The X-Files: Antibodies (25 page)

Jody knows how tough his mom was.”

Dorman looked up, turning his gleaming, hooded eyes at Mulder.

Mulder kept driving. The red pickup rattled over a pothole, and a loose wrench in the rear bed clanged and bounced. He hoped one of the bumps would knock it free so he wouldn’t have to hear the grating noise any more.

“Listen, Agent Scully.” Dorman’s voice was sooth-ing; his mangled voice box must have healed quite nicely. “Jody’s nanocritters work just fine—and that’s what I need his blood for. I think the nanocritters his dad gave him might be able to fix the ones in me. It’s my only chance.”

Dorman winced as his body convulsed again, and he tried not to gasp into the phone. The hand holding the revolver twitched and jerked. Mulder hoped his fingers wouldn’t clench around the trigger and shoot a hole through the roof of the pickup.

“You saw how I look,” he said. “Jody remembers what I was like, how everything was between us. Me and him playing
Mario Kart
or
Cruisin’ USA
. Remind him about the one time I let him beat me.”

Then he sat back, curling his mouth in a little bit antibodies

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of a smile, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps predatory.

“David Kennessy was right. There are government men after us. They want to destroy everything we created—but I got away, and so did Jody and Vader. But we’re marked for eradication. I’m going to die in less than a day unless my nanocritters can be fixed. Unless I can see Jody.”

Mulder looked over at him. The broad-shouldered, devastatingly sick man was very persuasive. On the phone he could hear faint voices, a discussion—presumably Jody talking to Scully. By the expression on Dorman’s face, Jody seemed swayed by the big man’s arguments. And why not? Dorman was the only connection remaining to the boy’s past. The twelve year old would give him the benefit of the doubt. Dorman’s shoulders sagged with relief.

Mulder felt sick in the pit of his stomach, still not sure whether to believe Dorman or not.

Finally Dorman growled into the phone again.

“Yes, Agent Scully. Let’s all go back to DyMar. The lab will be burnt and abandoned, but it’s neutral ground. I know you can’t trick me there.”

He rested the revolver in his lap, calmer and confident now. “You have to understand how desperate I am—that’s the only reason I’m doing this. But I won’t hesitate. Unless you bring Jody to meet me, I
will
kill your partner.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t even need a gun.

All I need to do is touch him.” As if in an effort to provoke Mulder, he dropped the revolver onto the worn seat between them.

“Just be at DyMar.” He punched the END button.

He looked at the sticky residue on the black plastic of the phone, frowned in disappointment. He rolled down his window and tossed the phone away. It bounced on the gravel and shattered.

“I guess we won’t be needing that anymore.”

FORTY-ONE

Mobile Tactical Command Center

Northwestern Oregon

Friday, 7:01 P.M.

Satellite dishes mounted atop the van tilted X at different azimuths to tap into various relay satellites. Computer signal processors sifted through the complex medley of transmissions broadcast by hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people.

The van sat parked at the terminus of a short dirt road that ended in a shallow dumping ground. Compost, deadwood, rotting garbage, and uprooted stumps stood in a massive pile like a revolutionary’s barricade. Some farmer or logger had been tossing his debris here for years rather than pay a disposal fee at the county dump.

PRIVATE PROPERTY and KEEP OUT signs offered impotent threats; Adam Lentz had far more serious methods of intimidation at his disposal.

No one had been out here for some time, though, especially not after dark. The men on the professional surveillance team had the area to themselves—and with the black-program technology rigged into the van, they had most of North America at their fingertips.

Tree branches bristling with pine needles offered a antibodies

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mesh of camouflage overhead, and the thick clouds made the night dark and soupy, blocking the stars—

but neither the trees nor the clouds hampered satellite transmissions.

The computers in the dashboard of the mobile tactical command center scanned thousands of frequencies, ran transmissions through voice-recognition algorithms, searched for key words, targeted on likely transmission points.

They had continued their invisible surveillance for hours with no success, but Adam Lentz was not a man to give up. Unless he broached the subject himself, the rest of his team members would not dare to comment on the matter either.

