The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(69)

“She promised me,” he said. “She promised me she could get me out of this jam if I helped her.”

“I don’t care. Neither will Calypso. The best thing you can do right now, the only thing you can do, is help me stop Lauren. She goes down, everything goes back to normal, which means you’re alive and well and on your happy way to the White House, Mr. President. No harm, no foul, and we can all forget about this mess.”

The waitress came back with our plates. I sprinkled a little salt and pepper over the scrambled eggs and unwrapped a red plastic straw. Roth stared at his food like he didn’t know what it was for.

“What can I do?” he said. His hands lay dead in his lap, limp and helpless as the rest of him.

“Start from the beginning. How did you get mixed up with the lab rats from Ausar?”

He shook his head and let out a bitter little chuckle.

“You mean, how did they get involved with us,” he said. “I was on the Ausar board of directors. I’d originally wanted to use the company to push longevity research. Then we found the tunnel in Mexico, and it was off to the races.”

“Who else was on the board? Were you all clued-in?”

“Clued-in?” he said, tilting his head. “Oh! You mean did we all know what we were dealing with? No. Just a few of us. Everyone else was kept at arm’s length. Nedry, Clark, and Payton were assigned to a black-books account and given facilities off the main corporate campus. Everyone knew they were working on the Viridithol project, but the actual details were kept quiet, and all the published papers were filled with garbage data. It was a very tight operation. Very smooth.”

“Until you started feeding plant cuttings from another dimension to pregnant women,” I said.

He reached for a packet of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “The researchers promised me they had it all under control. Not long after, Payton got cold feet and grew a conscience. He would have exposed us. Exposed everything.”

I swirled my straw in my glass of Coke. Ice cubes bobbed up and down in the drink like tiny icebergs.

“It wasn’t their idea, was it?” I said. “Nedry and Clark. You were the one who ordered Payton’s murder.”

“You would have done the same thing in my shoes. Come on, this wasn’t about the deformed kids. He was going to tell the entire world that we’d found a gateway to the f*cking Garden of Eden and draw the media a map to get there! You know, don’t you? You’ve seen the horrible shit that’s on the other side of that tunnel. You can imagine how many innocent people would have died trying to ‘return to Eden.’ Yes, I had him killed, and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change my mind. Bob Payton had to die.”

I was tempted, for one perverse heartbeat, to tell him I’d spoken to a very alive and well Payton two nights ago. I kept it to myself, though. Payton could live until I was sure he’d sent the smoke-faced men back where they came from. After that, his survival would be highly negotiable.

“After the Viridithol scandal,” Roth said, “the whole thing collapsed. We’d had the foresight to stash as many assets offshore as we could before the government came and kicked in the door. That was the end of the story, until I met Lauren Carmichael.”

I scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. Greasy, salty, cheap, and perfect. Just what you want to settle a rumbling stomach, late at night after a gunfight.

“Let me guess,” I said. “She came to you looking for help with bringing the feds down on Nicky Agnelli. You wanted to know why. You started digging and discovered you had common interests. Namely, she was trying to build Gilles de Rais’s machine, while you, Nedry, and Clark already had access to his notes and could finish the puzzle. The peanut butter to Lauren’s chocolate.”

Roth sipped his coffee and nodded. “It’s funny. She was so suspicious at first, thinking I wanted to usurp her position and be the one to activate the machine. I finally convinced her that I don’t want to be a god. I just don’t want to die. Besides, I’m more than happy to let her take all the risks. There’s also the…changes.”

“Changes?”

He glanced away for a moment, staring out the plate-glass window at the desolate parking lot.

“She’s been taking Nedry and Clark’s serum for weeks. Viridithol-2, created through an extract from white blood cells oversaturated with the original drug. It’s not killing her, but…she’s nothing I’d call human, Mr. Faust. Not anymore.”

“She’s attuning herself,” I said. “Making her spirit and flesh friendlier to the Garden’s energy, getting ready for the final step. How long do we have?”

“Days? Hours? The mutation is exponential. She’s waiting like an expectant mother, waiting for the power coursing through her veins to tell her she’s ready. The Enclave is finished. I’m almost certain they have all the sacrifices prepared and ready, and Nedry and Clark have been working around the clock. I’m not involved. I can’t be. My job now was just to sit back, keep paying the bills, and wait. Given that she tried to murder me tonight…I guess all the bills are paid.”

“Where do I find her?”

He nodded vaguely toward the distant lights of the Strip, a grimy scarlet smear against the diner window.