Germ Page 10

  Karl straightened and returned the gesture. Their eyes locked and the boy whispered, “Heil… Father.” He hungrily scanned his father’s strong features. The man smiled softly and lowered his arm. Josef snapped his head at the warship, and Karl boarded.

  From the bridge atop the conning tower, he watched the wharf shrink with distance. He had turned and was about to climb into the sub when a single sharp crack of pistol fire startled him. When he jumped back to the rail, he saw all the men who’d stayed behind: his father, the soldiers, and the scientist-chaperones. They were huddled on the dock, faces turned down looking at a body. One of them leaned over and picked something up. He held it to his head, a shot rang out, and he fell. Another man stepped forward, picked up the gun, and repeated the process.

  Karl watched his father stoop down, stand up, and stick the barrel of the gun into his mouth. His arm appeared to be shaking, but at that distance, Karl couldn’t be sure. He was facing the harbor, seemingly watching the U-boat.

  Does he see me? Karl wondered.

  For a moment, Karl forgot who he was supposed to be. Gone from his mind were the grueling lessons he had endured since age three: what it meant to be part of the Master Race, to be Josef Litt’s son, to be a scientist with special knowledge of nature’s way … None of it mattered now. Only his father’s acknowledgment.

  His father yanked the gun out of his mouth and stared across the increasing expanse of water toward the U-boat. His shoulders seemed to fall slightly.

  He does! He sees me!

  He was about to raise his arm and call out when the U-boat, which had been making a wide bank out of the harbor, suddenly passed a shoulder of land, and the dock vanished. Five seconds later, the last shot rang out.

  Karl stood on the bridge a long time, sea spray slapping his face, stinging his eyes. Finally he lowered himself into the boat.

  When the captain told him they were bound for Bahia

  Blanca, Karl had imagined emerging into a bright Argentinian sun. But when they disembarked forty-five days later, it was into another moonless night. Soldiers in green uniforms ushered them toward a waiting bus. They filed past a tall man with a young, earnest face. “Wait!” the man said in German. He had an unsure smile on his face. He turned to look back at the U-boat, at the crew unloading boxes of unused supplies under the supervision of armed soldiers. To the children he said, “Where are the adults? Where are the scientists?” His German was heavily accented.

  Karl stepped forward. “We are the scientists.”

  The man’s smile broadened, then disappeared.

  “Are you Herr Reynolds?” Karl asked. ‘I am.”

  The boy withdrew an envelope from inside his shirt and held it out to the man. “My father asked me to give you this.”

  Reynolds tore open the envelope and read the letter inside, glancing often at the small faces before him. He lowered the letter and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he had reached some sort of decision.

  “Very well, then,” he said. His voice was strained. “Welcome, all of you!” He sighed and gestured toward the bus. “Please …”

  The bus took them to an airfield; a plane took them to America.

  Kendrick Reynolds eventually found families for the other children. Karl he adopted—though Karl refused his name. And while the boy’s dockside claim that he and his peers were scientists had been an exaggeration, most of them were extraordinarily brilliant children with a foundation of scientific knowledge rivaling postgraduate students. From this foundation, Reynolds developed a program that made him powerful and wealthy. And Karl grew to love the man.

  Until the betrayal.

  twenty

  The fire occasionally flickered and flared as it found a remnant of virgin wood to consume. But mostly it smoldered resentfully as it faded away. Still, the stone hearth held its heat and sent it into the den. Allen Parker came back to the world and realized he was hot. He pushed back from his desk, dead tired. He’d learned more about the topic of Donnelley’s deathbed remarks than he’d ever wanted to know. Acid churned in his stomach.

  He shut down his computer, saved the Mozart CD from yet another play-through, and meandered out of the den, switching off lamps as he went.

  He stepped into the kitchen to turn off the light over the stove and remembered again the turkey dinner he’d left in the microwave. He pulled it out, peeled back the cellophane, and held up two pieces of meat with his thumb and index finger. He lowered them into his mouth and switched off the light with his other hand. In the master bedroom, he turned on the bedside lamp, stripped off his clothes, and pushed them into a chute. He heard them fall softly into a basket in the basement laundry room, where Maria, his part-time housekeeper, would wash and press them.

