Necessary Evil (26 page)

Tell an enemy a lie he wants to believe, not the Lie you want him to believe.

—Tilok proverb

E
ither the dead men or their missing voices alerted Tillman's men. As Kier and Jessie slipped into the cavern, M-16 rounds poured through the entrance. Dozens of bullets smacked the stone with explosive cracks as the fugitives collapsed to the side, exhausted. Kier held one of the new radios, waiting for the parley he knew would follow. It didn't take long.

"Listen up there, Mr. Kier." It was Tillman. "Maybe we can make a deal."

He had an edge to his voice that was starting to sound like nerves.

"Tell me about the lab books," said Kier.

Silence for a moment.

"Why don't you come down and tell me? You've been reading them. You come down, we'll talk."

"Do we seem that stupid?"

"You're stuck in a goddamn hole. No way out that we can't watch."

Kier laughed. "You'll have to do better than that."

"Punch your birth date into the radio, then press star." Kier did as he was told, wondering how Tillman knew when he was born.

"Now it's just you and me. If we can make a deal, you can live."

"Quit wasting time. Tell me why I should make a deal."

"We've got your whole family in the palm of our hand— your mother, sisters, everybody. This is the big leagues. Mess with me, they die."

"Go on." Kier's voice remained flat, but he felt his heart in his throat.

"You give us our stuff, we give you your tribe. We'll give you the medicine they need to survive. You sign some documents admitting this was a big mistake. We sign documents admitting everything you did was in self-defense. You sign a confidentiality agreement with the government. Big misunderstanding. Everybody goes home."

Jessie grabbed the radio. "How the hell can the government be in on this?"

"Early on they sponsored some of the research. Now they don't want anything to do with it."

"The government never condoned experimenting on people. Not in this day and age."

"What? Jesus, you are a virgin, aren't you?"

"Why don't you give us just one name?"

"Why don't you get a life?"

"May I?" Kier said to Jessie. She handed him back the radio. "We know you've cloned people. You experiment on the infants."

''Mr. Kier, you
have
been reading.''

"You developed a means of reading the human genome. Then you wanted to learn gene function so you started on a computer model that would correlate particular genes to particular proteins. You made clones so you could control variables like disease and then watch which genes were implicated. You developed a chip technology for use with the clones, but you don't need it anymore. You've got yourself the best computer model in the world. But to do it, you had to experiment on cloned people and commit various other crimes."

"Sounds pretty fantastic to me. Nobody's going to believe you without evidence."

''You found a person denominated 1220, who seemed to have some interesting immunity. I believe it affected susceptibility to a virus dubbed RA-4TVM. One of your little sidelines was building viruses. It was a natural because you could read and manipulate DNA and RNA. RA-4TVM was your accident. And with all your knowledge I haven't figured how you screwed up or if mother nature bit you in the ass or what. Anyway, you came up with a live-virus vaccine for RA-4TVM. You also developed an antivirus that kills cells infected by RA-4TVM. Together AVCD-4 and the nif-plus deleted RA-4TV mutation vaccine can prevent and cure RA-4TVM. So far so good?"

"You haven't told me what RA-4TVM is."

Kier hesitated, his mind spinning. He didn't know. Not even a clue.

"I think it's something you made. Probably you were trying to build a vector and it ran amok. Maybe mutated. Maybe combined with inert DNA from long extinct retroviruses that have become part of our genetic makeup. At any rate, you were convinced it was a great little delivery wagon and rushed its development. Something went wrong. A surprise. Why don't you tell me?"

"You deal with us and maybe we will."

''But if you can manipulate genes, you can cure viruses. I figure that before you could figure a way to explain how you developed cures, you had to understand how the cure virus would behave in a population. Somehow, some way you made guinea pigs of my tribe."

"God, what an imagination. But you're just daydreaming, Dr. Kier. It's an interesting fantasy. The fact is your people have a naturally occurring but as yet undiscovered virus. I happen to have the cure. We may have helped some couples with fertility problems, but that's it."

