The Genesis Key (30 page)

Chapter Fifty-Four

Bethesda, Maryland.

I
t was dark by the time Kathleen pulled into the garage of her apartment building, weary and defeated. Her mind was numb, her clothes and skin covered with soot and grime. There was dried blood in her hair and on her face from the cut on her forehead.

Kathleen guided her Subaru into her assigned space on Level P4, parked, locked up, and made her way groggily to the elevator. Every muscle in her body was stiff and aching. She was already thinking about the hot bath she would take when she got upstairs. She would unplug her phone, turn off the TV, pour a glass of Chardonnay, and just sink into the tub. There, she could finally do some thinking. She needed to sort everything out in her head and figure out what to do next.

A good night's sleep wouldn't hurt either.

She arrived at the sixth floor, stepped into the landing, and began making her way toward her apartment at the end of the hallway. She was a few steps shy of her door when a terrifying thought suddenly occurred to her.

She wheeled around and walked quickly to the other end of the hallway, where a small window overlooked the visitors' parking lot. She stood on tiptoe and peered out the grimy window.

She recognized the canary-yellow Mustang that had been parked at the front of the lot for nearly three months. How someone had managed to keep that rust-bucket there for so long without it being towed away was a mystery to her. She also saw a red Toyota pickup truck that belonged to one of her neighbors and a black Corvette that belonged to the current boyfriend of the blond bombshell on seven.

But what about that one?

Kathleen's heart skipped a beat as she spied a shiny black BMW double-parked at the back of the lot. Without question, it was the same make and model she'd seen this morning. The one driven by the man who'd threatened to kill her. She looked around frantically, half-expecting the man to be behind her at that very moment. But the hallway was quiet and empty.

Was he in her apartment?

Kathleen raced to the elevator and pushed the DOWN button. She nervously eyed her apartment door, just twenty feet away, fully expecting it to swing open at any moment to reveal the man with the purplish scar.

“Come on!
” she whispered, pressing the down button several more times.

The elevator arrived with a loud
ding
, and she winced at the noise. As soon as the doors opened, she slipped inside and jabbed the P4 button several times.

Thirty seconds later, the elevator reached her parking level. Looking both directions and seeing no one, Kathleen tentatively stepped out and hurried to her car. She buckled herself in, started the engine, and lurched out of her parking space. She maneuvered quickly through the garage, braking hard at each turn with a squeal of tires as she spiraled up three levels to P1.

With a wave of her electronic pass, the unmanned entrance gate to the garage automatically lifted. She pulled out and turned right onto Sandalwood Street, slowing down momentarily to glance up at the living-room window of her apartment.

A man's face was staring down at her.

Then he was gone.

Kathleen gasped and floored the accelerator, sending her Subaru peeling wildly down Sandalwood Street.

Chapter Fifty-Five

“T
here she goes!” Bill McCreary exclaimed, pointing at Kathleen Sainsbury's car as it made a sharp right turn onto Old Georgetown Road about two blocks away.

“I'm on it,” replied Goodwin, punching the accelerator of the Suburban.

“Where's she going?” McCreary muttered under his breath.

“I dunno, boss. But we'll find out.” Goodwin made a hard right onto Old Georgetown Road and maneuvered his vehicle skillfully through traffic until it was approximately ten car lengths behind the silver Subaru.

“G
od
damn
it!” barked Venfeld as he turned away from the window and rushed to the door of Kathleen Sainsbury's apartment. He barreled out into the hallway, slammed the door hard behind him, and bounded quickly to the elevator. When the elevator failed to arrive within ten seconds, he cursed again and sprinted to the end of the hallway, toward the fire stairs.

He took the steps two at a time, nearly losing his balance as he flew down six flights to the lobby level. He burst through the stairwell door, banked hard left, and rushed out the back door into the visitors' lot behind the building. The unexpected presence of a brightly painted red-and-yellow tow truck struck him immediately. It took a moment for him to realize what was happening. “Hey!” he screamed at the man standing beside the tow truck. “What the hell are you doing?”

The tow operator remained unfazed and continued pressing up on the hydraulic lever on the side of the tow truck until it had finished lifting the front end of Venfeld's BMW off the ground.

Venfeld raced over and got directly in the man's face. “I said, what the hell are you doing?”

