Slick from the constant wet, the limestone made for ankle-jarring, knee-banging frustration. When they reached the bottom of the chute and her memory of it returned, she gave an involuntary groan.

  "Wait here," Kier said.

  "Is that a joke?"

  Without a word he began scrambling furiously with hands and feet up the edge of the water-filled shoot. He disappeared in the dark shadows of first light. She heard a rock tumbling and then another. Instinctively, she stepped back. When at last she heard a yell she began groping for a line and was almost disappointed when she saw its outline in the gray light. Knowing Kier, she tied it firmly around her waist, managing only through great effort to stay on her feet as he pulled her up.

  At last they were on the dreaded ledge. Before they began, Kier looked at her. Dawn was just breaking.

  "The cavern is the one place they can't corner us or catch us. Not even infrared will work. Once we go in there, they have to either bring in an army or wait."

  "Okay."

  She was thinking about how exposed they would be. She forced herself to follow Kier's brisk walk along the ledge until he dropped flat on his face and she almost landed on top of him, lying between his legs, her chin on his butt. Kier looked 360 degrees, then pointed to something that froze her body stock-still.

  An M-16 will kill at a mile, although aiming at such great distances was problematic because the bullet traveled in an arched trajectory. Shooting a couple of people at six hundred yards was a simple matter.

  There were two groups of men, one on the slope far beneath their ledge and one on the mountainside at their elevation, but behind them. Each group stood perhaps six hundred yards distant. Both groups had emerged from the heavy forest at about the same time. She and Kier had five or six hundred feet remaining to reach the cave, at least half the length of the ledge. The worst part was ahead. It was inconceivable that they would not be seen.

  Now they crawled. Sharp rocks grated over her thighs and belly. Nothing could be dislodged; not a single one of the hundreds of golf-ball-sized chunks could leave the ledge. One ping would bring field glasses searching around to their tiny outcropping. Watching Kier, she did as he did. An elbow and a knee moved together, but slowly, carefully, with exasperating precision. There was no option as to where to place her reddened elbows and skinned knees. Using the captured binoculars to study their hunters, Kier moved when the groups moved, stopped when they stopped.

  Keeping Kier's pace while maintaining concentration was punishing. Soon Jessie found herself groaning every time an elbow caught the rock or came down too hard. Each little stone that branded a knee became hateful.

  Then, in a split second, the glimmer of hope that had spurred her on evaporated. Just ahead of them two more men walked on their very same ledge, toward the entrance to the cavern. Kier and Jessie could not go up, they could not go down, and they could not stay put. If they shot the two in front of them, the bodies would fall and the men below would see them instantly. The near certainty that she would die hid in the darkened corners of her mind, waiting like a cancer to take it over. There would be no need to continue struggling once she accepted it.

  For a few seconds, surrender seemed sensible. On further reflection, it seemed fully justified. It was only her innate grit that made her want to go out fighting.

  Chapter 24

  A strong arm needs a stronger heart.

  — Tilok proverb

  The two men on the ledge ahead wore camouflage whites. Any moment now, they would turn, check their back trail, and fire. When they did, bullets would start flying from three directions.

  For once, Kier did not appear to have an immediate plan of action. Reaching up, she tugged at her M-16. Kier stopped to slip the carrying strap from his torso.

  Something Dunfee had told Jessie came to mind. The most brilliant escapes relied on distraction. But how could these men be distracted?

  Desperation hatched an idea. Crawling onto Kier's back, she whispered in his ear.

  "We need them to drop on the ledge, right?"

  "To shoot them without their bodies falling-yes."

  Quickly she explained her idea.

  Time stretched out. The passing seconds seemed like pearls dropping through honey. At any moment, they might be spotted-and her plan required time. They backtracked twenty feet to a slight bend where they would be less visible. After removing his pack, Kier donned the mountain-climbing harness he'd retrieved from under the cabin, then scampered up the rock face at the point offering the best handholds. He would have to traverse the face of the cliff above the men, using nothing but natural handholds and footholds. If no such climbing aids existed, or if he made a sound, or if the troopers happened to look up, that would be the end.

