Immortal (23 page)

He hung up, looked at the photograph again and then out the window across the city to where the Sangre de Cristo mountains loomed in the lonely darkness beyond.

New Mexico was a huge state largely filled with desert and nothing much else. To survive out in the wilderness men would need specific skills to be able to live off the land with minimal
support. He thought back to his days in the Marine Corps with the 15th Expeditionary Unit, and the skills they’d employed.

On November 25, 2001, the 15th MEU Special Operations Command launched an amphibious assault over four hundred miles into Afghanistan, with Ethan’s own platoon attached to a Marine Recon
patrol. Landing at an airbase southwest of Kandahar, they had established Camp Rhino, America’s first forward operating base and conventional ground presence in Afghanistan. Deploying again
in 2003, Ethan’s platoon, again supporting Marine Recons, crossed the border into southern Iraq and secured the ports of Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr in order to destroy Iraqi resistance and enable
follow-on humanitarian assistance to begin.

Ethan had, with his men, learned several important lessons during the initial infiltration into Afghanistan that had helped them upon arrival in Iraq. Chiefly, that the desert might be extremely
hot during the day but it becomes extremely cold during the night. Water, though scarce on the surface, was available at depth beneath the dunes and wadis, if you knew where to look for the
telltale signs of old river courses betraying the presence of rare downpours and the subterranean aquifers they fed. The ports secured in Iraq had revealed another useful quirk of desert life: the
presence of coastal water produces morning mist as the sun rises, which can be captured in suspended plastic bags as moisture, providing limited additional water to troops in time of dire need. But
the most important lesson of all, above anything else, was local knowledge. Befriending native Bedouin tribes, trackers and guides had taught Ethan more about desert survival in three months than
he’d learned with the Corps in three years.

He looked out into the darkness. A small group of seven men could conceivably live indefinitely off the land without betraying even the slightest hint of their presence. They would only be
forced into urban areas to buy medicines. Obtaining food, water and shelter would not require assistance, especially if they did not age.

But an old man, one like Hiram Conley, might tire of such a lifestyle. Ethan remembered what Tyler Willis had said: whatever had kept them alive for so long had not made them younger, it had
only halted cellular senescence. They had become frozen at whatever age they were when they encountered whatever it was that had given them the gift of immortality. That meant that Hiram Conley had
been around sixty years old ever since the Civil War, which for his era was virtually geriatric. He may have been suffering from various age-related ailments already, and thus cursed with having to
endure them forever. Ethan figured that a century and a half of chronic arthritis would be enough to make anyone throw in the towel, immortal or not.

A knock at the door broke his reverie, and he opened it to see Lopez standing with Zamora in the corridor outside.

‘Thanks for coming over,’ Ethan said to Zamora as he bid them inside, noticing that the officer had removed the sling from his arm.

‘No problem,’ Zamora replied, ‘although I can only speak to you now in an unofficial capacity. Something’s going on at town hall and it stinks.’

‘They’ve shut you down?’ Ethan asked, closing the door.

‘USAMRIID’s taken over,’ Lopez said as she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Butch Cutler’s got a small army of guys crawling over what’s left of Tyler
Willis’s apartment, searching for traces of chemicals.’

Ethan frowned.

‘It doesn’t make any sense. If we’re assuming that for some reason Jeb Oppenheimer or someone within SkinGen decided to blow up the apartment, then why would USAMRIID be in
there looking for chemicals? Forensics would be able to detect any kind of explosives or accelerants used in the attack.’

‘Maybe SkinGen didn’t make the hit,’ Lopez suggested.

‘What do you mean?’

Zamora took out a photograph, a black-and-white mugshot. A strikingly handsome man stared at the camera, a height chart on the wall behind him.

‘You’re looking at a man named Lee Carson,’ Zamora said, ‘arrested for drunk and disorderly outside a bootlegger’s called Old Wayne’s in Albuquerque.
Yesterday, a call came in from Jay’s Bar and Grill in La Cienega, south of Santa Fe. A girl who works there reported a man who came in by the name of Lee Carson, whose hand appeared to be
suffering from some kind of wasting disease. I recognized it as the same affliction being suffered by Hiram Conley when I encountered him out Glorietta way.’

Ethan felt a pulse of excitement.

‘He’s one of the others that Willis mentioned? Can we be sure?’

