The Immortalists (6 page)

It was two in the morning, and the only sound in the street was the rattle of a collapsing gutter on the house next to him. Light was courtesy of a full moon, occasionally supplemented by a street lamp that had escaped being vandalized by the local kids.

It was the second time Richard had run home that week. He was putting in brutal hours at the lab to try to revive his work, and unfortunately they only had one car. Or maybe it wasn’t so unfortunate. He’d been a pretty decent athlete in college, and the six miles of lung-searing torture was getting him back in touch with his physical side.

So far the long days and late nights were paying off more than he could have reasonably hoped. He’d managed to recover most of his data from offsite backups, and an embarrassing amount of groveling had allowed him to hold onto about half his staff. Mostly the youngest and least experienced—the ones who didn’t care much for authority and still had the luxury of defying it—but all were capable, dedicated people.

He pulled the sleeves of his sweatshirt down to protect his arms from the cold as he cut through a trash-strewn lot a few blocks from his house. He’d promised Carly he’d be home by one thirty, and she tended to worry when he missed his self-imposed curfews.

He’d made his offer to PharmaTan almost a week ago through Chris Graden—everything he and Carly had discussed, plus a sweetener that he hadn’t yet told her about: an offer to sign a ten-year employment contract with very few stipulations. Graden thought it amounted to indentured servitude, but there wasn’t time to screw around with negotiations.

Despite being an offer that no company in its right mind would refuse, though, there was still no word. What the hell were they waiting for?

The light on his sinking front porch came into view, and Richard picked up his pace to the degree his cramping thighs would allow. No point in courting any more of Carly’s wrath than necessary.

His stride faltered when he saw a shadow cross from his neighbor’s yard through the large hole in the fence that he’d been meaning to fix for months. He bent at the waist and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard from exertion and a sudden flair of anger.

That was it—the last goddamn time that dog was going to take a horse-sized dump in the grass where his daughter played. No more friendly reminders. No more reasoning. And sure as hell no more pleading. That mutt was going to the pound.

He crept onto the grass, trying to quiet his panting and stay in the shadows. The dog was nearly as old and fat as its owner, but he wasn’t exactly Speedy Gonzales either anymore.

The fit was tight, but he managed to get through the hole and slip into his backyard. Empty.

Endless years in school, countless academic awards, two PhDs…and he’d been outsmarted by a dog. Again.

Richard started to skirt the house on the way to the front door but stopped when he noticed the screen from Susie’s open window lying in the dirt. Yet another thing that needed fixing.

He padded over and was about to reach for it when he saw something move in his daughter’s room. At first, he thought he might have woken her up, but the shadow moving toward her bed was far too big to be either her or Carly.

The windowsill was probably five feet off the ground, and Richard was shocked when his attempt to vault through it succeeded and he found himself slamming down painfully on top of Susie’s open toy chest. The loud crash caused the man hovering over her to spin around, an object in his hand glinting briefly in the dim light before it dropped and he reached for something at his side.

Richard rolled gracelessly off the chest, managing to land on his feet and launch himself toward the figure. Susie shrieked as he and the man collided, and Richard felt something impact the top of his skull. The butt of a pistol. He had a gun!

The blow was hard enough to collapse his knees but not hard enough to stop him from swinging a fist upward toward the man’s stomach. At the last moment, though, a more effective target presented itself, and he drove his knuckles into the man’s groin with the same adrenaline-fueled power that had gotten him through the window.

A satisfying grunt filled the room, but the gun barrel kept swinging inevitably toward his face.

Then he was blind. For a moment, he thought the gun had gone off, but there was no sound. It took another split second to realize that Carly had turned on the lights and that the gun was still coming at him. He got hold of the man’s arm but then took a blow to the side of the head that drove him the rest of the way to the ground.

The man was shading his eyes with a gloved hand, so it was impossible to see his features—only his short black hair and wiry build beneath a windbreaker and jeans. What was clear, though, was that this time there was nothing Richard could do about the pistol lining up on him.

He put his hands up reflexively and waited for the impact of the bullet, but it never came. Carly jumped across their screaming daughter’s bed and slammed into the man with enough force to spoil his aim but not enough to knock him to the ground. He grabbed her throat and held her suspended as Richard fought to get back to his feet.

It had been a good try, but he realized that all she’d done was delay the inevitable and doom herself too.

Then Richard spotted the object the man had dropped on the carpet. A syringe.

He grabbed it and sunk it into their attacker’s khaki-covered thigh, using the last of his strength to push down the plunger.

