The Fury and the Terror (64 page)

Woolwine dropped the vial from which he had withdrawn a powerful hypnotic and started toward the dpg. But without the glow of black light he couldn't find her.

"Seal the room!" he shouted to someone beyond the viewing glass. The dpg slapped Woolwine hard across the face, and he staggered back, glasses askew on his face, one shocked eye revealed.

The EKG machine that monitored Robin Sandza's heart rate began to beep in emergency cadence.

Woolwine recovered from the smack in the face and lunged forward with the needle held like a stubby rapier. Poised to jab flesh he couldn't see. Jab, jab—nothing there, or there, or behind him. The room was glowing now from Robin's funerary light. Woolwine raised his head sharply toward the cat's cradle containing Robin's slight body. He saw Robin float free of all restraints, rise toward the domed ceiling. His face was a luminous death mask. But Robin's eyes were open. They were free of pain, ecstatic.

"No! No! No!"

Eden's dpg gave the doctor a hard shove from his left side. Woolwine tripped himself up and sprawled, the hypodermic in his hand crumpling beneath him.

Robin?

I'm almost there. I could use a push too. But take it easy. You don't know your own strength. The shining blue cord—cut it for me, please.

Where are you going?

Can't make that out yet. Too far away. But I know it's where I want to go. I can feel gravity pulling me. Just cut the cord.

Done. Good-bye, Robin.

Marcus Woolwine was on his feet again, minus his mirror sunglasses. The doppelganger watched his eyes as he looked at the flat-line EKG. There was no supportive whoosh from the respirator. Saline solution and drops of chemical sustenance dripped uselessly from the ends of dangling IV lines. He saw Robin's body, white and weightless as an egret's feather, float higher, begin to glow translucently, dissipate atom by atom.

Good-bye—Guinevere. Good luck. Tell Eden I said . . . you deserve to be free. It's what we all deserve ... for being, and trying.

The door to Robin's former prison stood open, and medical technicians were milling about, gazing in wonder at the all-consuming but pacific drift of light that had replaced Robin's body. There was nothing visibly left of him except for a fine drift of sparky ash. Marcus Woolwine, in a grunting fit of rage, struck at everyone who stood helplessly near him. Bloody saliva flew from his mouth. He had bitten his tongue.

Eden Waring's doppelganger walked away. Nothing left for her to do there. She felt weightless herself. She took four or five climbing steps and found herself a welcome distance from the underground facility. On the surface, good Montana ground, on a rise a mile or so away from the fake brightly illuminated fort that marked the site of Plenty Coups. She sipped a rush of raw wind through clenched teeth, basked in starlight. There was a storm in heaven, off to the west, as beautiful and slashingly violent as a Van Gogh painting. A rumble like chariots across the sky, arriving with a pantheon of gods for a celestial inquiry. She felt that it had something to do with Robin, part of his redemption. Or was it about the condemnation of those who had used him, and his powers, so badly?

She waited for Eden to take notice of her, and bring her home.

BIG COUNTRY RANCH • JUNE 7 • 9:54 P.M. MDT

T
he medevac helicopter from Bozeman had arrived just ahead of the storm that had banged its way down from the mountains and was traveling full-throttle across the Big Country range like an old-time Mallet, the behemoth of long-haul locomotives.

Two physicians and two paramedics were aboard the chopper. A paramedic tried to attend to Rona Harvester's devastated nose, but she kept throwing him off and crawling to where Victor Wilding lay on the floor. They'd had to restrain him to keep him quiet long enough to thump up a vein and insert an IV. He'd already had morphine from one of the RNs on duty at the ranch's small infirmary. His temperature was 106, pulse 180. His blood pressure was systolic 270, diastolic 150. The higher figure was a crisis number. Wilding was in imminent danger of blowing out every valve in his heart, a major blood vessel in his brain.

Rona coughed blood from her throat. "Victor! It doesn't matter! You know it doesn't matter that Robin is dead! Don't
do
this to yourself! Victor, Godddd,
I need you
!"

