Within five minutes she was in the passenger seat of a car, on her way back to the Saguaro Inn. She checked the mirrors the entire drive but saw no sign of followers.
About halfway to the motel, she realized she was still carrying the dime-sized GPS tracking device she had planned to plant on Drake in her pocket. She shook her head, realizing that this plan had been made obsolete three realities ago, and tossed the tiny device out of the window.
As they pulled into the motel, Erin closed her eyes for just a few seconds, letting relief wash over her for the first time, and prayed that Kyle Hansen would have similar success and would be joining her shortly.
19
ERIN PALMER SAT cross-legged on the bed, on top of a faded yellow-and-orange floral bedspread, while Kyle Hansen was parked on a small wooden chair that was in front of a cheap, laminated, particle-board desk.
“Well, no risk of anyone thinking of looking for us here,” said Hansen, making a show of looking around the room in mock horror. A slow smile came over his face. “Big risk of the entire motel being condemned or falling down around us.”
Erin couldn’t help but return his warm smile. He seemed more genuine than most people she had met, and charming in an unpolished way. Which was a good thing. After years of working with psychopaths, too much polish hit her the wrong way.
As she gazed into his eyes, a momentary image came into her mind of a naked Kyle Hansen holding her equally naked body in his arms and kissing her passionately, and she could almost feel the smoothness of his body against hers.
Where did that come from? she thought.
Lisa Renner had been so right. Two years without sex—with little human contact of any kind—started to wear on the psyche. Which is why she had been intent on seducing her collaborator, Hugh Raborn, who turned out—maybe—to be an alien named Drake. It was a good thing she hadn’t met with him in San Diego, she decided, because even though she didn’t think of herself as overly choosy, she still insisted that the body parts of her sexual partners be 100 percent human. You just didn’t compromise on certain things.
Was she really so desperate, though, that she could switch gears from Drake to Kyle Hansen so quickly? In her heart, she knew the answer to this wasn’t desperation. In only a few hours she already found Kyle to be more appealing than any man she’d met in the past two or three years, including Drake. And working together to escape a dragnet and holing up together in a motel seemed to accelerate the bonding process, as did sharing any number of world-shattering, mind-blowing secrets.
Hansen had managed a clean escape from the student union in a similar fashion to her own, but his arrival at the motel had been thirty minutes behind hers. It was one of the longest thirty minutes of her life, and the suffocating, mind-numbing fear she had felt during this entire period was not due to what his capture or death would mean for her own prospects of survival, or any lofty cause, but was felt for him alone. This wait had exposed her emerging feelings more surely than a rational self-examination of her emotions ever would, as much as she refused to fully acknowledge it.
She wondered what he was thinking. Was he picturing her naked as well? She suspected that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, even among men who didn’t know her. Only when she used makeup and disguise to purposely make herself look unappealing was she free from the male libido. Had she been more of a free spirit, had a psychopath never ripped her life away from the path it was on, she wondered what her life might be like. She wondered if she would enjoy the interest from men instead of wishing it would go away. She certainly wouldn’t be in the field she was in, doing the work she was doing. A veterinarian perhaps, working with the animals she loved rather than with human monsters she loathed. And she certainly wouldn’t be collaborating unlawfully with someone of uncertain … species.
“Any more messages from Drake?” she asked.
Hansen shook his head. “I ditched my phone. It was the one thing you forgot to tell me to do.”
“Oh. Right. Good thinking.” Erin raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you’ve read some thrillers, after all.”
“I’m not that lame,” protested Hansen. “Doesn’t everyone know that cell phones can be used to track people nowadays?”
“I guess so.”
“And Drake ditched his as well. And so did you. So it was an obvious thing to do.”
“So how are we going to connect with Drake?”
“We go to the designated location and he’ll contact us.”
Erin reflected on Drake’s text message. “So SF wasn’t San Francisco. But CO did mean Colorado, right?”
“Right. We need to get there. But let me explain more about that part of the message later. Right now, I’d love to finish our conversation.”
“Me too,” said Erin.
Hansen left the chair and slid down onto the worn beige carpet, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, facing Erin on the bed five feet away.
Erin decided the chair he had abandoned did look uncomfortable, although she was still sure the ones in Dean Borland’s office were more so, despite their far more welcoming appearance. The two of them both sitting cross-legged in a bedroom reminded her of slumber parties she had had as a little girl, only she doubted the air would soon be filled with delighted giggling, nor that the conversation would turn to who was the cutest boy in class.
“Where were we?” said Hansen, breaking Erin from her reverie.
“I believe we left off when I was saying that Drake had miscalculated. That his cure wasn’t the panacea he thought it would be.” Erin shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Had she really just used the word panacea? Maybe she had been in academia too long. “And you told me I didn’t have the full picture,” she continued. “Yet again.”
A thoughtful look came over Hansen’s face as he considered the best way to move the conversation forward from this point. “Everything you said before we were interrupted is absolutely true,” he began. “As far as it goes. Just having a cure isn’t enough. And approval could take a decade, even if a corporate sponsor stepped up right away based on an anonymous tip, and the FDA allowed it to happen. This is time we, as a species, probably don’t have. And you’re also right that the very people we need to cure are the ones who would refuse to take it.”
Hansen paused for several long seconds, as though not eager to continue.
“So tell me where I’ve gone wrong,” prompted Erin. “Come on, Kyle, don’t keep me in suspense.”
Hansen sighed. “Drake wasn’t planning to give them a choice.”
Erin rolled her eyes. “Okay, shoving it down the throats of millions of psychopaths won’t work either. Not that they’d identify themselves. And even if they did, and you could force them in some other way, it’s ridiculous. Unless you really do believe that Santa can visit every kid on earth in a single night.”
“There is a way,” Hansen assured her. “One whose delivery doesn’t involve chimneys. Drake has engineered a cold virus to carry the cure. A hypercontagious cold virus. Within a year, probably less, it will infect every man, woman, and child on earth. It’s designed to be very mild, so ninety-nine percent of the population will get nothing more from it than a runny nose and maybe sneeze for a few days. One percent of the population, however, a few weeks after being infected, will no longer be psychopathic.”
The enormity of this vision was mind-numbing. Erin’s mouth fell open and stayed there for an extended period as she wrestled with the sheer audacity and scope of the concept. “You can’t do that,” she whispered.
“Maybe we can’t,” he acknowledged. “But Drake and his computer, after coming up to speed on our genetic code, can. The Wraps have developed genetic engineering to a level we can’t yet begin to approach.”