Chapter 76
Jack loved lightning. Sitting on the rock ledge looking at the approaching late spring storm across the high canyon country, the rain hanging from the thunderheads in dark veils, he could almost anticipate when the next bolt would rip the sky.
He had been in many storms, had felt the violence of the great American heartland storms, had ridden out a typhoon on a fishing boat in the South China Sea, had been drenched in the monsoon rains of Myanmar—a place the US government continued to call Burma, rest of the world be damned.
But somehow, there was nothing that compared to the high desert storms that rumbled through the mountains of the American Southwest. Thunder crackled through the thin air as if someone had dropped a boulder on a concrete slab, the sound echoing outward between the rock walls, one angry rumble supplanting the next.
It wasn’t that Jack needed to be out here at this moment. It was simply that the exertion of the rock climb in the clear mountain air facilitated his thinking. Out here, accompanied by the feel of the approaching storm, the pieces of the puzzle were assembling themselves in his head.
Sometimes luck helped you find the key thread, and as you plucked it, the security that cloaked your opponent's movements unraveled. In this case, the break had come from the incident at the state basketball tournament. The drugging of the water bottle had led Jack and Janet to focus their attention on Raul Rodriguez and, by proxy, on his father, Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez.
The information that Janet had provided this morning added to a growing pool of circumstantial evidence that pointed to the likelihood that Ernesto had taken his work beyond the confines of the lab. Although Jack still didn’t have any hard evidence that clarified the exact nature of what Dr. Rodriguez was working on within the Rho Division, he was beginning to develop a fairly good idea.
Not only had the scientist’s son made a miraculous recovery from terminal cancer, but he appeared to have remarkable healing powers as well. The school nurse, Harriet Lu, had told Janet that Raul had been rushed to her office a few weeks ago after having suffered a serious cut in shop class. However, by the time she had examined the hand that had slid into the buzz saw, except for a redness where the palm appeared to be mildly skinned, there was no indication of damage.
The shop teacher, Mr. Hendricks, had been certain that he had seen the hand cut open, but when confronted with the evidence of his own eyes, he finally decided that he must have imagined it. Perhaps what he thought he had seen had only been based upon his expectation of injury due to having observed Raul fall forward across the machine. Mrs. Lu would not have even spoken of the incident had Janet not mentioned what a lucky young man Raul was.
Finally there was the tabloid story of the rat. Jack had come across it in the supermarket; a front-page story in the Inquisitor about what a Los Alamos custodian claimed was the Rasputin of rats. It was exactly the sort of tale Jack would normally chuckle at and dismiss, had it not been for the name of the custodian.
Carlos Delgado was on Jack’s list of employees with access to the Rho Division, head of a cleaning crew for the building in which Dr. Rodriguez worked. So Jack had purchased the rag and read the story of how Carlos had found a rat that he couldn’t seem to kill. Not with poisoned bait. Not with a trap. Upon finding its head caught in the trap, he had stomped down upon it to break the animal's neck. But when he popped the catch open, it had miraculously run off, disappearing down a storm drain.
The story was almost certainly embellished, but had a ring of familiarity about it, considering what he had learned about Raul. Jack would have loved to have a conversation with Mr. Delgado. And he would have, had the custodian not gotten himself killed in an automobile accident the very day that the story appeared in the tabloid.
A late-night trip to the salvage yard had revealed an oddly shaped hole in the brake line, the type of hole that was characteristic of a shaped micro-charge. Mr. Delgado had been very unlucky indeed to bring himself to the attention of someone with the rarefied skill-set that included the construction and use of shaped micro-charges. No doubt, the person who had set it off had done so from a promontory overlooking this winding canyon road. Perhaps from the very one on which Jack now sat. The loss of brakes at just that point on the highway below had resulted in the two-hundred-foot plunge that had snuffed out the life of Carlos Delgado, a family man who left behind a wife and four small children.
As Jack studied the curve in the highway where the guardrail had been insufficient to arrest the flight of the Chevy Malibu, the first drops of rain spattered down onto his face. There was no doubt about it. Someone with a skill set with which Jack was all too familiar was nearby and interested in the same thing that occupied his and Janet’s attention. Who was it?
Jack stood up. Almost, it seemed that he sniffed the air. Then, like some great cat, he disappeared into the rocky crevice from which he had emerged.