“ He almost did. But he underestimated me.”
“ Where is he?”
“ You'll find him on the road out there, in that truck that's turned over.” She pointed it out to him with a flick of her head and her eyes. He followed the gestures down to the truck.
“ You made a hit like that from here?”
“ I had to stop him, to place him at this scene. You'll find a security guard dead along with a stand-in for the Claw named Frakley and my serologist, Dr. Robertson.”
“ Robertson's all right,” said J.T., who had followed Rychman up.
“ We found two dead security guards below,” added an agent, who ordered that Dr. Coran be released from the cuffs.
“ He must've been crazy to try a stunt like this here,” said J.T.
“ He was a lunatic,” replied Rychman.
“ I don't think he planned to kill me here. He and Frakley meant the paralyzing agent for me, not for Robertson. I think they meant to overpower me, take me somewhere else to torture and kill me.”
“ It's over now,” said Alan. “That bastard can never again hurt you or anyone else.”
Alan strengthened his hold on her and helped her toward the stairs. J.T. and the other men watched until J.T. shouted, “All right, secure this area. M.E.'s going to want to go over this area just the same as down in the lab and the lobby. Get a photo man up here. I'll call in our people for evidence-gathering. We don't want anything screwed up here. We've got to protect our own.”
Simon Archer was in desperate, horrid pain, his eyes having gone blind with the last impact to his cranium, his body slumped so tightly below the wheel and on the floor of the cab that he had to be pried out by the hands that reached him. He was bleeding from three wounds, the head wound the most severe. It would likely kill him within hours if not minutes. The ambulance attendants nonetheless began their regimen, placing him on fluids and IV-drip, stabilizing him as much as possible as the ambulance driver got the signal to transport. This was all happening as Jessica and Rychman got to the ground floor and came out to the waiting car that would take her home.
“ Dammit,” she said, “he's not dead. He's not dead!”
Her eyes were bulging with a murderous rage.
“ He's in the hands of God now, Jess. Leave it… come away,” said Rychman, pulling at her. She tugged back and came away with the gun from his shoulder holster, pointing it at the ambulance just as the attendant closed the door, the man's eyes going wide at seeing her. Rychman grabbed the gun and sent the muzzle skyward, but she didn't pull the trigger.
“ Are you crazy? You might've hit one of the attendants.”
“ That's the only reason I hesitated.”
He took the full measure of her hatred in all at once, and he found it immeasurable.
She lifted her cane. “You got any scars to match this, Rychman?”
“ If you want to match scars, let's do it somewhere more private, shall we? Come on, Jess. Enough for one night. You've got to let it go now.”
“ In God's hands? Do you think God will put that bastard in a cell next to Matisak?”
He had no answer for her. Instead, he held her once more in his arms. She wrapped her own arms around him and sobbed.
Twenty-Nine
The bullet entered here.” The doctor pointed to the occipital lobe of the brain represented by the plaster-cast model he was using. “It completely fractured the occipital bone, here; and this in turn destroyed much of the occipital artery, which is why the man is on a heart-lung, because that artery supplies the head and scalp with blood from the carotid.”
“ Is he in any pain?” Jessica wanted to know.
“ When he's conscious, which isn't often, yes, considerable pain.”
She nodded. It was all she wanted to know. But the doctor continued with his explanation just the same.
“ We've done successive brain scans to determine the sites of blood clotting and the extent of damage. Radioisotopes indicate far more damage than can be repaired in any one operation, and in his condition any single operation could kill him.”
Alan Rychman pointed to a computer chart beside the brain model. “What's this, Doctor?”
“ Oh, the BEAM.”
“ Beam?”
“ Brain map, brain electric activity map,” he replied, lifting the chart and pointing out the evidence of brain activity going on inside the head of the dying man not fifteen feet from them. “The computer map of the brain responds to the brain's electrical signals, monitoring them and creating a map for us every hour. Abnormal patterns, blocked and distorted signals, like those you see here and here indicate extensive damage. Of course, you realize the violent jarring of a bullet into the brain is, well, tantamount to a Hiroshima bomb exploded in that contained miniature world. Little wonder his body reaction is one of paralysis and long periods of unconsciousness. I'm surprised the man has not lapsed into irreversible coma and brain death.”
“ But he will, eventually, won't he?” asked Jessica.
“ it's very difficult to say.”
She took the BEAM chart from him, staring at it and asking aloud, “What do you suppose he's thinking in there? What kind of thoughts are going through his mind?”
“ Mostly just pain and suffering, I should think.”
“ Who deserves it more?”
There was 3 silence among them which was only accentuated by the blips and electronic hum of the life-support system that Simon Archer was attached to.
“ As I said, there is extensive damage throughout the brain. Even if he should, by some strange force, manage to live, he would be a simpering idiot.”
“ A jury would be hard-pressed to give a simpering idiot the death penalty,” she said coldly. “Despite the fact he engineered the deaths of so many others.”
“ It's out of our hands, Jess,” said Alan, trying to lead her away.
She pulled from Alan's hold and went to the glass partition that separated her from Simon Archer's helpless form, wishing only a few minutes alone with him. As she stared at the evil encased in the glass room, his orifices jammed with tubes, his head covered in a turban of white linen, she wondered if the evil within him would not somehow beat death, would not somehow transcend it. She thought of Gerald Ray Sims' insistence that his deadly other self, Stainlype, would infect someone else upon his death. He had warned her that it could be her, and at this moment, standing over another human being, wishing it only suffering, pain and death, she began to think that maybe Gerald Ray Sims, Matthew Matisak and Simon Archer had, after all, infected her with their madness and rage.
She could almost see the floating parasite rising above Archer, the evil of his Casadessus, lying in wait for a host to come near enough and stay long enough to be infected and corrupted by it. And perhaps the process had already occurred.
Dr. Phillip C. Graf, chief of brain surgery and neurological disorders at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., exchanged a long glance with Alan Rychman. Taking him aside, he said, “You may want to get your friend a little psychiatric assistance on this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a depart-ment to run.”
Graf was gone, and now Alan took her in his arms and held her. Her holding onto him was like grabbing onto the side of a boat in the midst of drowning. She said in his ear, “Thanks for staying on, Alan.”
Over his shoulder she stared at the pathetic form of the man she had so maimed.
That was the last she had seen of Simon Archer, and now she was in the Cayman Islands, some 150 feet below the surface, as far from the horrors of her profession as she could bodily get. Alongside her, in the vivid blue-white of the deep, outlined against the stark beauty of the coral reef, was Alan Rychman. They had together run away, and being here, in the ocean, there was no chance either one would be disturbed for some time.
Alan held her each night on the boat as it cradled her to sleep in the soft foam. They made love beneath the brilliant sun on deck, not a soul within sight, and they dove together, marveling at the beauty that life could, in its proper course, create.