A Heartbeat Away (30 page)

CHAPTER 57

DAY 7
1:00 A.M. (CST)

Griff kept Bartholomew’s arm pinned tightly against his back and followed closely behind him.

“I’m not going to run again,” Bartholomew pleaded. “Promise. I shouldn’t have run in the first place. You … you surprised me is all. Please, you’re really hurting me.”

“And I’m not taking any more chances.”

Bartholomew fell silent and led Griff through a pair of dimly lit corridors and down a small flight of stairs that ended at a heavy oak door. The surrounding walls were concrete bricks, painted gray and in need of cleaning.

“You’ll need to let go of my arm if you want me to take you downstairs.”

“I’ll let go,” Griff said, “but you need to know that you are in even more of a fix than usual.”

“How’s that?”

“You and Sylvia Chen are partly responsible for the sickness and death that are going on at the Capitol. She’s dead. Murdered. Try my patience now, and I won’t hesitate to hurt you, and I’m willing to bet that nobody will do anything but cheer.”

With difficulty, Bartholomew looked over his shoulder. He appeared genuinely surprised.

“You’re talking about the president?” he asked.

Griff tried to read through the man’s words. Did he have any idea whether or not the president was involved with what Sylvia Chen had done at the Certain Path Mission? It seemed almost certain that the answer was no. Allaire, at least in terms of this aspect of Chen’s work, was probably innocent. From now on, Griff decided, if he needed the man’s help, he would seek it out. He would also, as soon as possible, share his growing suspicions with the president regarding Paul Rappaport.

“Those experiments you helped Chen with had nothing to do with drug addiction,” Griff said. “It was part of a biological research program that I was involved in. I’m a scientist—a virologist just like Chen. The virus we were developing, that you helped her try out on people here, is what the terrorists released during the State of the Union Address.”

“Oh, God. I heard on the news that it was just some sort of flu, not anything—”

“You know that it’s lethal, don’t you?… Don’t you?”

The cleric bowed his head. Then he began to cry.

“I’ve done such terrible things,” he said. “Such terrible things…”

His voice trailed off and his body was racked with each sob. Griff had to remind himself that Brother Xavier Bartholomew was, in all likelihood, a sociopath, capable of turning on emotion like he would a faucet.

“If you cooperate and tell me everything I want to know, I promise to speak up on your behalf. Understood?”

Bartholomew nodded dispiritedly. Griff let go of him and took a cautious step backward, ready to react. Shaking the feeling back into his arm, the man withdrew a black string necklace that was tucked inside his robe. Dangling from it was a large, antique metal key that looked straight from the set of a horror movie. He unlocked the heavy door with a clank that resonated off the walls. Then, after a hard tug on its ornate handle, the door creaked open.

The passageway behind the door was a spiral stone staircase that was dimly lit by a light glowing from someplace below.

“Are there many places like this in Wichita?” Griff asked.

“There may be, but I’ve never heard of one. Apparently, the man who built this place was a little—what’s the word—eccentric.”

“I’ll bet I could come up with a few words that were more appropriate.”

Bartholomew started down the staircase and Griff followed warily. The stairs were narrow and so steep that Griff used one hand to keep his balance. The heavy, bone-chilling air grew mustier as they descended. The smooth sidewalls became exposed rock, suggesting that the original excavators had left the stones exactly as their tools had unearthed them.

Eccentric, indeed.

The stairs finally ended at a surprisingly large circular room with three dark passageways extending off of it like the spokes of a wheel. Hanging on the walls of the room, secured there by metal spikes driven into the stone, were implements of torture and pain—whips, batons, wood rattans, shackles, and chains. The space kindled memories of his cell in the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

“What
is
this place?” Griff asked.

“Believe it or not, it used to be a wine cellar. Then I transformed it into what many of my acolytes call the center of all things.”

“Is this where you beat people?”

“It was aversion therapy, reserved for only the hard-core addicts and alcoholics—the ones who had failed at everything else, including AA. Whatever you might have heard, I had many, many successes.”

“Okay. Is this where you conducted your—
aversion therapy
?”

“Not here.”

Bartholomew flicked a wall-mounted switch that illuminated the passageway directly in front of them. A string of tiny colored Christmas lights on a long cord hooked into the ceiling lit the way.

Bizarre … macabre … alarming … disgusting …

Griff searched his vocabulary for the most apt description, and found all of them wanting.

