Necessary Evil (24 page)

Leaving it draped over her shoulder, Kier walked on. ''You can help carry the food back if you have a thing about your breasts."

"I have no thing about my breasts. They're just private, that's all. Unlike some people I don't go around with my genitals hanging out." She caught herself doing it again. "Not that there's anything wrong with them."

"You seem to have a fascination."

"That's not true. That is so silly and so male."

She watched him wade through the rushes without reply and swim toward a teepee-shaped mound of mud and sticks that she knew to be a beaver lodge.
He's got to be crazy to swim in that freezing water,
she thought. But to show him she could do it, she wanted to go after him. If she was going to be his equal, she had better find a way to go. Almost running, she went to a tree, where she struggled out of her clothes while watching Kier out of the corner of her eye. He disappeared under the water twice, then climbed out on top of the beaver house.

She heard silenced pistol shots in rapid succession, and the heavy thunk of .45 slugs plowing into the mud and wood. In moments, he was pulling on something, a wire snare she assumed, to haul in a large, flopping brown mass. Two more shots and the animal stopped straggling.

Clad in her bra and loincloth, she deposited her clothes in the backpack, then went to the water's edge and stepped in, grateful that there was no ice crust. She considered that her bra, if wet, would only make her cold after she emerged. She pulled it off and tossed it on the snow. The cold water hit her ankles, then her legs, aching all the way to the bone. She gasped, but forced herself into the water, wondering all the while if the cold might do her in.

She could feel Kier's gaze even though he pretended to be busy with the beaver. As she walked briskly forward, the pond bottom felt like mush under her feet. An icy burn moved up her legs to her thighs, then to her belly. When the water was a little over waist deep, she began to swim. In less than a minute she swam the forty feet to Kier, who hauled her out atop the beaver lodge. The air actually felt warm. She crossed her arms across her chest.

He seemed to send his eyes everywhere but to her body. "Pull this to shore. Get dressed and wait for me. I'll be right behind," he said. He handed her the stick, which was still attached to the wire snare. She managed to take it in hand without moving her arms. Obviously, Kier had snared the beaver by driving the animal from its stick house. The noose was still tight around the beaver's neck.

''Okay,'' she said, jumping back in without further comment. "Oh God, oh God," she muttered through gritted teeth as she swam back.

The cold held her like a monster in its jaws, gripping and crushing all the way to her innards. It felt as though the chilly water were sucking the life from her, constricting her lungs, narrowing her vision. It frightened her. From her survival training she knew this kind of cold could incapacitate a person in minutes.

Towing the dead animal, she swam in a sidestroke, pulling with her left hand, while grasping the stick in her right. The beaver was heavy and made the going much slower, but she had only gone a few feet before she discovered that she could touch bottom. Getting a purchase with her toes, she pushed ahead quickly. At waist deep, she tried to run, pulling with all her strength. Stepping out onto the land gave Jessie one of the most triumphant feelings she could ever recall. The pleasure of it overcame the pain of the cold—something she would not have thought possible.

She pulled the dead creature to the water's edge and, still exhilarated by her success, watched Kier, who stood waist deep among leafy plants that looked a little like ivy atop the pond. Making herself ignore the cold, she reentered the water to join him. In a few seconds, she was at his side.

"What can I do?"

''Run your toe down the plant stock to the bottom. Dig in the mud with your toe and then follow a big root out 'til you come to a ball. Break it off with your . . . '' He grimaced in concentration as he spoke, and a white ball floated to the surface. "As I was saying . . . with your toe and you'll get one of these."

Doing as he said, she sent her foot down the stock and tried

to find the lateral root. But by now everything ached; her teeth chattered and she felt faint. Still she wanted to do it.

Squirreling her foot around in the mud, she tried to find a root. But it eluded her, while Kier popped up another, then another.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

She watched his lips move in seeming slow motion. Her world was swimming in glue. If only she could just get one of those damn tubers.

Abandoning the use of her foot, she ran her hand down the stem, determined to grab one. She went under. On the bottom her hand found a root ball, then a large strand. She yanked. Up she shot. There it was . . . a white tuber.

"Yes!"

"Come on."