‘The girl described Lee Carson as about twenty-five years of age,’ Zamora said, and then gestured to the mugshot. ‘That was taken in 1929. Old Wayne’s was shut down
during the great Depression, long before World War Two.’

Ethan stared at the photograph again.

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said finally.

Turning, he picked up the old photograph of the seven soldiers standing beside the cart in 1862, and scanned their faces. Within seconds he saw what he was looking for, and handed the photograph
to Lopez.

‘Second from right, the one with the hat on,’ he said.

Lopez stared at the picture, and Ethan saw her jaw drop.

‘He’s there,’ she said in a whisper. ‘This photograph is over a hundred fifty years old.’

Ethan looked at Zamora.

‘These people, survivors, whatever they are, must be in contact with each other. They must be experiencing some kind of reaction. Tyler Willis said they were suffering from a bacterial
infection. If we assume that they were all infected at the same time, then they’ll all be showing these kinds of afflictions. Maybe that’s why Hiram Conley came out of hiding: he knew
he was dying and needed help. It’s the only reason these people would reveal their secret.’

Zamora caught on to where Ethan was going.

‘They’ll rally together and try to find a solution,’ he said. ‘They’ll seek out medication, a cure.’

‘The question is where?’ Ethan pondered out loud.

Zamora was about to answer when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, answered, and his face fell as he listened. Slowly, he lowered the phone to his side and looked at Ethan.

‘They’ve found Tyler Willis’s body.’

11.58 p.m.

Ethan rode in the passenger seat of Zamora’s patrol car as they drove up to the police cordon. Two ambulances and a pair of squad cars were parked, their strobe
lights flashing in the night and reflecting off trees and bushes lining the side of a lonely track. Behind them, the main road ran north past the Los Alamos National Laboratory, not more than two
hundred yards away, where Ethan had first met both Tyler Willis and Saffron Oppenheimer.

‘Keep your heads down,’ Zamora said. ‘Let’s not upset anyone.’

‘Are USAMRIID on site already?’ Ethan asked in amazement, spotting a large vehicle bearing the department’s distinctive badges parked further down the track.

‘They were already in Santa Fe,’ Zamora said, winding down his window as a police officer approached them on foot. ‘Wouldn’t have taken them long to get here.’

The officer recognized Zamora and waved them through. They parked before getting out and walking toward the scene of the crime.

‘Not far from the research center,’ Lopez said uneasily. ‘You think that maybe we were wrong and Saffron Oppenheimer got her hands on Willis?’

Ethan shook his head.

‘No, but maybe that’s what the perpetrators would like us to think.’

They had almost reached the cordon when Butch Cutler saw them coming, turning from looking at what was obviously a body lying in the dirt to stride toward them, one hand pointing at Ethan.

‘I’m not surprised you’ve turned up,’ he snapped. ‘Trouble seems to follow you.’

Ethan ducked under the cordon along with Lopez and Zamora.

‘Think you’ll find it’s the other way round,’ he said, not letting Cutler intimidate him. ‘When was he discovered?’

Cutler glanced over his shoulder.

‘Two hours ago by a local resident out walking her dog. The mutt found the body, she called the police.’

‘What happened to him?’ Lopez asked.

Cutler turned his fearsome gaze in her direction.

‘Looks like a mugging or similar,’ he replied. ‘He’s been beaten up and stabbed, no cash or belongings on him.’

‘You got any idea who might have done this?’ Zamora asked, rubbing his temples.

Butch Cutler nodded slowly. ‘Some.’

‘Jeb Oppenheimer,’ Ethan said to Cutler, trying to control the surge of fury now coursing through his veins. ‘We were in the SkinGen building when Tyler Willis was there and
you had us pulled out.’

‘You had no damned right to be there,’ Cutler shot back, jabbing a finger into Ethan’s chest.

Ethan reacted without conscious thought, swatting Cutler’s hand aside and whipping his left palm up toward the USAMRIID chiefs jaw. Cutler spun aside from the blow and was about to counter
when Lopez leapt between them.

‘Cut it out!’

Ethan stood, fists clenched, looking over the top of Lopez’s head at Cutler.

‘Sooner or later, this screw-up is going to bring you down,’ he hissed.

Cutler smiled coldly.

‘Just as your deft handiwork is getting you thrown out of the county?’

