Elixir. Part 7

"I'm not talking about Veratox, silly." Wendy's eyes were wide and intense, and she wore a huge grin, the kind that was just this side of erupting into giggles.

"What are you telling me?"

"Dada, mama, goo-goo."

Chris bolted upright. "What?"

"We are with child, my love-preggers, knocked up, all of the above." She was beaming happily.

"Yahooooooo!" And he pulled her to him.

"When's it due?"

"November third."

She wrapped her arms around him.

"I don't believe it," he said, and rocked her in his arms.

In a few moments the lights were out and they were naked under the covers, arms embraced. Chris let himself dissolve into the warm joy of the moment, as he made love to his wife and reveled in the thoughts of being a father again.

And through the window, a crescent moon smiled down on them through a bank of fast-moving clouds.

The same crescent moon smiled down on Antoine Ducharme, fifteen hundred miles to the south.

He woke with a start. Everything was still, including Lisa asleep in the big round bed beside him. The ceiling fan hummed, the only sound other than that of the Roman shades swaying gently in the breeze. If there had been an intruder, the security guards would have heard, and the dogs would be barking their brains out.

At forty-six years of age, Antoine had become a light sleeper; the slightest disturbance aroused him. But that was all right, since he would take a catch-up nap tomorrow. Besides, he loved the night from the balcony. It gave him a chance to reflect on his fortunes. And if he was still alert he would open a good book. Antoine was an avid reader of mystery novels, particularly women writers, both the cla.s.sics-Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers-and American contemporaries. He liked how women treated crime with such delicate sensibilities, driven by a greater urgency for order than male writers.

Antoine padded through the French doors onto the veranda off the master bedroom-a bal.u.s.trade marble structure that overhung the northern peak of the island. His villa-named La Dolce Vita after the movie-was a palatial structure nestled high on a hilltop with a three-quarter view of the sea. The daytime vista was particularly splendid: voluptuous green slopes sweeping down to turquoise water edged by a white sand beach to the left and the small protected harbor to the right where night lights illuminated the flanks of Reef Madness. It was a view that could make the hardest man ache.

His watch said 3:12. On a chaise lounge he stretched out under an outrageously starry sky. As usual the midnight air was comfortably cool and laced with spices and apricot perfume. He poured himself some brandy and let the sweet miasma fill his head.

He knew the realities. Once Veratox was synthesized, Darby would have no need for his apricots. But he also knew that the synthesis was very difficult and could take years. Meanwhile, Antoine had Darby Pharms over the barrel, as the Americans liked to say. It had cost Quentin a finger, but he paid up. That was the nice part of being on top. You got others to do the enforcement. Not that Antoine had lost his stomach for it. He had killed eighteen people in his day, most when he was an upstart. He had even taken pleasure in killing. But he was in his middle years now and could afford others to do that, leaving him more time for more genteel pleasures. Life was good.

Out at sea a freighter blinked along the horizon. A few shooting stars streaked across the Pleides in the constellation of Taurus, which was unusual for this time of year. A portent, he thought. As he stared at the heavens, he thought about Lisa asleep inside, about waking her and making love. She had a G.o.ddesslike body which was a source of great physical pleasure for him-the key reason he had spared her life. After discovering her infidelity with Marcel, he had hired a h.o.m.os.e.xual guard who did not let her out of sight. She had begged Antoine to forgive and forget what had happened. He agreed to half her request. The day would come when she would get fat and he would tire of her-and retribution would need be redressed. But, now, things were in place. The center held.

At about 30 degrees northeast he could just make out Kingston airport. A few degrees further east the freighter's lights rippled in the air. Behind it, flashes of heat lightning. There would be rain tomorrow, but it would be short, then the sun would come out and dry things up-a pattern of nourishment and splendor, the natural rhythms of paradise. And he was part of them. In fact, he owned some of them.

He closed his eyes and thought about how rich life was. He thought how wonderful it would be to freeze his life at such moments to live them out forever. A pity man could not stop the clock. With all his millions, he was just as mortal as a pauper.

Antoine's eyes snapped open.

A strange sound. Beyond the crash of the waves against the sh.o.r.e. Beyond the chirping of tree frogs. Beyond the whispers of the Antilles trade winds through the bougainvillea. For a moment he thought it was the brandy playing tricks on him.

Engines. But not a security vehicle. Nor a boat. A persistent rumbling drone. From inside he returned with a powerful pair of binoculars. The sound grew louder.

