Jon sat down in front of him. Blood vessels had popped around Patrick’s eyes, and the muscles on his neck, shoulder, chest, and arms looked thick and chiseled, as if he had just finished a weight-lifting workout. He began to weep.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jon said. “I think they’re all going to be all right.”
“I was afraid I killed Chris. Are they on their way to the hospital? How are they?”
“Chris is hurt pretty bad,” Jon said, “but he was conscious when they took him away. Carl has a broken arm and rib. Hal has some broken teeth and a cut tongue, but he’ll be okay. He’s staying with Chris.” The two men sat quietly for a long moment, overwhelmed by what had happened. Then Jon cleared his throat and asked, “Patrick… Patrick, what did it feel like?”
“What?”
“Come on, Patrick, you’ve got to tell me. You got hit over the head with a steel pipe. My God, you were shot in the head and in the back by a big-ass forty-five automatic from point-blank range! The gun blasts almost knocked me over!”
“I… I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve got to, Patrick!” Masters retorted. “You know as well as I do that this program is dead. It failed with the airlines and the FAA, and after this neither ISA nor any other government agency will come anywhere near BERP. It’s over.
“But you experienced it, Patrick. You know what it’s like to survive something like that. I’d never have the guts to put that thing on and have a Hal Briggs fire live forty-five-caliber rounds at me! You’re the only one who will ever know what it felt like to be…” He paused, then went ahead and said it, “… be invulnerable, like Superman. What was it like? How did it feel?”
Patrick whispered something too low to be audible, then began to weep again.
“Never mind,” Jon said reassuringly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s over. We’ll destroy the suit. I promise it’ll never hurt anyone else again.”
“Jon… dammit, Jon, it felt great, it felt wonderful!” Patrick exclaimed, his tears now more shame than pain. “When I felt that energy rush through the suit, I felt more alive than I’ve felt in months. The power is incredible, Jon, enormous. It’s like a drug, like a shot of adrenaline jammed right into the heart. But the energy surge did something else too-it made me a little crazy, like a berserker. Everything was running in slow motion. The gunshots felt like ocean waves hitting you-you get pushed around, and you can feel the force behind them, but then the impact is gone and you’re still left standing.”
“Did it hurt? Did the energy surges hurt you?”
Patrick laughed. “Oh God, yes,” he said. Jon looked at him as if he had gone off his rocker. “The pain was… exquisite. That’s the only way I can describe it. Exquisite. It was what I always imagined slow death would be like, once you accepted the fact that you were going to die. I felt liberated, powerful, free. My whole body felt as if it were on fire. Every nerve was alive, jangling my brain. The incredible pain made me feel…” He shook his head, shrugged, and said, “… immortal. I was dying, but I felt immortal. It felt… good.”
“I’m destroying that damned suit, Patrick,” Jon said firmly. “Apart from what it made you feel like doing, even if it protected you from Hal’s bullets the suit itself could have killed you. It’s not worth it. No government contract or big breakthrough is worth it.”
But Patrick didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He looked totally wiped out. “I’ll call Wendy too…”
“No,” Patrick said. “I’ll tell her.”
The first thing Patrick did, after visiting Chris Wohl and Carl Heinrich in the hospital, was go home and hug his wife and child. But he said nothing. He simply held them close and let their warmth wash away the memories of that terrible morning.
University of California-Davis Medical Center,
Stockton Boulevard and Forty-Second Street,
Sacramento, California
the next morning
When Patrick arrived at the UC-Davis Medical Center the next morning, he was startled to find a crowd of reporters and TV cameras at the entrance. “Mr McLanahan!” they shouted. “Over here, Mr McLanahan! What do you think of the court’s decision?”
Patrick always tried to avoid the media, but they were everywhere this time, and he could not hide the confusion on his face. “Mr McLanahan, you heard about the appeals court’s decision, didn’t you?”
“No, I haven’t,” Patrick responded, curious now.
“A judge in the state appeals court has overturned the superior court’s no-bail ruling for the two defendants charged with murder in the Sacramento Live! shootout,” the reporter said. “He said there’s insufficient evidence to hold them on an attempted-murder charge.”
Patrick gasped. “What?” he exclaimed. “No-that can’t be!” The reporters circled him like sharks around a wounded marlin. He knew he shouldn’t react, should conceal the horror he felt, but he couldn’t contain his disbelief. This can’t be, he said to himself. The best, the only opportunity to discover more about who had attacked Paul and killed the two Sacramento police officers seemed to be slipping out of their fingers.
In a daze, Patrick pushed his way through the knot of reporters and into the entrance. There were more of them at the nurses’ station on Paul’s floor but the policeman on duty cleared a path for him as he made his way to the room.
Jon Masters was already there, together with a technician who worked with Carlson Heinrich. Paul was sitting up in bed looking apprehensive, on his lap the ever-present notepad he used for communicating. A lot of the bandages and dressings had been removed from his neck and throat. The most horrible parts were his shoulder and left arm. Despite three separate surgeries, the shoulder, unprotected by his bullet-proof vest, could not be repaired, and the damage to the left bicep and elbow was too extensive. A month ago, the decision had finally been made to amputate the arm. Paul had taken the news stoically, but the nurses told Patrick in private that they had seen him silently weeping when he was alone at night, and more than once he had buzzed them for something to alleviate the pain in the arm that was no longer there.
“You hear about the court decision?” Jon asked.
“Just did, from the reporters outside,” Patrick said, sitting down beside the bed and clasping his brother’s right hand, “but no details. What in hell happened?”
“The appeals court said there wasn’t enough evidence that the suspects had anything to do with the shooting.”
“Then they must know who they are,” Patrick said. “Did they say?”
“They’re former German soldiers,” Jon said.
Patrick nodded-he had figured that professional soldiers were involved in the attack. “Let me guess: They work for some mercenary group or drug gang, and they sneaked into the country and planned the robbery…”
“Nope. What Chandler said that night on the tape is true; they have valid Canadian entry and work visas, and a valid Canadian residence and employer. All verified. They said they were visiting friends in Sacramento and didn’t know they needed a visa to visit here from Canada.”
“That’s bullshit! It’s gotta be bullshit!” Patrick exclaimed. “Didn’t the police check out their stories? Where were they staying? What were they doing? Where were they going?”
“They claim they were walking down some road, the Garden Highway I think they said, heading from the riverfront to the apartment complex where they’re staying, and got hit by a truck,” Jon responded. Patrick’s mind flashed to what he remembered of the Garden Highway. It paralleled the Sacramento River and was very desolate in spots. The Northgate section of town, just off Northgate Boulevard and the Garden Highway, had a large German-immigrant population, so large that it was known as Little Berlin. There were numerous immigrants from Eastern Europe in some of the other apartment complexes in the area too; and with several families often occupying a single apartment unit, it was almost impossible to keep track of the residents.