David Morrell - The Protector

"Well, that's enough to ruin my day," Cavanaugh said.

"Mine already was ruined," Kline said. His wrists remained tied together beneath his leather jacket. "Two hollows from here, there's a lane on the right."

Jamie drove on, went up an incline, and descended into the first hollow.

"Take this lane," Cavanaugh told Jamie.

"No, that's not the one," Kline said. "I told you two hollows."

"I know what you told me," Cavanaugh said, "but we're trying this one."

Jamie pulled off the road. Flanked by dense bushes and trees, two shadowy weed-choked ruts in the dirt were blocked by a wooden gate, the white paint of which had faded to the color of dirty chalk. What attracted Cavanaugh's attention was that the weeds in the lane looked crushed, as if a vehicle had recently gone over them.

"I don't see a lock," Jamie said. After a cautious glance around, she got out of the car and unhooked a rusted chain from the gate, swinging it open. She drove through, stopped, and took another wary glance around before she returned to the gate and shut it behind her.

"It's so flimsy," Jamie said, getting back into the car, "if we have to when we come back, we can always ram through it."

"Park where the undergrowth conceals us from the road. We'll walk," Cavanaugh said.

After warning Kline to be quiet, Cavanaugh made him lead the way up a potholed lane that twisted through trees and bushes. He had his pistol out, following Kline at a careful distance.

Overhead branches shut out the sun. Then the branches opened, and the steep rise brought them to knee-high grass in a clearing where old weather-grayed picnic benches looked down on a valley half a mile wide. The area down there was completely devoted to pasture, no shade trees anywhere, which was odd if the pasture was intended for horses, Cavanaugh thought, but not odd if the trees had been leveled to create an unobstructed line of fire and to remove places in which an intruder might be able to hide.

A wooden sign attached to a post had faded yellow letters that might once have been orange: welcome to bailey's ridge.

"Looks like one of the locals tried some kind of tourist thing several years ago," Cavanaugh said.

He glanced down at indentations in the long grass, where a vehicle had recently been parked. Then he motioned for Kline to walk along a furrow in the grass toward the picnic benches. A trampled area around one of the benches attracted his attention, as did cigarette butts, the paper of which looked fresh.

"This was where your men watched for me, right?" Cavanaugh asked. He peered down at the paved road that went through the pasture. "From here, they could see pretty much everything that happened down there. Yesterday, what made you think I'd use the next lane?"

"It's the only area where the trees have been cut back from the road. Until a month ago, a chain-link fence used to be there. The dirt was disturbed when they ripped the poles out. The sanitiz-ers tried to smooth the dirt and put in bushes, but it's obvious the landscape's been changed. Every other lane that seems to go nowhere is made of dirt and has weeds and potholes. That lane's as smooth and weed-free as can be. Beyond the trees, it becomes paved."

"How did Prescott and his controllers get permission to block off a historic site?" Cavanaugh asked.

"Prescott didn't need permission. This property's historic, but it isn't owned by the government. It's his."

"Is it safe to go down there?"

"Nobody's around. The lab was abandoned as soon as the project was terminated."

"But where's the lab?"

Kline pointed toward the valley.

"I don't see anything except a burned-out farmhouse," Cavanaugh said.

"The first time Bailey's farmhouse was destroyed was in 1864," Kline explained as they drove along the road through the pasture, approaching the burned structure. "After your Civil War, the new owner-an industrialist who'd made a fortune selling munitions to the government-bought most of the land around here and had a mansion built where Bailey's house had stood. The original cellar was incorporated into the design. Stones from the original house were used in the walls."

"You should have been a historian."

"My father was." Kline's voice was filled with regret.

They reached the scorched, collapsed building and got out of the Taurus.

Despite the devastation of the burned timbers and the blackened stones from the fallen walls, Cavanaugh was able to get an idea of how impressive the mansion had been in its heyday. He imagined pillars and two long porches, one above the other, people standing on them, waving, as horse-drawn carriages brought brightly dressed visitors. "It's a shame Prescott's controllers had to destroy it."

"They didn't destroy it," Kline said. "Prescott did."

Cavanaugh and Jamie looked at him.

"Prescott's controllers confined him to the mansion when they terminated his project," Kline said. "A man doesn't devote himself to researching fear unless he identifies with it. If he's paranoid, he's going to become more so when he sees signs all around him that people consider him a liability."

"Fear's his primary emotion," Cavanaugh agreed. And now, thanks to him, it's mine, he added silently.

"To protect himself, Prescott did something his controllers could never have anticipated, given how proud he was of this property," Kline said. "One night when his fear became especially intense and he was certain he was about to be killed, he burned the mansion down. Because he looked so heavy and out of shape, his controllers had misjudged him, putting a few guards on him, while the majority were devoted to keeping intruders such as myself off the property. In the confusion caused by the flames, he was able to slip away into the darkness. The fire was only half of his tactic, however. He also released the hormone as the mansion burned. Under its influence, the guards panicked and shot at what they thought were attackers coming through the flickering shadows. Several got killed by their own men-another mess that had to be cleaned up. The shots brought the guards from the perimeter. Meanwhile, Prescott stole one of their vehicles and smashed through a fence at the back of the property. He abandoned the vehicle in a nearby town, where he had a car stored in a garage that he'd rented under another name."

"Just goes to show-paranoia's a survival trait," Jamie said.

"Where's Prescott's lab?" Cavanaugh asked.

"In back," Kline said.

They rounded the jumble of scorched timbers and stones and approached a similar ruin, but this one looked as if it had been a barn.

"The fire Prescott set didn't spread this far," Kline said. "A few days later, his controllers were responsible for this one. It was part of their sanitizing. An efficient way to get the job done."

"The lab's underground?"

"Under the barn." Kline pointed toward where blackened wreckage had been moved to form a path across the barn's concrete floor. He indicated a hatchlike slab. "That's the entrance."

"You and your men cleared this? Weren't you afraid of being caught?"

"By whom? I told you the property had been abandoned. There's no reason to guard this place. There's nothing here for Prescott's controllers to worry about."

Kline suddenly groaned. As Cavanaugh gaped, Jamie screamed, seeing blood fly from Kline's forehead. A faraway shot echoing, Kline toppled face-forward into the dirt.

It happened so suddenly and so unexpectedly that Cavanaugh was momentarily controlled only by his startle reflex. Until now, after the tension of what had happened in Rutherford's condo, he had managed to keep his nervousness at bay. This was supposed to have been a fact-finding mission, not a confrontation. Now the unaccustomed fear that Prescott's hormone had created in him and that he had struggled to subdue took possession of him again. But his fear for Jamie was even greater. His muscles responding like tightly wound springs abruptly released, he dove toward her, pushing her down with him next to the barn's wreckage.