The Dragon Factory (32 page)

It was bad thinking.

But try as I might, I couldn’t find fault with it.

The plane flew on through the burning August skies.

Das Alte Schloss

Stuttgart, Germany

Five days ago

Conrad Veder stood in the shadows beneath one of the arches in the courtyard of the Old Castle in Stuttgart. He chewed cinnamon gum and watched a pigeon standing on the plumed helmet of Eberhard I, Duke of Württemberg, a wonderful statue sculpted by Ludwig von Hofer in 1859. Veder had read up on the Old Castle before coming here, partly as research for this phase of the job and partly out of his fascination with German history. He was a man of few abiding interests, but Germany had intrigued him since the first time he’d come here thirty-four years ago. This was his first visit to Stuttgart, however, and this morning he had whiled away a pleasant hour on the Karlsplatz side of the Old Castle in a museum dedicated to the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a former resident of Stuttgart who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. A couple of years ago Veder had seen the movie
Valkyrie
, based on the incident. He thought Tom Cruise was a good fit for Stauffenberg, though Veder liked neither the actor nor the traitor who had failed in what should have been an easy kill.

After reviewing all the data, including floor plans of the site of the attempted assassination, Veder concluded that he would have done it differently and done it correctly.

He checked his watch. Almost time.

He took the gum from his mouth, wrapped it in a tissue, and placed it in his pocket. Veder never left useful traces behind. Veder had little respect for police intelligence, but their doggedness was legendary.

A group of tourists came ambling past—fat Americans in ugly shirts, English with bad teeth, haughty French. It was no wonder stereotypes persisted. As they passed, Veder melted into the crowd. He was dressed in jeans and a lightweight hooded shirt with the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club embroidered on the right chest and the emblem of the Mercedes-Benz Arena on the back. There were at least five other people in the square with similar shirts. He wore sunglasses and a scruff of reddish gold stubble on his jaw. His gait was slouchy athletic, typical of the middle-aged ex-athlete who resented being past his prime. It had taken Veder only a few days to identify the personality subtype among the crowds in the city. He saw hundreds of them and now he was indistinguishable from any of the others who wandered in and out of the shops and museums around the Old Castle.

He followed the crowd into the Stauffenberg museum. Veder was not dressed this way when he had visited the museum earlier that day. The other costume had been similarly based on a common Stuttgart
look
, and like this one it was equally at odds with Veder’s true appearance.

It was possible, even likely, that he could have wrapped this job up during his early visit, but he liked the distractions and confusion that a group would provide. Earlier the attendance at the museum had been sparse. If someone very smart was to have watched the security tapes from the morning they might have been able to make some useful deductions about Veder’s true physical appearance. But amid a sea of tourists he was virtually invisible.

The crowd was made up of three different tours, and the tour guides herded the people into one of the rooms to await a brief lecture by Stellvertretender Direktor Jerome Freund, the professor who was the assistant director of the museum. Freund came out of the back, walking slowly and leaning on a hardwood walking stick with a flowery silver Art Nouveau handle. Veder knew that the limp had been created by a high-powered bullet smashing Freund’s hip assembly. That shot had been one of the very few misses Veder had ever made, and he disliked that he had failed in the kill. That, at the time, he had been bleeding
from two .22 bullets in his own chest did not matter. It was one of three botched jobs—all related to the work he had done for his former “idealistic” employers.

Freund was a tall man with a Shakespearean forehead and swept-back gray hair. His spectacles perched on the end of his nose and arthritis stooped the big shoulders, but Veder could still see the wolf beneath the skin of a crippled old man.

The speech Freund gave was the same one he had given that morning. Even the professor’s gestures were the same.
Ah,
Veder thought,
there is nothing so useful as routine.

He waited until the professor began describing the day of the assassination attempt. If this was all rote to the man, then he would raise his cane and use it to point to the large photo that covered one wall, tapping the photo with the cane tip to indicate where Stauffenberg and Hitler had each stood. All throughout the talk Veder pretended to take photos with his digital camera. Sure enough, the professor turned and began tapping the wall.

If Veder was a different kind of man, he might have either taken pleasure in how easy it was or been disappointed that it did not challenge his skills, but Veder had the cold efficiency of an insect. Insects are opportunistic and they don’t gloat.

He pressed the button on the camera and the tiny dart shot out of a hole beside the fake lens, propelled by a nearly silent puff of compressed gas, traveling at a hundred feet per second. Freund flinched and swatted the back of his neck.

“Moskito
,” he said with a laugh, and the hot, sweaty tourists chuckled. It was hot and flies, gnats, and mosquitoes were everywhere. The lecture continued, the moment forgotten. Veder remained with the tourists until they finished the tour, and as the crowd boiled out into the courtyard he detached himself and strolled idly across to the opulent market hall. He bought clothes in different stores, changed in a bathroom, and became another kind of tourist who vanished entirely into the crowd.

Veder had no desire to linger. He did not doubt the efficacy of the pathogen on the dart, and he had no need to see his victim fall. He
would read about it in the papers. It would make all of the papers. After all, how often does a German scholar die of Ebola?

By the time the first symptoms appeared, Conrad Veder was on a train to Munich. He was asleep within twenty minutes of the train leaving the station. By then Jerome Freund was already beginning to feel sick.

If the gods listened to the prayers of men,
all humankind would quickly perish since they
constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

—
EPICURUS

The Dragon Factory

Sunday, August 29, 12:51
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 9 minutes E.S.T.

