Part 1 (1/2)

FOUNTAIN SOCIETY.

by Wes Craven.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

As a first-time novelist I needed all the help I could get, and there are many people without whom this book would not have been written. I thank them all from the bottom of my heart: Jeff Fenner, Tom Baum, Richard Marcus, Leslie King, and David Baden, for being there with me in the trenches; Ellen Geiger, who supported this project, and me as a novelist, when the story was a notion and I was untested; Bliss Holland, for introducing me to Ellen; Marianne Maddalena. who endured my absences from our film work and never flagged in the friends.h.i.+p; Laurie Bernstein for all the hard work and support; Dr. Judy Swerling, who kept me reasonably sane; John Power, Larry Angen, Andrea Eastman, Robert Newman, and Sam Fischer, all for being smarter and tougher than I am and with such grace; Michael Korda, for your faith in me; my friends, who didn't laugh; my family and my kids, Jonathan and Jessica, who give me my beginnings and ends. And most of all, Comelia, for bringing me hot tea and love until I finished. 1 DETENTION COMPLEXHAIFA The cell held fifteen men. It was ten by twelve and stank of sweat, filth and fear. The only amenity offered was a hole in the center of the concrete floor which served as a toilet. The cell contained, so far as Ras.h.i.+d al-a.s.sad had been able to gather, three Lebanese commandos who kept to themselves and were dreaded even more than their jailers. One of their number had been beaten badly during capture and was raving with fever and gangrene. This kept the others in a murderous mood. There were also six nondescript Palestinians, none known to Ras.h.i.+d. From what he surmised they were nothing more than workmen, drivers or ex-army thieves, the usual s.h.i.+te dregs. They gave true Palestinian fighters a bad name, screaming under torture, wetting themselves and having nothing of importance to disclose when they quickly broke. He despised them. The four Syrians were probably spies of one sort or another, more than likely industrial. He ignored them. There was Ras.h.i.+d himself proud to be a s.h.i.+'ite Muslim and a Hezbollah guerrilla. Not once had he uttered a sound, although they had removed everything on him that could be pulled off with a pair of pliers. And then there was this tall blond pig of a Russian over in the corner This Russian was not to be known, Ras.h.i.+d understood. He was the Only other professional there, and he was unapproachable. Someone had tried to f.u.c.k him the first night, and the Russian had killed the idiot before he could even open his mouth in protest. The corpse had been removed two days later, when the smell reached the guards two floors above. In that very guard room Lieutenant Joram Ben Ami, watch commander of the intelligence unit at Haifa, was reading a message from his superior in Jerusalem at that very moment. The call they had both been expecting had been received from Was.h.i.+ngton at 12:45 P.M. local time, 1:45 A.M. in Was.h.i.+ngton, which was considered a good sign. It meant that the CIA was transmitting when scrambled telephone messages were least likely to attract attention. The business to which the call referred had been in process long enough to be in danger of random slipups, leaks to the press, unwanted attention from whistle-blowers and bleeding-heart congressmen, but the process had remained secret, and so the Israelis and the Americans were able to continue providing mutual benefit for each other. Ben Ami had been given the order to prepare two more units. That would make a total of ten prisoners s.h.i.+pped to the U.S. over the past six months, in return for which the Israeli air force would receive another five air-to-air Sparrow missiles. An excellent trade, in Ben Ami's opinion. He chose Ras.h.i.+d al-a.s.sad, the Hezbollah guerrilla, as the first. Ras.h.i.+d was the motherless a.s.shole suspected of bombing a bus of Jewish settlers in downtown Haifa six weeks ago. The only unfortunate thing was that he was to be s.h.i.+pped untouched. The second unit was stipulated by Ben Ami's commander-it was to be the Russian caught spying for Iraq. He needed to be processed slightly, so Ben Ami relayed the orders to his best team. An ordinary claw hammer was used, both because it was what was on hand, and because they all hated Scud-selling Russians. His teeth came out with surprising difficulty. Just before dawn, an unmarked American C-120 touched down on the airstrip outside the detention complex. Half a dozen long crates were fork-lifted out of the hold, and the two prisoners, heavily drugged and in handcuffs, were taken aboard by CIA operatives. The plane rose again, and the deal was done. Twenty hours later, thousands of miles away from this airstrip and from each other, Ras.h.i.+d al-a.s.sad and his Russian companion would be in the hands of an organization so secret not even the CIA spooks who acted as their handlers knew its purpose. Neither man would survive his arrival for more than a few days.

