Immortal (6 page)

The girl smiled again and picked up a phone, dialing an extension number. When she’d finished speaking and put the phone down, she directed them toward a nearby elevator.

‘Second floor, third on the right. Just call me if there’s anything else you need.’

‘I’ll be sure to do that.’

Ethan flashed another grin at the girl and followed Lopez into the elevator. She rounded on him as the door closed.

‘You ever been able to talk to a girl without hitting on her?’

Ethan stood with his hands behind his back, watching the numbers change on the digital display above the doors.

‘I was just being polite.’

‘Polite? You’d leaned any closer to her you’d have been dribbling into her blouse.’

Ethan looked down at Lopez in amusement. ‘What’s the problem?’

Lopez shrugged. ‘It’s just not professional, is all.’

‘Like breaking into strangers’ cars is?’

Lopez rolled her eyes but said nothing as the doors opened and they turned right into a corridor. Rows of pictures adorned the walls, bizarre, kaleidoscopic images of what looked like
microscopic bugs and spores and fungi.

‘Welcome to geek heaven,’ Ethan said as they made for the third door on the right.

Lopez looked up at one of the grotesque images, portraying what looked like a slug with eight legs tucked up close to its head.

‘What the hell is that?’ she wondered out loud.

Ethan was about to hazard a guess when another voice answered for him.

‘
Demodex folliculorum.
’

They turned to see a young black man standing behind them with a cup of coffee in one hand and his other arm in a sling. He smiled from behind fashionable square-lensed spectacles with
distinctive burgundy frames as though almost embarrassed, and gestured with his cup to the picture on the wall.

‘It’s a tiny mite, less than half a millimeter long.’

Ethan glanced at the picture. ‘The image is magnified.’

‘Yes. The demodicids just look like worms with legs that are tiny stumps.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ Lopez asked curiously.

‘Not at all,’ Willis said. ‘You’ve probably got a few hundred of them on you right now. They live in the pores and hair follicles on your face, and often in the roots of
your eyelashes. Women get more of them because of the cosmetics they use. Those little critters just love the chemicals.’

Lopez blanched, staring wide-eyed at Willis. Ethan, trying not to smirk, stepped forward.

‘We’re here on Lieutenant Zamora’s behalf.’

Willis’s smile faded and his shoulders seemed to sag. He nodded, and gestured ahead to the open door of his office. Ethan led the way inside, followed by Lopez who was tentatively touching
her face. Willis closed the door behind them and slumped into a swivel chair behind a small desk, upon which sat a computer and several paper trays. The office had a small window that looked out
over a parking lot, the distant green hills tinged with blue in the hazy sunlight beyond.

‘I suppose this is about what happened at Glorietta Pass,’ Willis said sulkily. ‘I’ve told the police everything I know.’

‘Maybe you have,’ Ethan said, ‘but then again maybe you haven’t.’

Willis opened his mouth to protest but Lopez cut across him.

‘We don’t have time to mess around, Tyler. This man, Hiram Conley, shot you after an argument in which you were every bit as involved as he was. We have a dozen witnesses and all of
their statements correlate. You knew this guy and you know why he shot you. Speak up, and this will all be a lot easier.’

Willis’s feeble defiance crumbled, but he shook his head. ‘It’s not that easy. You don’t know what’s been happening here.’

‘Then maybe you should fill us in,’ Ethan suggested. ‘This isn’t about local law enforcement anymore, Tyler. The government is taking an interest in what happened down
here, and what you tell us will get back to them. If they think that you’re lying . . .’

Ethan let the loaded statement hang in the air between them. Willis digested its meaning, and set his coffee cup down on the desk before him.

‘I’m not lying about anything,’ he said. ‘The government wouldn’t have any interest in me at all if it weren’t for what Hiram Conley showed me.’

‘Go on,’ Lopez encouraged.

‘What happened to Hiram Conley’s corpse?’

‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ Lopez said, folding her arms and gesturing out of the small office window. ‘Theft of state-controlled corpses is a federal offense. If
you’re charged, you can get used to a view of the outside world just like that one but with bars.’

‘I never saw what happened to Conley after the ranger shot him, I swear!’ Willis yelped.

