Vertical Run (38 page)

And kept hearing him, as they fled into the dawn.

A lone man on horseback.

His name is David Elliot. He is lanky and dark, his complexion not yet whitened by the onset of final disease.

This ride is his last journey. Death, he knows, awaits him at its end.

His eyes are brown, and might appear solemn were it not for the smile that crinkles their corners.

He knows that he will die alone, and has made his peace with that inevitability. Autumn is near, winter not far away; his body will not be found until the summer comes again.

This knowledge accounts, in part, for his smile. The microbe that will shortly enter its third, killing stage needs a living host. And so, by dying far from any other human, he will slay that which has slain him.

There are other reasons why he smiles, but they are private things.

Today, he’s more than two hundred miles east of San Francisco, in the Sierras. He crossed the mountain divide yesterday, and picked up his horse from a leathered man who seemed not to have aged a single year since Dave had last seen him.

Dave gave the man money and a handful of letters. The
letters were addressed to a
pied-à-terre
on Sutton Place, to an office in Basel, to a dormitory at Columbia University, and to a ranch in Colorado. The man counted the money, smiled in a leathery way, folded the letters into a shirt pocket, and promised not to mail them until after the first snow of the season.

Now David Elliot is riding west into the high mountain fastness, up a cobbled slope, toward a small valley he visited once and has never forgotten. There is no trail, but he knows where to go. Every foot of ground—granite, grey and shot with streaks of black—is fresh in his mind, as though he’d been here only yesterday.

He hasn’t shaved. Three days of stubble speckle his cheeks, chin, and upper lip. He wishes it would grow faster. It would be good to have a moustache at the end.

Dave pulls out a handkerchief. He lifts the brim of his floppy straw hat and wipes away a line of sweat. He knows how much further his destination is. There’s only another hour to go.

It is nearly sunset when he arrives. The air is filled with golden light. He breasts a small rise, looks down, and catches his breath. The valley’s loveliness is heart-stopping. At its center, greener than a green bottle, there is the emerald lake that he has always remembered, just as he has remembered the soft evening shadows that of necessity lie across it. Nothing moves. And yes, the air is wine.

This one moment has been the finest in his life, the finest that can be experienced. He knows that, of all men, he is privileged to have experienced it twice. And the knowledge fills his heart with joy.

In 1946 Allied war crimes investigators discovered that Dr. Shiro Ishii, a general of the Japanese Imperial Army and commander of a military organization known as Unit 731, had constructed the world’s largest and most advanced biological weapons laboratory in Manchuria. Satellite laboratories were later found in Tokyo and elsewhere. Evidence assembled by investigators demonstrated that throughout the course of the war, Ishii and his assistants had conducted extensive biological weaponry tests on Chinese civilians and on American and British POWs held at various camps in Southeast Asia.

Inexplicably Dr. Ishii (whose crimes far exceeded those of his German counterpart, Dr. Josef Mengele) was never brought to trial. Rather, he was allowed a long and prosperous retirement, enjoying a sizable pension from the Japanese government as well as income from other sources that remained anonymous until, just as this novel was being sent to the typesetters,
The New York Times
revealed that the U.S. government had paid Dr. Ishii a handsome stipend.

Such few records as are publicly available are ambiguous as to the ultimate disposition of the extensive body of research reports prepared by Dr. Ishii and his staff.

Joseph R. Garber’s first novel,
Rascal Money
, was published in 1989. He is a columnist for
Forbes
magazine and writes occasional literary criticism for the
San Francisco Review of Books
.