ST. MAURICE, SWITZERLAND.

Nearing o.r.g.a.s.m, Elizabeth was having strange thoughts about being caught up in The Wizard of Oz. She was in Dorothy's house, and the twister was sweeping around her, rattling the shutters and roaring in her ears. Wood splintered and she was lifted into the air. Then at last she wasn't thinking at all. All week long she had been obsessing about this afternoon, listing in one column all the reasons for showing up, in the other all the reasons for breaking the relations.h.i.+p off. The problem was, the same items kept popping up in both columns. At least, for the moment, she was free of her most haunting preoccupation-that she would never see Hans Brinkman again. She arched her back and surrendered to the storm. She heard his cry of release, then despite his best efforts, his heart no longer seemed in it. He fell away, and a moment later he was throwing open the hotel window. He took in several deep breaths of frigid Alpine air. She tried to catch her own breath.

He turned and smiled that perfect smile, then got back into bed with her, pulled the covers over them both and kissed her. ”That was wonderful,” she said.

”But you didn't...” He made a gesture.

”No, but my watch stopped,” she said lightly, returning his smile. ”Really, Hans, don't worry about it.” He rolled out of bed just as quickly as he had gotten in, and gave a sigh. ”I'm a selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.d, aren't I?” ”You are, yes, but that's my problem.”

She tried to make it light, too, but it didn't feel that way inside. She couldn't help asking herself what all these Sat.u.r.days had amounted to, when all was said and done. Granted, he was rich and handsome, but she had been with handsome, powerful men before and hadn't felt a tenth of what she felt with Hans, or for him. The others had been devoted to her, had lavished gifts on her-but not Hans. Attention, yes, in unpredictable bursts, but for the most part his days were spent in the world of global finance and his evenings devoted to his marriage, with all of the social life that went with it. Places she did not know and was not invited to. In fact she was, she knew, a complete secret from the rest of his life and the people in it. She did not exist in his world. Only here, in these rooms, for a few hours a month. It was not enough, even though she had allowed it to become everything she really cared about; she knew it had to end, sooner or later. And recently, she reluctantly felt it should be sooner than later. As Hans dressed she watched him from under the covers, like a biologist studying a baffling animal from a blind. Hans Brinkman was thirty-five, ten years older than she, golden-haired, eyes flecked with green and brown. Like pools in Alpine streams, Elizabeth had thought when she first saw them-cool, and full of hidden life. The afternoon sun glinted off his finely muscled body, his shock of thick blond hair. That last climax had been his third, yet he seemed unaffected. He was an athlete even in bed, she realized, and they were locked in some sort of contest she was probably fated to lose. She was halfway down a h.e.l.lish black diamond trail when she had first spotted him-a flash of color shooting by on skis in the brilliant Swiss sunlight. ”On your left!” And then a blur.

This caught her attention in a hurry, since it was usually her pa.s.sing the few who dared this sheer face. But there was something else, too. A feeling that she knew him, or needed to, and it was so strong that it was downright eerie. Had she glimpsed a boyish grin in that streamlined, racing figure? No, just a wicked grin-she was sure of it! On full auto, Elizabeth shot out in a breathstopping arc off an ice shelf she had always wisely avoided before. Halffalling, half-flying fifty yards down slope in the air, she managed to land upright only by a combination of grit, skill and pure luck. But she was ahead of him, and she meant to keep it that way-pointing her skis straight down-hill and tucking into the egg. But it wasn't that simple. What followed was a race that went from high-end sport to thrill-seeking to giddy terror as the two traded places in a cascade of dare and double dare. They were neck and neck again in the final stretch, a straight, precipitous chute that rejoined the regular slope at its end. And it was at the moment when they had reached that juncture-with the wind tearing at her face and her heart pounding-that a s...o...b..arder on the main slope wiped out directly in her challenger's path. Elizabeth realized in an instant that unless she gave way, the man beside her would choose to slain into this kid like a ton of bricks at ninety miles an hour. She braked hard, and with a cry of glee the man shot over to her track and was gone without a backward glance. She should have known then.

Later, at the lodge, he sought her out and offered to buy her a drink. She found herself saying yes, and after they had finished playing jet-set geography, trying in vain to determine where they'd met before, he paid her his first compliment: ”We're both crazy, you know,” he said. She laughed and nodded. ”You a professional?” she asked, and meant it. He smiled broadly, clearly flattered that she would think so. ”Finance.”

