Shadowfires (38 page)

“The feds can’t know that’s my intention.”

“But if they’ve got a file on you—and they do—then they know you well enough to suspect that’d be your plan.”

“All right, yes,” she admitted unhappily.

“So any Pentagon-supported scientist is going to be real eager to please the government and keep his own fat research grants, and he’s sure as hell going to alert them the moment such a file comes into his hands. Certainly he’s not going to risk
losing
his grants or being prosecuted for compromising defense secrets, so at best he’ll tell the reporter to take his damn file and get lost, and he’ll keep his mouth shut. At best. Most likely he’ll give the reporter to the feds, and the reporter will give
us
to the feds. The file will be destroyed, and very likely we’ll be destroyed, too.”

Rachael didn’t want to believe what he said, but she knew there was truth in it.

Out in the woods, the cicadas were singing again.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

Evidently Benny had been thinking hard about that question as they had gone through room after room of the cabin without finding Eric, for his answer was well prepared. “With both Eric and the file in our possession, we’re in a lot stronger position. We wouldn’t have just a bunch of cryptic research papers that only a handful of people could understand; we’d also have a walking dead man, his skull staved in, and by God,
that’s
dramatic enough to guarantee that virtually any newspaper or television network will run an all-stops-pulled story before getting expert opinions on the file itself. Then there’ll be no reason for the government or anyone else trying to shut us up. Once Eric’s seen on TV news, his picture’ll show up on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
, and the
National Enquirer
will have enough material for a decade, and David Letterman will be making zombie jokes every night, so silencing us won’t achieve anything.”

He took a deep breath, and she had a hunch that he was going to propose something she would not like in the least.

When he continued, he confirmed her hunch. “All right, like I said, I need to search this place thoroughly to see if I can come up with any clue that’ll tell us where Eric’s gone. But the authorities may show up here soon. Now that we’ve got a copy of the Wildcard file, we can’t risk having it taken away from us, so you’ve got to leave with the file while I—”

“You mean, split up?” she said. “Oh, no.”

“It’s the only way, Rachael. We—”

“No.”

The thought of leaving him alone here was chilling.

The thought of being alone herself was almost too much to bear, and she realized with terrible poignancy how tight the bonds between them had become in just the past twenty-four hours.

She loved him. God, how she loved him.

He fixed her with his gentle, reassuring brown eyes. In a voice neither patronizing nor abrasively commanding but nevertheless full of authority and reason, a voice which brooked no debate—probably the tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of inferior rank—he said, “You’ll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won’t have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from us. We’ll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I’ll thoroughly search the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that points us toward Eric, I’ll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we’ll go after him together. If I don’t get a lead on him, we’ll meet up and hide out together, until we can decide what to do next.”

She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it, he was right.

Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will you get out of here?”

He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out. “You’ll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That’s got to be ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it. You’ll take this Mercedes, and I’ll take the Ford just far enough to swap it for something else.”

“They’ll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”

“Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this particular license number, driven by a man fitting Eric’s description. You’ll be driving, not Eric, and we’ll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I am.”

Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”

“Las Vegas,” he said.

The answer startled her. “Why there?”

“Southern California’s too hot for us. I’m not confident we can hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”

“What place?”

“I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”

“You’re a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”

“My real-estate development company’s been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I’m hardly a wheeler-dealer. It’s small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it’s an older motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And it’s not in the best repair. In fact, it’s closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks ago, and we’re going to tear it down next month, put up a new place: sixty units, a restaurant. There’s still electrical service. The manager’s suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom, furniture, telephone—so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans. Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a sensation that the feds can’t put a lid on. Anyway, if we can’t get a lead on him, hiding out is all we
can
do.”

“I’m to drive to Vegas?” she asked.

“That’d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us—and considering what’s at stake, I think they want us real bad—they’ll probably have men at the major airports. You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I’ll follow in a couple of hours.”

“But if the cops show up—”

“Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip away from them.”

“You think they’re going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.

“No. I just know I’m
more
competent.”

“Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a half decades ago.”

He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”

And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that. What was it he’d said—that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?

“Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.

She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future together, was for her to do what he wanted.

