Into The Inferno Part 38

I said, "Let's go back to your aunt's office."

"I want to look around here. This is where they work. There's got to be something."

Somewhere in the building a telephone rang. We looked at each other, and Stephanie stopped breathing. The phone rang eight times before it stopped. "A telemarketer," I said.

"At eleven o'clock at night?"

I shrugged. "I'll be upstairs. Somebody shows up, you scream. I'll do the same."

"Sure you will."

Upstairs in DiMaggio's office, I circled the room trying to figure out what was bothering me. They had to be keeping it on the premises, in either this building or the one we'd bypa.s.sed outside. They had to have a substance that turned people into zombies. A product potent enough that they maintained shower facilities on all three floors. A product that might be neutralized with something as simple as soap and water-for I'd found nothing else in any of the showers. Where would they keep this product? Better yet, where would they keep an antidote for it?

Sitting with my feet on DiMaggio's desk, I paged through the letters Stephanie had unearthed. I'd been there a few minutes when visions of Achara's charred corpse popped into my head. It was hard to put something like that completely out of mind, particularly if the victim was someone you'd known and liked. Achara had taken a risk giving me those numbers. The first series had been the combination to the keypad on the downstairs door, but what about the second series?

Without consciously thinking about it, I walked across the room to the liquor cabinet, went into the bathroom behind the wall, and found a void behind the cabinet. I'd seen it earlier but hadn't guessed the significance.

It took a few minutes to figure out that the liquor cabinet was on wheels and that moving it to one side would expose a tall gray door to a hidden vault. Somehow Achara had known I might be here before the week was out.

In giving me the combination to this vault, if indeed that's what the numbers were, she'd accurately gauged the urgency of my desperation as well as the depth of her employer's obfuscation. There had to be something in here she needed on a regular basis, something Achara needed to access when the boss wasn't available.

Sixteen years of memorizing Scripture finally paid off in something more meaningful than being able to take down women's phone numbers without a pen and pad.

18-24-18-63-08-46.

I worked the dial carefully and at the end of my troubles heard nothing. If I'd dialed the correct combination, there had been no confirming click to acknowledge it.

However, when I pulled on it, the heavy vault door swung wide.

58. HEY, LADY-KILLER: GET RELIGION;.

SAY YOUR PRAYERS; DON'T SPILL The vault interior was eight feet tall, five feet across, and maybe three and a half feet deep. There were five shelves, a gray cash box the sole squatter of the upper shelf, notebooks and manuals stacked on the two shelves closest to eye level, vials in racks on the shelf at belt level, a collection of dust b.a.l.l.s on the first shelf above the floor. On the floor were two large corrugated cartons, one taped shut, one open.

I examined the notebooks and a manual, but the jargon contained so many formulas, they might as well have been auth.o.r.ed by aliens.

The first three vials were labeled hydrochloric acid, sodium azide, and sodium cyanide-not the ingredients you wanted to drop in Aunt Maud's tea. I was no chemist, but I'd had my share of hazardous materials cla.s.ses for the fire department and knew hydrochloric acid and sodium cyanide shouldn't be mixed. Sodium azide was a poison if taken orally and lethal enough that even contact with your skin was to be avoided. Two years ago it had been the centerpiece of a shocking story about a pair of teenagers who'd broken into a factory in Ma.s.sachusetts and gotten it on themselves while looking for cash and drugs. Both died. G.o.d only knew why Marge was keeping it in this vault or what they used it for here.

Dangerous as they were, these weren't chemicals that would send your brain back through twelve million years of evolution. No. We were looking for something else.

I knelt and peered into the open cardboard box on the vault floor. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't a carton of Bibles. I pulled the first three or four out and examined the black leather bindings in the dim light.

Last February Holly's truck had been carrying Bibles.

