Three brothers must have lived here. Identical triplets, with the same genes, the same scars, and different birthdays. Two of them were now dead, and the third was somewhere south of here, engaged in a long chat with Meredith Miles’s ex-con front gate guard. I’d shut them all down, but ultimately they were Larsen’s victims. Not mine. Maybe he had a way to justify what he’d done to them, could explain it to himself if not the world at large. After all, he wasn’t enslaving other people. Just copies of himself.
I went to the other side of the room and found the helicopter maintenance logs. There was a fifty-five-gallon drum of Jet-A fuel strapped to a dolly. A backup, I supposed, in case the chopper ever landed here without enough gas in its tanks to safely fly out again. There were metal shelves stocked with engine parts and tools, and an entire bookcase of manuals.
And between two of the shelves, in a concrete wall that directly abutted the hill outside, there was a solid steel door. The door had no handle, and no keyhole. There was a small black box on the wall next to it. A tiny camera was positioned at the top of the box, and a blinking red light sat at the bottom.
I leaned and put my ear against the door. I could hear the long, low hum of something running on the other side of it. Exhaust fans, maybe. The metal was thick and unyielding, and cold to the touch.
I needed to get in there, and I thought I knew how.
Five minutes later, I was back in the main house with the dolly and straps from the fuel drum. Larsen wasn’t quite where I’d left him. He’d come back to his senses. After flipping over onto his stomach, he’d pulled himself along the floor about five feet. He was trying to pull himself up on the end of a couch.
He hadn’t heard me come in, so I walked right up to him, knelt, and grabbed his arms before he even knew I was there. I pulled them behind his back and tied them together with one of the fuel drum straps. Then I hoisted him up, leaned him against the dolly, and put another strap around his chest to keep him up.
“How are you doing?” I asked him. “Can you feel your toes?”
He didn’t answer. Which was fine, because I didn’t care in the slightest. I tilted him back, then wheeled him out of the house and up the path to the maintenance shed. We rolled inside and I brought him past the metal shelves, over to the door. I undid his chest strap and held him up by taking a fistful of his curly blond hair, and then I lowered him down to the black box to present his face to the camera.
Nothing happened. I reached around and slapped him with my free hand until he opened his eyes.
The red light stopped blinking. Then it turned green, and the door clicked open. There was a hiss of cold air rushing out, the dusty scent of oxygen, and a sharp tang of rubbing alcohol. And underneath that there was a lower smell, the odor of old bandages festering in a trash can.
I pulled the door the rest of the way open and looked in.
I was standing at the mouth of a cave. The entrance tunnel sloped gently downward, and was lit overhead by high-wattage LEDs. Up ahead, the tunnel curved out of sight.
I brought Larsen fifty or sixty feet inside, and then I laid down the dolly and left him there. I walked onward, still following my gun sights. Before I reached the curve, I heard something that almost stopped my heart.
A baby crying.
First there was just the one. The hungry, fearful wail of a very young infant. The cries came in waves of three, as though the baby had to draw a new breath after each effort. The sound must have awoken others, and they began to join the first. I couldn’t tell how many. It sounded like I was coming up to the NICU ward in a children’s hospital. I lowered the gun and clicked the safety. I looked back at Larsen, and he turned his face away from me. He couldn’t meet my eyes. So I went on. I had to be a witness. I had to see what he had done.
My new shoes made a sticky sound on the freshly painted floor. I looked down and saw that I was leaving bloody prints, each one a little fainter than the last. Overall, I’d left quite a trail behind me, in reaching this point. But it ended here. I knew that as I turned the corner, went through a double set of glass doors, and saw the first domed room in front of me.
The room was a circle, fifty feet in diameter. The perimeter was lined with heavy lab tables. Microscopes were wired to laptop computers. I saw bench-mounted equipment that I couldn’t begin to identify, and several things the size of industrial photocopiers in the center of the room. There were shelves of glass bottles and plastic jugs, and racks of test tubes, and miles of thin plastic tubing. Larsen was bringing his clients’ DNA here, perfecting it with his CRISPR machines, and transferring it into human eggs. After that, it was just a matter of gestating a disposable vessel.
