Necropolis (33 page)

“Sounds like Russian Roulette,” I said.

“More like cooking when you don’t know how ingredients will interact,” said Maggie. “You could produce the tastiest chili in existence or poison sludge.”

“Is that what the Shift is?” Armitage said.

“No!” barked Crandall. “Look, the Shift is carried by a retrovirus, I won’t deny that. But it’s a mutation of a bioweapon, not some experiment that got loose from our lab.”

“So you say.”

“I don’t deny we’ve capitalized on the event, but Surazal did not cause the Shift!”

I looked at Maggie. At her polygraph eyes. “He’s telling the truth,” she said. “As he knows it.”

“Nicole could’ve kept him in the dark,” said Armitage.
 

“Okay,” I said, “Go back to Surazal in my time. Why would they risk running illegal experiments in the first place?”

“Sheer competitive impatience, probably. Marketable products were at least a decade away. That’s ten to fifteen years of very expensive R&D before the first big product comes to market. And faster is not only cheaper: whoever gets there first, well… We’re talking about products as world-transforming as the telephone, the light bulb, the personal computer. Remember how long Microsoft had the market cornered?”

“What kind of ‘world-transforming’ products are we talking about?”

“A gene-therapy drug that produces more intelligent children? More attractive children? Disease-resistant children?”

I’d forgotten Jonathan was here until he spoke. “A world where ignorance, disease and disparity are banished. Where every child is a genius and an athlete. Think of how much we could accomplish.”

I shook my head. How could anyone retain that kind of optimism? Was it faith or denial? From wherever it sprang, I’d never feel it. I was built different—I’d come out of my mother wanting to slap the doctor back.

“Drug companies don’t just give away billion dollar treatments, Jonathan,” said Armitage.

“Neither do insurance companies,” said Maggie. “Only the rich would be able to afford them.”

“The beginning of a true genetic underclass,” I breathed. “The rich could actually become physically and mentally superior to the poor.”

“What about longer-lived?” asked Jonathan, getting us back on point.

“Surazal could have been exploring anti-aging,” said Crandall. “A bit early for significant research, but… perhaps.”

“Logical. Except for the fact that Nicole Struldbrug hasn’t aged a day in forty years.”

Crandall reeled like I’d struck him. “What are you talking about?”

Could he really not know? I thought back to that cement room. Nicole
had
sent him away before admitting it to me in the cement room. “How long have you known Nicole, doctor?”

“Sixteen years.”

“Who ran the company before her brother, Adam?”

“Isodor, their father. It’s been family-held since the 1800s.”

“Then how did you know I’d been killed?”

“Nicole told me.”

“She told you she killed someone?”

“I balked at first when I learned that our team was to use human test subjects. So, as
incentive
, she told me a story about encountering a resistant investigator and what happened to the woman and her husband. She didn’t tell me it had happened forty years ago. Then, to make sure I really understood, she brought in McDermott. I took one look at his scarred face and realized I didn’t have a choice anymore.”

A glacier crept over the surface of my thoughts. “McDermott’s dead.”
 

“No, he revived during the Dark Eighteen down in Ecuador or somewhere.”

“Bolivia,” I hissed.

“When he was shipped to Necropolis, she made him Director of Security.”

Yet another lie from Lady Nicole. Alvarez’s tattered newspaper clipping rushed back at me. The close-cropped platinum blonde hair, the dead blue eyes… The man who’d blackmailed Hector Alvarez into killing two people…
 

When I came back a minute later, everyone was looking at me in alarm. Maggie placed her hand on my arm.

“Donner,” she said.

My mouth was bone-dry. “I’m okay.” I swallowed. “When did Adam become CEO?”

“About fifteen years ago, after Izzy retired.” Crandall clicked his tongue. “Tell me why you think Nicole hasn’t aged in forty years.”

So I gave it to him, the whole thing. Nicole in that hallway forty years ago. The murders. What she said in the cement room. Instead of looking shocked, Crandall quietly nodded to himself. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“It… explains a few things.”

