Spiral (5 page)

“Mom, guess what? We had a Crawler funeral.”

“Care to explain that one?”

Dylan told her about the fungus that could decompose a MicroCrawler. Then he jumped into the car, put in his earbuds, and turned up the music, a kid just like any other. Liam watched her reaction, taking joy at the flash of excitement in her eyes. “Let me guess: you stole a few genes from an archaeal bacterium?”

Liam nodded. “An alkaliphilic.”

Maggie kissed her grandfather on the cheek. “Congratulations. Now come home with us. Have a late dinner. Tell me all about it.”

“Can’t. I have a northern blot running. And an RNA assay to finish.”

“Pop-pop. Come on. You look like you’re about to collapse.”

“I always look like this. ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat—’

“ ‘—upon a stick.’ Don’t be like this. It’s late. It’s almost nine.”

Liam kissed her on the forehead. “Go.”

LIAM RETURNED ALONE DOWN THE EMPTY HALLWAYS. MAGGIE
was right. An eighty-six-year-old man should be spending every second he had with his family, not in a research lab alone, shuffling genes in and out of fungi. But this was the way it had to be. His work was not yet finished.

Liam stopped at the door to his lab and listened. No sound.

He was worried, not without cause. The woman, the one who had been following him, was getting more brazen, less and less worried about being seen. He’d had fame-struck stalkers like this twice before—an unfortunate side effect of the kind of notoriety Liam had achieved—but nothing had ever come of it. The police had talked to them, and they’d faded away. Liam had dutifully reported this one to the campus police, but they had yet to identify her.

Perhaps she was harmless, perhaps not. She was the right age, but she didn’t move like a starstruck graduate student.

She moved like a professional.

Liam typed in a few commands and stood back to watch the Crawlers, then put his arthritic fingers to work at the thousand little tasks that the Crawlers still couldn’t do. They couldn’t, for example, set goals, choose which fungi to cull and which to propagate. They didn’t have an agenda to guide their actions. Agendas mattered a great deal. Liam’s agenda had been clear for more than sixty years, since that spring day in the Pacific. An agenda he kept entirely to himself.

Liam thought of Jake. On the pretext of showing Jake a rare herd of pure white deer that roamed the premises, Liam had taken him to Seneca Army Depot, an abandoned military facility thirty miles north and west. But the real reason for their trip was different. Liam had started to tell Jake things, peel back the layers. Jake was a student of war, he understood.

Liam’s agenda was his own, except for the pieces he’d fed to Jake. Jake now knew that there had been a Japanese biological superweapon, destroyed by the fourth nuclear explosion in history. Liam had spoken the name: the Uzumaki. Liam had not said the word aloud for decades.

But Jake didn’t know more still. He didn’t know what that bastard Lawrence Dunne had started. Jake didn’t know that Liam had in his possession one of the seven brass cylinders. Or that after over sixty years, he had finally found the Uzumaki’s weakness.

Click
.

Liam froze. The noise came from just outside the lab.

“Maggie?”

He wouldn’t put it past her to come back and make another attempt to pull him away.

No answer.

“Jake?” He was a night owl, too. Liam often found him in his labs past midnight. “Jake?”

Liam listened. Nothing.

He looked around his lab. The Crawlers were in the gardens. The computer screen had put itself to sleep.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Click!

The lights went out.

2

TINK, TINK, TINK
.

When Liam Connor came to, the sound was the first thing that broke through.

Tink, tink, tink
.

He was confused, unstuck in time, flashes coming quick and disjointed. He was twelve, walking the green hills of Sligo, hunting new species of fungi. He was twenty-two, on a warship in the Pacific, contemplating a small brass cylinder in his hand. He was thirty-one, in their first house in Ithaca, watching his wife crawl out of bed, completely naked. He was fifty-nine, the king of Sweden hanging a medal on his neck. He was seventy-seven, seeing his great-grandson for the first time, Dylan’s little beet-red face scrunched and screaming.

Tink, tink, tink
.

After a moment, he settled down, becoming his current self. He was an old, old man, an Irish gnome. Eighty-six. Emeritus professor of biology at Cornell University.

He tried to move, but everything was wrong. He couldn’t lift his arms. He couldn’t open his mouth. He had the sense he was upright, but he couldn’t be sure. His vision was blurry, smudges in black. He couldn’t see anything, save for a faint glow coming from behind him. It was a mix of yellow, green, and red, each color ebbing and strengthening to its own rhythm.

Tink, tink, tink
.

The sound was familiar. He knew the sound. What the hell was it?