The tow truck driver didn't flinch. Without removing the lit cigarette that dangled from the side of his mouth, he replied in a slow, backcountry drawl, “You're parked illegally.”

“I don't give a damn!” Venfeld snapped. “Put my car down.”

“Towing fee's two hundred dollars.
Cash.
”

Venfeld's eyes hardened. He reached into this coat pocket, pulled out his Beretta, and aimed it at the man's chest. “How about this instead?”

The man's expression barely changed. Apparently, he'd been through this before. “All right, fella, take it easy.” He pressed the hydraulic lever down without saying another word.

Venfeld watched anxiously as his BMW slowly leveled out and the harnesses were unhooked.

“Now, get your truck out of my way!” Venfeld said as he slipped into the driver's seat of his BMW, slamming the door shut.

Venfeld gunned the beemer and squealed out of the visitors' lot. He'd lost a lot of time, and he knew Dr. Sainsbury's car would be long gone by now. But it didn't matter; he knew exactly where she was going.

As he drove, Venfeld plugged a small electronic device into his navigation system and pushed a button on the portable unit. Seconds later, a bright red dot appeared on the street map on the BMW's navigation console.

Venfeld smiled. As it turned out, Zafer had managed to do something right after all. The small GPS tracker that he'd placed inside the wheel well of Dr. Sainsbury's car was still working like a charm.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Sunset Knoll, Maryland.

“S
orry, visiting hours are over,” said Ellie McDougal, the evening shift supervisor at Garrison Manor. Her deep, booming voice reverberated throughout the cavernous lobby and down the long corridors leading to the residents' rooms.

Kathleen Sainsbury stepped closer to the front desk and removed her dark glasses. “Hi, Ellie,” she said.

“Ms. Sainsbury, is that you?” Ellie exclaimed, finally recognizing her.

Kathleen nodded sheepishly. She knew she looked awful.

“Oh my word! Are you okay? What happened?”

“Let's just say it's been a rough day,” said Kathleen, forcing a smile.

“My goodness! Let me get you a wet towel.” Ellie began lifting her large frame out of her chair with considerable effort.

Kathleen held out her hand to stop her. “No, it's fine, Ellie. Really.”

Ellie sat back down slowly without taking her eyes off Kathleen.

“I was actually hoping I could sleep in my grandfather's room tonight. You think that would be okay?”

“Well, you're supposed to get overnight stays approved in advance, but . . .” Ellie tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips together, weighing the situation. “I guess it would be okay. I'll send the orderly with some extra sheets and a blanket.”

“Thanks,” said Kathleen with a relieved smile.

Kathleen made her way to her grandfather's room on the third floor and unlocked the door. The room was entirely dark, save for several bright stripes of moonlight streaming through the Venetian blinds. Her grandfather was sound asleep in his bed, mouth open, snoring loudly. Kathleen approached him, put her hand lightly on his shoulder, and smiled. He'd always been a heavy sleeper. Alzheimer's hadn't changed that. She wondered what he was dreaming about and whether his dreams were more lucid than his memory.

Checking her watch, she was surprised to find it was already past eleven o'clock. She desperately needed a shower and some sleep. She fished her car keys out of her pants pocket and placed them quietly on the glass coffee table in front of the sofa. She was just about to slip off her grungy jeans when the lump in her other pocket jogged her memory.

She pulled out the contents of her right pocket then plopped down onto the couch to study each object carefully in the moonlight. There was Agent Wills's business card, which she placed on the left-hand side of the coffee table. There was Bill McCreary's business card, which she positioned beneath Wills's card. There was the small, neoprene sample bottle with the smudged label, which she positioned upright next to the two business cards. And there was the tiny jump drive—no larger than her thumb—that Carlos had given her this morning, just before the explosion.

She held up the jump drive in the moonlight and considered it for a moment.
What did Carlos say was on here?
It took a while for her to remember—this morning seemed like an eternity ago. Then, it came to her. Carlos had said something about drafting a patent application, which he'd saved to the jump drive. Kathleen twisted the jump drive slowly between her thumb and forefinger, pondering that fact for a few seconds.

Suddenly, she sprang into action. Picking up her grandfather's phone, she dialed extension 1000.

