The Immortalist (45 page)

“Does it hurt?” asked Loscalzo.

“Not anymore.”

Gifford opened a drawer and grabbed a box of gauze pads and a roll of tape. Shirtless, he went into the office and sat down, pressing a wad of gauze against the front stomach wound.

With his free hand, he flipped open Niedermann's phone and began to scroll through the directory. “I've got to warn Senator Libby. There'll be all sorts of rumors. We need her to pressure the mayor of New York to keep the city from interfering. The Lottery must go on.”

“Are you serious? The way you are?”

“This is more important than me.” Gifford punched a code.

He heard a click as someone on the other end picked up. “Hello?” Gifford was surprised to hear a man's voice.

“Excuse me. I was calling to speak to Senator Harper Libby.”

“I'm Justin Moffatt, the senator's chief of staff. I've had her calls forwarded to my phone.” Gifford had met Moffatt at a hearing on health-care policy. He was a baby-faced, prematurely balding Generation Xer with an argumentative streak.

“Well, may I speak to her?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Look, I know it's late. But tell her it's Charles Gifford calling. I know she'll speak to me.”

“I don't care if you're the president of the United States. She can't talk to you.”

“Listen—” Gifford was confused. Why was Moffatt getting Harper's calls, anyway? This was her personal number.

“She's in the hospital, Mr. Gifford.”

“Hospital?” Gifford was stunned. “What happened?”

“It's a bad case of the flu or something. She came down with chills and a fever after dinner. An hour ago she could barely breathe. They took her to Georgetown Hospital, to intensive care. We're praying she makes it through the night.”

“That's . . . that's calamitous.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” Moffatt paused—brusquely, impatiently. “Is there some issue that I can help you with, Mr., uh, Gifford?”

“No, thank you.” Too stunned to say more, Gifford hit the
END CALL
button.

Overcome by light-headedness, he leaned back in his chair. His hands were shaking—from the shock of the news, the fight with Niedermann, the gunshot—all of it. He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. “Here.” He handed them to Loscalzo. “Take the ice chest down to the Navigator. I'll need you to drive.”

Gifford threw the blood-soaked gauze pads into the trash, grabbed a fresh batch, and taped them to his stomach. Then he opened an armoire in the corner and put on a clean white shirt. After carefully tucking the shirt into his trousers, he put on a tan trench coat, transferring the gun from his pants to his coat pocket before buttoning up.

As he headed out of the office, Loscalzo met him by the elevator. The little thug pointed toward the water still gushing on the far side of the lab. “What if someone finds the stiff?”

Gifford shrugged. “Almost no one can get in here. Access is restricted. Besides, all I need is a few hours. After that, let them arrest me if they can. I won't matter anymore, and neither will Jack Niedermann.”

Gifford closed his eyes and tried to think away the pain in his side. It was only a flesh wound. He could get by with it. Just until noon. He could hold out that long.

FRIDAY

Lottery Day

One

IN THE LOBBY
OF THE HANCOCK
County–Bar Harbor Airport, Cricket sat with her legs curled under her on a mustard-yellow Naugahyde chair, munching from a bowl of mixed nuts. She ignored the drone of the ceiling-mounted TV above her and listened to the rattle of the front doors as the raging storm outside beat against the glass. From time to time a snore would erupt from across the room, where Hank was stretched out with his legs dangling over the arm of a settee.

Beyond the deserted ticket counters, a light was on in the back office. Paul Hobbs, airport manager, a fiftyish man with a round face, round glasses, and a flat, snub nose, sat behind a computer covered with Post-it notes and drank coffee out of a brown-stained mug. When the sun rose at 5:38, Hobbs would be piloting Cricket and Hank to Teterboro Airport, on the outskirts of New York. If her hunch was right, Charles Gifford would already be there.

Less than an hour ago, things seemed to be going amazingly well. Emmy was awake and talking so much that Cricket had to give her a sedative to put her back to sleep. Erich Freiberg had set up a screening center in the cafeteria on the campus quadrangle, and so far no new cases of Nemesis had cropped up. Wig had purified another batch of antiserum for the two sick houseboys. There was only one loose thread—finding Gifford. But that grew increasingly worrisome. Niedermann had gone in search of him, but no one had heard back in two hours. Niedermann wasn't answering his cell phone. So Cricket and Hank left Emmy in Jean's care and went to Gifford's lab to check for themselves using the Level I pass that Niedermann had returned to Cricket.

They found the lab deserted, with half an inch of water covering the floor. Niedermann lay dead. In the cold fluorescent glow, his face was purple, contorted in a grimace. His tongue protruded through his teeth. The fingers of his right hand were mangled. A sheared-off bone jutted from his wrist. He had obviously been killed in a vicious struggle.

Cricket put on a pair of rubber gloves to examine him. The soft tissues of his neck were corrugated, as if from the imprint of hands. It was a hangman's fracture, so called because it used to happen when a convict was dropped from a scaffold and the knot of the rope snapped his neck. It took massive force to cause an injury like that. No ordinary man could have inflicted it. But Cricket knew firsthand how strong Gifford was.

Only Gifford could have killed Niedermann. But why?