  He walked naked into the bathroom and up to a panel set into the tile near the doorless shower stall. It was more of a shower

  room,

  really; some families lived in smaller spaces. He pushed a button that would bring the water temperature and pressure of the showerheads to a preconfigured setting. He checked himself out in the wall-sized mirror opposite the shower, pulling his belly in a little. He didn’t look too bad, considering.

  A bit of the exhaustion washed away under the steaming shower jets, replaced by a healthy, relaxed tiredness. He cranked his neck around, letting the stream massage his muscles. The heat, the pulsating pressure, the tropical sound of the water splashing against the tiles and reverberating between the walls—it all made holding on to the day’s tension impossible. He was just rinsing the shampoo from his hair when the phone rang. He darted out of the shower, snatched a towel off a rung, ran into the bedroom, and grabbed the receiver on the fourth ring.

  “Dr. Parker,” he announced.

  “You’re out of breath, sir. You all right?” It was a man with a heavy Southern accent.

  “Who is this?” He patted his face with the towel.

  “Name’s Detective Fisher. I’m investigatin’ the murder of Goodwin Donnelley—the man you worked on in the ER today—and the other man who was killed with him.”

  The clock beside the bed glowed 11:18.

  “Isn’t it a little late to be calling, Detective Fisher? I’ll be happy to talk with you in the morning, but I—”

  “That’s not why I’m callin’. I mean, not really. We’ve got ourselves a situation here, and we have reason to believe your life is in danger.”

  “My life?”

  “Two of the nurses who assisted you with Donnelley died tonight. They were murdered.”

  “Murdered?” He sat heavily on the bed.

  “As well as one of the EMTs who brought ‘im in, I’m afraid. Tell ya the truth, Doctor, it wasn’t until we got the call on him that we made the connection. We checked with the hospital, and they confirmed that the two women and the EMT assisted Donnelley after the shooting.”

  “What are you saying, Detective?” He wanted to hear it outright.

  “What I am tryin’ to tell you, Dr. Parker, is that someone—or multiple someones—is killin’ off everyone who came in contact with this Donnelley guy before he died.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you can help me with that one. I understand Donnelley spoke to you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, sir, that’s different from what one of your nurses, Gail Wagner, told me not ten minutes ago. If you—”

  “Four nurses assisted me,” Allen said, changing the subject. “What about the other two?”

  “Like I said, I talked with Ms. Wagner by phone just a few minutes ago. We’re sendin’ a car over to her apartment right now. We can’t reach the other nurse or the other EMT. And nobody seems to know where that special agent woman went.”

  “Julia Matheson?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. Even her own office in Atlanta’s scratchin’ their heads over her whereabouts. I hope that’s not a bad sign. We’ve also picked up the bartender where they gunned down Donnelley and Vero, but I suspect nobody wants him. I think wh
oever’s behind these killings is concerned about some kind of deathbed confession, somethin’ Donnelley wouldn’t have told just anyone unless he thought he was dyin’.” Fisher waited for him to comment. “What’s your take on that, Doctor?”

  Allen said nothing.

  “Dr. Parker, these murders all went down within the last two hours. Someone is moving mighty fast here, mighty fast. Now, sir, I’m sending over—”

  A shadow flickered in the hallway outside his door, where the moonlight spilled in from the living room windows. For an instant, the dappled light was totally obscured—not the result of a passing bird or breeze-blown branch. Allen’s stomach clenched tight, and his heart seemed to stop before kicking into high gear. The security system was not on. By habit, he set it right before climbing into bed. That way, he didn’t have to disarm it to answer the door or wander outside. Some nights, he didn’t use it at all.

  “Okay?” Fisher was saying. “Dr. Parker?”