Lentz was also not one to lose patience. He had cul-tivated it over the years, when patience and a cool lack of emotion as well as an absence of remorse had allowed him to rise to this unrecognized yet still substantial position of power. Though few people understood what he was all about, Lentz was content with his place in the world, with the importance of his activities.

But he would have been much more content if he could just find Agent Fox Mulder.

“He can’t know we’re looking for him,” Lentz muttered. The man at the command console looked over, his face stony, reflecting no surprise whatsoever.

“We’ve been very discreet,” the man said.

Lentz tapped his fingertips on the dashboard, pondering. He knew Mulder and Scully had split up.

Agent Mulder had seen the dead trucker whose body Lentz’s team had cleanly eliminated. Both Mulder and Scully had been to Dorman’s isolated cabin out in the hollow, which—along with the body of Patrice Kennessy—was now a pile of smoldering ashes.

Then they had fled, and Lentz believed either Agent Mulder or Scully had the boy Jody and his nanotech-infected dog.

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But something else was spreading the plague.

Patrice Kennessy and the boy had feared something.

Was the dog going rampant? Had the nanomachines within it—as Lentz had witnessed so clearly and so brutally in the videotaped demonstration—somehow gone haywire so that they now destroyed human beings?

The prospect frightened even him, and he knew that his superiors were absolutely right in insisting that all such dangerous research be contained. Only responsible,
authorized
people should know about it.

He had to restore order to the world.

Outside, the awakening night insects in the Oregon deep woods made a humming, buzzing sound. Grass-hoppers, tree bugs . . . Lentz didn’t know their scientific names. He had never been much interested in wildlife.

The hive behavior of humanity in general had been enough to capture his interest.

He sat back and waited, clearing his mind, thinking of nothing.

A man with many pressures, burdens, and dark secrets, Lentz found it most restful when he could make his mind entirely blank. He had no plans to set in motion, no schemes to concoct. He proceeded with his missions one step at a time.

And in this instance, he couldn’t proceed to the next step until they heard from Agent Mulder.

The man at the command deck sat up quickly.

“Incoming,” he said. He pushed down his earphones and fiddled with switches on his receiver.

“Transmission number confirmed, frequency confirmed.” He almost allowed himself a smile, then turned to Lentz. “Voice pattern match confirmed. It’s Agent Mulder. I’m recording.”

He handed the earphones to Lentz, who quickly snugged them in place. The technician fiddled with the controls and the recorder.

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227

Lentz listened to a staticky, warbled conversation between Mulder and Scully. In spite of his own tight control over his reactions, Lentz’s eyes went wide, and his eyebrows lifted.

Yes, Scully had the boy and the dog in her custody—and the boy had healed himself from a grievous wound . . . but the most astonishing news of all was that the organization’s patsy, Jeremy Dorman, had not been killed in the DyMar fire after all. He was still alive, still a threat . . . and now Dorman, too, was a carrier of the rogue nanotechnology.

And so was the boy! The infestation was already spreading.

After various threats and explanations, Dorman and Agent Scully worked to arrange a time and a place where they could meet. Mulder and Scully, Dorman, Jody, and the dog were all falling right into his lap—if Lentz’s team could set up their trap sufficiently ahead of time.

As soon as the cellular transmission ended, Lentz launched his team into motion.

Every member of his group was well aware of how to reach the burned-out ruins of the laboratory.

After all, each one of the mercenaries had been part of the supposed protest group that had brought down the cancer research establishment. They had thrown the firebombs themselves, set the accelerants, deto-nated the facility so that little more than an unstable skeleton remained.

“We have to get there first,” Lentz said.

The mobile van launched like a killer shark out of the dead-end dirt road and onto the leaf-slick highway, accelerating recklessly up the coast at a speed far from safe.

But a mere traffic accident was not enough to worry Adam Lentz at that moment.

FORTY-TWO

DyMar Laboratory Ruins

Friday, 8:45 P.M.

Back to the haunted house,
Scully thought as X she drove up the steep driveway to the gutted, fire-blackened ruins of the DyMar Laboratory.

