But the fear was still there. In point of fact, it had grown, slowly eating her up inside like the cancer that ate away at her guts. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on what she must do. Perhaps, she thought, she was not truly devoted after all.
So she turned to something else.
From the very beginning she had tried to understand the truths of Lamaism in a different light. Everyone is linked, and everyone has the ability to influence the world through thought. She had come to believe this to be literally true. She had no doubt about what had happened to her. That night so many years ago she had felt something alien worm its way inside her body. Some kind of energy had been released that had forever altered her genetic makeup.
First chemotherapy had failed. Then the bone marrow transplant wouldn’t take. Spirituality alone hadn’t solved anything. As far and as wide as she had looked, there was no other option. So Jean Shelley had created one.
They still didn’t know exactly how Sarah did it, but effect had something to do with electromagnetic energy. It seemed that whatever had caused her leukemia could cure it as well. At least, that had been Shelley’s hope. And in fact, Sarah’s strange power had put her into remission twice. Each time the cancer had returned, but already she had lived for six years longer than even the most optimistic doctors had predicted.
Both she and Evan had tried very hard to teach Sarah the importance of making amends for your mistakes. They had made real progress at first, until the fire. After that, they had lost her. She had come to hate all doctors, anyone who had anything to do with her life in the facility. In her mind, they had betrayed her. She had to be sedated every time Shelley was in the room, and then she had retreated deep inside herself.
Jean Shelley’s death was coming. She had one last chance, but it was all getting so complicated now. She had worked so very hard to play everything just right, teasing Jess Chambers along, letting Evan think what he needed to think to be useful to her. What she had done could not be undone, all the long, complex plans she had put into motion, and everything was spiraling toward an end. It wouldn’t be long before this last chance had passed beyond her reach.
The bell rang. The next scene in the last act. She closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts for a moment. She would have to give a command performance now, and she needed every ounce of energy she had left.
Evan Wasserman forced his way through the door before she had swung it fully open. He looked like a madman, tie pulled down and to the side, hair flying wild about his egg-shaped skull, eye twitching uncontrollably. “They want to introduce this into the general population,” he said in a rush. “They want to sell it like some kind of treatment for… for… high cholesterol levels or something. They don’t know what they’re getting into, Jean. It’s gone too far, do you understand? Too far!”
He clutched at her like a drowning man would cling to driftwood, his face close to hers so that she could smell the sour stink of his breath. “Oh God, Jean, what are we going to do? We’ve got to shut it down somehow. But your treatment— look at you, you’re so pale, God, I’m so sorry…”
“Hush, now,” she said. She forced a smile, reached up to touch his face with gentle fingers. “It’s all right. We’ve done what we could do, and it’s gotten away from us. But I’ll be okay.”
“Oh no,” he moaned. He buried his slick, sweaty face in her neck, and she managed to remain still, putting her hand around the back of his head and holding him to her. His voice was muffled by her blouse. “No, you won’t, not if we can’t get her to cooperate. We were so close to a breakthrough, I, I can’t lose you.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I love you, I’m sorry, but it’s true, I always have. I know you don’t want to hear it.”
“I know you do, Evan,” Shelley said. “I love you too.” And then he was trying to kiss her with his slimy, wormlike lips, wet with the salt of his tears, and it took every ounce of her self-control not to pull away from the horrible smell and taste of him.
Finally she got him to the couch, and poured a shot glass of brandy. His hands were shaking too much to hold it. “Here,” she said, holding it up for him to drink. “That’s better. Now, tell me it again, from the beginning.”
She listened as he described his conversation with Cruz and Berger. Then he told her about Jess Chambers’s visit.
“We should never have let her become involved,” he said. “Now she’s sniffing around and she’s got her wind up. It’s only a matter of time until she puts it all together. She’ll go to the state, the papers, she’ll expose us both.”
“Jess served her purpose,” Shelley said. “Sarah opened up again, didn’t she? Just as we’d hoped.”
“But now Helix is taking over. They’re going to cut me out completely, I can feel it coming. They don’t know what they’re doing with her.” Wasserman shook his head. “I just wanted to save the hospital,” he said. “And I wanted to save your life. I never thought it would go this far.”
“Perhaps they can control it, as they say.”
“There’s no controlling what she has,” Wasserman said. “Now they want to offer the ability to anyone with money enough to buy it. God forbid it gets into the hands of madmen. Dictators? Terrorists? Imagine someone like Hussein with that kind of power!”
Shelley stood up and went to the window, hugging her arms across her chest. Wait just long enough to add the proper tremor. She turned to find him staring at her. “What do you think we should do?”
“We have to stop them, and stop her,” he whispered. “The way we always talked about. Wipe this obscenity off the face of the earth. Destroy every sample, every record. It has to end right here.”
Shelley soothed him, agreed to all he said, let him caress and touch her. Then, after he’d gone, she went back out on the patio.
The air had turned cooler in the late afternoon, and a breeze picked up stray leaves and whirled them across the lawn. She watched the orange and red colors dancing through the deepening shadows, and sensed an air of neglect, as if the grass were just half an inch too long, the shrubs grown out and getting leggy. A dead branch had come down near the edge of the wooded patch on the southeast corner.
The phone was ringing. Shelley stumbled back inside and fumbled for it on the counter, picked up on the fourth chirp.
“Our men lost her,” Berger said. “She pulled a stunt at a light, there were witnesses. We didn’t have any secondary support, it was only tagged as a shadow. If we knew that she was on to us—”
For the first time that day, real fear washed over Jean Shelley. This was not part of the carefully designed plan. Up to this point, everything had gone perfectly with Jess Chambers. Shelley had planted the seeds of doubt, challenged her to let it all go, knowing full well she would not. Jess knew just enough to be suitably angry, but not enough to blow things wide open. Wasserman was the last piece of the puzzle, and his undoing would serve as the perfect final distraction for the firestorm that would come.
This would not do. She clutched the phone in a white-knuckled hand, took a deep breath, and let it out. “She wouldn’t have suspected a tail. She must have seen you following her and put it together.”