CHAPTER 17
Eldon Tarver stood alone beneath a flaming sky, staring at a mansion built by slaves 150 years before he was born. One of the most splendid homes in Vicksburg, the Greek Revival palace stood on a hogback bluff overlooking a once-strategic bend of the Mississippi River. Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms.
Dr. Tarver moved deeper into the shadow of an oak tree and watched a Lincoln Continental sail slowly up the long, curving driveway to the house. After it parked, a heavyset man in a soiled business suit staggered out of the driver’s door, straightened up, and made his way toward the mansion’s front door.
William Braid.
Dr. Tarver removed his backpack and laid it at his feet. He breathed in sweet honeysuckle, the scent of spring. It reminded him of his childhood home in Tennessee—a mixed memory.
Braid struggled for nearly a minute to fit his key into his front door. He hadn’t shaved for days, and his suit was a wreck. After another thirty seconds, he took out a cell phone and called someone. He seemed to be ranting, but Eldon couldn’t make out his words. As Braid walked farther from the house, probably to improve his reception, Eldon glanced at his watch and returned to his thoughts.
Like William Braid, America seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. She was squandering her power in half-fought wars and exporting her manufacturing base to future enemies—in short, practically begging for Darwinian retribution. Of all the great modern thinkers, Dr. Tarver believed, Charles Darwin had proved the most prescient. His laws worked at every level, governing the life cycles of microbes, men, and nations. Dr. Tarver tracked the elegant operations of those laws like a watchmaker observing a flawless timepiece. Like all scientific laws, Darwin’s could be used not only to describe the past but also to predict the future. Not by chance had Eldon Tarver been one of the few scientists to predict the emergence of HIV in Homo sapiens. Darwin’s laws had also revealed to him that the new paradigm of war so ballyhooed in the news media—war against terrorist groups rather than nations—was merely an illusion.
There was nothing preternatural about his insight. The future was barreling toward America with such momentum that nothing could stop it, and any child of the Cold War should have seen it five years ago. That future was China, an ancient empire reborn as industrial superpower, a single-minded engine of economic expansion that cared nothing for ethics, the environment, loss of life, or the destinies of other nations. This insured that in a very short time, China would be locked in mortal combat with the only other monolithic power on the planet. And the United States, Tarver knew, was woefully unprepared for this Darwinian battle for survival.
William Braid had been walking aimlessly as he talked on the phone, but now he took a sudden turn toward Dr. Tarver’s hiding place. The doctor tensed until the fat man veered left and stopped beside a well-tended bed of roses, still ranting at full volume. From this distance Dr. Tarver could tell that Braid was stone drunk.
The battle between the United States and China would begin as a cold war, with leaders on both sides denying that a conflict even existed. But in a world of scarce resources, industrial giants could dissimulate for only so long. The first skirmishes would occur in the area of international trade, then escalate into the realm of international banking. Long before armies ever faced each other on land or sea, the targeting coordinates of nuclear missiles on opposite sides of the globe would be changed to reflect the new reality. And for the second time in history, the world’s smaller wars would recede into the background as children grew up in the shadow of a polarizing conflict that brought with it a unique and almost comforting order.
William Braid barked something in Dr. Tarver’s direction, then threw down his cell phone and reeled up to his front door like a boxer about to drop to the canvas. Bending over his key again, Braid uttered a startled cry of triumph and disappeared inside the house.
Dr. Tarver removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket, put them on, and studied his watch. He would give Braid a minute or two. The only future he would ever know.
Unlike the last cold war, this one would not drift along for decades, punctuated by self-limiting crises. Because the Chinese weren’t the Russians. The Russians, as Tarver often told his colleagues, were basically just like us: white Europeans with a strong Judeo-Christian heritage, despite whatever lip service they’d paid to communist denials of God. But the Chinese were most assuredly not like us. When push came to shove, the Chinese were capable of destroying half of their population to wipe us off the face of the earth. As Mao once said, “If nuclear war kills half a billion of our people, we will still have half a billion left.” And then he’d laughed.
But Mao had not been joking. War with China was inevitable, and Eldon Tarver knew it. But unlike the professional ostriches now running the country, he wasn’t content to sit back and watch it happen. In 1945, Eldon’s adoptive father had fought his way across four blood-drenched islands in the Pacific, and he’d learned a thing or two about the Asian mind. He might have been a bitter old bastard with iron-hard hands, but he had inculcated the lessons of that war into all his children—even the one he’d adopted solely to obtain an extra worker on his farm. Thus, unlike the dilettantes who reveled in anti-Chinese repartee on the cocktail party circuit, Eldon Tarver had a plan. He had studied his enemy for decades, preparing to wage what the Pentagon called asymmetrical warfare. But Dr. Tarver had a simpler phrase for it: one-man war.
