windshield were parking stickers for Harvard Medical School faculty. He cut around to the main entrance, which to his surprise was unlocked, although he could have cut his way inside. The door opened to a security desk and gate with no one in attendance. Behind it was a door leading through a corridor to another entrance leading to the basement.
With his pistol drawn, he descended the stairs.
Halfway down, he detected a faint high-pitched electronic sound. At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor lit by a bank of fluorescent lights. Coming off either side of the corridor were rooms, some with windows. But the only one that was lit was toward the end—and the source of the electronic squeal.
It got louder as he approached the room, his pistol gripped in both hands.
The sound was some kind of alarm, and the piercing shrill was making him anxious.
He reached the knob of the door, turned it, and, gripping the pistol, kicked it open.
The alarm was emanating from a rack of electronic equipment that sat beside a gurney on which lay the body of a woman. She was hooked up to an IV and the various monitors on which alarm lights pulsed with the squealing. Clutched in her hands was a photograph of a young boy.
From the various video images, he recognized Elizabeth Luria.
And like the Kashian kid in the videos, she was hooked up for suspension from an IV. But unlike in the Kashian videos, the monitors were blinking red and squealing because all the vital function lines on screen were totally flat.
The woman had suspended herself to death.
74
An hour later, Zack and Sarah were passing through Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The earlier heat of irritation had cooled, leaving him grateful that she was with him.
As they moved to the right-hand lane, Zack pointed out the submarine base in the distance where his father had brought him when he was maybe seven.
“What do you remember about him?”
“Not a lot. He wasn’t around much,” Zack said. “He was a project engineer and worked long hours. I saw him mostly on weekends. Then my parents separated after Jake’s death. Sometime after that, he dropped out of sight.”
“That must have been rough.”
“It was.”
“But you have some good memories of him.”
“Until I was about ten. After he left, I saw him on a few occasions, which were mostly me telling him about what I was up to, but little about himself. Funny thing, as I got older, I thought of myself as not having a father, just a mother.”
“That’s sad.”
“To compensate, I made up stories about him. He was something of a photographer, so I’d tell kids he was on assignment for
“I guess that’s how you dealt with his absence.”
“And all along he was a Benedictine monk praying and making jellies for tourists.”
They crossed the Piscataqua Bridge. Although he had passed this way fifteen or more years ago, he felt nothing overt—just a vague sense that he was pursuing some kind of directive. Or maybe it was just dumb autosuggestion after all. And the very possibility made his heart slump.
“If he’s really still alive, what would you say to him?”
“I’d ask him why he left me and my mother.”
They soon passed a sign reading, “Welcome to Maine. The way life should be.”
“Now what?”
“We keep going.”
“Until?”
“Until I come to the right exit.”
“Do you know which one?”
“Not yet.”
75
For several minutes, Roman didn’t know what to do. Elizabeth Luria was dead. So were Stern and others who had put together that lab. He didn’t care about those he didn’t know about. The project was dead.
And the Kashian kid was missing.
Roman had spent the previous night and that morning poring over data in Morris Stern’s laptop. The mathematical stuff meant nothing to him. But the videos and explanations of the neuroimages of Kashian kept playing in Roman’s brain. And as he drove back to Boston, an idea began to grow. A very good idea. No, a brilliant idea. In fact, an
The term had shot up from the recesses of his memory. From his fretful days at St. Luke’s.
When he was a kid suffering through sermons, he remembered one Sunday in January when Father Infantino held forth on the meaning of the Day of Epiphany, when Christ’s divinity was revealed to the Magi. He went on about how each of us must find meaning in our lives and must listen to the yearnings of our souls, just like a lot of famous people who had made a difference in the world—Mother Teresa, President Kennedy, Martin Luther King. He hammered on about how each had experienced a revelation of how they should dedicate their lives—of how they were driven by higher missions from the rest of us. But the only difference between them and ordinary people was that they had discovered a clear purpose that they had embraced with fierce determination.
Back then, Roman’s only yearning was for Father Infantino to wrap up so he could go to Goodwin Park and play ball with the other kids.
But as he headed north on 95 toward Watertown, Roman experienced his own little epiphany, and it flickered in his head like a votive candle.
76
The sensation was back.
They were only a few miles into Maine on the northbound side of the turnpike. They had passed a long stretch of marshland that gave way to forests of pine and deciduous trees. Maybe it was the thick claustrophobic woodlands that triggered some recall or premonition, because a strange awareness hummed in the fore of his brain. And it was stronger.
He thought about telling Sarah but decided against it. He didn’t quite grasp what he was experiencing—if it was real, some quirk of his imagination, or if he had slipped into another neurological ditch. But the longer he drove on, the more he felt that he was following an invisible beacon beamed at him by some unknown source.
He kept his hands on the wheel, moving with the turns of the highway, half-certain that if he let go, the car would proceed under some weird remote control.
