True Evil (21 page)

"Turn and look!" Chris shouted.

Ben pivoted off the bag with his right foot and sprinted a third of the way to second base. The throw would easily beat him to the bag.

He had to come back.

Chris heard Thora cheering from the bleachers, but he didn't look up. He'd been in a mild state of shock since seeing the photograph Alex Morse gave him on the bank of St. Catherine's Creek. His first instinct had been to drive home and confront Thora, but by the time he passed the hospital in his car, he had calmed down enough to turn around, go inside, and make rounds instead. After that, he'd returned to his office and finished out the afternoon. Most of Thora's blood tests had been completed by then, and the only abnormality he found was mild anemia, which he often saw in distance runners—

"Dad?" said Ben. "Do you want me to steal on a passed ball?"

Chris stared at Ben as though in a trance. This handsome young boy who called him Dad was the son of a man Chris had never met, the issue of a chapter of Thora's life that remained largely unknown to him. Before Alex Morse arrived in Natchez, the unknowns in Thora's life had not much bothered Chris. But now everything had changed. He hadn't spoken to Thora since she left his office that afternoon. After work, he'd called Ben and told him to be waiting outside the house. Thora had waved from the kitchen window when he drove up, signaling for him to wait, but Chris had left for the baseball field without a word.

"Dad!" Ben said again. "Do I steal or what?"

Chris tried to force his mind back to reality. He hadn't eaten lunch or dinner, and he'd been feeling dizzy since the game started. It was the bottom of the sixth inning, and the opposing team was up by one run. If his boys couldn't score and push the game into extra innings, it was over. He looked at the batter's box, and his heart sank. He'd reached the bottom of his batting order: three weak nine-year-olds in a row. They were good boys, but they couldn't hit a baseball if their lives depended on it. He had moved Ben deep in the order to keep some power late in the lineup, but Ben could only do so much. Chris knelt beside him, met his eyes, and whispered, "Steal no matter what."

Ben started to question this call, then thought better of it. He understood the situation. The instant the next pitch crossed the plate, Ben bolted for second base. The catcher caught the ball cleanly, jumped to his feet, and fired the ball across the pitcher's mound. His throw was a little high—just high enough for Ben to slide safely under the second baseman's glove as it whipped down to tag him. Half the crowd went wild, and the other half groaned.

Chris gave Ben a thumbs-up and watched his left fielder walk nervously into the batter's box. The boy took his position at the plate, then looked worriedly at Chris. Chris hitched up his belt, giving the signal to bunt. While he waited for the pitch, he glanced over the chain-link fence to his left. As he did, he realized that his eye had been drawn by movement. A young woman was riding past the field on a bicycle. When she lifted her right hand in a subtle wave, Chris's heart thudded in his chest.

Alexandra Morse.

She'd probably panicked after he disappeared from the creek bank. She'd called his cell phone so many times since that meeting that he'd switched it off. She'd even tried calling his office, but his staff had refused to put her through. Chris didn't care. As Morse rode slowly away, his head whipped around at the ring of a baseball hitting aluminum. His left fielder had bunted the ball six feet in front of the plate and was now charging toward first base, his arms windmilling wildly in an effort to keep himself balanced.

Chris screamed encouragement, but in vain. The catcher drilled the ball into the first baseman's glove while the boy was still ten feet from first base. The first baseman tried to throw Ben out at third, but Chris knew before he looked that Ben had made it. He patted his left fielder on the shoulder and told him he'd made a good play.
Stay focused on the game,
he thought, fighting an urge to glance in Morse's direction again.
Ben is on third…we can tie it right here.

There were two outs on the scoreboard. His next batter already had a strike against him. The opposing pitcher hadn't thrown many wild balls today; most of his pitches were straight down the pipe. A strikeout was a near certainty. To tie it up, Ben would have to steal home plate. He had the speed, but would he have the opportunity?

Chris looked across the field at his third-base coach, a local welder. The man was looking at him questioningly. Chris closed his eyes for a moment, then tugged on his right earlobe. If the catcher missed a ball, Ben would go for it.