She raised her eyebrows, actually amazed. ”You might as well have told me you were a scientist,” she laughed. ”I almost was,” he said matter-of-factly. Then he seemed lost in thought for a moment, as if he were genuinely fascinated by something he had just glimpsed internally. Then he turned back to her, completely present again. ”When I studied physics I never did anything dangerous. Not till I got into high finance. Now that's where it's worth putting your neck on the line. Like you do. You in money?” She blinked. In money? What an odd expression. ”I'm not that smart.”

”Yeah, right. What's your IQ, about 140?” She looked at him, realizing she had no idea. ”Really, I'm good at this,” he pursued, intrigued. ”Never wrong. SATs what, about 1500?” ”Never took the SATs,” she admitted.

”No college? I'm shocked,”

”Does that make me a dumb blonde in your book?” He leaned toward her, frowning. ”Elizabeth, you know why men call blondes dumb?” he asked, with a boyish solemnity she found hard to resist. ”No.”

”Because beautiful blondes make them feel dumb because they can't express what they feel when they're faced with a beautiful woman. There was some truth to that, she thought, and it was endearing of him to say so. But it was also completely disingenuous. Looking back now, as she snuggled deeper into the bed and remembered that meeting from a safe distance, she knew beyond a doubt that if Hans Brinkman doubted his abilities in any area, she had never seen the slightest hint. No, the only weakness he had ever displayed since she had known him was an inability to remain close to her long enough for her to take his presence for granted. G.o.d, she would love to have that luxury. But instead, there was only the elusive thrill of the unbroken charger-no knight-just the stunning white horse. She had fallen for that mythical energy and had fallen hard to be sure-and now here she was, a year later in the fluorescent glare of reality, blond model in a black book, hotel plaything of an investment banker who barely had time for her. How predictable was that?

She pulled the sheets around her and wondered. Was she afraid to let him go, or just afraid of him? The answer, she suspected ruefully, was both. And that fear, bordering at times on the voluptuous, made Hans all the more intriguing. The fact was that Elizabeth liked risk-yearned for the taste and challenge of it. And deep inside she was even convinced that on the other side of such places and situations lay the reality she so desired. From the slopes of Switzerland to the runways of Paris, she had found everything she treasured most by threading pa.s.sageways of fear to the other side. Everything she treasured, including Hans. But this infatuation with her fear had, on one horrendous occasion, nearly cost Elizabeth her looks and her livelihood, not to mention her life, so she also developed a healthy sense of caution. At this moment, with anxiety and hunger and blind antic.i.p.ation all swirling around her, she found herself watching Hans Brinkman with increasing objectivity. You can walk away from this, she was thinking. Put it all behind you, girl! She saw him smile, as though he were reading her thoughts. ”What are you brooding about, Elizabeth?” he asked. She stiffened slightly. The faintly patronizing way he always used her full name-why hadn't that gotten under her skin before? ”I was thinking back to when we met,” she said. ”Ruing the day,” he teased, and before she could agree, ”I lied to you, you know.” She looked at him, suddenly afraid. He grinned. ”Well, not an outright lie, a lie of omission. I didn't tell you I'd been stalking you. By now breathing was difficult. ”Stalking me?” ”I'd seen your picture in Allureremember that little reading room at the ski lodge? And when I looked up, there you were in the lobby. It was like magic. As if we were fated to be together. Or as if we'd already met before.” ”In another life,” she said, trying for flippancy. But it had come out like a statement of fact, and it scared her even more. It sounded so right, even though she had not even thought before saying it. That feeling of deja vu. ”Something like that, yes. It threw me. I was almost afraid to approach you-I don't know why, it never happened before. So I thought, well, I'll impress her on the slopes, then we'll have something to talk about.” ”It worked,” she said carefully ”You impressed me, too,” he said almost fondly. He touched her hair. ”You aren't starting to regret it, are you?” he asked, and suddenly there was a sadness in his voice that completely unnerved her. ”No!”

