Necessary Evil (9 page)

Now he relived the feeling. His breaths grew deeper and there was tightness inside him. He felt the shame. His mother's raw determination still felt like a dead weight crushing his soul. This stew of old emotions had brought him to a place where he could not taste certain of life's flavors. He could not, it seemed, taste the flavor of love or savor it with another. What he didn't know was why.

Jessie had heard nothing during the several minutes since Kier had left. Then she heard a single shot. As Kier had suggested, she put Miller in the lead, with his hands cuffed behind, and backtracked on Miller's trail. Shortly they heard more shooting.

"Tonto's a bullet-ridden carcass," Miller said.

"Shut up," she said, wondering if he was right and feeling a lot more than she expected. They traveled easterly, then angled to the north, heading away from Claudie's and the Volvo, until they came to the creek. Finally, leaving Miller's track, they turned south down the creek. Jessie understood Kier's logic. New tracks that took a different direction heading off toward the Donahues' would need explaining.

Walking in the water, she discovered a torture more exquisite than any she had known—save one. The pain was bluer than the dead blue of a particular glacial lake that would forever stand in her memory. The sensation spreading in her feet was like the lifeless cold of that pristine water: A horrible, bone-deep ache that would, she knew, eventually cut her feet from her body. She had thought they would simply go numb; well, they did, but only after pain like a twisted gut. Kier's strategies and this wilderness seemed to demand suffering.

At first, as she and Miller walked, Jessie thought of survival, of spotting the next paramilitary trooper before he spotted her.

After a time, though, as the sounds of the battle receded and the frothy air and dense forest closed in around them, her mind departed the macabre of Wintoon Mountain for the ordinary macabre of her office, of her nightmare with Frank. Tears came to her eyes and she cursed herself. How, when she was barely alive, when she had come here to this godforsaken brush patch at the other end of the United States to escape—with this place turning into a war zone, people maybe dying—could she think about Frank and his sick friends?

She wasn't going to do it. The one thing that had to remain hers was her mind.

As she began to wonder whether Kier were dead or alive, something crashed in the distance, the woods resounding with numerous explosions and the staccato of automatic weapons. More firepower than she would have thought possible was unleashed in the next minute. She felt unusually alone.

Using a small stick between fingers that still clenched a grenade, Kier cleared a hole at the far edge of the log. It seemed from the conversation that at least two men had remained with Crawford. They had walked a little way up the hill now, by the sound of their receding voices. Kier listened as best he could. After a time, he heard nothing. Still, they could be watching. It would be more dangerous to come out slowly.

With a quick thrust of his elbows, Kier cleared away the snow, rising in silence, and bursting from the hollow.
Go ahead, think about the guys who just tried to kill you.
His mind prepared itself for slaughter. Hands ready to rise from his sides, biceps straining, and pectorals tight with anticipation, his breath rushing from his throat—at the last instant he held the grenade handles tight. He didn't throw. There was no one within sight, though Kier could now hear someone talking nearby.

They had taken the bait. The leader hadn't arrived. The men were assuming Crawford was a safely dead enemy and Miller was one of his victims.

Kier slithered away on his belly.

The fire that succors a family will burn the enemy.

—Tilok proverb

J
ack Horatio Tillman walked to the crashed jet with long, unflagging strides. He planned to work his way methodically along the track until arriving at the thicket where the men had found Crawford. They had come up with a neat little theory that had Crawford as a turncoat who stole the journals.

After arriving at the two unconscious soldiers, it took Tillman only a minute or two to determine that his men had not carefully read the signs. He managed to slap Jones awake; Jenkins was still out cold. His men had run past with barely a sideward glance, more interested in catching the attacker and obtaining the possible reward. Whoever took out Jones and Jenkins had a weak stomach. They had gone to great pains not to kill. It wouldn't be Crawford.

Tillman himself hunted big game when not occupied by the running of his pharmaceutical and medical research businesses.

If it was feasible, he would gladly run his empire from a canvas tent in the bush.

Tillman's father had inherited money. Not so much that he couldn't spend it all, or drink it all, but enough that it enabled him to hunt most of his life. For as far back as Jack Tillman could remember, when his father wasn't drinking, he was hunting. He had endured his father's drunken beatings and reveled in his hunting expeditions. The only thing they had done well together was track and kill for sport.

The track in front of him now—this so-called Crawford's track—was made by an athletic male much stronger in the legs than Crawford. Whoever it was had backtracked so perfectly, so rapidly, that his high-step rivaled that of a Tennessee Walking horse. Crawford could not have maintained this gait for a dozen paces without kicking snow.

The mystery man had kicked no snow. To lay this track was close to impossible. Carefully, Tillman pulled the loose snow out of a footprint until he reached the packed ice crystals beneath. The foot had been held much straighter than that of a duck-walking soldier. Crawford couldn't have left an imprint like this one. As the foot had landed, it hit the ball as much as the heel. Only a stalker moved this way naturally. The man who left this track, even while fleeing, was trying hard to confuse his men.

