‘That’s classified. But I need a good one. And I need him or her to have a certain, shall we say, moral flexibility.’
Monty became serious, as he always did when he realized that Gant wasn’t kidding around, or that an opportunity had presented itself. ‘It could cost you some money, finding a person like that.’
‘I’m prepared to pay money.’
Monty nodded. ‘Let me see what I can do.’
The next conversation took place a month later in the parking lot of a closed rest area off the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway in West Virginia. It seemed like a long way to go to have a chat, but Monty insisted on it. They parked their cars about fifty yards apart. Gant walked across the asphalt to the rental sedan Monty leaned against. The pavement was cracked and broken. The rest area itself was high up in the mountains. The view of the valley far below and to the west was wide open. You could forget to breathe while looking at it. The view south along the ridgeline was probably the purple mountain’s majesty the children used to sing about. The wind howled incessantly, and immediately Gant knew why Monty had picked this place to talk.
Gant glanced only once at the rest area building – in some distant past it had been home to bathrooms and maybe a restaurant or gift shop. It was boarded up now. One of the wooden boards that covered the front doorway had been pried open a crack. Gant peered at the darkness between the board and wall – it wasn’t out of the question that people were living in there. It wasn’t out of the question that vampires lived in there. It looked like a place where they would hide out in the daytime.
Monty had a single sheet of paper in a manila folder. Neatly typed on the page was a name, an address and a telephone number. That was all.
‘Davis Foerster,’ Monty said, his voice just barely audible above the wind. ‘The CIA has been watching him from the time he was fourteen. He won a prize from the National Science Foundation that year, for a project that demonstrated ways of accelerating the growth of cancer cells. The following year he jumped to computer science and won another national contest, this time for a paper arguing that in our lifetimes, artificial intelligence would become smarter than man, and would bind all the networked computers in the world together into a single, hyper- intelligent entity that would quickly make humanity obsolete. This entity would then go on to use the available computing capacity on earth to unlock the secrets of the universe.’
‘The CIA?’ Gant said. ‘You work for the CIA?’
‘I work with all kinds of people.’
‘For the job I’m thinking of, I’m not sure a CIA man will do.’
Monty shook his head. ‘As far as I know, the CIA has never touched Foerster. They were interested in him and that’s all. They did a psychological assessment on him. What you have to understand is this guy is eight different kinds of bad news. He’s unstable, from an abusive upbringing. He’s considered deeply neurotic and possibly delusional. He’s consumed by rage and feelings of powerlessness and persecution. He’s been in and out of various facilities, juvenile detention and mental hospitals, for the past seven or eight years. His first stay in juvie came when he was sixteen – a group of ten-year-olds were outside his window taunting him, so he went outside and sliced one of them up with a razor blade.
‘He seems to lack empathy for other living things, human or animal. He tortured stray cats as a child. He conducted experiments on them, like some kind of grammar school Josef Mengele. As an adult, he’s believed to be a serial rapist, and his M.O. is most likely blitz attacks with blunt objects on defenseless victims, like old women or women who are asleep. In fact, it’s likely that at one time or another he’s killed a woman or women in the initial attack and then had sex with the corpse. Of course, by now he may have graduated to more sophisticated methods.’
‘If they know all this about him,’ Gant said, ‘why is he still on the street?’
Monty shrugged. ‘You’re the ex-cop war hero. Go and arrest him if you want. But I suggest you hire him for the job. He can do whatever science you need, and he has the moral flexibility you described. Keep him close while the operation is ongoing. Afterwards, I think you should dispose of him. He’s not the kind of person you want out there knowing your secrets.’
Monty smiled then, his white teeth gleaming. ‘And, as I’m sure you realize, the world will probably be a little better off without him.’
In the end, Gant took half of Monty’s advice. He hired Foerster. Afterward, he paid him handsomely and sent him on his way. Why had he done that? For one, Foerster seemed a lot more stable in person than Monty made him out to be. He was a jerk, of course, almost unbearably obnoxious at times. But he was no drooling psycho. He worked long hours without complaint, living on take-out food and very little sleep, and when it came to the science he knew exactly what he was doing. There was trial and error, sure – he had never grown anthrax before, weaponized or not – but he mastered the intricacies of it in short order.
There was something creepy about Foerster, but the operation was a huge success, and he was part of that success. It might have been bad judgment, it might even have been short-sighted selfishness, but Gant figured that if he ever needed a microbiologist again, Foerster was his man, so it was better to keep him alive. And it was even more than that. Gant recognized something in Foerster. In a sense, they had some things in common, were almost kindred spirits.
They both kept secrets.
‘You can’t keep hiding out here forever.’
It was her mother talking. That morning, Katie had evacuated to her mother’s tidy house in Beaufort, about an hour away by car. Now, in the late afternoon, she was still there. She had no immediate plans of leaving.
She’d eaten lunch with her Mom, and as the sun waned they were enjoying a few Margaritas on her Mom’s back patio. It was pleasant enough, sitting at the table and putting a buzz on. The patio looked out on her Mom’s backyard and garden. They were more modest, certainly, than Katie’s, but still pretty nice. It had rained a lot down here this summer and even now, in November, the whole backyard – the trees, the bushes, the hanging vines – were as dense and lush as a rainforest. It seemed to Katie like a magical place out of a fairy tale. And the strong drinks didn’t hurt either. They put a filter between Katie and her Mom’s more annoying commentary.
It was good to be there in one important sense – Tyler had arrived home and found her gone. In fact, he had called about an hour ago, wondering where she was and what he ought to thaw out for dinner. Of course, he knew exactly where she was – both their cars were outfitted with GPS units mounted inside the dashboard, which he could monitor from his laptop computer. It was very convenient. If the cars were ever stolen, he could find them again with just a few clicks. And if Katie ever used her car to run away from home, he could find her again the same way.
Tyler also knew what he ought to make himself for dinner. He was a big boy and had lived on his own for many years before they met. He had called her to send a message. Although their conversation was brief, and polite, he was in effect telling her: I’m home now and you should be, too.
But she wasn’t home and she wasn’t coming home. Not tonight. See, two could play at this game of being absent without leave. He thought he could come and go as he pleased and she was supposed to stay home and play wifey, but she was done with that. It was over. Certainly, she would make it look good for public consumption – for instance, she was organizing their annual Halloween party as she always did – but privately, she would make him feel how she felt.
Katie’s mother went on. ‘I mean, it seems like every few days you’re sleeping over here, and I doubt it’s for my benefit. If you’re having these sorts of problems, maybe you should go into counseling together.’
She looked at her mother, really soaking her in. She was a woman in her late fifties. She was careful about sun exposure. She drank eight glasses of pure spring water a day. She followed a mainly vegetarian diet, though she wasn’t a fanatic about it. At Katie’s insistence, she had taken up yoga about ten years ago, and had retained some of her youthful flexibility and strength. Her eyes were bright and alert, even after a few drinks. About the only obvious clue to her age were the crow’s feet around her eyes, and the wrinkles on her forehead and neck – she refused to consider plastic surgery, though many women she knew had already gone for it two or three times.
Still, Katie’s father had died five years earlier and his death had taken its toll. Her Mom she wasn’t as vigorous as before – wasn’t quite the queen of the ball she had once been. She had diminished without him, and had become thinner and more fragile. She was still passionate about gardening, and about her charity work. She
