Michael Palmer - A Heartbeat Away

“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.