Out of the Sun (20 page)

"What's wrong with hoping, Donna? You're the only one who's ever talked as if he can be saved."

"Saved in theory. It's true some research has been done at Emory University in Atlanta which suggests deep coma retrieval might become a practical possibility. They're working with Hector Sandoval, the pioneering neurosurgeon, to refine the necessary laser-surgical techniques. But they haven't even reached the experimental stage yet. And even if we could get Sandoval interested in treating David, he'd be crazy to agree when the risk of failure's so high. Better from his point of view to maintain David on life support for as long as it takes to be optimistic about the outcome."

"You mean .. . there's a strong case ... for doing that?"

"Yes. And I'd have been impressing it on Iris if I'd had the chance."

"But she's actively considering letting him die. Her husband's trying to talk her into it. And David's doctor backs him up."

"I know. That was the way things were shaping up when I was over there. But what can I do? Lazenby's just waiting for one of us to show ourselves. I don't enjoy living like a fugitive. I have a mother, father and two sisters in Seattle who probably think I'm dead. Makepeace has a daughter in Minneapolis who hasn't heard from her in over a month. This isn't easy on any of us." Her face had flushed and her chin was quivering. Tears were suddenly close. She whipped off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then looked at him with reimposed self-control. "Persuade Iris to hold off taking a decision, Harry. Can you manage that?"

"I think so." It was both an exaggeration and a simplification. Iris had promised to do nothing without consulting him first. And one sure way to hold her to her promise was to avoid being consulted. Offhand, in fact, he could think of no better way. "For a while, at least."

"And how long does a while need to be? You want me to say, don't you?" Donna frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then said: "I think you'd better meet the others, Harry. That's the only way to settle it."

"So what do we do?"

She glanced at her watch. "I have a return flight booked for later this afternoon. I need to be on it."

"Shall I come with you?"

"No," she said, a little too hurriedly for his liking. "Travelling together would be complicated. And risky."

"Why? You said yourself '

"We'll go on as we've started, all right?" Was petulance the price she had to pay for suppressing her vulnerability? Or was she playing a deeper game than Harry could grasp? He had no way of knowing. And no alternative but to agree, as he signalled with a nod. If David had a chance, it lay in her hands. She could win the medical arguments Harry could not even present. She could call in the best in the business to help his son. If she wanted to. "Stay in Chicago tonight. Fly out in the morning."

"Where to?"

She deliberated for what seemed like several minutes during which her large dark eyes studied him coolly. Then she said: "Dallas."

"You've been there the whole time?"

There's a hotel right by the terminal," she went on, calmly ignoring his question. The Hyatt Regency. Book into it when you arrive. We'll contact you there."

"When?"

"By Wednesday at the latest. What name are you travelling under?"

"Norman Page."

"Right." Once more she glanced at her watch. "I have to go." But the urgency was synthetic. Harry felt sure she would have allowed more time than this for their meeting. She was not hurrying to catch a plane so much as to cut short their exchanges before they could stray beyond what was strictly necessary.

She rose and headed across a frozen patch of grass to the expressway crossing. He followed, noticing for the first time how quick and determined her movements were. Catching her up as she pressed the pedestrian button, he said: "I wanted to ask you more about David."

"I know," she replied, keeping her eyes fixed on the red pictogram of a man on the far side of the road. "But I can't trust myself to say more. I loved him once."

"But you don't now?"

"He made that impossible."

"I'm sorry. I've no right to intrude. It's just.. ."

"You want to know what kind of son Iris bore you. I understand that. Strangely enough, I'm not sure I could tell you even if I wanted to. He's always kept too much of himself hidden. Take you, for instance. He told me his father was dead long after he knew you were alive. He even told me about the visit to Rhodes with Torben and the scene in Lindos. I remember them joking about it one night over dinner. He never hinted ... never implied .. ." She shook her head. "He never trusted me with the truth."

Before Harry could respond, the traffic lurched to a stop, the red man changed to green and Donna set off across the road at a clip. Harry had to break into a trot to keep up. At the other side she carried straight on, up a quieter road leading towards the city centre. "Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to admit it," he panted. "As fathers go ... I suppose I take a bit of owning up to."