Kier was walking toward the shore with his hands full. Pushing herself, she straggled to follow him, clambering with numb feet up onto the bank. She watched while he deposited the edible portion of the arrowhead plant in the snow. Before returning to the water, he glanced in her eyes, perhaps to determine how she was managing in the cold. Methodically, he bent over and began pulling bulrushes. She could feel him discreetly studying her and wondered if he was admiring her or merely concerned for her survival.

"Grab like this." He showed her to hold fast to the base of the young plants to get the root ball. They pulled up ten or so and moved to the cattails. Kier showed her some smaller plants, no more than a foot high.

"Like this," he said, grasping the cattail inside the two outer leaves and pulling. Then they worked in calf-deep water, side by side, harvesting cattails in earnest. Occasionally, she glanced his way, and when she did, she had a feeling that, even as he worked, he was totally aware of her. After they had half a dozen of the smaller plants, Kier began on the larger ones. But

when she tried to stand next to him she discovered that her legs felt like flimsy stilts under a drunken clown.

"You can help most by getting dressed so we can break the plants into the parts we need," he said.

Gratefully, she struggled onto the shore, her feet like dead flesh, and made her way to the backpack. Fumbling through Kier's clothing, rope, ammunition, and hand grenades, she found her clothes. As she pulled out her things and set them on the pack, she looked for something to dry herself.

"Use my shirt," Kier called out.

Turning away from him, standing as near the tree as possible, she shucked the loincloth and toweled herself vigorously.

On the way back to the cabin, hauling the food, Jessie began to feel a chink in her armor. Although she couldn't put her finger on what had changed, there was something about the shared adventure in the pond, the toughness of it, maybe the acceptance of his challenge, that bound them. Whatever—she was developing hope. It was a startling admission, but Jessie had grown weary of denying it. And this hope was a damnably dangerous thing.

A man with a handsome face is good for a summer,

a man with a sharp eye and strong bow is good for many winters.

—Tilok proverb

S
tretching in the heat of the wood stove, Jessie decided that nothing had ever felt so good. Both candles on the table were burning. One lantern glowed and a little natural light shone through the windows. The sounds of the boiling water and crackling fire, the smells of cooking meat—these things charmed the senses. Cattail sprouts and two kinds of tubers steamed over a saucepan while the beaver meat sizzled in its own fat. At one end of the cabin all of their clothing but what they wore hung from a line strung wall to wall. Kier, shirtless and wearing almost-dry jockey shorts, tended the food as Jessie, clad tentlike in his T-shirt and her panties, stood close by.

She could have sat or leaned against the wall. It wasn't necessary for her to be near him. Of course, she was also close to the food. The newest shoots from the cattails, now six months old, could still be eaten raw, and she had already eaten quite a few.

Sweat glistened in the hollow at the base of Kier's throat. She noticed it, and the bulk of his arms. Although his arms were long and a little bit lanky, they were the size of a thin man's thighs. Veins in his flesh stood out just like those on hefty athletes. His chest was massive and hairless, smooth.

She could feel the heat of him. When his eyes caught hers, she had a great urge to smile, as if they were sharing some secret joke. Whenever she looked up, his gaze was there, waiting in ambush. The eyes were deep brown, smiling. Aside from mirth, they looked full of desire. Maybe love. Again she looked away. She hated to think she was embarrassed.

"Prolonged eye contact is a form of boundary testing," she said in as detached a tone as she could muster.

When next she looked, he was concentrating on the food, no longer staring. As he pressed the meat with a fork, she studied his face, looking to see if there was any hint of his emotions. She could read nothing until he glanced her way with a little smile.

"What?" she asked.

"Are my eyes such a force?"

For a moment, her gaze followed her hand as it reached for a cattail sprig, then returned to his.

"It's your desire."

Kier turned from the frying pan, inches from her, looking down into her face. The warmth of him washed over her as she tried to decide . . . what? She reached out with her hand, even as things tumbled in her mind. Her hand hovered over his chest, waiting. It was a perfect parody of her indecision.

"You're right. I'm sorry. I was flirting," he said, breaking the spell. "It's an unnatural situation. We're both tired."