Bartholomew ducked to pass underneath an archway, and motioned for Griff to follow. The vapor of their breathing now hung in the chilly air, and the musty odor was more overpowering the further in they traveled—the smell of fear … and of death. Griff shuddered. Ventilation was minimal. Beneath his parka, he had begun to perspire.

The corridor opened into a square room—an antechamber of some sort. There were stone alcoves built into three of the room’s walls. Each alcove had a wooden door with a small, barred window in the upper center.

“I conducted my mission work here,” Bartholomew said. “Sometimes, I kept my brothers and sisters here for days without food. Sometimes, if necessary, I would beat them. The key was to weaken their wills.”

The terrible irony of the man’s statement hit home with force. Griff reflected grimly on the day he first met with Sylvia Chen at her office at Columbia University, and on his decision to move to New York to work with her on the microbe she was developing.
The key is to weaken their wills
. It seemed possible she had said those exact words.

“Your brothers and sisters?” he asked Bartholomew, now.

“Those who came to me for salvation.”

“Your prisoners, you mean.”

“They could leave any time. The doors weren’t locked. They asked for this treatment only after they failed at AA and many other programs.”

Griff ran his fingertips over one of the doors and tried to imagine what it had been like for Bartholomew’s tragic sisters and brothers.

“How do you explain these locks?” he asked.

Bartholomew looked remorseful.

“I added the locks at Sylvia Chen’s insistence,” he said.

“Explain.”

“She came to me with an offer. She had researched me well, and she knew about my arrest and my ensuing financial troubles. She offered me a way to get back on my feet and continue to help people at the same time.”

“So she paid you?”

Griff vaguely remembered a visit to Kalvesta a few years before from a bureaucrat with one of the government accounting offices. He wondered now if Chen had juggled her books to cover this black site operation. He also wondered if the president was in any way involved.

“She paid for everything,” Bartholomew confirmed. “The equipment that was brought in. Everything.”

“What equipment?”

“There were airlocks and partitions and showers and all sorts of things that I didn’t understand.”

“She wore a biocontainment suit when she worked down here?”

“If such a suit is what I think it is, she wore one all the time.”

“And the people she worked on—your clients?”

“They were bottom-of-the-barrel alcoholics and drug addicts. They drifted in for a meal and some prayer, and often they stayed. They were lonely men and women. No family. No friends. Like I said, bottom of the barrel.”

Correction,
Griff was thinking,
you’re the bottom of the barrel
.
You and Sylvia Chen.

“So the brothers and sisters Dr. Chen worked on—they all died?”

Griff forced back a fresh surge of anger.

“They did.”

“How many of them were there altogether?”

“I don’t know. Six? Seven? Eight?”

Greed in action—financial and scientific.

Griff felt utterly repulsed.

“What did you do with the bodies?” he asked.

“We have a large furnace down another passage. Heats the whole building. We cremated the bodies in the furnace, then eventually discarded the ashes in a steel drum. I don’t know what Chen did with the drum.”

“Why are you telling me all this now?” Griff asked.

Tears streamed down Bartholomew’s flushed cheeks.

“Because I’ve been secretly praying that you’d come,” he said between heavy sobs. “I was too weak-willed to kill myself. Believe me, I’ve wanted to. And I’ve tried—more than once. So I prayed that somebody would find out the truth and come to free me from my sins. I guess that person is you.”

Griff detested and pitied the charlatan with equal vigor. His intentions may have been honorable at one time. His methods and his avarice, however, never were.

“According to my information, not all of the subjects involved in Chen’s experiments died.”

Bartholomew nodded.

“Oh, now that I think about it, that’s true. One of them escaped. I had given in to Chen and started coming down here and wearing those biocontainment suits, as you called them. I was inexperienced at working in those horrible things and didn’t set the lock properly on his cell. Chen blamed me for the mistake.”

“Why didn’t the guy turn you both in after he got out of here?” Griff asked.

“That wasn’t ol’ J.R.’s style. He looked out after J.R. and no one else. Besides, he was already wanted for robbing a convenience store someplace at gunpoint. The man had a heavy habit. I mean heavy. Habits like that need constant feeding.”

“What do the initials stand for?”

Bartholomew did not answer immediately. His cards were almost played out, and Griff could see him trying to calculate some sort of deal. Griff could no longer hold back his anger. He lunged at Bartholomew, seizing him by the front of his robe and slamming him backward against the stone wall.

“Tell me his name!” he rasped.

“Johnny … Johnny Ray Davis. He called himself J.R., though, like the guy from TV.”