"Swing hard, Ricky!" Chris shouted. In this league, a swinging bat increased the odds that the catcher would miss the ball, especially the way Ricky Ross swung the bat. He was as likely to hit the catcher's mitt as he was to hit the ball as it flew over the plate.

The pitcher unloaded a fastball. Ricky swung like Mark McGwire overdosing on steroids—and missed. The ball glanced off the catcher's mitt and caromed off the backstop behind him. Ben exploded off third base, reaching full speed in five steps, but the pitcher was already dashing to cover home plate. The catcher wouldn't beat Ben to the plate for a tag, but the pitcher might.

Ben sprinted as far as he dared before dropping into his slide, and then he was skidding down the baseline in a cloud of dust. Every voice in the bleachers fell silent, and Chris's heart rose into his throat. He thought Ben had it, but a flash of white at the center of the dust cloud made him clench his fists in fear.

"Out!"
screamed the umpire.

The stands erupted in a schizophrenic roar of fury and joy. Chris ran toward the plate, but it was no use arguing the call. He hadn't seen the play. Instinct told him that no one had, including the umpire. There was so much dust that the final act of the game had been obscured. Ben got up, his face red, and stared at the umpire with tears in his eyes. He seemed on the verge of challenging the ump, so Chris caught him by the arm and pulled him into the dugout.

"It was a good try," Chris said, "but it's over. Time to be a man."

The two teams lined up, then filed past each other saying, "Good game, good game," and then it was over. Chris gathered his team behind the dugout, gave them an encouraging wrap-up talk in the gathering dusk, and dispersed them to their waiting parents. Four or five fathers told him he should file a protest about the final call, but Chris shook his head and told them to start thinking about the next game.

"Dad?" said Ben, tugging at his arm. "Can we stay and watch C.J.'s game?"

"No, honey," said a female voice from behind Chris.
Thora's voice.

"Aw, come on, Mom! Dad didn't say no."

"All right, then," Thora said in a clipped voice. "Ask your dad and see what he says."

Ben grinned and looked up at Chris. "Can I, Dad? Can I?"

"Sure," said Chris, "Let's see how C.J. does against Webb Furniture."

Ben screeched in delight and ran off toward the bleachers.

"Why did you do that?" asked Thora, stepping in front of him with a betrayed look. "I thought we were going to spend some time together at home."

Chris choked back a half dozen replies. "He really wants to stay."

"But I'm leaving tomorrow."

"By your choice."

She looked at Chris as though he'd slapped her.

"You'll only be gone three days," he said. "Right?"

Thora nodded slowly but said nothing.

He walked past her toward the bleachers. He thought she might call after him, but she didn't. As he walked, he tried to get a handle on his emotions. After going back to his office, he had done as Morse suggested and checked the online billing records for Thora's cell phone. He'd found several numbers he didn't recognize, but none belonged to Shane Lansing. Chris knew this because he had called them all to check. Stranger still, there had been no call at 12:28 p.m. There wasn't even a call in the thirty-minute window surrounding 12:28. Either Agent Morse was mistaken, or Thora had a cell phone he knew nothing about.

CHAPTER 17

Eldon Tarver stood alone beneath a flaming sky, staring at a mansion built by slaves 150 years before he was born. One of the most splendid homes in Vicksburg, the Greek Revival palace stood on a hogback bluff overlooking a once-strategic bend of the Mississippi River. Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms.

Dr. Tarver moved deeper into the shadow of an oak tree and watched a Lincoln Continental sail slowly up the long, curving driveway to the house. After it parked, a heavyset man in a soiled business suit staggered out of the driver's door, straightened up, and made his way toward the mansion's front door.

William Braid.

Dr. Tarver removed his backpack and laid it at his feet. He breathed in sweet honeysuckle, the scent of spring. It reminded him of his childhood home in Tennessee—a mixed memory.

