Mutant (23 page)

Chapter 15

He hadn’t prepared for rain.

The drops streamed down his face and got in his eyes, making it nearly impossible to see as he knelt in the darkness trying to cut through the fence with wire cutters. The wire proved to be much thicker than he’d thought, and he kept losing his grip on the handles as he strained to make each snip. He also couldn’t stop shivering. Despite his exertions, the combined effect of the wind and wet clothing compounded his loss of body heat.

“Shit!” he said, the cutters once more slipping from his grasp. He felt more miserable by the second.

It had seemed such a good idea in the afternoon when he returned to his car determined to find out what lay below that metal cover. He drove over to the railyard as he’d planned, but on the way spotted a general store that catered to farmers. There he bought heavy-duty wire cutters, a crowbar, and a flashlight, the clerk eyeing him suspiciously as he checked the items through. While topping up his gas tank at a nearby service station, he also purchased a disposable camera with a flash. Picking up wet-weather gear had never crossed his mind at the time, not with the sky a magnificent blue spotted by little more than a few puffy, nonthreatening clouds.

Nor had he thought he should be in any hurry to get back to the greenhouses. Nightfall would be best, he figured. He might get away with wandering around the perimeter of the place behaving like a bird-watcher in broad daylight, but snipping his way in required the cover of darkness.

At the railway yard he had posed as a train buff with his camera as a prop and struck up a conversation with the yardmen. He even popped a few photos of the rusting diesel switcher as it rumbled to and fro to complete the illusion, and before long turned the conversation to a topic he figured they’d bite at. “So, who uses railcars to ship stuff these days? I hear branch lines are dying out.”

A wiry, gray-haired man who wore an engineer’s cap shoved well back on a wizened forehead had glared at him from eye sockets as deep as a pair of wrinkled leather pouches. “Are you a reporter?” he demanded.

“No, I’m a doctor. I just like trains.”

“It’s those reporters that are always predictin’ the end of the railroads,” he declared sullenly.

Steele commiserated, and added the consolation that at least one new company seemed to have given them business, gesturing with his thumb in the general direction of Agrenomics.

One of the younger men let out a snort of derision. “Not anymore. We hauled our last shipment out of there a week ago. And it wasn’t much of a contract this time, since we didn’t send it very far. Plugged it into a local freight headed for Queens.”

“They used to ship more?” Steele prodded.

“Oh, yeah. Once a week pretty well all winter,” continued the youth, “and those cars we hooked into transcontinental freights, heading south or southwest. I remember because we always had to fill out waybills labeling them as hazardous products.”

“Really? What kind of stuff would an outfit like them ship that would be dangerous?”

“Maybe he’s one of them environmentalists,” interrupted the old man, glaring at him again. “Don’t tell him nuthin’.”

“Oh, put a plug in it, Dusty,” said the youth, giving Steele a wink. “Or you’ll make the doc here think there’s something to hide.”

The old man scowled at his junior but kept quiet.

The youth leaned toward Steele. “Dusty’s been suspicious of outsiders coming around ever since steam gave way to diesel. He figures all change is for the worse, and that people asking questions is the surest way to stir it up.”

“So what does Agrenomics ship?” Steele pressed, trying to sound innocently curious.

The young man shrugged. “What farmers always use—products to make their crops yield more—except this time it’s that genetically modified stuff that’s been in all the papers lately. It don’t bother me none. I figure those guys over there know what they’re doing, and they’re super careful, telling us to classify it in the same category as pesticides as far as handling instructions go, just to be safe. In other words, it’s nothing you’d want to take a bath in, but probably no worse than a lot of the other toxic shit we haul.”

A half hour later Steele had pulled into the parking lot of the roadside restaurant he saw earlier near Agrenomics. After ordering a beer for himself, the only person he managed to show his scar to and talk about Pizza Face with turned out to be the barman. “I never saw a guy who looked like that,” he said, studying the composite drawing that Steele had handed him. “But I don’t much see anybody come in from there anymore.”

“Really?” said Steele, sounding incredulous and looking around at the neon and Western decor of the place. “But why?” he demanded, as if people who wouldn’t hang out in such a fine saloon must be crazy.