He smiled again. Was he happy now? Or was he seeing right through her, amused as only a true cynic can be? She raged at herself in frustration. I am regretting it. Come on, Lizzy, in the animal kingdom-which is where Hans definitely lives-a smile is just another show of teeth. ”We remind me of that Cole Porter song,” he said amiably. ”What's it called?” ”I don't know any Cole Porter songs,” she lied. She knew exactly the one he was thinking of. ”Too hot not to cool down,”' he sang off-key. ”That what you're afraid of? The Angel's Curse?” She looked at him. She knew he would say what it was and he did. ”It's a corollary of the Rule of Blondes: men think they're not good enough for you, so they act accordingly. They disappear, or f.u.c.k it up, and hurt you. That's what's always happened, right?” ”Whereas you know you're good enough?” she countered, not caring to answer that one. What on earth was he leading up to? ”I know,” he said, his voice dropping into a gentler register. ”We were meant to be together.” She took a deep breath. Whether he had meant to or not, he was giving her an opening she could not ignore. ”Then why aren't we?” she heard herself ask. ”Are you afraid to upset your home life?” It was the first time she had alluded to his wife, even indirectly. She felt a spasm of regret as she saw his face cloud over, but she pressed on. ”I think we should talk about it,” she said, steeling herself for what he might say. And then, when he said nothing, she said, ”I'm not really sure I want to go on like this,” He nodded, looking idly toward the window, the distant mountains. ”You know, I'm not sure I do either.” Elizabeth's chest constricted. It was bad enough to consider being the dumper. To be the dumpee was terrifying. ”She's gone off me,” he said darkly. ”She finds meeasily distracted. My mind is too much on my work, she says. Not that I blame her. Lately we travel in our separate ruts-our life seems to work better that way.” He shrugged. ”Listen, I really don't want to talk about Yvette. Not today.” He glanced at his watch. ”Then when?”

He ignored her question. ”And yes, I hate hotels, too,” he said, reading her mind. ”Then my place. I could use some home-court advantage.” ”No. I don't want to endanger you.. .”

She looked at him. ”Endanger me?”

”The less Yvette knows....” he said, his eyes veiled again. He left the phrase hanging. ”Next time we'll talk. We'll have it all out. I promise.” Abruptly, he resumed dressing, while Elizabeth tried to sort out her emotions. She watched his body disappear into his charcoal suit until he was just a wealthy chic businessman again. She tried to control her breathing but couldn't. With real despair she realized that she was still head over heels in love. ”Sat.u.r.day, Elizabeth,” he said, already at the door and blowing her a gentle kiss. ”Same time, okay?” He was gone before she had answered, softly, irresolutely, with dismay, ”Sat.u.r.day, yes.” She heard him run to the elevator, heard it whir as it descended. Pulling the sheet around her, suddenly she felt chilled to the bone. She curled into a ball and pulled the duvet over her head until she was hidden in protective darkness. 2 WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO-DELTA RANGE.

Peter Jance, seventy-six years old and feeling every minute of it, scrambled up the long grade of scrub and hard sand he and his crew had dubbed Mons Venus. His once thick golden hair was a brittle gray mane now, but he was still handsome in a hawk-faced way and, on this project at least, his mind was miles ahead of everyone. As usual, that put him in a h.e.l.l of a fix. Only a few fellow geniuses conceded that what he was working on was feasible. The rest of the scientific community thought he was out of his mind. And maybe they're right, Peter said to himself, squinting into the distance. It was easy to feel trepidation and self-doubt today, if he had been capable of either. The sun beat down on the sand and mesquite like a blacksmith's hammer, and all around him people were cursing the heat. Instead, Peter found himself glorying in it. Like a penitent celebrating the lash, he mused, though it scarcely diminished his love for the landscape. White Sands Missile Range occupied 3,200 square miles of New Mexico desert, an area as big as Rhode Island, Delaware and the District of Columbia combined, and was now his to play in, a paradise of rolling gra.s.slands, sand dunes and lava flows heaving into foothills and ragged canyons. He loved its life-bighorn sheep, p.r.o.nghorns, mountain lions. There were golden eagles and horned lizards, rattlesnakes, kangaroo rats and tarantulas. Coyotes, bobcats and foxes hunted here at night; mule deer, roadrunners, giant centipedes and wind scorpions were to be found during the day. Even introduced species like African oryx, a fivehundred-pound antelope from the Kalahari region, flourished here by the thousands. This was one of the little-mentioned perks of working on a supersecret, low access base: few people got in, and nature thrived. Except for the part of nature that worked for the U.S. Army. That part inspired less awe, and not a little regret. The soldiers.