  As he scaled the cliff, Jessie started to strip. There was no sexual purpose in what she did. These men would not be seduced on a rocky ledge or dissuaded from their plan by anything so pedestrian as sex. Of that she was certain. Rather her idea was to appear harmless. A naked person didn't pose danger. In the second or two that it would take for them to take stock of her, she had to convince them that she knew something important, even vital.

  Her toes were three or four inches from the precipice. She held herself against the rock. After finishing the shirt buttons, she tried to shed the coats. First the outer arm. Dizzying height froze her mind and her movements. She took one hand from its solid perch, then shrugged her shoulder, slipping off the coat while rocking precariously on the balls of her feet. Her calves began to burn from the squatting.

  Finally down to her bare skin from the waist up, she dangled her feet off the ledge, using it as a bench. Quickly she slithered from her pants, ending up in nothing but her panties.

  Again she let her gaze go down the cliff. The drop was bad, really bad. One little teeter or slip and she would plunge. God, she had to put her mind someplace else.

  Both groups on the ground had been moving continuously for an unusually long time. Surely they would stop and study the cliffs at any moment. When that happened, she would die in a hearbeat. The men in front of her appeared as only partially visible shoulders and elbows. Maybe eighty feet ahead, they moved cautiously toward the cavern.

  Glancing at her watch, Jessie saw that Kier had been on the cliff for five minutes. She leaned out to see, then clung to the wall. Leaning had given her a greater sense of the abyss. He looked to be up about thirty feet and twenty feet forward. Shaking his head in disgust, he had pointed at the men with his silenced pistol and motioned her forward. Damn. He would try it from where he was, with an obscured line of sight and too far for a one-handed pistol shot. She would need to lure them a long way.

  Her hands trembled. She hated her fear. With every passing moment the two men were getting farther away. Over and over she pictured herself falling-alive and bullet riddled. She stood and shivered in the freezing air. She stepped over the pack, and almost stumbled. The ledge was barely a foot wide. Around the slight corner she continued. The men still moved. Faster now, over one hundred feet away, and still looking toward the cave. She scampered fifty more feet, then squatted in the wind.

  "Help me," she said in a small, terrified voice.

  The men whirled. One almost lost his balance.

  "What the hell?" The first squinted and leveled his M-16.

  "He's after me… Please… please… he's coming.. "

  "Shoot the bitch."

  "He's coming." She began the tricky task of retreating from the thugs while continuing to face them. Initially, she moved more quickly than they did.

  "Wait. Don't shoot. I've got Volume Six."

  Now they were coming closer. At any second they could blow her off the ledge in a bloody mist. But it was working. Glancing everywhere but up, they kept coming, gawking. Dropping her arms, she exposed her breasts. It took many more breaths than she cared to count for them to pick their way along the ledge.

  "Get down, get down… he's behind me." She lay flat as she spoke, praying that they would follow suit.

  Thirty feet from her, the first man dropped prone, aiming past her. His partner fell to one knee, doing the same. Then, as if seized by a new thought, the second man spun around and looked toward the cavern. The first now trained his M-16 on Jessie's forehead.

  The farther man finally dropped to the ledge as the first lifted a radio to his lips. Kier had to fire.

  Pffft. The first man's head jerked, blood spraying from his neck. Pffft. Pffft. Pffft. Three more silenced shots jerked his comrade's body. Pffft. The last bullet went just below the second man's helmet. An arm went over the ledge. The body quivered in a spastic curl.

  Already Jessie was up and running, hunkered down, trying to catch the falling dead man. He was slipping over the side. Kier dropped in front of her like a vulture landing on carrion. He grabbed the body as it fell. Twisting, turning, Kier and the man both went. She heard a snap, then the climbing line draw taut. Kier hung from the safety rope in his harness, clinging to the body of the slain soldier.