“Layoffs!” the barkeep growled, imbuing the word with the rich contempt he obviously felt it deserved. He stood about six foot two, wore a blue denim shirt with cutoff sleeves, and had a motorcycle tattooed over a Confederate flag on one of his considerable biceps. His name tag read TEX; his accent said Brooklyn. “They started handing them out two weeks ago all of a sudden-like with no warning. Everybody’s been told it’s just a summer schedule, but nobody believes that. One of the women in their finance office says that despite all the hoopla when the place first opened, they never really got the volume of business she’d been led to expect. Hell, why should I be surprised? Half the biotech stocks I own tanked last March and still haven’t recovered.” If there’d been a spittoon in the place, Steele felt the man would have used it to put a period on the end of this bit of insight.

“Do they still use security guards?” Steele asked. “Maybe one of them can tell me more about the guy who set his dogs on me.”

“They mostly work at night, and never come in here anyway. They seem to have kept their jobs a bit longer than the others, at least until last week. I go by the place on my way home at night, and see their vans parked in the lot. Since Friday though, it looks as if even they’ve been cut back. There’s only been one vehicle left in front.”

Steele returned to his car, where he used his cellular to call home and warn Martha that he’d be late. Then he drove back to where a country road crossed the rail line leading to Agrenomics and parked. So they’re shutting down, he mused, sifting through everything else he’d heard in the course of the afternoon. And I suppose it could be because they’re broke. What the rail men said about shipments falling off certainly jibed with the bookkeeper’s lament about there being no new business. But the timing of the layoffs intrigued him.

He opened the door, got out, and stretched his legs. All around him blue fingers of dusk extended into the golden swirl of insects lingering over the fields. A pair of birds darted between the streaks of dark and light, the flash of their wings catching his attention and the occasional chirp of their evening song breaking the silence. Folding his arms and leaning against the car, he watched the creatures dive and swoop for a few seconds, still ruminating about Agrenomics.

The attack on him had occurred seventeen days ago. McKnight had showed up here asking questions a few days later. They’d started issuing the pink slips right on the heels of that visit. Coincidence again? Maybe. “But not bloody likely,” he muttered. Because if they were involved, McKnight would have rattled the hell out of them. Because even though I’d survived, they’d have felt secure that nobody, let alone Kathleen Sullivan, could subsequently link Pizza Face with them. Then a homicide detective arrives asking about a security guard with acne scars in connection with an attempt on my life.

His heart quickened. That’s why they’re clearing everyone out so fast. They don’t want anyone around in case the cops come back and somebody lets something slip. He pushed away from the car and started to pace, certain that he’d just seen through Agrenomics’s attempt to cover their tracks. Not an admission of guilt, he knew, but behavior suggesting that they had something to hide.

About that moment he noticed the rounded brow of a black cloud begin to peer at him over the horizon. But flushed with a sense that he’d somehow gained a step on whoever wanted him dead and might gain yet another if he found out what lay beneath the greenhouses, he’d refused even to consider putting off his planned sortie on account of a possible storm. Especially one that doesn’t look like it will amount to much, he told himself at the time.

The rain continued pelting him as he struggled to sever yet another stubborn link of wire. Goes to show what I know about weather, he thought, blinking fiercely and trying to squeeze yet more runoff from his eyes.

The floodlight nearest him stood more than a hundred feet away, just inside the perimeter, leaving virtually no illumination where he worked. Yet he didn’t want to risk using his flashlight, still convinced that simply because he hadn’t seen any sign of surveillance didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He knew that the digital cameras they’d installed at the hospital could function in almost no light; and one of the technicians had showed how their computerized zoom could zero in on a face half a mile away.

Above him the lightning cracked and seared the air, each discharge so close on top of the other that the thunder seemed continuous. His forearms began to quiver with each use of the cutters, his strength sapped by the force it took to cut the steel strands. He started wondering if a bolt from on high might strike the fence and put him out of his misery when the blades suddenly bit through a particularly recalcitrant link. The handles snapped shut, his knuckles rammed together, and he gave a howl of pain that most certainly would have alerted any guards patrolling the main building had it been a clear and silent night. Massaging his fingers as the pain receded, he all at once considered the storm a blessing.

He renewed his attack on the fence, and within twenty minutes had finished snipping out the side and the top of a two-foot square, enough to fold back an opening he could squeeze under. Grabbing his crowbar and flashlight, he crawled through, his body sliding easily over the wet mud. Timing his use of the flashlight to the lightning, he found the metal cover in short order. Taking the crowbar in both hands, he slipped the tip of its curved end under the rectangle’s edge and pried upward with all his might.

