face, stared into his eyes-and had the shocking, unshakable feeling that
she was going to lose him.
She tried to tell herself that her sudden apprehension was the
understandable reaction of a thirty-year-old woman who, having made one
bad marriage, had at last miraculously found the right man. Call it the
I-don’ t-desee-to-be-this-happy syndrome. When life finally hands us a
beautiful bouquet of flowers, we usually peer cautiously among the
petals in expectation of a bee. Superstitionvinced especially in a
distrust of good fortune-was perhaps the very core of human nature, and
it was natural for her to fear losing him.
That was what she tried to tell herself, but she knew her sudden terror
was something more than superstition, something darker. The chill along
her spine deepened until she felt as if each vertebra had been
transformed into a lump of ice. The cool breath that had touched her
skin now penetrated deeper, down toward her bones.
She turned from him, swung her legs out of the bed, stood up, naked and
shivering.
Benny said, “Rachael?”
“Let’s get moving,” she said anxiously, heading toward the bathroom
through the golden light and palm shadows that came through the single,
undraped window.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We’re sitting ducks here. Or might be. We’ve got to keep moving.
We’ve got to keep on the offensive. We’ve got to find him before he
finds usH)r before anyone else finds us.
Benny got out of bed, stepped between her and the bathroom door, put his
hands on her shoulders. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Don’t say that.”
“But it will.”
“Don’t tempt fate.”
“We’re strong together,” he said. “Nothing’s stronger.
“Don’t,” she insisted, putting a hand to his lips to silence him.
“Please. I. . .1 couldn’t bear losing you.”
“You won’t lose me,” he said.
But when she looked at him, she had the terrible feeling that he was
already lost, that death was very near to him, inevitable.
The I-don’ t-deserve-to-be-this-happy syndrome.
Or maybe a genuine premonition.
She had no way of knowing which it was.
The search for Dr. Eric Leben was getting nowhere.
The grim possibility of failure was, for Anson Sharp, like a great
pressure pushing in on the walls of Geneplan’s underground labs in
Riverside, compressing the windowless rooms, until he felt as if he were
being slowly crushed.
He could not abide failure, he was a winner, always a winner, superior
to all other men, and that was the only way he cared to think of
himself, the only way he could bear to think of himself, as the sole
member of a superior species, for that image of himself justified
anything he wished to do, anything at all, and he was a man who simply
could not live with the moral and ethical limitations of ordinary men.
Yet field agents were filing negative reports from every place that the
walking dead man might have been expected to show up, and Sharp was
getting angrier and more nervous by the hour. Perhaps their knowledge
of Eric Leben was not quite as thorough as they thought. In
anticipation of these events, perhaps the geneticist had prepared a
place where he could go to ground, and had managed to keep it secret
even from the D.S.A. If that were the case, the failure to apprehend
Leben would be seen as Sharp’s personal failure, for he had identified
himself too closely with the operation in expectation of taking full
credit for its success.
Then he got a break. Jerry Peake called to report that Sarah Kiel, Eric
Leben’s underage mistress, had been located in a Palm Springs hospital.
“But the damn medical staff,” Peake explained in his earnest but
frustratingly wimpy manner, “isn’t cooperative.”
Sometimes Anson Sharp wondered if the advantages of surrounding himself
with weaker-and therefore unthreatening-young agents were outweighed by
the disadvantage of their inefficiency. Certainly none of them would
pose a danger to him once he had ascended to the director’s chair, but
neither were they likely to do anything on their own hook that would
reflect positively on him as their mentor.
Sharp said, “I’ll be there before she shakes off the sedative.”
The investigation at the Geneplan labs could proceed without him for a