Last Gasp (52 page)

Mara was on his knees. He seemed to be praying, his lips miming soundlessly. Then his lips peeled back and dropped off to reveal his gums and teeth, the flesh of his skull bubbling and shriveling like melting cheese as he directed the nozzle into his face. His robes caught fire and flared up. In seconds the flames had consumed his scarecrow body and he continued to burn long after the nozzle had fallen from his charred black fingers. The fire spewed out across the carpet, setting alight a gilt chair, which as the horsehair stuffing caught fire poured out thick ringlets of smoke.

The luminous dial of his watch read 4:17. Chase squinted at it and lay back on the pillow. He touched his hair, feeling the crisped and blunted ends where he’d leaned too close in turning off the gas nozzle. Bloody stupid thing to have done: He could have been fried alive, like that other poor devil.

He stared up at the shadowed ceiling, knowing that sleep would never come. There was too much on his mind. Cheryl knew he was holding something back—her silence told him that. He had expected the worst but the worst hadn’t come, not yet, though the silence was forestalling the inevitable.

Slipping out of bed, taking care not to disturb her, he put on his dressing gown and went into the living room. He didn’t switch on the light. The bottles on the cabinet gleamed temptingly, but instead he fumbled his way to an armchair and sat down.

Sooner or later he would have to tell her. The inevitable was near; in fact it was here and now, he realized, when he saw her pale form in the bedroom doorway.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Chase said unnecessarily. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“You didn’t.” Cheryl came into the room. “Do you want some coffee?”

Chase shook his head before it occurred to him that she wasn’t able to see him properly. “No thanks.”

He heard a rustle as she settled herself on the arm of the couch and arranged her robe to cover her legs. Neither of them spoke for a minute. “Why didn’t you tell me, Gavin?”

“Tell you?” he said obtusely.

“Yes,” Cheryl said deliberately. “Tell me. You. Instead of Nick.”

“You asked him?”

“Yes, I asked him. I knew there was something wrong. But I was hoping you’d tell me yourself. You didn’t.”

“I had to think about it, get it straight in my own mind first.”

“Get it straight?” Cheryl said with mock astonishment. “Get what straight? Gelstrom is funding the project. What the fuck was there to get straight.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“It’s very simple,” Cheryl contradicted him, folding her arms. It was a sign of battle. “Do I really have to remind you? A man who made a fortune supplying toxic chemicals to the army, who for years was in collusion with the Pentagon hatching a cozy little plan called DEPARTMENT STORE to kill every living thing on this planet, and who now—sweet Jesus, this is poetic justice in spades—who now because he’s been stricken with the disease he wanted to inflict on everyone else suddenly has a change of heart, and—surprise, surprise—wants to switch sides, to become the savior of mankind instead of its executioner. Have you got it? Is that straight enough for you?”

“Gelstrom is dying,” Chase said quietly. “Nothing can save him and he knows it. He’s not doing this for himself.”

“Oh, I see!” Cheryl exclaimed with ponderous sarcasm. “This is a—what do you call it?—a grand final gesture. Oh, well, sure, that changes everything. By all means welcome him back into the fold. Forget the past and let’s all be buddy-buddy. Sure, why not? I expect he’s really a great guy at heart, fond of his gray-haired old mother, had a difficult upbringing, and so on—”

“Cheryl, will you listen to me? Please? Will you try to understand?”

“In a word, no.”

Chase leaned toward her. “Gelstrom isn’t behind this project, can’t you understand that?” His voice had risen, and he glanced at Dan’s door, then went on in a lowered tone. “He’s not involved in any way.”

“Except for the small matter of a couple of billion dollars.”

“Does it matter where the money comes from? Money is money.” Chase had said it without knowing if he actually believed it.

For Cheryl, words were hardly adequate to express what she was feeling.

“I didn’t understand when you first told me about the project, before I knew that Gelstrom was funding it. But now—’’she broke off, fighting down emotion. “How can you, of all people, say that? Knowing what that man has done? My God, it does matter about the money—it does!”

She stood up and he heard her rummaging about in the darkened room. A moment later something solid and heavy with sharp corners hit him on the chest and tumbled into his lap.

