A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [128]
The man was weeping piteously now, but Griff would not make the same mistake by lowering his guard.
“Did you supply her with people?”
Griff was shaking with anger.
“I … I did.”
“Where did she conduct these experiments? Tell me, dammit!”
“Let me go,” Bartholomew said in a shaky voice, “and I’ll do better than tell you.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ll show you,” he said.
CHAPTER 57
DAY 7
1:00 A.M. (CST)
Griff kept Bartholomew’s arm pinned tightly against his back and followed closely behind him.
“I’m not going to run again,” Bartholomew pleaded. “Promise. I shouldn’t have run in the first place. You … you surprised me is all. Please, you’re really hurting me.”
“And I’m not taking any more chances.”
Bartholomew fell silent and led Griff through a pair of dimly lit corridors and down a small flight of stairs that ended at a heavy oak door. The surrounding walls were concrete bricks, painted gray and in need of cleaning.
“You’ll need to let go of my arm if you want me to take you downstairs.”
“I’ll let go,” Griff said, “but you need to know that you are in even more of a fix than usual.”
“How’s that?”
“You and Sylvia Chen are partly responsible for the sickness and death that are going on at the Capitol. She’s dead. Murdered. Try my patience now, and I won’t hesitate to hurt you, and I’m willing to bet that nobody will do anything but cheer.”
With difficulty, Bartholomew looked over his shoulder. He appeared genuinely surprised.
“You’re talking about the president?” he asked.
Griff tried to read through the man’s words. Did he have any idea whether or not the president was involved with what Sylvia Chen had done at the Certain Path Mission? It seemed almost certain that the answer was no. Allaire, at least in terms of this aspect of Chen’s work, was probably innocent. From now on, Griff decided, if he needed the man’s help, he would seek it out. He would also, as soon as possible, share his growing suspicions with the president regarding Paul Rappaport.
“Those experiments you helped Chen with had nothing to do with drug addiction,” Griff said. “It was part of a biological research program that I was involved in. I’m a scientist—a virologist just like Chen. The virus we were developing, that you helped her try out on people here, is what the terrorists released during the State of the Union Address.”
“Oh, God. I heard on the news that it was just some sort of flu, not anything—”
“You know that it’s lethal, don’t you?… Don’t you?”
The cleric bowed his head. Then he began to cry.
“I’ve done such terrible things,” he said. “Such terrible things…”
His voice trailed off and his body was racked with each sob. Griff had to remind himself that Brother Xavier Bartholomew was, in all likelihood, a sociopath, capable of turning on emotion like he would a faucet.
“If you cooperate and tell me everything I want to know, I promise to speak up on your behalf. Understood?”
Bartholomew nodded dispiritedly. Griff let go of him and took a cautious step backward, ready to react. Shaking the feeling back into his arm, the man withdrew a black string necklace that was tucked inside his robe. Dangling from it was a large, antique metal key that looked straight from the set of a horror movie. He unlocked the heavy door with a clank that resonated off the walls. Then, after a hard tug on its ornate handle, the door creaked open.
The passageway behind the door was a spiral stone staircase that was dimly lit by a light glowing from 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