True Evil

again, the faith of her tribe. But now she had broken that faith, at least in their eyes-their being an all-inclusive euphemism for the quasi-military, superpatriotic culture known to outsiders as the FBI. It had destroyed a part of her to break that faith, to forge daily reports, to ask fellow agents to cover for unauthorized absences. What would it do to her to be expelled from the Bureau altogether? She felt hollow and afraid, like someone about to be driven out of her village and forced alone into the bush. But there was a higher duty than that owed one's tribe-the obligation to one's family. To blood. And no matter what it cost, she would not break faith with them. After her mother died, Alex would be the only Morse left, save Jamie Fennell. Like Alex, Jamie had no one else. Why couldn't the Bureau understand that?

Fed up with being passive, Alex took out her cell phone and clicked into text-messaging mode. If she had to sweat out the next twenty-four hours, she wasn't going to do it alone.

Andrew Rusk was surfing an Internet porn site and thinking about calling Janice into his office for some personal attention when his cell phone emitted the brief chirp that signaled an incoming text message. He looked away from the menage a trois on his screen-two girls on a guy, his fantasy since high school-and pressed READ on his cell phone. His heart began to race as he saw the words outlined in blue:

You're going to pay for what you did. I don't care how long it takes. You're going to ride the needle, Andy. For Grace Fennell, for Mrs. Braid, for all the others. I don't care what happens to me. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.

Rusk stared at the message with a sense of unreality. The letters seemed to shimmer before his eyes, like blurry waves of heat over desert sand. He checked the source of the message, but no number showed up. It didn't matter. He knew who had sent it.

His first instinct was to get up and tape two squares of Reynolds Wrap to his northeast window, but his good sense stopped him. For one thing, Dr. Tarver might not see the foil until the end of the day. For another, Tarver was already upset enough about Alex Morse. This new development would only add fuel to the fire. And the hotter that fire got, the less Rusk's life was worth.

'What the hell is she doing?' he thought aloud. 'Why would she send this?'

She's trying to provoke me. It's like throwing a rock into a thicket to try to make your prey move into your sights. That means somebody's watching to see which way I jump. Waiting for me to lead them somewhere.

'Just stay cool,' he murmured. 'Stay cool.'

Rusk toyed with the idea of sending Dr. Tarver one of their Viagra spam messages. Tarver would likely receive this within the hour, and it would prompt him to head for the country club where Rusk normally dropped off the operational packets. Annandale was exclusive enough that he could even risk a conversation with Tarver there. But he could not know how the doctor would react. He needed to think before he did anything. If Alex Morse was working with the full backing of the FBI, the usual drop point would afford no protection whatsoever.

'Stay cool,' he said again. Then, in a much lower voice, he said, '‘Do you have the patience to do nothing?'' Rusk was no scholar, but he had read the Tao Te Ching during college-mostly to please an English major he was screwing-and that line had stuck with him. The best time to do nothing, of course, was when your adversary was about to make a big mistake-or had already made one. But Alex Morse hadn't made any recent mistakes that he knew about. 'That I know about,' he said thoughtfully.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number of a detective agency he sometimes used. They were expensive, but they boasted several former government agents among their operatives. Some had been IRS agents, others had worked for the DEA or BATF, while a highly paid few were former special agents of the FBI.

'It's time to find out what Agent Alex has really been up to,' he said.

Chris was in an examining room checking a prostate gland when Jane called him out to take Dr. Connolly's call. He ripped off the glove, hurried to his office, and picked up the phone.

'Pete? It's Chris Shepard.'

'Hey, boy! What's it been, seven years?'

'More.'

'The last I heard, you were playing Albert Schweitzer in the Mississippi Delta.'

'Just a phase.'

'I know better.'

'How's your wife, Pete?'

'Anna's good. And my daughter's starting at UVA med next fall.'

'God, is she that old?'

'No, I'm that old. Now, what's all this about giving people cancer on purpose? That was a pretty strange message you left me. Have you switched from making documentaries to horror movies? Or did somebody get murdered down there?'

'To tell you the truth, Pete…I can't talk about it.'

There was a long pause. Then Connolly said, 'Okay, well, I did some thinking about it during what passed for my lunch. You ready?'

'Shoot.'

'As for chemical agents, multiple myeloma can be caused by a spectrum of carcinogens. Herbicides are particularly damaging. But you're talking about a twenty-year incubation period before the cancer hits. Toxins could work much faster, but virtually all are detectable using gas chromatography and a mass spectrometer. The CSI guys would bust you in a hurry.'

'On TV they would. I'm finding out that the real world is different.'

'What the heck are you into, Chris? No one's going to be mixing this stuff up in his kitchen sink. Not even in an average university lab.'

'I hope you're right,' Chris replied, ignoring the question.

'Radiation is another obvious choice,' Connolly went on. 'There's no doubt you could induce leukemia with it.'

'But could you do it undetectably?'

'Not easily. But it might be possible.'

Chris felt a strange thrumming in his chest.

'X-rays would probably cause all sorts of side effects, both local and systemic, so forget that. Radiotherapy pellets would probably cause burns, skin tumors, maybe nausea early on. Although there are some alpha emitters whose effects aren't dose-related at all. Even the smallest exposure is oncogenic.'

'Really?' Chris grabbed a pen and scrawled this on a notepad.

'It would take a real specialist to know that kind of thing, of course. The most interesting radiation option isn't pellets, though.'

'What is it?'

'Against some tumors, we use irradiated liquids that have very short half-lives. I'm talking twenty-four to forty-eight hours.'

Chris felt a chill of foreboding.

'Take thyroid cancer. We put radioactive iodine into the bloodstream. The iodine collects in the thyroid, kills the cancer cells, then is harmlessly excreted from the body. A sociopathic radiation oncologist could probably figure a way to induce cancer like that without leaving any measurable trace.'

Chris wrote rapidly; his time with Connolly would be limited. 'Go on.'

'I know about an actual case where somebody used irradiated thallium to attempt an assassination in Africa. The radiation broke the thallium into microparticles that dispersed throughout the body. The victim nearly died, but at the last minute they shipped him here. Our best doctors treated him for over a week. He ultimately survived, but anywhere else in the world he would have died. And I seriously doubt whether anyone else could have traced the cause of death.'