Devoted Page 2

  Driving through the early night, he is racked by anger and by self-pity and anxiety, but also by what he believes to be grief, an emotion that is new to him. Ninety-two Refine employees are in the locked-down high-security facility near Springville, prevented from communicating with the outside world, in their final hours of life. He’s as pissed off at them as at Dorian. One of those geniuses—or several—has done something careless that sealed their fate and put him in this untenable position. Yet some are his friends, to the extent that a CEO can allow himself friends among those he must supervise, and their suffering, as it should, distresses him.

  During the building of that complex, he’d taken pains to ensure that the module containing his office and those of his immediate support staff—five others—would go into airtight lockdown ninety seconds after all of the labs were hermetically sealed in a crisis. When the alarm sounded, he assured his staff that they were safe, that they should stay at their posts—and he quietly departed.

  He had no choice but to lie to them. The alarm didn’t announce impending disaster, but an immediate one. They are as contaminated as the researchers in the labs. Shacket is likewise contaminated, but in mortal circumstances like these, he isn’t capable of lying to himself as easily as he lied to them.

  Anyway, he’s always been clever about eluding the consequences of his mistakes. Maybe his luck will hold through one last escape.

  He’ll soon be hunted, the quarry of legitimate authorities but also of Dorian’s ruthless cleanup crew. He hopes, in what he believes is a spirit of mercy and sorrow, that all employees at Springville will perish before any can bear witness against him.

  5

  When Rosa Leon went downstairs to make a sandwich for herself, Kipp was alone with Dorothy.

  The lamplight was low, the shadows as smooth as still water, the stately pine beyond the window silvered with moonlight.

  She said, “I have arranged with Rosa that you will be with her when I’ve gone. She’ll take good care of you.”

  By way of acknowledgment, Kipp thumped his tail three times on the mattress. Three meant Yes, all right. One thump meant No or That feels wrong.

  In truth, his destiny would take him elsewhere than with Rosa.

  No need, however, to distress Dorothy.

  “Short stuff, you have been a gift of no less value to me than my son, Jack, or dear sweet Arthur.”

  Kipp raised his head from his mistress’s hip to lick her pale hand, with which she so often smoothed his coat and fed him treats.

  “I wish together we might have found a way to solve the mystery of your origins.”

  With a long sigh, Kipp expressed agreement.

  “But in the end, our origins are all the same, born in the heart that shaped all that is.”

  Kipp yearned to say so much to her while time remained.

  Although his intelligence had somehow been enhanced to a human level, he lacked the vocal apparatus for speech. He could make many sounds, but none were words.

  She had devised a clever method of communication, but it was in a ground-floor room, and she lacked the strength to go downstairs.

  It didn’t matter. Everything he wanted to say to her had been said before. I love you. I will miss you terribly. I will never forget you.

  “Dear child,” she said, “let me look into your eyes.”

  He adjusted himself, laid his head upon her breast, and met her loving gaze.

  “Your eyes and heart are as golden as your breed, dear Kipp.”

  Her eyes were blue and clear and deep.

  6

  Lee Shacket parks his Dodge Demon in a far corner of the lot at the Best Western motel in the small town of Delta, Utah. Sitting in the car, he shaves off his immaculately trimmed beard, which he’s had since he was twenty-four. He washes his hands with a sanitizer and inserts nonprescription contact lenses to change his eyes from tungsten-gray to brown.

  After pulling on a baseball cap to conceal most of his blond hair, he heads south on State Route 257, transitions to Route 21, then to Route 130. After 125 miles, he arrives in Cedar City, where he registers at the Holiday Inn, using a driver’s license and credit card in the name of Nathan Palmer.

  In his room, before dyeing his hair, he needs to know if the situation in the Springville facility has made it to cable news. Standing in front of the television, the first thing he sees is video taken near the end of the workday, before nightfall. When he’d fled, the lab complex hadn’t been ablaze. The fire broke out minutes after his frantic departure. The ferocious flames tower sixty or seventy feet above the lab complex, from one end to the other.

  The blaze must have been triggered to obliterate the truth of what happened in that place. Without his knowledge, fuel of some kind and an ignition system must have been incorporated into the structure to ensure that all proof of the nature of the work being done there would never be discovered in the aftermath of a crisis.

  He has no doubt that the researchers were intentionally burned alive—incinerated, nothing but bones left, if even that—to deny the coroner evidence. Although they might have died anyway, in days or weeks, the profound cruelty of the incineration of the staff shocks Lee and leaves him so weak in the legs that he needs to sit on the edge of the bed.

  He had abandoned those people to their fate, yes, but Dorian had decided their fate for them. There are degrees of evil, and Lee Shacket takes refuge in the thought that what he’s done pales when compared to what his boss has done.

  Surely Dorian Purcell has secretly authorized this extreme measure, his idea of a fail-safe. Dorian fancies himself a visionary, as does nearly everyone in the press who writes about him, and a true visionary knows that progress requires sacrifices, that what matters is not the short-term cost in lives and treasure, but the great benefit to humanity that will be achieved in the long term. To justify murdering tens of millions, Stalin is reputed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” By comparison, ninety-two deaths might be, to Dorian, nothing more than a mere footnote to the great enterprise that has been undertaken at Refine’s Springville laboratories and will be relaunched elsewhere a year from now.

