either, but it was somewhat less threatening.
“Where would he go?” she asked.
Benny shrugged. “1 don’t know. But if I do a thorough search of the
cabin, maybe I’ll find something that’ll point me in the right
direction.”
“Do we have time for a search? I mean, when we left Sarah Kiel at the
hospital last night, I didn’t know the feds might be on this same trail.
I told her not to talk about what had happened and not to tell anyone
about this place. At worst, I thought maybe Eric’s business partners
would start sniffing around, trying to get something out of her, and I
figured she’d be able to handle them. But she won’t be able to stall
the government. And if she believes we’re traitors, she’ll even think
she’s doing the right thing when she tells,them about this place. So
they’ll be here sooner or later.”
“I agree,” Benny said, staring thoughtfully at the Mercedes.
“Then we’ve no time to worry about where Eric went.
Besides, that’s a copy of the Wildcard file in there on the living-room
floor. All we have to do is pick it up and get out of here, and we’ll
have all the proof we need.”
He shook his head. Having the file is important, maybe even crucial,
but I’m not so sure it’s enough.”
She paced agitatedly, the thirty-two pistol held with the muzzle pointed
at the ceiling rather than down, for an accidentally triggered shot
would ricochet off the concrete floor. “Listen, the whole story’s right
there in black and white. We just give it to the press-” “For one
thing,” Benny said, “the file is, I assume, a lot of highly technical
stuff-lab results, formulae-and no reporter’s going to understand it.
He’ll have to take it to a first-rate geneticist for review, for
translation.”
“So?”
“So maybe the geneticist will be incompetent or just conservative in his
assumption of what’s possible in his field, and in either case he might
disbelieve the whole thing, he might tell the reporter it’s a fraud, a
hoax.”
“We can deal with that kind of setback. We can keep looking until we
find a geneticist who Intermpting, Benny said, “Worse, Maybe the
reporter will take it to a geneticist who does his own research for the
government, for the Pentagon. And isn’t it logical that federal agents
have contacted a lot of scientists specializing in recombinant DNA
research, warning them that media types might be bringing them certain
stolen files of a highly classified nature, seeking analysis of the
contents?”
“The feds can’t know that’s my intention.”
“But if they’ve got a file on you-and they d then they know you well
enough to suspect that’d be your plan.”
“All right, yes,” she admitted unhappily.
“So any Pentagon-supported scientist is going to be real eager to please
the government and keep his own fat research grants, and he’s sure as
hell going to alert them the moment such a file comes into his hands.
Certainly he’s not going to risk losing his grants or being prosecuted
for compromising defense secrets, so at best he’ll tell the reporter to
take his damn file and get lost, and he’ll keep his mouth shut. At
best. Most likely he’ll give the reporter to the feds, and the reporter
will give us to the feds. The file will be destroyed, and very likely
we’ll be destroyed, too.”
Rachael didn’t want to believe what he said, but she knew there was
truth in it.
Out in the woods, the cicadas were singing again.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
Evidently Benny had been thinking hard about that question as they had
gone through room after room of the cabin without finding Eric, for his
answer was well prepared. “With both Eric and the file in our
possession, we’re in a lot stronger position. We wouldn’t have just a
bunch of cryptic research papers that only a handful of people could
understand, we’d also have a walking dead man, his skull staved in, and
by God, that’s dramatic enough to guarantee that virtually any newspaper
or television network will run an all-stops-pulled story before getting
expert opinions on the file itself. Then there’ll be no reason for the