Braid struggled for nearly a minute to fit his key into his front door. He hadn't shaved for days, and his suit was a wreck. After another thirty seconds, he took out a cell phone and called someone. He seemed to be ranting, but Eldon couldn't make out his words. As Braid walked farther from the house, probably to improve his reception, Eldon glanced at his watch and returned to his thoughts.

Like William Braid, America seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. She was squandering her power in half-fought wars and exporting her manufacturing base to future enemies—in short, practically begging for Darwinian retribution. Of all the great modern thinkers, Dr. Tarver believed, Charles Darwin had proved the most prescient. His laws worked at every level, governing the life cycles of microbes, men, and nations. Dr. Tarver tracked the elegant operations of those laws like a watchmaker observing a flawless timepiece. Like all scientific laws, Darwin's could be used not only to describe the past but also to predict the future. Not by chance had Eldon Tarver been one of the few scientists to predict the emergence of HIV in
Homo sapiens.
Darwin's laws had also revealed to him that the new paradigm of war so ballyhooed in the news media—war against terrorist groups rather than nations—was merely an illusion.

There was nothing preternatural about his insight. The future was barreling toward America with such momentum that nothing could stop it, and any child of the Cold War should have seen it five years ago. That future was China, an ancient empire reborn as industrial superpower, a single-minded engine of economic expansion that cared nothing for ethics, the environment, loss of life, or the destinies of other nations. This insured that in a very short time, China would be locked in mortal combat with the only other monolithic power on the planet. And the United States, Tarver knew, was woefully unprepared for this Darwinian battle for survival.

William Braid had been walking aimlessly as he talked on the phone, but now he took a sudden turn toward Dr. Tarver's hiding place. The doctor tensed until the fat man veered left and stopped beside a well-tended bed of roses, still ranting at full volume. From this distance Dr. Tarver could tell that Braid was stone drunk.

The battle between the United States and China would begin as a cold war, with leaders on both sides denying that a conflict even existed. But in a world of scarce resources, industrial giants could dissimulate for only so long. The first skirmishes would occur in the area of international trade, then escalate into the realm of international banking. Long before armies ever faced each other on land or sea, the targeting coordinates of nuclear missiles on opposite sides of the globe would be changed to reflect the new reality. And for the second time in history, the world's smaller wars would recede into the background as children grew up in the shadow of a polarizing conflict that brought with it a unique and almost comforting order.

William Braid barked something in Dr. Tarver's direction, then threw down his cell phone and reeled up to his front door like a boxer about to drop to the canvas. Bending over his key again, Braid uttered a startled cry of triumph and disappeared inside the house.

Dr. Tarver removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket, put them on, and studied his watch. He would give Braid a minute or two. The only future he would ever know.

Unlike the last cold war, this one would not drift along for decades, punctuated by self-limiting crises. Because the Chinese weren't the Russians. The
Russians,
as Tarver often told his colleagues, were basically just like us: white Europeans with a strong Judeo-Christian heritage, despite whatever lip service they'd paid to communist denials of God. But the Chinese were most assuredly
not
like us. When push came to shove, the Chinese were capable of destroying half of their population to wipe us off the face of the earth. As Mao once said, "If nuclear war kills half a billion of our people, we will still have half a billion left." And then he'd laughed.

But Mao had not been joking. War with China was inevitable, and Eldon Tarver knew it. But unlike the professional ostriches now running the country, he wasn't content to sit back and watch it happen. In 1945, Eldon's adoptive father had fought his way across four blood-drenched islands in the Pacific, and he'd learned a thing or two about the Asian mind. He might have been a bitter old bastard with iron-hard hands, but he had inculcated the lessons of that war into all his children—even the one he'd adopted solely to obtain an extra worker on his farm. Thus, unlike the dilettantes who reveled in anti-Chinese repartee on the cocktail party circuit, Eldon Tarver had a plan. He had studied his enemy for decades, preparing to wage what the Pentagon called
asymmetrical warfare.
But Dr. Tarver had a simpler phrase for it:
one-man war.