Mutant (14 page)
Steele raced from Sandra’s bedroom after calling 911 and peered over the edge of the balcony, desperately searching for a way to reach the ocean. A story below and fifty feet to his left, he saw steps leading down the cliffs from a small yard. Not bothering to dress, he ran inside, raced to the ground floor, and found another set of glass doors opening on what must have once been her son’s play area. In seconds he reached the stone staircase he’d seen from above and started down it, desperately scanning the churning waters for any sign of Sandra. Each time the moon emerged he saw white surf curling around large black knuckles of coral amid open sections of frothing water. Maybe she landed in a deep tide pool, he prayed, but as he watched the thundering breakers and hissing foam of their aftermath, his hopes plummeted.
He reached a small cove and started scrambling over the rocks, slicing his palms and soles yet paying the cuts no mind. “Sandra!” he screamed, barely able to hear himself over the roar of the ocean. Occasionally a swell rose enough to engulf him, and he ended up clinging to spiny outcrops as the water surged back out to sea, threatening to suck him in with it. At one moment he lost his grip and felt himself being swept away until an incoming breaker slammed him back toward shore. He managed to get his legs up to break the impact between himself and the jagged surfaces waiting for him there, then screamed as the entire length of his body scraped over their projections and into shallower water.
Scrambling to his feet, he found himself on a flat rise where the surf only occasionally reached. He peered into the maelstrom around him, vainly trying to catch sight of her, and had all but given up hope when he spotted what looked like a patch of seaweed caught in a tide pool. A breaking wave parted the black strands to reveal the white roundness of her face and breasts as she floated on her back, seeming to stare at the stars with sightless eyes.
In seconds he was down to her, cradling her neck in his arm and covering her cold lips with his in an attempt to blow into her lungs. But he’d no sooner begun when he felt his arm covered in some sort of sludge. At first he thought it had to be a kind of pollutant, perhaps from a sewer outlet. Then he realized that it had the consistency of toothpaste squeezed from the tube, and that strands of the stuff were streaming out the back of her skull.
He instantly retreated into the familiarity of technique, diligently providing her with two puffs of air followed by fifteen compressions on her chest—exactly as he’d always taught his residents in cases of a solitary rescuer—rather than face the reality that her lungs would never breathe again.
That’s how the paramedics, the police, and the accompanying media found him—naked, methodically doing CPR on her corpse, and oozing blood head to toe from his abraded skin.
Chapter 10
His story would normally have appealed only to the local appetites with a taste for the lurid. But because he’d been on the national networks the previous evening calling for the regulation of naked DNA, the media swarmed all over the tragedy. By noon local time he’d become the lead item on all the major evening news broadcasts back East. Images of him draped in a blanket, looking dazed, and still smeared in blood while being led to a police car began to fill television screens across four time zones as commentators read out seamy story leads.
“Yesterday’s outspoken critic of naked DNA, Dr. Richard Steele, is himself found naked, early this morning, in a suicide’s love nest.”
“The naked truth! DNA expert now questioned in doctor’s suicide.”
“From triumph to tragedy: Credibility of advocate for regulating naked DNA ends up on the rocks. Details after a word from our sponsor.”
No one bothered to mention that the cops released him later that same morning. Neither did the announcers show any qualms about smearing the concerns of an entire scientific community in their eagerness to get him. But that they reduced Sandra’s death to little more than a titillating aside he found the most disgusting of all.
“Bastards!” he screamed, hurling his remote at the TV in his hotel room, then wincing with the effort. His many scrapes and cuts had been tended to in the ER of Honolulu General, but they still burned like hell.
The television survived his assault, only to show some media stud with blow-dried hair who proceeded to gleefully report what Kathleen Sullivan had been put through last night.
“My God,” said Steele, having heard nothing about it. Aghast, he tried to phone her, only to be told that she’d already checked out and left for the airport. She may not even know what a circus I’ve made of things, he thought, wondering if she’d caught the bulletins about him before getting on her plane.
Next he called home and got Martha on the line. “I’m all right,” he quickly reassured her. “The police let me go—”
“Just come home, Richard,” she interjected. “Now! Chet needs you here. He’s too ashamed to go to school in the morning.”
Three hours later he got a standby seat. Before boarding he called Dr. Julie Carr and requested that she inform him when the memorial for Sandra would be.
