VIABLE (23 page)

He explained how in a quiet room he could hear the beating of another person’s heart.

28

IT
WAS
THE car Lars noticed first. Almost hidden behind the Chevron gas station that sat opposite the squat building that housed Mineral County’s Chamber of Commerce. Almost, but not quite.

Nevertheless he’d almost missed it. Too many things on his mind. He hadn’t heard from Doctor Stone in a couple of days. He was beginning to regret letting her talk him into meeting Gant alone. And his call with DeWitty. What in the hell to do about that, or about Joseph Brandt or Emily Mortimer? Then on top of it all that morning the Mayor had summoned him to a meeting, demanding an update on the shooting at Mount Grant. The Chamber of Commerce was all the way across town, and he’d decided the walk would do him good, give him time to think. As he’d made his way up Veterans’ Memorial Highway he’d barely noticed the decorations going up, the lights being hung, the small town preparing to celebrate the last day of the year. 

But a late model Cadillac sedan. Black, V8. There weren’t many cars like that in Hawthorne. You’d have to go all the way up to Carson City, maybe even Reno, to find a dealer who’d sell you one, and even then it’d run you more than he made in a year as sheriff. Considerably more. It was the second time he’d seen the car, he was sure of it. He’d spotted it the day before yesterday, parked up the street from the sheriff’s office.

He continued walking, past the Chevron, still heading towards the Chamber of Commerce although his meeting with the Mayor was for the moment forgotten.  When he was certain he could no longer be seen from the gas station he cut across the highway and doubled back, keeping the forecourt between him and the Cadillac until it was no more than twenty yards away.

Late afternoon. New Year’s Eve, plenty of people around.
His
town. Nevertheless something made him flip the clasp that held his old .357 in its holster as he approached the car. For the first time he got a good look at the two men sitting in front.

Both wore sunglasses and sported crew cuts. Their eyes were hidden and they covered their reactions well but he knew they had both seen him the moment he broke cover. Now they were trying their best to ignore him.

He walked around to the driver’s side of the car and knocked on the glass. After a moment the window slid down with a soft hum.

‘How can we help you Sheriff?’

The driver smiled. Behind the mirrored Ray-Bans it was hard to see whether the smile made it as far as the man’s eyes, but Lars would have bet against it. The accent wasn’t local. Midwest somewhere. Wisconsin. Maybe Minnesota. His companion in the passenger seat said nothing, continuing to stare straight ahead.

‘License and registration please.’

‘Were we doing something wrong, Sheriff?’

‘Just show me the documents.’

The man reached carefully into the pocket of his suit jacket, producing an Arizona license and the car’s registration documents. The driver’s license said John Langley. The car was registered in his name. The addresses on the vehicle registration document and the license matched. Lars called the license tags in to Connie anyway. 

‘You boys in town long?’

‘Just passing through, Sheriff, just passing through.’

A burst of static. Connie confirmed that the vehicle was clean.

Lars examined the license a moment longer and then handed the documents back through the window. As the driver was about to take them from him, Lars let them fall into the footwell. As the man leaned forward to retrieve them his jacket shifted, offering a glimpse of what was concealed inside.

Lars hand dropped to the butt of his gun, drawing it.

‘Hands on the wheel. Now.’ He nodded towards the man in the passenger seat. ‘You too. Palms flat on the dash. Keep them where I can see them.’

After only the briefest hesitation both men complied.

Lars reached in through the window, carefully withdrawing a compact submachine gun from a holster underneath the man’s shoulder.

Heckler & Koch MP5K. He recognized the stubby barrel, the shortened cocking handle, the vertical foregrip. Two similar weapons had been found strapped to the side of the van that had crashed into Mount Grant. He had looked it up when the forensics report had come back. Weighing only a few pounds the small, powerful submachine gun cost almost twenty thousand dollars. The high rate of fire combined with the weapon’s accuracy meant that the MP5K was favored by special forces around the world.

Lars nodded in the direction of the man in the passenger seat.

‘You carrying one of these too?’

After a moment the man nodded, continuing to stare out of the windscreen.

‘We have permits Sheriff, if you’ll just let me show you.’

‘Keep your hands where I can see them, Mr. Langley. You want to tell me where I might find these permits?’

‘Inside jacket pocket.’

Lars reached into the man’s jacket, pulling out a concealed-carry weapons permit in the name of John Langley. The address matched the address on the driver’s license and registration documents.

‘Your friend got one of these as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Arizona too?’

‘Yes.’ The driver’s smiled never wavered.

‘Alright boys, well you’ll need to hand these weapons over. Arizona permits are no good here in Nevada.’

For the first time the man in the passenger seat turned to look at him. He was wearing the same mirrored Ray Bans as his companion, but Lars didn’t need to see the man’s eyes to tell he wasn’t smiling.

‘This is bullshit. You don’t need a permit to carry a gun in Nevada.’

Lars nodded. Much to his regret, for over fifteen years it had been legal for Nevada residents to carry a concealed weapon on their person, and there was nothing he could do about that. As long as he remained sheriff there wouldn’t be a gun store within the town’s boundaries however. He may not be able to stop folks wandering the streets of Hawthorne tooled up like Yosemite Sam, but he could make sure they had to travel all the way up to Carson City or Reno to buy their hardware.

‘Well that’d be true for open carry, but seeing as I found these squirrelled away on your person that’s a different matter. Concealed weapons require a permit unless you’re residents of Nevada, which you boys aren’t.’

The man in the passenger seat opened his mouth to argue but the driver cut across him.