The cardiologist with the med team recommended a sedative. Two of them held Rona while the intramuscular dose was administered. Rona still wouldn't stop screaming, when she wasn't spitting gobbets of blood. Her hysteria, the window-rattling thunder, and the big flaring bolts that turned the room's every face and object into a gothic frieze scraped their nerves.

Clint Harvester, however, didn't seem to be upset. He sat patiently in a chair while everyone else was running for something. His eyes went to Victor Wilding's flushed, engorged head on which his features were etched like an intaglio to the scary display outside. Part of his demeanor may have been due to Buck Hannafin, who stood behind Clint with a hand on his shoulder. Until he heard another helicopter coming down through the torrent, miraculously unstruck by lightning, Buck didn't know where Courtney Shyla had disappeared to.

With the IV in and Wilding packed in bags of ice, he was rushed outside. A second medevac helicopter had landed a hundred yards away in a clearing uphill from the house. Nearly everyone in the Harvester household—MORG agents included—followed the stretcher bearers as far as the deck outside the front entrance, where they were pelted with rain and hail and flying leaves.

Courtney had reentered the house by another door. She was wearing a poncho with a hood that dripped rain. From the hall outside the dining room she silently got Buck's attention and when he turned she used hand signals to tell him what she wanted. The paramedic and nurse who were trying to get Rona to lie down on another stretcher failed to notice when Buck left the room with Clint Harvester.

The MORG agent whose job it was to keep his eyes on both Rona and Clint moved to intercept them. "Sir—"

Buck said with a wave of his hand, "For God's sake, I'm just gonna get the President looking decent. You stick with Miss Rona, lend a hand if need be. We'll be back in a jiffy."

O
utside the four men taking Victor Wilding down the series of right-angle steps from the house dropped him when lightning sheared the top out of a larch tree fifty feet from them, a torrent of sparks shooting through the low clouds. A smoking bough sailed onto the lower deck of the house, burying a MORG agent and a couple of houseboys. Windows were shattered.

Wilding's stretcher skittered down another twenty steps, where it stopped falling and stood, momentarily, upright. Wilding's face appeared to glow with a pale blue light, like the corona of a gas flame. His heavy-lidded eyes were expressionless. His temple bones stood out, and there were swollen veins across his forehead, in his neck. With his dark sodden clothing and rain-slicked hair, his wrists and ankles in leather restraints, he had more than a passing resemblance to the just-unwrapped monster in the classic movie version of
Frankenstein
.

No one who saw it was sure of what happened next. Most witnesses believed that another lightning strike to the metal frame of the stretcher had electrocuted Victor Wilding.

Lightning has the power to stop hearts and carbonize lungs, just as it had the theoretical power to animate the fanciful creature in James Whale's movie. But no one had ever seen or heard of a victim of lightning almost fully consumed within his clothing—not just burned beyond recognition but
gone
, except for a few bits of heel and toe bones in his Timberland hiking boots. The boots, like Wilding's clothing, were otherwise intact, not a single lace singed by heat that had, for seconds, reached several thousand degrees Fahrenheit. A spontaneous combustion as bright and hot as an exploding star.

C
ourtney Shyla escorted the stretcher on which Rona Harvester lay, covered against the fury of the storm and quieted by an intramuscular shot of Adavan, to the second medevac helicopter, a venerable Jolly Green Giant that could accommodate up to fifteen stretchers. The MORG agent assigned to Rona climbed in after her and was greeted with a blow to the back of the neck by one of Royce Destrahan's paramilitary operatives.

Courtney returned to the house by a side door, walked up the steps to the bedroom floor, and found another MORG agent outside the President's suite. He looked overexcited. He was holding a bullpup, but the safety was on. D-U-M-B, she thought.

"President's getting dressed. What are you doing up here?"