He tried to remember what had happened. He had been in his lab, he was sure of that, tending to the gardens of decay. The gardens. He was fiddling in the gardens, then—then nothing. A blank spot in his memory. Was it still the same night? Still Monday?

He couldn’t move his head. He was upright, but he couldn’t move. Someone had struck him; he remembered that now. He could still feel the blow.

He heard another sound. A rush of air, slight, gentle. Silence. Then again.

Breathing.

He was sure of it. Someone was sitting right behind him. In the darkness. Very close.

Tink, tink, tink
.

He tried to open his mouth, to speak, but he couldn’t move. His mouth wouldn’t open. Something was wrong with his tongue. It was trapped against the bottom of his mouth.

He studied his surroundings, fighting a pain like a knife blade between his eyes. He was in a huge room in the shape of a half-cylinder. The concrete roof twenty feet overhead curved in a smooth semicircle to the floor. He faced the back end of the cylinder, the flat, stained concrete wall no more than ten feet from his face. Liam realized where he was: an old munitions bunker on the abandoned Seneca Army Depot site, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Liam had spent months at the depot over the past four years, secretly toiling over his last great—and highly secret—project.

A woman stepped in front of him, her face illuminated by the dim, pulsing glow coming from behind. He recognized her immediately as the woman who had been following him. She was Asian—Chinese, he was nearly certain. Somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing small, round glasses. She leaned forward, her face no more than twelve inches from his, features illuminated by an ever-changing mix of yellow, green, and red light. She was pretty, made more so by the flaws of two thin, perfectly symmetric scars that ran along her cheekbones. She wore all black, down to the gloves on her hands.

She flicked on a photographer’s light, mounted on a stand beside her. He blinked against the sudden brightness, waited for the blotches of white to settle down into shape and color. He tried to speak but couldn’t open his mouth. He felt as though his head were in a vise.

Once his eyes adjusted, she held up a small mirror so he could see himself. She adjusted the angle until he caught his reflection.

He was a shocking sight. His head was encased in a metal frame, with struts and bands holding his skullcase like a patient with a neck injury. A rubber-and-steel clamp held his jaw rigidly fixed. He looked old, incredibly old, even older than his eighty-six years. The wrinkles on his face were a cracked riverbed, and tufts of white hair stuck out every which way from his skull. He was a corpse, a ghost, strapped into headgear from a Frankensteinian nightmare.

She lowered the mirror. When she spoke, her English was excellent but still bore traces of her native land. “A mutual friend sent me,” she said.

She was Chinese, from the north, he guessed. He felt a tremor at the base of his spine. What she said next nearly stopped his heart.

“I came for the Uzumaki.”

Tink, tink, tink
.

The sound. He knew the sound.

He looked down. A glass petri dish sat in her lap. Four sparkling objects were in the center of the dish, scurrying about, each no larger than a dime.

MicroCrawlers.

They skittered around in the petri dish with terrifying speed, colliding with the walls,
tink, tink, tink
. Their legs were segmented etched silicon, sharp as razor blades.

He closed his eyes, but he could still hear the
tink
of silicon against glass.

“I’ve taken this place apart. Where is it?”

He forced himself to focus. He hadn’t yet seen a gun. If he could get loose, he’d have a chance. He was a small man, impossibly old, but he was still quick, and he could be brutally vicious when he needed to be.

Tink, tink, tink
.

She reached toward him and touched a spot on his headgear. A whirring sound. The headgear pried open his jaw with a mechanical precision, rigid, like the door of a safe. The air was cold on the back of his throat.

Tink, tink, tink
.

She lifted her right hand and closed her fingers into a fist. The Crawlers stopped their incessant scurrying in the glass dish. The sudden silence was jarring. Somehow she controlled the Crawlers with her gloved hand.

She picked up one of the Crawlers with a pair of tweezers. She placed the little robotic creature deep inside his mouth, on the back of his tongue. He had to fight not to panic, not to gag. The legs were like tiny scalpels, cutting into the tissue with even the slightest movement. He could taste droplets of blood rising up on the back of his tongue.

She touched another button and the piezo motors buzzed, closing his mouth for him, clamping his teeth together with an audible
tock!
She placed a hand on his mouth, sealing his lips. With two delicate fingers, she reached out and pinched his nose closed.

“Swallow it,” she said.

The seconds ticked away, probably a minute, before he panicked. He struggled violently against his bonds, his body rebelling against the lack of oxygen. He felt as though he might break a bone at any minute. His will was strong, but he knew his body couldn’t take this kind of punishment. He held out as long as he could, thrashing and pulling, but then his vision started to go.