‘Take an educated guess,’ Ethan said, picking up on Lopez’s attempts to entrap Willis into revealing whatever it was he was trying to hide.

‘It’s too dangerous!’ Willis snapped.

‘Tell us what you safely can,’ Ethan suggested, ‘at least then we’ll be able to see where it might take our investigation.’

Willis sighed and rubbed his forehead.

‘It started a few weeks ago, when I was coming to the end of a two-year study into an illness known as Werner syndrome.’

‘What’s that?’ Lopez asked, already scribbling notes.

‘It’s a very rare disorder characterized by premature aging, more so than any other segmental progeria. The disease is caused by a mutation in a gene that causes excessive telomere
attrition.’

‘So, people with this disorder die prematurely?’ Ethan hazarded.

‘They normally develop without symptoms until they reach puberty,’ Willis said, ‘upon which they age rapidly, often appearing decades older. Other symptoms include loss of and
graying of hair, thickening of the skin and cataracts in both eyes.’

‘Is it curable?’ Lopez asked.

‘That’s what I was working on,’ Willis said. ‘A recent study found that mice which were genetically modified to express the genes thought to cause Werner syndrome in
humans were restored to normal health and lifespan when vitamin C was put in their drinking water. The work was incomplete but the potential for study was immense. I’d also been studying
cellular defense proteins in humans called sirtuins. Drugs that boost these proteins have already been shown to extend the lifespan of mice by about fifteen percent.’

Ethan thought for a moment.

‘So how does Hiram Conley tie into all this?’

‘I was working on a number of cellular senescence papers,’ Willis said, ‘trying to understand how Werner syndrome worked and whether it could be reversed in order to slow
aging. I’d published a few when Hiram Conley showed up here, real quiet like. He said he had something to show me, and handed me a vial with what he claimed was spinal fluid in it, from a
lumbar puncture. It’s not every day that somebody wanders into your lab with spinal fluid, so I agreed to culture it to see what emerged. A few days later I looked at the fluid under a
microscope and realized that it was filled with microscopic fauna that I recognized.’

‘From where?’ Lopez asked.

Willis gestured to a small photograph tacked to the wall of his office that appeared to show tiny bacterial cells suspended in solution, imaged with a powerful microscope.

‘Back in 1999, scientists working in a cave complex extracted bacterial samples from sodium-chloride crystals formed from prehistoric sea salt. The microscopic organisms were revived in a
laboratory after being in suspended animation within the crystals. They couldn’t identify the species and referred to it as strain 2-9-3, or
Bacillus permians.
What was special about
it was that the organisms were two hundred fifty million years old.’

Ethan blinked.

‘The dinosaurs were still around then.’

‘The dinosaurs had only just got
started
back then,’ Willis corrected him. ‘
Bacillus permians
represents the oldest living organism known to man. In May 1995,
forty-million-year-old
Bacillus sphaericus
were found in the stomach of a bee encased in amber. They were also in a state of suspended animation and were revived in a laboratory.’

‘How did Hiram Conley get these bacteria, and from whom?’ Ethan inquired.

‘I don’t know. He refused to tell me, except to say that the spinal fluid was his own.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Lopez said. ‘You need to tell us everything, Tyler.’

‘Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?’ Willis burst out. ‘This is far bigger than any of us. It isn’t about Hiram Conley or any of the
others.’

Willis stared at them for a moment, and then realized his mistake.

Ethan pushed himself off the wall, his arms folded across his chest.

‘What
others
?’

‘You cover the reception area, I’ll get through the back and break down the doors.’

The battered old 1968 Dodge Camper in which Saffron sat smelled of axle grease, mould and unwashed upholstery. The vehicle was a wreck they’d found abandoned in a farmer’s yard in
Silver City two days before. Colin ‘Hugger’ Manx, a lanky, curly-haired geek whom she swore had never washed in his life, had managed to get it running after a day of swearing and
wrench throwing, and had driven them to Los Alamos that morning. In the back of the camper sat two furtive-looking teenagers, the self-named Ruby Lily, a wisp of a girl with blonde dreadlocks, and
an anemic-looking boy who called himself Bobby, all greasy black hair and white skin, his narrow chin flecked with spots.