He was right. People in harrowing circumstances felt compelled toward one another for strange reasons. She and Kier would never work. Looking at him now, he seemed relaxed. The tension had departed, leaving only the cooking smells and the comfort of the fire. Yet something inside her wouldn't let her leave it alone.

"Do you think that some hurts are so big we never really get over them?"

"I don't know. A lot of times I think that sort of thinking is just an excuse."

''Did you ever think about the downside of love?''

"What's that? Loss of freedom?"

"No. The fact that it ends. Either in life or in death." He looked perplexed. "You don't have the faintest idea what I'm getting at, do you?"

"Afraid I don't."

"Do you think you ever just decided to go it alone because the risk of it all ending was too great? I mean when you were a little kid. When your dad died. When your first wife left you. Did you ever say to yourself: 'Kier will take care of himself. Kier doesn't need anybody else'?"

"Everybody needs to take care of himself. But I think I understand what you mean."

"Your first wife left you."

"Well, it was complicated."

"Don't complicate it, Kier. You taught at the university together, Claudie told me."

"Yes."

"You wanted to come to the mountains so you both moved here."

"Yes."

"She left."

"Okay. She left."

"So this stir-the-oatmeal kind of love that you're longing for—how risky is that?"

"I've heard the old saw about afraid to fall in love. I don't think that's me."

"God no. Kier couldn't be afraid of anything. So let's not talk about fear. I want to know what you did with all the pain."

Kier shook his head with a half-smile.

"I felt the pain," he said, looking irritated.

"Which caused you more pain, your father's dying or your mother's need to prove that her son could be somebody even without a father?"

"Where do you get all this?"

"You forget. You've spilled your guts to my brother-in-law, and we both know that Claudie owns him. I put it all together."

"So you're a shrink as well as a cop?"

"I'm a disillusioned woman, Kier. Maybe numb from the pain myself."

He put his hand to her face for just a moment, then shook his head. "I guess I don't like depending on other people."

"What if we changed the word to 'trust'? What if we said you don't like the feeling of needing to trust someone?

''When you were at that university, with your wife, where she was the hotshot, where she knew everybody, came from a prominent family, knew her way around, how did that feel? Did you maybe worry just a little bit about what if she cut you loose?''

"I think I was confident of her loyalty."

''So when you moved back to your turf, where you knew everybody, where you were the hotshot, where you were in control, did that feel different? Did you really need to trust her back here?''

"Any of us feels insecure if we're out of our element."

"That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you not being able to love somebody when it takes a lot of trust. Actually, I think I'm talking about you not being able to love somebody."

"I can love Willow. Are you questioning that?"

"Love can never be built on a lie. Until you tell her what

you have in mind for love—this passionless caring sort of thing that you call 'stir the oatmeal'—then you can't love her."

"Well, no one can fault you for not speaking your mind." He gave her a little smile.

''No, I speak my mind well. Go ahead and change the subject. I know you're dying to.''

"Remember I was going to tell you what I read, something I figured out."

"Yes," she said.

"It's something that I only barely understand. I think I have an idea of how, at least in the early stages of their research, they created the God Model that enabled them to figure out gene function. They call it DNA chip technology."

"I remember reading something totally unintelligible about that."

"I think I understand the basics of how it works," he said. "Are you ready for more biology?"

"As long as there's no lab."

"Just the theory."

Kier began putting the food on the table as he talked.

"In each cell is a little factory that produces one or more types of protein. Instructions to the factory regarding what kind of protein come from the messenger molecule RNA."

She dished up the beaver tail, trying to cut a sizable hunk for herself. But her mind was mostly occupied with Kier's explanation and didn't focus on the fact that she was using an ordinary butter knife.

"Wait, wait. Let me make sure I've got this. When a cell wants to send a message to make some particular protein, it sends out RNA."

"Right. Let's use this," he said, pulling out a sharper knife.

"This RNA is unique to that particular gene."

"That's right. The RNA is just a mirror image of the DNA that makes up the gene."

"Beavers are tough guys," she said.

"They are." They both took a few bites, saying nothing. Then Kier began again with his mouth full, obviously intent on his thought.

"So at a given moment in time if you collect the RNA that a cell is giving off, then you will have a fingerprint of both the involved DNA and, if you know enough about the process, the protein that is being created. Another way of saying it is that you will know which gene is activated."

