The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Too soon to tell,” said Hu. “We’re running DNA tests now, but you forgot to bring me a blood sample or bring back a specimen.”

  “By ‘specimen’ you better mean a urine sample,” I said, “because if you’re referring to those people as specimens I’m going to—”

  “They aren’t people,” said Hu. “If they are Neanderthals, then they are not human. No, wait, before you leap over the table and kick my ass, think for a minute. You’re going to make the argument that Neanderthals evolved from Homo erectus just like we did and therefore common ancestry makes them human. Whereas I can applaud your hippie granola we’re-all-one-big-family sensibilities, the fact is that they were distinctly different from modern humans. They may not have even interbred with early humans, and our last common ancestor died out about six hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Besides, the Kid was wrong when he said that they were reclaimed from mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrion only has a little over sixteen thousand DNA letters that code for thirteen proteins. To reclaim and grow an extinct species you’d need DNA from the nucleus, which has three billion letters that produce more than twenty thousand proteins.”

  “Who the fuck cares?” I yelled. “They’re people. They talk; they think; they look like people. . . .”

  “I don’t know what they are, Ledger, but they’re still scientific oddities. Not people.”

  “Enough,” said Church quietly. He looked at me. “The New Men will be transported to a U.S. military facility in Central America.”

  “You mean an internment camp?”

  “No. They will receive medical attention and assessment to determine how we can best integrate them into society, if they can be integrated into society, and with the heavy conditioning and genetic manipulation they’ve undergone we may have to face the reality that they cannot be successfully integrated into our culture.”

  “So what will happen to them?”

  “Ultimately? I don’t know. I’ve made a strong case on their behalf to the President, and he agrees that this needs to be handled with the utmost care and the greatest concern for their well-being and their rights.”

  “Rights?” asked Hu. “What rights?”

  Church turned to face him and Hu withered under the cold, hard stare. “The President agrees with me that they are to be treated as liberated prisoners of war. Their basic human rights will be addressed first, and at some later point wiser people than us will determine how best to serve their needs.” He paused. “Terrible things have been done to these people, and in many ways this is as great a human rights atrocity as the death camps.”

  “Sure,” said Hu. “Fine. Whatever.” He went back to work on his laptop, and I drank my coffee and poured another cup.

  Hu brightened. “Okay, maybe I got something. . . .”

  “Got what?” I asked. “A conscience?”

  Church interrupted, “We’ve had a busy night collating the information from the Hive. We still haven’t pinned down the location of the Deck, but Bug thinks that will happen this morning. First Sergeant Sims is already prepping Echo and Alpha teams for a full-out assault. If the facility is in Arizona, then we can get ground support from the L.A. office. Unfortunately, Zebra and X-ray teams are still in Canada. If this morning goes well for them, then they’ll close out that matter and we can put them on the ground.”

  “What about the teams from the Hangar?” The Brooklyn facility had four field teams. Baltimore and L.A. had two each, Denver and Chicago had one. I knew that the Chicago team had been chopped down in a mission two weeks ago that had killed the team leader and four of the six operators. They were vetting new candidates from Delta and the SEALs.

  “Tango and Leopard are overseas. Hardball is in the process of moving to Denver to replace Jigsaw. They’re on standby.”

  Unlike traditional branches of the military the DMS didn’t use the standard A, B, C code names for all of the teams. They did originally, but as teams were wiped out they were replaced by teams with new names that started with the same letter. If Grace and I ever came up for air we were supposed to start building new B and C teams to replace the original Bravo and Charlie Teams massacred during a major terrorist action in late June.

  “We’ll also have National Guard support and if necessary a squadron from the Three Hundred and Fifty-fifth Fighter Wing out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson.” He measured out a half smile. “We’re taking this very seriously, Captain. I had a long talk with the President last night and again this morning. He’s put enough assets and resources at our disposal to wage a war.”

  “That’s what this is,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s definitely what this is.”

  “Where do we stand with intelligence?”