You can’t not breathe; breathing is involuntary
.

You swallow
.

He felt the Crawler progress down his esophagus, the sharp burning as the legs tore at the soft tissues. He tried to scream, but he couldn’t move his jaw, couldn’t lift his tongue. He was locked down, frozen, the sound of his scream trapped inside his head.

She removed her hands, and he gasped for air through clenched teeth, chest heaving. He tried to make sense of what was happening.

She pushed the button, and his mouth again opened. She used a small flashlight to look inside. “Good,” she said.

She repeated this agonizing procedure three more times, until he had a total of four Crawlers in his belly. Liam fought to get control of himself, to quell the panic. He had to stay strong. He knew what she wanted. He couldn’t let her have it. No matter what it took. No matter how much he would have to suffer.

She held her gloved hand up before him, fingers curled, as if her hand were a spider. “Ten seconds,” she said.

She wiggled her fingers, bringing the Crawlers to life.

His entire body lit on fire, his teeth cracking together with brutal force. His stomach convulsed, twitching from the pain from a burning sun suddenly ignited inside him. His vision went white. He had never felt a pain like this, the twisting, roiling monster in his stomach sending out wave after wave of agony. Time slowed down.

He became unstuck, drifting in time. He saw birds, flying birds, chased by men with very large guns. A distant bell rang. He saw the ship, the line in the sky, the mushroom cloud, like it had happened yesterday. He saw thousands of tiny spirals spreading across the firmament like sparks from a fire.

Far away, he heard her voice, counting down numbers: “Three, two, one …”

The pain slowly subsided. It took what seemed like hours for his body to recover, for the convulsions in his stomach to fade. His eyes were squeezed shut. His cheeks were cold. He was crying.

He returned to himself. He opened his eyes. The woman was there, her gloved index finger tapping at her lips.

“TELL ME,” ORCHID SAID. “BLINK TWICE IF YOU ARE READY.”

She studied him, watching for the signs. The signs that he was breaking. She glanced at his hands. When they gave up, the hands relaxed, became dead fish. Connor’s were clenched. Connor had not given up.

“Professor Connor, listen carefully,” she said as she picked up the roll of medical tape. “You may think what just happened is the worst I can do to you. It is not. It will get much, much worse.”

She taped his eyelids open, pulling the lids straight up. A powerful technique on many levels. The physical discomfort was excruciating as the eyes dried, but ever more critical was the denial of one more form of resistance. The stripping away of another layer. Removing the ability to block out visual stimuli, to make the outside world go away.

She snapped a photo of him in this state, then opened her satchel, removed a laptop computer. She typed in a few commands and then held the screen up before his face. She could tell from the twitches of his cheek muscles that his eyes were beginning to burn.

“I’m going to read you a list of names. Just listen. Just watch.”

She opened a small flip pad and read the first name. “George Washington.” An image of the first president appeared. “Charles Darwin.” Darwin flashed up. His head was shaking. He could hardly see now, she surmised, his eyes drying inexorably.

She took a bottle of eye drops from the table, Murine, bought at a drugstore more than six hundred miles away. Never purchase anything local. No receipts. No remembered face.

Connor’s eyes darted back and forth between the computer screen and her face. She felt it coming off him: the fear of knowing. He saw the infrared lasers and photodiodes mounted along the edges of the computer screen. He understood. Smart man, Liam Connor. She had never tortured a Nobel Prize winner before.

The computer was her truth detector. Advertising firms had developed sophisticated programs to monitor human reactions as people watched commercials on a computer screen. They traced eye movements. Pupil dilation. The blood flow in vessels in the sclera, the whites of his eyes. The military used the same technology for interrogations. She had adapted the technology for her own needs. She had found it effective.

Darwin stared up from the computer screen. Test names, these were tests. Calibrations. To see how Connor responded to stimuli, developing a map of his responses.

She started in on his colleagues. “Mark Sampson.” A picture of his longtime scientific collaborator appeared. She had taken it from his website. No response. She continued reading, a new picture with each name. “Vlad Glazman.” Nothing.

“Jake Sterling.”

The little red indicator bar on the bottom of the screen flickered. A small signal but easily discernible above the noise. She made a note.
Good
. He was already high on her list—she had his home, his lab, his phone fully instrumented.

Now
, she thought.
To the heart of it
.

NO, NO, NO, PLEASE, GOD, NO …

She worked her way through his colleagues, his friends, then finally his family.
Block your thoughts. Stop thinking. Stop feeling.…