  “I’m sorry?” His head was swimming. He couldn’t move. From his position he could see down the entire hall that bisected the home’s front half from its back. All he saw was blackness, spattered as usual with diffused moonlight. He couldn’t tell Fisher he thought someone was already in the house. That might encourage them to abandon all caution and hurry to kill him. He figured his best chance for survival lay in not being caught off guard.

  “I said I’m sendin’ a cruiser over to your house right now, for your own protection. Lock your doors and windows and stay inside till it gets there. Don’t open the door unless you see it outside, okay?”

  “Uh, yeah, okay.”

  Could the intruder be listening in on an extension?

  There was a moment of silence on the phone. Fisher obviously expected Allen to ask more questions, express more concern, protest this disruption of his life.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Fisher finally said and hung up.

  twenty-one

  Allen dropped the cordless phone onto the bed.

  Keeping his attention on the doorway, he reached under the bed and pulled out an aluminum baseball bat. In college, a series of dorm room breakins had taught him the emotional comfort of accessible weaponry.

  He backed into the bathroom and punched the button that turned off the shower. As the last droplets fell to the tile floor, he heard a thin creak come from somewhere down the hall. His mind flashed through an inventory of the house: What in it creaked? Which hinges needed oil? Which floorboards were loose? None came to mind. He was still holding the towel in his left hand. He let it drop; what was pride next to survival?

  He tiptoed to the bedroom doorway, bat held high in both hands. He stepped into the hall and stopped, listening intently while letting his vision adjust to the dark. The light from the bedroom spilled into the hall only a few feet before surrendering to shadows.

  Murdered, the cop had said. But he hadn’t said how. Shot? Stabbed? Bludgeoned? Torn apart?

  Stop it! Doesn’t matter. Dead—that’s all that counts. Don’t want to be dead. Don’t want to be dead.

  Slowly he began to distinguish subtle shades of gray: the darker area of the linen closet door; the place where the hall opened up to the big foyer and living room; the place farther along the black, black hall where the weak glow from the embers in the fireplace barely marked the opening to the den.

  He lifted his foot and inched it forward with the slowness of a cat’s yawn. He set it down carefully, then waited, listened. He repeated the process with the other foot. His breathing seemed extraordinarily loud. He tried to take slower, shallower breaths but managed only a few before his lungs cried out for more oxygen to fuel the surge of adrenaline in his bloodstream. He had to will his leg to start another step.

  He jumped as a flash of movement down the hall caught his eye. Gone now. Black moving in black. Someone could stand in the darkest parts of the hall, he realized, without being seen. And to that person, he would be perfectly silhouetted in the lighted rectangle of the bedroom doorway. The image of a hideous dark figure running toward him filled his imagination for a split moment. This was too much. He backed into the bedroom and shut the door.

  Murdered.

  He felt the breeze on his bare back. He turned to see the sheers that covered the glass opposite the bed billowing away from an open sliding door. He’d been in the room to change clothes and then to shower, and neither time had he opened that door. His mind raced.

  The door was open. He hadn’t opened it.

  He could see the whole room fairly well, except for behind and under the bed and in the bathroom and walk-in closet. He weighed his options: bolt for the front door and hide outside? or into the bathroom, and hope no one was lurking there? or shut and lock the sliding door, search the bedroom, and guard it until the cops arrived?

  He didn’t like any of them but opted to stay in the bedroom. Trying to leave no flank exposed, he shuffled sideways toward the sliding door. He held the bat high in his right fist, keeping his left hand open and up in a posture of defense. As he moved closer to the door, the far side of the bed came into view. No one there.

  He shuffled past the open bathroom and closet doors, the blackness within each seeming to shift ominously, teasingly. He strained his eyes, expecting one of the shadows to peel itself free and flash toward him. The tips of his left fingers were now touching the fluttering sheers. To shut the door, he had to reach out and grab the handle. If someone was waiting on the deck outside, he wouldn’t know it until they were face-to-face.

  He stretched through the sheers for the handle. For one suspended instant he peered out into the blackness of the deck, imagining the sparkle of a blade slicing through the air to impale him.