  “Sit and I’ll go over it. The full intelligence packet is being downloaded to your PDA, but here are the talking points, and there are some real speed bumps.” He tapped a key and the LCD screen behind him showed a picture of the man the boy SAM had identified as Hans Brucker.

  “This is Gunnar Haeckel,” said Church. He tapped another key and a second photo appeared. It was a scan of an employee ID photograph. “This is Hans Brucker.” He hit some keys and two fingerprint ten-cards appeared, one beneath each photo. “Here are their prints. Now watch.” He tapped keys and the cards moved together and the computer program corrected the angles of each so that they overlapped. Brief lights flashed every time a loop or whorl aligned. It was like looking at a string of firecrackers. One by one each separate fingerprint image flashed white to indicate that a complete comparison was finished. All ten prints were perfect matches.

  “Yeah, you told me that there was a screwup. Someone’s screwing with the fingerprint index.”

  “No,” said Church. “These are the correct prints from each man.”

  Hu looked up finally, grinning. “We’re also running a high-speed DNA profile on Brucker. Guess what?”

  “You look too pleased with yourself, Doc. This isn’t going to be good news, is it?”

  “It’s about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while,” Hu said. “What we got here is a new chapter in the second Star Wars movie.”

  “Huh?”

  “Second Star Wars movie. After Phantom Menace, before Revenge of the Sith.”

  It took me a moment to fish through the raw geek data in my brain.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Yep,” said Hu, grinning fit to bust. “Attack of the Clones!”

  “Oh . . . come on. . . .”

  “Sadly,” said Church, “Dr. Hu is correct.” I noticed a little twitch in his voice when he said “Dr.”

  “Well,” I said, “we already have unicorns and tiger-hounds. Why not clones?”

  Hu looked a little deflated, as if he expected a bigger reaction from me. Truth was that I’d toyed with that concept on the flight back from Costa Rica, after learning that the fingerprints matched. I’d dismissed it mostly because I didn’t want to believe it.

  “We have any aliens or crashed UFOs?” I asked.

  “Not at the moment,” Church said dryly.

  “Okay, then what about the Extinction Wave? What do we know about that?”

  “That’s the real problem,” said Church. “Doctor?”

  Hu said, “It looks like our mad scientists have been trying to take diseases that are normally genetic—meaning passed down through bloodlines—”

  “I know what ‘genetic’ means,” I said.

  He sniffed. “They’ve been trying to take genetic diseases and turn them into viruses. It’s wacky and way out on the cutting edge. Essentially they’re rebuilding the DNA of certain viruses to include the genes that code for Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, certain types of cancer . . . that sort of thing.”

  “So this is the Cabal,” I said. “This was what they were working on during the Cold War days.”

  “Definitely the same agenda,” said Church, “and some of the same players.”

 
; “The difference,” Hu said, “is now they can actually do this stuff. They’ve cracked the process for turning genetic diseases into communicable pathogens.”

  “And the Extinction Wave is going to be a coordinated release of these pathogens?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Church.

  “How the hell do we stop them?”

  “That’s what you’re going to find out for us when you raid the Deck. We have a glimmer of hope—”

  “Not much of a glimmer,” Hu cut in, but Church ignored him.

  “—in that we found several matching lists of the countries and regions where the pathogens will be released.”

  “That’s great! We can warn—”

  “I’ve also been on the phone with the State Department. Embassies in each country have already been put on standby. There’s an issue of delicacy here,” Church said. “We have to keep our awareness of this under the radar until we’ve taken down the Deck and the people responsible. We can’t risk a leak that might lead to this new Cabal going dark and starting up again at a later date and in new locations.”

  I nodded.

  “From everything we’ve read,” Hu said, “there’s a specific release code that needs to be sent out. Your dancing partner, Carteret, said that the release code was programmed into a trigger device that is always kept by either Otto Wirths or Cyrus Jakoby. He said he thinks it’s a small device about the size of a flash drive but with a six-digit keypad on it.”