“Of course,” she replied without hesitation. “But what about you? Are you all right? It must have been awful for you.”
The kindness in her voice nearly broke the tight hold he had on his emotions. “Oh, I’ll be okay.” To his own ears he didn’t sound too convincing.
“Dr. Steele,” she said, “this may be presumptuous, but you probably need to hear someone tell you that you didn’t cause her death.”
Nor did I prevent it! he nearly snapped back. “Thanks,” he said instead. “I appreciate your saying it.”
“Take care of yourself.”
By dawn, New York time, he pulled up to his front door at Thirty-sixth and Lexington. Depositing his luggage in the entranceway as noiselessly as possible, he went directly to Chet’s room, where he tiptoed over to the head of his son’s bed and waited for him to waken. As he sat watching the boy sleep, the sun peeped through the blinds and spread across the youth’s face. Hesitantly Steele reached out and stroked the dark unruly hair. Chet stirred in his sleep, then fell still, accepting the touch with a contented smile.
One Week Later
Morgan stared sullenly over the gray surface of New York’s East River as it surged south toward the tip of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the ocean beyond. The color reminded him of the paint used on his garage floor—glossy and meant to disguise grease or oil, but never quite doing the job. Its rush to depart America made him entertain similar ideas of leaving the country.
He raised his eyes to where, on the Queens side opposite him, a giant
Coca-Cola
sign bade the water’s flotsam adieu. The
C
s towered nearly as tall as the multitude of towers, grimy chimneys, and concrete silos that dominated the industrial stubble of that far shore. Behind him descended the continuous noise of traffic from the overhead Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the sounds blending with the cries of seagulls. Farther back still, the buildings of New York City Hospital and the protean complex of the medical school, each edifice sporting an insignia that resembled a giant happy-face button, smiled down on him. Over it all fell a glistening drizzle, the droplets too fine to be seen yet substantial enough to make the air feel like a filmy gauze against his face.
“You tell our client that he damn well better not arrange another ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ type of accident for her anytime soon!” exploded the man standing beside him. “It would look too suspicious. As it is, with those idiots of his bungling everything the way they did—I mean, using guns with silencers during what’s suppose to be a home invasion—give me a fucking break! We’re just damn lucky that despite everything the Honolulu cops still interpreted the fiasco more or less the way we intended.”
Morgan said nothing in reply, continuing to stare into the distance as the murk of evening clotted around them. In forty-nine more days, I’ll be fixed for life and safely hiding out in a tropical paradise, he kept telling himself. But the business with Sullivan and the increasing prospects of getting caught had left him so rattled that the promise of unlimited wealth no longer steeled his nerve the way it used to. Nor did the chance to destroy the livelihood of those at Biofeed International, who’d willingly profited by what he’d done and then spit him out when it went bad, fire him up anymore. He’d even begun to fantasize about bolting, except he knew that their “client” would have him hunted down and killed. For the first time in his life, sleep no longer came without the help of pills, and all too often when he did nod off, he’d awaken a few hours later, his heart pounding and his breathing labored.
“Panic attacks,” his doctor had decreed, handing him yet more capsules, red this time instead of canary yellow.
A gust of wind slapped him from behind, pulling him out of his reverie with a dash of cold rain to the back of his head and neck. He glanced sideways, studying the man who had recruited him to this madness with the lure of money and revenge as bait. He knew he better choose what he said to him with care, or he’d reveal the extent his appetite for seeing it through had weakened and get himself tagged a security risk. “But if she finds the vectors and goes public,” he began, “someone at Biofeed may panic and decide to come clean. Then it’ll be my name and the connection with Rodez that turns up. You know she has to die before we let any of that happen.”
“I know, goddamnit! I know! But kill her now, and the police will rethink her ‘close call’ in Hawaii. Right off, they’ll suspect that she might have been the target all along, after which it’s not such a stretch to consider somebody didn’t want her snooping around Hacket’s farm looking for genetic vectors related to bird flu. Once they start marching their homicide investigation down
that
particular path of inquiry, panicky tongues at Biofeed will be even more likely to loosen, and for sure the cops will find the trail through Biofeed to you. I repeat, tell our ‘client’ to call off his dogs!”
Morgan’s sensation of feeling trapped tightened its hold on him, juicing a squeeze of cold sweat from his already damp skin. “And how the hell am I going to persuade him to do that?” he snapped. “Don’t you get it? His team won’t quit. They’re probably already here in New York, still intent on offing her.”