  Now what?

  Kier wrapped his legs around the dead man and, incredibly, began pulling himself up the line. Grabbing Kier's arm, she pulled as best she could within the limitations of her precarious position on an eighteen-inch ledge. She felt puny and weak, but her efforts seemed to help.

  "Again," Kier grunted, this time getting his arms and torso on the ledge, still gripping the man between his legs. "Take the line off my harness and wrap it around him."

  It would require her leaning far over the edge. Kneeling squarely on burning knees on the rough ledge, she undid the large snap on Kier's harness with relative ease. But the dead man hung three feet below her. As if reading her thoughts, Kier threw his right arm over the back of her calves, pinning her to the ledge. His left hand clung to the ledge.

  "I can't do this much longer."

  "Jesus," was all she said as she leaned over the side.

  For a moment, vertigo paralyzed her. If Kier lost his grip on her or the rock, they would both go. She lowered the line between the mountain and the lifeless body, letting the snap dangle. She could not retrieve it except by hanging lower.

  "I don't think I can do this," she heard herself say.

  "We'll die if you don't."

  Crying, she let herself go headlong, slithering down Kier's body, then over the dead man. Kier's fingers bit to the bone behind her knee. Life seemed so simple. The only thing between her and her maker was a single human hand.

  "Lower," she said.

  For a split second Kier let her leg slide through his hand until he locked his grip on her ankle. His arm shook with the strain. Sick with fright, she reached under and around the body. Stretching for the line, her muscles screamed all the way to her fingertips. She grabbed it, wrapped it once, then again around the dead man, and fastened the clip at the rope's end back onto the line.

  "God, get me up," she said, almost certain he couldn't do it.

  His arm quivered even more as he groaned with the effort of the one-armed pull-up. Dangling crazily, she clawed up the back of the dead body, and up Kier's thigh. Straining to reach behind herself, she felt the ledge and pulled sideways and up in a painful lunge.

  Kier released the grip of his legs, allowing the body to hang from the line. He climbed the line onto the ledge and quickly hauled the dead soldier after him.

  By cutting the snowsuits off the bodies, they made the dead men less visible against the cliff. The soldiers walking the mountainside below had disappeared from sight into the pines. Behind them the other group was moving through forest interspersed with meadows and at the moment were out of sight. Kier and Jessie raced along the ledge again as soon as Jessie had regained her own clothing. Now Kier carried two more radios, eight more grenades, and extra ammunition.

  With any luck, their adversaries' expectations would work against them-any soldiers who saw them would assume the two white-clad figures walking the ledge were their own. Tillman would be powerless.

  Chapter 25

  Tell an enemy a lie he wants to believe, not the Lie you want him to believe.

  — Tilok proverb

  Either the dead men or their missing voices alerted Tillman's men. As Kier and Jessie slipped into the cavern, M-16 rounds poured through the entrance. Dozens of bullets smacked the stone with explosive cracks as the fugitives collapsed to the side, exhausted. Kier held one of the new radios, waiting for the parley he knew would follow. It didn't take long.

  "Listen up there, Mr. Kier." It was Tillman. "Maybe we can make a deal."

  He had an edge to his voice that was starting to sound like nerves.

  "Tell me about the lab books," said Kier.

  Silence for a moment.

  "Why don't you come down and tell me? You've been reading them. You come down, we'll talk."

  "Do we seem that stupid?"

  "You're stuck in a goddamn hole. No way out that we can't watch."

  Kier laughed. "You'll have to do better than that."

  "Punch your birth date into the radio, then press star." Kier did as he was told, wondering how Tillman knew when he was born.

  "Now it's just you and me. If we can make a deal, you can live."

  "Quit wasting time. Tell me why I should make a deal."

  "We've got your whole family in the palm of our hand- your mother, sisters, everybody. This is the big leagues. Mess with me, they die."