They both ate ravenously. Kier stopped talking to take a few more bites.

"The quantity and type of RNA that is given off by various cells may change as circumstances change. Such changes could include stress, disease, hormonal surge, tough beaver tail, passionate sex. . . . The patterns of the proteins made by those cells change as the body sends signals to deal with the new situation."

"So the trick is to discover which genes are sending out RNA in response to the condition under study," she said.

Kier continued chewing. "Exactly."

"And this DNA chip measures it."

"Sort of. To create a DNA chip, droplets of DNA from different genes are put on a chip. They can put thousands of droplets on each chip. When Tillman's researchers wanted to know what RNA was produced under a given bodily condition, they could extract RNA from the cells of whatever living tissue was affected and expose it to the chip. By seeing which DNA droplet matched the RNA, the researcher could tell which gene was activated as a result of the illness or condition under study.''

"I follow that. You know in advance which DNA is in each droplet. The chip detects which droplet the RNA matches, and then you know which gene it came from."

"That's right. Then by studying a person who has recently been infected with a disease, for example, they can learn through the RNA from various organ samples which genes are involved in fighting the disease, and where relevant, which are involved in propagating the disease."

"So this would help them understand disease processes."

"Right," he said. "Causes, cures, the works. But to do this efficiently, you would need human subjects. And you would need a sample of every disease you wanted to study. So it becomes clearer why all the diseases. But if they were, for example, using Tiloks, we would at the very least have a bunch of sick Tiloks. And for what I'm talking about, you'd be regularly punching holes in their bodies to get tissue samples from organs so it wouldn't be a secret."

"So they're not doing that on the Tilok tribe. You're thinking if the reference in this RA-4TVM study was to human infants, then they were cloning people and using the clones for medical research."

"That's right. First they used this chip technology on the same cloned infants. Later they just took organ samples and ran the RNA through the computer. And that's how they got light-years ahead of the rest of the world's scientists."

"So they sacrificed babies to make progress," Jessie said.

"It seems too outlandish to be possible. But I believe it, even if I can't prove it."

When they finished eating, they lay exhausted on the bed. Both fell instantly unconscious.

It happened in the middle of the night, after they had been sleeping for hours. Nothing that he could recall had awakened him, but he opened his eyes with a start. A creaking sound disturbed the still cabin. He couldn't tell its source. For no discernible reason he became very uneasy.

"We've got to leave right now."

He was shaking her awake. He turned on a small light, grateful that he had covered the windows. Her mouth opened, probably to ask why.

"Get dressed. I'll throw the food in the pack and get some other things."

"What is it?" she asked, already pulling on her jeans.

"No time to figure it out." He had his pants on, then his outer shirt, leaving his T-shirt for her. They struggled into the camouflage outerwear. Kier began cramming more canteens, professional mountain-climbing gear, and snare material into the pack, all of which he had hauled from a trapdoor in the floor.

"Let's go." Five minutes had passed since it first hit him. Too long. "Out the back window."

He helped her through the window and led her straight away from the cabin into the forest so that someone watching the front would detect nothing. Once again, however, they left a trail in the snow. After two hundred yards, they circled, coming back to the creek that they had followed down to the cabin. Remaining in the creek so that they would leave no tracks they headed back uphill toward the caverns.

"Where in the hell are we going?"

"Hide in the caves."

"Why not follow the creek down? Your whole tribe could be—"

"If they figured out the creek, they'll be waiting below."

"But how do we know—"

"We don't know anything," he cut in. "It just didn't feel right."

As if in response, an explosion rocked the mountainside behind them, reverberating in the fog. M-16 automatic-weapon fire rang out.

"I'd say they just destroyed my friends' new cabin. With luck we have a minute or two before they start on our track."

Kier trotted up the creek now, hoping that Jessie could keep up.

It made no sense, he told himself. They had gone a couple of miles underground. Tracking should have been impossible. Dogs couldn't follow their bodies coated in charcoal and pine scent, even assuming they brought bloodhounds this far into the mountains. Tillman probably was not fooled by the avalanche, lost no time, and had a man or two follow each creek down the mountain. If so, he had an uncanny ability to predict Kier's methods.