There was another tunnel on the far end of the lab. The crying was coming from down there. This passage had doors all along one side, one every ten feet, for a hundred feet. The doors were steel, and had tiny square windows in their centers. Thick, wire-reinforced glass in the windows. There were steel-flapped slots midway down each door. Like mail slots, but wider. As wide as a metal food tray.
I went to the first door and looked through the window.
I was looking at a tiny cell, carved out of the solid rock. In its thirty-six square feet, it held a cot, a steel toilet, and a sink. All of them were low and small. The toilet was a foot high. The sink was eighteen inches off the floor. The cot was four feet long. Someone had drawn on the wall with crayons. Nothing I could make out. Just random, sad scribbles.
I hadn’t thought my stomach could sink any lower. I’d been wrong.
That cell was empty, but there were nine more. I found Madeleine behind the fourth door. The first time I’d seen her, she was nothing but a lump under the covers. A spill of blond hair across a pillow. This time, she was curled into a fetal position on a too-short cot, with her back to me. She had no pillow and no blanket. She was wearing an open-backed hospital gown. The scars on her back were gone. In their place were open wounds. Larsen meant to tap her for all she was worth. It had been his plan all along, interrupted by two decades. She might have been in the same cell, on the same cot, on the night that Dr. Park had his crisis of conscience and broke her out.
I used the butt of the gun to tap on the door. Madeleine didn’t move, so I tapped harder. Finally, she sat up. She moved to the end of the cot and put her knees up to her chest. She hadn’t looked at the window.
“It’s me,” I whispered. “Lee Crowe.”
“Lee?”
She looked up. When she saw my face, she started crying. I held the gun to the window.
“I’m going to get you out,” I said. “Stand all the way to the side, face against the wall.”
She nodded, and moved.
There were two locks on the door. A dead bolt, and a simpler lock on the doorknob. I put two bullets into the top lock and one into the knob. Even after that, it took five kicks to get the door open. She came tumbling out of the cell and into me. She held on to me, but I didn’t put my hands on her. I didn’t know where her wounds were.
“The babies,” she whispered.
“Have you seen them?”
I felt her nod against me.
“Whenever they take me out. For the harvesting.”
“Who was doing it?”
“His name is Larsen. And he had other men helping.”
“I took care of them,” I said. “Is there anyone else—besides the babies?”
“Follow me. I’ll show you.”
She took my hand and led me down the hallway. I looked into the windows of the remaining cells, but they were all empty. Madeleine pointed toward another, up ahead.
“Look,” she said.
I leaned in. I was looking into a large domed room. It was the same size as the first lab I’d walked through, but it was being put to a very different use. There were six metal stands arranged in a semicircle. Each stand held a clear plastic bin. Inside every bin was a swaddled baby. Most of them were screaming. Their faces were red and pinched, like dried apples. There was a woman in there with them. She h
ad matted brown hair that stuck out in all directions. Her eyes were heavily lidded, half closed from sleep deprivation. She wore a sweatshirt and a pair of surgical scrub pants. Neither looked like they’d been washed recently. She was barefooted, and her toenails were long.
As I watched, she picked up a baby. I cringed, not knowing what to expect. But she cradled him gently and began to rock him. I watched her mouth make shushing noises, impossible to hear over the wailing. She walked to a shelf and took a bottle of premixed formula from a box. The room was crammed with supplies. Diapers. Bottled water. Creams and wipes. There was an unmade bed and an overflowing trash can.
I moved away from the window and looked at Madeleine.
“She’s a prisoner too,” Madeleine said. “At night, when we’re alone, we talk. We can hear each other if we shout.”
I could believe that. The sound carried well down here. The steel doors shut in everything but the screams.
“How can he trust her with them?”