A surprised yelp rose above his daughter’s wails just before Carly’s full weight landed on top of him.

Again, the gunshot he anticipated didn’t come. The man staggered to the open window and fell through it, landing with a muffled thump in the dirt below.

Richard pushed his dazed wife off him and crawled to a position where he could peek over the sill, spotting the man running unsteadily across the yard, syringe still dangling from his leg. It fell into a patch of weeds just before he squeezed through the hole in the fence and disappeared into the darkness.

Richard slammed the window and shut the curtains, turning to see Carly untangling their trembling daughter from her sheets.

“The police!” he shouted. “Call the police!”

His wife looked back at him, eyes still wide with panic, and then ran from the room.

“Susie!” he said, grabbing his daughter by her delicate shoulders. “Listen to me. Calm down. Are you hurt? Did he stick you with anything?”

“Do you mind?” Richard said, leaning out his daughter’s bedroom door and eyeing a uniformed cop pawing through the linen closet in the hall. “He wasn’t after my pillowcases.”

“We’re just trying to be thorough,” a voice behind him said. “Is there some reason you would have a problem with that? Maybe afraid of what we’ll find?”

Richard turned back to see Detective Timothy Sands staring out Susie’s bedroom window, his face bathed in the swirling red and blue light of a police cruiser parked in the driveway. He looked even more pissed off than when he’d showed up with an arrest warrant the week before. His short hair was matted, and his clothing was disheveled in a way that suggested he’d been pulled from bed to come there.

“Look, someone climbed through my daughter’s window and tried to kill her in her bed. I never graduated from the police academy or anything, but I’m thinking that the critical piece to this mystery isn’t in my towels.”

“What makes you think he was trying to kill her?”

“Because he was leaning over her with a gun and a syringe?”

“Right,” Sands said. “But you told me you emptied the syringe into his leg and he ran away. If it was a weapon, it wasn’t a very good one.”

“Come on,” Richard said angrily. “The dosages to kill a grown man can be very different than what it would take to kill a sick eight-year-old girl. Or it could be slow acting or some kind of biological agent. You know that as well as I do.”

“What I’m saying,” Sands said, turning away from the window, “is that I seem to be coming here a lot lately. I’m also saying that you have access to syringes. And I’m wondering why neither you, your wife, nor your daughter seem to be able to give me a solid description of a man you were dancing around with for God knows how long in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room.”

Carly walked in and handed her husband a bag of ice to slow the growth of the lump rising on his head. He tried to smile in thanks but only managed a wince as he pressed it to his scalp. Miraculously, his was the most serious injury of the night. Susie was terrified but completely unharmed, and beyond the bruises darkening on her neck, Carly seemed no worse for the wear either.

“You do have access to syringes, don’t you, Doctor?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Carly started but fell silent when Richard motioned for calm. She glared at Sands long enough to make the cop look away and then marched back toward the living room where their daughter had started crying again.

“You think I had something to do with this?” Richard said. “What possible motivation could I have?”

“How about this: I hear you’re trying to do a deal with PharmaTan where you get off scot-free. Seems like it wouldn’t hurt to drum up a little sympathy.”

Sands leaned back against the wall, his scowl making it clear that he wasn’t a fan of being denied a conviction by a bunch of backroom dealing.

“Christ,” Richard said under his breath. “Are we just wasting our time here, Detective? Are you even going to look into this?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” he responded, jabbing a finger in the air. “Do you have an insurance policy on your daughter’s life?”

“What?”

“Must be hard, huh, Doc? Single-handedly trying to cure a disease like this? But if your daughter was dead, it’d be over, wouldn’t it? You could go be a plastic surgeon in Hollywood and live the good life.”

Richard just stood there blinking, trying to quell the anger rising in him. It was clear that Sands was purposely trying to throw him off balance, but it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“Detective, that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. If it had been me, I’d have succeeded, and no one would have ever known.”

“Maybe your wife came in and surprised you. But she understands the stress you’re under and she’s trying to protect you. You should just tell me. Get it off your chest. I mean, you don’t need any more stress than you’ve already got, right? That shit’ll eat you alive.”

Richard kept his expression placid but struggled to unclench his teeth. “I think if you were to actually give that theory any thought, you’d find that it’s not all that plausible.”

“Oh, I intend to give it some thought. A whole lot of it, in fact.”

Another uniformed cop came in and whispered something into Sands’s ear and then left them alone again, closing the door behind him. An arrogant smile spread across the detective’s face. “No syringe, Doc.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My men looked where you said it was, and it’s not there. Care to change your story?”