d.a.m.n, his gut hurt. Was it his guilt talking or the illness? Or were they now hopelessly intertwined? You made this bed, he thought, so now you lie in it. So what if the enemy troops hadn't been his idea? When the notion had first come up, three months ago, he had argued against including live subjects, to the point at which Colonel Oscar Henderson, the bean counter in charge of funding this project, pushed the issue to the level of a deal breaker. There were several ways to interpret Henderson's stubbornness: as a sign that he had lost faith in Peter's vision, doubted his abilities, even his loyalty; or merely as a desire to p.i.s.s on Peter's project so it would have his scent. Power has to be arbitrary, as Peter had come to realize-otherwise it's just sound policy. A lifetime of struggling to maintain his vision while being accused of biting the hand that fed him had driven home that truth. His wife, Beatrice, on the other hand, leaned toward the theory of the loyalty test to explain Henderson's insistence on live subjects. They had spent a week debating the issue, Peter arguing that it tainted all of them and was unnecessary. Beatrice, of course, called him a pompano-their pet word for a pompous a.s.s-and as usual, she was right. After all, he could turn around and walk back down the hill, couldn't he? Call Henderson's bluff? And was he going to? No. As a matter of fact, the result of his wife's chastis.e.m.e.nt was to make him more determined than ever to see this project through to the end. All the concerns he had voiced to Beatrice-just so much ritual self-doubtwere merely an attempt to quiet the churning in his gut by flattering his conscience. With the result being, of course, that his symptoms were flaring up more painfully than ever. The pills he was taking put his inner ear on gimbals, and now, plodding skyward through the sand, he had to pee again, despite the fact he'd done so five minutes before leaving the bunker. ”Dr. Jance? Maybe we could slow down a little bit?” Peter glanced back down the hill. His support team were slogging behind him as best as they could, and one of them, Alex Davies, had apparently decided to take on the job of their spokesman. Peter smiled. Only Alex, in all the world, had the familiarity to suggest he slow down. Peter had known him since he was a kid, and Alex was banking on that. He was a decent kid, despite his pestering. Peter suspected that he might even have a conscience, which was unusual among scientists in this generation. It made Peter like him for it and-come to think of it-for his lack of qualms about speaking up. Despite their constant, collective p.i.s.sing and moaning, no one else on his team had voiced a serious complaint about any part of this enormously difficult and demanding project on which they labored like indentured servants. Of course, Peter reflected now, he had looked for just such a gung ho, unquestioning quality during the screening process. Wild-card geniuses scrounged from universities all over the United States, this team const.i.tuted the best and the brightest scientists working in weapons development today. Wet behind the ears, yes, and in Alex's case somewhat unpredictable, but who else was willing to put in outrageous hours for peanuts just for the opportunity to work with Peter Jance? Cap Chu, his accelerator specialist, he had shanghaied from MIT. Cap was a secondgeneration Chinese-American from Oakland, whose unchanging uniform was a Raiders T-s.h.i.+rt and cutoff Levi's, and whose unconscious tendency to mimic his boss's speech patterns often made Peter want to laugh aloud. But in tens years or less, Cap Chu was a shoo-in to write the book on particle weaponry for the next century-and as Beatrice put it, the kid was a steal. Hank Flannagan, pausing to light a Marlboro, was another diamond in the rough. Flannagan understood the weapons applications of fusion the way angry boys understand a rock's applications to a picture window. His form of relaxation was stretching out on his dirt bike at sixty miles an hour while he sailed through the pucker bush, or jumping ravines so wide fellow riders braked and covered their eyes in horror. Peter, no stranger to physical risk, encouraged him in this hobby. Flannagan returned from these forays not only unscathed, but bristling with solutions to some of the most challenging mathematical problems the team confronted. The woman among them, just now hooking her arm through Alex Davies's, was Rosemarie Wiener. The fact that Peter was funding a project to achieve an unprecedented kill factor didn't bother her one bit. She was herself a protean thinker in the tactical applications of microwave and ultrasound beams and an avid fan of sophisticated military mayhem. The correlation between raw force and long term survival was not lost on her. She had been raised on a kibbutz and took s.h.i.+t from no oneexcept maybe Alex Davies, with whom, at this moment, she was flirting hard, the sound of her delighted laughter rising sharply through the s.h.i.+mmering heat. Peter wondered if it was l.u.s.t or political instinct. With this generation it was hard to tell. Certainly if there was one among these nascent whiz kids headed for real power, it was Alex Davies, so even if Rosemarie was only networking, she had chosen well. Alex was the grand-son of Dr. Frederick Wolfe, a scientist spearheading his own top secret project for the Army, both at other bases and here at White Sands. If Alex himself was something of a catch on his own merits, as a future father-in-law Frederick Wolfe made the kid an all-time trophy. Anyone near Wolfe moved up quickly, and this particular project, code-named Fountain, was legendary on the base, both for the deferment and funding it received and for the cachet it gave to all who Were a.s.sociated with it. As to what exactly the Fountain Project was, it was a mystery. It was Wrapped in secrecy so extreme that even Peter, who warily counted Wolfe among his oldest friends, could only guess at what it might be all about. To make things even more intriguing, Peter's own wife Beatrice was employed by Wolfe as a neurobiologist on the Fountain Project. But she, too, was kept on a need-to-know basis-at least judging by what she disclosed to Peter. Her specialty was spinal regeneration, so Peter speculated that maybe it had something to do with trying to cure battle injuries to that stem of stems. But that was only one possibility. Beatrice swore only Wolfe knew the big picture, but Peter found that hard to swallow, considering the ranks of bra.s.s coming in and out of Wolfe's compound. Clearly Wolfe and his Fountain Project were the darlings of someone bigperhaps even the Commander in Chief-and that meant its purpose was not only known in detail by some, but considered important. Hugely important, judging from the amount of funding Wolfe seemed to enjoy. Good luck to him. Peter was never one to begrudge a friend's good fortune. Besides, the fact was the two had known each other since their twenties, and often shared test ranges and personnel--even, as in this case, family members. Wolfe had given Beatrice a position of power within the Fountain Project, and Peter had agreed to take Alex aboard in return. Peter gave the kid the room he needed to be his own quirky self, while Wolfe had a.s.signed Beatrice to a lab in the Caribbean. On their end, it was an arrangement that permitted the couple to remain close, but not so close they would tear each other's heads off from propinquity, which was what they tended to do when they worked on the same project. This was a great boon to Peter, for he and Beatrice needed each other desperately, and thrived on distant proximity of just the right kind. Too close to each other and they were miserable; too far apart and they were lost. ”Hey, Uncle Peter? Are we there yet?” Saying it with just the right tone of irony and fondness, the kid somehow got away with it. Alex Davies was a wild card, to be sure, but one Peter was glad he'd drawn. Any regrets Peter had personally harbored about having the kid more or less foisted upon him had vanished within a week of the young man's arrival. For one thing, Alex knew the base's labyrinthine cl.u.s.ter of Cray supercomputers like the back of his hand. That knowledge allowed Peter to throw dozens of theorems, algorithms and mathematical models at this project each week, rather than once a year through the usual channels. For that alone, Alex was a G.o.dsend. So the fact that Alex got a little cheeky from time to time was of little import. In his own quirky way, Alex Davies was vital to the project's chance for survival and also for its eventual success. Ignoring the twisting pain in his stomach, Peter kept walking at the same killer pace he had set at the bottom of the hill. Despite his illness, he had more energy than most men half his age. Six feet tall, with no suggestion of a stoop, he had spent his youth and much of his middle age accepting every physical challenge he could find. He had bicycled through Nepal when it was known only to National Geographic photographers, trekked halfway across Borneo surveying for an oil company. He had run marathons all over the East Coast just for the h.e.l.l of it-and until just recently, he played squash with a ferocity that appalled his opponents. Not that he'd worked at any of it very hard. His first love, his obsession, in fact, was physics, the source of all the challenges that truly mattered. It just happened that he was gifted with one of those almost freakishly athletic bodies, capable, it seemed for many years, of anything he asked of it. It had given him a lifetime of pleasures and mobility and, most important, had afforded a superb platform for his brain, bathing it in rich, super-oxygenated blood, allowing its undisputed genius to run at full throttle for six decades. Until the pancreatic cancer.