“Front desk,” answered Ellie McDougal in a quick, professional manner.

“Ellie, it's Kathleen Sainsbury. Do you guys have a computer I could use?”

“A computer? Uh . . . well, there's one in the rec room on the first floor, but it's locked right now.”

“Ellie, I know I'm pushing my luck here, but could you unlock it for a few minutes? I need to check something really important.”

There was a moment of silence followed by a heavy sigh on Ellie's end.

“Please,” Kathleen said plaintively, “I know I'm asking a lot . . .”

“Okay,” Ellie relented. “Meet me down there and I'll unlock it for you.”

F
ive minutes later, Kathleen and Ellie McDougal were standing outside the Garrison Manor recreation room. “I really shouldn't be doing this,” Ellie grumbled as she unlocked the door using one of several dozen keys attached to an enormous key ring.

“I know. Thank you very much. I
promise
I won't be long.”

“Just make sure to lock it behind you when you're done, okay?” said Ellie, making no effort to conceal her discomfort with the whole situation.

“I will.”

Ellie McDougal walked away, and Kathleen entered the darkened rec room. She quickly found the light switch and flipped it on. At one end of the large room, several rows of couches and chairs were arranged in concentric semicircles around a massive, flat-screen television set. The walls at that end were adorned with old movie posters—
Gone With the Wind
,
Casablanca
, and the like.

In the center of the room were a number of game tables, each surrounded by four folding chairs. A few of the tabletops had preprinted checkerboards; others were covered with green felt.

At Kathleen's end of the room, approximately fifteen upholstered chairs were arranged in groups of two and three, each group centered around a small, round coffee table. Magazine racks and several bookcases lined the walls. In one corner was a small wooden table holding a slightly outdated desktop computer and CRT monitor. Kathleen made her way to the computer and turned it on.

It seemed to take forever for the machine to boot up. But, eventually, it whirred to life and a version of Windows appeared on the screen, apparently functional and ready for use. Kathleen slipped the jump drive into a USB port on the back of the computer, and, seconds later, a small window popped onto the screen showing a single file named “patent_app.doc.” She double clicked and opened it.

The document was much larger than she'd expected—eighty-four pages in total. A smile crept across her face. “Carlos, you outdid yourself,” she whispered. She quickly scrolled down through the document and saw page after page of text like the following:

She'd seen enough. She sat back, crossed her arms, and thought about Carlos lying in a hospital bed somewhere.

“L
eft turn ahead in . . . two hundred feet,” announced the monotone female voice of Luce Venfeld's navigation system. Venfeld slowed his BMW and spotted the red roof of the Garrison Manor retirement home ahead on the left. He was just about to make the left turn into the driveway when he changed his mind.
Better to drive by
, he decided. He straightened the wheel and cruised slowly by, taking note of Kathleen Sainsbury's silver Subaru parked at the front entrance.
Bull's-eye.

Then something else caught his eye . . .

Immediately next door to Garrison Manor, in a bank parking lot, Venfeld spotted a white Chevy Suburban with dark tinted windows parked lengthwise along the hedge dividing the two properties. “Damn it
,
” he muttered as he drove by, being careful not to tap his brakes or speed up too rapidly.

A quarter mile down the road, well out of sight of Garrison Manor and the white Suburban, Venfeld doused the BMW's headlights and pulled into the driveway of the Daniel J. Hicks Funeral Home, a small, white brick building with black shutters and a gray roof. He parked behind the building, out of view of the main road. He cut the engine and waited in silence for several minutes before finally emerging quietly from his car. He carefully inspected the chain-link fence at the back of the funeral-home property, beyond which lay the forty-seven manicured acres of Mount Hope Memorial Gardens.

After confirming that no one was looking, Venfeld scaled the chain-link fence and dropped down onto the cemetery grounds on the other side. He walked swiftly along the fence line, guided by the light of the waxing quarter moon, dodging tree trunks, prickly rosebushes, and the occasional stray burial marker, until he reached the back of the Garrison Manor grounds. Through the fence, he gazed at the facility's two residential wings, stretching toward him like open arms. The building was nearly entirely dark, except for the flickering blue luminescence of TV sets in some of the rooms. As quietly as he could, he scaled the fence again and landed on the Garrison Manor lawn with a soft thud. Stooping low, he scurried to the nearest tree—a massive white oak—and crouched behind its trunk.

