Dr. Tarver was a pathologist, not a herpetologist, but he had a long history with snakes. It had begun in childhood, this education, and not by choice. For Dr. Tarver, serpents were inevitably bound up with the idea of God.
Not the way his adoptive parents had seen this relationship—because only fools tempted death as a test of faith—but bound up with God nonetheless.
As a boy Eldon had watched dozens of frightened rattlesnakes held high by chanting hillbillies who believed that God had anointed them against the lethal compounds in the bulging poison sacs behind the slitted eyes. He knew better.
He had seen many of those hillbillies bitten on their hands, arms, necks, and faces, and every blessed one had suffered fleshly torments beyond their imagination. Some had lost digits, others limbs, and two had lost their lives.
Eldon knew their fates because he had been one of those hillbillies once, not by choice or even by birth but by the authority of the State of Tennessee. He also knew that the skeptics who accused his adoptive father of keeping the snakes in refrigerators to make them sluggish, or of milking their venom before the services, had no idea whom they were talking about.
The faith of those hillbillies was as genuine as the rocks they plowed from the brick-hard earth of the Appalachian foothills every day but Sunday. They wanteddeath in the church with them when they witnessed to the Lord. Eldon had personally gathered many of the vipers for Sunday and Wednesday services.
The church elders had quickly seen that the big, birth-marked boy taken from the Presbyterian Children's Home in Knoxville had the gift—so much so that his adoptive father had begged him to take up the cloth himself. But that was another story….
Eldon watched the sunlight play upon the coral's overlapping scales, each scale part of a perfect minuet of indescribable beauty.
There had been no corals in Tennessee. You had to go east to North Carolina or south to Mississippi to find them.
But during his long walks in the wilderness around Jackson, he had seen three or four in the past few years. It was one of the hidden pleasures of this much-maligned state.
The serpent's body curled around his arm in a fluid figure eight, a perfect symbol of infinity. His adoptive father's congregation had believed snakes to be incarnations of Satan, but the twin serpents on the caduceus that Eldon wore on a chain around his neck were far more representative of the reptile's true nature, at least in the symbolic realm.
Serpents symbolized healing because the ancient Greeks had seen their skin-shedding as a process of healing and rebirth. Had the Greeks understood microbiology, they would have observed much deeper links between serpents and the secret machinery of life.
But even the ancients had understood that snakes personified the fundamental paradox of all medicinal drugs: in small doses they cured, while in large ones they killed.
He held the coral snake up to his face and laughed richly, then opened the Nike bag, slid the snake inside, and zipped it shut.
Turning toward the distant clearing where he'd parked his car, Dr. Tarver experienced a sense of fulfillment that far exceeded that which he had felt upon finding the dead birds. Indeed, he felt blessed.
Americans lived in constant fear, yet they never really knew how close they were to death at all hours of the day and night. If you wanted to find death, you hardly had to go looking for it.
Stay in one place long enough, and it would find you.
Dr. Tarver's journey to his laboratory took him north along Interstate 55, east of the main cluster of office buildings that surrounded Jackson's great capitol dome. To his left, the AmSouth tower jutted up from the low skyline of the capital city.
His gaze moved along the sixteenth floor, to the blue-black windows of the corner office. Eldon had driven along this interstate and checked those windows almost every day for the past five years.
But today was the first time that sunlight had ever flashed back from the office like a silver beacon, reflecting off the aluminum foil that he had named as an emergency signal all those years ago.
The muscles of his big chest tightened, and his breathing shallowed.
There had been bumps in the road before—small matters of planning, or miscommunication.
But never had anything justified the use of this signal.
The foil meant real trouble. Eldon had chosen this primitive method for precisely the same reason that intelligence agencies did. If you were truly in danger, possibly even blown, the worst thing you could do was contact your associates by any traceable method.
Unlike a telephone or a computer or a pager, the foil was nonspecific.
No one could ever prove it was a signal. Not even the NSA could train cameras on every square inch of land from which that square of foil could be seen. No, the foil had been a good idea. So had the prearranged meeting. Andrew Rusk knew where to go; the question was, could he get there without being followed?
What could the emergency signal imply other than unwanted interest on the part of someone?
But who?
The police?
The FBI?
At the most fundamental level, it didn't matter. Dr. Tarver's first instinct was to eliminate the source of the danger. Only Andrew Rusk knew his identity, or anything about his recent activities. And Rusk could not be trusted to keep silent under pressure.
The lawyer thought he was strong, and by the standards of the early-twenty-first-century yuppie he might be.
But that particular subspecies of Homo sapiens had no clue to the true nature of strength or hardship. No idea of self-reliance. Seconds after seeing the aluminum foil, Eldon was thinking of finding a comfortable perch overlooking one of the streets Rusk drove every day and putting a large- caliber bullet through the lawyer's cerebral cortex.
