Perilous Panacea (34 page)

Chapter Forty-Two

Applenu listened to the one-sided cell phone conversation between Lormes and Reedan. Although Reedan was free, his wife, who sat between him and Lormes in the back seat of this automobile headed for wherever, faced the same fate Reedan escaped.

Lormes snapped shut the phone. “That son of a bitch is going to cause us trouble,” he said. “It’s your fucking fault, Applenu. You let the bastard escape.”

“I did not let him escape.”

“What do you mean, he let him escape?” Beecher asked, glancing into the rearview mirror to look at him directly.

“When we thought Reedan was going to put out the fire, I saw him whisper something to Reedan, and then he went into the office,” Lormes said. “When he came out, Reedan took off spraying everybody with the fire extinguisher. Reedan heads for the office door, and it’s open. From the beginning we said that door must always be locked.”

“I didn’t unlock it. Somebody else must have.”

“The hell they did,” Maxwell said from the front passenger seat. “I went in there just before you did, and I had to use my key.”

“It looks like Hearn was right when he said he didn’t know whether you could be trusted,” Lormes said to Applenu. “He said even though you were an Iranian, Sherbani didn’t trust you.”

Applenu met Lori Reedan’s sideways glance and detected the flicker of a questioning or grateful smile for helping Curt as she realized he was now in the same situation she was in.

- - - - -

“Curt, wake up.”

Lori’s voice? A dream? When he finally forced his eyes open, he was lost. He blinked, letting his mind catch up and unscramble itself from the nightmare jumble of dreams he had just escaped, dreams haunted by the demented characters that ruined his life these past months. He lay on his side, his cut face burning, and his aching legs folded into a space too small for his long frame.

“You awake, Curt?”

Not Lori’s voice waking him. He twisted onto his back and gazed at the beige ceiling of the unmarked police car, the back seat shivering under him.

A thin voice called from far away: “Breaker-breaker, one-nine. Was somebody over there in the north-bound lane looking for one of them yellow Ryder rent-a-trucks? Over.”

“That’s right,” the voice in the front seat answered. “We just heard it’s up ahead.”

“That’s right, good buddy. I just passed it back at the eighty-nine-mile mark.”

“I thank you, good buddy.”

Curt sat up, his legs still stretched out on the seat.

Karl Eberhard laid the microphone on the front seat and glanced over his shoulder. “You think it’s them, Curt?” Even with the front seat back as far as it would go, Eberhard filled the driver’s seat up to the steering wheel. The large barrel of his upper torso dwarfed his head, which was further shrunk by his thirty-year-old crew cut. A smile usually decorated his baby-fat, smooth face with a never-changing youth. Today, without the smile and with the dark-blue, wrinkled circles under his faded-blue eyes, he looked as old and tired as Curt felt.

“You shouldn’t have come along, Karl,” Curt said.

“You’re in no shape to do it alone.”

Do what? Curt wondered as he recalled the waking nightmare that began when he found the note and pictures on his kitchen table. He collapsed into a chair, unsure about going on. Although totally spent emotionally and physically, it still wasn’t over. How could he go on? Then he panicked: Beth. He bolted from the chair, his body moving while his brain remained in the chair, not catching up until he stood inside her bedroom and focused on her undisturbed bed.

Back downstairs, he ran into Karl and Sarah coming up the steps from the front door. Karl led him into the kitchen and calmed him down. Sarah told him that Lori had left Beth with them. “Lori said she’d be back by eleven. She didn’t return, and she didn’t call.”

Sarah read the note on the legal pad and glanced at the pictures underneath. Horrified, she shoved them into the envelope and insisted he call Richard Saul, the FBI agent whose card she had gotten when he questioned her the previous afternoon. She ran home and returned with the card and her cell phone. She punched in the numbers and handed Curt the small phone.

He hesitated taking it. “Beecher’s note says no police if I want to see Lori again.”

Sarah persisted. “Just tell him what happened. He’ll know what to do.”

Curt took the phone and put it to his ear. After an eternity, the voice mail came on and Curt left a message for Saul to call him.

His first thoughts on Lormes and company centered on the small airstrip down by Oliver Springs. That’s where they must have flown him in, based on the lack of air traffic when they landed and the time it took them to get him to their factory after they landed. He decided they would be leaving there once it got light, but there would be no chance to take them by surprise down there.