No freighter. Too many lights and getting larger. Antoine felt his heart kick up. Airplanes were heading directly toward the island from the northeast. But no flights were scheduled tonight. And no planes ever approached from that direction. Nor so low. They couldn't be flying more than a hundred feet above the water. And so many. There must have been half a dozen in tight formation bearing down on Apricot Cay. Small planes, and moving fast.

Somewhere the dogs began barking. Then guards were shouting. The security phone rang inside, but before he could get it, eight jet planes rocketed up from the water's surface about a mile off sh.o.r.e and fanned out over the island.

Suddenly there was a volley of explosions that shook the villa and lit up the heavens. The planes were bombing his island with napalm. In a matter of minutes the forests were ablaze with jellied fire and filling the sky with thick black smoke.

He could barely hear Lisa scream for the noise. Security alarms wailed and guards fired automatic weapons helplessly as bombs continued to rain across the island, filling the night with choking fumes from incendiaries and burning orchards of apricots and marijuana.

To the south two direct hits destroyed the marina and the processing plant as drums of ether sent flaming mushrooms into the sky. Another sweep took out the airstrip where three of his own planes were blown to shrapnel. When a bomb hit the road behind the villa, Antoine dashed inside. Lisa was on the floor crying hysterically, but no rockets had hit them. Antoine Ducharme's death was not the object of the raid. Just his operation-to destroy it now and forever.

It took less than thirty minutes for eight F-14 fighters to set ablaze half the island and every processing building and storage shed, including, Antoine would later learn, a small barge containing a load of apricot pits destined to leave tomorrow for Boston Harbor. And what the napalm didn't kill, a solitary B-52 bomber did in three pa.s.ses over the southern slopes, spewing Agent Orange.

When it was all over one fighter jet peeled off from formation and sent two rockets into Reef Madness.

Crouched behind a window, Antoine Ducharme watched the boat explode. As his rainforests raged with fire, all Antoine Ducharme could think was that this was not supposed to happen. That his man had a friend in the White House. That his man's father-in-law was "bosom buddies" with Ronald Reagan.

That weasely little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Quentin Cross. He would pay for this with all he had.

6.

THE WHITE HOUSE.

Ronald Reagan sat in his bathrobe in the private quarters of the west wing breakfasting on scrambled eggs and stewed apricots when his secretary called to say that Ross Darby was on the line with an urgent call. It was 6:55 A.M.

The President punched the lighted b.u.t.ton. "I've got a seven-thirty meeting with Cap Weinberger, what's your excuse?"

"Sorry to call at this hour, Mr. President, but I have something of a problem."

Even though they had known each other for nearly half a century, Ross Darby just could not address his old pal by first name, because this was official business.

"I just got a call from an a.s.sociate that U.S. naval jets bombed Apricot Cay in the Caribbean. I'm sure you're aware of that fact since you no doubt gave the orders."

There was a long pause as Darby waited for the president's response. Then Reagan cleared his throat and said, "Well, you put me in kind of a funny position, Ross. Frankly, these are matters of national security."

"National security?"

"Yes. What's the problem?"

"Mr. President, I don't know if you were aware that Apricot Cay was the sole habitat of the very species of apricot which our new cancer drug comes from. We just got FDA approval the other day, as you well know."

"The same island?"

"Yes, and from what I understand the entire crop and orchards have been incinerated. They were napalmed, every last tree, and it appears they finished off the place with some kind of defoliant."

More gaping silence as the president measured his words. "And you're calling to ask why."

"Ron, I invested millions in that island and staked the future of the company on that harvest, not to mention that we had a cure for many cancers in those trees."

"h.e.l.l, I'm sorry, Ross," Reagan's voice was low and scratchy. "But why in G.o.d's name did you pick the same island?"

"Same as what?"

"Ross, it's seven in the morning and I've got a long day ahead of me, so let's please stop playing games."

"I don't know what you are driving at."

"That Apricot Cay was trafficking ten to twenty billion dollars of cocaine and marijuana each year, and all of it heading for the American streets."

"What?"

"Ross, they had shipments moving in and out of there every day, by land and air, like it was New York Harbor. What I want to know is how you could have risked investing in such a place, especially given our anti-drug campaign. I don't know how to say it without saying it, but frankly I feel personally betrayed, as will Nancy."

"Ron, I didn't know."

"How in h.e.l.l could you not know, for G.o.d's sake? You must have visited the place before you invested. You did, didn't you?"

"No."

"Well, whoever set up the deal for you must have known. They had to. Intelligence says the place was a fortress."

Darby listened in numbed silence as the president continued. Before he hung up, Reagan said, "Ross, I'm going to forget this call ever took place."

"Thank you, Mr. President," Ross said, and hung up.