Only by doing this could he insure his own safety. Of course, if he killed Rusk, he would never know the nature of the threat. Killing Rusk would also mean activating his escape plan, and Dr. Tarver wasn't ready to leave the country yet. He still had important work to do.
He glanced down at the Nike bag on the front seat beside him. The prearranged meeting place was thirty miles away.
Did he have time to run the birds out to his lab?
Should he risk meeting Rusk at all? Yes, answered his instinct. Not one death has yet been called murder by the police. Not publicly anyway. Even logic dictated that he should risk the meeting. No one could trap him in the place he had designated.
A new possibility arced through Eldon's mind.
What if Rusk had put up the aluminum foil as bait?
What if he'd somehow been caught and, in exchange for leniency, was offering up his accomplice on a platter?
There might be cops waiting at the lab right now. Eldon could afford to lose the birds. West Nile was an unpredictable virus, highly variable in patient populations, depending on preexisting immunities, cross-immunities, other factors.
The possibility of capture outweighed any possible gain in research. Dr. Tarver gripped the wheel tighter, exited I-55 at Northside Drive, then got back onto the elevated freeway, heading south.
What about the coral snake, though?
He hated the idea of ditching it with the birds. Perhaps it should attend the emergency meeting.
Or should he do as he'd once done after his briefcase was stolen from his car at the mall?
Park his unlocked car in a remote section of the lot with an expensive bag on the seat. In the chaotic free-for-all of crime that was Jackson, a thief had stolen the bag in less than thirty minutes. Dr. Tarver had always imagined the look on the felon's face when he expectantly opened the bag and found not plunder but a coiled whip of muscle and deadly fangs. Instant karma, shitbird…
A wicked smile glittered in his beard. It was funny how seemingly unrelated events revealed hidden significance as time passed.
The foil on the building and the coral snake might well be connected in some Jungian web of synchronicity. Maybe the snake was somehow the resolution of the problem signaled by the foil.
He unzipped the bag and waited for the yellow-banded head to emerge. Ten miles melted beneath his tires before it did.
When the first red band slid out of the bag, Dr. Tarver took the coral's head between his thumb and forefinger and drew its body out of the bag.
Children were sometimes bitten by corals because the snakes were so beautiful that kids couldn't resist picking them up. Were corals not naturally so secretive, there would be a lot more dead children in the American South.
The serpent hung suspended for a moment, then coiled itself around the doctor's big forearm for the second time.
A euphoric rush dilated his blood vessels. Unlike chemically induced highs, the reaction caused by the sliding of scales against his bare skin never lost its potency.
He felt the thrill of a young boy holding a gun for the first time: the intoxicating power of holding death in your hand. The death of others, the ability to bring about your own…
As he drove southward, Dr. Tarver reveled in the proximity of eternity.
Even after three shots of vodka, Chris found himself unable to sleep.
At 5 a.m. he finally gave up. He slid silently out of bed and dressed in the closet, then walked out to the garage, loaded his bike onto the rack on his pickup, and drove twenty minutes to the north side of town.
There, under a violet sky, he topped off his high-pressure tires, mounted his carbon fiber Trek, and started pedaling north on the lonely gray stripe of the Natchez Trace.
The windless air had felt warm and close while he was filling his tires, but now his forward motion cooled him to the point of a chill. This far south, most of the two-lane Trace was a tunnel created by the high, arching branches of the red oaks that lined the parkway.
The effect was that of a natural cathedral that extended for miles.
Through the few breaks in the canopy Chris saw a yellow half-moon, still high despite the slowly rising sun. He pumped his legs with a metronomic rhythm, breathing with almost musical regularity. Small animals skittered away as he passed, and every half mile or so, groups of startled deer leapt into the shelter of the trees.
A warm, steady rain began to fall. Landmarks rolled by like a film without a sound track: Loess Bluff, with its steadily eroding face of rare soil; the split-rail fence that marked the ranger station at Mount Locust; the high bridge over Cole's Creek, from which you could see Low Water Bridge, the site of some of Chris's happiest childhood memories.
After he crossed the high bridge he got serious, pumping his thighs like a Tour de France rider, trying to work out the accumulated anxiety of the past eighteen hours. The thing was, you couldn't work out anxiety arising from circumstances that remained outside your control, and Special Agent Alex Morse was definitely not under his control. He jammed it all the way to the end of this stretch of the Trace, then made a 180-degree turn and headed back southwest.
Out of the whisper of tires on wet pavement came a faint chirping. It took him fifty feet to recognize the sound of his cell phone. Half the time he had no reception out here; that was one reason he chose the Trace to ride.
Reaching carefully backward, he dug his cell phone from the Gore-Tex pouch hanging beneath his seat. The LCD said UNKNOWN CALLER. Chris started to ignore the call, but the early hour made him wonder if one of his hospital patients was in trouble. It might even be Tom Cage, calling about the mystery case on 4-North.