Yes, too bad about that, wasn't it? In the game of cellular roulette, he had come up double zero. Not that he'd expected to go to his grave intact-that much of an optimist he wasn't. Still, coming out of nowhere as it had, and in the midst of the most important work of his life, the cancer had felt like an undeserved punishment. It was playing hob with his body at the moment, an infuriating distraction to the workings of his mind. Come on, Jance, he berated himself, clamping his teeth against the pain, stop feeling sorry for yourself. He struggled to focus on the business at hand, the hundreds of tasks needing completion before he could begin his countdown. He a.s.sailed his own disease by reimagining it. If it was some ravening beast tearing him from within, he'd see it as something without imagination or charisma-the pain in his entrails nothing but a dark ham- lives of a few animals that would have died anyway, not even his own life. It was the work that mattered. And success. He watched intently, ignoring the black spiral of pain that was working its way through his gut again, as his team fanned out, checking tethers and adjusting telemetry devices. It was zero minus fifty minutes, and time was racing through his fingers like quarks through an accelerometer. His n.o.bel Prize, his international awards, the laboratory that bore his name at MIT-none of it mattered now, if it ever had. Beyond the acclaim, beyond the misgivings, there was only the idea, moved toward reality through painstaking research and development that had gone on seemingly forever until this approaching moment. In just fifty minutes, the instant when everything might come to fruition would arrive. And in that instant, the idea could become substance. If it happened, he knew, the realization of that idea would dominate military thought for the foreseeable future. But the time factor-the necessity for those hours, months and years of cerebration and calculation and fiddling and trying and trying again-made everything one great race against the very limitation of a man's life span. Stupidly small budgets, arbitrary deadlines, the ignorant carping of the Army bra.s.s had all conspired to undermine his work, his dream, his place in the history of science. Experiments that could have worked brilliantly if they had been adequately funded were rushed headlong from the drawing board into the field and discarded forever if they failed just once. The process was nothing short of insane, and it had all come down to this: if this day's trial shot didn't work, he and his research would be worthless and the last decade of his life would be declared an utter waste. The pain clawed at his belly. Inwardly, he snarled back at it. You're here, he swore to himself. You're going through with it, and your doubts be d.a.m.ned. He turned around and p.i.s.sed against a yucca, ignoring the burn. Somewhere behind him a sheep was bleating as if its throat were cut. Perkins was right. Time to get going or they would all be dead from the heat.

