“Today, University Children’s Hospital is making news on more than one front. Hours ago, an armed militia group in Guatemala took responsibility for the abduction of Dr. Callahan. The group claimed that, by interfering in the customs and practices of native Mayan tribes, she and other American doctors are practicing a form of genocide. Any further interference, they warned, will lead to the captive doctor’s immediate execution. A hospital spokesperson would not comment on what, if anything, is being done to secure Dr. Callahan’s release.
“Abductions of U.S. tourists and relief workers in Central and South America have been on the rise for several years. The U.S. State Department says they have no knowledge of the group involved in this abduction. They advise U.S. citizens traveling abroad to…”
35
Barnesdale settled onto the couch in his library. A single flame-colored swath of light from a Torchiere floor lamp crawled up one corner of the walnut-paneled room.
He picked up the remote from his coffee table and pressed play.
The TV played an image of the Research Tower’s small marble-floored lobby, the tempered glass entry doors, and a small section of the walkway just outside the entrance. It looked more like a photograph than a video running in play mode. Except for the seconds counter on a time stamp in the upper right corner that read 7:12:23, nothing was moving.
Twelve minutes after seven, Saturday morning, eleven minutes before Elmer McKenna had walked through the front doors.
Barnesdale didn’t fast-forward the recording. He wanted to see if anybody had been milling in front of the building’s entrance around that time.
He’d had all day to think about the scene that was about to unfold on his TV screen. There had been no reports of a stolen badge, and even Elmer would have noticed if his badge had gone missing. He knew he’d see Elmer enter the Research Tower at 7:23. One of the three Infectious Diseases laboratories was located on the eighth floor. Elmer had gone to his eighth-floor lab on Saturday morning.
But Elmer had pressed both 2 and 8. That was no accident. He had pushed the button for a coworker.
Barnesdale had walked the perimeter of the building a few hours earlier, looking for other points of entry. There were none. The only other doors at ground level were fire exits from stairwells on either side of the building. Neither door had an exterior handle, lock, or keypad. The only way to enter through those doors would be with a crowbar, and neither door showed any signs of tampering.
Inside the tower, people used elevators to travel between floors because the exit doors on each floor couldn’t be opened from inside the stairwells. Presumably, that prevented people from wandering between floors.
But it wouldn’t prevent someone from leaving the building. Anyone could leave the building without having to use the badge-swipe system, merely by walking down either of the two stairwells and exiting through one of the side doors.
Barnesdale sat forward on his couch. For the second time a pair of legs appeared briefly in the upper left corner of the image. It was a man wearing gray slacks, cordovan shoes, and a white lab coat. The time stamp read 7:20:03.
In three minutes he would know who had switched the marrow samples. He pictured Elmer walking up to the front door in his usual cloudy state.
Someone he knows, probably a coworker, approaches from behind and greets him. Elmer opens the door and the pair walk inside together.
They continue chatting as they board the elevator. The Zenavax mole asks Elmer to save him the trouble and press 2. Elmer obliges.
The mole wishes Elmer a “good day” as he gets off on the second floor. Fifteen minutes later, his work completed, the mole leaves using one of the stairwells.
It seemed more than a small irony that Elmer had opened the door for the person who switched the dead boy’s marrow. The eccentric old fool had thwarted his own son’s efforts.
The time stamp now read 7:22:05. In one minute he’d have the leverage he needed to ensure his safety. Zenavax wouldn’t touch him once they knew there was a letter in his attorney’s safe, a letter to be opened in the event of his death.
The Zenavax IPO was in eight days. On that day, the shares he held in a blandly named trust — shares he received for his “special services”—would be sold into the feeding frenzy that was developing around the company’s Initial Public Offering.
And he’d be done with Zenavax.
A strand of hair fell over his forehead. He fought a tremor as he tried to pat it back in place.
Barnesdale forgot about the stray hair when he saw Elmer McKenna’s image appear on the video.
Elmer trundled up to the front door and swiped his badge through a reading pad mounted on the door frame. He turned to his rear when a man wearing gray slacks and cordovan shoes appeared in the corner of the screen.
The pulse in Barnesdale’s neck throttled up when the man stepped into the foreground.
“You bastard,” he whispered. “I got you.”
“White guys just shouldn’t shave their head.” Sammy pruned his face and pursed his lips. “Uh-uh, no way. Just shouldn’t be done.”
Luke ignored Wilkes’s chatter and examined himself in the mirror.
Sammy had taken Luke’s full head of hair and turned it into a one-eighth-inch crop of dyed red stubble, but what drew most of Luke’s attention was the badly dimpled cleft lip scar. The scar was fashioned with a Krazy-Glue-like substance, and the jagged mark crossed through his upper lip and formed a pucker as it snaked its way into his right nostril.
They were in one of the back rooms at Sammy’s offices, which were located in an industrial park complex about a mile from Burbank Airport. A makeup bench ran along one wall. The rest of the room looked like a photography studio.
“The scar won’t last more than four or five days,” Sammy said while handing Luke a small tube. “Hold onto this. You’ll need it when you return. Don’t forget what I showed you, and don’t show up at a passport checkpoint without that scar.”
Luke rubbed an eye. “How am I supposed to keep these contacts in? They sting like hell.”
“You’ll get used to them, and anyway, you won’t need ’em once you get to Guatemala.”
Sammy had created Luke’s new identity with the same proficiency and sense of routine that other men achieve only with a TV remote. He had perused the online obituaries from several southern California newspapers and found three recently deceased males in their mid-thirties. After a call to a criminal attorney, Sammy discarded one of the names because of a criminal record that could lead to unwanted scrutiny if Luke was stopped or questioned.
Luke selected one of the two remaining names. He was now Edward Schweers.
Next, Sammy had gone to work with his contact at the DMV. Two hours later they had the former Mr. Schweers’s Social Security and driver’s license numbers. It would be several weeks, or perhaps months, before dutiful public servants marked Edward Schweers’s state and federal records as deceased.
Luke scrutinized the ID photos that Sammy had taken. The only difference between them was his eye color. In one pair of photos, his eyes were their natural dark brown; in the other, they were cobalt blue.
“Forget the contacts,” Luke said. “I don’t want to have to explain to some Customs agent why my eyes are bloodshot. Use these.” He tossed the two brown-eyed photographs to Sammy.
By morning one of Sammy’s vendors would create a passport and driver’s license from the photos.
Earlier, Luke had reached Ben Wilson in his office. The pathologist agreed to leave a package with ten thousand dollars in cash on his front porch at exactly 10:00 P.M. Sammy would drive by at 10:03 and pick it up. A third of the money had been spent already on Sammy’s vendors, and Luke’s journey hadn’t even begun.