At first nothing budged. He gave another heave, and slowly it gave. Purchasing better leverage, he managed to slide the heavy slab a few inches off the opening.

No light came from the space below. Immediately he leaned over the dark slit and risked shining a beam from his flashlight into it.

Stairs. Heading perpendicular from the fence. But leading down to what?

Fearing he may already have set off some alarm by breaking the opening’s seal, he figured he had very little time. See what I can and get out, he told himself, starting to count seconds in his head.

Wrestling the cover to one side, he gave himself enough room to get in and, again using his torch, descended about a dozen steps. He found himself in a low corridor still leading in a direction that would take him under the greenhouse; twenty feet farther he came to a larger passageway at a ninety-degree angle to the one he was in. It, too, had no lights, but using his beam, he saw to the right that it ran as far as he could see. To the left he could make out a door where it ended about a hundred and fifty yards away. But not just any door. It looked like a hatch, the kind he’d expect to see on a submarine. And in the upper half he could see what appeared to be a window.

His count reached fifteen. He estimated the distance from the main building gave him less than sixty seconds more before the guards arrived. He started to sprint toward the door, determined to at least get a peek at what lay on the other side.

Chapter 16

“One steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats . . .” Resetting the clock in his head, he ticked off the seconds the same way he kept track of time while pumping a heart in ER. Racing at three strides a
steamboat
, he got twenty yards when his left calf muscles shot into spasm and snapped his tendons taut with the force of a rack.

“Shit!” he cried, stumbling forward and feeling as if someone had kicked him from behind. Staying on his feet, he continued to run but with a limp, and when his count reached fifteen, he’d barely covered half the distance. I won’t beat the guards at this rate, he thought, not if they’re already on the way.

As he hobbled along he looked for another passage leading off to the left hoping there might be a quicker way out for him. He saw none. In fact, there were no other exits or corridors leading anywhere. Strange, he thought, such a long tunnel with nothing but a solitary door at its end. As if they wanted as much distance as possible between what went on behind it and the main building. His curiosity soared, the count reached twentyfive, and his wet soles squeaked noisily as they slipped on the linoleum.

Overhead he spotted a tiny light glowing red as an ember in the darkness. Directing his flashlight toward it he illuminated a camera pointing straight at him. Well, if the guards didn’t know they had an intruder before, they do now. He quickened his pace, the rock-hard contraction in his bad leg tightening with every step, and his breathing growing ragged.

Drawing close to the door he focused his erratically weaving beam of light on the handle and caught sight of a number pad. He knew similar locks in the hospital took a four-digit code to open and quickly resigned himself that there’d be no getting in without the combination. He pulled from his pocket the camera he’d bought that afternoon.

There still weren’t any sounds of approaching guards in the corridor behind him. Maybe they’re coming up to where I cut the fence from the outside, he thought. I’m trapped if they do. What then? A bullet in the head . . . or would they call the police and charge me with breaking and entering? A felony conviction would leave him without a license to practice medicine. If it weren’t for Chet, he lamented, he’d rather the bullet.

At forty
steamboats
he reached the door. The thick window appeared to be made of Plexiglas and it distorted his light as he played it around the interior of the room inside. He made out lockers, benches, and a cart stacked with what seemed like surgeons’ greens along with boxes of disposable latex gloves. It looked like the changing room of an OR.

He moved his light toward the back and saw windows on either side of another hatchlike door. Again glare made it difficult to see, but through them he spotted workbenches, ventilation hoods, racks of specimen tubes, and even an ovenlike incubator—all identical to the equipment found in any hospital bacteriology or virology lab. But when he shot his beam through the window of the second door and saw a space bristling with nozzles with a third airtight hatch beyond it, he knew this to be nothing like any ordinary hospital facility he’d ever seen.

Swinging the beam farther to the right he gave a start, seeing in the circle of light what resembled a row of human skins hanging limply against the wall. He quickly recognized that they were a dozen silver-gray outfits, each with gloves, boots, and a visored helmet attached in an ensemble. A black corrugated tube trailed out the back of the headgear like a dreadlock and led to a utility belt in the suit’s waistband, suggesting a separate air supply. Three other such outfits hung nearby, these crimson and equipped with cylinders on much bulkier belt packs. Dangling from the ceiling overtop of everything were coils of small orange hoses with metal tips, the kind used to put compressed air in tires.