"We're not going to get anywhere if you feed me your trumped-up stories."

"I know a hell of a lot about you, Kier. I've been studying your clones. Fine boys. Maybe you'd like to meet them."

Kier was stunned, unable to think properly.

"The number 042863 588561289 that was on the various tables in Volume Six. I thought maybe you'd recognize it."

Then Kier saw it. It was his birthdate and social security number. He hadn't looked at those numbers at all because he had never possessed Volume Six.

"Why me? Why would you clone me?"

"Well, you among others. I had to clone somebody and you've got excellent genes. Half-breeds often do. Everything from your propensity to muscle, straight teeth, and facile brain, Kier. It's a compliment."

"How many are there?"

"You cooperate and I'll tell you."

"What are you doing with them?"

"Yours or other people's?"

"Mine."

"Your offspring. They're safe." Tillman lowered his voice to a soothing tone. "Kier, you can save them and your tribe if we make a deal. But you're fantasizing about a lot of things. Nothing wrong with making a baby. People do it every day. You've got some odd ideas about what we're doing. But I can straighten out the misunderstanding."

Kier felt disoriented, but he knew he had to maintain absolute control. "You're scuffing your hind legs a bit much—like a dog trying to cover his scat."

''We seem to have a chicken and egg problem here. If you're on board, we can tell you things. If you're not, naturally we'd rather keep our own counsel. I'm afraid you'll just have to trust us a little. You give me back what is mine. Then you get the young Kiers. You get your tribe safe from an unfortunate and naturally occurring infection. Those mink farms are a real hazard. I can tell you one thing. A lot of your people are gonna die if we don't make a deal."

"Call your men off, go back down in the valley. Then we'll talk about getting you your fifth and sixth book." Kier was trying to decide exactly how to run his bluff.

"If I pull back and you don't show up for the powwow, you're going to piss me off."

"You're not going to make a deal with this maniac?" Jessie whispered fiercely.

Kier patted her arm in reply, and shook his head.

"You go back to the Donahues' farm." Kier stood with the radio. ''Wait with your radio on. I'll be there day after tomorrow at nine a.m."

"It doesn't take that long to walk out of these mountains."

"You'll forgive me if I don't trust you and take my time."

"You don't show, a lot of people are going to die." Tillman signed off.

She put her hand on his arm. For once there was no anger in her eyes.

"I am at a loss for words," she said.

He had never felt so bewildered. Obviously Tillman wanted to throw him off balance, and it had worked. The table of contents stuffed into Crawford's boot had a section titled "Adult Cloning Methodologies." It was now absolutely clear that it meant adult people, not adult monkeys. There had been numbers of four digits and each four-digit number was followed by a letter of the alphabet. Undoubtedly the four numbers were an abbreviation. Probably the first four numbers of the birth date. By running the numbers together with no breaks or slashes, it had not been obvious.

Perhaps Kier's number had appeared several times followed by an "a," a "b," and so forth. Or maybe it was only listed in Volume Six. He couldn't remember how many letters were opposite each number. Undoubtedly each letter was the designation for a child clone. He wondered who "1220" was.

"I know what you're thinking . . . my not having anything to say," she said.

Kier half smiled.

"Is it that funny?"

"Well, you're talking," he said.

"I know. I can't help it. It's so weird. So bizarre. Here you are with a whole bunch of little people who are identical to you. It would be like finding out you had a bunch of twin siblings." She paused and moved closer to him. "I'm sorry. I wish there was something I could do. How much like you do you suppose they'll be?"

She put her arm around him. He thought about how good it felt.

"God, they'll be a lot like you."

He put his arm around her and held her close.

"He really rang your bell, didn't he?"

Kier looked down into her eyes, seeing the trouble in them.

"I guess he rang my bell as much as yours," she continued. "I can barely handle one of you in this world. Now I find out I'm sharing the planet with several of you."

