They were never supposed to come here.
Never.
He’d made that very clear.
Victor switched off the television, stepped out of the tub, and dried himself off. A few moments later, before he had time to finish getting dressed, he heard the footsteps of the two men on the stairs.
He knew he’d locked the front door earlier, but that hadn’t seemed to slow Geoff down one bit. Victor cinched his bathrobe around his waist and stalked out of the master bedroom.
The two men were waiting for him in the hall.
“What are you doing here?” His voice was seething. “I told you never to-”
“I know what you said.” Geoff was an immobile mountain of a man with a broad nose that looked right at home mounted on his bulky face. “But this is important.”
The other man stood beside him quietly. A gray-bearded man in his sixties with cool, piercing eyes, Dr. Octal Kurvetek had worked for twenty years for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the supervising physician for the executions by lethal injection.
He’d always made Victor nervous, but his skills had made him the perfect man for the job Victor had hired him to do.
Victor tore his eyes off Dr. Kurvetek and glared at Geoff. “Well, what is it? And this better be good.” “There was a slight problem.” Geoff’s face registered no emotion.
“What kind of problem?”
“Hunter never showed up,” Dr. Kurvetek added.
“What?” gasped Victor. “He didn’t show up? How could he not show up?”
“The subject reacted unexpectedly,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “And the police were called in.”
“And?” Victor demanded.
“Obvious suicide,” said Geoff. “Hunter probably bolted.”
“We kept an eye on the scene, but even after everyone left, he didn’t come,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “We went to his apartment but he wasn’t there either. His drawers are a mess. It looks like he left in a hurry. I thought that instead of calling you on the phone we should discuss this in person.”
Victor tried to connect the dots. It was hard to tell how much Hunter knew. He hadn’t been told much, but it was almost certainly enough to hurt them if he decided to talk to the authorities.
Plus General Biscayne would be arriving on Thursday.
No, no, this couldn’t be happening. Not now.
“Where’s Suricata?”
“At Hunter’s,” said Geoff. “Case he comes back.”
Victor let all this sink in for a moment. If anything happened to the device and the Project Rukh Oversight Committee found out about it, Drake Enterprises would lose its defense department contract. And then the investigations would begin. “And, you took care of the-”
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Kurvetek said. “It’s safely tucked away at the base. We did that first.”
This was one time Victor was glad he’d put Octal on the books so that he could receive unlimited access to Building B-14, but still he didn’t want to think about any of this. His head was beginning to hurt. It was all too much. But at least the device was secure. He needed a drink. “Take care of the house, and find Hunter. Call me when you know more. Let’s rein this in. No more loose ends.”
The two men left the house and Victor went searching for his bottle of pills.
It only took Creighton five minutes to gather the necessary items from his condo. Even though he didn’t like the idea of having to move on this so quickly-and he was more than a little ticked off at having to say good-bye to Randi-now that everything was in play his adrenaline was jacked up and that was something he liked very much.
After loading the darts in the hydraulic-powered dart gun, he left to find Cassandra Lillo, the woman he’d already started to think of as his next girlfriend.
15
Tuesday, February 17
5:10 a.m.
I rose before dawn for a jog. Tessa would be asleep for another three or four hours, so it gave me a chance to be alone, think through the events of the previous night and not feel guilty about splitting my attention between her and my work.
The wind had calmed down but left the morning cool enough to warrant sweatpants. Despite all that had happened the night before, after twenty-five minutes of running I felt my mind clearing.
Last night, when I’d returned to the hotel and tapped on Tessa’s door, Lien-hua had stepped into the hall and told me that Tessa was asleep.
“Is she doing all right?” I’d asked Lien-hua.
“I believe so. Yes. But I thought it would be best to stay with her, anyway, until you arrived.”
It seemed like there might be something else on her mind. “Are you OK?"
“Just processing some things. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow. I need some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, OK?”
There was more to be said, but it wasn’t going to happen that late at night. After I’d thanked her again and she’d left for her room, I began to wonder if maybe Tessa had said something to her. Maybe John Doe’s suicide had been harder on Tessa than I thought. If so, my plans for the week might have to take a dra-matic detour. As dawn arrived, a streak of high cirrus clouds drifted above me, and early morning sunlight squeezed out the night. But with the day came the heat. In contrast to last night, it seemed like God had dialed the thermostat for Southern California up all the way the moment he sent the sun to awaken the city.
I came to an intersection, saw a sign for Bryson Heights High School, and wondered if they might have a track or a fitness trail. I jogged toward the school, found that they didn’t have a track, but they did have a football field. And that was good news because football goals meant I could crank out some pull-ups.
I found the goalposts, jumped up, grabbed the horizontal bar, and it felt good to get into the rhythm. Up. Down.
Up.
Down.
When I was nineteen I worked for a year as a wilderness guide and I fell in love with rock climbing; and the best way to stay in shape for the crags is doing pull-ups. At first a couple hundred pull-ups a day was impossible-I could barely do ten. But over the years, I’ve worked my way up, and, after more than four thousand days of doing them, pull-ups come almost as natural as walking.
Up.
Down.
I squeezed out a set of forty, took a breather, and then tried flying solo with my left arm. The homeless guy’s bite didn’t affect my arm as much as I thought it might, but with every pull-up I could still feel it sting.
Up.
I thought of him. Bewildered. Raving. Losing his life. All so meaningless. So tragic.
Down.
Most of the time I try to focus on the positive impact that my work at the NCAVC has, but sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. Up. The majority of people who’ve ever lived on our planet have led short, difficult, brutal lives and then died before their dreams could come true.
Down. People like Sylvia Padilla and that man last night and Christie, my wife who passed away last year, taking all of our plans for the future with her.
Up. It’s tragic and pointless, but it’s the way the world is.
Down. We live in a country where television newscasters are allowed to get excited about the score of a baseball game but aren’t allowed to show emotion or remorse while reporting a homicide, a suicide bombing, or a rape.
Up.
Down. That’s our world.
Enough with the left. Only managed nine. Time for the right.
Sweating, sweating. Today would be a scorcher.
Every time I pulled my chin toward the goalpost, I was able to glimpse the stoic ships in the harbor and catch the glisten of sunlight on the ocean. Without last night’s anxious wind, the sea was early morning still.
Up.
Coronado Island stared at me from the bay. The island was a study in contrasts, with thousands of naval personnel living in anonymous-looking barracks right across the street from some of the most expensive real estate in the world; and of course one of America’s most lush hotels, the Hotel del Coronado, lay only a quarter mile from the Spartan living conditions of the Navy SEAL Amphibious Training Base.