A Heartbeat Away

someplace below.

“Are there many places like this in Wichita?” Griff asked.

“There may be, but I’ve never heard of one. Apparently, the man who built this place was a little—what’s the word—eccentric.”

“I’ll bet I could come up with a few words that were more appropriate.”

Bartholomew started down the staircase and Griff followed warily. The stairs were narrow and so steep that Griff used one hand to keep his balance. The heavy, bone-chilling air grew mustier as they descended. The smooth sidewalls became exposed rock, suggesting that the original excavators had left the stones exactly as their tools had unearthed them.

Eccentric, indeed.

The stairs finally ended at a surprisingly large circular room with three dark passageways extending off of it like the spokes of a wheel. Hanging on the walls of the room, secured there by metal spikes driven into the stone, were implements of torture and pain—whips, batons, wood rattans, shackles, and chains. The space kindled memories of his cell in the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

“What is this place?” Griff asked.

“Believe it or not, it used to be a wine cellar. Then I transformed it into what many of my acolytes call the center of all things.”

“Is this where you beat people?”

“It was aversion therapy, reserved for only the hard-core addicts and alcoholics—the ones who had failed at everything else, including AA. Whatever you might have heard, I had many, many successes.”

“Okay. Is this where you conducted your—aversion therapy?”

“Not here.”

Bartholomew flicked a wall-mounted switch that illuminated the passageway directly in front of them. A string of tiny colored Christmas lights on a long cord hooked into the ceiling lit the way.

Bizarre … macabre … alarming … disgusting …

Griff searched his vocabulary for the most apt description, and found all of them wanting.

Bartholomew ducked to pass underneath an archway, and motioned for Griff to follow. The vapor of their breathing now hung in the chilly air, and the musty odor was more overpowering the further in they traveled—the smell of fear … and of death. Griff shuddered. Ventilation was minimal. Beneath his parka, he had begun to perspire.

The corridor opened into a square room—an antechamber of some sort. There were stone alcoves built into three of the room’s walls. Each alcove had a wooden door with a small, barred window in the upper center.

“I conducted my mission work here,” Bartholomew said. “Sometimes, I kept my brothers and sisters here for days without food. Sometimes, if necessary, I would beat them. The key was to weaken their wills.”

The terrible irony of the man’s statement hit home with force. Griff reflected grimly on the day he first met with Sylvia Chen at her office at Columbia University, and on his decision to move to New York to work with her on the microbe she was developing. The key is to weaken their wills. It seemed possible she had said those exact words.

“Your brothers and sisters?” he asked Bartholomew, now.

“Those who came to me for salvation.”

“Your prisoners, you mean.”

“They could leave any time. The doors weren’t locked. They asked for this treatment only after they failed at AA and many other programs.”

Griff ran his fingertips over one of the doors and tried to imagine what it had been like for Bartholomew’s tragic sisters and brothers.

“How do you explain these locks?” he asked.

Bartholomew looked remorseful.

“I added the locks at Sylvia Chen’s insistence,” he said.

“Explain.”

“She came to me with an offer. She had researched me well, and she knew about my arrest and my ensuing financial troubles. She offered me a way to get back on my feet and continue to help people at the same time.”

“So she paid you?”

Griff vaguely remembered a visit to Kalvesta a few years before from a bureaucrat with one of the government accounting offices. He wondered now if Chen had juggled her books to cover this black site operation. He also wondered if the president was in any way involved.

“She paid for everything,” Bartholomew confirmed. “The equipment that was brought in. Everything.”

“What equipment?”

“There were airlocks and partitions and showers and all sorts of things that I didn’t understand.”

“She wore a biocontainment suit when she worked down here?”

“If such a suit is what I think it is, she wore one all the time.”

“And the people she worked on—your clients?”

“They were bottom-of-the-barrel alcoholics and drug addicts. They drifted in for a meal and some prayer, and often they stayed. They were lonely men and women. No family. No friends. Like I said, bottom of the barrel.”

Correction, Griff was thinking, you’re the bottom of the barrel. You and Sylvia Chen.

“So the brothers and sisters Dr. Chen worked on—they all died?”

Griff forced back a fresh surge of anger.

“They did.”

“How many of them were there altogether?”

“I don’t know. Six? Seven? Eight?”

Greed in action—financial and scientific.

Griff felt utterly repulsed.

“What did you do with the bodies?” he asked.

“We have a large furnace down another passage. Heats the whole building. We cremated the bodies in the furnace, then eventually discarded the ashes in a steel drum. I don’t know what Chen did with the drum.”

“Why are you telling me all this now?” Griff asked.

Tears streamed down Bartholomew’s flushed cheeks.

“Because I’ve been secretly praying that you’d come,” he said between heavy sobs. “I was too weak-willed to kill myself. Believe me, I’ve wanted to. And I’ve tried—more than once. So I prayed that somebody would find out the truth and come to free me from my sins. I guess that person is you.”

Griff detested and pitied the charlatan with equal vigor. His intentions may have been honorable at one time. His methods and his avarice, however, never were.

“According to my information, not all of the subjects involved in Chen’s experiments died.”

Bartholomew nodded.

“Oh, now that I think about it, that’s true. One of them escaped. I had given in to Chen and started coming down here and wearing those biocontainment suits, as you called them. I was inexperienced at working in those horrible things and didn’t set the lock properly on his cell. Chen blamed me for the mistake.”

“Why didn’t the guy turn you both in after he got out of here?” Griff asked.

“That wasn’t ol’ J.R.’s style. He looked out after J.R. and no one else. Besides, he was already wanted for robbing a convenience store someplace at gunpoint. The man had a heavy habit. I mean heavy. Habits like that need constant feeding.”

“What do the initials stand for?”

Bartholomew did not answer immediately. His cards were almost played out, and Griff could see him trying to calculate some sort of deal. Griff could no longer hold back his anger. He lunged at Bartholomew, seizing him by the front of his robe and slamming him backward against the stone wall.

“Tell me his name!” he rasped.

“Johnny … Johnny Ray Davis. He called himself J.R., though, like the guy from TV.”

Griff felt his pulse begin to race. The blank space beside the man’s name in Chen’s notebook was no accident.