For a long moment, Ross stared out the window into the gray light. He was shaking as if there were a brick of ice at the core of his body. Eighteen years ago he was a.s.sociate Professor of Pharmacology at Middles.e.x State University, and Darby Pharmaceuticals was a makeshift lab in his bas.e.m.e.nt where he developed new compounds, selling the patents to companies such as Pfizer and Merck. Over the years he had turned Darby Pharms into a $70 million business because of his knack for developing pharmaceuticals with prestige, profit, and universal application, such as synthetic estrogenic hormones, cholesterol lowering drugs, and-Veratox. Yet he suddenly saw himself as a foolish old man everybody goes about humoring but never letting on with the truth that the sky is beginning to fall.

Quentin sat across from him studying the carpet, his eye twitching uncontrollably. Sometime around 4:30 that morning he had telephoned Ross with the news of the bombing. When pressed to explain the military's action, Quentin had no answer. That was when Ross dialed the White House.

"He said that the island was the major drug distribution center of the western hemisphere. Did you know that?"

Quentin could not raise his eyes to his. "You think I'd do business with a drug lord?"

"That's what the h.e.l.l I'm asking you."

"I was there to buy apricots, period. I had no idea he was dealing in dope. None whatsoever."

Darby nodded, thinking what a miserable G.o.dd.a.m.n liar his son-in-law was. "We're ruined, I hope you know."

Quentin studied his cuticles without a word. Then he got up and walked to the window."

It was late November, and most of the trees had lost their leaves. A fine rain fell and glazed his gray Mercedes coupe in the executive lot. Quentin could just make out the Nantucket sticker on the windshield. Last month workmen had finished constructing their summer home on an oceanside bluff in Siasconset-a big sprawling place, called NewDawn, that put him in enormous debt in antic.i.p.ation of taking over the pharmaceutical company with a patent for the world's first cancer cure.

"I didn't know."

"Turn around!" Darby's voice was like a gunshot.

Quentin turned.

"Look me in the eyes and say that again."

"I-I...," he trailed off, stuck on Darby's stare.

"Just what I thought," Ross said. He took a deep breath and hissed through his teeth. "According to your records we're half a million dollars in the hole to your drug buddy. Half a million for all the charcoal we could ever ask for." He slammed down his coffee cup. "He said the son-of-a-bitoh was the Don Corleone of the Caribbean. He said he had a fortress down there with his own army, a fleet of planes, processing plants, and shipping docks. And you didn't know. The G.o.dd.a.m.n DEA's been watching him for a year from spy satellites three hundred miles up, and you couldn't tell from ground level. What the h.e.l.l do you take me for?"

Quentin looked away. The real figure was $2.5 million, but Ross would never know. He would also not ask him to resign because there was n.o.body else in line. Besides, how would Ross explain that to Margaret and the kids?

"Not to mention another $2.8 million trying to synthesize the stuff for the last two years. That's another dead end. You've ruined us, Quentin, and you made me look like a blue-ribbon a.s.s to the president of United States. It's probably out of pity I'm not facing federal prosecution.

"But I suppose there's a silver lining in everything: I can spend my retirement in financial ruin instead of financial ruin and federal prison." Darby flopped into his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.

A hush fell on the room, all but for the pattering of the rain against the windows.

"Maybe not," Quentin said.

Darby looked up. "'Maybe not' what?"

While Ross glowered at him, Quentin picked up the phone and punched seven numbers.

Chris was in a deep sleep when the phone rang. He caught it, but not before Wendy woke up. It was Quentin Cross. His message was terse: Meet him and Ross in the office at eight-thirty.

"It's Sat.u.r.day, for G.o.d's sake." She craned her neck to see the clock. It was a little after seven. "What did he say?"

"Just that it was urgent." He got up to get dressed. "Probably another hare-brained scheme to synthesize the toxogen."

"You don't believe that. They never call on Sat.u.r.days." His face had that fistlike tightness it got when something was bothering him. "Honey, what's going on?"

She could see that he didn't want to upset her, but it was time to fess up. "I think they're firing me."

"Firing you for what?"

"For not getting a better yield."

"That's ridiculous. They can't fire you if it can't be done."

"I didn't say it can't be done. It's just that I can't do it. So they'll find somebody who can."

"They can't do that," Wendy said. Tears sprung to her eyes. Chris was a decent man and brilliant scientist whose entire professional life had been dedicated to benefiting the human race. For two years he had labored tirelessly to synthesize the stuff. If they were terminating him, it was grossly unjust.

"It's their company. They can do what they want."

"Can't you fight them? Get a lawyer?"