Griff felt his pulse begin to race. The blank space beside the man’s name in Chen’s notebook was no accident. It was certainly possible that he had escaped before being exposed to the WRX virus. But then again …

“Do you know whether Chen ever gave J.R. the virus?” Griff demanded. Bartholomew hesitated and Griff slapped him across the face with all his strength. Then he lifted his hand to do it again. “My patience is gone, you fraud. Answer me!”

A trickle of blood had formed at the corner of Bartholomew’s mouth. Even in the dim light, Griff could see his handprint in scarlet on the man’s cheek.

“He … he was here for more than a week, so I suppose he got the virus. In fact, I’m sure he got it.”

“And he didn’t get sick?”

“Not so far as I know. He was well enough to pick the upstairs lock and then steal a bunch of stuff from my desk before he took off.”

“Jesus,” Griff whispered, his heartbeat now a jackhammer. “Do you know where he is?”

Bartholomew looked at him with feigned bravado.

“What’s in it for me?”

“Your life,” Griff snapped, fiercely grasping the man by the throat.

Bartholomew managed a nod of surrender, and Griff let up.

“He’s in prison. El Dorado Correctional Facility. Now ain’t that a kick. He escapes from this cell here, and winds up in El Dorado.”

“What’s he in there for?… I said, what’s he in there for?”

Griff could see the end of what resistance remained in the man.

“Murder. Double murder, in fact,” Bartholomew said. “Bastard’s there on death row.”

CHAPTER 58

DAY 7
6:30 A.M. (CST)

The El Dorado Correctional Facility, situated east of the town of El Dorado, was a sprawling complex of brown cement buildings seemingly designed to compete with its desolate surroundings.

Following Brother Bartholomew’s admissions, Griff had contacted the president. It was time to trust him. Beyond funding Sylvia Chen’s research, Griff was convinced that James Allaire had no connection with the way she had conducted it. Allaire’s response to Griff’s report regarding the Certain Path Mission and J. R. Davis was to galvanize all the resources at his disposal. Clearly, the man understood that time was running out for all those in the Capitol.

Now, Griff’s military escort, organized in amazingly short order, passed through two perimeters, one made of chain-link fencing, and the second of tightly strung wire. Both were topped by razor wire.

Griff’s limousine driver checked his watch.

“Normally takes forty minutes to get here from Wichita,” he said through the partition. “We did it in just a little over twenty.”

Overhead, three Apache helicopters hovered, kicking up dust while their crews kept watch in all directions. The El Dorado security team met Griff’s black armor-plated limousine at the gate, and then escorted the caravan into the correctional facility’s main parking lot. A moving wall of Humvees flanked each side of the limo. Ambulances and police cars, along with a fleet of motorcycles, also participated in the transport team that was filling most of the available parking spaces in the expansive prison lot. Clearly, Dr. James Allaire was not a president of minimal action, especially when his life and his family’s were at stake.

Griff stepped onto the tarmac and shielded his eyes from the early morning sun and the chopper-generated winds. A SWAT team joined with the military police and the correctional officers from the El Dorado facility. Griff suspected that their orders were to safeguard him from assassination. It was good to see that Allaire was finally giving Genesis their due.

The circle of armed security surrounding Griff parted to allow a lone man to approach. He wore a dark suit and had thinning hair on top, and an ample belly below. His face featured a neatly trimmed gray and brown beard. The man shook Griff’s hand vigorously and shouted to be heard above the helicopter’s whirl.

“Warden Jay Tobert, Dr. Rhodes,” he said. “Welcome to El Dorado. We’ll get you processed and with the prisoner as quickly as possible. I hope you’ve had a chance to review the files that you requested?”

Griff nodded. He’d been given the faxed pages by one of the MPs and read all about Johnny Ray Davis on the drive to the maximum-security penitentiary. Charged with the shooting death of a husband and wife during a failed carjacking, Davis was sentenced to die. Despite an initial plea of innocent, the evidence included in the file was irrefutable. Forensics and ballistics linked Davis to the crime. Several reliable eyewitnesses sealed the case for the prosecution.

Griff swallowed hard as he glanced at the stone walls and steel bars. It was one thing to be reminded of time done in prison, but something far worse to be back inside one, regardless of the reason. The familiar feelings of hopelessness and despair returned as though they had never left.

“Reception is waiting for you,” the warden said. “We’ll go to the Tower East building first to get you cleared. Then we’ll be heading over to our Commons building. That’s where you’ll meet Davis.”

Griff followed Tobert while the battalion of security followed him.