"You didn't fit his image of himself. You were a potential embarrassment."

"I'm not sure which of us that's harder on."

"Not you." She pulled up and turned to face him. "Whoever it was who thought you ought to know about David was doing him a bigger favour than you. Who else would have come this far on his account? Who else could have won my confidence?"

"Have I won it?"

"Amazingly, you have."

"But how?"

"By being the real thing."

"What do you mean?"

She came closer to smiling then than she had since they had first met. "You'll fly to Dallas tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"That's what I mean." With no further word of explanation, she turned and hurried on to the junction, where the road met a busier thoroughfare. Harry watched as she raised her hand and a taxi pulled up for her. She climbed in, leant forward for a word with the driver, then fell back in her seat. She did not look in Harry's direction as the car started away, but he had the strangest impression which light, shade and distance could all have falsified that she was crying as the taxi vanished from sight behind a building on the corner.

TWENTY-NINE

Wednesday morning in Dallas was grey, still and drizzly. It had never looked like this on Kostas's television set at the Taverna Silenou, courtesy of which Harry had clocked up nine years' random exposure to the everyday melodramas of Texan oil folk. They had left him with an abiding impression of blue skies, high winds and a city peopled with sexually incontinent megalomaniacs talking in badly dubbed Greek. The reality, as viewed from a hotel room at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, was reassuringly drab by comparison. Jets descended slowly from the louring cloud base and ascended slowly into it, while a polluted mizzle encroached on the featureless horizon. It was movement without event, place without location: a transportation al limbo in which Harry felt unnaturally secure.

Raising his coffee-cup to his lips only to discover that the coffee had gone cold, he grimaced and reached for a cigarette instead, then returned to leafing through his complimentary copy of the Dallas Morning News. If there had been any further developments in the strange affair of Globescope Inc. and its accident-prone former employees, they evidently did not warrant a mention when there were so many homegrown murders, football games and unique customized realty opportunities to report to the citizens of Dallas. Which was probably just as well when he considered the disturbing tone of the front-page article he had chanced to spot at a news-stand in the departure lounge of O'Hare Airport the previous day. An article whose headline

GLOBE SCOPE SHARE PRICE

' 159

FALLS ON REPORT OF THIRD STAFF FATALITY had Caused him to

abandon his intention of buying an out-of-date copy of the Sunday Express there and then in favour of an up-to-date Wall Street Journal.

Harry rose, walked across to the bed and sat down amidst the rumpled sheets. He bent over to retrieve the paper from where he had discarded it last night and scanned once more the sparse contents of an article he could by now have made a reasonable attempt at reciting from memory.

The macabre crop of fatalities and near-fatalities among recently released employees of Globescope Inc." the Washington-based socio-economic forecasting corporation, impacted on Globescope's share price on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, which lost $2!/2 to close at $11%. This followed a report in yesterday's Berlingske Tidende that the Danish-born physicist Torben Hammelgaard, retained as a researcher by Globescope until April of this year, had been found dead on a bridge across Copenhagen Harbor in the early hours of Saturday morning.

An autopsy has proved inconclusive as to the cause of Mr. Hammelgaard's death and the results of a second autopsy are presently awaited. The Copenhagen police have said they would like to interview a middle-aged Briton going under the name of Barnett, who is thought to be the last person to have seen Mr. Hammelgaard alive. Mr. Barnett vanished from his Copenhagen hotel on Saturday.

In Washington, a Globescope spokesperson said they had no knowledge of or dealings with Mr. Barnett. Byron Lazenby, President of Globescope, was reported to be confident that the corporation's share price will recover as soon as the circumstances of Mr. Hammelgaard's death are clarified.

Harry tossed the paper back onto the floor and took a long nerve-settling drag on his cigarette. If a second autopsy showed Hammelgaard had been murdered, the Copenhagen police would do more than express a polite wish to interview him. They would come looking for him. Just as well then that Norman Page, not Harry Barnett, had booked into the Hyatt Regency. And that the Dallas Morning News remained firmly parochial in its concerns. Nevertheless

Harry grabbed the telephone at the first ring, praying it would be Donna's voice he would hear on the other end. But it was not.