A light clicked on in the master bedroom of the Braid house, spilling low-voltage halogen light onto the perfectly manicured lawn. Dr. Tarver knew about the halogen bulbs because he’d spent time in that bedroom nearly two years before. He lifted his backpack and moved swiftly around the house to the patio doors. Braid would not have switched on his security system yet; like most people, he was a creature of habit. And like most people—at least in relatively safe Mississippi—Braid did not feel the least bit threatened while the sun was still shining. That was why Dr. Tarver had come early.
He opened the French doors with his key—a key that Braid had given Andrew Rusk over two years ago—then slipped inside and moved toward a closet beneath the main stairwell. Dr. Tarver was halfway there when a brief ping echoed through the house. He stepped into the closet and stood absolutely still, listening the way he had when he’d hunted for food as a boy.
He heard nothing.
He had planned to wait until Braid went to sleep to do his work, but now that he was here, he couldn’t bear the thought of the wasted hours. It wasn’t as if this operation were going to add a single line of data to his research notes. As he stood fuming in the closet, a possible solution struck him. If Braid was in the shower now, Eldon could do what he needed to do and be headed home before the moon was up. All it would take was a little audacity, which was not a scarce resource in the Tarver gene pool.
He removed his shoes, then opened the door and moved quickly along the carpet runner in the hall. At the end of this runner lay the master bedroom. He listened at the bedroom door with the same concentration he’d used in the closet. Nothing. Braid was almost certainly in the bathroom.
Dr. Tarver silently opened the door, confirmed that the room was empty, then moved straight to the closed bathroom door. Braid was either taking a shower or taking a crap. Eldon hoped it was the former. Looking down, he saw a faint trace of steam wafting up from beneath the door.
He moved to a highboy against the wall to his left. In the top drawer he found the weapo
ns he had known would be there (man was a creature of habit): a dozen vials of insulin and two bags of syringes. There were two types of insulin: short-acting Humulin R and the longer-acting Humulin N.
Unsnapping his pack, he removed a 10 cc syringe and stripped off the packaging. This syringe could hold five times more liquid than the standard diabetic syringes in Braid’s drawer—twenty times his usual dose. The doctor lined up ten vials from Braid’s drawer, then quickly filled the syringe to capacity. To complete the charade that would later be played, he loaded two of Braid’s syringes as well, then uncapped the needles on both. Held in one hand, they looked like the fangs of some cybernetic serpent.
As he reached for the doorknob, Eldon dimly heard the shower flowing. He had to move fast. If Braid emerged and saw him, there might be a struggle, despite the man’s inebriated state. Even if Braid was suicidal, Eldon could not count on a passive victim. Facing the black maw of death, some would-be suicides would kill a dozen men to save themselves. Dr. Tarver turned the knob with his gloved hand and pushed.
He heard the hiss of wood against the nap of the carpet. The bathroom was large, but thick with steam. Braid had forgotten to switch on the exhaust fan. He must have the water very hot. He’s so drunk he can’t feel it.
Dr. Tarver felt intense satisfaction. This scenario was far better than his original plan. His sleeping gas left a traceable residue in the tissues for up to thirty-six hours (if you knew what to look for), and in some people it could cause allergic reactions. This method involved no forensic risk—only iron nerves.
He laid the two smaller syringes on the bathroom counter, then positioned himself to the left of the shower door. Behind the etched glass, a pale, flabby blur swayed in the steam. Eldon heard four wheezing breaths, then a groan that made him suspect Braid was either urinating or masturbating. A moment later, a strong odor confirmed the former. It took more than urine in the shower to disgust a pathologist, but Dr. Tarver was disgusted—not by the bodily function, but by Braid’s essential weakness. The man had decided to change his life, then proved unequal to his desire. Braid’s mental process eluded him. Why had the man broken down? Had he decided that it was all right to murder your wife quickly but a mortal sin if she suffered? That was the kind of contradictory thinking that afflicted the nation as a whole. Eager to be away, Eldon slid two gloved fingers behind the stainless steel pull on the shower door. Then he knelt, opened the door, and speared his needle into a prominent vein in Braid’s lower leg.
There was no reaction.
He had injected almost the full barrel of insulin before Braid jerked away and gasped, “Wha…?” It reminded Eldon of the time his adoptive brother stuck a penknife into a cow’s side. At first, nothing. Then the cow shambled three steps away and looked back at him in dumb incomprehension. Had Braid even felt the needle? Or was it the draft he’d noticed?
It was the draft! He was reaching out blindly to close the door. Either Braid suffered from severe neuropathy, or he was blind drunk. Before the door closed, Dr. Tarver slipped one hand behind Braid’s ankles and yanked his feet out from under him. The man went down hard, banging his head on a tiled seat and possibly breaking his hip. After more than a minute of groaning, Braid tried to get back to his feet, but his left leg refused his considerable weight.
Dr. Tarver crabwalked away from the shower door and sat on the commode behind a small partition. Whatever injury Braid had sustained, the pain was severe enough to burn through the anesthetic alcohol. His groans slowly escalated to bellows of rage, then screams of panic. A plump white hand emerged from the open door, clutched the tiled edge of the shower basin. Eldon worried for a moment that the fat man might extricate himself from the shower, but then the insulin began to take effect. The fingers of the hand stopped moving, the screams faded back to groans, and finally the groans to silence.