“Looks like you’ve got some friends in pretty high places,” Tobert understated on their walk to Tower East. When Griff just nodded, the warden continued to fish for information. “Not every day the president of the United States calls me to request special access.”

“Not every day,” Griff echoed.

“I understand that the Wichita police arrested this Bartholomew fellow on his way out of town.”

Again, Griff nodded.

“He tried to run,” he said. “Guess he panicked after I made the call to Washington. I imagine you’ll be hosting him here at some point.”

“We do good keeping our prisoners where they’re supposed to be. Haven’t had a successful rabbit since I became warden. Good thing, too, because if Johnny Ray ever busted out of here we’d have a heck of a time catching him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Boy’s a natural runner,” Tobert said. “I’d guess he could run straight to California without stopping or getting winded. Guy never gets tired jogging in the yard. And I mean never.”

“Well, I don’t know what’ll happen to Bartholomew now that he’s in custody,” Griff said. “But I hope it isn’t good.”

Griff also hoped that Allaire would follow through on his promise to investigate Paul Rappaport. That part of their short phone conversation had been anything but pleasant. He had called the president’s emergency number from Bartholomew’s cramped, cluttered office at the Certain Path Mission.

“Rappaport shows up and Melvin is killed,” Griff had said to Allaire. “Murdered by someone working for Genesis. Explain to me how Genesis knew about our plan?”

“I can’t,” Allaire said. “But you had no right jeopardizing our objective by sneaking out of Kalvesta, Rhodes. You’ve gone rogue on me and I don’t like it one bit.”

“Pardon my saying so, Mr. President, but I don’t much care what you like. What I care about is what you do. And I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” Allaire said.

“Two things, actually. I want you to treat Rappaport as a suspect. Have him watched. Put a tail on him. Wiretap his phones. Get ahold of his computers. Put the CIA, NSA, FBI, and any other letters you can think of on him. Put a dossier together that will detail what he’s had for breakfast every morning for the last ten tears. I’m convinced it’s him, and somewhere along the line we’ll find that he’s tipped us off to that. He’s the force behind Genesis. He did this to become president.”

“You think he arranged to have his own daughter robbed while she was taking a shower?” Allaire asked. “You think he would arrange to traumatize her by cutting up her underwear and spreading it across her bed, just so he could get me to appoint him the designated survivor?”

“Anybody who did this to you and the others at the Capitol is capable of anything,” Griff had replied. “The setup for the release of WRX3883 has been going on for a long time. The whole Genesis thing—the blackout in New York, and those explosions—were just a prologue leading up to the State of the Union.”

“I’ll think about it,” was all Allaire had said. “What’s the second thing?”

“Have Sergeant Stafford go out with some men to the ventilation shaft to retrieve Melvin’s body. He was a hero. If you ever get out of this, he deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor, or whatever the civilian version is of that.”

“Consider it done. Now get to that prison and this time keep me posted about what you’re doing.”

Griff was replaying that conversation in his mind when he was startled by a loud buzz. He stiffened at the sound. The heavy metal door unlocked and the noise stopped.

“It’s hard coming back to prison, huh?” the warden commented, evidently aware of Griff’s history.

“You have no idea,” Griff said.

“Well, thankfully, you’re right about that.”

Griff went through the screening process without incident and followed the warden into the prison yard. The helicopters continued to circle overhead like the buzzards in his recurring Ebola dream. Crossing a patch of barren ground, they entered the Commons building. The corridors there were quiet and deserted.

“I’ve got ’em on lockdown for as long as you’re here,” Tobert announced proudly.

“Thanks. I’m sure that won’t win J. R. Davis any popularity prizes.”

“He can take care of himself. Truth is, I think most of the guys are scared of him.”

The warden opened a door marked
ATTORNEY
’
S ROOM
and motioned Griff to follow him inside.

Griff was surprised to see only a foldout table in the center of the room, with a plastic chair on either side, but no Plexiglas divider to separate the lawyers from the convicts. He took a seat at the table facing the door. Four guards stood behind him.

The door buzzed and then opened. Three more guards entered, escorting a man in an orange prison jumpsuit. His ankles and wrists were shackled. Two of the guards assisted the convict in getting seated. Faded tattoos of women covered the outsides of both his arms. His jet-black hair was buzz cut, his narrow face horselike, and his upper lip had been gashed at some point and sutured carelessly, so that the edges of the vermillion border did not meet. The result was what amounted to a permanent sneer.

But the most striking feature of Johnny Ray Davis’s countenance—the one that struck Griff almost immediately, were his eyes.

The right one was sky blue … and the left was chestnut brown.