  “He didn’t say any of that to me,” I said.

  Church adjusted his glasses. “He told me,” he said. “He was quite willing to unburden his soul.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  Church ate a cookie and didn’t answer.

  Hu said, “So we have to get to Wirths or Jakoby and get that trigger device before the code is sent to agents around the world who would then release the pathogens.”

  “Only that? Swell, I’ll see if I can work it into my day,” I said sourly. I reached over and took a cookie from Church’s plate. “We’re going to have to go in quietly. Otherwise, they’ll just trigger the device at the first sign of an invasion. Quiet infils take time to set up, and I can hear that frigging clock ticking.”

  “I have an idea about that,” said Hu. “This trigger device probably is a flash drive. A device of the kind Carteret described isn’t big enough to have a satellite uplink. It probably doesn’t have any kind of transmitter. I asked Bug about this. He agrees that the trigger device probably needs to be plugged into a USB port and then the code sent out via the Internet. It’s the smartest way to do it, and it would allow for individual codes for each launch.”

  “Okay, so what’s the plan?”

  “An EMP,” he said. “Right before you rush the place, or maybe after you’re inside, but before you start going all Jack Bauer on everyone, we pop an E-bomb on them.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “An electromagnetic bomb,” he said. “Very cool stuff. It’s a bomb that creates an electromagnetic pulse. It won’t kill people, but the EMP fries anything electrical and should wipe out their computer systems. Unless they’re ruggedized . . . but that’s a risk.”

  “We have this stuff?”

  “The Navy was playing with them during the first Gulf War,” said Church. “And we used one to take out Iraqi TV during the 2003 invasion. If we can locate the deck I can arrange to have an E-bomb dropped.”

  “Friend in the industry?” I asked.

  “Friend in the industry,” he agreed.

  “Then that’s our edge,” I said. I stood up and reached across the table to Hu. “Nice work, Doc.”

  He looked at my hand as if I was offering to beat him to death with it. After a few seconds’ hesitation he took my hand and shook it.

  “What about the Jakoby family?” I asked. “The Twins. SAM said that they were involved. He told me that they were the ones who genetically engineered the unicorn for the hunt and they treat Cyrus as if he’s their prisoner rather than their father. SAM doesn’t know them that well, but he said that they have a lab somewhere and that Cyrus has been trying to find it for years. The Twins call their lab the Dragon Factory.”

  “Wonder if they’ve engineered a dragon?” Hu mused.

  “There was nothing in the recovered records that gives any indication of the location of the Dragon Factory,” Church said. “And MindReader has not been able to pin down a recent location for either Paris or Hecate Jakoby. They were last seen at an art show in London a week ago. We have nine of their known residences under surveillance by police in four countries. At this moment, beyond providing animals for the hunts we don’t know the scale or depth of their involvement. We’re poised to seize all of their known holdings and assets, however, but that move won’t be made until we’re sure it won’t interfere with our attempts to find that trigger device.”

  “And their dad?”

  “There are no photos of Cyrus Jakoby anywhere. No personal details of any kind other than when the Twins mentioned him in passing during press interviews. If he’s being kept as a prisoner, then it might explain why he’s so conspicuously off the radar. There was a sensational news story about the birth of the Twins, but none of the papers carried photos of the father.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t want his face publicly known,” I said. “That squares with the assumption that ‘Jakoby’ is not his real name. Could be anything from a drug lord on the lam to someone in witness protection.”

  “It covers too much ground for easy speculation. Bottom line is that we don’t know who he is, and it is remarkable that MindReader cannot dig up a single piece of verification on him.”

  “If he’s tied to the Cabal, could someone have used that old system—”

  “Pangaea,” he supplied.

  “—to erase records of him?”

  “Yes. And considering the connections to the Cabal that already exist in this case I think that’s what has happened.”

  “How about Otto Wirths?”

