It was a sensible precaution. “You sure you’re okay?”
Rob was pastier than ever and unsteady on his feet. “We’re two-footed lab rats,” he murmured, weaving through the crowds, trying to avoid any physical contact. “I’m okay. Just walk, all right?” This, in reaction to my trying to carry his suitcase. “I’ve got it, really,” he insisted. “God, I feel so stupid. I thought there were limits. I should have read your books more closely.”
“You should rest. We’ll sit in a hotel lobby, have some bottled water.”
“Did you hear? Someone’s spiking bottled water all over the three boroughs.”
“Yeah, but it’s ammonia and bleach,” I said. “Garden-variety sicko.”
“How do we know it isn’t a cover?”
I shook my head. We didn’t. We didn’t know anything. We had been working and traveling for a week. We were half-dead from exhaustion, Rob’s left arm was bandaged from a flying splinter, I had cuts on my scalp—covered by a baseball cap.
I looked up at the Empire State Building. Still impressive, still New York. I had a sudden shivering sense of place. This was the real world; out west it was twilight crazy-time, bugfuck nonsense.
But bugfuck kills. We had been the lucky ones.
The basement had partially fallen in, trapping Rob and me for a while. Tammy crawled out through a hole in the floor. We heard her walking overhead, shouting, then another round of cannon fire.
While I pulled aside rubble and used a two-by-four to prop up a piece of floor blocking the exit, Rob grabbed an ice chest from under a fallen beam and went through what was left of the lab. He filled the chest with jars and little plastic dishes.
We found Tammy bleeding and screaming and walking around the front yard, stretching out a mangled hand. I did what I could, holding pressure points, scrounging through a first-aid kit to put together a bandage.
Rob searched through the leaning walls and collapsed rooms and found Marquez in the shambles of the den. There was blood and glass and broken model airplanes all over and Elvis had very obviously left the building.
The dogs in the kennels had fallen silent, lying on their tummies, ears laid back, eyes big.
The house was burning fiercely. There wasn’t much time.
Police cars, ambulances started rolling in. We helped Tammy get to the paramedics and decided we couldn’t do any more there. We rode the elevator down to the second house, which had only been lightly damaged. There we found a red Mercedes S320 with the key in the ignition. The garage door opened and we departed the scene before fire trucks and other vehicles could block off the lower streets.
Marquez had thought of everything. A second set of plates in the trunk, and the car was registered in Nevada.
We took a chance and visited Tammy in the hospital. Four new bodyguards watched us enter the door to her room. No police protection.
She was groggy but she could talk. “Tell Dr. Goncourt he kills good people,” she said, and stroked my hand. “He killed my man. He killed my son.”
Then she gave us the keys to Joe’s kingdom. Bank-account numbers and passwords that Marquez had made her memorize. Security codes to lockboxes in seven cities, with phone numbers where we could hide out if things got impossible on the street.
And the crown jewels: maps and key codes for sections of the Lemuria and the Goncourt estate on Lee Stocking Island. She did not know whether the key codes were current.
I hated to abandon Tammy, but there was nothing we could do for her. We had work to finish.
I had changed my mind during the gunship slaughter. The cowardly masters pulled puppet strings, but the puppets had fucked up. The masters were vulnerable. And they had killed a whole lot of innocents. They had tried to kill a pregnant woman.
Janie would never let me into our heavenly condo if I didn’t do something to square that angle.
We drove to San Jose and stored Rob’s samples in an office he had rented with Rudy Banning, half repository for Rudy’s crazy piles of research and half makeshift lab. Rob had kept paying the rent even after Marquez lent him his basement.
It was a kind of safe house, just in case.
There, he worked feverishly for several days, then gave us the latest version of his vaccine. While he worked, I made a phone call.
I was eager to fight, but if I could arrange for some special help, I thought we’d have a better chance.
New York became Rob’s holy grail. I swear he acted as if we were going to visit a shrine. I thought we were too obvious, too open. He did not care. “I need to get some specimens,” he had said. “I can put it all together if I just get a few specimens.”
We must have looked like two bums in a bad New York comedy.
Rob suddenly pulled up short in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at clouds dropping specks of rain, then fixed his eyes on me.
“Are you all right?” he asked with real concern. “It’s a witch’s brew, I know it is. I didn’t have time. I need those last few surface proteins. I can make antisense RNA and block the gene expression—”
“Hold it.” I pulled him up close. Our suitcases bumped. A dark green Ford Crown Victoria, no marks, passed us for the third time. An old guy wearing a brown-leather bomber jacket hung his arm out the window and watched us. He caught my eye and nodded amiably, then motioned for the driver to pull over.
Rob and I stood like two jacklighted deer.
The guy in the bomber’s jacket stepped out on the curb and waved his arm. “Damn it, Ben, get over here!” he shouted. “We’re your ride.”
Rob shivered. I thought he might pass out. I squinted at the man. “Stuart?” I called, and smiled. I immediately straightened my face. No reason to smile, no reason to trust anyone.
“Yeah, get in,” Stuart said.