Sweeping his torch back to the foreground he saw an area of shelves stacked with what looked like binders, books, and videos. On an adjacent table rested a VCR and TV.

A door slammed against the wall in the distance. Voices and running footsteps followed. He spun around to see a faraway rectangle filled with light and small shadowy figures. Above them fluorescent lamps flickered to life, and the harsh white illumination marched toward him section by section.

He turned back to the window, raised his camera, and panned, snapping a string of flash photos the instant before darkness disappeared at his end of the corridor.

Then he ran for the exit, directly toward the men who were coming at him. He counted six shapes, but couldn’t make out if they were carrying guns. They ordered him to stop, their shouts sounding hollow echoing along the closed space. He pulled his jacket up over the top of his head and kept his face down as he scooted under the camera, the way he’d seen mobsters do when they got nabbed in front of TV reporters. If I do get away, he thought, it had better be without leaving them picture ID.

Peering up through his eyebrows, he estimated the half dozen guards hurtling in his direction were twice the distance from the opening for the stairs as he was. They were also closing the ratio fast. His heart pumping as hard as his thighs, he tried to run faster. What would my cardiologist say if he could see me? he wondered.

The side hallway now looked fifty yards away, the men a hundred and fifty. He couldn’t make out their features, but at this distance he’d no trouble hearing the menace in their words.

“Stop, you bastard!”

“Halt now, or we’ll shoot!”

“You’re a dead man, fuck-face!”

He saw one of them start to pull a gun from a holster.

Shit!

He poured on more speed, ignoring the throbbing in his leg and keeping his eye on the man with the weapon. He can’t risk firing a shot and puncturing the sealed door behind me, Steele reasoned, relieved to see him keep the muzzle pointed at the ceiling. But once we’re up top, I’ll be an open target for sure.

A final spurt halved his distance to the stairs while they still seemed a hundred yards away. Rounding the corner he had barely a fifty-yard lead. He bounded up the stairs and pulled himself out the hatch in seconds. Grabbing his crowbar he sprinted to the opening in the fence and dived through it sliding facedown in the mud. Taking no more than a second to hook the flap into place with one of the cut links, he made for the darkness of the adjacent field.

The storm hadn’t abated any, the rain hitting his face like a blast from a cold shower as his feet slithered in the soaked earth. Lightning bathed everything in white so continuously that he knew if he continued upright they’d see him easily. He dropped to all fours where he’d be hidden between the rows of corn and scurried on his hands and knees for what he guessed to be another hundred yards, then risked a glance over his shoulder into the dimly lit compound. His pursuers, their flashlights bobbing in the darkness, ran from greenhouse to greenhouse, still inside the fence. They hadn’t found where he’d cut his way through yet.

Heading diagonally toward the railway line, he scampered crablike on his hands and feet traveling a few hundred yards more past a line of trees before he stood erect and ran full out. He found the tracks in a rare interval of darkness, pitching headfirst down a low embankment, landing on his nose, and skidding across the gravel to the ties. Stopping an inch before cracking his head against the rail, he muttered, “Where’s the goddamned lightning when I need it?”

Fifteen minutes later he climbed in his car, wheeled it back toward the highway, and roared away from Agrenomics. He’d have to find another route back to New York. No way would he risk driving by their front gate.

“They’re using moon suits, Kathleen, and the place has got an air lock with what looks like decontamination showers. I saw a level-four virology facility once during an ER conference at the CDC. It’s where they deal with the most hazardous microbes in the world, such as Ebola and Lassa. I swear this could be a smaller version of it.” He’d reached her on his cellular while filling up with gas and getting directions for New York. “Somehow I’ve got to get back in, especially to look at the documents and videos they’ve got stored there.” He didn’t add
If I’m not
in jail
, but he thought it.

“Wait until you hear my news, Richard,” she replied, and proceeded to tell him all about her conversation with Julie Carr.

“My God,” said Steele when he’d heard her out.

“I even think the vaccine may be what Taiwan and Oahu had in common and the vectors for it are probably what Pierre Gaston wanted me to look for in the Rodez samples.”

“Why would it be in Taiwan?”

“Because exploiting a natural outbreak of bird flu there by unloading a half-assed vaccine on unsuspecting farmers in order to make a quick buck is exactly the way some biotechnical companies would operate. Except in this case they did something particularly harebrained. Criminal, even.”

“Knowingly criminal? You mean they knew they were risking a recombinant event from the outset?”

