Yes, too bad about that, wasn’t it? In the game of cellular roulette, he had come up double zero. Not that he’d expected to go to his grave intact-that much of an optimist he wasn’t. Still, coming out of nowhere as it had, and in the midst of the most important work of his life, the cancer had felt like an undeserved punishment. It was playing hob with his body at the moment, an infuriating distraction to the workings of his mind. Come on, Jance, he berated himself, clamping his teeth against the pain, stop feeling sorry for yourself. He struggled to focus on the business at hand, the hundreds of tasks needing completion before he could begin his countdown. He assailed his own disease by reimagining it. If it was some ravening beast tearing him from within, he’d see it as something without imagination or charisma-the pain in his entrails nothing but a dark ham- lives of a few animals that would have died anyway, not even his own life. It was the work that mattered. And success. He watched intently, ignoring the black spiral of pain that was working its way through his gut again, as his team fanned out, checking tethers and adjusting telemetry devices. It was zero minus fifty minutes, and time was racing through his fingers like quarks through an accelerometer. His Nobel Prize, his international awards, the laboratory that bore his name at MIT-none of it mattered now, if it ever had. Beyond the acclaim, beyond the misgivings, there was only the idea, moved toward reality through painstaking research and development that had gone on seemingly forever until this approaching moment. In just fifty minutes, the instant when everything might come to fruition would arrive. And in that instant, the idea could become substance. If it happened, he knew, the realization of that idea would dominate military thought for the foreseeable future. But the time factor-the necessity for those hours, months and years of cerebration and calculation and fiddling and trying and trying again-made everything one great race against the very limitation of a man’s life span. Stupidly small budgets, arbitrary deadlines, the ignorant carping of the Army brass had all conspired to undermine his work, his dream, his place in the history of science. Experiments that could have worked brilliantly if they had been adequately funded were rushed headlong from the drawing board into the field and discarded forever if they failed just once. The process was nothing short of insane, and it had all come down to this: if this day’s trial shot didn’t work, he and his research would be worthless and the last decade of his life would be declared an utter waste. The pain clawed at his belly. Inwardly, he snarled back at it. You’re here, he swore to himself. You’re going through with it, and your doubts be damned. He turned around and pissed against a yucca, ignoring the burn. Somewhere behind him a sheep was bleating as if its throat were cut. Perkins was right. Time to get going or they would all be dead from the heat.
SOUTHERN ACCESS ROAD, WHITE SANDS
Ten miles south of where Peter was working, the desert flattened until it was a griddle spreading as far as the eye could see, bleached sand blinding and barren to the horizon of the Tularosa Basin. This desolate moonscape was bisected by a single two-rut track, and on this a dust-blasted Range Rover heaved, roiling a plume that stretched a half-mile behind it into the blistered air. Inside the Range Rover were Peter’s wife, Dr. Beatrice Jance, and Dr. Frederick Wolfe, who was doing the driving. Wolfe was in his early seventies, gaunt and pale, with hair like steel wool, thick eyelids and a mouth turned down darkly with an expression of perpetual disdain. His surgeon’s fingers were long and large-knuckled; the huge dome of his skull was dotted with liver spots the size of quarters. He had the air of a man who expects the best while he listens for the worst, and whose slightest disapproval had the force of a curse. Nosferatu was the nickname given him by one brash young geneticist who had been employed by him for just a week. That man soon found himself teaching high school biology in Mexico. Better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli, one of Wolfe’s few heroes, advised. Better still to love oneself so completely, so faithfully, that the question never mattered. And, in fact, that was the way it worked for Wolfe. Scientists from all over the world had flocked to the side of this implacable genius, whose experiments in biogenetics were so bold and far-reaching that no one but he could grasp their complete significance. And with Machiavellian dexterity Wolfe pitted these scientists against each other, ego to ambition, in such a way that he got the best of their work and kept his secrets to himself and his inner circle. Virtually no one he had asked to join him had refused; no one who had come aboard had quit him voluntarily. Beatrice Jance was no exception.
