Bloodletting (37 page)

The four interns had been thrilled at the prospect of doing something a little more challenging than preparing semen and fiber samples, and running his errands for him. Under normal circumstances, he would have reveled in teasing them with the value of the work and then sending them out to launder the lab coats, but time was of the essence. And he had to admit they had actually done a pretty good job. Maybe he'd even throw them a bone and tell them as much.

Extracting the viruses hadn't proven much of a challenge. He just hadn't been prepared to find so many. There were three distinct strains of Influenza A: H1, H3N2, and H7N2; and two of Influenza B: variants of the Shanghai and Victoria strains. Delineating one from the next by hemagglutinin and neuraminidase morphology had been a painstaking process. By the end, they had examined nearly every single drop of fluid and the enthusiasm had long since vanished. All they had found were dead flu viruses. One after another after another, until finally something completely different appeared on the slide of the female intern who had spit in his coffee. Just a little twitch of movement had caught her eye, a lone living virus in a sea of dead ones, and they had it.

There was the cause of so much death.

The snakehead retrovirus.

Marshall now sat at his computer comparing the structure of the unaltered virus from the database to that of the one they had found in the vaccine. The interns leaned over his shoulder, salivating at the prospect of publishing their findings and making a name for themselves. Little did they know that if they were able to prevent the release of the vaccine, no one would ever be allowed to know how close the world had come to catastrophe. The average person preferred not to know such niggling details.

There they were: the modified Gag protein, the lentivirus-like Env, the triple icasohedral arrangement. It was truly a work of art, like painting the Mona Lisa on the head of a pin. Marshall could only stare in awe. This was the culmination of experimentation that had begun nearly seventy years ago, before there was even color television. And now with this single viral organism, millions of years of human evolution could be accelerated in the time it took to sniff.

He would have felt more comfortable juggling nuclear warheads.

Were it not for the fact that it was now evidence, he would have taken great joy in holding the slide over a Bunsen burner and watching the sucker fry.

He dialed Carver's cell phone, but there was no answer, so he left the message he had prayed he would be able to. He tried Manning next. She sounded every bit as excited as he felt. In his hurry, he missed the opportunity to ask her out. A mistake he would rectify as soon as this was all over. The following calls were going to be more involved, the conversations much longer. He was going to have to convince both the FBI and CDC that the vaccine needed to be pulled from all across the free world in a matter of hours and they would have to mobilize every available body to accomplish this feat. But he would do it. It was just going to require some more caffeine.

Leaning forward, he extricated his wallet from the pocket of his lab jacket and turned to the intern who had flavored his coffee and done God only knew what to his skillet meal.

"I need a favor." She sighed and closed her eyes. Before she could vent her obvious frustration, he handed her his wallet. "Go get me another mochaccino."

She stared at the wallet and shook her head.

"And why don't you grab some for everyone. My treat. You guys earned them."

She might even have smiled when she took his wallet, but Marshall had already turned away and was dialing the phone, preparing to convince the most skeptical human beings on the planet that forty million people were going to be exposed to a rare fish retrovirus that would modify their chromosomes to contain animal genes if they didn't pull the flu vaccine that very night. Either that, or the next generation would be venomous children who could see in the dark and hunt for days at a time without sleeping.

He was going to need all the luck he could get.

III

Redmond, Washington

The tunnel seemed to close in around him, the thrum of the water through the pipes was like the pulse of some great beast. Directly in front of them was what they had expected to find, though none of them had spoken the words out loud. Carver had to turn away to compose himself. The flashlight shined from the wide black puddle on the concrete. It hadn't been a bloodletting. It had been a slaughter.

Footsteps closed in behind him and stopped. Hawthorne's flashlight shined over his shoulder, illuminating the carnage in the corner of his eye. He had to turn back, had to know.

"They left the body where they knew we would find it," Hawthorne said. "This was a setup to slow us down. They're long gone."

"And we have no idea where they are now," Wolfe said.

Carver steeled himself and directed his light over the remains heaped on the floor. Everything was so wet with blood that it was hard to determine at first exactly what was what. The lower legs were crumpled under the body, the back arched to showcase what little remained of the thorax, the arms sprawled out to either side. Fractured ribs poked out of the chest. The cavity was so bloody it was hard to tell fabric from flesh. The abdomen had been roughly opened and folds of bowel had squeezed out over the waistband of the tattered pants.

"We did this to him,"' Carver said. "We should never have left them behind."

He shined the beam upward. The silver pipes were bowed downward, stripped of the grime and flakes of rust that coated the rest of their length.

"They hung him up there," Carver said, lowering the light to finally look at the face. The belt was still tight around the neck, the buckle reflecting the beam, the remainder trailing across the floor parallel to the long black braid. Kajika's face was swollen and covered with blood, his mouth parted from the force of the makeshift noose under his jaw, eyes rolled upward beneath half-closed lids. "Just strung him up and butchered him."

The top of Locke's phone stood from the open chest like an impromptu tombstone.

They should never have involved Kajika, never dragged him across the country to use him for his knowledge of HydroGen, where he had helped lay the first brick above them and now lay dead below. But they hadn't brought Kajika into this mess in the first place. His participation had been preordained the moment he and Schwartz developed the viral protein coat. Maybe it had been Schwartz who had started him down this road, and whose death had guaranteed his own. In the end, it simply boiled down to the fact that Kajika knew too much and needed to be eliminated. It was a tragic waste of a brilliant mind and a genuinely kind soul, especially if Marshall was able to convince the powers that be to stop the distribution of the vaccine to the general population.