“She was a surrogate—that’s how he gets the babies in the first place. Surrogates, from online ads. But he tricked her, and brought her here. So one of those is hers. What can she do, but take care of them? They’re just babies. What would you do?”
I had no idea. The question was beyond any circumstance I had ever imagined. But it was a more personal matter for Madeleine. Twenty years ago, her own birth mother might have been locked in that room.
“We need to get her out,” she whispered. “Get all of them out.”
I looked at the door. There were more locks on this one. The other cells were for children who had graduated from the nursery. This one had the infants, and so it was built to hold their adult caretaker.
“We’ll need to find another way,” I said. “With them on the other side, I can’t just empty a clip at the locks.”
“There has to be a key.”
“Come with me,” I said, and we walked back down the hall to see if Larsen was still alive.
But Larsen wasn’t where I’d left him.
The dolly was there. And there was a long smear of blood along the floor, leading to the wall, where it stopped. He couldn’t have stood up. That was impossible, with gunshots in both his legs. Someone had to have helped him. Maybe Larsen’s chauffeur had driven home. He might have stopped for a drink somewhere, or dinner. A little bit of freedom—enough that I’d beaten him to the compound.
“Stay here,” I whispered. “And take this.”
I handed her the gun I’d been using, and drew two others from my waistband. Jim’s and Larsen’s. I began to walk up the tunnel, toward the maintenance shed. Halfway up, I noticed something else. A trickle of straw-colored liquid was running along the tunnel floor from up above. I knelt and touched it, brought my finger to my nose.
Fuel. Jet-A, from the fifty-five-gallon drum. I had moved it when I’d taken the dolly. But I’d left it upright, and sealed. It hadn’t been leaking. I thumbed the safeties on both guns, pulled back their slides, and checked that each chamber held a cartridge. Then I looked back at Madeleine. I nodded for her to move back, out of sight. When she had, I went up.
I stepped out of the tunnel and into the maintenance shed. I swept right, and then left. The room was empty. But the drum of Jet-A was on its side, fuel still spilling out. It was puddled on the floor, half an inch deep. Some of it was spilling into the tunnel, and the rest was flowing out the front door.
Now I could hear the noise outside: the building whine of a twin turbine helicopter starting up. I knelt in the puddle of fuel by the door and looked out, to the side. The helicopter’s rotor was beginning to spin. I couldn’t see into the cockpit, but the sliding side door was still open, and I could see into the main passenger compartment.
Larsen’s mother stepped out. She was wearing a flowing white dress. It blew around her in the building rotor wash. Her hair did the same. She had something in her hand and I couldn’t tell what it was until she turned. By the time I understood, I only had a second to make a choice.
I could run out of the building, dive into the high grass, and roll down the hill. In which case I would live. Or I could turn around and go back into the tunnel, to Madeleine and to the babies. In which case I would almost certainly die with them. Because what Larsen’s mother was holding was the helicopter’s flare gun, and even as I watched she was raising it up and pulling the trigger. I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t even try to shoot back. Not when I was standing in a pool of gas. I pushed off the doorjamb and sprinted back into the tunnel, pulling the steel door shut as I went.
“Run!” I shouted. “Run, now!”
I pounded down the tunnel. I caught up to Madeleine at the first set of doors and saw that the fuel had already made it that far. I shoved her through the doors, and then grabbed her wrist and started pulling her across the room.
The maintenance shed exploded when we were halfway across the domed lab. We were pulled backwards as the ignition sucked air out of the cave to feed the flames. Then the shock wave hit us and flung us forward. The double set of glass doors behind us probably saved us from being incinerated outright. We got up, pushed through the next set of doors, and ran past the line of children’s cells until we reached the nursery.
We might have survived the explosion, but it was the fire that would surely kill us all. Madeleine pounded on the steel door and looked through the window. The kidnapped woman was already there, on the other side of the glass. I could see her eyes, wide with terror. I looked back and saw that the entire lab was in flames.
