The Enclave (26 page)
“Your name is all they’d need.” Swain hesitated. “Then, of course, they’d uncover your military background—your knowledge of how to penetrate a facility like this, short-circuit cameras, even provide false visuals. Not to mention your mental health issues.”
Cam stared at him, cold to the core.
How can he know I have that
knowledge? That information is classified.
But then, so was the matter of his “mental health issues” which both Swain and Gen apparently knew about. Which meant Swain somehow had access to government files, even those the government had supposedly destroyed. And he wanted Cam to know it. . . .
His coming up here alone, the lack of guards, the relaxed meeting with Swain had eased somewhat the sense of being regarded as a criminal that he’ d experienced when escorted handcuffed into the lower security level. Stepping into the familiar meeting room, eerie as it was in the semidarkness, had implied that he was an equal—valued, free, and innocent. And that was exactly what Swain had intended, he realized now. To relax him, then drive in this knifepoint of potential disaster.
Swain smiled. “Still think we should call the police?”
“But you have his body. You can’t just dump it somewhere in the desert and hope no one will find it.”
Swain sipped his brandy. “We do have on-site facilities for taking care of the dead, you know.”
The Vault. He meant to put him in the Vault. There were over two hundred bodies frozen in their cryogenic canisters, four to each canister. To demand an inspection would be like opening a score of graves at the local cemetery.
“You can’t just make him disappear.”
Swain shrugged. “He was distraught. He took a hike into the mountains. The terrain is treacherous there. People get lost all the time. Most are never found.”
Cameron shivered. This was the story of Andrea Stopping.
“On the other hand, many here will testify that Manuel was an irresponsible person, egotistical and easily angered. No one would be surprised if, in a fit of pique over his unjustified—in his eyes—demotion he might decide to simply walk away. It would be an easy matter to hitch a ride back to Tucson.”
Cam swallowed the nausea crawling up the back of his throat.
“We’ve deliberately restricted knowledge of this incident to a handful of people,” Swain went on. “You, myself, Frederick, Paul Nevins, and the three men who arrested you are the only ones who know. The guards know only what you claimed and they saw, which unfortunately is significant enough to create a security risk for us, so we’ll be sending them off to our South American facility before week’s end.”
Swain finished off the rest of his brandy, set the glass on the tray, then raised his eyes to meet Cam’s. “Thus we can leave things . . . for as long as you like.”
Cam could hardly breathe, Swain’s cobralike gaze holding him spellbound—horrified, helpless, waiting for the fatal strike. At length, when it did not come, Cam swallowed and pulled his eyes away, staring out at the three stars of Orion’s belt lowering now behind the mountains. Other stars, brighter than those in the dark sky swam across his vision.
“There is another bit from our surveillance videos you should see,” Swain said, picking up the remote off the tray. He pressed a button and the painting of the Indian warrior rotated clockwise to horizontal aspect and became a flat-screen monitor.
He pressed the remote again, and the screen lit with a frozen, fuzzy night shot of a loading dock dimly lit by a light source offscreen to the right. As they watched, one of the campus’s service carts appeared out of the shadows and backed up to the dock. The driver had Cam’s build and wore a baseball cap, sweatshirt, and jeans very much like ones Cam owned. His face obscured by shadows, the man leapt onto the dock and disappeared through the door. Shortly he returned with a gurney, which he collapsed at the dock’s edge. Then he stepped into the back of his cart and wrestled what appeared to be a corpse wrapped in black plastic onto the gurney’s bed, then extended the stretcher’s legs and wheeled it into the Vault.
“Records, of course, will indicate which canister went online tonight,” Swain said.
Cam sagged back into the chair, swallowed hard, and finally said, “What do you want from me?”
“I want your mind, son. I want your heart and soul and strength.” He smiled at Cam’s shocked expression and shook his head. “I just want your loyalty, Cameron. I want you to believe me when I say I have your very best interests at heart and trust that I know what I’m doing. And I want you to share my vision.”
Cam could only stare at him, drowning in the depths of sudden disaster.
Finally, Swain sighed wearily and said, “Never mind. For now just go on with your plans. Head in to Tucson tomorrow. Have your day off. If you can make the security meeting, do so.” He paused. “Just make sure you
do
come back.”