They sat, holding each other for a time. ''You know he never would have conceded what he did, if he wasn't completely desperate," she said.

Kier nodded. But, he could find neither energy nor consolation in that thought.

''Maybe they were expecting the plane to crash,'' she finally said.

"They had to be expecting something ugly. They were here in force. Tillman's guy told me the fiberglass pods were supposed to have been dropped."

"If you did want to deliver something secret to Wintoon County, why would you drop it from a jet? Why not just drive in on the county road?" she said. "Maybe the goal was some illusion. Maybe the point wasn't to deliver something to Wintoon County. Maybe the real point was to make something disappear."

It was precisely what he was thinking.

A young man will fight a bear, but a wise man will hang the camp meat in a tree.

—Tilok proverb

"
W
orm's Way? I don't like the sound of that," Jessie said. "Why not go back the way we came in—at Tree Cave?"

"It'll be okay."

"Exactly how small is it? How long is the tunnel?"

"Tight for maybe forty feet. But I can fit. For you, it'll be easy."

She stared at him.

"You aren't normal, Kier. You're not afraid of things that scare the piss out of most people. So when you say it's tight for forty feet, what about the rest?"

"You crawl for a hundred yards, then lie flat on your back for probably thirty yards. Then comes the tight part. Hopefully not much rock has fallen down. I haven't been through in a few years."

"Do the kids go there?"

"No."

"Why?"

Kier started to walk and decided to change the subject. There was no point in having her frightened out of her mind before they even arrived at the tunnel.

It took almost a half-day's hiking through the darkroom-black caverns until they stood before the telescoping rock passage that Kier called Worm's Way. They had used up two lights and were on their third, but they had several more lights from incapacitated or dead enemies.

Stooping to look, Jessie would have sworn the passage petered out just beyond the first bend sixty or seventy feet away.

"Can't be."

"It's an illusion," he replied.

Bending, she looked again.

"Once you get there it's not as tight as it looks. Around the corner it opens up a little."

"It's 140 yards to daylight?"

"About that, give or take."

At first it was easy to crawl, and although it got low at the bend, it did open some, just as Kier had said. They enjoyed three feet of clearance for the next thirty or forty feet around the bend, then almost had to drop on their bellies. At this point Jessie still had a couple of feet on either side, which helped control her claustrophobia.

Because they could not risk a light near the exit point, they had to feel their way from here. Kier could do little to make it easy for her. When they stopped for a moment now and then to take stock, he encouraged her by telling her how he admired her strength and her determination.

The air tasted stale and slightly bitter in her throat. She found herself breathing more deeply without knowing if it was from exertion or fear. A choking sensation began to overtake her. Diseases like hantavirus came to mind. It became easier to imagine the ceiling caving in, or becoming trapped, or dropping into some unknown shaft because they had taken a wrong turn.

"Talk to me," Kier called out as her chest heaved with choking.

"How much farther?"

"We're about halfway."

That pierced her like a knife. The earth was crushing in on her. She yearned to stretch her arms out at her sides, but couldn't. She inched like a caterpillar, but still felt her back rubbing against the rock above her. And up farther it would be tighter still. She couldn't imagine it. She couldn't imagine surviving it. The chill of the limestone under her fingers sent the lonely cold to her mind. She couldn't raise her forearms or hands more than a few inches above her head—a constant reminder that she was locked under a mountain of rock.

At the academy they had put her in a sensory-deprivation tank that they flooded with water in the darkness. The marines used it to deter the faint of heart. It had been disturbing, but as the sound of her heart had filled her ears, she told herself over and over: They won't kill you.

What could she tell herself here?

"I don't know if I can do this."

"Listen to me," he said. "Turn over on your back and close your eyes. You can be wherever you let your mind put you. Remember the bed in the cabin. Remember the stars."

In desperation she did as Kier said, barely able to roll in the confined space. She filled her mind with the way she'd felt under the night sky. When she had calmed herself again, she listened to his voice.