  On the TV, a news anchor solemnly reports that the research being conducted at the facility involved seeking a revolutionary cure for cancer. This is a ridiculous lie, but the newsreader no doubt believes it. Cancer research isn’t so dangerous as to require that it be conducted in a walled, isolated compound a mile from the last residences on the outskirts of a Provo, Utah, suburb. However, in an age when news departments operate on tight budgets, many in the media tend to believe whatever they’re told by any source they trust, reserving investigative journalism solely for those they find dishonorable or suspicious. In public, at least, Dorian Purcell holds all the right positions on issues that matter to the opinion makers and is all but universally seen as one of the good guys.

  The preliminary official explanation for the fire is that the facility maintains its own dedicated power plant to minimize outages that would affect research projects, that the plant is fueled by natural gas, and that perhaps a leak under the foundation went undetected until the building was basically perched on a bomb.

  “Yeah, right,” says Lee, switching off the TV.

  Later, having become a new brown-haired brown-eyed clean-shaven man, he goes out to dinner. Never a snob about food, he has happily eaten his share of Holiday Inn fare and the equivalent over the years, although on this occasion, nothing tastes appealing. The salad greens are bitter. The vegetables are vaguely metallic. The potatoes have no flavor. He is able to eat the chicken, but it isn’t as savory as it ought to be.

  He craves something else but doesn’t know what might satisfy. Nothing on the menu holds any appeal for him.

  In his room again, he mixes spice
d rum with Coca-Cola and drinks until he can sleep.

  At three thirty in the morning, screaming, slick with cold sweat, he wakes from a nightmare of which he can remember not a single detail.

  The disorientation that is characteristic of dreams remains with him. At the windows, an otherworldly cobalt-blue light leaks around the edges of the draperies, as though in the world beyond these walls, a silent catastrophe is emitting lethal radiation. He is sober, but the small room feels vast, the bed adrift on a sea of undulant shadows. When Lee throws back the covers and sits on the edge of the mattress, the floor crawls under his bare feet, as though carpeted by an insect horde. He fumbles with the nightstand lamp and finds the switch. Sudden low light beaches the floating bed and reveals no insects. Yet the place is almost as shadowy as—and no less eerie than—it had been in the dark.

  After rising from the bed, he stands in indecision, certain that coiled within the nightmare had been an urgent presentiment of an onrushing evil that isn’t merely a sleeper’s fantasy, that is instead a truth on which he needs to act to save himself. But still he has no memory of the dream.

  He settles in a chair, gripping the upholstered arms with both hands, rocking back and forth even though the chair isn’t a rocker and doesn’t move in sympathy with him. He can’t seem to be still. He needs to move, as if to prove to himself that he’s alive.

  In the nightmare . . . He recalls something now. He’d been trapped, paralyzed, wrapped tightly, as though cocooned, a white translucent material across his eyes; formless shadows swelling and receding; sounds rising and fading around him.

  With a shudder, he wonders if the spectrum of genetic material with which his cells have been contaminated might include that of some worm that dies only to be born anew from a cocoon.

  He was helpless in the dream, and lonely. He rocks ceaselessly in the unmoving armchair. He has immediate getaway money and an elegant residence in Costa Rica and $100 million where no authorities can find it, but a profound loneliness makes him vulnerable, with no meaningful purpose.

  He feels powerless, as when he’d been a child under the iron rule of a violent alcoholic father and a mentally disturbed mother.

  He can’t endure being powerless. He cannot tolerate it.

  In addition to the scientists at Springville, twenty-two hundred Refine employees had answered to him. Now he has authority over no one. He had power, position, respect, twenty Tom Ford suits that he wore with colorful sneakers. All that is gone. He is alone.

  Only now does he realize that the worst of all miseries to afflict the human heart is loneliness.

  Lee Shacket has never been good at relationships. He’s had girlfriends. Hot ones. He’s not a troll. Women like the way he looks. They admire his ambition. He has a sense of humor. He can dance. He has style. He’s good in bed. He listens. But he’s never been able to sustain a love affair. Sooner than later, each woman starts to seem inadequate, inauthentic in one way or another. The relationship begins to feel shallow, lacking worthwhile emotional nourishment, a mere teaspoon of romantic essence; nevertheless, he always eventually feels as if he’s drowning in that teaspoonful, suffocating, and he needs to escape.

  He has gone still in the armchair. His stillness alarms him, as if staying alive depends on remaining in motion. He thrusts to his feet and paces the room, increasingly anxious.

  Something strange is happening to him.

  In the low lamplight, his restless reflection in the mirror is spectral, as if it’s the spirit of some former guest who died here and is wanted neither upstairs nor down, who has nowhere to go.

  As he circles the room, he tries to recall when and where his life went wrong, not regarding the events at the labs, but prior to that. When had he last been truly happy? It seems important that he remember. When had his future been most promising?

  Although Lee has achieved great success with Dorian Purcell, each promotion comes with such a significant increase in stress that, in spite of making a fortune, he can’t honestly say he has been happier during these years than before.