SOUTHERN ACCESS ROAD, WHITE SANDS.

Ten miles south of where Peter was working, the desert flattened until it was a griddle spreading as far as the eye could see, bleached sand blinding and barren to the horizon of the Tularosa Basin. This desolate moonscape was bisected by a single two-rut track, and on this a dust-blasted Range Rover heaved, roiling a plume that stretched a half-mile behind it into the blistered air. Inside the Range Rover were Peter's wife, Dr. Beatrice Jance, and Dr. Frederick Wolfe, who was doing the driving. Wolfe was in his early seventies, gaunt and pale, with hair like steel wool, thick eyelids and a mouth turned down darkly with an expression of perpetual disdain. His surgeon's fingers were long and large-knuckled; the huge dome of his skull was dotted with liver spots the size of quarters. He had the air of a man who expects the best while he listens for the worst, and whose slightest disapproval had the force of a curse. Nosferatu was the nickname given him by one brash young geneticist who had been employed by him for just a week. That man soon found himself teaching high school biology in Mexico. Better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli, one of Wolfe's few heroes, advised. Better still to love oneself so completely, so faithfully, that the question never mattered. And, in fact, that was the way it worked for Wolfe. Scientists from all over the world had flocked to the side of this implacable genius, whose experiments in biogenetics were so bold and far-reaching that no one but he could grasp their complete significance. And with Machiavellian dexterity Wolfe pitted these scientists against each other, ego to ambition, in such a way that he got the best of their work and kept his secrets to himself and his inner circle. Virtually no one he had asked to join him had refused; no one who had come aboard had quit him voluntarily. Beatrice Jance was no exception.

As he maneuvered the Range Rover across the desert sands, Wolfe Watched her from the corner of his eye. Beatrice was still magnificent-her glorious ash-blond hair had long since turned a blazing white, and there were fresh wrinkles pursing her broad pale mouth, but her athletic grace was intact, the soft gray eyes still remarkably energetic. But she hadn't returned his smiles, not once in the last thirty minutes. No, of course, her thoughts would all be of Peter. She looked over at Wolfe, catching him looking, and smiled as he looked away, What that smile meant, though, Wolfe was d.a.m.ned if he knew. ”If I swallow much more dust,” she shouted over the noise of the wind, ”I'll pa.s.s a brick.” Wolfe winced faintly, Her offhand coa.r.s.eness when she wanted to be vulgar was jarring. It was the same with Peter. The problem with these two was, no matter how far apart they were in the course of their work, they were always somehow together. It baffled him, really, and irritated him as well. There was such a thing as being too close. They fed on each other's doubts and anxieties, in his view, especially now with Peter's illness looming over all of them. Touching, how they'd tried to keep Peter's cancer a secret from him, the one man on whom nothing was ever lost, and the one man who could actually do something about it. ”Fortunate for both of us we've arrived,” Wolfe said, pulling himself back to the here and now. He produced an ID from his pocket and braked the Range Rover at a weed-choked fence. A man appeared and scrutinized the credentials. Wolfe eyed him with Olympian impatience. ”Obviously, you're new.

