ignore this house, Ed. Either Seth, or Oliver Guest, or both of them, will be here at some point.”
“We don’t ignore it. We come here every day — twice a day — and we do what we just did. You inspect it, with plenty of firepower as backup. Your friend and Dr. Guest may be tough customers, and they may get nasty; but I doubt they win many arguments with bullets.”
It was logical, and Art could suggest nothing better. But it felt wrong. Ed didn’t know Seth, and to all of them here at Catoctin Mountain, Oliver Guest was little more than a name and an unpleasant legend.
The sense of uneasiness lasted while he cleaned mud from the floor, carefully closed the front door, and walked with the other two back toward Ed’s house. The strong gusts of morning wind had ended. The afternoon had become hot and leaden, depressing Art’s spirits and dulling his mind.
He comforted himself with the knowledge that no matter what happened, Dana and his friends could not be harmed.
43
From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.
Chance, as Louis Pasteur famously remarked, favors the prepared mind.
Actually, my hero among nineteenth-century medical researchers is not the Frenchman Pasteur, flamboyant and ebullient, but his methodical, painstaking, physically unprepossessing German contemporary and rival, Robert Koch. Koch it was, not Pasteur, who in rigorous Teutonic fashion established the procedural rules for modern bacteriology and virology, those tunes to which all serious research workers even today must dance.
However, Pasteur’s well-known comment encourages a converse statement: Chance can transform or undo the most careful planning.
I had proof of this when Seth Parsigian and I headed for the place where we were to meet his colleagues. He had provided the method of transportation, an ugly box of a car that in its distant heyday must have been a sports utility vehicle. There was something that looked like dried blood on the passenger seat, concerning which I made no comment.
I loaded into the rear compartment a dozen boxes, complaining of their weight and of my own physical weakness. He offered no sympathy. I expected none, even had the weakness been genuine. As I packed the boxes, I explained what they were. When I said “test kit” I did not mean some tidy package or sealed plastic unit, where the press of a button popped final results up on a display. For that type of innately digital analysis, microchips would be an absolute essential. What I could provide used old-fashioned chemical tests, with reagents and precipitates and the comparison of colors. The work was not difficult, but it could be messy. And as soon as we reached our destination (but not before) I promised that I would reveal to Seth and his colleagues the sequence of tests to be performed, and their interpretations.