Robin Cook - Shock

'Why do you care where he had it in his wallet?" Joanna asked.

'Because it means he doesn't use it often," Deborah said. "We don't want him to miss it until after we've had a chance to use it. Come on! Let's find those car keys, hide them, and get the hell out of here."

"Getting out of here is the best suggestion you've made all day,' Joanna said. "As far as the car keys are concerned, why bother? He's not going to wake up for at least twelve hours, and when he does, he's not going to feel much like driving."

KURT HERMANN STARED AT THE POLAROID PHOTO OF THE new employee, Georgina Marks. He was holding it in his rock steady hand beneath the green-glass-shaded desk lamp. As he studied her face he recalled the appearance of her full body, with her breasts ready to spill out over the front of her dress, and her skirt barely able to cover her behind. To him she was an abomination, a direct affront to his fundamentalist mentality.

In his slow, deliberate style, Kurt laid the photo down on the desktop next to the photo of the other new employee, Prudence Heatherly. She was different – obviously a Bible-fearing female.

Kurt was sitting in his office in the deserted gatehouse where he frequently spent his evenings. Adjoining the office was a makeshift gym where he could hone his muscular, finely tuned frame. As a determined loner he avoided socialization. And living on the Wingate premises made it easy, especially since the institution was sited in a small town which had nothing to offer as far as he was concerned.

Kurt had been working for the Wingate Clinic for a little more than three years. The job was perfect for him, with just enough intrigue and challenge to make it interesting and yet not so busy that he had to work too hard. His military experience made him uniquely qualified for security. He'd joined the army directly after high school and had made it into the Special Forces, where he'd been trained for covert operations. He'd learned to kill with his bare hands as well as with any number of weapons, and he'd never been troubled by it.

Joining the army had not been the beginning of his association with the military. Having grown up as an army brat, Kurt had never known a different lifestyle. His father had been in the Special Forces and had been a strict disciplinarian who'd demanded utter obedience and perfection from his wife and child. There'd been a few ugly scenes in Kurt's early adolescence, but he'd fallen into line quickly enough. Then his father had been killed in the waning days of Vietnam in a Cambodian operation which to this day was still classified. To his horror, after his father's death his mother embarked on a series of love affairs before she wound up marrying a prissy insurance salesman.

The army had been good to Kurt. Appreciating his abilities and attitude, it had always been there to smooth over the minor brushes with the law that Kurt's aggressive behavior sometimes brought on. There were a number of things Kurt could not tolerate, but prostitution and homosexuality in any form were at the top of the list, and Kurt was not one to shy away from acting on his principles.

Things had gone well in Kurt's life until he'd been posted to Okinawa. On that rugged island, he admitted, things had gotten out of hand.

Slowly Kurt leaned over and stared again into Georgina's eyes. On Okinawa he'd met a number of women just like her. So many, in fact, he'd felt a religious calling to reduce their numbers. It was as if God had spoken to him directly. Getting rid of them was easy. He'd have sex with them in an isolated environment, and then, when they had the moral depravity to demand money, he'd kill them.

He was never caught or charged, but eventually he was implicated by circumstantial evidence. The army solved the problem by discharging him under President Clinton's government employee reduction plan, which turned out to be mostly from the military and not from the bureaucracy. A few months later Kurt answered an ad placed by the Wingate Clinic and was hired on the spot.

Kurt heard the gate creak open followed by the sound of a car accelerating through the tunnel. Pushing back from his desk, he went to the window and opened the shutters. He could make out the taillights of a late-model Chevrolet as it disappeared down the gravel road. He looked at his watch.

After closing the shutters, Kurt returned to the desk. He looked down at the woman's now-familiar face. He'd seen that car come in soon after Wingate's and he'd followed it up to Wingate's house. It didn't take a rocket scientist to know what was going on behind closed doors. The appropriate Biblical passages immediately sprang to mind, and as he recited them his hands balled into tight fists. God was talking to him again.

IT WAS ANOTHER GORGEOUS, bright spring morning as the women sped northwest, heading back toward Bookford, which they'd left only nine hours previously. Both were exhausted. Contrary to the morning before, they'd not awakened spontaneously and had had to be dragged out of their beds by their respective alarms.

When they'd gotten home the night before, neither went to bed, much as they'd longed to. Deborah had felt impelled to clean her shoes, which had gotten muddy in Spencer's basement. She also spent some time accessorizing her outfit for the next day; she'd realized belatedly that she'd have to wear the same dress since all her other clothes were a completely different style, a fact which she felt would have suggested she wasn't whom she said she was.

Joanna had gotten on the phone with David Washburn to rehash exactly what she would do once she got into the Wingate's server room. At his insistence she even had to go over to his apartment to get some of his brute-force cracking software. He'd told her that the more he'd thought about it, the more he believed that even the server room console would require a password to get the keyboard to function. He showed her how to use the software and had her try it several times until he was confident she was familiar with it. By the time she got home it was well past midnight, and Deborah was already fast asleep.

As fatigued as they were, they drove in silence while listening mindlessly to morning talk radio. When they got to the Wingate entrance, Deborah, whose turn it was to drive, used her swipe card. The gate opened without a hitch, and in they drove. Since they were some of the first employees to arrive that morning, there were any number of parking spaces available. Deborah took one close to the front door.

"Are you worried about running into Spencer?" Joanna asked.

"Not really. With the hangover he's undoubtedly going to have, I don't think anybody is going to be seeing much of him today."

"You're probably right. Besides, he's probably not going to remember much about last night anyway."

"Well, good luck, partner," Deborah said.

"Same to you," Joanna said.

"I forgot to ask if you remembered your cell phone."

"I certainly did. And you?"

"Yup! And I even remembered to charge the battery. So let's do it!"

With a sense of purpose and not a small amount of anxiety, the two women alighted from the car and entered the building. According to instructions they'd gotten the previous day they went first to Helen Masterson's cubicle, where they completed a bit more paperwork. They were relieved that no problems with their fake Social Security numbers had emerged overnight.

From Helen's office space they split up, with Joanna heading to Christine Parham's cubicle only three down from Helen's and Deborah crossing the main hall to find Megan Finnigan's office.

Joanna wasn't sure how to get Christine's attention. The woman was at her desk, facing away from the cubicle's doorless entrance. First Joanna rapped on the partition wall, but since it was composed of a sound-absorbent material, the meager noise was not enough to rouse the office manager. Joanna resorted to calling the woman's name.