High Alert

CHAPTER 48

Gregory Haltman leaned back in his chair and studied a row of a dozen monitors showing different views of his estate. The monitors were there for his own personal satisfaction. Security was the job of the men he hired to protect him. In the building next to the garage, a complete monitoring station was manned twenty-four hours a day. But Haltman liked to keep his finger on things.

He wouldn't be doing that for much longer. The latest laboratory report from the hospital lay crumpled in a wastebasket near his chair. The numbers were all going in the wrong direction. With luck, he might have another four or five months. Maybe six.

It was ironic. He was one of the richest men in America, yet all his billions could not buy him more time. All they could buy was an array of drugs which gave him pain relief and provided an illusion of energy. Not long before, he'd taken two of the designer pills that boosted his alertness and woke up his body. Combined with the narcotics that kept the pain bearable, they produced a crackling high.

Gregory Haltman's mind was like a pinball machine on steroids.

He watched the monitors. Intermittent fog drifted over the grounds, sometimes blurring the view from the cameras, sometimes clearing.

One of the guards walked across the front of the house, accompanied by a dog. Haltman didn't trust the high strung dogs. They were never allowed inside his home. They were there to serve a purpose, nothing more.

The men who had killed his brother were coming, he was certain of it. Perhaps not all of them, but that was of little importance. If there were others, they would die in the nuclear holocaust he still hoped to unleash. Perhaps they would come tonight. Perhaps it would be tomorrow or the next day. It didn't matter. He was waiting for them. His security was on high alert.

They couldn't get to the house from the back unless they were human flies, able to climb the cliff. But the cliff was protected, as much by nature as by the hidden booby-traps strung below the patio edge. No, they had to come through the grounds.

He'd given orders to take at least one of them alive. He wanted to confront them, to make sure they knew they were responsible for the destruction that was about to happen. Things could still go wrong. It was still possible that war might not start. But at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing his brother's murderers had paid.

In the unlikely event his enemies somehow got past all the security, they would find him in this room. They'd be confident, seeing just an old, dying man, sitting in a chair. But he had a surprise in store for them, if it came to that.

Haltman's mind was a jumble of thoughts and images. He stood and winced with pain, then walked over to a desk and picked up a picture of Carissa.

Things could have been different, he thought. If you'd lived. If that animal hadn't taken you.

He held the picture up to his forehead for a moment, remembering, then set it back on the desk. The window coverings used to block the daytime sun were open. Outside, the wet stones of the patio glistened under the landscaping lights.

He decided he needed a drink. The doctors had warned him about mixing alcohol with the powerful cocktail of drugs he consumed every day. Well, the doctors had said a lot of things. Everything except what he wanted to hear, that a cure had been discovered or a new drug that would delay the inevitable.

Haltman went to a tall liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. He took out a bottle of cognac distilled from grapes grown on a sunlit hillside in France during the nineteenth century. It was the only bottle left in existence of that particular year and lineage. There didn't seem to be much point in letting it get any older. He broke open the wax seal and extracted the cork. He took a large, crystal snifter from the cabinet, filled it half full with the liquor, and returned to his chair.

He reached for another pill and swallowed it with some of the cognac. Somewhere at the edge of his jangled awareness, he heard the sound of a plane passing in the night.