Greg Iles - True Evil

Tonight, it seemed better that she had survived. Had Alex Morse died in that carport, a hundred FBI agents would have descended on this little corner of Mississippi. Now he had time to do what was necessary for a clean escape.

Eldon shouldered his backpack and walked slowly up the hill. As he neared the house, he veered right and moved around dense azaleas to the cluster of air conditioners that served the house. He had studied the blueprints provided by Rusk until he knew this house inside and out. He knew which air-conditioning units cooled which zones, for example, and he would soon make use of that knowledge. He continued circling the house, moving past an outdoor hot tub, then the swimming pool, then into the breezeway that led to the storeroom. There was some risk that he could be seen from the darkened windows inside, but instinct told him he was all right. Moving quickly into the storeroom, he pulled down a collapsible stairway and climbed into the attic. From here, he could reach the attic of the main house.

After squeezing his bulky shoulders through one crawl space, he entered a forest of rafters and ceiling joists. By walking carefully on the joists, he traversed the forty feet that took him to the duct he needed. Digging into the backpack, he removed a respirator gas mask and fitted it closely over his nose and mouth. Then he fitted a pair of foam-lined goggles over his eyes. After donning a pair of surgical gloves, Eldon reached into his pack and removed a heavy, oblong canister. It looked like the CO 2cylinders that kids used to charge paintball guns. He laid a heavy rubber mat over the duct to dampen vibration. Then, with a small, battery-powered hand drill, he bored a hole in the duct. After laying a thin piece of rubber over the hole, he lifted the cylinder and punched its sharp nozzle through both rubber and hole, creating a seal. Once he was certain of his setup, he drew a deep breath, then opened the valve on the cylinder.

The soft hissing that followed gave him intense satisfaction. Within two minutes, both men and the boy below would be unconscious. They would remain that way until morning, long after Eldon had left the house. The gas in the cylinder could not be purchased anywhere in the United States unless the buyer was the U.S. government. It had been provided to Dr. Tarver by Edward Biddle, an acquaintance from many years ago. Biddle had once been an army officer associated with a project Dr. Tarver had worked on. Now Biddle was an officer of a large corporation that handled critical defense contracts for the United States. The gas was an agent similar to that the Russians had used in their attempt to free the seven hundred hostages trapped by terrorists in a Moscow theater. Quite a few people had died from the gas in that instance, but most were elderly, and the dosage had not been precisely calculated. Unlike the Russians, Dr. Tarver knew exactly what he was doing.

He sat absolutely still for two minutes, then moved deeper into the attic to the folding-ladder steps over the closet of the master bedroom. So confident was he of the gas that he had not brought a firearm tonight. An unregistered weapon was the quickest path to arrest during a random traffic stop. Bracing both hands on a ceiling joist, he pushed down the spring-mounted steps with his legs. After unfolding the ladder, he carried his backpack into the closet and unpacked an aluminum thermos. Inside the thermos were two pre-loaded syringes. One contained a mixture of corticosteroids to suppress the human immune system. The other contained a solution that had taken Dr. Tarver over a year to develop. Twenty years, really, if you counted the research that had gone into it. But this specific solution had been a year in the making. It was different from those used on the other targets. And for that reason, Eldon was excited. He felt a hyperalertness that even the knowledge that this would be his last operation could not diminish. For there could be no doubt of that. Either Rusk had been lying to him, or Rusk was a fool. Either way, the connection had to be severed. But there were things Eldon had to do first. Some would be unpleasant, but not this. This was something he had waited for, for a very long time.

He walked into the master bedroom without even trying to be quiet. Dr. Shepard lay on his side in the bed, his mouth open wider than appeared normal, but this was common after the gas. Dr. Tarver took a mental snapshot of the bed to make sure he would leave everything exactly as he found it. Then he set the syringes on a dresser, pulled the covers off Shepard, and rolled the internist onto his stomach.

Dr. Tarver took a small LED flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, then got the steroid injection from the dresser. Kneeling between Shepard's thighs, he pulled down his boxer shorts and pushed one cheek aside, exposing the anus. Holding the light between his teeth, he opened the doctor's anus enough to insert the needle, then injected the steroids an inch inside the rectum. Dr. Shepard hardly stirred. Eldon repeated the procedure with the other solution, but at the last instant Shepard's lower body flinched in an involuntary muscle spasm. Eldon found his needle embedded at the entrance to the rectum. A bad mistake, but now that the hole had been made, there wasn't much point in removing it to find a site deeper in.

He hesitated before depressing the plunger. Several times today he'd thought of extending his experiment. He'd known the boy would be in the house, and since his research was likely to be cut short, the boy offered a unique opportunity. Eldon had not prepared enough solution to inject both Shepard and his son with the precalculated dose, but instinct told him there was probably enough. On the other hand, a juvenile immune system might be resilient enough to overcome the virus. Given the unknowns, Eldon depressed the plunger to the bottom of the syringe's barrel and gave Shepard the full dose.

The boy would live.

Eldon turned Shepard back on his side, pulled the covers over him, then loaded everything back into the pack and walked quickly down the hall. He found the boy on a sofa bed in the home theater. To his surprise, he discovered an older man sleeping in an easy chair in the den, three empty beer bottles beside him. Eldon did not know the man. He took a cell phone from his pack, aimed its tiny lens at the stranger's face, and shot a picture of him. Then he forced his hand into the stranger's back pocket and took out his wallet.

Eldon looked around the room. Leaning against the sofa by William Kilmer's feet was a camouflage backpack. When he opened the backpack, a strange numbness began spreading outward from his heart. Inside was a handgun, a starlight scope, a canister of pepper spray, a camera, and a pair of handcuffs. It took several moments for Eldon to gather himself, but he put everything back exactly as it had been before he arrived.

He left the house by the ladder in the closet, retracing his steps back to the duct, where he sealed his tiny hole with duct tape. Ten minutes after he injected Shepard, he was walking swiftly through the trees toward the highway. The sense of exhilaration he'd felt inside had vanished, now replaced by anxiety, anger, even fear.

Tonight, everything had changed.

Alex sat with her elbows propped on the desk of her hotel room in Washington, drunk on Ativan and room service wine. She'd been staring at her computer for hours, afraid that the announcement bell wouldn't ding when Jamie logged on to MSN. The bell had not dinged yet, but not because of a malfunction. For whatever reason, Jamie simply had not logged on. The reason might be as simple as a power outage in Jackson, but Alex couldn't make herself believe it. Given what Jamie had told her during their last video chat, she feared that he might have tried something desperate….