Jack Horatio Tillman walked to the crashed jet with long, unflagging strides. He planned to work his way methodically along the track until arriving at the thicket where the men had found Crawford. They had come up with a neat little theory that had Crawford as a turncoat who stole the journals.
After arriving at the two unconscious soldiers, it took Tillman only a minute or two to determine that his men had not carefully read the signs. He managed to slap Jones awake; Jenkins was still out cold. His men had run past with barely a sideward glance, more interested in catching the attacker and obtaining the possible reward. Whoever took out Jones and Jenkins had a weak stomach. They had gone to great pains not to kill. It wouldn't be Crawford.
Tillman himself hunted big game when not occupied by the running of his pharmaceutical and medical research businesses.
If it was feasible, he would gladly run his empire from a canvas tent in the bush.
Tillman's father had inherited money. Not so much that he couldn't spend it all, or drink it all, but enough that it enabled him to hunt most of his life. For as far back as Jack Tillman could remember, when his father wasn't drinking, he was hunting. He had endured his father's drunken beatings and reveled in his hunting expeditions. The only thing they had done well together was track and kill for sport.
The track in front of him now-this so-called Crawford's track-was made by an athletic male much stronger in the legs than Crawford. Whoever it was had backtracked so perfectly, so rapidly, that his high-step rivaled that of a Tennessee Walking horse. Crawford could not have maintained this gait for a dozen paces without kicking snow.
The mystery man had kicked no snow. To lay this track was close to impossible. Carefully, Tillman pulled the loose snow out of a footprint until he reached the packed ice crystals beneath. The foot had been held much straighter than that of a duck-walking soldier. Crawford couldn't have left an imprint like this one. As the foot had landed, it hit the ball as much as the heel. Only a stalker moved this way naturally. The man who left this track, even while fleeing, was trying hard to confuse his men.
The runner was large and long legged, his pace steady and purposeful, not panicked. Each stride was approximately the same length. There was little deviation in the direction of travel. The person knew this terrain. Most obvious of all, the foot was much too large to be Crawford's. It was barely possible that it was Miller's. But if it were Miller, Tillman knew he had vastly underrated him.
A chill unrelated to the cold passed through Tillman. Not fear, he thought, but acute anticipation. His face burned with anger at the stupidity of his men. Doyle was out here, which frustrated him more. Of all his men, Tillman had begun to suspect that the new man, Doyle, was the kind he could count on. But during all the radio talk, Doyle had been strangely silent.
Things were going badly, badly enough that Jack Tillman could be prosecuted for serious crimes. But he didn't intend to be a candidate for capital punishment.
In his forty-eight years nothing had ever threatened Jack Tillman quite like this. The likelihood that the jet would crash at the drop site was infinitesimal, and yet it had happened. No doubt his men seriously underestimated Marty Rawlins and his four cronies. Most likely a fight had erupted when the scientists were told about the drop.
But even with that bit of bad luck, what were the odds that one of his own men turned or, even more unlikely, that combat-ready strangers had meddled with the crash site? Tillman had obtained background on all the residents near the drop site. Meticulous people had done the research. Tillman knew about the Tilok vet, Kier Wintripp, an outdoorsman who had been written up in magazines.
His home was in Johnson City and his summer cabin was up the valley from the Donahues' ranch. He had led a manhunt for five militia-types that had raped and killed two Indian girls. The vet had tracked ahead of the sheriff's group. According to the story, he had told the authorities the wanted men had ambushed him. There was a firefight. The vet carried a lever action 30/30 while the men he hunted had submachine guns and other military hardware. All five of the men were dead by the time the sheriff arrived. The Indian didn't have a scratch. As a combat-hardened survivalist, this man would have the ability to kill, even if he lacked the stomach for it.
Tillman already knew a great deal about Kier Wintripp. And he had more information available-much, much more. He knew the very stuff of which the man was made and considered him the only immediate resident who was potentially dangerous. On the reservation, twenty miles distant, other Tiloks might pose a threat, but fortunately, several mountain ridges divided the Donahue ranch from the Tilok tribal lands.
Until now people and circumstances had always behaved more predictably than the wild animals Tillman hunted. His pharmaceutical firms succeeded because he understood ordinary people's fear of disease as well as the scientists who sought to conquer this fear through the power of healing.
Tillman had become an industry giant almost overnight because he also knew how to turn other people's failures to his advantage. His first venture was a dying company that had bet all its stockholders' money on a drug that failed its first major double-blind study. It was supposed to perform near miracles on the healing of wounds. In fact it only made the wounds less painful, which, when discovered, caused the stock to plummet.
Tillman talked his way into the company and was elected president mainly because he was the only interested and remotely qualified candidate. But he knew that the drug's analgesic properties could be enhanced to make surgical wounds less painful. By adding other compounds to the cream, company scientists made a new topical pain killer used on everything from wounds to babies' gums. Spectacular sales enabled Tillman to parlay profits from the pain remedy into a sophisticated laboratory with scientists he could use for more substantial projects. Research, Tillman knew, was made ridiculously slow by absurd rules and artificial constraints. Tillman undertook to solve the problems with the bureaucracy and succeeded again.
With the money came time to think, to devote himself to issues of global importance. Disease, it seemed to Tillman, was often associated with dysfunctional lifestyles. Poverty and the idle hand from which it stemmed created a host of maladies. Gluttony was tributary to a different set of diseases. Careless sexual habits spawned numerous others. It seemed that the flaws of mankind nurtured disease. The scourge of disease was nature's discipline.
Society needed a more advanced approach to disease than merely curing it, for to cure all disease was to take away nature's ability to chastise, which in turn slowed the process of evolution by promoting the dysfunctional. Disease was a thing to be used. Mankind could advance only by curing selected people and certain plagues.
Controlling disease, then, was essential to enhancing its function. The ability to cure was just a single component in such control (and not unhappily, a source of great wealth). The creation of convenient disease and its selective use, the natural corollary to cure, while profitable, would be appreciated only by a much more advanced culture.
Tillman saw himself as a man ahead of his time. His theories could not be broadly disseminated in his lifetime, for he would always be mortal, unable to escape the bonds of aging. No cure for aging was close enough to save him. He could only prolong his life. The ticking clock required that he conduct progressive research, the key to which had always been keeping each chief scientist at the various Tillrnan laboratories isolated from the work of the others. It was usually desirable to convince each team leader that he was the only one bending the rules, the only one in on the real secret, and the only one sharing in the big money. Only two pseudo-scientists on the business side knew nearly everything. These men Tillman trusted implicitly.
Then came Marty Rawlins-a genius whose abilities crossed many disciplines and who made brilliant technical decisions in every research program that he touched. A man like Marty could do far more if he knew the whole, and so the seduction of progress had led Tillman to deviate from his usual operating plan.
Ultimately, he let Marty and his team synthesize and direct DNA research on a wide-ranging basis, coordinating the work of three separate laboratories and many subgroups within those laboratories. By the time Tillman realized how much Marty had figured out and how pettily squeamish he was, it was too late.
Viewed in isolation from the circumstances, Marty Rawlins's death shamed Tillman, and Tillman regretted it deeply. He took no joy in killing good men, but this was discipline and necessity. This was order. And, in a sad way, progress.
Tillman took his own introspection as clear evidence that he was not a sociopath. Rather, he had an