He led Cam back to the elevator then and, as the doors opened, clapped his shoulder with a warmth that seemed utterly inappropriate. “We’re in this mess together, Cameron, but your part is by far the most precarious. I know you didn’t kill him, but my loyalty and heartfelt endorsement of your character will not go far in a court of law. Especially when they bring out the circumstances of your military discharge. . . .”
He gave Cam a quick smile, then pressed him into the car. “It’s late. You should get some sleep. It’ll all seem better in the morning, I promise.”
Cam stood in the car, facing his superior as the doors closed between them. He put a hand to the railing as once more the floor dropped sickeningly beneath his feet, almost like his life was doing right now. And he was certain that not much of anything would be better in the morning.
At 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, Cam checked out at the reception desk in the ziggurat’s high-ceilinged main lobby, then headed down to the underground parking garage northeast of the building. It was earlier than he usually left, but despite a second night of getting to bed around 3:00, he’d found himself unable to sleep.
There was something deeply disturbing in knowing he was being framed for murder. It was the sort of thing that happened to other people—most of them on TV crime dramas—not to him. Especially not the “him” of today, the mild-mannered, absentminded but respected geneticist with several important papers published in the better journals and winner of more than one research award. Memory of his interview with Swain in that cozy theater room beneath the gaze of the stern-faced Indian seemed as much a part of some bad dream as his race through the Afghan tunnels. And yet, like the tunnels, the theater room was real, and both the race and the interview had happened.
This early on a Sunday morning, the garage was tomb-silent. His footsteps echoed eerily around him as he strode down the concrete ramp past shadowed rows of parked cars. The back of his neck prickled with the sense of being watched. And not just by security cameras, but by actual human eyes.
Despite his efforts to appear relaxed, he found his pace quickening, especially when he spied his red Jeep Cherokee in the line of cars on his right. He reached it without incident, opened the door, tossed his duffle and laptop onto the passenger seat, and got in. And immediately hit the door-lock switch.
Then he sat there, staring at the concrete wall beyond the Jeep’s hood, breathing deeply as his stomach churned and his hands trembled and lights flared across his vision with such brightness he thought he might pass out. Or fall into another flashback.
But he did neither, and the anxiety passed. When he was himself again, he unzipped the external pocket on his duffle, pulled out his iPod, hooked it to his belt, and put on the earphones. Then he switched on the ignition, fastened his seat belt, and put the Jeep in reverse. As he backed out of his parking space and headed up the ramp toward the ground-level exit, still several turns above him, his rearview mirror showed a figure standing in the lane behind him, watching him go.
So apparently his paranoia wasn’t as baseless as he’d thought. Swain had implied Cam would be watched today, and Cam did not doubt for a moment that the RFID adhered to his windshield not only lifted the parking garage gates from his path but transmitted the exact location of his vehicle to that high-tech security center hidden in the ziggurat’s bowels. But with all of that, the fact they’d set an eyes-on tail after him, too, gave it all a greater reality. And confirmed his fears that Swain did indeed suspect he might bolt.
Thus, as he drove out the garage’s exit and onto the divided two-lane road that led out to Highway 92, he was not surprised to see a blue sedan slowly emerge from the parking garage in his wake.
He kept his speed moderate, noting the sedan pull out onto the blacktop behind him. It was a Honda Accord, and it matched his speed, keeping the distance between them constant. The curving blacktop rolled up and down over the hilly terrain, beneath a cloudless sky washed with the rose of the coming dawn.
It took Cam about five minutes to reach the curving stonework walls of the Institute’s main gate. He waited a bit at the stop sign, hoping his tail might pull up behind him so he could get a look at the driver, but when the car didn’t appear, he gave up and turned onto the highway, heading west. Only as he crested the first hill did one last glance in the rearview mirror show the Honda pulling up to the same stop sign. Cam was over the hill and out of sight before he saw which way it turned, but it didn’t matter. If the car was following him, he’d see it soon enough.
And so he did, not five minutes later, the Accord hanging back enough to be frequently obscured by the road’s dips and turns. Just for fun, one time when he had the tailing car in sight, he suddenly sped up as he went over a hill, hoping to trick the driver into thinking he was making a break for it. Instead he slowed on the downslope, so that he was going about half his original pace when he started up the next hill, a long, straight ascent that would keep the two of them in sight of each other for some time.