I picked out a book and leafed to a random pa.s.sage, something William P. Markham had taught us to do. My index finger fell on Ecclesiastes 2:2021: Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun. Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun. Yeah, me, too. According to Markham, a random opening of the Bible would be directed by G.o.d; thus, whatever pa.s.sage you turned to was given to you by G.o.d, meant for you specifically, a message from above, the word of G.o.d out of his mouth. Before his stroke my father often let his Bible fall open at random. If he happened on a pa.s.sage he didn't like, he continued the process until he found something more to his taste. Yeah, me, too. According to Markham, a random opening of the Bible would be directed by G.o.d; thus, whatever pa.s.sage you turned to was given to you by G.o.d, meant for you specifically, a message from above, the word of G.o.d out of his mouth. Before his stroke my father often let his Bible fall open at random. If he happened on a pa.s.sage he didn't like, he continued the process until he found something more to his taste.

I recited the next verse in Ecclesiastes from memory. " 'For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.' " " 'For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.' "

The pa.s.sage was about two emotions I had come to know well: despair and vanity. I was in despair because of my situation yet had enough vanity left to think I counted for something in the grand scheme of things, that I was more than a molecule on the a.s.s of a flea crawling across a map of the universe. There was only one problem.

I wasn't.

I was the same as every other human on the planet, and when the final random asteroid came hurtling through s.p.a.ce to take us all out in one big flash, to pitch us into the inferno, our destruction would no more be directed by William P. Markham's G.o.d than by a finger randomly placed in the Bible.

How I wanted to believe in a G.o.d. I envied believers, no matter what their persuasion. Maybe that was the despair the pa.s.sage in Ecclesiastes had spoken of. But wasn't it the ultimate vanity for me to think I was important enough that a G.o.d a billion light-years away had enough interest to orchestrate my days and nights, mine, Jim Swope's?

There were probably countless habitable planets for a G.o.d to keep track of, and here he was letting little old me have this fender bender, giving me a good job, giving me a wonderful pair of daughters, letting my wife leave me, turning me into a veggie-all because it was part of some grand scheme that would make sense somewhere down the line.

What if G.o.d had put a single germ on the planet Earth a billion years ago and was coming back in another billion years to see what had come of it? What if that was all there was to his plan?

It wasn't as if I didn't want to believe.

More than anything I wanted to believe in a Lord who would rescue me. Yet, no matter how hard I wanted it, I couldn't convince myself there was a G.o.d or that G.o.d provided an afterlife.

I opened six or eight Bibles from the open box, then ripped the s.h.i.+pping tape on the second box, which, according to the label, had been freighted in from Tennessee.

Fancy that.

More leather-bound Bibles. I took one out and turned it upside down, flapping the pages as if to dislodge a bookmark. Something broke on the floor at my feet and I heard the hollow, tinkly sound a shattered Christmas tree decoration might make.

The floor around my feet glinted with tiny jewel-like shards of gla.s.s. I'd dropped a small gla.s.s ampoule. Pieces of broken gla.s.s were everywhere, on my shoe, in my pant cuff, on my sock. Alert not to cut my hand through the latex glove, I brushed them away.

When I inspected the inside of the Bible, I found a section of the Old Testament cut out with a razor knife, just enough to accommodate the vial. I opened four more Bibles before I found a second ampoule. When I had six of them, I lined them up on a nearby chair.

Each was stoppered with a tiny synthetic cork and half filled with a greenish-gray powder that looked like ground pencil lead. None of the ampoules were labeled.

Canyon View appeared to have more use for religion than I had.

There were another thirty or so Bibles in the boxes, no telling how many more ampoules. When you thought about it, a book made a relatively secure container. After all, it had taken a whole lot of mishandling to burst the boxes in Holly's truck.

Moving to the desk across the room, I sank into Marge DiMaggio's plush leather swivel chair and pulled the telephone across until I could read the dial pad from the light of the street lamp outside. Stephanie answered her cell phone on the first ring.

"You all right, Jim?"

"I think I found the mother lode."

"What is it?"

"You have to see it."

"Be there in a minute."

She was breathing heavily when she burst through the door, her hair tossed back with the speed of her movement. "Don't move from the doorway," I said as she started into the room.

