Gateways (39 page)

Matthew Shepherd became his best friend.

When Jason got home in his dirty and torn white suit, Rudy Zion took one look and started whipping him with his belt. “I didn’t tell you to go out and ruin your suit and play with the dirty boys in the neighborhood. After this, you do what I tell you.”

Jason hated him for two days and then his suit was patched and cleaned and he went out on the street with Zion and his wife. Louise played the tambourine to attract a crowd and Zion took off his cap and put it on the sidewalk with a few dollars in it to prime the pump.

Jason was the star of the show. Rudy Zion introduced him as “the little Jesus on Earth,” said a prayer and Jason shouted “Amen!” at the end of it. Zion looked upset and surprised but a few more dollars and a handful of coins landed in the hat.

Over the next few years Jason practiced writing short prayers and speeches. He had a sweet, loud voice and people really listened when he warned them they’d all go to hell if they didn’t come to Jesus right away.

The marks—that’s what Zion called them one night after a few bottles of wine—gave them everything they had and a few of them touched Jason and shook his hand. They were all true believers, Rudy said with a trace of cynicism.

Jason was the center of attraction and a huge draw until his voice started to change when he was twelve. The collections grew thinner and Rudy looked at him with worry, no longer quite so proud of him.

The blow-off came when Matthew Shepherd found a stream in the woods with clay banks so they could slide down to the water. It was the most fun Jason had ever had. He had folded up his suit to keep it dry and when they were through he washed himself thoroughly to get rid of the clay.

When he got home, Rudy Zion had woken up early and noticed that while Jason’s suit—which had been let out numerous times and now hardly
fit him—was dry, Jason’s hair was wet. He took off his belt to whip Jason but Jason had become a very strong twelve. He took away the belt and gave Zion three whacks on his ass, then grabbed up his little case and ran out the door.

He met Matthew Shepherd in the alley and Shepherd gave him some of his old clothes to wear. Jason took off the white suit and spread it out in the alley, Shepherd found a can of gasoline in the garage and they poured it on the suit and set it on fire.

Jason didn’t open up the case to look at the plaster Jesus. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t be flashing gold. But he had learned a lot, all right—too much.

Matthew Shepherd never saw him again.

But he never forgot Jason, either.

Lester Kamps had been making a routing security check of the medical houses in his district when he ran across Blake Pharmaceutical. A pleasant group of whitewashed buildings, neatly landscaped, so it looked more like a college campus than a medical manufacturing site.

The only thing that bothered him was the two-story windlowless building in back that obviously had been thrown up quickly. He leafed through the short description he had in his briefcase and there was no mention of the addition.

He parked his car and stared at the building for a long moment and then the tumblers fell into place and he had a pretty good idea of what he was looking at. A stealth lab. Rumors were a dozen or more were scattered throughout the country. But representatives from the Department of Defense flatly claimed they didn’t exist.

Lester arranged lunch with the Blake officers, none of whom was comfortable at the lunch table, and when he asked for a tour of the new addition to check on security, they told him bluntly his security clearance wasn’t high enough. The CEO, the chief executive officer, was a thin, elderly man while the chief financial office was a young go-getter who probably played handball without gloves. Henry Ellis, the chief operating officer, was a fleshy man, and Lester guessed he drank too much, was the life of the Christmas party, and knew everybody by their first name.

They had a cover story for the new facility but Lester didn’t believe a word of it.

Back at his office, he worked the phones and finally hung up, puzzled. Nobody in Washington knew much about Blake and nothing about any new addition. He finally called in Bailey, the oldest man on staff, one reputed to have been a protégé of J. Edgar Hoover. Lester gave him a list of the three officers at Blake.

“I’d like to know something about their backgrounds.” He hesitated. “Personal as well as professional.”

Bailey glanced at the list and cracked a thin smile. “There’s something on everybody,” he murmured. “Start with rumors and then talk to the family, other relatives, friends, and enemies. Find out enough, something’s bound to stick. Most people will censor themselves but they seldom censor the same things. Put it all together and you can usually come up with a pretty ugly but accurate picture.”

“You learned a lot from working with Hoover, didn’t you, Eddie?”

“Mr. Hoover built the Bureau,” Bailey said quietly. “He wasn’t above blackmail doing it.”

Bailey announced his visitor at noon a week later. Lester met Henry Ellis at the door, hand outstretched.

“Glad you could make it, Hank—coffee? Cream and sugar, right?”

Ellis smiled nervously and sipped at his cup. “I take it everything at the plant was okay?”

“Everything was fine.” Lester glanced at the papers on his desk and shook his head. “That’s about it, Hank.” He let Ellis get as far as the door then let a note of doubt creep into his voice. “Your daughter, Rachel, still lives in Sebastopol?”

Ellis paled and Lester motioned to the chair. Ellis walked slowly back and sagged into it.

“She happy there?” Lester asked innocently.

Ellis desperately wanted to wipe the sweat from running into his eyes.

“She . . . lives alone, Mr. Kamps. Edna and I send her money every now and then.”

“Every month,” Lester said, thoughtful. “Something of a remittance lady, isn’t she?” His voice now turned official. “You love Rachel, don’t you? A little too well,” he added dryly. He pulled an eight-by-ten out of an envelope and slid it across the desk. “You remember this, Ellis? Her photograph from the high school yearbook? She was stunning, even when she was fifteen. You were very fond of her—too fond.”

Ellis, hoarsely: “What do you want from me?”

Lester rang for his secretary to bring in more coffee and a plate with
doughnuts. “You can have the chocolate ones, Ellis—same brand as in the company dining room.” Lester waited until the secretary had left the room. “One of your workers—a Valerie Watkins—died recently. Nobody knows what of. Big mystery.”