Then he remembered the Ryder rental truck parked by the loading dock when he ran out of the building, the one they’d been loading earlier in the evening. From what now seemed years ago, he recalled Drafton mentioning New York. They would head north with that truck full of nuclear material. Why wait for them to contact him? Follow the truck back to them. Lormes, Applenu, and some others who had Lori might fly north to meet the truck. He decided to follow it and catch them by surprise. A long shot, but what else did he have, besides waiting for them to call and tell him where they were going to pick him up and kill him?

It was then that he remembered the cell phone number, which he retrieved from a notepad in his office. He dialed the number. After four rings, Lormes answered.

“This is Curt Reedan. I want to talk to my wife.”

“How did you get this number, Reedan?”

“You gave it to me when you recruited me for Margine Nuclear Technology.” Curt could hear other voices and a hum indicating they were in an automobile.

Curt heard Beecher say, “Give me that.” Beecher came on the phone. “Did you get my message, fuckhead?”

“Is Lori okay? Let me talk to her.”

Lori came on the phone. “Curt, are you okay? I’m…”

“She’s okay” Beecher said. “We will call you at six tonight. Just be there.” He hung up.

Curt decided his only hope was to catch up to them and confront them. Karl argued against the plan, but when Curt insisted, Karl wouldn’t let him go alone. It was Karl’s idea to use the police car so they had access to a CB as well as a police radio.

- - - - -

Curt swung his feet off the back seat and arranged them around the two rifles, a shotgun, and two pistols—a forty-five and a thirty-eight—on the floor. He stared up ahead for the truck. A green highway sign approached. He blinked, read PULASKI, but didn’t get the miles before it swung past. He stifled a yawn.

“How far have we come, Karl?”

“Over two-hundred miles. We’re in Virginia. We made good time ever since we got through that mess in Oak Ridge.”

When they hit the Oak Ridge Turnpike, it seemed everyone was trying to get out of the city, and they had to turn around and take the long way out of town. On the radio, the police were reporting that a big chemical spill was responsible for the evacuation.

In the front seat, the CB radio squawked about smokies up ahead. Eberhard lifted his foot from the accelerator, and the speedometer needle quickly dropped to the speed limit.

“There’s the truck,” Eberhard said.

Curt watched the big yellow box with black letters on the back and side strain up a hill half-a-mile ahead. It looked like the truck parked outside the factory, but this was the third such truck they had overtaken, the first two just outside of Knoxville. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe he should have waited for their call and then made plans, depending on their instructions.

“You say they’ve got enough plutonium in that truck to blow away several cities?” Eberhard asked. “While you were sleeping, I was thinking about how I’ve spent thirty-two years working on nuclear reactors…over half of my life. And now, as if Three Mile Island and Chernobyl weren’t enough, we’ve got this. Like always, there are some lines from Shakespeare that fit.”

“Shakespeare?” Incongruities in Eberhard’s personality constantly astounded Curt.

“Remember in Macbeth, where he says something like, ‘That we but teach bloody instructions, which being taught, return to plague the inventor.’? I don’t know why those lines stuck with me.”

“Bloody instructions” reminded Curt of Applenu. Was he also there against his will?

He saw the police car in the southbound lane as described on the CB and turned his attention to the yellow truck a quarter-of-a-mile ahead. Probably just another truck, somebody moving their family across country. No tension this time, not like for the other two. No tension, no disappointment. No stirring up the hate this time, he thought, leaving him with that constant ache of loneliness and apprehension that had settled into his bones like a crippling disease. What would they do to Lori this time?

After Eberhard saw the cops heading in the opposite direction, he speeded up. “When we catch up,” he said, “duck down in the seat while I drive by and have a look.”

“It’s not them, Karl. They’re probably somewhere in a motel asleep…or on another road.”

“I don’t think they’re sleeping. They’re probably trying to get to their home base as soon as possible. They intend to call you from there.”

“We don’t know where their home base is, so we don’t even know if they’re on this road. They might have taken I-75 north. Or they might have gone south.”

“They might have, but I-81 is our best bet. It’s the closest route to anywhere from Washington to Boston, from Pittsburgh to New York City. You said yourself they mentioned New York.”