The safety cabinet light had been left on, and Cricket looked inside. She saw a micropipetter. A jar of sterile saline. A bag of plastic tubes. A yellow paper pad covered with calculations. They appeared to represent ultraviolet absorbances at wavelengths of 260 and 280 nanometers. That's how DNA concentration was usually measured. It looked as if Gifford had computed a total of fifty nanograms of something. But what?

Then Hank had pointed to the orange-capped tube inside the cabinet.

Cricket saw writing on the tube. She picked it up and held it sideways in the light. There were three lines, neatly printed in fine-tipped ink, in a handwriting she had seen before:

VECTOR aet791homosapiens

Batches 28–31, 33–38, 46 5 ng/ml

STERILE/CERTIFIED PURITY

Stunned, she let the tube drop from her fingers. “No!” she cried. “It isn't possible.”

Impossible, but indisputable. The Methuselah Vector was back in Gifford's hands. He had been dividing it up into single-injection doses. That could mean only one thing: he had found a way to go on with the Lottery. He had killed Niedermann for getting in the way.

How could he be so crazy? No scientist in his right mind would continue in the face of all the evidence that linked the Methuselah Vector to Nemesis. Had his infection with the virus clouded his judgment? Cricket knew that herpes sometimes attacked the brain. But that explanation was too easy. Something else had infected his thinking, too—the idea of the Methuselah Vector itself. So certain was he of the righteousness of his cause that nothing else mattered.

If she was right, Gifford could have been headed to only one place—New York.

Cricket called the county sheriff's office. Deputy Parkman—the very man who had arrested her the day before—escorted her and Hank to the airport to look for Gifford's plane. Hancock County was a small, daytime airport, without runway lights. For hours a tropical storm had been raging, with winds gusting up to 40 mph. Even if Gifford reached his plane, he couldn't possibly take off unaided, in the dark, and into such weather. There was a good chance of catching him on the ground.

Rain was bouncing off the pavement when they arrived, blue lights flashing. In the tie-down area, three rows of planes were poised with noses uptilted and wings outstretched, like a flock of giant prehistoric birds about to take flight. Hank knew what to look for: a four-seater Cessna 400 Corvalis TT. Single prop. All white on top, blue underneath. But the space where Gifford tied it down was empty. He had managed to take off after all.

The sheriff summoned Hobbs in the middle of the night to try to trace the plane. Gifford hadn't filed a flight plan. His transponder didn't answer. No one had picked him up on radar—neither the Boston or New York TRACONs, nor the Bangor Flight Service Station, nor the Moncton or Montreal Control Centers. He could have been flying low—which was risky as hell, since he'd be flying in or just below the clouds with nothing but altimeter and compass to guide him. But he could have pulled that off by staying over water. Or he could have crashed.

Alerts were sent out to all regional airports, but so far no one had spotted him. Hobbs remembered that Gifford usually flew to Teterboro when he visited New York.

“Can you find someone to take me there?” Cricket asked.

“Colgan and Cape Air run flights out to Logan Airport, in Boston. From there you can catch a shuttle flight to New York.”

“No. Now. Directly.”

Hobbs grinned. “Look around you, ma'am. This is not O'Hare. This is a quiet little regional airport. In the middle of the night.”

“Please, there must be some kind of charter service, a plane for hire—anything. It's a public emergency.”

“Says who?”

Cricket showed her CDC badge. “We're trying to head off an epidemic, Mr. Hobbs. Dr. Gifford is infected by an extremely dangerous virus. Under no circumstances must he be allowed to reach New York City.”

Hank overshadowed Hobbs with all of his lanky frame. “She's not kidding. There's a real shitstorm going on. People are dying. Now, can you get us a pilot or not?”

“Sure, sure. I'll do it.”

“You?” asked Cricket.

“I've got a Beech Baron of my own that I sometimes use to ferry people around the islands. She'll get you to New York, all right. But I won't take off blind into this mess. We'll have to wait for daylight.”

Cricket dreaded what lay ahead. She was hanging by a thread, mentally and physically. But no one else understood Gifford as she did. No one knew the danger he carried inside his body—and his mind. She felt an all-too-familiar tightness in her chest.
This Methuselah Vector is like a black hole, sucking me in. No matter how hard I try, I can't escape it.

With Cricket's flight arrangements concluded, Parkman got ready to head back to campus. Hank should have gone with him, but he insisted on going with Cricket to New York. “Didn't you see what happened to Niedermann?” he argued, when Cricket objected. “You're more of a threat to Charles than he ever was. He'll kill you as well.”

“Hank, Emmy needs you.”

“I won't let you face Charles alone.”

Cricket bristled. “What right have you got to let me or not let me?”

“What right, Cricket? I love you. That's what right.”

Love? Hank was as stubborn as Étienne. Both of them besotted with chivalry. It had gotten Étienne killed. She couldn't bear the thought of losing Hank, too.

Cricket appealed to Parkman. “Can't you make him go with you?”

“No, ma'am. Not if he doesn't want to.”

Cricket threw up her hands. After Parkman left, she was too angry to even look at Hank. Fortunately, he didn't push things after that. He stretched out on a settee that was two feet too short for his lanky frame and quickly fell asleep.

Cricket herself hadn't shut her eyes since she had stolen a few winks Thursday morning, but sleep was impossible now. It seemed that the weight of the whole world was upon her as she paced from end to end of the lobby, waiting for the sun to rise.