Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(64)
Neal does not mention this—not even when Augustus asks about his daughter—at the Deerstalker Golf Club outside of Eugene. “She’s good,” he says, and Augustus says, “Good. That’s good.” The day is damp and gray, the grass still heavy with last night’s rain, soaking their shoes and slowing their balls and giving the men a good excuse for their frequent slices and mulligans. Chase wears jeans and a Windbreaker, Neal and Augustus slacks and sweaters. They drive a golf cart along the slick asphalt path—the tires spitting, the clubs rattling when they round a corner—and behind them follows another cart carrying a two-man security detail.
At the eighth hole, a par five that doglegs left, Augustus and Chase both end up blasting away with their fat-headed drivers and hooking into the woods. Neal opts instead for a five iron, takes a few practice swings, and then gently thwacks his ball in a long, curving arc that comes to a rolling stop right where the fairway elbows.
Chase whistles appreciatively. “A real golfer.”
“Used to be.”
“What’s your handicap?”
“My handicap is golf.” He pats his stomach. “And ice cream.”
A quiet joke. In response Chase laughs a little too loudly. This is, Neal suspects, because of the Volpexx. More than an hour ago, when they met in the parking lot, Neal removed from his trunk a carton packed with one hundred bottles, each rattling with one hundred pills. He ordered them shipped to his campus office, instead of the lab, charging them to his discretionary fund.
Immediately Chase pulled a jackknife from his pocket and slashed open the box and popped open a canister and punched through the foil. “When I was growing up,” Chase said, “my cousin started getting these headaches. They’d come and go at first. Then it didn’t matter how much aspirin he took. They took him in after the nosebleeds started. Brain cancer. Inoperable. Thirteen years old. Tumor the size of a starfish. In the end, he started saying and doing the most terrible things. Nobody wanted to be around him because nobody recognized him.”
He used his sleeve to dry off the rain-spotted spoiler of a car. On it he crushed three pills with the cap of the bottle until they were a mess of white powder. He pulled out his wallet and cut the powder into two lines with a credit card. “That’s how I feel these days. With this thing inside me. I want you to kill it, Doc.”
Then he rolled a dollar into a straw and brought it to one nostril while plugging the other. He staggered back with his eyes watering, furiously rubbing his nose. Then he sneezed into his elbow and gave them a dopey grin and slapped both his knees and said, “Phew. That’s a dose of death right there.”
Now Neal joins the two men in the woods. They wade through the damp cover of oak leaves, the leaves slurping and squelching underfoot. They turn their faces downward and hunt for the balls they know they will not find. And while they move among the thick-waisted trees, ten feet apart, Augustus talks about the plan. It is a good plan, he thinks. They will start by making a call to Senators Wyden and Merkley.
Chase kicks over a pile of leaves and says, “I’ve punched Wyden. Twice.”
“He’ll forgive you. Because this is what we’re going to promise our dear senators: major campaign donations from Nike, Intel, Lithia, Harry and David, and Alliance Energy. Alliance Energy being the key. One of our major talking points over the next few months being nuclear energy. In turn, the Senate earmarks a lump sum from the federal budget for the Center for Lobos Studies, which will remain affiliated with the Infectious Disease Research Center and which our man, the distinguished Dr. Desai, will direct. And hopefully we will have a vaccine in place within the next two years. That’s completely possible. You’ve said that’s possible.”
Neal peers out of the woods and eyes the fairway and judges the angle of their drive and guesses again the placement of the balls. He does not look at Augustus when he says, “Creating the vaccine is not a problem. Implementing it is. The ACLU has blocked vaccine research the past twenty years.”
“These are special times. America is under attack.”
When Neal was a boy—in Los Angeles, his father first generation and a professor of psychiatric studies—he would spend his weekends hunting for golf balls. Trolling the woods, raking the sand traps, wading the ponds. The courses would pay him a nickel a ball. The groundskeepers thought he was Mexican and called him José. He said he was Indian and they asked about his headdress and tomahawk and he said, “Not that kind of Indian. Indian Indian.” He carried a backpack with him and by the end of the day it would be full of Titleists and Dunlops. He would bring his goggles and wear his swim trunks and dive down into the gray-green murkiness of the course’s ponds and lakes, holding his breath until his lungs ached, until his vision went spotty, clawing golf balls from the muddy bottom like pearls.
Now he approaches a rhododendron and peaks under it and spies the dimpled white ball and feels that old excitement that comes whenever he discovers what no one else can. He holds his breath as he bends over his gut and palms the ball. “So it’s as simple as that?”
“There’s nothing simple about it. But it will work.” Augustus removes his glasses and untucks a flap of his shirt to clean the lenses and inspects Neal as if he might need some polishing as well. “We’re going to make certain you get the support you deserve.”