As he maneuvered the Range Rover across the desert sands, Wolfe Watched her from the corner of his eye. Beatrice was still magnificent-her glorious ash-blond hair had long since turned a blazing white, and there were fresh wrinkles pursing her broad pale mouth, but her athletic grace was intact, the soft gray eyes still remarkably energetic. But she hadn’t returned his smiles, not once in the last thirty minutes. No, of course, her thoughts would all be of Peter. She looked over at Wolfe, catching him looking, and smiled as he looked away, What that smile meant, though, Wolfe was damned if he knew. “If I swallow much more dust,” she shouted over the noise of the wind, “I’ll pass a brick.” Wolfe winced faintly, Her offhand coarseness when she wanted to be vulgar was jarring. It was the same with Peter. The problem with these two was, no matter how far apart they were in the course of their work, they were always somehow together. It baffled him, really, and irritated him as well. There was such a thing as being too close. They fed on each other’s doubts and anxieties, in his view, especially now with Peter’s illness looming over all of them. Touching, how they’d tried to keep Peter’s cancer a secret from him, the one man on whom nothing was ever lost, and the one man who could actually do something about it. “Fortunate for both of us we’ve arrived,” Wolfe said, pulling himself back to the here and now. He produced an ID from his pocket and braked the Range Rover at a weed-choked fence. A man appeared and scrutinized the credentials. Wolfe eyed him with Olympian impatience. “Obviously, you’re new.
The guard, wiry and humorless, ignored Wolfe’s withering glance. From somewhere inside his civilian vest came the crackle of a walkie-talkie. He ignored that, too, until he had finished inspecting Wolfe’s ID.
“Six-month rotation,” he finally said, and flashed his own ID. Wolfe waved it away. “How was D.C., Dr. Wolfe?” “Benighted and besotted,” Wolfe muttered. “As always.” The guard flicked an uneasy eye toward Wolfe’s passenger. “Beatrice,” sighed Wolfe, “Mr. Greenhorn wants your credentials, too.” Beatrice dug into her battered leather satchel, pulling out paperbacks, a scientific calculator, a Spinhaler, a tube of sun block-every-thing but her papers. “Dr. Beatrice Jance,” she said, as if that explained everything. The guard stiffened brightly.
“Wife of Dr. Peter Jance?”
She smiled, not threatened. “And he is married to me as well.” “No kidding. Sorry.” The guard stepped back, star struck, and saluted. “You both have a nice day now,” he added, pulling out his walkie-talkie to announce them. Wolfe saw Beatrice blink as she glimpsed the automatic weapon slung vertically under his vest. He put the Range Rover in drive, and within moments, guard and shack and razor-wire hurricane fence disappeared in the dust. “Everyone seems to know Peter,” Beatrice declared, still shouting over the wind. Wolfe looked at her impassively, Was this an instance of simple wifely pride, or was she trying to put a dent in his vanity? “Any kid admires an adult who likes to blow things up,” he said. “That’s probably it,” she returned.
Her tone was level, no hint of irony or regret. As faithful to the cause as she is beautiful, concluded Wolfe. Feeling as empty as a used-up pack of cigarettes, he put the pedal to the floor.
Two miles deeper into the desert, Wolfe and Beatrice arrived at the compound of corrals, pens and living quarters Wolfe had called his second home for the past five years. The Fountain Compound, whose low-lying sprawl and air of bland guardedness suggested a prison for white-collar felons, was actually an unlisted unit of the Army’s Battlefield Environment Directorate, or BED, one of the many Army research laboratories sprinkled across White Sands. The Army had begun its residency at White Sands in 1946. In the early years, its Signal Corps had supplied radar and communications support for the American conversion of captured German V-2 rockets at the dawn of the U.S. space program. Now its projects ranged far from rocketry, to weapons systems research and on into biological and chemical means of warfare that were beyond the wildest dreams of even Hitler’s architects of death.