“Like what?”

Crandall’s eyes fired in scientific passion. “Nicole provided us with human tissue samples to reverse-engineer. Tissue samples with remarkable properties.”

“From where?”

“She wouldn’t say. But the cells were resistant to free radicals. Very long telomere chains. And they had a Hayflick limit which was greater than normal by a factor of three.”

“Someone translate that, please?” asked Armitage.

“They’re factors in aging,” I said.

“We assumed it was gen-enged material, stolen from another company. We never dreamed it could be from a real person. Because that would mean that the person could be—”

“Hundreds of years old,” whispered Maggie.
 

***

Maggie, Armitage, Max and I stood with Jonathan in his office at the rear of the sanctuary. It had been a storeroom for Maury’s Deli, but now it housed a couple of gray filing cabinets and a desk salvaged from a defunct insurance company. Since the Shift, life insurance wasn’t what it used to be.

Max tossed his smartscreen onto the wall. A graphic flashed up, bathing us in blue sheen. “Surazal began as a chemical manufacturing company in 1879 in Germany. The founder, Abel Struldbrug, was a German Jew. The factory was destroyed during Dresden’s firebombing in World War II. Abel’s son Abraham got out of Germany and restarted the business in New York in 1946. He retired in ’83, passing the reigns to son Isodor—Izzy to his friends. By 2005, the company had become a diversified conglomerate. One of the nation’s largest drug companies, it had its fingers in a lot of pies. They had subsidiaries that manufactured weapons and provided private security for contractors in the Gulf wars. Combined with their scientific and pharmaceutical divisions, they were perfectly situated to step in when things went to hell.”

Max punched a couple keys and the image changed. “Adam Struldbrug took over as CEO from Izzy in 2038. Nicole is Adam’s twin. She’s been a thorn in his side since day one.”

“Oh yeah?”

Max smiled. “Even with their tight control of information, stories leak out.”

“Such as?”

“A couple of her assistants have gone missing. And there was a very public case of sibling rivalry in the Russian Tea Room. Nicole smashed a wine glass into Adam’s face. He needed dermal regeneration.”

“Ouch.”

“Do you think Adam knows what’s going on?”

Max shrugged his shoulders. It was like tectonic plates shifting. “Given Surazal’s size, maybe not.”

I remembered my chance encounter with the man. His comment about spying on Nicole. I had trouble believing he’d be out of the loop on something this big. But Nicole was as hard to pin down as a rattlesnake.

“And get this,” said Max. “Dr. Gavin, the Head of R&D? The guy you talked to? He’s MIA. Officially, on vacation.”

“He’s on vacation, alright,” said Armitage. “In hell.”

“We’re missing the bigger question,” I said.
 

“Okay, soldier,” said Armitage grumpily. “Enlighten us.”

“Is this mutant DNA hers?” I rubbed my eyes. “If Nicole’s as old as we think, is Adam, also? If so, how can they be Isodor Struldbrug’s children? And how does this all connect to the Shift?”
 

“Crandall was supposed to clear things up,” said Maggie. “But all we have are new questions. What now?”

“First,” Armitage said, “We find out what Jakob knows about the Lifetaker.”

“And if that doesn’t help, we go to the source,” I said, turning to Armitage. “Have your tactical people draw up a plan.”

“A plan for what?” he said.

“Snatching Nicole Struldbrug.”

That went over real well.

42

BRIAN

B
rian noticed the cargo truck for several reasons. First, it was an automated Studebaker Transtar Deluxe. Brian had never seen a two-tone version before. Its owner had taken poor care of it. The chromium was tarnished and there were dings all over the pylon fenders. Not surprising. City residents loathed smarty cargo vehicles. They caused terrible traffic slowdowns since they
never
exceeded the speed limit, let alone drove aggressively. In this city, lawful driving was just plain unnatural. And because there were no human operators to scream at, drivers vented their frustration by chucking bottles and trash at the Sunday drive-bots.

