A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [106]
“Because if we’re right, and Chen was experimenting on people, I would assume that the subjects were referred to her by Bartholomew.”
“It’s possible.”
“What’s possible?”
“For a man of the cloth to go bad. In Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum—one of my favorite actors, incidentally—plays Harry Powell, a serial killer and self-proclaimed preacher, who has L-O-V-E tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and H-A-T-E on the other. Then there’s Reverend Phillip Shooter in Hot Fuzz and, of course, Cardinal Richelieu in all the Three Musketeer movies and spin-offs. Those are just for starters. Now that I think about it, there’s—”
“Melvin, I get the point. I want to know how these people were chosen, where they were treated, and what was done to them. And most of all, I want to know what happened to J. R. Davis. Was he just some sort of clerical error on Sylvia’s part, or is he still alive?”
Griff held up Davis’s lab report, distinguished from the others in the fax set by a result that did not conclude with the word “deceased.”
“Could Bartholomew be in jail?” Forbush asked. “That news report was from a few years ago.”
Griff surfed the Web some more.
“It says here the case against him was dropped a few months before trial. That was about two years ago. Doesn’t say anything about the ministry closing down.”
“And Allaire can’t know about this?” Melvin asked.
“Allaire might have orchestrated all of this,” Griff said. “I don’t know the man well enough. He doesn’t trust me, anyway. What if he ordered Chen to conduct human experiments? You’d think he would have told me if he knew Chen was dosing people with the virus, but I’m just not sure. If he’s involved, he might decide I’m going to use this stuff against him. Or else he’ll think I’m just setting it up to give me leverage to bolt. For now, Melvin, nobody else can know about this—at least not until we know more ourselves. It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Can you sneak me out of here, the way you did Angie?”
“What about our work? Orion? Our experiments?”
Griff rubbed at his eyes.
“What experiments are we going to continue, Melvin?” he asked, his voice cracking. “The ones that aren’t working? The ones that never had a chance to work? I was on this job for years at Columbia, then here before they arrested me. Find a way to keep WRX3883 from killing people—that was my original assignment. And I failed. A lot of scientists fail. That’s just the way it is. We fail and we fail until one day we shift gears and change direction and something works. So now, I’m being asked to do in a week or two what I couldn’t accomplish in years. You tell me what I’m leaving?”
“We could lose a lot of time. It could be the end of the line for the people in the Capitol.”
“I’m telling you, Melvin, it’s the end of the line already. I’ve done everything I can think of. If this J. R. Davis really did survive his WRX infection, then we might have something. We might have that change of direction.”
Forbush sat pensively for a while, then said, “I don’t believe we should take the chance of trying to sneak you out in the trunk.”
“Why not?”
“I think Angie and I were lucky. Now that we actually did it, I would bet eight out of ten times we’d be caught.”
“Maybe they were under orders to let her go so she could be followed.”
“Now that you mention it, that seems possible. I lied to the guards about a critical experiment being in jeopardy unless I got to town for some supplies we didn’t have, so they might have been in a rush. Plus, I do asthma attacks well because I actually have it. The guard was rummaging through the glove compartment for my inhaler when Angie slipped into the trunk.”
“So the trunk isn’t going to work. What else?”
“What about the exhaust system?”
Griff saw the possibilities immediately.
“How many of the ventilation ducts have surface access outside the wire?”
“Only one,” Forbush said. “We have a dedicated single-pass air exhaust discharge for the Kitchen ventilation system that pumps HEPA-filtered air to the surface. It was intentionally installed far from occupied