The guard, wiry and humorless, ignored Wolfe's withering glance. From somewhere inside his civilian vest came the crackle of a walkie-talkie. He ignored that, too, until he had finished inspecting Wolfe's ID.

”Six-month rotation,” he finally said, and flashed his own ID. Wolfe waved it away. ”How was D.C., Dr. Wolfe?” ”Benighted and besotted,” Wolfe muttered. ”As always.” The guard flicked an uneasy eye toward Wolfe's pa.s.senger. ”Beatrice,” sighed Wolfe, ”Mr. Greenhorn wants your credentials, too.” Beatrice dug into her battered leather satchel, pulling out paperbacks, a scientific calculator, a Spinhaler, a tube of sun block-every-thing but her papers. ”Dr. Beatrice Jance,” she said, as if that explained everything. The guard stiffened brightly.

”Wife of Dr. Peter Jance?”

She smiled, not threatened. ”And he is married to me as well.” ”No kidding. Sorry.” The guard stepped back, star struck, and saluted. ”You both have a nice day now,” he added, pulling out his walkie-talkie to announce them. Wolfe saw Beatrice blink as she glimpsed the automatic weapon slung vertically under his vest. He put the Range Rover in drive, and within moments, guard and shack and razor-wire hurricane fence disappeared in the dust. ”Everyone seems to know Peter,” Beatrice declared, still shouting over the wind. Wolfe looked at her impa.s.sively, Was this an instance of simple wifely pride, or was she trying to put a dent in his vanity? ”Any kid admires an adult who likes to blow things up,” he said. ”That's probably it,” she returned.

Her tone was level, no hint of irony or regret. As faithful to the cause as she is beautiful, concluded Wolfe. Feeling as empty as a used-up pack of cigarettes, he put the pedal to the floor.

Two miles deeper into the desert, Wolfe and Beatrice arrived at the compound of corrals, pens and living quarters Wolfe had called his second home for the past five years. The Fountain Compound, whose low-lying sprawl and air of bland guardedness suggested a prison for white-collar felons, was actually an unlisted unit of the Army's Battlefield Environment Directorate, or BED, one of the many Army research laboratories sprinkled across White Sands. The Army had begun its residency at White Sands in 1946. In the early years, its Signal Corps had supplied radar and communications support for the American conversion of captured German V-2 rockets at the dawn of the U.S. s.p.a.ce program. Now its projects ranged far from rocketry, to weapons systems research and on into biological and chemical means of warfare that were beyond the wildest dreams of even Hitler's architects of death.

WHITE SANDS, DELTA RANGE.

Fifteen minutes after leaving the animals tethered on the hill, Dr. Peter Jance and his support team were a quarter mile away on a ma.s.s of steel, ceramic and exotic materials that cost the U.S. government and its taxpayers more per ounce than gold. Dubbed The Hammer, the whole apparatus weighed one ton, which was about a hundred tons lighter than anything else that had been cooked up during the ill-fated Star Wars period, and that lightness translated into its supreme feasibility as a military weapon. The Hammer, in essence, was the most advanced Directed HighEnergy Weapon system ever conceived, and singly the product of Peter Jance's unique vision. That vision, and the knowledge that informed it, had their roots in the Manhattan Project, where Peter had begun his scientific career, in 1943, as a twenty-one-year-old mathematician; Einstein himself had announced that Peter was the only scientist at Los Alamos who had caught an error in his calculations. They had exploded the first thermonuclear device just thirty miles north on this very testing ground, at a site called Trinity, and a month later had seen two j.a.panese cities atomized by their device.

Then, after the war, there were the years of building the Tevatron Collider, a behemoth at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois. The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the TC shot protons against antiprotons at collision energies of 1.8 trillion electron-volts. Peter had proved that atoms were not merely protons and electrons whirling around a nucleus-he had helped throw open the doors of a ”particle zoo” of gluons, mesons and mysterious atomic dust particles called quarks, while the rest of science scrambled to catch up. But it was during the Reagan administration that Peter had finally come into his own, without the interference that had dogged him after Hiros.h.i.+ma. He proposed and developed everything from rail guns to ultrasound weapons that could melt the eyes and inner ears of any soldier within their range. The problems now were technical, not bureaucraticquestions of size and power requirements. All of the devices were huge, enormously costly, and consumed electricity like Manhattan in July, One shot from these weapons was all you got-it took six to eight hours before they were ready to fire again. None were useful for actual combat. Until the Hammer.