Shadow of Eden (10 page)

He lay back down and snuggled closer to her. “We rarely have that level of clarity or that level of consequence. I can’t remember ever having that feeling before. Mostly, we go through our lives wondering if we are making the best choices but we can’t tell, not really. It is a strange place to be . . . And in all reality, I’ll never be there again.”

“Well,” she said knuckling his hair. “I’m glad you had your big insight. And I hope you never have an opportunity to be that clear again.”

“Yeah, yeah. Now, lift up your legs.” Steve pulled her closer to him, wrapping his legs up under hers.

He softly stroked her stomach as she lay on her back. “You feel wonderful.” His hands were strong and confident, triggering a flow of desire. His fingers found her navel and teased her with light circles before sliding down and between her opening thighs. She realized how much she needed to connect with him. Today had been unsatisfying. He had been close, touching her often, but not really with her, not in a way that she needed. Now she finally had him to herself.

His erection pressed against her thigh
.
Anne pulled Steve’s face up to hers and kissed him deeply. He smiled at her between kisses. “I want you.”

Yes
. She had almost lost him and now he was back and safe with her. She reached down and held him in her hand.
Welcome home, hero.

Chapter 19

L
inda Resnick hung up her phone and pushed back from her desk. Walking to the window, she gazed out over the morning’s mist-enshrouded trees that lined the Potomac, dark gray from the reflected overcast sky. She watched a couple of outboard fishing boats make their way down river, the anglers tossing their lines with practiced snaps of their rods.

The call had been from the US ambassador to China, Pierre Justice. When the boats finally slipped from view, she turned her thoughts back to the call.

“Things here are in flux, Linda,” he had said. “It’s four days since the massacre and they are all afraid to say anything—even my highest placed and usually most candid contacts. Everybody is diving for cover. Something big is going on, bigger than I have so far seen, and I can’t get a hold of it.”

The conclusion she had to make was that someone was pulling the strings behind the scenes, but not yet secure enough to go public. Was Chow still in power, or was there a running succession struggle going on even now? Clearly, the signals indicated great instability at the top, but without knowing any details, she was left in the insecure position of having to make unilateral national policy. It was tough to dance without a partner.

Justice’s call capped a long, rough weekend of trying to orchestrate international condemnation of China’s actions with little success.

Her frustrations had been nicely summed up in today’s
Washington Post
. Following the slaughter, it had reported, the China News Agency translated its mass suicide story into all the major languages and distributed the fiction widely to the foreign media, complete with video of army troops walking at dawn among the dead demonstrators in apparent shock at the mayhem. China’s account invoked the mass insanity surrounding religious cults and specifically cited the Jonestown slaughter. The
Post’s
analysis suggested the account had had the intended effect of providing a semi-plausible explanation for the deaths and thereby blunting overt international criticism of China’s actions.

CNN, too, had actively distributed their shocking images—the pictures of Amy Chan and the nameless, impassive face of the army private who had killed her. With those images splashed on the covers of nearly every non-Chinese news publication, the world knew the truth. But, as the
Post
had written, even though everyone knew what had really happened, China’s story and its economic power, had effectively swayed official positions to its side and after the first twenty-four hours, few governments had publicly condemned the slaughter. The story so closely mirrored the State Department’s internal findings that Resnick wondered if the
Post
had gotten its information from an internal source.

Not reported were the CNN staff’s efforts to escape China. After hearing Larry Calhoun’s idea on how to help Ernie Whiteside, she had readily agreed and requested aid through MI6 for a British agent to assist with the CNN news crew’s extraction. Calhoun had been correct that England maintained a considerable undercover presence in its former colony, and MI6 had agreed to release an agent to extricate Herb Wong, George Liu, and the others.

As currently formulated, their plan was to make their way north, overland through China until they were opposite Taiwan. From there they would attempt to charter an aircraft or boat to cross the Taiwan Straits into Taiwan. A complication was the need to rescue the injured technician from the hospital. If they could not accomplish that objective, they would be forced to leave him in Hong Kong.

Resnick would welcome the news that they were safe, but in view of the muted international response to China’s massacre, she also wanted the PR that would come from their successful emergence from China.

Glancing at her clock, she saw it was almost nine o’clock and nearly time for the morning National Security Council meeting. Resnick had spent her morning preparing her policy recommendations for the briefing, anemic in light of the international recalcitrance. President Dixon wanted meaty response options, but her dilemma—and the President’s—was that any unilateral US moves that would hurt the Chinese, would also hurt American interests. Dixon was unwilling to do that. The other options were strictly symbolic—for public consumption—and everyone knew it.

The phone rang, her official phone, not the outdated AT&T Merlin system that provided standard State communications. This was the direct access line from heads of state and their ambassadors. She looked at her watch, seven minutes to the meeting. If she answered the phone she would be late . . .

She picked it up.

Chapter 20

Phoenix, Arizona

T
he hallways of Banner Samaritan Hospital had been freshly wallpapered in a bright yellow pattern, but the pictures had not yet been hung, giving the place a hollow, institutional appearance. Steve walked into the 4B nurses station and up to the white Formica secretary’s counter. Spinning the lazy Susan chart rack to the right slot, he pulled out the plastic loose-leaf chart with ‘Rosenwell’ written in block letters on its spine, his first consultation following the Thanksgiving weekend.