"We'll be there in minutes. Just minutes. Reach and grab the rock, then pull." She did it. "Pull," he said again and again, making a rhythm for her of reaching, pulling, and sliding.

The regularity of it was calming, breaking up the terrible pictures in her mind. She found herself breathing with every reach and every pull, enhancing the rhythm. Reach, breathe, pull, breathe.

They did not stop or rest again until they came to the tightest section.

"Now don't let your hands come back past the top of your head. Stretch yourself out. Think string bean."

At that she laughed quietly. Kier chuckled back. They started again. Now she could almost kiss the rock. Her knees could scarcely rise to dig in her heels. It was so tight she couldn't imagine Kier moving. At that moment her hands touched his feet. Oh God, no.

He was stuck. She could feel him struggling. Her heart jumped. Inside her head a small, imaginary Jessie cringed at things too horrible to contemplate. The feet ahead of her still weren't moving. There was only struggle. Too much breath rushed in and out to even ask. She couldn't bear the wrong answer.

Something in her mind started pounding.
Perhaps I'm coming undone.
She noticed her head moving wildly side to side as if a giant hand were making her say no. She wanted to scream, but didn't. Then a voice spoke in her head. Her voice. She was back under the stars. There was something tiny inside her that wanted to reach out to something huge, something infinite.

You need to be at peace inside the mountain,
she told herself, imagining herself rising up out of her body and passing into the stone. In a few moments, it no longer seemed so confining. The mountain was still above her, but it didn't contain her. She was part of it.

Then she saw the face of her late father. Before she had time to think what the tears meant Kier's voice cut through her consciousness. For a split second, she had thought it was the voice of her father.

"We're gonna make it."

The feet were gone. Calmer now, her mind urged her forward. In seconds the light of day replaced the utter blackness. A minute more of squirming and Kier pulled her hands into a wide-open world. The air tasted like her mother's fresh pillowcases. The little Jessie inside her head danced for joy.

It did surprise her that the men in white suits had disappeared like a bad dream. Kier speculated that Tillman would try to pick up their track in the morning after they had passed farther down the mountain. Tillman would want to feel in control. He would want to ensure that they kept the appointment. But he would be too shrewd to risk scaring them off by leaving men in place. Kier planned to leave no trail by following creeks, and once they got below the snow line, by sticking to rocky slopes and washes.

With the wind whipping her unprotected ears with enough velocity to make her jaw ache, the reptilian mist washing over her, Jessie needed all her faculties to step precisely where Kier did. To do this, she wore no hood or helmet over her head. When Kier insisted on some protection, she agreed to wear only the helmet. More than once (she supposed as a form of encouragement), he remarked that she had saved them on the ledge. Even so, one more freezing hike over dangerous ground on a hungry stomach meant misery on a scale she never cared to repeat.

She developed confidence in Kier's theory about Tillman's willingness to pull back only after they had traveled miles without incident. When they doubled back, there was no one following. Below the snow line now, Kier took them down then up and over a high ridge and down into a different drainage.

They walked beside a beautiful stream in the afternoon sun. To her amazement it made her forget her weariness and her hunger.

"The whisperings of the mountain are like laughter—nourishment for the soul, Grandfather says."

Jessie's senses began to catch the special feeling of this wild place. They traveled a river trail worn smooth in the verdigris granite. Around them echoed the many sounds of moving water: its murmurs, its bright tones like loose change, its pelting drumbeat, and in the distance, its cavalcade roar.

She felt the intrigue of the forest for the first time. Angled shafts of sun met the trees' hefty, gnarled old arms ending in hands of feathery, green-needled leaves. The chilly breath of the woodland on a winter afternoon left this world of light and shadow tinted with the sparkling wet of fresh rain.

On one side of them, there was a six-foot drop to rushing water; on the other, the firs grew thick, overhanging the ancient pathway.

"Watch your step." He offered a hand as if she were a porcelain princess.