Curt laid his hot face against the cool, black-vinyl seat. Sun-scoured green hills slid across his gaze, inviting him back to sleep. He blinked himself alert. Although he needed more rest, chaos and terror awaited him in his sleep like twin assassins. He turned back to the approaching truck.

Eberhard glanced back at Curt. With his jaw set, his fat-man’s smile from other days threatened, but did not surface. “You ready?”

They were in the right lane with two cars between them and the truck. Eberhard accelerated into the left lane and passed the first car, a yellow VW. “Okay, get down.”

“That car,” Curt yelled. “Drop back.”

“What?” Eberhard let up on the accelerator.

“Get back in the right lane.”

Eberhard drifted in behind the yellow VW. “What is it?”

“That black car behind the truck. A Lincoln, isn’t it? White-and-black plates, right?”

“A big Town Car with New York plates, so what?”

“It’s the car Beecher and Maxwell had out at our place last night.”

“You sure?”

“We’ve got the right truck.”

“Holy Christ. Now what?” Eberhard ran his left hand through his crew cut. “Holy Christ.”

“Drive past and look them over. See if you can see Lori.”

Curt stretched out on the seat as they approached the horror he had hoped to avoid.

“There’s a big guy driving.”

“Beecher.”

“Looks like somebody else is in the front seat. And there’s probably somebody in the back. They’ve got that dark glass, and it’s tough to make out how many or anything else about them.”

“Two in front and more in back?”

Lying on his back, Curt stared out the back window as they pulled up to the moving yellow box. Big black letters R-E-D-Y-R glided by the window as they moved toward the cab, which rode high above the road. Curt covered his face with his right arm so the driver would not recognize him if he looked down. When they rolled by the cab, Curt caught a glimpse of Markum—no mistaking his red head and freckled face.

“There’s another guy in the cab besides the driver.”

Eberhard accelerated away from the truck, and Curt raised his head to peer over the seat. He recognized the dark face of Simmons next to Markum.

In the front seat, the turn signal clicked a metronome beat, quick like Curt’s pulse. Eberhard pulled off the interstate and up an exit ramp; at the top, they crossed a highway and pulled onto the entrance ramp. Eberhard accelerated, and they raced back into the northbound traffic, three cars separating them from the Town Car.

“They’re all there,” Curt said. “All five or six of them. They didn’t take a plane out. Lori’s got to be in there.”

“Unless she’s…”

“I don’t want to hear it.” His breath quickened as he thought of the ordeal she had been through. The pictures on the table and video flashed into his mind, probably never to be blocked out. And it still wasn’t over.

“They probably had to fly the plane in to pick them up, and the fire changed their plans,” Eberhard said rapidly.

No longer interested in why they were there, Curt’s mind searched for a plan. Every time he was chased, he scampered around, running at random, never knowing what to do next, which way to move. Now the pursuer—or was he?—he still didn’t have a plan.

“We can use the radio to call the police,” Eberhard said.

“What good would that do? By the time we explain our problem, these guys will be out of the local jurisdiction. Besides, who’d believe somebody calling from a stolen police car?”

“Then call the FBI again,” Eberhard said and pulled his cell phone from his breast pocket along with a calling card and handed them across the seat to Curt. “Call that guy Saul.”

Curt dialed Saul’s number and again got his voice mail. He left another message telling him where they were and to call Eberhard’s cell phone.

Eberhard slowed. “They’re signaling to pull off the road.” He braked and quickly brought the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road about a hundred yards behind the Town Car.

Beecher got out of the driver’s side, and Applenu got out of a rear door. They exchanged places and pulled back onto the road.

“If they’re changing drivers, they’re not going to get off this road for awhile,” Eberhard said. “Get on that phone and get the FBI’s number in Knoxville and see if they can find Saul. They can be here in no time with a helicopter.”

- - - - -

In the middle of the back seat, Lori opened her eyes when the car pulled over and Applenu and Beecher changed seats. When she saw Maxwell stir in the front passenger seat and turn to look back, she again pretended to sleep. A torrent of questions, regrets, and fear whirled around her brain and kept her from sinking into the plush black-leather seats and falling asleep. Just remember you’re a farm girl, she thought again. You’re tough.