"Mr. Page?"

"Yes."

This is the front desk. Your cab's here."

"What cab? I never Then he realized what the taxi's arrival must mean and did his best to suck the surprise out of his voice. "Yes, of course. Thanks. I'll be right down."

THIRTY

"You from outa town, sir?" asked Otis McSweeney of the Yellow Checker Cab Company as they cruised through a part of Dallas the television cameras had never focused on, a part where vacant lots, weed-pocked pavements, peeling clapboard and rusting metal meant the houses tended not to have their photographs splashed across the Dallas Morning News property pages.

"Yes. A long way out."

"Only Fair Park, it's kinda quiet this time o' the year. You'll have the Cotton Bowl jus' about to yourself."

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes sir." Otis laughed. "Near a fact as they come." He seemed to be enjoying the joke. But since asking for an explanation would involve Harry revealing that he did not know where they were going, it seemed best to grin and say nothing.

A few minutes later, they slowed for some lights, then took a left through an imposing flag poled gateway and entered Fair Park. A seemingly infinite expanse of large unattended buildings and wide empty roads revealed itself through the drizzle. They passed a sign reading 749,000 square feet available for lease for conventions, rodeos, concerts, ice events, etc, swung past a vista of shuttered Art Deco pavilions and steered towards a distant ferris wheel presiding forlornly over a silent fun fair

Otis turned left into a road box-canyoned by the soaring flank of a sports stadium and slowed to a halt. "Cotton Bowl jus' for you, sir," he announced. That'll be eighteen dollars and fifty cents."

Harry handed Otis a twenty-dollar bill, then clambered out into the mild damp-rag day. He watched the taxi perform a slow U-turn, followed it back out onto the main boulevard and stared after it as it cruised away towards the exit. Beyond the gates, a sprawling metroplex went about its business. But in the 749,000 square feet of Fair Park on a wet November morning, time stood still. Emptier than any prairie, a desolation of unused space stretched its circumference around Harry, hollow with the memory of summer multitudes, loud with the absence of their voices.

Then, as the thrum of the taxi finally faded into the gentle hiss of the drizzle, another sound came to Harry's ears, that of a higher-pitched car engine, approaching slowly from behind him. He turned to see a mud-brown camper-van heading towards him from the fun fair It was fitted with a reflective windscreen, behind which the driver remained invisible. Harry stepped back, wondering if he had walked into an elaborate trap. If so, it had been adroitly sprung. He was alone and far from help of any kind.

The camper-van coasted to a stop in front of him and the side-door slid open. To Harry's immense relief, Donna looked out from the rear seat and beckoned for him to climb in. He did so without a word, sitting down beside her to find the occupants of the front seats staring at him over their shoulders. The driver was a thin frowning woman with black curly hair and an olive complexion, dressed in jeans and a leather fleece-lined jacket. The passenger was a tubby little man wearing a large hooded anorak over shirt, tie, razor-creased trousers and thin gold-buckled shoes. Snow-white hair flopped school boyishly over his brow, but his eyes were rheumy, his face lined like dried mud.

"Makepeace Steiner and Rawnsley Ablett," said Donna by way of superfluous introduction. "Harry Barnett."

"Hi, Harry," said Steiner.

"You should know I think this is crazy," said Ablett without the hint of a smile. "But I was outvoted."

"We're grateful to you for coming," put in Donna, laying her hand briefly on Harry's forearm. "All of us."

"We think you can help us," said Steiner.

"How?"

"We'd better keep moving. You tell him, Donna." Steiner started away, driving just as slowly as before. "Then he can tell us'

Tell you what?"

"Whether you'll do it," growled Ablett.

"It's like this, Harry," said Donna. "We've talked it over. Over and over. Sooner or later, Lazenby will track us down. What happened to Torben proves that. It took them six weeks to find him. Even if it takes them twice that to find us, we still won't be ready for them. The tape may be a lifeline. A short-circuit. Who knows without listening to it? But we can't listen to it without retrieving it from Lazenby's office. And we can't just walk in and help ourselves. If we try to break in and get caught, it'll be tantamount to suicide. So there's no way we can realistically attempt to get the tape."