“Tell her to move all the babies. Now—now!”
Madeleine started shouting, and then I pushed her aside. I gave the woman fifteen seconds, and then I began to shoot the locks. I emptied every gun I had. Fifty shots in all, maybe. Two of the guns had no suppressors. When I was finished, I could see Madeleine shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear anything but ringing. I kicked the door and it didn’t budge. The air was already full of oily smoke, and it was starting to get hot.
I kicked three more times. My head was spinning. I stepped back, and kicked a final time, and the door swung open. Madeleine went in first, and I followed. I shut the door, and looked to my right. The woman was huddled on the floor. She’d stacked the swaddled babies in her arms the way a person carries firewood. She was cradling all six of them while rocking back and forth on her knees.
Their faces were wailing, but I couldn’t hear them.
Madeleine went to the woman and I went to the storage shelves. I found a stack of clean swaddles. Another shelf had jugs of water, for mixing powdered formula. I took an armful of both and went back to the door. I began soaking the swaddles and stuffing them into every crack I could find.
Before I was finished, the overhead lights went out. Red lights came on above the door, and then they faltered too. There was a boom from outside, from somewhere above us. The backup generator, or maybe the battery bank.
Now there was just a square of orange light from the door’s window. Dim and smoky and distant. I crawled across the room until I found Madeleine in the dark. She passed me a warm bundle, then another. We sat there with the woman, whose name I didn’t know, each of us with two babies in our arms. I had never held an infant before. I cradled them on my lap and put my face against their heads, breathing into their soft hair. The air was thick and choked with smoke. The babies were panicky and jerking, and coming out of their swaddles.
My eyes started to sting and tear up, so I closed them. I lay down close to the floor and held the babies next to me. I reached out, first in front of me, and then behind me. Madeleine and the woman had gone prone as well. Madeleine squeezed my hand in the dark.
Her palm was warm and sweaty, and I could feel her heartbeat pulsing against my skin. She let go of me, and then I was alone in the dark with the two babies. I could feel the floor slipping, tilting back and back, the way a room begins to spin six or eight drinks into a bottle. I thought about the grass outside, cool and wet from the fog and rain. I could hav
e been out there, watching the flames rise upward from the hillside, a bright flare in a dark landscape. I saw myself there, kneeling on the wet earth. In front of me, smoke rose up, and curled around in a convection current, eating its own tail. For just a moment, I thought I understood eternity. What it meant to live forever, and what it meant to die. But there was no choice on the table, no offer before me. I had already chosen. I lay there in the dark, and felt nothing but acceptance.
37
If you watch a few men die, you start getting some fairly solid ideas about what it might be like. How it would feel to slide off into the dark while your fingers go cold and your limbs get stiff and your last words are lost forever. You think about the sorts of things that might be waiting there, on the other side.
None of it was going the way I’d imagined.
For one thing, I hadn’t expected all the pressure on my face. Something was pinching the bridge of my nose and something else was digging into the back of my head. Dusty-smelling air burned my nostrils. It burned all the way into my chest, and I coughed, and then I realized I had it all wrong. I opened my eyes to a blur of pulsing red light and roving shadows. Someone was squeezing my hand. I jerked, and swept my arms around. I couldn’t find the babies. When I tried to sit up, someone pressed me back down.
“Easy, Crowe.”
I looked around, and my eyes struggled to focus. I thought I saw stars. Then Inspector Chang was leaning over me. He just looked at me, and waited until I put things together on my own.
“You ran the phone number,” I whispered. “You tracked it.”
“I got curious,” he said. “I called a friend in LAPD—easy, don’t get up—and he added it to an existing Amber Alert. So it was fast tracked.”
I tried to sit up a third time, and he didn’t stop me. I lifted the oxygen mask from my face and dropped it. I was on the ground, two hundred yards from the hillside. There was an ambulance parked next to me. Three fire engines had left tracks in the grass leading up toward the shed.
Blood Relations Page 30
