Barbara Mason ran her hand through her shoulder-length dark hair in frustration. "There's no way you can find anything any sooner than that? Early mornings or late afternoons?"
"I'm afraid not," the woman on the other end of the line said regretfully. "We're booked solid for the next three weeks. I'd be happy to get you the names of facilities in Boston that can perform the tests you need, if that would help."
Barbara sighed. She could just hear Benton if she suggested that he go out of state for medical tests. He might be cooperating with her, but he was still extremely vocal in his protests of everything she proposed. It was only her own stubbornness that had kept him at the blood tests, physicals, cat scans, x-rays, and everything else she had put him through in the last three days. She was convinced that if she suggested Boston for the full cardiac panel that she wanted to perform next, he would finally balk and that would be the end of it. She had the feeling she was pushing things even trying to get him to Portland. "No," she said reluctantly. "Just give me the soonest opening that you have, and make a note that if you have any cancellations, I want it. It doesn't matter when . . . my patient can come on a moment's notice." Even if I have to drug him and drag him there bodily, she promised herself.
After a few more arrangements, she hung up the phone, picked up the sheaf of test results, and leaned back in her office chair wearily. She scanned through them again, her frustration mounting. She was running out of ideas on what to try next. Every test she had run came back showing that he was in perfect health. His color was good, he seemed to have plenty of energy, and even the exhaustion seemed to have disappeared. But there was a knot in the pit of her stomach that was telling her something wasn't right. The more her tests said he was fine, the more frantic she was feeling. What was more, she had a mounting sense of urgency that she couldn't explain. She'd been concerned about his spells of weakness since she first became aware of them five months ago, and yet he was still functioning normally and, if he was to be believed, had not suffered a problem since the night Jonny left home. Maybe there was nothing wrong, but somehow she just didn't believe it.
A knock on her office door caused her to look up. "Come in!" she called. The door opened immediately and Kathy stuck her head in.
"Race Bannon is here asking to see you."
Frowning, she sat forward and laid the papers on the desk. "Send him back. Who do we have waiting?"
"No one," she replied, shaking he head. "You've got a break over lunch. It's why he's here now. He called earlier and I suggested that he come at this time. You want me to get you a sandwich or something?"
"Maybe later."
"Okay." Kathy disappeared and very shortly another knock on the door heralded Race's arrival.
"Come in, Race," Barbara called.
"Hey," he said, sticking his head in the door. "Am I interrupting anything?"
"Not at all. Kathy tells me that I'm officially at lunch now, so come on in and pull up a chair. What's on your mind?"
Race looked a bit uncomfortable as he eased himself down into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. "It's about Estella . . ." he said hesitantly.
"What about her?" Barbara asked.
"She's not feeling very well."
"No, I don't imagine she is. I warned you that this wasn't going to be easy."
"I know, I know. Maybe it's just that I didn't really appreciate what you meant by the things you told us, but still . . . " He sighed. "It's a constant battle to keep her in bed and resting, and I think that I'm losing the war."
"She's actively up and moving around?" Barbara demanded in alarm.
"No," Race said grimly. "Not any more. She's learned her lesson on that one, I think. Furthermore, I absolutely won't tolerate it and she knows it . . . not after what happened the first time she pushed it."
"Tell me."
"She spent Thursday and most of Friday sleeping, but by Saturday she'd pretty much slept herself out. I tried to find things to keep her mind occupied, but by that afternoon she was so restless she was climbing the walls. I'd been working in the garage and finally decided I'd better check on her. When I got to our bedroom, I found her missing. I finally tracked her down out in her lab in the lighthouse. She said she was feeling much better and needed to get finished with the borrowed samples while she was still feeling well enough to work. Said she wanted to get them returned."
"I told her -"
"I know you did. So did I. But my wife is notorious for not listening when the advice isn't what she wants to hear. Needless to say, we fought about it . . . a row like we haven't had since before we were divorced. She just wouldn't listen. Finally, I just picked her up bodily, carried her back to the house, and dumped her back into bed." He gazed heavenward. "I can't begin to tell you how furious she was."
"I can imagine." Barbara smiled grimly. "And how thoroughly did she pay for her little excursion?"
"Very thoroughly," Race said, and Barbara saw him shudder. "It wasn't ten minutes after I put her to bed that she started getting nauseated again. She barely made it to the bathroom before it hit. She heaved off and on for nearly two hours, even after there was nothing left in her system to vomit up. Everything I tried giving her just came right back up, including the medication you gave her for the problem. Finally, she just refused to take anything else and rode it out. By the time her stomach finally settled, she was so exhausted and dizzy she couldn't even get up off the bathroom floor. Scared the hell out of me. I almost called you at home."
