“All right, yes,” she admitted unhappily.
“So any Pentagon-supported scientist is going to be real eager to please the government and keep his own fat research grants, and he's sure as hell going to alert them the moment such a file comes into his hands. Certainly he's not going to risk losing his grants or being prosecuted for compromising defense secrets, so at best he'll tell the reporter to take his damn file and get lost, and he'll keep his mouth shut. At best. Most likely he'll give the reporter to the feds, and the reporter will give us to the feds. The file will be destroyed, and very likely we'll be destroyed, too.”
Rachael didn't want to believe what he said, but she knew there was truth in it.
Out in the woods, the cicadas were singing again!
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
Evidently Benny had been thinking hard about that question as they had gone through room after room of the cabin without finding Eric, for his answer was well prepared. “With both Eric and the file in our possession, we're in a lot stronger position. We wouldn't have just a bunch of cryptic research papers that only a handful of people could understand; we'd also have a walking dead man, his skull staved in, and by God, that's dramatic enough to guarantee that virtually any newspaper or television network will run an all-stops-pulled story before getting expert opinions on the file itself. Then there'll be no reason for the government or anyone else trying to shut us up. Once Eric's seen on TV news, his picture'll show up on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the National Enquirer will have enough material for a decade, and David Letterman will be making zombie jokes every night, so silencing us won't achieve anything.”
He took a deep breath, and she had a hunch that he 'was going to propose something she would not like in the least.
When he continued, he confirmed her hunch. “All right, like I said, I need to search this place thoroughly to see if I can come up with any clue that'll tell us where Eric's gone. But the authorities may show up here soon. Now that we've got a copy of the Wildcard file, we can't risk having it taken away from us, so you've got to leave with the file while I—”
“You mean, split up?” she said. “Oh, no.”
“It's the only way, Rachael. We—”
“No.”
The thought of leaving him alone here was chilling.
The thought of being alone herself was almost too much to bear, and she realized with terrible poignancy how tight the bonds between them had become in just the past twenty-four hours.
She loved him. God, how she loved him.
He fixed her with his gentle, reassuring brown eyes. In a voice neither patronizing nor abrasively commanding but nevertheless full of authority and reason, a voice which brooked no debate — probably the tone he had learned to use in Vietnam, in crises, with soldiers of inferior rank — he said, “You'll take the Wildcard file out of here, get copies made, send some off to friends in widely separated places, and secrete a few others where you can get your hands on them with short notice. Then we won't have to worry about losing our only copy or having it taken away from us. We'll have real good insurance. Meanwhile, I'll thoroughly search the cabin here, see what I can turn up. If I find something that points us toward Eric, I'll meet up with you at a prearranged place, and we'll go after him together. If I don't get a lead on him, we'll meet up and hide out together, until we can decide what to do next.”
She did not want to split up and leave him alone here. Eric might still be around. Or the feds might show up. Either way Benny might be killed. But his arguments for splitting up were convincing; damn it, he was right.
Nevertheless, she said, “If I go alone and take the car, how will you get out of here?”
He glanced at his wristwatch not because he needed to know the time (she thought) but to impress upon her that time was running out. “You'll leave the rental Ford for me,” he said. “That's got to be ditched soon, anyway, because the cops might be onto it. You'll take this Mercedes, and I'll take the Ford just far enough to swap it for something else.”
“They'll be on the lookout for the Mercedes, too.”
“Oh, sure. But the APB will specify a black 560 SEL with this particular license number, driven by a man fitting Eric's description. You'll be driving, not Eric, and we'll switch license plates with one of those cars parked along the gravel road farther down the mountain, which ought to take care of things.”
“I'm not so sure.”
“I am.”
Hugging herself as if this were a day in November rather than a day in June, Rachael said, “But where would we meet up later?”
“Las Vegas,” he said.
The answer startled her. “Why there?”
“Southern California's too hot for us. I'm not confident we can hide out here. But if we hop over to Vegas, I have a place.”
“What place?”
“I own a motel on Tropicana Boulevard, west of the Strip.”
“You're a Vegas wheeler-dealer? Old-fashioned, conservative Benny Shadway is a Vegas wheeler-dealer?”
“My real-estate development company's been in and out of Vegas property several times, but I'm hardly a wheeler-dealer. It's small stuff by Vegas standards. In this case, it's an older motel with just twenty-eight rooms and a pool. And it's not in the best repair. In fact, it's closed up at the moment. I finished the purchase two weeks ago, and we're going to tear it down next month, put up a new place: sixty units, a restaurant. There's still electrical service. The manager's suite is pretty shabby, but it has a working bathroom, furniture, telephone — so we can hide out there if we have to, make plans. Or just wait for Eric to show up someplace very public and cause a sensation that the feds can't put a lid on. Anyway, if we can't get a lead on him, hiding out is all we can do.”
“I'm to drive to Vegas?” she asked.
“That' d be best. Depending on how badly the feds want us — and considering what's at stake, I think they want us real bad — they'll probably have men at the major airports. You can take the state route past Silverwood Lake, then pick up Interstate Fifteen, be in Vegas this evening. I'll follow in a couple of hours.”
“But if the cops show up—”
“Alone, without you to worry about, I can slip away from them.”
“You think they're going to be incompetent?” she asked sourly.
“No. I just know I'm more competent.”
“Because you were trained for this. But that was more than one and a half decades ago.”
He smiled thinly. “Seems like yesterday, that war.”
And he had kept in shape. She could not dispute that. What was it he'd said — that Nam had taught him to be prepared because the world had a way of turning dark and mean when you least expected it?
“Rachael?” he asked, looking at his watch again.
She realized that their best chance of surviving, of having a future together, was for her to do what he wanted.
“All right,” she said. “All right. We'll split. But it scares me, Benny. I guess I don't have the guts for this kind of thing, the right stuff. I'm sorry, but it really scares me.”
He came to her, kissed her. “Being scared isn't anything to be ashamed of. Only madmen have no fear.”
24
SPECIAL FEAR OF HELL
Dr. Easton Solberg had been more than fifteen minutes late for his one o'clock meeting with Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom. They had stood outside his locked office, and he had finally come hurrying along the wide hall, clutching an armload of books and manila folders, looking harried, more like a twenty-year-old student late to class than a sixty-year-old professor overdue for an appointment.