Carver turned to see the glimmer of tears on Wolfe's cheeks before he quickly wiped them away. Wolfe's eyes narrowed to crescent moons. His lips writhed over bared teeth.

Hawthorne walked past Carver and carefully extracted Locke's cell phone without stepping in the blood. He shoved it into the interior pocket of his jacket.

"I'd say he hasn't been dead more than an hour tops," Hawthorne said.

"We should fan out and look for the others," Carver said.

"They aren't here. They knew we'd try to track Locke by his GPS beacon. This was just a distraction to buy them more time."

"Time for what? We beat them. We found the retrovirus. We know where they're breeding it. We know it's in the flu vaccine. I'm sure by now they're already being pulled out of hospitals and destroyed. There's no way they'll be given to patients. And Dreck's dead, so they won't get another shot at this. The fish will be killed, the virus eliminated, and they'll be left with nothing."

"So it would seem," Hawthorne said, "but we still have our work cut out for us. Locke and Archer are still out there somewhere, as are Heidlmann and Darby."

"And they still need to eliminate us," Carver said.

"We need to look at this objectively. Locke and the others have maybe been missing for four hours now. Dodge has been dead for nearly one of those. That leaves three hours during which they presumably broke into the hotel room, moved them to a different location, and brought Dodge back here. So wherever they took the others can't be more than ninety minutes away. Factor in the time it would take to move Archer and Locke into a secure location and the time it would have taken to set up and kill Dodge, and we're dealing with a radius of roughly sixty miles."

"The others are already dead," Wolfe said.

"If they were, they'd be down here as well," Hawthorne said. "There was something else planned for them."

"Then we're wasting time," Carver said, turning away and pointing the light back into the tunnel. He veered right at the junction and started to jog. They still needed to make sure there were no more bodies down there; they couldn't leave without being sure.

Behind him, he heard Wolfe ask in a soft tone, "We aren't just leaving him here...like this, are we?"

* * *

Between the three of them, it took another fifteen minutes to clear the underground tunnels. As they had suspected, they had found nothing, save a handful of partial footprints in dried blood leading to the doorway to the main building. The door had been unlocked, the security system disarmed. They had climbed the staircase into the main lobby of the HydroGen office building and walked right out the front door into the parking lot. There was no time to waste on the circuitous route through the woods, so they ran down to the highway and followed the shoulder to where they had parked the Caprice.

There was another car behind theirs in the dirt lot, a newer model red Mustang with a National Car Rental sticker on the bumper. Washington plates, recently washed. The silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, the windshield reflecting what little of the setting sun pierced the banks of clouds. Carver's first thought was that some tourist had been drawn to the trailhead, but he knew better. The moment they reached the lot, the man opened the driver's side door and climbed out. He shielded his eyes from the glare, but Carver would have recognized him anywhere.

The man strode directly toward him.

Carver didn't know what to say when the man stopped and he stood face to face with Jack Warner.

His father.

IV

Elsewhere

Consciousness returned with crippling waves of pain, making the prospect of closing her eyes again and welcoming the darkness more appealing by the second. She was so cold. Shivering did little to generate heat beyond the burning in her ankles. If she still had feet, Ellie imagined they were a mottled shade of bluish-black. She didn't know how long she had been there, but with each subsequent breath she took, each droplet of blood that dripped into the collection basin from the catheter in her arm, she drew that much closer to spending the rest of her life in this hell.

There was no voice to scream. Even what little saliva she managed to accumulate only felt like acid sliding down her throat. And there was no energy left to rage against her bonds.

This was it. Either the man cut her down, or she was going to die like this.

She wished she could cry, but her body couldn't spare the moisture for tears.

Her eyes closed. When she opened them again she was in the middle of an unending desert littered with sun-blanched bones, only they were no longer human. Strange amalgams of man and animal: skulls with horns and tusks; knees that bent the wrong way; fingers and toes capped with talons; scapulae with the framework of vestigial wings. She walked over them with the cracking sound only dried bones could make until she collapsed on the sand. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the gentle tapping of fluid dripping to the sand.

Plip
...
plip
...

Only now her eyes were open again. If they'd ever really been closed at all.

She heard soft breathing, now easily distinguishable from her own wheezing.

"Can you hear it?" a voice whispered.

Plip
...
ploop
...

"That's the sound of life. The blood contains everything we are. It's the seed for an entire species. Even a single drop generates ripples in the gene pool that spread throughout the entire world. And those ripples grow larger and larger until they become waves. Every tsunami begins somewhere as a single drop."

She felt the warmth of his breath on her forehead, and then his lips. They lingered almost lovingly before disengaging.

"Soon you will be gone, and the others won't be far behind you. Then it will just be me, sitting alone on the shore of a once placid sea, making ripples that will one day become waves."

Elliot understood. The only people who even knew he existed outside the select group privy to his birth were dead. Buried in the desert, hanging in his smokehouse, or chalk outlines on his porch. Those of them who were like him had all been drawn together to be killed, all of the surviving twins from the abduction thirty years ago. That had always been the plan. They were the evidence of a crime yet to be committed.

But why not simply shoot her or stab her and be done with it? What was the point in dragging it out so long by bleeding her dry? Were the others down here somewhere as well, similarly strung up by their ankles, slowly bleeding to death?

He wanted their bodies to be found after the fact, found drained of every last drop of life. Their bloodlines irrevocably severed forever.

"Are you still with me?" he whispered, the disembodied words reaching her as though from a great distance.

She wasn't sure whether she was or not. The pain was fading, in its stead numbness. She no longer shivered, but found herself waiting for the black hole inside of her to yawn wide and draw her into the void.