‘What are you going to do?’ Manx demanded of her. ‘You can’t just stroll in there and expect them to let you into the labs.’

Saffron shook her head.

‘They’ll have a set of doors that contain a mid-pressure area that people have to pass through. They have them so that contaminants from the laboratories can’t flow out of the
building, like a HazMat facility. We’ll use the gun on those.’

Saffron waited for a riposte from her companions, but nobody responded. She looked down into the footwell of the camper, where an unlicensed sawn-off Beretta shotgun and a handful of cartridges
lay at her feet. As if suddenly paranoid, she checked the rear-view mirror. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the cracked mirror. At twenty-nine, she was older than her companions by some
years and regarded by them as something of a veteran. Her long blonde hair was tied up in a tight knot behind her head, as it had been for some months now. On the rare occasions when she let it
fall it reached almost to her thighs. Her high cheekbones and clear green eyes made her look like a catwalk model who’d survived a particularly heavy night out. To Saffron all she saw were
the subtle features that betrayed her grandfather’s influence: the firm line of her lips and the sinister glitter of radicalism that flickered like a distant star in her eyes.

‘The shift’s about to change,’ Manx said, his voice an octave higher than before. He gripped the steering wheel more tightly and looked over his shoulder. ‘Everybody
ready?’

Ruby Lily and Bobby nodded dutifully, each picking up a baseball bat lying beside them. Saffron ignored Colin. He’d only joined them because they’d needed someone to fix the vehicle,
and now he was acting as though he’d conceived of the entire plan. Saffron disliked him. Her dislike had become even more intense after she’d gotten so drunk with her friends at the
commune that she’d been too tired to fend off his romantic advances when he’d stopped by her tent in the early hours. She’d barely made any attempt to stop him, and had actually
fallen asleep before he’d finished. She’d briefly woken to realize that her comatose disinterest had provoked in him a sudden and embarrassingly flaccid manhood that had caused him to
flee her tent in a hail of frustrated expletives.

Now, Manx was on a mission to regain his bruised ego.

‘You’ll go when I tell you,’ Saffron murmured to him.

‘I only take orders from one person, honey.’ Manx grinned, jabbing a finger at his own chest. ‘Me.’

‘Fine,’ Saffron said, pulling the shotgun from the foot-well and offering it to him. ‘You’d better lead from the front then.’

Manx’s bravado wilted as quickly as his stubby white dick had the previous night. He blanched, his eyes fixed on the gun.

‘You brought the damned thing,’ he blustered. ‘I’m not carrying it for you.’

Saffron lowered the weapon back out of sight.

‘Best you do as I say then, understood, Colon?’

Manx avoided her gaze and ignored the giggles from the rear of the van, shrugging and stroking his threadbare goatee beard as he turned back to watch the front of the laboratories on the
opposite side of the road.

‘Why the hell are we hitting this little place anyway?’ he muttered, trying to draw attention away from her insult. ‘It’s hardly worth the effort.’

‘Any place like this is worth the effort,’ Saffron retorted. ‘As long as there’s a single vivisection operation in the United States, in the world, it’s worth it.
Would you want to be in there, being tested?’

She turned as a small knot of people exited the main building, and felt a jolt of apprehension twist her stomach.

‘This is it,’ she said, sliding the shotgun into a slim carry-all and opening her door. ‘Ready?’

More furtive glances from Ruby Lily in the rear seat, and Manx swallowed thickly as he gazed at her, but all three of them moved to exit the camper.

‘Go, now!’ Saffron snapped.

She climbed out of the camper, shouldering the carryall and striding purposefully to the main road, crossing it before descending the asphalt opposite. The white building in front loomed above
her, the expensively manicured gardens and beautifully crafted logo mounted on the walls hiding the horrors she knew lay within, of animals poisoned, murdered and dissected so that the mascara of
Hollywood starlets wouldn’t smudge so easily. The thought fired her anger as she approached the scientists now ten feet away, their eyes taking in her appearance and that of her companions
and the first flicker of panic distorting their features.

One of them, a young man with a thin beard, turned back for the door.

Saffron took the carry-all from her shoulder, letting it fall away to reveal the sawn-off as her features contorted into a mask of rage.