The runner was large and long legged, his pace steady and purposeful, not panicked. Each stride was approximately the same length. There was little deviation in the direction of travel. The person knew this terrain. Most obvious of all, the foot was much too large to be Crawford's. It was barely possible that it was Miller's. But if it were Miller, Tillman knew he had vastly underrated him.

A chill unrelated to the cold passed through Tillman. Not fear, he thought, but acute anticipation. His face burned with anger at the stupidity of his men. Doyle was out here, which frustrated him more. Of all his men, Tillman had begun to suspect that the new man, Doyle, was the kind he could count on. But during all the radio talk, Doyle had been strangely silent.

Things were going badly, badly enough that Jack Tillman could be prosecuted for serious crimes. But he didn't intend to be a candidate for capital punishment.

In his forty-eight years nothing had ever threatened Jack Tillman quite like this. The likelihood that the jet would crash at the drop site was infinitesimal, and yet it had happened. No doubt his men seriously underestimated Marty Rawlins and his four cronies. Most likely a fight had erupted when the scientists were told about the drop.

But even with that bit of bad luck, what were the odds that one of his own men turned or, even more unlikely, that combat-ready strangers had meddled with the crash site? Tillman had obtained background on all the residents near the drop site. Meticulous people had done the research. Tillman knew about the Tilok vet, Kier Wintripp, an outdoorsman who had been written up in magazines.

His home was in Johnson City and his summer cabin was up the valley from the Donahues' ranch. He had led a manhunt for five militia-types that had raped and killed two Indian girls. The vet had tracked ahead of the sheriff's group. According to the story, he had told the authorities the wanted men had ambushed him. There was a firefight. The vet carried a lever action 30/30 while the men he hunted had submachine guns and other military hardware. All five of the men were dead by the time the sheriff arrived. The Indian didn't have a scratch. As a combat-hardened survivalist, this man would have the ability to kill, even if he lacked the stomach for it.

Tillman already knew a great deal about Kier Wintripp. And he had more information available—much, much more. He knew the very stuff of which the man was made and considered him the only immediate resident who was potentially dangerous. On the reservation, twenty miles distant, other Tiloks might pose a threat, but fortunately, several mountain ridges divided the Donahue ranch from the Tilok tribal lands.

Until now people and circumstances had always behaved more predictably than the wild animals Tillman hunted. His pharmaceutical firms succeeded because he understood ordinary people's fear of disease as well as the scientists who sought to conquer this fear through the power of healing.

Tillman had become an industry giant almost overnight because he also knew how to turn other people's failures to his advantage. His first venture was a dying company that had bet all its stockholders' money on a drug that failed its first major double-blind study. It was supposed to perform near miracles on the healing of wounds. In fact it only made the wounds less painful, which, when discovered, caused the stock to plummet.

Tillman talked his way into the company and was elected president mainly because he was the only interested and remotely qualified candidate. But he knew that the drug's analgesic properties could be enhanced to make surgical wounds less painful. By adding other compounds to the cream, company scientists made a new topical pain killer used on everything from wounds to babies' gums. Spectacular sales enabled Tillman to parlay profits from the pain remedy into a sophisticated laboratory with scientists he could use for more substantial projects. Research, Tillman knew, was made ridiculously slow by absurd rules and artificial constraints. Tillman undertook to solve the problems with the bureaucracy and succeeded again.

With the money came time to think, to devote himself to issues of global importance. Disease, it seemed to Tillman, was often associated with dysfunctional lifestyles. Poverty and the idle hand from which it stemmed created a host of maladies. Gluttony was tributary to a different set of diseases. Careless sexual habits spawned numerous others. It seemed that the flaws of mankind nurtured disease. The scourge of disease was nature's discipline.

Society needed a more advanced approach to disease than merely curing it, for to cure all disease was to take away nature's ability to chastise, which in turn slowed the process of evolution by promoting the dysfunctional. Disease was a thing to be used. Mankind could advance only by curing selected people and certain plagues.

Controlling disease, then, was essential to enhancing its function. The ability to cure was just a single component in such control (and not unhappily, a source of great wealth). The creation of convenient disease and its selective use, the natural corollary to cure, while profitable, would be appreciated only by a much more advanced culture.

Tillman saw himself as a man ahead of his time. His theories could not be broadly disseminated in his lifetime, for he would always be mortal, unable to escape the bonds of aging. No cure for aging was close enough to save him. He could only prolong his life. The ticking clock required that he conduct progressive research, the key to which had always been keeping each chief scientist at the various Tillrnan laboratories isolated from the work of the others. It was usually desirable to convince each team leader that he was the only one bending the rules, the only one in on the real secret, and the only one sharing in the big money. Only two pseudo-scientists on the business side knew nearly everything. These men Tillman trusted implicitly.