“Get a message to the man. Remind him how little time there is to go. Tell him that it will take at least another three weeks for the lab workers in Hawaii to finish processing her specimens, perhaps longer. Even if they manage to uncover the vector, which is no sure thing given their inexperience, the discovery will be so unbelievable I’m predicting she’ll doubt the result and won’t dare release the findings without first confirming them at the lab here in New York. That could give us a few weeks more. We can stop her then, just before she finally links it all to Biofeed—”
“Too many ifs and maybes,” Morgan cut in, allowing his long simmering resentment at being ordered around to creep into his tone. “He won’t wait.”
“But he must! By that time, whether the cops pass her death off as a good, old-fashioned random act of violence, New York style, will hardly matter. Because whatever they finally decide, it will take them a few weeks more to figure it out, and then it will be too late for them to stop us.”
“That’s playing it unbelievably tight.”
“Kill her now, and you’ll end up giving the cops a full seven weeks to find you. Do you prefer that?”
Morgan’s stomach clamped into a knot. “Of course not!” he started to say, but the taste of bile tickled the back of his throat, and he had to swallow several times more before he could force it back down.
“Then we agree,” the man continued, taking advantage of Morgan’s difficulty speaking. “Except for God’s sake convince him to let us handle her this time. The way his exotic imported help does things, they’re liable to screw it up again.”
“What if she figures it all out and goes public earlier than you expect,” Morgan challenged as soon as he got his voice back, “before we can silence her?”
The man glared at him. “Don’t worry. My position gives me sufficient access to her that I can keep tabs on her progress.”
“We both know you can’t guarantee that,” Morgan countered, his defiance growing.
“The topic’s closed, Bob! Understand?” His bellow sent a dozen seagulls that had gathered around them flapping skyward and screeching in protest. “Or would you like me to start dealing with our ‘client’ directly and inform him that you no longer have the enthusiasm you initially showed for our project?”
Morgan immediately fell silent, feeling more ensnared than ever. His skin grew even stickier against his shirt, and he caught a whiff of his own sweat—sour and stale as it wafted out of the collar of his coat.
“Good. Then let’s consider that matter settled,” declared the man, his voice all at once as nonchalant as if he’d just passed some minor motion at a routine business meeting. “How’s our crop doing in the south?” he asked brightly.
Morgan couldn’t change gears so easily. Still seething over their exchange, he sullenly answered, “According to my sources, it’ll start being harvested, marketed, and replanted on schedule next week.”
“And you’ve made our client understand that as a weapon, it will be a sleeper, not like what we’re using for the initial strike. I don’t want him tracking us down afterwards with complaints that he’s getting impatient for results.”
“He’s been duly advised.”
“Good!”
Another item on the agenda imperiously dispensed with, thought Morgan as silence once more congealed in the space between them.
“Now, there is someone you should take care of immediately,” the man suddenly announced a few seconds later, “before he becomes a big problem.”
The statement caught Morgan completely off guard. “Who?”
“That doctor, Richard Steele—the one who spoke so eloquently at the conference and was on TV, then made such an ass of himself.”
“Him? I’ve already had him checked out. He’s harmless. My security people tell me he mostly spends his afternoons in the park with the other old men.”
“Don’t underestimate him. As a physician, his medical knowledge could neutralize this whole part of our operation”—he gestured up at the FDR—“if he found it out in time. And a doctor doesn’t rise to the top in ER without having brains or his share of nerve. Should Sullivan ever get him revved up enough that he teamed up with her, and the two of them were on our tail, we’d be in trouble. Now here’s what I have in mind . . .”
The chatter of an approaching helicopter drowned the man out. No longer able to hear him, Morgan looked up and spotted the craft against a slate of black clouds that promised yet more showers. In seconds the stuttering roar amplified enough to hurt his ears as the machine drew closer, hovered above them, and then slowly descended to an asphalt tarmac off to their left that looked no bigger than a couple of tennis courts. Standing beside the surrounding chain-link fence, they were close enough to the accompanying blast of dusty air that they had to turn away, hunching their backs as it erupted around them. Morgan fished around in the pocket of his raincoat, its hem whipping about his legs, and brought out a disposable panoramic camera that he’d purchased from a souvenir shop on the way over. Looking very much like a tourist, he snapped a string of photos of the craft after it had settled onto the ground, making sure to include the familiar sight of the UN building in the background—as a landmark for his pilots.
