Back at the bed-and-breakfast he kissed Grady on the cheek, clasped her hand, and left her with Michael. His instincts were talking to him again. Grady and Michael were assuming he'd go back to LA. He didn't bother to correct the impression, although there were various ways they might find him out. Since he always took calls on his cell, it wasn't always easy to determine his whereabouts and people were very used to not knowing.
Preferring anonymity he stayed over in Greenwich Village, in the apartment of a retired FBI agent. The man was travel ing.
On the way to the office he stopped by the hospital. In mid- afternoon the hospital was getting ready for a shift change. Nurses were standing around flipping through charts and talking in low tones. Anna's room was a good walk down a long corridor filled with people with serious problems. There was a faint antiseptic smell and somehow it didn't help his mood. As he neared the door, the deep reserve of sadness that was always with him these days took over his mind. When he entered, he noticed that the monitor was now silent and each beat was only a line on the screen. Sitting by Anna's bed, her mother held her hand, and it made him feel good and it made him feel guilty all at the same time. When he ap proached Anna's mother, he noticed that her face was drawn and that deep fatigue had set in. The vigil was taking its toll.
"I will leave you alone," she said quietly.
Nothing had ever made him feel so helpless.
Anna's face revealed nothing and it seemed to Sam that she was very far away.
She always liked the smell of a good Cuban cigar, so in violation of all the rules he sat by her bed and smoked a few puffs. After he put out the cigar, he leaned forward and whis pered in her ear.
Sam sat in New York in front of the video-conferencing monitor, talking to Jill in LA the way old acquaintances do, snacking, drinking, and lapsing into silence between broken phrases that called up a history of late nights at the office, long lunches, walks in the park, and even pillow talk. They had each ordered in some fried yearling oysters and Sam carefully dipped the end of about every third oyster in ketchup. He called the ketchup dunking "cleansing the palate." Jill liked the unadulterated oyster flavor and skipped the condiment. Harry sat on the conference table of the New York office watch ing every oyster that went into Sam's mouth and got about one out of four. Jill said the dog had superior taste-he'd have none of Sam's ketchup. One of Sam's staff had been kind enough to bring the lonely dog with him from LA.
For a few minutes Jill listened while Sam tried to tell her how he felt about Anna lying unconscious in the hospital. For some reason it was hard for him to speak the right words, and yet he knew she understood.
"I wish I were there to hold your hand," she said. There were a few moments of silence. Harry put his chin on his paws and looked disconsolate.
"You know the way you're leaning back with those oysters, you're going to spill ketchup on your shirt."
"Have you ever noticed how some people can't just wear their ketchup stain-even ketchup lovers like me. They have to cover it with a tie, or hold their hand on their stomach, or take the shirt off and use towels and water. In the extreme cases they have to leave the office and get a new shirt. As long as that ketchup is there, they can't stop thinking about it. The ketchup actually rules their life."
Jill said nothing for a moment.
"Grieving is good, Sam. It's not like a ketchup stain, so don't even think about comparing them."
"I was talking about hypocritical ketchup lovers."
"And I was talking about you."
Sam thought about that. For him, was it Gaudet that was the ketchup stain? Or was it something inside? Was it his self-doubt? Was it that he had Indian blood? Or maybe it was his anonymous life. One thing he believed: nothing could be normal or right until he got Gaudet. Not grieving, not life. Maybe he could choose a public life after Gaudet. Maybe he would have more confidence that he was good enough for Anna. Now he didn't know.
He thought about what his mother had said about Grandfather, about the focusing of his life force. Could a man focus his life on catching another man and have a life worth living? It was a question that he shoved out of his mind almost as fast as it came. Some things were necessary, he told himself.
"You don't think you should tell Grady and Michael you're really in New York."
"It worked last time."
"Yeah, Grady was almost strangled."
"I've gotta get this man that is really not a man. He is more devil than man."
"I guess if we're going to stop him, we better get to work."
"Title of the file in Gaudet's mainframe was interesting," Jill said. " 'Alpha Worm.' Some kind of joke."
"Uh-huh."
"You're tired."
"Not that tired. How is Figgy doing?"
"Great. If you like would-be traitors. He has a lot of contacts and he's working them. I guess we just ignore that he seems to have had a meeting with our mortal enemy and isn't mentioning it. He has gotten information about Grace from the French, who are suddenly discovering that they knew things they supposedly didn't know."
"Do you think he would betray the United States for some renegade French spooks?"
"What do you think, Sam?"
"I think we got serious trouble that I don't understand. We can't trust Figgy with anything we don't want Gaudet to know until we prove otherwise. It is possible to meet with your enemy without embracing him. We can't forget that. I would like to think that Figgy and the French are trying to trap him."
"But you don't believe it."
"Unfortunately, I don't."
"You know I was talking to our Harvard guys. They just keep saying that this would be an unimaginable medical breakthrough if Grace had a way of altering the immune sys tem so that it would accept foreign cells. All of the diseases in which our bodies reject good cells could be cured. Growing and implanting replacement organs would be a breeze. We'd have pig farms growing human parts. Gene repair would be vastly simplified. You have to hear it for yourself. They make it sound like the Second Coming."
"It would be worth a fortune."
"And?"
"Maybe that's becoming bigger than whatever Gaudet is doing."
"Bigger to whom?"
"Everybody. All the governments. Hell of a thought. What if every government out there wanted it?"
"To own the discovery."
"Yeah. It would be an unimaginable thicket. But we better stop looking for ghosts and get Grogg in here."
"Grogg got into Northern Lights' computer. He found a Gaudet-related phone number in a Frank Grey's contacts list. He is one of the two that got the vector."
"So he was a threat to Gaudet? Maybe a falling-out?"
"Frank Grey also had the number of a man in the SDECE by the name of Jean Baptiste Sourriaux, and he is the same man that Gaudet wrote. And he was in Figgy's computer. And, of course, Baptiste was in the jet with Figgy."
"It's a small world."
"It gets smaller. Grey had a number in his directory that turns out to be the phone of Claudia Roche. But it was listed as Chaperone."
"It would not be a great hurdle to assume that Claudia Roche is the way to Georges Raval. She lives in Manhattan and is related to Chloe Raval in France, who claims that Georges Raval is her brother's son. Big Brain drew the correlation or we wouldn't know any of this. Could be some thing, could be nothing. Apparently, Chaperone was the name that Frank Grey at Northern Lights used for whatever he associated with Raval."