The X-Files: Antibodies (10 page)

“My God!” he muttered. “The animal rights activists would crucify us, David.”

But Kennessy didn’t allow the silence to hang on the tape. He stepped forward, delivering his rehearsed speech. He was running this show. Melodramatic though it might seem, he knew it would work.

“My medical breakthrough opens the doorway to numerous other applications. That’s why so many people have been working on it for so long. The first researchers to make this breakthrough work are going to shake up society like you won’t be able to imagine.”

Kennessy sounded as if he was giving a speech to a board of directors, while his pet dog lay shot and bleeding in his cage.

Lentz had to admire a man like that.

He nodded to himself and leaned forward, closer to the television. He rested his elbows on the desktop.

All the more reason to make sure the technology is tightly
controlled, and released only when we deem it necessary.

On the screen, Kennessy turned to the cage, looking down with clinical detachment. “After a major trauma like this, the first thing that happens is that the nanocritters shut down all of the dog’s pain centers.”

In his cage, Vader sat, confused. His tongue lolled out. He had clumsily managed to prop himself upright. The dog seemed not to notice the gaping holes in his back. After a moment, the black Lab lay down on the floor of the cage, squishing his fur in the 80

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blood still running along his sides. His eyes grew heavy, and he sank down in deep sleep, resting his head on his front paws. He took a huge breath and released it slowly.

Kennessy knelt down on the floor beside the cage, reached his hand in to pat Vader on the head. “His temperature is already rising from the waste heat.

Look, the blood has stopped flowing. Jeremy, get the camera over here so we can have a close-up.”

Dorman looked befuddled, then scurried over to grab the camera. The view on the videotape rocked and shook, then came into focus on the dog, zooming in on the injuries. Kennessy let the images speak for themselves for a moment, before he picked up the thread of his lecture.

“A large-scale physical trauma like this is actually easier to fix than a widespread disease, like cancer. A gunshot injury needs a bit of patchwork, cellular bandages, and some reconstruction.

“With a genetic disease, though, each cell must be repaired, every anomaly tweaked and adjusted. Purging a cancer patient might take weeks or months. These bullet wounds, though—” He gestured down at the motionless black Lab. “Well, Vader will be up chasing squirrels again tomorrow.”

Dorman looked down in amazement and disbelief. “If this gets to the newspapers, David, we’re all out of a job.”

“I don’t think so,” Kennessy answered, and smiled. “I’ll bet you a box of dog biscuits.”

Within an hour, the dog woke up again, groggy but rapidly recovering. Vader stood up in the cage, shook himself, then barked. Healthy. Healed. As good as new. Kennessy released him from the cage, and the dog bounded out, starved for attention and praise.

Kennessy laughed out loud and ruffled his fur.

Lentz watched in astonishment, understanding antibodies

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now that Kennessy’s work was even more frightening, even more successful than he had feared. His people had been absolutely right to take the samples, lock them away, and then destroy all the remaining evidence.

If something like this became available to the general public, he couldn’t conceive of the earth-shattering consequences. No, everything had to be destroyed.

Lentz popped out the videotape and locked it within a repository for classified documents. The fire safe at DyMar had protected this tape and the other documents with it, but unfortunately he knew with a grim certainty that they had not recovered every scrap, every sample.

Now, after all he had seen, Lentz finally understood the frantic phone call they had tapped, when David Kennessy had dialed his home number on the night of the explosive protest, on the night of the fire.

Kennessy’s voice had been frantic, ragged. He didn’t even let his wife speak. “Patrice, take Jody and Vader and get out of there—
now
! Everything I was afraid of is going down. You have to run. I’m already trapped at DyMar, but you can get away. Keep running. Don’t let them . . . get you.”

Then the phone recording was cut off before Kennessy or his wife could say anything else. Patrice Kennessy had listened to her husband, had acted quickly. By the time the clean-up teams got to their suburban house, she had packed up with the boy and the dog, and vanished.