From his new vantage point some fifty feet behind the building, Venfeld scanned the ground floor, looking for an obvious way in. Almost immediately, his eyes came to rest on an orange pinpoint of light in a dark recess near the back door of the central hall. He stared at it for several seconds, trying to figure out what it was.

Suddenly, it moved
.

R
eggie Jones took a deep drag from his joint, held it in his lungs for several seconds, then slowly exhaled a thin stream of marijuana smoke into the darkness. This was how he started almost every night shift at Garrison Manor, same as he had for the past two years. He didn't do it to get high, necessarily. It was just a way to relax and put him in the right mood for a long night of cleaning up bathroom accidents, delivering linens and medications to residents' rooms, helping old folks to bed, and—most draining on his psyche—dealing with Nurse McDougal. One “bammy” at the beginning of the shift and another halfway through usually did the trick.

Reggie reclined in a lawn chair and propped his feet up on the picnic table located just outside the back door of the main hall in a little patio nook that was mainly used as a smoking area by residents and staff. He took another drag of his bammy and cranked the volume on his iPod earphones, bopping his head and shoulders to his new favorite rap song, “2 Alive 2 Die.”

He did not notice the dark figure creeping up slowly behind him.

V
enfeld plodded silently across the grass, arcing his path so that he approached directly behind the man in the blue scrubs. He was close enough now that he could smell marijuana smoke wafting through the air and could hear muffled drum beats from the man's earphones.
This was almost too easy
.

At the edge of the patio was a rack of croquet mallets. Venfeld quietly eased one of them out of the rack and continued approaching the half-stoned orderly from behind, checking in all directions, one last time, to ensure no one was watching.

No one was.

At a distance of about three feet, Venfeld raised the croquet mallet high over his right shoulder and, in one swift motion, swung it hard like a baseball bat. It connected directly on the side of the Reggie Jones's head with a sickening, wooden
thunk
. Jones fell sideways off his chair and let out a loud grunt. As Jones scrambled to regain his footing, Venfeld delivered another powerful blow to the top of his head with the mallet. This time, Jones's body went completely limp, flattening to the ground.

Venfeld stood over the motionless body for several seconds with the mallet poised for yet another blow. After observing no motion for more than five seconds, however, he tossed the mallet onto the grass and crouched close beside Reggie Jones's unconscious body.

He plucked Jones's earbuds, still emitting the muffled strains of rap music, from Jones's ears and unplugged them from the iPod. He wrapped one end of the earphone cord around each of his hands until about one foot of the cord remained slack between his clenched fists. Then, looping the cord around Jones's neck and pressing his knee into the young man's back, he pulled up hard with all his strength.

Even unconscious, Jones emitted an involuntary groan as the cord instantly cut off blood and oxygen to his brain. After that, he was silent. A minute later, his body began twitching involuntarily, legs kicking wildly, torso contorting in spasms. Thirty seconds later, it was all over.

“Reggie?” squawked the voice of Ellie McDougal.

Venfeld was startled for a moment, until he realized the voice had come from a two-way radio clipped to Jones's belt. He unclipped the walkie-talkie and inspected it carefully.

“Reggie, you there?” McDougal repeated.

Venfeld pressed the talk button and mumbled, “Mmm-hmm.”

“Have you taken those linens up to Three-oh-eight yet?”

Venfeld thought for a moment, then muttered in a low, guttural voice, “Unh-uh.”

“Well hurry up and do it! Ms. Sainsbury is waiting for you.”

K
athleen made her way back to her grandfather's room and let herself in quietly with her key. She tiptoed to the couch, placed the jump drive on the glass coffee table beside the sample bottle, and eased herself into the couch's soft, overstuffed cushions.
A shower could wait
, she thought to herself.
This felt too good.

Glancing over at her sleeping grandfather, she yawned and spoke in a quiet voice, mostly to herself. “I wish you could help me with this, Grandpa. You were always good with big decisions.” She yawned again. “And this one's a doozy.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the cushions, fingers interlaced behind her head, wondering what she should do. She alone held the INDY gene . . . and the power to change humanity forever.
And she had no idea what to do with it.