Hecate and Paris stood together on a small balcony that jutted out from a metal walkway built above and around the central production floor of their primary facility. Below them over a hundred employees moved and interacted with the mindless and seamless choreography of worker bees. It was an image they had discussed and one they always enjoyed. Everything was color coded, which added to the visual richness of the scene. Blue jumpsuits for general support staff, white lab coats for the senior researchers, green scrubs for the surgical teams, orange for the medical staff, charcoal for the animal handlers, and a smattering of pastel shades for technicians in different departments. Hecate liked color, Paris liked busy movement.

The production floor was circular and a hundred feet across, with side corridors leading to labs, holding pens, design suites, bio-production factories, and computer centers. The lighting made it all look like Christmas.

Rising like a spike from the center of the floor was a statue of the tattoo each of the Twins wore in secret: a caduceus in which fierce dragons were entwined around the shepherd’s staff to form a double helix. Dragons were each carved from single slabs of flawless alabaster, the milky stone a perfect match for their skin. The central staff was marble, and the wings were made from hammered gold. The Twins had no personal religion, but to them the statue was sacred. To them it revealed aspects of their true nature.

Paris leaned a hip against the rail and sipped bottled water through
a straw. He and his sister always drank from a private stock of Himalayan water. The general staff was provided with purified water. Their dockside warehouse, however, was filled to the rafters with bottled water from the bottling plant in Asheville owned by Otto on behalf of Cyrus. No one at the Dragon Factory was allowed to drink any of those bottles. Hecate and Paris certainly wouldn’t.

Generally the water shipments went directly from the bottling plant to the customs yard and then by ship to ports all over the world. The current store was scheduled for distribution to several islands here in the Bahamas. The cargo ship was scheduled to dock in ten hours.

“You really think Dad put something in the water?” asked Paris.

“Don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Like what? We’ve tested it for toxins, mercury, pollutants, bacteria . . . it’s just water.”

“Maybe,” Hecate said neutrally. “Maybe.”

“If you’re that concerned with it, then dump it into the ocean and fill the bottles with tap water.”

“We could,” she said. “But wouldn’t you like to know what’s in it?”

“You ordered a battery of new tests as soon as we got back. Let’s leave it until our people finish their analysis.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or . . . do you think you know what’s in it?”

She took his bottle from him and sipped it. “Know? No, I don’t know, but I have some suspicions. General suspicions . . .”

“Like . . . ?”

“Genetic factors.”

Paris looked at her in surprise. “Gene therapy?”

“It can be done in water. It’s difficult, but Dad could do it.
We
could do it.”

“What kind of gene therapy?”

“I don’t know. If Dad was just a corrupt businessman I’d think he was adding something to create an addictive need for the water. For that particular brand of water.”

“We tested for hormones. . . .”

“No . . . Dad’s all about genetics these days. And viruses.”

“We checked for viruses,” Paris said nervously.

“And found none, I know. That’s why I’m having the water tested for DNA.”

“What do we do if we find something in there?”

“Well, Brother . . . that depends on what the gene therapy is intended to accomplish. If it’s just an addictive component, then we let it slide but ask for a bigger cut of the water market.”

“What if it’s something bad?”

“ ‘Bad’?” She smiled at that. “Like what?”

“Like something destructive. Something that will kill people.”

Hecate shrugged. “I don’t know. Why? Are you getting squeamish?”

“After what the Berserkers found in Denver? What if I am?”

“God! It’s a little late to start developing a conscience, Paris.”

His eyes met hers and then shifted away. “I’ve always had a conscience. Something like a poison or a plague . . . that would be different.”

She shrugged.

Paris said, “The stuff we recovered from Denver. That’s Nazi death camp stuff. That’s . . . that’s wrong on a whole different level from anything we’ve done.”

“It’s fascinating.”

“Christ! It’s gruesome. I can deal with some slap and tickle. And, yes, I can deal with a little snuff . . . but the systematic torture and extermination of
millions
of people?”

His sister gave another dismissive shrug.

“Why the hell does Dad want that crap?”

“Why would any geneticist?” she asked.

“I don’t want it.”

“I do. I wish we had the Guthrie cards. Hundreds of thousands of blood samples, all neatly indexed with demographics. They’d be useful for collecting genetic markers.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d like to build our empire on those kinds of bones.”

“What . . . you don’t like being an evil mastermind?”

“This isn’t a joke, Heck.”

“I’m not joking. And don’t call me that.”

“Is this how you see us? I mean, really? Do you think we’re evil?”

“Aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

Hecate handed back the water bottle. “We’ve killed people, sweetie. A lot of people. You yourself have strangled two women while you were screwing them. Not to mention all the people the Berserkers have killed. I never saw you shed a tear. Evil? Yes, I think that pretty much covers it.”

“We’re corrupt,” Paris said, almost under his breath. “Corruption isn’t actually evil.”

“It’s certainly not a saintly virtue.”

He crossed to the other side of the balcony and stared out through a big domed window at the warehouse on the dock. The doors were open and he could see the pallets of cased water. “Is there a line? Between corruption and evil? If so . . . when did we cross it?”

Hecate studied her brother’s profile. She had suspected that this was coming, but she hadn’t expected to hear this much hurt in Paris’s voice. “What’s going on with you? You’ve been in a mood ever since we left Dad’s place.”