thought over Hamlin’s plan, it began to make sense to him.
Perhaps it was going to work out after all.
And if it didn’t?
Paul Randolph didn’t even want to think about that possibility.
Chapter 31
SALLY MONTGOMERY OPENED HER EYES, and the first thing she saw was the ceiling. Acoustical plaster, the kind she had always hated. And the color—that awful shade of pale green that was supposed to be restful but was faintly nauseating. So she was in a hospital bed. She had a moment of panic and struggled to sit up. Then she heard Steve’s voice.
“It’s all right, honey,” he was saying. “There’s nothing wrong. You just—well, you sort of came apart a couple of hours ago, so Mark gave you something to put you to sleep for a while.”
Sally sank back onto the pillow and gazed silently at her husband for a few moments. Was it a trick? Was it really Mark who had given her the shot, or Wiseman?
Wiseman.
Wiseman was dead. Wiseman, and … and the Corlisses, and Carl Bronski. Tears welled up in her eyes and brimmed over. Steve reached out and gently brushed them away.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” she asked, her voice hollow.
“All except Randy,” Steve replied.
“What happened?”
“Not now,” Steve protested. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
“No. I want to know what happened, Steve. I have to know.”
“It was an accident. Apparently Bronski lost control of the car—a blowout, maybe. Anyway,: it skidded off the road, turned over, and the gas tank ruptured.”
“Oh, God,” Sally groaned. “It must have been horrible.” Her eyes met Steve’s. “They … burned?”
Steve nodded. “Jim and Lucy did. Carl was thrown out of the car. It rolled on him.”
“And Randy?”
“He got out. Somehow, he got out. His clothes burned completely off him, and all his hair …”
Sally closed her eyes, as if by the action she could erase the image that had come into her mind. “But how could he have survived? The burns—”
“He did survive. And he’s all right, Sally. It’s like what happened with Jason.”
The door opened and Mark Malone appeared. He closed the door behind him, then stepped to the foot of Sally’s bed, glanced at her chart, and forced a smile. “I wish I could say you looked better than you do.”
“Steve just told me about … about …” Her voice faded away as her tears once again began to flow. She groped around her bedside table and found a Kleenex. Wiping away the tears, she pushed herself a little higher up in the bed, then forced herself to meet Malone’s eyes. “What does it mean, Mark? What’s going on?”
“I wish I could tell you,” Malone replied. He hesitated, then spoke again. “You have a visitor. But you don’t have to see him.”
“A visitor? Who?”
“Paul Randolph.”
Sally’s eyes widened. “From CHILD? He’s here? But—but how? Why?”
“He telephoned about an hour ago. He wanted to know if we’d done something to our computer programs.”
Sally felt her heart skip a beat. “The programs?”
Malone nodded. “That’s what he said. His story was that their computer tried to do a routine scan of the updates of our records and couldn’t.”
Steve frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means all the codes are gone,” Malone said. “It means that all our evidence has disappeared.”
“But it doesn’t matter,” Sally said. “We’ve got the printouts—” Malone’s shaking head stopped the flow of her words.
“They’re gone, Sally. Before Arthur killed himself he destroyed everything. He altered records in the computer and burned all your printouts. It’s all gone, Sally. Everything.”
As the full meaning of his words sank in, Sally felt suddenly tired. Tired, and beaten. It was over. The information was gone, all of it. But where? And even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. “They did it themselves, didn’t they?” she asked. “The people at CHILD dumped the whole thing out of the computer.”
“Undoubtedly,” Malone agreed. “Although Randolph denies it. That’s why he came out here. I told him what’s been happening out here, and he wants to hear the whole story from you. He says he also wants to tell you what they know about Group Twenty-one. Except they call it the GT-active group.”
“What does that mean?” Steve asked.
“It refers to something called introns,” Malone said. “I think Randolph can explain it better than I can, but if you don’t want to talk to him,” he added, turning his attention back to Sally, “you don’t have to.”
Sally’s eyes grew cold. “I want to,” she said. “I want to know what they’ve been