“Bullshit! I saw it drop.”

“Well then maybe it sprouted wings and flew away, huh?”

Richard was having a harder and harder time tracking on what had happened that night. It was just another of a hundred things that didn’t make any sense. He’d watched the backyard through the edge of the curtains virtually nonstop to make sure the man who had come through the window didn’t return. The syringe had still been there when the police arrived. He was sure of it.

“Tell them to look again.”

Sands’s smile broadened, transforming his expression into an inexplicable one of triumph. The truth seemed to be of no importance to him, and he saw no reason to hide the fact. His only interest seemed to be burning a certain down-and-out biologist.

“No problem,” Richard said. “I’ll pull some soil samples from where the syringe dropped and tell you exactly what was in it. With a little luck, I’ll also be able to give you the genetic signature of the man it was stuck in.”

A bluff, of course. He was pissed off, and it was all he could think of to wipe the obnoxious smirk off the cop’s face. And it worked. Maybe a little too well.

Sands charged, jamming his thick forearm into Richard’s throat and driving him back against the wall. “There
was no syringe
,” he said, enunciating as though he were talking to a slow child. “Do you understand me, you son of a bitch?”

That was about all Richard could take. The confusion, fear, and frustration of the last week suddenly overwhelmed him, and he pushed back. Hard. Sands was lifted off his feet and bounced off a chest of drawers before landing on his ass in the middle of Susie’s Sesame Street rug. He leapt immediately to his feet and reached for his gun as Richard put his hands in front of him in a gesture of peace. “Whoa! I’m sorry, OK? It’s been a long day.”

Of course it would do no good. When you shoved a cop, there was only one outcome. He was heading to lockup with an assault charge added to his long list of sins.

But Sands seemed frozen, crouched on the rug with his hand halfway to his holster. He’d won, but for some reason he seemed unwilling to take his prize. Instead, he just started for the door, pausing for a moment before opening it.

“
There was no fucking syringe.”

Carly pulled the blanket from the back of the sofa and placed it over her daughter, tucking it gently around her delicate neck. She’d stopped crying less than a minute ago when exhaustion finally overpowered her terror and sent her into a sudden, coma-like sleep.

Carly, on the other hand, wondered if she would ever sleep again. Her heart was still pounding uncomfortably in her chest and adrenaline continued to course through her, keeping her on the edge of panic.

The last police officer had gone fifteen minutes ago, and she could hear Richard banging around at the back of the house but had no idea what he was doing. A few moments later, he strode in with a large duffel thrown over his shoulder and scooped Susie off the sofa. His eyes seemed a little wild as he looked around the room. She thought she’d seen every emotion possible play out on her husband’s face over the years, but this one was new and a little frightening.

“Richard, what are you doing? She just got to sleep—”

He put a finger to his lips, then waved an arm around them as if to indicate that someone might be listening.

“We’re leaving,” he whispered.

“Leaving? To go where?”

But he was already heading for the kitchen. Carly chased, finding him peering through the window at the still darkness beyond. Convinced that the coast was clear, he pushed through the door and started across the backyard.

When she caught up, he had stopped at the edge of their lawn staring down at a wide, shallow hole where the syringe had dropped and at the old shovel lying next to it.

“Richard. Please. Tell me what—”

But he’d set off again, squeezing awkwardly through the hole in their fence and cutting through their neighbor’s yard, careful to circumnavigate any light bleeding from windows or beaming from porches.

Carly followed, unsure what else to do. Her husband seemed to have sunk into some kind of paranoid alternate reality as he crossed onto the property of one of the few neighbors they actually knew. Susie remained motionless with her cheek resting on his shoulder as he paused, looking around him with birdlike jerks of his head. Apparently satisfied that there was no army lurking in the shadows, he continued to a pickup that Carly recognized as the one that he occasionally borrowed to haul lab equipment.

Richard opened the driver’s door with his free hand, pulling the seat forward and laying Susie in the tiny backseat. Carly circled around the bed as he slipped behind the wheel. After a nervous glance toward the owner’s house, she climbed hesitantly into the passenger seat.

“What the hell are we doing?” she said as he grabbed the key from the visor and shoved it into the ignition.

“We’re getting out of here.”

“We can’t just leave. Detective Sands—”

“Sands?” he said, starting the engine and backing along the dirt track that led to the road. “He’s in on it.”

Carly fell silent, examining the side of his face in the gloom.

On their wedding day he’d been tanned and athletic, with a handsome, clean-shaven face and blue eyes that always hinted at the excitement he felt about the world and the things he could learn from it.