"Why not?"

"I spilled something."

"What?"

"I don't know."

"At least let me switch on a-"

Before I could stop her she'd turned on the lamp near the door. The black light. She turned it off as soon as she realized her mistake. I suppose, as had I, she'd forgotten the lamp was ultraviolet.

"Turn it back on."

A moment later we were looking at a green phosph.o.r.escent glow coming from the floor in front of the vault and from my feet. It was stronger in certain spots, weaker in others, as if the black light were tracking footprints. My footprints. And my left foot, the one I'd dumped the ampoule on. Now we knew what the black light was for. Whatever was in the ampoules had been laced with phosph.o.r.escent matter to make it show up under ultraviolet. I'd noticed ultraviolet lamps in the offices downstairs, too.

"Jim. Look at yourself." For the first time I looked down at my lap and the desk in front of me. A greenish glow came off the telephone I'd used to call her, smatterings of green on the desktop, a stronger glow from my right hand and s.h.i.+rt. "It's on your face, too. What is it?"

"Holly had Bibles in her truck. Canyon View was s.h.i.+pping books. They s.h.i.+p this s.h.i.+t in Bibles."

"What's that on the inside of the safe door?"

"Oh, c.r.a.p. I didn't see that." I walked across the room to the vault and moved the door until the combination of ultraviolet and outside light made the notice readable. "They call it DiMaggio number fifty-six, or D number fifty-six. Your aunt related to Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player?"

"By marriage. Phil was."

"He hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games. D number fifty-six: 'Avoid contact with skin. Avoid contact with eyes. Avoid flame. Avoid breathing vapors in the event of fire. Rinse thoroughly in a series of staggered showers. Use cold water and at least fifteen minutes of heavy soaping. Destroy clothing and anything else that comes into contact with number fifty-six.' 'Avoid contact with skin. Avoid contact with eyes. Avoid flame. Avoid breathing vapors in the event of fire. Rinse thoroughly in a series of staggered showers. Use cold water and at least fifteen minutes of heavy soaping. Destroy clothing and anything else that comes into contact with number fifty-six.' " "

Circ.u.mventing the green glow on the floor, Stephanie took a couple of steps into the room. "You go take a shower. The way you are now you can't even sit in the car."

"Don't come in."

"Push that door back toward me. I'll turn on the light and read it. There might be something about an antidote."

"Okay, but don't walk over here."

"I won't."

I swung the heavy vault door so Stephanie could read the instructions; then I stepped into Marge DiMaggio's shower facility. The room had two exits. Now I knew why. You went in one end contaminated, came out the other clean. Or so you hoped. There were three shower stalls, with rinse-off areas outside each, gla.s.s doors arranged so that you stepped in one side, then out the other, making a kind of S as you worked your way through. A diagram on the wall presented the steps.

I took off my clothes, then rendered the latex gloves I'd been wearing inside out, one into the other, and stepped into the first shower stall and turned on the water. It was heart attack cold-warm water opened the body's pores and allowed the absorption of foreign substances. I soaped up, scrubbing every part of my body with the sterile mitts provided, scrubbing until I ached all over from the cold. I found the shampoo and lathered my hair. I s.h.i.+vered under the cold spray for fifteen minutes and found myself beginning to go hypothermic. I stayed in the second shower ten minutes, as suggested on the wall diagram. Ten more minutes in the third shower.

After toweling off, I stepped into a too-small set of blue hospital scrubs and a pair of paper slippers that fit perfectly. DiMaggio had big feet. Or maybe these were leftovers from her husband.

Back at DiMaggio's office the overhead lights were on. Stephanie was on the other side of the room, her back pressed firmly against the wall. I wondered for a split second whether she'd somehow gotten into the D#56. She seemed frightened, no, petrified.

But D#56 wasn't the problem.

The problem was standing next to the closed vault door. Scott Donovan was the problem. An even bigger problem was the nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol he held in his right fist.

"Hey, lady-killer," he said, grinning at me. "All clean now?"