“Read your own goddamn book!” Cheryl stood next to the couch, breathing hard. “It’s all in there. How certain companies made fortunes by raping the world and quietly disposing of anyone who got in their way. How a few scientists tried to warn people what was happening and were persecuted or ended up dead for their trouble. My own father, you might remember. You ought to read it. It might do you good— certainly jog your memory about a few things you’ve obviously forgotten.”

Chase smoothed the rumpled dust jacket and placed the book on the table. There wasn’t anything Cheryl could say that he hadn’t already thought about and agonized over. He was even prepared to concede that she was right; morally right, that is. But moral rightness or wrongness wasn’t the issue. He
had
to work on the project; it was a gut feeling as strong as any he’d ever felt in his life. Right or wrong didn’t stand a chance.

“You’ve spoken to Nick about it. How does he feel?”

“He thinks you’ve taken leave of your senses.”

“Then he must have changed his mind overnight,” Chase said. “I told him about Gelstrom on the way back from Desert Range. His exact words were, ‘Money is the means to an end, not an end in itself. If the guy wants to pay for his sins, why try to stop him?’ ”

“You omitted to tell him that Gelstrom murdered my father.”

“The reason I didn’t tell him that is because we don’t know whether Gelstrom was responsible. We don’t know that anyone was. It could have been an accident.”

Cheryl laughed, an ugly sound in the dim room. “What the hell is this, Gavin? A meeting of the Joseph Earl Gelstrom Appreciation Society?” He couldn’t see her face but he knew its expression. She said with a vehemence he’d never heard before, “At least Nick has principles he believes in—and adheres to.”

Well, well, well. It began to look as though a true-confessions therapy session had been going on here while he was running himself ragged at the UN. Little wonder that when he got back to the hotel he’d walked into an atmosphere you could have cut with a blunt shovel. “Where do we go from here?”

“I guess that’s up to you.”

“I’ve given them my answer. I’m not going back on it.”

“Then I guess you have my answer too.”

“I don’t want to lose you, Cheryl.”

“No?” The word was a bark, short and brutal. “I thought perhaps you were looking forward to working with Ruth Patton.”

“Ruth isn’t involved in the project.” What the hell was this?

“Is she involved with you?”

“What do you mean?”

Cheryl was leaning stiffly against the back of the couch, her face a pale indecipherable blur. “You ought to be more careful, Gavin. Especially in front of your son.”

A sickening chill swept through him. He tasted something vile at the back of his throat. He felt as if the solid foundation of his life had given way, as if he had been betrayed: first Nick, and then Cheryl, and now Dan. There were other emotions mixed in with it, sorrow, self-pity, and a thin streak of stubborn, bitter defiance.

He took a breath and said very calmly, “I’m not doing this for Ruth, for Prothero or Van Dorn, for Gelstrom, or for myself. If you can’t see why I’m doing it, if you won’t try to understand, then you and I have nothing more to say to each other.”

“I didn’t think we had,” said Cheryl, tight-lipped and dry-eyed.

By dawn of the day after the incident at the UN, armored ground forces, airborne troops, and two squadrons of helicopter gunships had been mobilized for a combined assault on an area adjacent to the White River, roughly ten miles south of the small town of Lund in eastern Nevada.

Intelligence reports indicated that members of the religious sect known as the Faith had been living in the vicinity for at least ten years, yet three sorties by reconnaissance aircraft had so far failed to pinpoint the exact location. The army commander in charge of the operation doubted whether the settlement could number much above three hundred people, but even so a community of that size should have been easy to spot in the emptiness of sparse scrub and bare mountain peaks. He ordered another sweep at first light, this time employing the full range of detection devices at their disposal, including high-resolution film, infrared and spectroscopic analysis.

Meanwhile roadblocks were set up on every highway, minor road and backwoods trail within a radius of fifty miles from the target point. Which turned out to be a real headache. There were literally hundreds of unmapped mining trails crisscrossing the valley between Currant Summit and Mount Grafton, and it seemed impossible to seal off the area so that individuals and small groups couldn’t sneak through the cordon.