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ Zamora said, trying to ease the situation. ‘Can we see the body?’

Cutler scowled, but reluctantly gestured for them to pass through. Ethan walked past him, Lopez deliberately keeping herself between them as they moved toward the body lying on the soil
nearby.

Willis lay on his back, his shirt stained with blood from what looked like an incision in his chest. His eyes were closed and his features seemed peaceful, but his eyes were heavily bruised from
what appeared to be blunt-force trauma, his left temple a bloody mess and one of his teeth missing.

‘We know he was at SkinGen,’ Lopez said. ‘One of Oppenheimer’s men could have done this to him. The cut’s too clinical, too clean to be a stab wound.’

Ethan looked at the remains for a few moments and then across at Cutler, his rage now withered.

‘Have forensics been called?’

‘On their way,’ Cutler said.

‘This was done purposefully,’ Ethan said, gesturing to Willis’s corpse. ‘Somebody wanted to send a message that anybody doing research into aging could end up like
this.’

Butch Cutler winced.

‘Only if you’re assuming SkinGen’s involvement, which we’re not right now. This has no bearing on Jeb Oppenheimer whatsoever.’

‘This man was in his hands when he died,’ Ethan insisted.

‘So you allege,’ Cutler said, and turned to face him. ‘But what is an absolute fact is that the last people known for sure to have seen Tyler Willis alive is the pair of
you.’

Ethan frowned.

‘We interviewed him,’ he said. ‘Then Saffron Oppenheimer and her band of merry men tried to blow up the Aspen Center. We’ve been working with Officer Zamora here ever
since.’

Cutler shook his head.

‘Taking a blade to a corpse wouldn’t take long,’ he growled. ‘What’s to say you didn’t do it, if circumstantial evidence is enough for you to accuse SkinGen
of corporate homicide?’

Zamora raised a placating hand toward Cutler.

‘That’s pushing it, Chief. There’s no motive.’

‘There’s
always
a motive,’ Cutler replied, still glaring at Ethan. ‘Or a reason to cover your tracks. Warner here could have committed the crime in that apartment,
then had it blown to pieces. Would have destroyed any biological evidence. You said it yourselves: it would have taken someone with professional knowledge, an outdoorsman or a soldier, to have
incinerated that apartment with so little evidence as to the cause.’

‘You’re forgetting,’ Lopez snapped, ‘that it was Ethan who realized
how
it was done. Pretty damned stupid to commit a perfect crime and then reveal to
investigating officers how you’ve done it.’

‘Or cunning enough to throw the investigators entirely off your scent,’ Cutler mused out loud before looking directly at her. ‘As for motive, money’s always a big draw
for two-bit bounty hunters looking for their next quick buck.’

Ethan was about to reply when Lopez suddenly whipped round and cracked Cutler high across his cheek. The USAMRIID chiefs head flicked to one side as he grabbed his face instinctively before
lunging for Lopez, one thick hand shooting out to close around her neck.

Ethan leapt in and slammed his elbow down through Cutler’s arm, breaking his hold on Lopez. Ethan twisted at the waist and swung his forearm across Cutler’s face, batting him
backward a couple of paces.

‘You touch her again,’ Ethan snarled, ‘you’ll wind up sucking your dinners through a straw.’

‘That’s enough,’ Zamora shouted, stepping between them. ‘Cutler, you’ve got jurisdiction here. Either start acting your age or I’ll have you forcibly removed
from the scene. Warner, Lopez, with me, now!’

Ethan, realizing that he was in danger of completely losing it, turned and walked away with Zamora. The lieutenant ducked under the cordon and turned to face him.

‘Okay, Tyson, listen up. You pull any other stunts like that, I’ll arrest you my goddamned self.’

‘We’re wasting our time,’ Ethan said. ‘Whatever’s really going on here, we’re never going to find it with Cutler blocking our every move. We need to find the
men in that photograph and get them to tell us why this is all happening.’

Zamora glanced back at Tyler Willis’s corpse.

‘My guess is that Cutler’s right and money has a role in all of this. You don’t abduct somebody unless you’re trying to find something out, and whatever Willis knew was
obviously worth a lot to someone. Enough to kill him.’

‘The photograph,’ Lopez said. ‘The faces were the same then as they are now. Somebody, somewhere, must be able to recognize them.’