  Then he got hold of the handle.

  At that moment, when he was at the apex of his stretch and was just reversing direction to pull the door shut, he first felt, then heard footsteps on the carpet directly behind him. Without looking, barely thinking, he swung down with the bat and felt it connect with something—someone! In the edge of his vision, he saw a man, big, with something raised over his head. He used his grip on the door handle to propel himself forward. He felt wind on his back. Something made contact, shearing pain just below his shoulder blade. He swung his leg around and through the opening. In two steps he was at, then over the railing … falling through darkness.

  The grassy earth below caught him with unkind arms. He crumpled, slamming his head painfully against it. He sprang up and ran for the woods where his backyard ended. He heard a thunk! and a divot of grass exploded near him, flying into the air and back down.

  He was being shot at!

  Fifty feet to the woods.

  An irregular dot of blood-red light hovered like a firefly on the grass in front of him. Allen realized that the assailant was using a laser sight to target him. It spasmed back and forth, then vanished as it found his back. He jerked to the right. Immediately he heard the thunk! again. Another divot erupted from the yard.

  Twenty feet.

  He crashed into the heavy foliage … tumbling over the first thick branches … rolling onto heavy loam, twigs, more branches, stones … smashing into a thick oak. A dozen small wounds opened on his naked body. He rose facing his yard and saw a shape, black against the gray silhouette of the house, leaping as he had over the railing. The laser shot off into the sky, visible only when it pierced some mist. Before the figure landed, Allen was running again, blindly crashing through the deep woods. The ground fell away sharply. His bare feet slammed down on bruising round rocks and cutting sharp ones. Skeletal fingers of tree branches clawed at his face, his arms, his legs.

  He plunged madly down the hill, trying to recall the topography, the placement of the area’s roads and houses below. He wondered wildly if he’d find refuge or if a bullet would find him first. He heard the crunch of twigs behind him and pushed harder, rebounding off trees, tumbling and leaping forward, tumbling again. Holly bushes raked their thorns across his skin. His chest slammed into an unyielding
branch, knocking him off his feet. He landed hard … was up again … pounding down the hill… slipping on ferns … flinching as limbs lashed his face, back, legs … fighting the urge to stop, to rest, to think.

  The night had robbed the leaves and wildflowers of their brilliant daytime colors, leaving them with only shades of gray. He plowed through them, scrambling into prickly brambles, falling into blankets of ankle-high plants.

  The moonlight was more hindrance than help. It cast a maze of shadows before him, deceiving him time and again, causing him to flinch away from thickets of razor branches that weren’t there, only to send him crashing into ones that were. Far worse, he imagined its apathetic glare illuminating his pale skin like a beacon for his pursuer.

  Trying to avoid catching a bullet in his brain, he added to his chaotic scramble a series of erratic zigs and abrupt zags. He knew this method of escape was noisy and didn’t care: speed was his advantage now, not stealth.

  He leaped over a thick clump of tangled vines, roots, and shrubs. His foot came down hard on earth that gave away. His leg sank into the ground, broke through something with a sharp crack, and stopped when the surface was up to his waist. His head flew forward. He raised his hands before his face before it hit a large, flat rock.

  The wind knocked out of him, he gasped for breath as a plume of dust mushroomed up from the hole. The soil around his sunken legs began to collapse into the hole, wedging him more firmly in the earth. His foot must have crashed through a dried and rotten root system, the broken ends of which were now digging painfully into his foot, ankle, and shin.

  As his breath came back, he waved away the dust and found himself staring at a name etched in stone: Ed Johnson. A notorious name in these parts, belonging to a man hung in 1906 for rape. Allen was in the old Negro cemetery, which dated back to the Civil War. He had fallen into Ed’s grave, and what he had thought was a dried root system was more likely a rib cage. The ancient bones gouged at his ankle, ripped at his calf. He leaned onto his side and wiggled his leg. Something chalky ground under his heel. He turned onto his stomach, reached for the top of the headstone, and tugged. The earth around him shifted, and he pulled free.