Bailey had been more than thorough in going through the newspaper obits.

“Did she have access to the new addition?” It was just a guess.

Ellis shook his head, the sweat flying off his forehead. “She never went there, her duties didn’t take her there.”

Lester picked up the papers on his desk and threw them in the air. “You’re lying to me. I know fucking well she had access and my guess is that she died of something she found there.”

Another guess but a shrewd one.

Ellis hesitated, agonized. “We never gave her access but somebody turned off the cameras and the motion sensors one night and we knew there had been a break-in. We guessed it was her.”

“How did you know that?”

“She had wanted to investigate it for a long time. Then we hired a new young security guard . . . and he developed a thing for her.”

“And he let her in.”

Ellis nodded. “You never met Valerie. She was an incredibly sexy woman.” Something showed in his face that made Lester want to throw up. “We couldn’t prove anything but then she got sick and we knew for sure it had been her.”

“And the guard?”

“Disappeared.”

Lester’s voice became a gentle purr. “I want to know what’s going on in the level-four containment building at the back of Blake.”

“I . . . can’t tell you.”

“Sure you can. This room isn’t bugged—everything you say is strictly between you and me.”

Ellis sank farther back into his chair. “I . . . really don’t know that much.”

Lester waited, silent, and Ellis finally said: “We make vaccines.”

“Vaccines? As in plural?”

Ellis shook his head. “Just one.”

Lester gave him a minute. “Tell me the story, Hank,” he said gently.

“World War I—1918.” Ellis paused to wet his mouth with cold coffee. “There was a small village in the Alps. It got snowed in, nobody in or out until spring. When the food and mail trucks finally made it up there, they
discovered everybody was dead. Their pathologists couldn’t find anything and the bodies were buried in a deep mass grave. A few years ago medical men went back to the village—it’s a big year-round ski resort now—and took more tissue samples from the bodies in the grave, still frozen.”

“The Swiss reconstituted it as a viable virus? Like we’ve done with the 1918 flu virus?”

Ellis shook his head. “They shipped it to us, we’ve had more . . . experience in reconstituting viruses. Our scientists took DNA tests and it didn’t resemble the 1918 virus at all. It didn’t resemble any virus. The only thing they have in commnon is that they’re airborne. We suspect this one is a hundred percent fatal.”

“But Blake is making a vaccine, right?”

“That’s . . . not the first thing we do.”

“What is?”

“We tweak it—we make it into the worst possible version of the disease that we can think of.” Ellis finally wiped the sweat off his forehead. “We have to do that,” he pleaded. “If the other side—any other side—had tissue samples, that’s what they’d do. We try to make a vaccine for the worst possible scenario . . .” His voice trailed off. “Human trials should begin in about four years.”

It took Lester a moment.

“You’ve made the worst possible disease,” he said slowly. “But you won’t . . . have the vaccine for at least another four years.”

“That’s fast,” Ellis said, eager. “Most weeks we work twenty-four-seven.”

“How do you detect if somebody’s infected?” Lester asked.

Ellis shook his head. “We’ve done research on mice—it’s not detectable by any blood test.”

Lester could feel the sweat start to soak his collar.

“What’s the incubation period?”

“We’re . . . not sure,” Ellis said. “Best we could figure out was based on how long it took from the break-in to when Valerie was taken to the hospital. Maybe three weeks, give or take, before the victim becomes . . . infectious.”

“And the disease cycle itself once you’ve become infectious?”

Ellis looked like he was going to be sick. “Judging from Valerie, maybe two or three days. Again, it could be longer—or shorter.”

Lester was afraid to ask the next question.

“How is it spread?”

The sweat had started to run down Ellis’s forehead.

“I told you it’s airborne. Respiratory droplets are probably involved, when people sneeze or cough or even laugh or simply exhale. Some diseases can be spread on dust particles, which means they can travel . . . long distances.”

“There’s no defense, is there?”

Ellis slowly shook his head. “We don’t know of any. It’s what we’re trying for.” There ws a note of pride in his voice.

“Did Miss Watkins steal any of it?”

Ellis looked smug. “We had DOD men check out the plant. Nothing was missing.”

DOD had lied, Lester thought, afraid of panic. Something had gotten out. But nobody would use an airborne disease because of the danger of blowback. It would be as dangerous to you as to your enemy—and to all the innocent bystanders.

All Lester could think of then was the World War II training film.
Duck and Cover—What to Do in Case of an Atomic Attack.

Cynics had made a slight addition.

Bend over, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye . . .

But this wasn’t funny.

“You never found anything in Valerie Watkins’s apartment?”

“DOD reported it as clean. They even went through her small basement lab—she did a lot of work at home—and found no trace of it.”

“What about the security guard, her boyfriend?”

Ellis shook his head.

“I told you—disappeared.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not much. A few of the people who knew him said he was a ‘Jesus freak.’ ”

“He have a name?”

“Jason,” Ellis said, wiping his forehead again. “Jason Hendrix.”

The locker room in the clubhouse had the same warm, moist feeling that all gyms have. There were the usual metal lockers, wooden benches, posters of tennis greats on the walls and at one end the steam room and at the other a pro shop with new racquets for sale.

The towel boy told Brian that Mr. Shepherd would be coming in from
the courts in a few minutes. There was a wicker chair by a racquet stringing machine in one corner and Brian made himself comfortable.

The story he’d gotten from his contact in the FBI was garbled—he hadn’t been far enough up the pecking order to get it straight. A woman working for a medical lab had died under mysterious circumstances and her boyfriend had stolen some super-secret material from her. That was it, except the boyfriend had been named Jason and was a religious type. What Brian wanted was to unravel the mystery and interview the boyfriend. With a good videotape, he could be a segment on
The Rachel Maddow Show
. Maybe.