“No, about that they were probably as blindly ignorant as the rest of the world. What they deliberately ignored was that the use of any bird flu vaccine in an active endemic area should have been contraindicated, the same way giving a flu shot to humans who already have the flu is contraindicated because it would make them sicker. Farmers scattering the feed around a flock where some of the birds were already infected would only fuel the outbreak.”

“My God!” he said again. “But how can you prove that’s what Agriterre did?”

“Once I get the primers I need from Julie, I’ll show they made the stuff. It’ll be up to Inspector Racine to track down where they marketed it.”

“So that’s what the attempts to kill you and me have been all about? To cover up a faulty vaccine for chickens?”

“To cover up the fact it killed Tommy Arness, and probably the child who died in Taiwan. Any good lawyer there could at least argue the vaccine certainly made the outbreak worse. That’s two counts of negligent homicide and a potential class-action suit for damages from Taiwanese farmers if the story came to light. You don’t think trying to escape jail and massive lawsuits would be motive enough for murder?”

He didn’t know what to answer. Her logic sounded plausible, sort of. If she were talking about just Biofeed in Hawaii and a few people trying to avoid prison, maybe he could see them killing Hacket and trying to kill her to keep the truth about Tommy Arness’s death secret. But the scale and international sweep of what they were up against here—Agriterre in France, the murder of a French geneticist, the killers in Hawaii running around with silencers and speaking a language native to Iran or Afghanistan, and finally the attack on himself in New York—it all seemed such a massive web. Too big to be only about a careless attempt to immunize a bunch of hens. Besides, when companies of this size make mistakes, even lethal ones, they usually hired lawyers, not killers.

“Frankly, Kathleen, a lot doesn’t fit,” he said, and proceeded to tell her why. When he finished, silence reigned on the line, interrupted by spurts of static as a few flashes lit up the distant sky. Wandering away from his car to find an area where the reception would be better, he felt his wet and muddied clothes stick to him like paste, but at least it had stopped raining. “Kathleen?”

“I’m here. Just thinking over what you said.”

“There’s something else I can’t make sense of. What’s Agrenomics’s interest in all this? They weren’t even in operation until a year after Tommy Arness got infected.”

She hesitated a few seconds. “I don’t know. Maybe the person or persons responsible for that vaccine came on staff at Agrenomics in the meantime. Possibly they’re even doing similar work with bird flu in the lab you saw, intending to market it again, and don’t want the real story about how dangerous it is to get out.”

“You don’t need all the expense of a level-four facility to handle the usual strains of influenza virus, including H5N1. Masks, gloves, gowns, and vented hoods would suffice—basically the same level of precautions I’ve seen you take against the spread of genetic vectors in your own lab.”

“It does sound like overkill,” she admitted.

“Whatever they’re making at Agrenomics, I think we have to assume they laid out all the money it would take to build what I saw because they actually need a level-four viral facility.”

As he waited through another earful of thoughtful silence from her, he started to shiver. Soaked to the skin with nothing to change into he felt cold to the bone.

“So what do you think they’re doing?” she asked.

He grimaced to keep his teeth from chattering. “I’ve no idea. You know the field. What would a geneticist be up to with those kinds of pathogens?”

“Whoa! You’re scaring me, Richard.”

“What are the possibilities?”

“None that are sane. There’s always talk among research geneticists about trying to attenuate one of the really infectious monsters, like the AIDS virus, and using it as an even more aggressive carrier than the ones we have now to transport genes. But even that’s not a level-four pathogen. The thought of a commercial outfit like Agrenomics playing with the organisms you mentioned? It gives me the creeps. . . .” She trailed off, her breath ending in the quick uneven gasps of a shudder. “Hell, only a lunatic would even think of that kind of thing.”

Wondering if she intended the epithet to include him, he said, “So what do we try now?”

“I think the first thing you should do is come over here to the lab and comfort a lady who you’ve frightened all to hell.”

His own breathing coasted to a full stop.

“I can hear you shivering, Richard. You must be soaked. From here it looked like a hell of a storm up your way.”

He said nothing.

“We’ve got a place to shower, and our hot plate always has a pot brewing. There are no robes, but we’ve lots of lab greens and white coats you can slip into while we dry your clothes. Then we can discuss strategy. After what you just suggested, we need to do some fast thinking. How about it? But before you come, call Martha and put her out of her misery with a word that you’re okay. I talked with her earlier, and she sounded worried sick.”