Sure enough there came the Honda, popping over the top of the hill at a fair clip, then braking sharply when the driver saw him much closer than expected. Cam chuckled his amusement and wondered if he should try it again. Eyes on the rearview mirror, he was readying himself to gun the engine when a gold Chevy Corvette came flying over the hillcrest, blasted around the slow-moving Accord, and raced up the incline toward Cam. The coupe blew around him on a double yellow line and thundered up the highway way too fast for the road.
It was still in the other lane as it approached the hilltop when a white cargo van appeared in its path. The Corvette swerved hard right, then left to avoid the shoulder, fishtailing over the crest and out of sight. Cam came over the hill in time to see the car swing wide along the leftward curve, hit the dirt shoulder and go airborne, tumbling off the roadway in a cloud of dust.
By the time Cam caught up, it had come to rest upside down on the grassy slope of a shallow drainage area, front fender smashed into a small yucca. Its roof was crunched, its windows shattered, its wheels still spinning.
Pulling off the road, Cam parked and ran down the hillside, through the ruptured barbed-wire fence, and on to the car. When he arrived, the driver was already wriggling out through the empty windshield frame.
Cam pulled him the last bit out and helped him to his feet. He was a heavyset, balding, middle-aged man, covered with dust. A cut on his forehead bled profusely, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. “You all right?” Cam asked.
“Yeah . . . just shaken up a bit.” The man looked at his car and swore softly.
“Let’s get you up to the road,” Cam said, “and I’ll call an ambulance.”
“I don’t need an ambulance. A tow truck, though,
that
I’ll need.”
As they climbed back up to the road, the white cargo van pulled off the road in front of Cam’s Jeep. It eased forward to the middle of the curve where the Corvette had gone off and stopped, keeping the engine running. The passenger window lowered, and from his seat inside, the driver asked if the man was all right.
Cam said he was, and after helping the bleeding stranger settle at the roadside, he stepped to the van’s window. “He says he’s okay. Just cut his brow.”
“Could be in shock,” the van driver said. “Could have a concussion, too. I better call.” He picked up his cell phone as Cam glanced back at the Corvette driver, still sitting where Cam had left him, mopping the blood from his face with a handkerchief. At Cam’s back, the van’s side door slid open. Suddenly a bag dropped over his head and he was yanked into the vehicle. The side door slammed, the engine revved, and the van made a hard, screeching left turn, heading east as it had been when it first met the Corvette.
Everything happened so fast, by the time Cam realized he was being kidnapped, it was too late: the strong sweet smell of a soporific was filling his head with black cotton.
The next thing he knew, the hood was gone and he was reclining in a raised-back hospital bed. Rudy Aguilar sat in a chair beside him. The janitor disguise was only partially gone. His white hair fell in thick locks over his shoulders, but he was clean-shaven and minus the wrinkles, his dark eyes a sharp contrast to the pale hair and brows.
“I kinda thought I might see you today,” Cam murmured.
Rudy held up a white plastic cup. “Water?”
Cam took it, drank, then pushed himself up in the bed and glanced around at the tiny featureless room. “Where are we?”
“Command HQ,” Rudy said with a wry smile. “Such as it is.”
Which wasn’t exactly what Cam had meant, but obviously Rudy was going to play things close to the vest for a while.
“Swain had a tail on me.”
Rudy nodded. “Blue Honda Accord. Pulled over to watch when the Corvette crashed. So far he’s still on your tail. Or at least he thinks he is.” Rudy explained that as his men were yanking Cam into the white cargo van, a double had stepped out of it to take his place. The double would stay with the injured Corvette driver—also one of Rudy’s team—until a tow truck arrived. Relieved of his charge, the double would continue on to Tucson, where he’ d do Cam’s laundry, visit the U of A, then lead the Accord on a roundabout journey through town, withdrawing cash from various ATMs. Around midafternoon he’ d head south toward Nogales at the Mexican border, only to change his mind when he got there and turn back for the Institute, stopping at Catalina State Park, just north of Tucson, to eat and watch the sunset.