By ten o’clock the data from the latest reconnaissance had been processed. They revealed extensive cultivation to the east of the river and also showed up a high level of thermal activity, detected by the infrared scan, which could mean one of two things: natural hot springs bubbling up from underground or human habitation.

Yet still, maddeningly, the film and photographs revealed nothing. A few old mine workings and that was all.

Finally, running short of patience and inspiration, the commander made the decision to send in two advance ground units, to approach from north and south respectively. At 1:20 a column of trucks and armored personnel carriers moved along the narrow blacktop of route 38; the southern force comprising 264 officers and men of the Forty-seventh Marine Group. Their orders were to locate the settlement, detain anyone they found there, and radio back the position to headquarters at Caliente.

Fifteen miles from Lund, Maj. Sam Coogan told his driver to stop. Behind them the column crept to a halt. With his second-in-command, Captain Hance, he leaned over a map spread across the wheel cowling of the leading truck.

Major Coogan circled the area with a gloved finger. “It has to be somewhere here. Gotta be. But where?” He shook his head and gazed around at the scrub-dotted hillside. It was cool and the sky was darkening rapidly. Three miles away the peak of Mount Grafton wore a cap of purple thundery-looking clouds.

“Storm coming on, sir,” Captain Hance observed. “Damn, if they can’t give us a fix from the air how do they expect us to find it?” Coogan grunted. “You know what concerns me more? They could be waiting for us. That pyro-suicide was on every telecast and radio bulletin—they must know we’re coming after them. And with a bunch of religious nuts you can never be sure—”

His attention was caught by a staff sergeant farther down the column who was standing on the lip of the road and pointing down into a gully. The two officers went to look. It was the gutted burned-out wreck of a jeep lying on its side, with twisted and blackened Utah plates.

Coogan raised his eyebrows quizzically and looked at the captain, and together they turned to look at the rutted track on the opposite side of the road that wound jaggedly upward through the foothills toward Mount Grafton.

Inside the mountain Bhumi Bhap sat cross-legged on the sandy floor of his cell. A wick floating in a bowl of oil provided a dim flickering glow, illuminating the crudely carved walls that sloped up to the conical roof.

From outside the cell there came a low muttered chanting. The inner circle of adepts had been summoned; they were now waiting, preparing for Lift-Off.

It would not be long. Soon men with weapons would come to destroy, in the same way they had blindly and foolishly destroyed the earth. So be it, Bhumi Bhap decided. Everything had been prepared, was ready. He would lead the way to destruction.

I
am become death, the shatterer of worlds
...

This world was no longer to be denied the death it craved. Let it perish. Let the species that had defiled and despoiled it drown and choke in its own excreta. Bhumi Bhap rejoiced in the certain knowledge of what was to be. His own mortal body, the self that was “I,” meant nothing to him. The uncountable atoms of which he was made would continue to exist, to circulate throughout the universe, and would eventually, inevitably, form part of another consciousness. From somewhere out there, dispersed across a billion light-years of space, he would witness the end of this clod of mud and still be there, eternally cognizant, waiting and watching for the slow cycle of rebirth to begin.

The chanting died away as he appeared in the doorway.

He moved slowly through their ranks with his crippled, lurching walk. In the light of the lamps and candles the pits of his eyes were cavernously hollow and black. His sticklike figure in the sagging robes seemed to lack substance, seemed almost, despite the lurching gait, to drift in dreadful incorporeal silence along the main gallery.

Bhumi Bhap gave no word or sign. They followed after him, twelve of his youngest and most devout disciples, descending to the lowest level where, in these chambers, resided the machines that provided power for the mountain, feeding off the lake of oil beneath their feet.

When they were gathered, silent and kneeling, Bhumi Bhap spoke softly of the Optimum Orbital Trajectory, reminding them that their lives were dedicated to its attainment. Very few were so fortunate in having been given a purpose; fewer still in having the opportunity to fulfill it.

“We do not fear death,” he told them, “because for us death has no meaning. It is merely a transition, exchanging one form of existence for another. The stuff of your being cannot be destroyed, only that which is the selfish ego, and which anyway you are taught, as adepts of the Faith, to denounce.