  “Same thing. Nothing. The names are probably aliases. However, there is another possible tie to the death camps. Eduard Wirths, the senior medical officer at Auschwitz, was nicknamed ‘Otto’ as a child. Some of his close adult friends still called him that, though in all the official records he went by Eduard.”

  “So, you’re thinking that Otto is what? Son, grandson? Named after Eduard’s nickname?”

  “It’s worth considering.”

  Hu said, “Or he could be a clone of Eduard Wirths. Hey, don’t look at me like that, Ledger. If we’re playing with clones, then we have to factor them into all of this. And it’s been thought of before. You know, The Boys from Brazil. Ira Levin book. Movie with Gregory Peck—”

  “They were cloning Hitler.”

  “Why not? Maybe someone’s cloning the whole upper echelon of the Nazi Party. Or a whole army of Hitlers!”

  “Don’t even joke,” I said.

  “Okay, but if we run into an army of short guys with toothbrush mustaches and undescended testicles don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  I shook my head and turned to Church. “How’s the Kid?”

  Church did not answer right away. “We’re doing some additional testing.”

  “I want him to go with me when we raid the Deck.”

  “Why?”

  “He used to live there. We don’t have time to learn the layout and intricacies on our own. I don’t like taking a kid into a combat situation, God knows, but we’re short on advantages.”

  Church nodded. “We can wire you with a camera and have the boy online with you from the TOC. But he doesn’t go into the field.” He paused. “I don’t entirely trust the boy,” he said.

  “Why the hell not? If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be anywhere with this.”

  “I’m sensible of the debt we—and the world—owe him. But his connection to the key players behind this makes me uneasy. We can discuss it more later. Dr. Sanchez is with him at the moment.”

>   “Rudy’s back?”

  “Yes. He flew in early this morning at my request. He’s been with the boy for several hours now. I’d like to hear his assessment on the boy before I—”

  The door burst open and Bug rushed in. He was grinning from ear to ear. Grace was a half step behind him. She shot me a quick, excited look, but it had nothing to do with last night.

  “We have the buggers,” she said. “Captain Smythe from the Ark Royal just called. There was a small plane in a hangar at the Hive. One of Smythe’s pilots searched the plane and checked the controls and mileage, gas usage—the lot.”

  Bug said, “I matched the mileage log against traffic control records, using Arizona as a probable location. I think we found the Deck. It’s definitely Arizona. A nowhere spot near Gila Bend, just over the border from Mexico.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Hu. “Are you sure?”

  Bug slapped a satellite printout onto the table. It showed a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a desert landscape. Smack dab in the center was a structure with twelve sides.

  “Son of a bitch,” Hu said.

  I clapped Bug on the shoulder. “Outstanding!”

  Church said as he got to his feet, “Captain Ledger, Major Court-land . . . get your teams ready to roll. Alert all stations. I’ll get on the horn and find us an E-bomb.” His face was hard and colder than I’d ever seen it. “We’re going to war.”

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  Southwest of Gila Bend, Arizona

  Monday, August 30, 5:19 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 42 hours, 41 minutes E.S.T.

  I was alone in a world of heat shimmers, scorpions, biting flies, and nothing else. The Sonoran Desert may not be the Sahara, but it has its moments. The temperature at one o’clock in the afternoon was 122 degrees, and there was not so much as a wisp of cloud between its furnace heat and me except camouflaged BDUs and a thin film of sunscreen. Bunny and Top were in the air-conditioned back of an FBI van that was painted to look like a Comcast Cable TV truck out on a dirt road that led from nowhere to nowhere. Grace and Alpha Team were somewhere in a Black Hawk helicopter on a mesa fifteen miles to the northwest. Somewhere up in the wild blue yonder was the 358th Fighter Squadron, ready to rain hell and damnation down on the Deck if I gave the word. One of those planes carried an E-bomb. The upside was that we could get one; the downside was that my own electronics might not survive it. The ruggedized unit I had in my pack was supposed to be able to withstand the EMP, but as has been pointed out to me so many times since joining the G, it was a piece of equipment built by the lowest bidder.