Behind the clouds the moon spread a pearlescent glow, a shimmering brightness in the soupy sky overhead. On the hills surrounding DyMar, the forest had once been a peaceful, protective barricade—but now Scully thought the trees were ominous, offering cover for the stealthy movement of enemies, perhaps more violent protesters . . . or those other men that Jody feared were after him and his mother.

“Stay in the car, Jody.” She walked to the sagging chain-link fence that had been erected to keep trespassers from the dangerous construction site. Nobody manned it now.

The bluff overlooking the sprawling city of Portland was prime business real estate, but she saw only the blackened ruins like the carcass of a dragon sprawled beneath the diluted moonlight. The place was empty, dangerous yet enticing.

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229

As Scully passed through the open and too-inviting chain-link gate, she heard a car door slam. She whirled, expecting to see Mulder and his captor, the big man who had shot Jody—but it was only the boy climbing out of the car and looking around curiously. The black Lab bounded out next to him, anxious to be free, glad that his boy was healthy.

“Be careful, Jody,” she called.

“I’m following you,” he said. Before she could scold him, he added, “I don’t want to be left alone.”

Scully didn’t want him to go into the burned ruins with her, but she couldn’t blame him, either. “All right. Come on, then.”

Jody hurried toward her while Vader bounded ahead, frolicking. “Keep the dog next to you,” Scully warned.

Small sounds of settling debris came from the unstable site, structural timbers tugged by time and gravity. No damp breeze stirred the ashes, but still the blackened timbers creaked and groaned.

Some of the structural walls remained intact, but looked ready to collapse at any moment. Part of the floor had fallen into the basement levels, but in one section concrete-block walls stood tall, coated with fire-blistered enamel paint and covered with soot.

Bulldozers sat like metal leviathans outside the building perimeter. A steam shovel, Porta Potti out-houses, and construction lockers had been set up by the contractor in charge of erasing the last scar of DyMar’s presence.

Scully thought she heard a sound, and proceeded cautiously toward the bulldozer. Fuel tanks sat near the heavy equipment. The demolitions crew had been ready to begin—and she wondered if the unusual rush to level the place had anything to do with the cover-up plans Dorman had talked about.

Then Scully saw a metal locker that had been 230

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pried open. A starburst of bright silver showed where a crowbar had ripped off the lock, just below the marking, DANGER: EXPLOSIVES.

Suddenly the darkness seemed much more oppressive, the silence unnatural. The air was cold and gauzy damp in her nostrils, with a sour poison of old burning.

“Jody, keep close to me,” she said.

Her heart pounded, and all of her senses came fully alert. This meeting between the boy and Jeremy Dorman would be tense and dangerous. But she would make sure Jody got through it.

She heard the approach of another engine, a vehicle rattling and laboring up the slope, tires crunching on gravel. Twin headlights swept through the night like bright coins.

“Stay with me.” She put a protective hand on Jody’s shoulder, and the two stayed at the edge of the burned-out building.

It was an old red pickup truck patched with primer, rusted on the sides. The body groaned and creaked as the driver’s door opened and Mulder climbed out.

Of all the unbelievable things she had witnessed with Fox Mulder, seeing her strictly suit-and-tie partner driving a battered old pickup ranked among the most unusual.

“Fancy meeting you here, Scully,” Mulder said.

A larger form heaved itself out of the passenger side. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and even the shadows could not hide that something was wrong with the way he moved, the way his limbs seemed to have extra joints, the way weariness and pain seemed ready to crush him.

Jeremy Dorman had looked bad before, and now he appeared even worse.

Scully took a step forward but kept herself in front of Jody. “Are you all right, Mulder?”

“For now,” he said.

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Dorman took a step closer to Mulder, who edged away in an attempt to keep his distance. The broad-shouldered man held a revolver in his hand . . . but the weapon itself seemed the least threatening aspect about him.

Scully drew her own handgun. She was a good shot and utterly confident. She pointed the 9mm directly at Jeremy Dorman. “Release Agent Mulder right now,” she said. “Mulder, step away from him.”