After Susie had been diagnosed, that excitement had dulled, but he’d soldiered on, somehow managing to continue to be all things to all people—to their daughter, to her, to the other kids and parents. The question of what he’d left for himself sometimes kept her awake at night.

She suspected he’d been having periodic panic attacks for at least a year, but he hid them well, and she found herself afraid to bring it up. She knew him better than anyone did, but still had never found a way to gauge how close he was to the edge.

How could she possibly understand what he was going through? She couldn’t save Susie—all she could do was love her. But his situation was completely different. He
might
be able to save her. And that glimmer of hope—that unfair responsibility— was slowly tearing him apart.

They dropped off the curb into the road, and he threw the vehicle into drive, accelerating up the empty street, eyes flicking to the rearview mirror every few seconds.

“Do you have your cell on you?” he said.

“No. I—”

He nodded and dug his from his pocket, then threw it out the window.

“That phone had your whole life on it, and we just stole a car,” she said, concentrating on keeping her tone serene. Was this it? Was he finally in the throes of the breakdown that anyone else would have collapsed into years ago?

“Joey said I could borrow it anytime I want.”

“I don’t think he meant in the middle of the night without asking first.”

“What do you want me to do?” he said, his voice sounding like a shout in confines of the cab. “They’ll be able to track our car. Like they tracked Troy’s.”

Carly twisted around in her seat and looked down at Susie in the dim light, running the back of her hand gently across her sunken cheek. It wasn’t fair that she had to live like this. And that her husband—one of the few truly good people she’d ever met— should be destroyed by it.

“Who’s ‘they,’ Richard?”

He swerved toward an on-ramp, not answering until they were safely on the highway and he was satisfied that the road behind them was empty.

“I know you think I’m crazy. I just need you to give me a chance to explain.”

“I’m listening, Richard. I always have been, you know.”

He reached over and squeezed her hand. “Yeah, I know.”

He fell silent, and she decided not to press.

“I told you that Troy thought Annette’s death was related to the data on that drive and that I didn’t believe him. That I thought it was just the grief talking.”

“But now you’re not so sure.”

“Troy’s dead, I’m on the verge of going to prison, my lab’s trashed, someone tried to kill Susie, and the cops seem very interested in making that syringe disappear. It’s getting hard to ignore the fact that there are a lot of bad things happening to people who come into contact with that data.”

He went silent again, and Carly watched the side of his face for a few moments, unsure what to think. “Can I ask some questions?”

His eyes darted toward her and then back to the windshield. “I’m not having a meltdown, Carly. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m about to throw myself off a bridge.”

“Are you sure?”

“About the meltdown or the bridge?” He forced a smile, and she relaxed a bit.

“What does Susie have to do with any of this?”

“What if that guy’d succeeded? When we found her in the morning, we’d just think her heart finally gave out.”

“But what does that have to do with the research?”

“If there’s anything there that can help kids like Susie, there’s no lawsuit or criminal charge that’s going to keep me from pursuing it. But what if she was gone? With the legal problems, my people run off, the memories…” His voice faded for a moment. “I’d probably just walk away. I don’t think I’d have the strength to keep going.”

Carly nodded slowly, wondering exactly what he meant by “walk away.” It was something she thought about a lot. What would he walk away from? Where would he go? But those were questions for another time.

“What if someone is getting close to a breakthrough along a similar line?” he continued. “Or maybe they’re even far enough along to be coming up with usable therapies based on ideas similar to the ones Annette was working on? They might have spent hundreds of millions on research and development. That’s a hell of a lot of money, and I doubt they’d be too happy if someone like me or Annette cut their legs out from under them.”

“Richard, Sands is going to think you’re running. You’re going to be a fugitive.”

“Sands? It’s not Sands.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I bounced him off a wall earlier—”

“Jesus, Richard…”

“You know what he did? Nothing. Just sat there looking confused. That’s not normal, Carly. If cops know anything, it’s what to do when they’re attacked. He’s taking his orders from somewhere else. I surprised him, and he didn’t know what to do.”

“Are you—”

“And what about the missing syringe? I told him I could test the area where it fell to figure out what was in it and get DNA from the man who I stabbed with it.”

“Maybe that’s why he took the dirt. Maybe he’s taking it to the lab?”

“So he just had some cop dig it up with a shovel they found in our shed? Come on, Carly. They have crime scene people who do that kind of work. You know that as well as I do.”

She nodded and settled back into her seat, watching the glare of the lights speeding by. What else could she do?