‘Now Billy, I’m sure the sheriff here knows the law in his own state. Let’s not argue with him. Sheriff, isn’t it true that Nevada is a “shall issue” state for concealed weapons?’ The man turned to his companion. ‘That means the sheriff here has no discretion in the matter – he has to issue a permit as long as the applicant demonstrates he’s qualified. Maybe we can swing by tomorrow and get ourselves sorted out.’

‘Sure Mr. Langley. You and Billy call by the sheriff’s office and fill out your applications. We’ll take your fingerprints and get you all checked out. Make sure you are who you say you are. Once we’re happy on that score the law gives me a hundred and twenty days to deal with your applications. We’re kinda busy here right now, what with everything that’s been going on up Mount Grant, so might be a while before I get ’round to it. I’m sure I’ll do my best. We wouldn’t want you boys running off to the Supreme Court complaining your Second Amendment rights had been violated, now would we?’

The smile flickered on the driver’s lips for the briefest of instants before returning. Lars collected the second machinegun from the man in the passenger seat and then they drove off, leaving him standing in the forecourt of the Chevron.

Lars couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to draw his gun on duty. But that wasn’t what really troubled him. These men were professionals. The fact that he’d been able to spot them, that they hadn’t had time to sort out permits for their weapons, it all indicated things were happening quickly. And if they had him under surveillance they would also have teams covering the Doctor and probably Fitzpatrick. He wasn’t worried about the commander. As long as he stayed on the base he was well protected and could take care of himself. Alison Stone was a different matter however. He’d give her another call as soon as he got back to the office. 

He ejected the magazines from each weapon and checked the chambers for rounds, making sure the safeties were on. Satisfied, he started walking back in the direction of the sheriff’s office, forty thousand dollars worth of military grade hardware that he knew would never be collected slung over his shoulder. In a year they’d hand them over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. If ATF auctioned the weapons then perhaps Mineral County might get some of the proceeds and maybe he’d get himself a gun cabinet for the house.

Well, at least that would make Ellie happy.

29

ALISON
LOOKED
OUT of the small window, checking her Honda was still where she had left it, parked next to the dumpster in the darkness of the motel’s empty parking lot. She pulled the faded curtains closed, returning to the bed in the center of the small motel room where she had left her notes. She picked up the thin sheaf of papers, flicking through them as her hair dried, still not daring to believe what she thought she had found. She could hear the sound of water running as he took a shower in the adjoining room. They had learned that morning that the motel’s plumbing wasn’t up to the challenge of providing them with hot showers simultaneously, and she had squealed through the thin wall that separated their rooms as her shower had suddenly run cold when he had turned his on. This evening they had agreed to synchronize, and she had gone first.

The motel had certainly seen better days. Both of their rooms were musty, badly in need of decoration. It wasn’t even that convenient for Davis. She had suggested that they might find somewhere a little better to stay but he had insisted that the place was perfect. Far enough away from the campus to make it unlikely that anyone would look for them there, at least for a while. And more importantly they had been able to pay in cash, without having to provide a credit card as a deposit.

Not that Alison cared. She would stay there indefinitely if she needed to. It had been a long day but she wasn’t even remotely tired, and hadn’t needed the shower to revive her. She flicked back through the pages of her notes, still incredulous. Was it even possible?

The first evening she had concentrated on his physiological abilities, looking for external clues as to how he might be different. She would readily admit that despite the years she had spent at medical school it wasn’t her forte, and after she had performed a number of basic examinations she had been happy to let him simply explain to her what he had discovered about himself over the years. The things he had told her had been fascinating, but she had been eager to dig deeper, to start examining the structure of his blood, his cells, his genetic make-up, to start unraveling the mystery of why he didn’t age, of how his body seemed to retain the ability to renew and even develop itself. It was her area of expertise, but she hadn’t expected quick or easy answers. She knew that the process would be slow and painstaking.

She had begun that morning by taking some of his blood, repeating the tests she had run on the sample that the sheriff had given to her at their first meeting. She had explained to him as he had bent over the microscope the importance of hematopoietic stem cells, their incredible powers of self-renewal, and how to identify them in the slide he was looking at from the red marker she had added. As she had found with the first sample she had tested, his blood contained exceptional numbers of these cells, far in excess of the concentrations she would expect to find. When they had first met Henrikssen had asked her whether these cells might be capable of explaining his sudden recovery at Mount Grant and she had told him she didn’t think that was possible, but she had scribbled a note to herself to look into this again. There were studies that showed that animal hematopoietic stem cells were indeed capable of forming other cell types - muscle, blood vessels or even bone. Given what he had told her the night before she may have been too quick to dismiss that idea. 

But the first blood sample she had taken hadn’t shown what she had really been looking for – the cells she had seen when she had tested the second sample of his blood that the sheriff had brought her – the ones that had marked as embryonic stem cells. The test she had run had told her that increased levels of HSCs seemed to be normal for him but now she needed to identify the signaling mechanisms in his blood, the factors that triggered his body to produce even greater concentrations of HSCs and even more importantly to see whether she could recreate the conditions that had led to him producing what appeared to be embryonic stem cells.

The blood samples she had analyzed previously had both been taken at Mount Grant, the first shortly after he had been admitted, the second later that night. She remembered that she had made some notes on the flight back to Maryland the day the sheriff had come to see her – thoughts on external factors that might have been relevant based on what she had read from his medical records and what Henrikssen had told her. She had found the notes in her bag, re-reading them quickly.

Prior to/at abduction – possible elevated heart rate/bp/adrenaline (??)

Methohexital – heart rate/bp fall (briefly); adrenaline absorbed

Patient further sedated once in van (??)

Check with sheriff if ketamine/benzodiazepine found

GSW right kidney

Adrenaline administered

There hadn’t been much to go on. Cody had been unable to provide much further detail as to what had happened to him after he had been abducted, other than that they had given him something to sedate him.