"They said he'll call you back," Alicia repeated, holding her ground like a Prussian general.
He could picture his beautiful assistant in his palatial Paramount office, standing behind his Ping-Pong-table-sized executive desk, flipping her black hair in stylish exasperation as he screamed at her over the speakerphone. He had spent more than one hapless night trying to talk her into the sack, but she had eluded him like an NFL running back, always leaving with both her honor and his grudging respect. Still, Buddy screamed at her endlessly.
"Is Rayce around?"
"Yes. He's in with Marty."
"Get him on the phone," Buddy snapped.
Then he was on hold again, listening to a recorded selection of his movie themes. After a moment he heard Rayce Walker; it was a comfortable, upholstered voice, soft and deep, like expensive furniture.
"How's it goin', pard?" the stuntman said in his Arizona-New Mexico drawl.
"Rayce, I need your help," Buddy answered. "I'm sending the G-III to get you. Get four or five guys who can handle themselves… like Billy Seal, and that crazy fucking Indian we used on Sheriff of Apache Canyon, Little Boy, whatever-the one who drove the burning pickup into the lake."
"John Little Bear," Rayce corrected.
"Right. And go to the Malibu house and collect up some firepower outta my gun case. I have the Dominator and the two pistols from the plane with me now. Get your ass to Fort Worth. I need you fast," he said.
"What's up, Mr. B.?"
"We gotta go kick some ass," Buddy said, trying to sound macho, but feeling weak and foolish. "Also tell Alicia I need her to come with you to handle details. Tell her to call Rob at the business manager's, and clear all my credit cards. Also tell her that I want her to line me up a motor home I can rent in Fort Worth-bill the studio location scouting account. Make it at least thirty-seven feet long, roomy, with a big engine. We're gonna be traveling. I'll need cellphones and booze. Bring some white lady and a bag or two of grass. I'm down to seeds and stems."
"Yes, sir," Rayce said. "What's going on?"
Buddy didn't answer, just hung up. He'd been driving aimlessly down a Fort Worth street with no destination. Now he pulled the Blazer over and parked it by the side of the road. His hands were shaking and he needed something. At first he thought it was a zoot of cocaine, a pick-me-up that would blur the edges and lift his spirits, but as he reached for the shaving kit, he stopped. He realized it wasn't dope he wanted. What was it? It wasn't something he had; it was something he was missing. A new craving much harder to recognize. His mind ran down a list of physical needs, but he could check none of the mental boxes. And then, like a TV uplink that finally locked on the right satellite, the picture became clear.
As Buddy Brazil sat in the heat of his rented Blazer on the side of a road in Fort Worth, he realized what he craved more than anything else was his own self-respect.
Chapter 36
Max was a hero," Stacy said. "He went to Fort Detrick and found out about all this, and he tried to stop it. It's exactly the kind of thing he would do. He would risk everything, even his life, if he saw injustice or deceit. It's why they killed him." She whispered these words as if in church, kneeling in the gravel beside the SP tracks, bathed in moonlight.
They were a quarter mile east of Sugar Shack Jungle waiting for the ten-p. M. priority train carrying automobiles, which Cris had found on the Yardmaster's line-up sheet. The night was warm, and a few hundred yards up the grade they could see a cluster of hobos crouched below the tracks, also waiting to catch out, their voices rattling on the wind like water-churned rocks.
"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy, I miss him so much," she added.
Cris nodded his head. Her memories of Max brought back his own thoughts of Kennidi. He could feel his daughter's remembered warmth touching him, her child's breath on his cheek, her arm around his shoulder as she nuzzled up against him. The memory of her painful death couldn't destroy these tearful recollections.
"The thing about Max was he just seemed to understand. He could read your thoughts like a Gypsy. He would always know what frightened you, and then would find a way to help."
Cris looked over at her, struck by both her strength and beauty. The subtle moonlight lay in the shallows of her cheekbones, like pools of liquid silver, as she looked down the track for the freight.
After hearing Stacy describe her husband, Cris wondered why Max Richardson would work at Fort Detrick with such evil company. It didn't add up. "Why did Max go to study with Dexter DeMille?" he finally asked.
"Max had become extremely worried about Prions," she answered. "He told me that he felt they represented one of the most dangerous and potentially deadly situations in the global environment. He felt outbreaks like mad cow disease could be just the beginning. Mad cow was badly mishandled by the Brits in the early eighties. They didn't believe it would jump the species line, but it did, infecting sheep and cattle. The Brits have now identified over ten cases of human infestation, proving that Prions can also jump to Homo sapiens. These human cases of mad cow disease behave just like the Aboriginal Kuru that Dexter DeMille helped Carleton Gajdusek isolate in the seventies. Kuru was caused by a bizarre religious custom the Abos had of eating the brains of their dead relatives, so with both Kuru and mad cow, ingesting the rogue Prion is what passed it on. Max thought science was not equipped to deal with Prion sickness if it got out of control. Right now, in its pure state, it's slow-acting. We haven't seen too many human cases, but Max felt there could soon be a wave of human disease caused by infected beef. This was why Max wanted to work with Dr. DeMille-to find a cure and to understand how it spreads, and how long it incubates in humans before signs of the early stage of the disease show up, marked by mood swings and rages."
Cris was watching her closely, and she seemed to be kneeling at the altar of science.
"The problem in England was exacerbated because the government didn't fully subsidize the farms. If a farmer discovered a downer cow that he suspected had died of mad cow, the government only paid a tenth of the value of the carcass. Max said the result was that the farmer wouldn't report a diseased cow, but would sell the carcass to a feed company for full price without warning the chopping house of the cause of death. The feed company would grind it up and turn it into bonemeal and it would be used as food for other cattle. The Prions would survive in the bonemeal and would be passed to whole herds. Max was also studying the ease with which it jumped the species line. Wendell and Max ran a lab study last year and found that even vegetables fertilized with infected bonemeal carry the rogue Prion. Those vegetables could conceivably pass it to people if ingested. Not to be ultradramatic, but a case could be made that unchecked Prion disease could poison the whole earth, killing all mammalian species on the planet."
They were silent for a long moment.
"Max died trying to stop this," she went on. "We've got to get the Pale Horse Prion away from Kincaid before he further pollutes the bio-stream. The weapon that DeMille designed seems to run its course in hours, not years. That means DeMille and his team at the Devil's Workshop have juiced it up somehow. At Vanishing Lake it acted very quickly. A bio-weapon with a two-year lag time would be worthless. I know this sounds over-the-top, but if Kincaid tries to use these targeted Prions against large segments of society, he could perpetrate an event that would substantially alter the evolutionary process of mankind. If people with specific genes were eliminated, survivors who were not killed outright might share linked but weakened genes. In fifty years, who knows what downstream effect this could have on human development? We've got to prove that those bastards at the Devil's Workshop are actually developing this shit, and if we're going to get anybody's attention, we need a sample so we can choke Admiral Zoll on the evidence."