She smiled, feeling foolish for enjoying the man's peculiar chivalry when they had such a sobering obligation.

"Moccasins, mules, and hard heels have worn these trails in the rock for hundreds of years," Kier half whispered, catching her eye, making it hard for her to concentrate on the history.

She wanted to stop and talk. Actually she wanted to be close to him, but the fear of being ambushed and the need to press on kept them going.

Running over bedrock ledges into shimmering pools in a series of cascades, the river became a foaming roar in this part of the canyon—known as Spirit Gate. At the end of the cascades was a pool, surrounded by lichen and moss-covered rock, and ringed with old-growth fir, hemlock, and cedar. Jessie tilted back her head, awestruck by the timeless immensity of it all.

They stood on a gray-white rock beyond the reach of the spray from the last cascade, where a small clear pool mirrored the mountain. They stopped for a moment to drink.

Kier pointed at tracks in the mud. "Those are otter," he explained. He pointed farther away to the water's edge. "Those are coon."

All around the soft dirt told the story of the passing little feet.

"I'm chilled." She moved against him, feeling slightly bold. She let her gaze wander across the mountain. One lone fir grew crooked, high up, out of what seemed to be a smooth rock face. Wanting Kier's touch, Jessie felt a kinship to the solitary tree.

After a time, a gentle hand rested on her near shoulder.

"This hasn't changed for thousands of years, I suppose," she said, pulling his arm around her and leaning into his ribs.

"What hasn't changed, the scenery or the other?" he said.

"Well, both, but I guess at the moment I'm thinking more of the other."

The creek took them to the bottom of Mill Valley to the Wintoon River, but at a point far above the Donahues' or Kier's cabin. Quickly they darted across the Mill Valley Road, over a still-snowy ridge, and down into an area where they had not yet been—a place Tillman was unlikely to search for them.

At the far side of the ridge, Kier stopped and listened. They were in a dense forest.

"There's a cabin that's mostly hidden in the trees. We can approach it without being seen."

The owner was known as Indian Lady Margaret, Kier told Jessie, as they neared the dwelling. Her husband had been a successful fisherman, both on the river and in the ocean. Full of youthful energy at seventy, Indian Lady Margaret still kept the summer place that she and her husband had long ago built on the side of the mountain. It sat far away from any public road at the end of a jeep track in a tiny, natural meadow left to the sun by the conifer forest. As they approached the back of the cabin, Jessie could see that its walls were built entirely of stone; from the outside it appeared solidly enticing.

All one room, it was nevertheless a good deal larger than the now-destroyed honeymoon cabin. Kier knew right where to find the key and promised that its owner would heartily approve of their use of the place. In minutes, they had a fire going in the stove. Among the luxuries of this cabin was a feather bed and running water that flowed by gravity from a spring higher on the mountain. It took only a little doing to prepare their leftover food. Kier said Margaret wouldn't mind if they borrowed a canned ham that Jessie favored over reheated beaver tail.

For light they had kerosene lanterns. Not as bright as a normal array of electric bulbs, the lanterns bathed the cabin in a soft yellow glow. The rock walls would have been positively chic in a downtown New York restaurant—here they made good protection. The furniture consisted of a rocker with layers of blanket tacked on for padding, an old but serviceable sofa flanked by two handmade tables, and a five-board kitchen table with four rustic chairs.

Kier and Jessie still had enough energy left to speculate during dinner about the airplane and their adversary's machinations.

After dinner, Kier rigged sheets around a large bathtub in the corner. Using water that had been heating since before dinner, he made her a shallow bath. Almost falling asleep, he threatened to assist her in order to get his turn. Although they both talked of sleep with real eagerness, they were running on adrenaline and could not turn their drowsiness into the will to crawl in bed. Giving up on sleep for the moment, they sat down for a dessert of canned peaches.

"How the hell did he get a piece of you to clone?" she asked.

''I had my jaw wired together at the clinic. It was three years ago. They put me to sleep. They could have done anything."