After seeing the videotape, Lentz realized what a grave mistake he had made. Before, he had worried that Patrice might have a few notes, some research information that Lentz needed to retrieve. Now, though, the danger had increased by orders of magnitude.

How could he have missed it before? The dog 82

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wasn’t just a family pet that the Kennessys couldn’t bear to leave behind. That black Lab was
the dog
. It was the research animal, it carried the nanomachines inside its bloodstream, lurking there, just waiting to spread around the world.

Lentz swallowed hard and grabbed for the phone.

After a moment, though, he froze and gently set the receiver back in the cradle. This was not a mistake he wanted to admit to the man in charge. He would take care of it himself.

Everything else had been destroyed in the DyMar fire—but now Adam Lentz had to call in all of his resources, get reinforcements, spend whatever time or money was necessary.

He had a woman, a boy, and, especially, their pet dog to track down.

FOURTEEN

Kennessys’ Cabin

Coast Range, Oregon

Wednesday, 1:10 P.M.

The midday sunlight dappled the patches in X the Oregon hills where the trees had been shaved in strips from clearcut logging.

Patrice and Jody sat by the table in the living room with the curtains open and the lights switched off, working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle they had found in one of the cedar window seats.

The two of them had finished a lunch of cold sandwiches and an old bag of potato chips that had gone stale in the damp air. Jody never complained.

Patrice was just glad her son had an appetite again.

His mysterious remission was remarkable, but she couldn’t allow herself to hope. Soon, she dreaded, the blush of health would fade, and Jody would resume his negotiations with the Grim Reaper.

But still, she clung to every moment with him.

Jody was all she had left.

Now the two of them hunched over the scattered puzzle pieces. When finished, the image would show the planet Earth rising over lunar crags, as photographed by 84

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one of the Apollo astronauts. The blue-green sphere covered most of the small wooden table, with jagged gaps from a few continents not yet filled in.

They weren’t having much fun, barely even occupying their minds. They were just killing time.

Patrice and Jody talked little, in the shared silence of two people who’d had only their own company for many days. They could get by with partial sentences, cryptic comments, private jokes. Jody reached forward with a jagged piece of the Antarctic ice cap, turning it to see how the interlocking pieces fit in.

“Have you ever known somebody who went to Antarctica, Mom?” Jody asked.

Patrice forced a smile. “That’s not exactly on the standard tour list, kid.”

“Did Dad ever go there? For his research? Or Uncle Darin?”

She froze her face before a troubled frown could pass over her features. “You mean to test out a new medical treatment on, say, penguins? Or polar bears?”

Why not? He had tested it on Vader. . . .

“Polar bears live at the
North
Pole, Mom.” Jody shook his head with mock scorn. “Get your data right.”

Sometimes he sounded just like his father.

She had explained to her son why they had to hide from the outside world, why they had to wait until they learned some answers and discovered who had been behind the destruction of DyMar.

Darin had split from his brother after a huge fight about the dangers of their research, about the edge they were skirting. He had walked away from DyMar, sold his home, left this vacation cabin to rot, and joined an isolated group of survivalists in the Oregon wilds. From that point on, David had spoken of Darin with scorn, dismissing the usual misguided complaints by Luddite groups, like the one his brother had joined.

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Darin had insisted they would be in danger as soon as more people found out about their research, but somehow David could not believe anybody but the technically literate would understand how significant a breakthrough he had made. “It’s always nice to see that some people understand more than you give them credit for,” David answered. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”

But Patrice knew he was naive. True this wasn’t the type of thing ordinary people got up in arms about—it was too complicated and required too much foresight to see how the world would change, to sort the dangers they feared from the miracles he offered.

But some people were paying attention. Darin had had good reason to fear, good reason to run. Patrice’s question now was who was orchestrating all this?

The demonstrators outside DyMar consisted of an odd mix of religious groups, labor union representatives, animal-rights activists, and who knew what else.