Courtney didn't want to go hand-to-hand even with an obvious incompetent. She shot him in the knee with the silenced HK Mark 23 she was holding beneath the poncho, and when he collapsed, in so much pain he couldn't scream, she used her slap-daddy, a leather truncheon filled with double-aught buck, to anesthetize him, dragged him into another bedroom and shut the door.

Buck Hannafin had appeared with Clint Harvester after getting him dressed and into his boots. Courtney gave each of them a hooded poncho.

Buck clamped a Stetson on Clint's head and they went downstairs, Courtney with her finger on the trigger of the .45. But nobody showed up to challenge them. They left by the side door and walked a hundred yards through drenched woods to the waiting helicopter. The rain had lost some of its sideways sting and fury.

"Shame we won't get to ride tonight," Buck said to Courtney as they boarded the helo. "But this works out better."

Rona Harvester looked at them with dulled eyes from her stretcher on the deck. Clint got on first, glancing at her. There was a clear shield taped down from cheek to cheek to prevent more damage to her nose. Behind the shield her eyes were swelling shut, turning black.

"Shame," Clint said. To no one in particular; he was just mimicking what Buck had said. He was led to a seat. Nick Grella helped him into his harness.

"Okay, Mr. President?"

Clint looked up at him with a faint smile, but not as if he knew who Nick was. "Candy?" he said.

One of the paramilitaries aboard came up with some M&Ms for the President. He sat there munching contentedly.

"Any serious change in plans?" Buck asked.

Royce Destrahan looked back at them from the right-hand seat in the cockpit. "No, sir. We'll change aircraft in Bozeman, shoot down across the Bitterroots to Hailey."

The rotors were turning. Buck said, "Idaho. Isn't there a first-class private hospital over Sun Valley way? Sure. They do some of the best reconstructive surgery you'll find this side of Lausanne, Switzerland. Guess that's a plus for Miss Rona. What's all the uproar out front?"

"Lightning hit a tree. Also the dude on the stretcher, according to the radio."

"Victor Wilding," Courtney cut in.

"That a fact? Well, they're gonna be looking for a new head of operations around Plenty Coups."

Rona moaned from the depths of the twilight to which she'd been consigned.

"MORG won't need nobody," Buck said grimly. "Once I get done rolling the rock off that nest of vipers. Maybe we need to wait 'nother few minutes until this Montana monsoon passes through."

"Can't wait long. They see the President's missing; we'll have shit for rain. Amazing how these storms just blow up out of nowhere."

"Fortuitous," Buck said, settling into a seat with a winded sigh, smiling sideways at Clint Harvester. He resisted an urge to reach out and wipe a gob of chocolate from the soon to be ex-President's chin. Not that Clint would recognize what an indignity the gesture represented. But Buck knew, and his heart felt hollow enough already.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE • JUNE 7 • 9:22 P.M. CDT

C
arlisle tied up his cruiser at the marina by Adelphia Coliseum across the Cumberland River from downtown Nashville. The blended voices of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood singing "In Another's Eyes" seemed to float on the bright cloud of light above the stadium bowl.

There were two parking lots that they could see, and a six-level parking structure that looked to be full. Thousands of cars, campers, trucks of all types. For a few moments after they'd left the boat they all simply stood unmoving on the riverbank, staring, disheartened.

Tom Sherard saw Metro police cars on the street. He had turned up the collar of his jacket so his bloody neck and shirt collar wouldn't be too obvious. He had shifted the lion's-head cane to his left hand, because his right hand had gone numb and there was no feeling in the forearm almost to his elbow. Every move he made seemed to press the bullet closer to his spinal cord. But he could still walk.

"How long do these shows usually last?" Tom Sherard asked Carlisle.

"Hard to say. Probably started at seven-thirty. Garth likes to give 'em their money's worth. Reckon he's good for another twenty minutes."

"Where do we start?" Bertie asked, with a slow benumbed shake of her head. The parking lots seemed infinite from their perspective. The stadium was huge.