  Even prior to Purcell, Lee hadn’t always been in high spirits, but his prospects for happiness had been greater then. He’d had hope in those days. The options open to him had seemed infinite; whereas now he has few, perhaps only one.

  And he is alone. No one to listen. No one to understand. No one to care. No one who must answer to him.

  The turning point, the motive force that changed Lee’s life, is Jason Bookman, a friend since college. Initially, Jason’s career soared, while Lee’s labored along. Then Jason brought him into Dorian Purcell’s inner circle.

  As he paces, his reflection in the closet-door mirror disturbs him. His face. Something strange is happening to his face; something is wrong with it.

  He hurries into the bathroom, where the light is better. His eyes are brown, hair brown, beard gone. Maybe others won’t recognize him, but he knows himself. His mud-brown glower is unimpressive when compared to the piercing tungsten-gray stare with which he had cowed so many junior executives. Otherwise, he looks all right.

  But he doesn’t feel all right. His face is as stiff as a mask. He works his facial muscles—yawning, puckering, grimacing. With his fingertips, he massages his chin and cheeks and brow, pinches his nose, pulls on his lips, searching for . . . some wrongness. Finally he decides that the stiffness is merely a consequence of anxiety. His body, too, is tight with apprehension.

  Jason Bookman changed Lee’s life, which led to his current disastrous circumstances. However, the worst thing Jason did wasn’t bringing him into Purcell’s orbit. Worse, Jason married Megan.

  Gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, Lee has an epiphany. Jason was so farseeing, so aware of the long-term risks of working for a power-mad narcissist like Dorian Purcell, that he brought Lee into the company to serve as a fall guy, a role that otherwise might have gone to Jason. Why hasn’t this been clear till now? Is he being unfair, paranoid? No, no. What once seemed like an act of friendship is abruptly, belatedly revealed as a Machiavellian maneuver. It wasn’t enough that Jason stole Megan from Lee; he also schemed to set up Lee to take the blame if things went wrong at Refine.

  Lee remembers the warmth of Megan’s kiss. Megan Grassley. Now Megan Bookman. Almost fourteen years ago, they dated for two or three months. He’d never gotten more than a kiss from her. He was used to easy girls, and she insisted on commitment before sex. He’d decided to teach her a lesson by taking a break from her and going out with a hottie named Clarissa, so Megan would understand that servicing a man’s needs was the best way to gain his commitment. But after a month, Jason began dating Megan; eventually they married. At the time, Lee hadn’t blamed Jason for poaching. He was magnanimous. He wished the couple well and counseled himself that his friend would regret hooking up with such a frigid bitch.

  Evidently, however, Megan had no problem giving it up for Jason. They flourished together, and year by year she looked hotter, much hotter than Clarissa. Okay. No problem. Lee hadn’t wanted her; she wasn’t fast enough for him. She was a Honda, and he needed a Ferrari girl. He had better options than her. The world is full of good-looking women, especially when you’re making seven figures a year and piling up stock options.

  But now he is jobless, alone. Soon to be an outlaw on the run.

  If he’d been more patient with Megan, she might have given herself to him. They might have married, and everything after that surely would have been far different from the current calamity.

  He suddenly knows when he had been happiest, when his future had been most promising: when he was dating Megan.

  Meeting his eyes in the mirror, he realizes that nothing is wrong with his face. The problem, if it is a problem, exists behind his face. Something is happening to his mind. There is a fever in his brain. If he purchased a thermometer, his
temperature would prove to be normal; he has no doubt that it would be 98.6 precisely. However, there is a fever of excitement in his brain: agitation, fermentation, effervescence. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He is exhilarated, electrified, galvanized.

  He knows what he must do. He can’t travel back in time fourteen years and marry Megan, but he can go to her in California, where she lives now. She is a widow. Three years a widow. She will be easier now than she was when they were younger, ready for a new life, for the right life, the one that they would have had together if Jason Bookman hadn’t come along. Lee will take her with him to Costa Rica. The boy, too, if she really wants to bother with a mentally disabled mute. Hot Megan and steamy Costa Rica: This prospect stimulates Lee, inflames him. He can be happy again, with a fine future that holds great promise.

  In the bathroom mirror, the reflection speaks to him, though it’s not his image any longer, but somehow that of Jason Bookman, the poaching Machiavellian betrayer of friends. “You’re infected,” Jason declares. “They’re swarming inside you. Something’s going wrong with your mind.”

  “Liar,” Lee replies. “You just don’t want me to get in her pants.” He snatches up the pint of spiced rum and throws it.

  The shattering bottle fractures the mirror, instantly beheading and dismembering Jason Bookman, daggers and dirks and stilettos and scimitars of glass spilling out of the frame, slashing down upon the sink and the faux marble encircling it, ringing like the silvery bells of some demonic fairy church. The aroma of spiced rum—orange peel, cinnamon, coconut, vanilla bean—spurts across Lee Shacket, splashes off the wall behind him.

  In a state of high excitement, two hours before dawn, he returns to the bedroom and quickly dresses for the long drive.