59. TUB-O'-LARD "Don't be shy," Donovan said, waving the pistol around in a mock orbit of greeting. His voice was as calm and soothing as it had always been. "Come in and join the festivities."

I stepped into the room, but not so far that I wouldn't fall back into the corridor when he shot me. Had Stephanie not been there, I would have fled. Or tried to. Now Stephanie and I were stuck to him and to each other as if he were a strip of flypaper and we were hapless insects.

Standing near the vault, Donovan turned his head to examine it, and Stephanie took the opportunity to gesture at me with her right hand. She held a small object behind her hip, but I couldn't tell what it was. A handheld heat-seeking missile launcher would have been nice, but it looked more like a syringe. I had no idea where she'd found it. She hadn't brought it with her. After Donovan made certain the safe was locked, he turned to us, his eyes as blank as a cod's.

"Too bad you're not safecrackers," he said, his tone reasoned and mellow, his demeanor so nonchalant you would have thought we were discussing the weather. "I never thought you'd get this close."

"You going to call the police?" Stephanie asked.

"At this point, that is not an option."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because there comes a time in business and commerce when somebody backs you into a corner and you find yourself forced to do something you never would have done under normal circ.u.mstances, something you don't want to do but which needs doing. I've found myself in that predicament several times in my career. Unfortunately, I'm in that predicament right now. You two shouldn't be here. I don't know what all you've found while you've been poking around, but we can't afford to take a chance you've uncovered any of our trade secrets. It wouldn't be fair to the people who work here."

"Let me get this right," I said. "You're going to kill us because you want to be fair to the people who work here?"

"Don't be twisting this all around. You people are the ones who made the mistake. Breaking and entering, I think it's called. It's a form of sabotage. Espionage, you might even call it. You've heard of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. No different. The work we're doing here has implications for national security."

His voice was soothing. It was hard to believe he had a gun and was saying what he was saying. The man who is about to kill you is supposed to be a maniac, not someone with the demeanor of a shy pizza delivery boy.

Stephanie must have heard him in the hallway while I was in the shower. I could visualize the scenario. She would have had time to warn me or shut the vault door, probably not both. She must have found the syringe inside the vault while I was in the shower. I wondered what was in it.

Showing up Monday morning to an office redecorated in blood and brains wasn't going to please DiMaggio, especially if the blood and brains belonged to her niece. Tonight Donovan's job was to get rid of us with the least amount of disruption to the office surroundings.

Maybe I was guessing, but his look wasn't one of moral quandary; it was more that of a man facing a conundrum: how to get these two yokels outside, dead, and into the trunk of his car with a minimum of fuss.

Donovan scratched the tip of his nose with the barrel of his chrome semiautomatic, pondering, looking us over, checking out Stephanie. I didn't know anything about guns, but his looked well oiled and cared for, like something he might use to take down bull elephants when he wasn't b.u.mping off burglars.

"How did you find us?" Stephanie asked.

"The building's got a silent alarm. All the key officers are automatically notified."

"You all drive in together?" I asked.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? If we had some witnesses."

He looked at me meaningfully, and his tone began to take on a hard edge. He was working himself up to this. I could see in his eyes behind those wire-rimmed gla.s.ses that he was trying to steel himself to the task at hand. At the commune once I'd watched my father butcher a live chicken. He'd made the same s.h.i.+ft in att.i.tude right before he picked up the chicken by its legs, laid its neck across a block of wood, and swung a hatchet down hard.

"You killed Achara, didn't you?" I said.

"You think because I'm standing here with a gun I'm the bad guy? Don't get confused. You You broke in. broke in. You You snooped through our building. I saw the offices downstairs that you ransacked. You're the ones who did this to yourselves. Don't be blaming it on me." snooped through our building. I saw the offices downstairs that you ransacked. You're the ones who did this to yourselves. Don't be blaming it on me."

"Achara did that to herself, too?"

"Not me. You burned your house down."

"You're going to kill us, Donovan, at least have the b.a.l.l.s not to lie while you're doing it."