Coma would soon follow.
Dr. Tarver got up, tossed the two unused syringes into the shower, then the empty vials from the drawer. Now came the truly unpleasant part of tonight’s work. Before he left this house, he would have to search it from top to bottom, including the computers. He could take no chance that Braid had left behind a confession in any form.
Walking back to the shower stall, Eldon bent and pulled up one of Braid’s eyelids. The pupils were fixed and dilated. William Braid was well on his way to being a vegetable, if he didn’t die of shock on the journey. For the first time in many years, Eldon reflected, the fat man’s face was not lined with care. As he walked down the hall toward Braid’s study, Dr. Tarver decided that it would be no stretch to say that this operation had been a mercy.
Amen.
CHAPTER 18
It was nearly dark in Natchez, but the stadium lights of three baseball fields had turned the surrounding park into an emerald island in the night. Chris had seen no further sign of Alex Morse, but he sensed that she was close. He had delayed going home to give himself time to think, but he wasn’t going to get that time. After moping by the fence for a few minutes, Thora was now making her way up to him in the bleachers, two sweating bottles of Dasani in her hands. Chris had chosen a seat on the top bench, hoping to avoid endless recitations of medical symptoms. Thora spoke to every patient she passed, and they responded with the effusive welcome reserved for the wives of physicians on whom they depended.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Thora whispered, sitting beside him at last.
“Nothing,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I just don’t like to lose.”
She set one of the bottles on the bench seat. “Seems like more than that.”
“Nope.”
Leaning toward him, Thora kept her eyes forward and spoke in a low voice. “I thought the prospect of sex would get you home early, win or lose.”
He looked at her then. When she turned to him, Chris saw unfamiliar lines of tension around her eyes. “What did you do today?” he asked.
She drew back slightly. “That’s a quick transition.”
He shrugged.
“The usual things,” Thora said, looking back toward the field. “I ran, I swam, I worked out at Mainstream. Then lunch. Then I argued with the contractors and bought a few things for my trip.”
Chris almost said, “How did lunch go?” but instead he asked, “What’s happening with the contractors?”
Thora shrugged, then clapped for a St. Stephens boy who’d hit a double. “Same old, same old. Delays on the woodwork, change orders. They want more money in advance.”
Chris nodded but said nothing.
On the next pitch, Ben’s friend C.J. cracked the ball out to the right-field fence, driving in the run and scoring a triple.
“Dad!” Ben cried from two rows down. “Did you see that? Are y’all even watching the game?”
“I saw it, all right. Next year maybe we can get you and C.J. on the same team.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ben high-fived one of his buddies, then climbed up to Chris’s side.
Chris almost sighed with relief. He didn’t want to talk to Thora. Not here. Not at home either, come to that. He wished she were leaving for the Delta tonight.
With Ben so close, Thora watched the game in silence. Chris couldn’t help but notice that almost everything Ben said was directed toward him. As the game wore on, Chris scanned the fences and the other bleachers. He knew nearly every face he saw. That was how it was in small towns. Some families had four generations sitting at this field, the infants rolling around in the dirt while their great-grandparents sat against the fence in wheelchairs. Looking down toward home plate, he saw a man about his own age waving at him. A strange numbness came into his hands and face. The man was Shane Lansing.
Before he was even aware of it, Chris found himself reappraising the surgeon’s sharp-jawed handsomeness and athletic build. For the first time it struck him that Lansing bore a marked resemblance to Lars Rayner, Thora’s absentee father. Their hair color was different, but apart from that, the similarities were considerable. They w
ere both lean and muscular, both arrogant and sometimes cruel, both surgeons with outsize egos. Lars Rayner, of course, was a topflight vascular surgeon and thus had reason for his arrogance. Shane Lansing, on the other hand, was a journeyman cutter who cared as much about golf as he did about medicine. He was grinning now, and Thora was waving back as though Lansing were a long-lost relation.
“Wave, Chris,” she urged, nudging him in the side.
Fuck him, Chris thought, almost saying it aloud. He inclined his head slightly in Lansing’s direction, then looked pointedly back at the game.
“What’s gotten into you tonight?” Thora asked.
“Nothing, I told you.”
“I thought you liked Shane.”
“I thought he was waving at you.”
She looked at him strangely. “What’s going on with you? What’s the matter?”
“Hey, Ben?” Chris said, taking out his wallet and handing the boy $2. “Run get me some popcorn.”
“Aw, Dad, there’s a line! A long one.”
Chris handed him the money and gave him a push. Ben got up and walked dejectedly down the steps.
“You ever see Lansing out at Avalon?” Chris asked in a casual tone.
“I saw him today,” Thora said without hesitation.
This admission brought Chris up short. “You did?”
“Yes. He stopped by the site on his way home for lunch.”
“What for?”
“To look at the house, for one thing.”