“All right,” she said. “All right. We’ll split. But it scares me, Benny. I guess I don’t have the guts for this kind of thing, the right stuff. I’m sorry, but it really scares me.”

He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Only madmen have no fear.”

Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one o’clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.

He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue shirt, and a green-and-orange-striped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as a joke gift. Even by a generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain. He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding chin.

In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his arms; therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped to pick up.

Solberg’s office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners, were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.

“Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time what lay beyond the walls of his office.

The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg’s second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past impatiens blazing with thousands of bright blossoms—coral, red, pink, purple—and vanished under the branches of jacarandas and eucalyptus.

“Gentlemen, we are among the most fortunate people on earth: to be here, in this beautiful land, under these temperate skies, in a nation of plenty and tolerance.” He stepped to the window and opened his stubby arms, as if to embrace all of southern California. “And the trees, especially the trees. There are some wonderful specimens on this campus. I love trees, I really do. That’s my hobby: trees, the study of trees, the cultivation of unusual specimens. It makes for a welcome change from human biology and genetics. Trees are so majestic, so
noble
. Trees give and give to us—fruit, nuts, beauty, shade, lumber, oxygen—and take nothing in return. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d pray to return as a tree.” He glanced at Julio and Reese. “What about you? Don’t you think it’d be grand to come back as a tree, living the long majestic life of an oak or giant spruce, giving of yourself the way orange and apple trees give, growing great strong limbs in which children could climb?” He blinked, surprised by his own monologue. “But of course you’re not here to talk about trees and reincarnation, are you? You’ll have to forgive me . . . but, well, that
view
, don’t you know? Just captured me for a moment.”

In spite of his unfortunate porcine face, disheveled appearance, apparent disorganization, and evident tendency to be late, Dr. Easton Solberg had at least three things to recommend him: keen intelligence, enthusiasm for life, and optimism. In a world of doomsayers, where half the intelligentsia waited almost wistfully for Armageddon, Julio found Solberg refreshing. He liked the professor almost at once.

As Solberg went behind his desk, sat in a large leather chair, and half disappeared from view beyond his paperwork, Julio said, “On the phone you said there was a dark side to Eric Leben that you could discuss only in person—”

“And in strictest confidence,” Solberg said. “The information, if pertinent to your case, must go in a file somewhere, of course, but if it’s not pertinent, I expect discretion.”

“I assure you of that,” Julio said. “But as I told you earlier, this is an extremely important investigation involving at least two murders and the possible leak of top-secret defense documents.”

“Do you mean Eric’s death might not have been accidental?”

“No,” Julio said. “That was definitely an accident. But there are other deaths . . . the details of which I’m not at liberty to discuss. And more people may die before this case is closed. So Detective Hagerstrom and I hope you’ll give us full and immediate cooperation.”

“Oh, of course, of course,” Easton Solberg said, waving one pudgy hand to dismiss the very idea that he might be uncooperative. “And although I don’t know for a certainty that Eric’s emotional problems are related to your case, I expect—and fear—that they may be. As I said . . . he had a dark side.”

However, before Solberg got around to telling them of Leben’s dark side, he spent a quarter of an hour praising the dead geneticist, apparently unable to speak ill of the man until he had first spoken highly of him. Eric was a genius. Eric was a hard worker. Eric was generous in support of colleagues. Eric had a fine sense of humor, an appreciation for art, good taste in most things, and he liked dogs.

Julio was beginning to think they ought to form a committee and solicit contributions to build a statue of Leben for display under a fittingly imposing rotunda in a major public building. He glanced at Reese and saw his partner was plainly amused by the bubbly Solberg.

Finally the professor said, “But he was a troubled man, I’m sorry to say. Deeply, deeply troubled. He had been my student for a while, though I quickly realized the student was going to outdistance the teacher. When we were no longer student-teacher but colleagues, we remained friendly. We weren’t friends, just friendly, because Eric did not allow any relationship to become close enough to qualify as friendship. So, close as we were professionally, it was years before I learned about his . . . obsession with young girls.”

“How young?” Reese asked.

Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I’m . . . betraying him.”

“We may already know much of what you’ve got to tell us,” Julio said. “You’ll probably only be confirming what we know.”