"You should have called! I would have come out right away. Did you . . ."
"Yes. I followed your instructions and forced her to take as much water as she could tolerate, and finally, when she seemed a little better, I added small amounts of Gatorade to bring her electrolytes back up."
Barbara sighed in frustration. "I know you all feel like you're taking advantage of me when you call outside of regular hours, but you can't let things go like that. If nothing else, call me and tell me what's going on and I'll be the judge of whether or not I need to come out and see her."
"Understood," Race acknowledged with a nod. "And she's promised me that she won't try anything like that again. Unfortunately, she's still bored senseless, so now she's taking a new tact."
"What?" Barbara asked with misgiving.
"She's taken to moving out into the family room and spending the day on the sofa. Says she can't stand being cooped up in the bedroom all the time."
"Well, I suppose I can see that. As I recall, there aren't many windows in your living quarters. Strange, considering how many there are in the rest of the house."
"It was deliberately designed that way. Remember, those rooms were mine before Estella and I got back together again, and much of the security for the Compound is centered there. We have things stored there that we don't want easily accessible should someone try attacking the Compound the way Baxter's people did at Christmas."
"Things?"
Race hesitated briefly and then said, "Weapons, mainly."
Barbara nodded. "I don't suppose there's any way to move her so that she can get some daylight . . . maybe a view?"
Race frowned, thinking about it. "There's a couple of guest rooms upstairs and one of them is right next door to the upstairs bathroom. With the kids gone, it's quiet and relatively private. I could probably move her up there without a problem."
"I'd suggest you do that, then, although I doubt that will stop her insistence on being down in the main part of the house during the day. At least, if she's in the family room, she feels as though she's still part of everyday life."
"What about the stairs, though? Surely going up and down stairs won't be good for her."
"You're probably going to have to help her with those, and eventually, when she gets worse, she won't be able to come down at all. But let's take it one step at a time. When she's in the family room right now, is she lying or sitting?"
"She more or less splits the difference, although she insists that she's staying within your guidelines. That's one of the reasons I'm here. I want you to lay those out for me so I have a better idea of what she can and can't do. She also demanded that a workstation be set up around the sofa. When Benton and I told her she was supposed to be resting and wouldn't accommodate her, she waited until we were off doing something else, and then recruited Matt Evans to help her set it up. She more or less stays reclined on the sofa most of the day, but she continues to insist on working."
"Has she had any more spells like the first one?"
"No. It's the only reason I've let her do it. But it worries the hell out of me." Race leaned forward earnestly and rested his arms on the desk. "What do I do, Barbara? How far do I let her push it?"
"Let's start by seeing how she's doing. I've got a full afternoon, and late office hours tonight, but I'll come out to the Compound tomorrow afternoon and run her through a full exam. She's due for it anyway. Then we'll decide how much of this she can tolerate." Leaning forward, she patted his arm. " I know this isn't easy . . . "
"No, it's not," he agreed. He slumped back into the chair again. "I hate this, Barbara. If I'd had any idea that she was going to have this kind of trouble, I would have seen to it that she never became pregnant again."
"I know," she told him consolingly. "But it's academic now. All we can do is play the cards we're dealt. Let me take a look at her and we'll go from there."
Race nodded, and started to lever himself to his feet. "Thanks, Barbara. I really appreciate it."
Waving him back into the chair, she said, "Don't run off. Since you're here, you can return the favor."
"Name it," he replied, settling back again.
"I need to pick your brains."
"About Benton?" he asked shrewdly.
"Who else?" Her tone was resigned. "I'm sure he's told you that I'm not turning up anything with all the tests I've run."
"Oh yes, he's told us . . . and the boys, too. In fact, he's quite smug about it."
"I'll just bet he is," she said in disgust. Then she looked at the man across from her earnestly. "I don't care what the tests say, Race, something isn't right!" she said stridently. "The fact that I haven't found out what it is yet doesn't mean it's not real."
Race held up his hands as if fending off a blow. "Easy. You don't have to convince me . . . I'm already a believer. And I'm just as worried as you are. I'll tell you something else. I think he's hiding something."
"Hiding something? Like what?" she demanded.
"I'm only guessing," he warned her. "But I think that he may have had a couple more of those bouts of weakness recently."
"What makes you think so?" she queried, leaning forward again anxiously.
He shrugged. "Little things. Like a couple of days ago . . . he didn't come downstairs for breakfast until almost 11:00. When I asked him about it, he said he'd gotten started working in his room and just got involved. He could have, I suppose, but there was just a look to him that made me uneasy. And it's not the first time, either."