“You’re sure our three copters will fit on that wee bit of space?” his companion shouted through cupped hands into his right ear, making it throb even more.
As if in answer, a second machine appeared overhead, adding to the din while it, too, slowly lowered itself until it rocked to a stop beside the first. While the whine of the rotors died down, Morgan pointed to the yellow markings within the landing area indicating where there remained room for a third, then continued to snap pictures. He seemed to be capturing the passengers as they disembarked and entered the small trailer home that served as a heliport depot for the greatest city on earth. In reality he focused on the nearby pumps and fuel storage tanks. In another shot he raised the lens enough that he also got a good picture of the hospital. In yet another he swung around a little farther south, capturing a wide angle view of the waterfront in that direction as well.
“And it’s certain we’ll have access to this facility at the precise time we need?” questioned his companion.
“Absolutely,” Morgan replied, finishing off the roll of film and pocketing the camera. “None of the companies using this port can park here overnight, and local air traffic will be shut down a half hour prior to the start of the show. We’ve scheduled our arrival to refuel just in time to beat that deadline. Then we’ll feign mechanical difficulty, to postpone taking off until it’s time to start the attack.”
The man turned to survey the expressway overhead. “And how much of
it
will be shut down this year?”
“Twenty-eight blocks—from Fourteenth to Forty-second.” Looking up, he gestured with both arms wide open as if he were telling a fish story. “And because it’s the millennium, they’re also closing off a smaller section below the Brooklyn Bridge.”
His companion continued to scan the edge of the elevated roadway, and Morgan, in spite of himself, began to picture what it would be like crammed with people. In his imagination he added a crowd along the river’s edge and an even bigger throng of latecomers jamming the streets leading to the river. As for the number of onlookers that could pack themselves onto every available rooftop, he’d no idea, but the city had already issued an estimate that total attendance in this particular area would hit a new record, topping at least three hundred thousand.
“How will you deploy the craft?”
“One for the FDR. One for the walkways at the river’s edge where we are now, and one for the side streets, including the rooftops, all the way back to Lexington. That third pilot will be paying particular attention to people on the hospital buildings.” He paused, visualizing each of the dozen or so structures capped off with a teeming crown of revelers. Then he added, “With any luck we’ll infect half their medical staff in a single pass, which will ultimately add to the confusion once victims start showing symptoms and come into ER. Of course, by then it’ll be their own DNA that’s making them ill, and they’ll be beyond medical help.” He hoped that his forced enthusiasm sounded convincing. In truth, the more he talked, the more filled with loathing he became.
“What height will you be spraying from?”
“At least a hundred feet, and it will feel gentle as a mist. Unlike what we shot into the corn plants, this vector, since it’s designed to be inhaled or to simply settle on exposed skin, eyes, or lips, can be delivered from much higher up with a far wider dispersal. At least, that’s what our lab simulations told us. And we figure the microscopic lipid particles we use to keep the invasive DNA intact will give the liquid a slightly greasy texture. At the end of a hot day, it might actually feel soothing to sunburned skin, inviting the targets to massage it into flesh that’s already inflamed. In fact, to minimize panic and everyone’s running away, we’re going to phone in rumors to the media that a skin-care company is pulling a publicity stunt, releasing one of their after-sun products onto the crowd. Hopefully that’ll maximize the numbers who we’ll douse.”
“And the infection rate?”
“According to our own animal trials, about forty percent of those exposed will succumb. That’s a hundred and twenty thousand people.”
“Oh, my God,” the man whispered, as softly as if uttering an actual prayer. He stared up at the expressway, wearing a look of dismay, the way a person might appreciate a troubling work of art.
Watching him, Morgan wondered if up to that moment the man had seen their plan only as an academic exercise, much as he himself had until one night over a cornfield in Oklahoma. Had his companion’s coming to the site and hearing the practical details finally driven home to him the full impact of what they were about to do? Now, maybe you’ll start to sweat it the way I have, he hoped. If so, from here on in, you and I will at least be on the same footing as far as nerve is concerned, and that ought to put an end to your unilateral threats to report waning enthusiasm. But in his own mind’s eye he continued to see the crowds as if they had already gathered in the freeway and along the river. They were all craning their necks and staring in his direction—compelled to see the monster who would fatally alter their genetic core.