Some were fruitcakes, some were violent. Her husband had died there, with only a crisp warning for her.
Go. Get away! Don’t let them catch you. They’ll be
after you.

Hoping it was just a temporary emergency, a flareup of destructive demonstrators, she had thrown Jody and the dog into their car, driving aimlessly for hours. She had seen the DyMar fire blazing on the distant bluff, and she feared the worst. Still not grasping the magnitude of the conspiracy, she had rushed home, hoping to find David there, hoping he had at least left her a message.

Instead, their place had been ransacked. People searching for something, searching for
them
. Patrice had run, taking only a few items they needed, using her wits and her fear as they raced away from Tigard, away from the Portland metropolitan area, into the deep wilderness.

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She had swapped license plates several times in darkened parking lots, waited until near midnight and then grabbed a day’s maximum cash from an ATM in downtown Eugene, Oregon; she had driven across town to another ATM, after midnight this time and therefore a new date, and gotten a second day’s maximum. Then she had fled for the coast, for Darin’s old, abandoned cabin, where she and Jody could go to ground, for however long it took for them to feel safe again.

For years she had worked freelance as an architect, doing her designs from home, especially in the last few months when Jody became more and more ill from his cancer and—worse—from the conventional chemo and radiation treatments themselves.

Patrice had designed this little hideaway as a favor for her brother-in-law several years ago. With rented equipment, Darin had installed the electricity himself, graded the driveway, cut down a few trees, but never gotten around to making it much of a vacation home. He had been too swallowed up in his eight-days-a-week research efforts. Corrupted by David, no doubt.

No one else would know about this place, no one would think to look for them here, in an unused vacation home built years ago for a brother who had disappeared half a year previously. It should have been a perfect place for her and Jody to catch their breath, to plan their next step.

But now the dog had disappeared, too. Vader had been Jody’s last remaining sparkle of joy, his anchor during the chaos. The black Lab had been so excited to be out of the suburbs, where he could run through the forest. He had been a city dog for so long, fenced in; suddenly he had been turned loose in the Oregon forests.

She wasn’t surprised that Vader had run off, but antibodies

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she always expected him to come home. She should have kept him on a rope—but how could she bear to do that, when she and her son were already trapped here? Prisoners in hiding? Patrice had been so afraid, she had stripped away the dog’s ID tag. Now if Vader were caught, or injured somehow, there would be no way to get them back together—and no way to track them down.

Jody had taken it hard, trying his best to keep his hopes up. His every thought was a wish for his dog to return. Apart from his gloom, he looked increasingly healthy now; most of his hair had grown back after the leukemia therapies. His energy level was higher than it had been in a long time. He looked like a normal kid again.

But his sadness over Vader was like an open sore.

After every piece he placed in the Earth-Moon jigsaw puzzle, he glanced through the dingy curtains over the main windows, searching the treeline.

Suddenly he jumped up. “Mom, he’s back!” Jody shouted, pushing away from his chair.

For a moment, Patrice reacted with alarm, thinking of the hunters, wondering who could have found them, how she might have given them away. But then, through the open screen door, she could hear the dog barking. She stood up from the puzzle table, astonished to see the black Labrador bounding out of the trees.

Jody leaped away from the table and bolted out the door. He ran toward the black dog so hard she expected her son to sprawl on his face on the gravel driveway or trip on a stump or fallen branch in the yard.

“Jody, be careful!” she called. Just what she needed—if the boy broke his arm, that would ruin everything. So far, she had managed to avoid all contact with doctors and any people who kept names and records.

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Jody remained oblivious to everything but his excitement over the dog.

The boy reached his dog safely, and each tried to outdo the other’s enthusiasm. Vader barked and danced around in circles, leaping into the air. Jody threw his arms around the dog’s neck and wrestled him to the wet ground in a tumble of black fur, pale skin, and weeds.