"Damn it!" she snarled, launching herself to her feet and pacing in agitation. "I just knew it! It's not in Benton's nature to be deliberately deceptive . . . at least not around family and close friends." She spun and glared at her visitor. "Why is he doing this, Race? What does he think he gains by lying to all of us about it? And why, if he's still suffering from this, did he fight me so long and hard about trying to find out what's wrong?"
"I don't think there's an easy answer to that question, Barbara. It's probably a whole host of things driving his behavior . . . not the least of which is denial."
"What do you mean, denial?"
Race Bannon looked disgusted. "You think Estella's a tough patient? Hell, she doesn't hold a candle to Benton. The man despises being sick and when it comes to being hurt, nine times out of ten, he'll just ignore it and keep right on going. You practically have to nail him to the floor to patch him up. He simply refuses to let anything stop him. And that may be a lot of the problem. In the past, he's just bulled his way through illness or injury, and he's always bounced back. If I had to guess, I'd say that's a lot of it. He figures that if he just keeps going and ignores it long enough, it will go away."
Barbara stopped in the middle of the floor and hung her head, staring at the floor blindly. After a moment she reached up and massaged the back of her neck, raising her head until it dropped back over her hand. The lines of weariness around her eyes and mouth suddenly struck Race, and he wondered just how much sleep she'd been getting recently.
"He's going to fight me on this next one, Race. I know he is. And if he refuses to take it, I'm out of options. There's no other tests I can do, and all the ones I've done say that there isn't a problem."
"What do you want to do?" he asked quietly.
"I want to do a full cardiac panel . . . stress test, arteriogram, 24-hour EKG monitor, the works. The way it hits him, the sudden weakness, the change in skin color . . . something is screaming 'cardiac' to me. But his blood chemistry isn't off, which is generally one of the first signs of heart attack. And if that's what it is, he should be in pain . . . but he swears he isn't. Surely he wouldn't lie to me about that! I just don't understand it . . ."
"You say you think he'll fight you. Why? He promised Jonny and Hadji he'd do anything you asked of him. What makes you think he'll back down on this one?"
Barbara sighed deeply. "Because to do what I want to do means taking him to Portland . . . or worse, Boston . . . to a specialist and hospitalizing him for about three days. The Medical Center here doesn't have personnel or the equipment for it. You think he's going to take that news well?"
"Going out of the area and having to see a new doctor?" Race thought about it for a while. "No . . . no, I think you're right. He's not going to like it at all. Jonny comes by his hatred of hospitals legitimately . . . if anything, Benton's worse than Jonny is about it. With everything else showing no sign of a problem, I think he'll figure he's given you all the latitude you need and call a halt."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"Well, I'm not above applying a little pressure of my own," Race said determinedly. "If he balks, we'll call Jonny and Hadji. He'll be seriously ticked about it, but I think that when real pressure is brought to bear by those two, he'll buckle."
Barbara crossed the room slowly and sank back into her chair again. For a while, she was silent, her head resting against the high back of the chair and her eyes closed. Race was about to rise and leave quietly when, without opening her eyes, she said, "Tell me about his life away from here."
"What do you mean?"
"What does he do when he's not here in Rockport? What kind of strange things happen to him when he's in all of those exotic locales he visits?" Race looked at the woman closely, wondering about the question. There was something in her voice . . . a hint of . . . longing?
"Much the same sort of thing he does when he's around here," Race replied a bit evasively, old habits kicking in automatically. "Largely field research of one kind or another. He loves archaeology . . . something he shares with Estella . . . although he's a bit more esoteric about what he studies. We've been to Easter Island to study the Moai statues, to the deep rainforest jungles of Colombia to investigate an ancient Incan civilization, to Tibet to study relics purported to be Yeti in origin . . . that sort of thing."
"To Cairo to study Egyptian artifacts . . ."
"Yes, there too," Race agreed cautiously, still not sure what she was driving at.
She finally opened her eyes and looked at him, and through the mirror of her eyes, Race could almost see her mind working. "If I can't come at this from the front, then I'm going to have to try for a back door of some kind."
"Huh?"