Still on London time, he was up and in the hospital by five-thirty. He hadn’t been able to sleep since his return anyway, his nights filled with visions of plummeting out of the sky while helplessly pulling on unresponsive controls as the ground raced up towards him. Getting back to the hospital actually felt good; something to occupy his mind.

Lying on the counter, he saw a two day-old newspaper that had his face plastered on the front page. The lead story shouted “Phoenix Neurosurgeon Saves Diving Jet,” in huge letters across the top. He rolled it up and slid it into the trash. The headline still irked him.

After reviewing the chart, he stepped into the darkened hospital room to observe the recumbent figure on the bed. A young woman in her mid-twenties lay still as if she were sleeping, then abruptly, her eyes flew open and she screamed in terror, flailing her arms like she was trying to fight off an attacker. It was right out of a horror movie. The attending nurse quickly closed the door. An older woman, her mother, Steve surmised, bent over the patient stroking her forehead and speaking soft words.

Then he saw the irregular muscular twitches in the young woman’s face, neck, and shoulders. He walked to her bedside and touched her right shoulder, evaluating the movements.
It couldn’t be.
But, he cautioned himself, there were entire books written on diseases that cause delusions and myoclonus, the medical term for the irregular jerks. Hers could be any one of them.

She stopped screaming and sank back into the bed with heavy lids half-closed.

“Hello,” he said to the woman standing next to the bed. “I’m Dr. James.”

“I’m Edith, her mother. Dr. Reese said you’d be coming.” She looked down at her daughter. “This is Shirley.” Edith’s worry lines around her eyes and her thinning, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a clip betrayed a hard fifty or so years. She was dressed in a pair of sweat pants and a large American Eagle t-shirt with faded gold lettering across the front.

He leaned towards Shirley and asked softly, “Can you hear me?”

Her eyes opened and she looked at him with scant expression. “Yeah. You going to give me another shot?” Her voice was groggy, either from the disease or sedation. Her chart indicated she had been getting injections of Haldol, a powerful tranquilizer.

He smiled. “Not me. I can’t stand needles. I’m Dr. James and I want to talk to you for a little bit.” She had a pleasant, surprisingly familiar face with fine, straight brown hair that cascaded across the pillow. A light blue hospital gown draped her slender body.

“I’m so scared,” she wept, her eyes wide and teary. “It feels like they’re coming to get me. They’re so real.”

“It’ll be okay, Shirley. Tell me what you see when you get your nightmares.” He pulled up a chair and sat down.

She got a frightened look in her eyes. “Men . . . bad men, and monsters, like when I was little—but worse, you know, and really scary, like it’s really going on. Can you make them go away?”

“I’m going to find out what’s causing your visions and try to stop them, but I’ll need you and your mother to help me.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“Can you tell me what happened to her?” Steve asked Edith. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve already told it lots of times.”

Edith nodded faintly and thought a minute before speaking. “I guess it began around the time when she started complaining about headaches. They weren’t too bad at first, but more than normal, you know?”

“When was this?”

“About three months ago. Back then she lived with her boyfriend, so I didn’t see her too often and couldn’t tell much.”

“But they got worse?”

“Yeah. Then about a couple of months ago her boyfriend left her and she had to give up her apartment. After two years! I’d expected more from that boy. She moved back in with me, not that I could really tell. She would go into her room and not come out for hours. I figured it was depression or something, so I got her in to see Dr. Reese who put her on Prozac, I think. That seemed to help her some and she slept better at night, but it didn’t do anything for her headaches at all. After a while, she stopped the Prozac and began taking my Darvocet until they ran out. That was about three weeks ago.”

“And then?”

“Her depression seemed to just get worse. She would lie in bed most of the day and wouldn’t go outside. She wouldn’t go see Dr. Reese again. I don’t know why.”

“When did she develop those twitches?”

“Just recently.” Edith paused. “Maybe a week ago. Maybe ten days. I can’t really say.” She played with a lock of Shirley’s hair.

“And her nightmares?”

“Oh, my God, those nightmares.” She sighed. “When my Shirley was a little girl, she had the worst nightmares. Night terrors, her pediatrician said. All the way through sixth grade, she would come into my bedroom trying to hide from the monsters that were trying to get her. It was terrible. She finally got over them, but now they’re much worse than ever.”

“More when the shaking is worse?”

“They do seem to happen at the same time, but I never really put them together before.”

“What made you bring her in?”

Edith’s lower lip trembled and eyes welled up. “I was late getting home from work and—” She pulled a wadded up Kleenex from her blouse pocket and carefully wiped the corners of her eyes, each time wrapping her finger with a dry part of the tissue. “I heard her screaming and she, she didn’t recognize me.”

“A nightmare?”

Edith nodded. “It was just awful. My baby, my little baby. I . . . I just couldn’t help her.”

“And the nightmares? Getting worse?”