Then came Marty Rawlins—a genius whose abilities crossed many disciplines and who made brilliant technical decisions in every research program that he touched. A man like Marty could do far more if he knew the whole, and so the seduction of progress had led Tillman to deviate from his usual operating plan.

Ultimately, he let Marty and his team synthesize and direct DNA research on a wide-ranging basis, coordinating the work of three separate laboratories and many subgroups within those laboratories. By the time Tillman realized how much Marty had figured out and how pettily squeamish he was, it was too late.

Viewed in isolation from the circumstances, Marty Rawlins's death shamed Tillman, and Tillman regretted it deeply. He took no joy in killing good men, but this was discipline and necessity. This was order. And, in a sad way, progress.

Tillman took his own introspection as clear evidence that he was not a sociopath. Rather, he had an uncommonly large vision and a sense of the future that other men lacked. He was becoming something unique and possessed a grand tool for the good of mankind. He knew he was not perfect and that some of his decisions might ultimately be found wanting by wiser men who would come after him. But these men would realize that cutting through modern man's emotional prejudices could only be accomplished by violating sensibilities pinnacled on society's metaphysical vanities—those spiritual grand illusions that impeded advancement.

At the giant log, Tillman asked to see the document taken from Crawford's boot. Doyle handed it to him. It was as he feared. Rawlins had made mention of a Volume Six, titled "Adult Cloning, Gene Mobilization and DNA Chips," with various damning subheadings that included "DNA Chip Gene Expression by Disease Category." Worse, the section subheadings bore the designation: "Adult DNA Cloning," and under that were I.D. numbers. Rawlins had gone insane.

"Look on the other side of the log, gentlemen," Tillman said to Diggs and Doyle.

Diggs, a small wiry man with chin whiskers, swallowed audibly. "I swear those tracks weren't there before."

"I just got here a couple minutes ago." Doyle pointed into the woods. "I was up that way, trying to sort things out."

As Tillman pondered the wisdom of shooting both men in the head, he studied the neat red sideburns that Doyle kept perfectly shaped. He felt the butt of his revolver, even as he realized that he was telegraphing his thoughts. The quiet concern in Doyle's eyes confirmed it. He dropped his hand from the pistol.

"He tricked you." Tillman spoke in deadly, quiet tones. "He waited until you relaxed before he came out. He carried Crawford's body, knowing that you would focus your small minds on the fact that there was only one set of tracks."

Rage came to Tillman as naturally as tides to the sea. Now these men knew something of the cloning and DNA work. And that something was too much.

"I recall reading of an Indian tracker with a summer home in this valley. It was in the materials we were given to review. Whoever we're chasing didn't want to kill," Doyle said.

Tillman could not help but be impressed, but he said nothing. He needed to create the hard edge of hatred in his troops. He needed to define the enemy. Talking wouldn't do it. Old tracks in the snow wouldn't do it. What he was thinking would be a hard thing, but it was rational.

"Gentlemen," he told Diggs and Doyle, "I want to show you something. I need you to put these on."

As nonchalantly as a drunk fondles a whiskey glass, he tossed them each a pair of handcuffs. He studied Doyle's clean-shaven face. There was professionalism even in the way he stood.

"Just on the right wrist please."

Diggs looked at Doyle nervously. Doyle betrayed no emotion. Neither moved, each holding his silver-gray manacle like spoiled food.

"Gentlemen?"

Diggs shuffled his feet, casting his eyes downward. Neither man dropped his M-16. Tillman hated what he was about to do with Doyle.

"Indulge me, gentlemen." Tillman spoke in good-natured tones, but with condescension, as if to schoolchildren.

Diggs put on his cuff.

"Now we're going to test your athletic prowess," Tillman said, nodding to Diggs. "I guess Captain Doyle no longer works in our little army."

"Wait a minute," Doyle said, moving to snap on his handcuff. The loyalty caused Tillman a stab of pain.

"Step over here."

Doyle did as he was told and placed his back against a fir maybe eight inches in diameter. Tillman cuffed his hands over his head so that they were locked behind the tree.

''Well, do you want your job, or not?'' Tillman said to Diggs, who, pursuant to Tillman's nod, stood against the same tree with his back to Doyle. Both were soon secured, with their guns on the ground and their hands over their heads.

Tillman popped open a stiletto with a slender blade.

Doyle cocked his head, eying the knife, but said nothing.

"We did the best we could." Diggs looked as though he might cry. "Please don't."

Doyle remained silent.

"Don't what?" Tillman asked. "Don't what?"

"Don't hurt me." Diggs struggled against the cuffs.

"Oh, this won't hurt." Tillman allowed the contempt he felt for Diggs to rise inside him like a screaming demon.

"Open your mouth. I want to see your tonsils."

"What?"

"Just do it."

Like a careful dentist Tillman positioned Diggs's open mouth, then took the knife from behind his back and, quick as a mantis tongue, punctured the side of the man's throat. Blood welled up in the mouth. He had hit the carotid artery. Tillman pushed up on the chin firmly with his left hand while Diggs choked on his own blood.