"Let's assume for a minute that the problem is cardiac in some way. Benton's still a young man . . . and he's in outstanding physical condition. The one thing we've learned over the last 50 years about cardiac problems is that they rarely appear out of nowhere. There are almost always factors that contribute to problem. Smoking, excessive drinking, poor diet, family history, undue stress, that sort of thing. So if we're going to assume that it's cardiac . . . for lack of a better scenario at the moment . . . we have to ask ourselves . . . what are the factors that may have caused it. He never smoked; he drinks on occasion, but rarely to excess; his diet is disgustingly good, particularly considering how much you travel; there's no heart problems on either side of his family . . . I know because I've already asked him; his cholesterol is low for a man his age and so is his blood pressure and glucose levels. So what does that leave? Undue stress? Up until the problems with Jonny, I don't really think he'd been under a lot of pressure. In fact, he seems to thrive under it most of the time . . . "
"Actually, as Kefira pointed out to Estella, Hadji and I back in April, his stress levels had been exceedingly high since about November. Work doesn't stress him, but threats to his family do."
"Good point, but even allowing for those and the stresses with Jonny since, I still don't see it being sufficient to cause problems without some other mediating factor. And from what you've told me, the early symptoms of the problem began showing up in December. That's not nearly enough time for stress to cause the problem. What about accidents or attacks? I've doctored each and every one of you for injuries incurred while in the field. Everyone, that is, except Benton. It seems like he never comes home hurt."
"He better not," Race said dryly. "If he does, it means I'm not doing my job very well. Let's face it, the reason the government placed me with this family was to guard Jonny and to see to it that Benton stayed in one piece. Jonny has always been a daredevil and harder to keep track of, so he tended to get hurt more readily. And I've made it a point to try to protect Benton as thoroughly as possible."
"A point," she acknowledged. "So you're saying he's never been hurt or gotten sick on any of the multitude of trips you've taken?"
Race thought about it for a long time. "No, not seriously. Bumps and bangs a couple of times, thumped on the head once or twice, but nothing remotely life threatening. I've always been extremely careful to . . ." He trailed off uncertainly.
"What?" she said sharply, leaning forward to stare at him intently.
"Surely that couldn't . . ."
"Don't hold out on me, Race. Even if it seems farfetched, I need to know if there was something that happened to him that might possibly be causing this."
Race shook his head. "I don't see how it could have anything to do with it, but you did say something about attacks."
"Yes?"
"When Jonny was about 13, Benton developed a sudden concern that he and the boys weren't spending enough quality time together. I remember it struck me as pretty silly, as those boys went with him everywhere and he included them in everything." Race shrugged. "But there was no arguing with him about it. So he left me at home and took Jonny on a vacation . . . just the two of them."
"Hadji wasn't included?"
"No. This was right after we'd discovered his mother alive in Bangalore and he'd returned there to get to know her and to spend some time getting used to the idea of being a Sultan. I suppose that could have had something to do with Benton's sudden urge to do some father/son bonding with Jonny."
"Yes, and?"
"So Jonny and Benton took off for a fishing vacation in England. Ended up in this little village in Devon called Wychford."
"I assume there's some significance to this story?"
"Yeah. Turns out, there was this scientist by the name of Smallwood living there. Seems his wife had been killed by a bunch of street thugs and as a result he hated conflict . . . of any kind. In an effort to find a way to make people get along better, he'd developed this computer chip that, when planted at the base of the skull, sent "signals to sooth the savage beast", as it were."
Barbara shuddered. "That sounds awful!"
"It wasn't good," Race agreed. "Aside from making the people bland and totally submissive, he also made the mistake of getting his funding for the project from a rather unscrupulous businessman by the name of Darcy who saw a way to use the chips to create his own personal army and make a ton of money at the same time. The guy found he could piggyback a carrier signal into the chip and when he changed the broadcast frequency he could turn all those placid townspeople into a ravening mob bent on destruction."
"He was hurt trying to defend himself against the mob?" she queried with another shudder.
"Worse. They got one of the damned things onto him. Jonny just shrugs the entire episode off, but Benton was pretty upset by it. According to him, there was one point when he was being forced to chase Jonny in an effort to stop him from disrupting the project. Benton claims he was on the brink of killing Jonny with his own two hands."
"Dear God."
"Nothing holy about what was going on there, let me tell you. Jonny managed to figure out what was happening and got rid of the chip on Benton, and then together the two of them were able to destroy the transmitter controlling the others, but it was a pretty nasty business all the way around. But I really don't see what it could have to do with this."
"You never know," she replied. "Do you have any idea how the chip worked? How it controlled their behavior or what triggered the berserker response?"
Race shook his head. "Absolutely none. You'd have to ask Benton."
Rummaging around on the desk, Barbara found a pad of paper and a pen. Looking at him intently, she said, "What did you say the name of the doctor and the town in England were?"
"The doctor was a guy named Smallwood, but he died in jail a couple of years ago. The name of the town was Wychford." He spelled it for her. "Why? What are you planning on doing?"
"I'm not entirely sure. Grasping at straws? Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . finding that back door I need so desperately."