Also strange was that the Transtar would arrive at Chambers and North End Avenue this early in the morning… five-thirty, when the Blister glowed pink and the vendor stands were curling back their morphinium carapaces. But Brian was no expert on the church delivery schedules, so he just kept an eye out.

It was freezing in the dawn light. He missed his union-suit, which had maintained his body temp at a perfect 96.8. Somebody stole the underwear with the rest of his smartclothes. Now all he had was a stinky wool coat that weighed twenty pounds and made his neck itch.
 

The truck’s only marking was a blue cross intertwined with a trident-like symbol. Brian remembered it from school. It was a Hindu trishula, a symbol of the three-sided aspect of Shiva—creator, protector, and destroyer. Which meant it was a Temple vehicle, not some vendor.

The routine was always the same. The truck would turn into the narrow alley, stopping next to the metal doors in the macadam that led to the church’s basement.

Brian’s mother had told him never to walk across loading doors. He’d dismissed her over-protectiveness, finding the saggy bounce of the metal exciting—

Emotion surged hotly in his throat. He stamped his feet until slivers of hurt shot up his shins. Fuck! Kid’s stuff. His old life was never coming back.
 

Once the loading doors were open, sealed boxes floated on magloaders down into the bowels of the church. But no one was ever there to supervise. Another oddity. Customers still didn’t trust automated loaders enough to leave them unattended. Usually there was some Teamster with his butt crack showing. But not here. Just the steady humming flow of those boxes up and down.

Come to think of it… There were as many boxes leaving the Temple as arriving. What would a Temple regularly export in such quantity? It couldn’t be garbage. Autocompactors rumbled through the streets twice a week and vacuumed the city’s dumpsters. So, what? Pamphlets, newsletters? But these boxes were covered in official-looking government labels, and they were really long, long enough to…
 

Long enough to smuggle
people
in and out of the building!

People who didn’t want to be seen.
 

Brian smiled.

That night at check-in, he told Yrko. Yrko told Loretta. And Loretta, after receiving her bundle of godsmack, transmitted the information to Nicole.

***

The complicated events that led a sheltered son of a prominent East Side attorney to report a generic delivery van to his tribe of gangbangers were as ironic as they were unlikely. Brian never realized the part he played in the raid on the Ender Temple and the loss of so many lives, because the next night, Yrko killed him.

Yrko had taken a strong dislike to the bindlepunk. The brat thought he was better than everybody else because he came from money. Fuckers like that had sneered down their noses at him his whole goddamned life. So late that night, Yrko tried to rape Brian, to teach him a lesson. As he himself had been raped in the tombs of a Rikers VCVC Prison Barge in the East River. Yrko had been violated by six men on that awful boat. A lesson he decided to pass along to Brian. Brian, surprisingly, fought back. Yrko lost his temper and broke his neck.

 
It was four days before Brian’s sixteenth birthday.
 

His father—had he lived—would’ve been fifteen.

His mother, having lost her entire family to forces unknown, upped her daily consumption of Xanax and wine and was soon another of the city’s walking dead.

43

DONNER

W
e were smuggled out of the temple in a polycomposite crate built to ship dark matter. If anyone looked close enough, they’d see EMD holostickers plastered across the sides. Which was ludicrous, because if someone was looking close enough to verify approval by the Exotic Materials Directorate, they’d almost certainly be wondering why an Ender Temple would need enough juice to power a suborbital. But the box was the right length and shape, so that’s what we used.

To me, it was just another coffin.

Dark matter had the helpful characteristic of being almost undetectable. Which gave the delivery driver an excellent excuse when checkpoint scanners couldn’t get an accurate image of a crate’s contents. And, my God, you couldn’t
open
the crates, man! You wanna contaminate the neighborhood? So the only thing the Surazal rent-a-cops could do was check the forged ID and motion us on with irritated jerks of the head. It worked well for the Cadre’s little underground railroad. It would keep working until some security ace cross-referenced shipments and discovered that this little church shuffled around twenty times more dark matter than existed on the planet.