In his pocket he carried a garrote-a piece of wire snare with a stout wooden handle at each end. Now he removed it, moving back toward the man who searched the brush near the flashlight. In three minutes, he stood beside an old alder, its base immersed in a big manzanita that afforded him cover in the filtered light.
Forty feet away, behind some black oak and a smattering of head-high fir, was the man who hunted him. He was using the barrel of an M-16 to probe the brush diligently, perhaps expecting at any moment to find a wounded Irishman.
Watching him make ever-widening circles, Kier realized it would take too long for the man to pass close enough for the garrote. The silenced pistol would be too loud. Several feet away lay a faint trail through the brush, a natural corridor. Perhaps Kier could somehow use it. He crawled to the narrow opening and sat down in the middle of it. A large oak spread itself over the trail. One hefty branch passed through the tops of some incense cedar. Quietly, Kier climbed the oak, hooked his legs over the branch, and hung by his knees over the trail. Against the thick foliage, he would be invisible unless somebody shone a light skyward. Kier groaned loudly like a dying man, and immediately the footfalls of his quarry went silent.
He groaned again, twisting his voice into a wounded man's despair.
With luck the man would come with his eyes cast down, his light creeping just ahead of his feet, and his mind on a half-dead man who must surely be lying on the ground. Footfalls moved rapidly through the forest, and a light beam scurried among the trees. The movement stopped, started again. At first Kier got only glimpses; then his heart sank. The man had wandered off the trail.
Not aware enough to find the natural passage through the brush, the hunter, obviously tired of looking, forced his way through the manzanita, the tick weed, and the red bud. Kier tensed and drew the. 45 from his belt when the fellow stopped short. Twenty feet separated Kier from his hunter. Kier barely breathed. He knew the man was listening for any sound, searching for any clue.
The light began moving around the brush. He came forward-ten feet away. Kier's concentration sharpened; his body was a taut-muscled spring. Damn! Veering off, the mere passed just out of reach.
Blood pounded in Kier's head and his feet began to tingle from the loss of circulation. He asked himself how long he could hang this way and still remain effective. The weight of the. 45 put a slight ache in his extended arms. The discomfort would grow until finally Kier would be unable to maintain a firing position. By pulling the gun to his chest, he reduced the muscle fatigue.
At last, the man found the break in the foliage and began following it, apparently giving up his random search. Slipping the pistol into his belt, Kier once again readied himself. At about five feet from Kier, the man stopped, knelt down, and began moving the outer branches of the cedar. He was crawling, searching beneath the foliage.
Kier knew he had to act. If the man went beneath him he could drop from the branch using the wire as he fell. Seconds stretched to minutes and still the man stayed away. By now Kier's feet were numb and his head felt swollen. He clenched the wooden handles of the garrote, his fingertips unconsciously caressing the coarse wood pegs. He concentrated again on his target until the man moved almost directly beneath him. Kier looked for the watcher, the smarter one, but saw nothing. He positioned the wire, took one deep breath, and released his knees.
The damp leaves of the forest floor under Tillman's bare palms, the cool of autumn rushing down his throat, the feel of his instincts guiding him to yet another quarry-these things enlivened him. Only the threat posed by an unsuccessful outcome nagged at him. Once again it occurred to Tillman that his personal intervention was required at every turn. When they desperately needed a breakthrough in testing methodology, it was Tillman who first insisted on cloning infants in a Brazilian laboratory. It was he who determined to use Tilok women as surrogate mothers, and it was he who had the foresight to make the baby clones brain dead. Although some of the others recognized the necessity, it was Jack Tillman who had to come in one Saturday to apply the needle to the thirty infants. No one else had the courage to move the project forward.
He had assembled the babies in New Mexico at a high desert viral research laboratory. Marty was due to arrive in two weeks. Of course, Marty could never be told explicitly what had been done. For the record, the two men Tillman had told of the plan said it was unethical and they were absolutely opposed. Yet on the day in question, the five senior lab personnel managed to be absent for the afternoon without any further discussion or explanation.
In the room normally reserved for autopsies and tissue samples, six of the babies were lined up like little loaves of bread on three stainless-steel tables. They were still wrapped in their blankets and strapped to miniature eggshell-foam mattresses. The other twenty-four babies lay in plastic cribs lined with the same material.
The lights had been dimmed, but that would not suit his needs. When he turned on the high-intensity fixtures, many of the babies began to wail. It perturbed Tillman that all the babies were positioned to stare into the manmade sun. Someone should have provided for a means to shade the babies' eyes. Nobody was paying attention to details.
Tillman had received hypothetical instructions. Plunge the hypodermic into the diamond-shaped fontanelle, the soft spot at the top of the baby's head. Someone mentioned anesthesia, but Tillman hadn't the time. He viewed his next act like a late-term abortion, except that the remaining tissue would mimic life and serve the cause of critical research.
He reminded himself of this several times as he filled the first hypodermic. The syringe's ten-gauge needle, a relatively large bore, was calculated to make the process go as quickly as possible. In a few minutes, the infants would become human tissue-no more and no less.
Since it was important that there be no infection, he used a small razor to shave the downy hairs from the scalp before applying alcohol with a swab, followed by Betadine. Grasping the head firmly in his left hand, he felt the fontanelle. Only skin, the epidura, and the meninges separated the brain from the external world at this stage of development. He would angle the needle toward the frontal lobe with his right hand. He wondered if he ought to feel something. But noting that he felt nothing, he told himself that he had achieved a clinical detachment.
Now, in the high mountains of northern California, on a lonely stalk, Jack Horatio Tillman struggled to find that same clinical detachment. His frustration with Kier and his own men made it difficult, but finally he thought he had succeeded.
He had entirely circled the small hemlock before he realized that something bulky appeared wrapped around its base. If it was the woman and she had seen him, he was in trouble. This was the last thought he recalled before his chest exploded in a kaleidoscope of pain and he felt the bone-crunching thud of a subsonic. 45 slug strike the steel plate in his body armor. It was the angle that saved him from serious internal injury.
His instinctive cunning left Tillman looking like a ground-sluiced dove. Slumping as though dead while in extreme pain was not something most men could do well.
His ribs were just bruised, he told himself. Nevertheless, it would be hard to have his first FBI agent while in this much pain. Ever since the thought had sprouted in his mind, it had been growing. Something about possessing the woman behind those eyes had stirred the pit of his being in a way he wasn't often moved. Now that she had shot him, his urge had become a passion. The picture of Jessie he had taken from the Donahue lady still lay in his pocket. Odd that he could become so intrigued based on nothing more than dead bodies and a photo.