  "Go on." Kier's voice remained flat, but he felt his heart in his throat.

  "You give us our stuff, we give you your tribe. We'll give you the medicine they need to survive. You sign some documents admitting this was a big mistake. We sign documents admitting everything you did was in self-defense. You sign a confidentiality agreement with the government. Big misunderstanding. Everybody goes home."

  Jessie grabbed the radio. "How the hell can the government be in on this?"

  "Early on they sponsored some of the research. Now they don't want anything to do with it."

  "The government never condoned experimenting on people. Not in this day and age."

  "What? Jesus, you are a virgin, aren't you?"

  "Why don't you give us just one name?"

  "Why don't you get a life?"

  "May I?" Kier said to Jessie. She handed him back the radio. "We know you've cloned people. You experiment on the infants."

  ''Mr. Kier, you have been reading.''

  "You developed a means of reading the human genome. Then you wanted to learn gene function so you started on a computer model that would correlate particular genes to particular proteins. You made clones so you could control variables like disease and then watch which genes were implicated. You developed a chip technology for use with the clones, but you don't need it anymore. You've got yourself the best computer model in the world. But to do it, you had to experiment on cloned people and commit various other crimes."

  "Sounds pretty fantastic to me. Nobody's going to believe you without evidence."

  ''You found a person denominated 1220, who seemed to have some interesting immunity. I believe it affected susceptibility to a virus dubbed RA-4TVM. One of your little sidelines was building viruses. It was a natural because you could read and manipulate DNA and RNA. RA-4TVM was your accident. And with all your knowledge I haven't figured how you screwed up or if mother nature bit you in the ass or what. Anyway, you came up with a live-virus vaccine for RA-4TVM. You also developed an antivirus that kills cells infected by RA-4TVM. Together AVCD-4 and the nif-plus deleted RA-4TV mutation vaccine can prevent and cure RA-4TVM. So far so good?"

  "You haven't told me what RA-4TVM is."

  Kier hesitated, his mind spinning. He didn't know. Not even a clue.

  "I think it's something you made. Probably you were trying to build a vector and it ran amok. Maybe mutated. Maybe combined with inert DNA from long extinct retroviruses that have become part of our genetic makeup. At any rate, you were convinced it was a great little delivery wagon and rushed its development. Something went wrong. A surprise. Why don't you tell me?"

  "You deal with us and maybe we will."

  ''But if you can manipulate genes, you can cure viruses. I figure that before you could figure a way to explain how you developed cures, you had to understand how the cure virus would behave in a population. Somehow, some way you made guinea pigs of my tribe."

  "God, what an imagination. But you're just daydreaming, Dr. Kier. It's an interesting fantasy. The fact is your people have a naturally occurring but as yet undiscovered virus. I happen to have the cure. We may have helped some couples with fertility problems, but that's it."

  "We're not going to get anywhere if you feed me your trumped-up stories."

  "I know a hell of a lot about you, Kier. I've been studying your clones. Fine boys. Maybe you'd like to meet them."

  Kier was stunned, unable to think properly.

  "The number 042863 588561289 that was on the various tables in Volume Six. I thought maybe you'd recognize it."

  Then Kier saw it. It was his birthdate and social security number. He hadn't looked at those numbers at all because he had never possessed Volume Six.

  "Why me? Why would you clone me?"

  "Well, you among others. I had to clone somebody and you've got excellent genes. Half-breeds often do. Everything from your propensity to muscle, straight teeth, and facile brain, Kier. It's a compliment."

  "How many are there?"

  "You cooperate and I'll tell you."

  "What are you doing with them?"

  "Yours or other people's?"

  "Mine."

  "Your offspring. They're safe." Tillman lowered his voice to a soothing tone. "Kier, you can save them and your tribe if we make a deal. But you're fantasizing about a lot of things. Nothing wrong with making a baby. People do it every day. You've got some odd ideas about what we're doing. But I can straighten out the misunderstanding."

 

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