by Jon Land
Again, Dane remained silent.
“I don’t remember how much it was. You’d think I would, but I don’t. What do you think that says about me?”
“That you enjoy your work.”
Beriya looked about him. “As you enjoy yours, comrade.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“Addressing you that way is a sign of respect. Would you like to know how I killed that boy? I did it with a plastic bag,” Beriya continued, without waiting for a response. “I waited behind a tree on the path through the woods he took to get home. When he walked past me, I jumped out and jammed it over his head and pulled tight. He fought and fought, took his time dying, but I remember wanting it to last longer.”
“How much would it take for you to come work for me?” Dane asked him, finding his voice firmly at last.
“The happiest moment of my life was feeling that boy die. I don’t think I took any money from the boys who recruited me to do it. I think maybe that’s why I can’t remember how much I was paid.”
“You’d remember the amount I could pay you,” Dane said, leaning forward in his chair.
“You’re wondering if I’m going to kill you after you give me what I came for.”
“I’ll admit the thought has crossed my mind today.”
“But you’re not scared.”
Dane tried to hold the big man’s stare, but couldn’t for very long. “I haven’t been scared in a real long time, since I planted my father’s coffin in the ground. He used to get drunk and beat the shit out of me. Guess that’s what he enjoyed.”
“I watched my father die during the rebellion in Latvia. It was my first action as a soldier. Helped me to understand what war was really like, how not all enemies wear uniforms. You know why it’s so easy for me to kill?”
“Because you picture the men who murdered your father?”
Beriya’s eyes dulled, no longer appearing to look at anything. “Because he taught me so much of what I know, and I need to be worthy of his teachings. He didn’t have to be in the square that day, battling the cowards behind the barricades. He felt it was his duty, that it wasn’t right to order another man to do what he wouldn’t do himself.”
“You haven’t quoted me a price yet,” Dane said, instead of responding. “How much to put you on the Dane Corp payroll.”
Beriya smiled. “I know you had the fire at that chemical plant set. I don’t expect you meant to kill anyone, but I’m curious as to how being the cause of their deaths sits with you. After all, it makes you little different from me.”
“Really?” Dane managed, finding his voice when the big man finally pushed the wrong button. “How many lives have you made better with your work lately?”
“That doesn’t make you any less guilty, pindo,” Beriya charged, using the Russian slur for Americans that had become popular during the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. “But it does make you a coward. I wouldn’t mention it to Comrade Zhirnosky if I were you.”
“Yanko Zhirnosky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia?”
“I wasn’t aware the two of you were acquainted.”
“His people helped arrange some oil leases for me through Gazprom in Pavlodar.”
“There’s no oil in Pavlodar.”
Dane managed to hold Beriya’s stare this time. “So I learned.”
“In any event, you’re going to have the opportunity to thank him personally. Comrade Zhirnosky would like to meet with you.”
“In Russia?”
“No, pindo, Texas. He’s on his way here now.”
72
MANHATTAN, KANSAS
They couldn’t take off because of thunderstorms in the area and Cort Wesley was growing more antsy by the minute, especially when Caitlin’s phone kept going straight to voice mail. He sat close to the front of the private jet. Jones was in the back, engaging in one call after another with various parties back in Washington, the man back in his element, seeming to grow taller and broader the more he talked.
Cort Wesley was stuck with his thoughts, starting with Dr. Jack Jerry leading them into what used to be his living room. Used to be, because all the furniture had been removed to turn the whole white birch floor into a map of the United States, drawn in the kind of Magic Marker, red and blue atop the white, that holds its pungent scent even after the ink has dried. Cort Wesley remembered them from school, hadn’t thought they actually made the markers anymore. The individual states weren’t labeled, but the scale of the hand-drawn map was perfect, right down to the borders between them. Incredible really.
As was something else.
More marker, a ton of it, all in black, except for some stray flickers of white from the greasepaint Jack Jerry must’ve sweated through, which had flecked to the floor as he worked. Somehow he’d managed to create lighter and darker shades of black, the thickest swatches like tar blotching various spots in Texas in a pattern not unlike the one showcased on a different map, visible only under ultraviolet light.
In Alexi Gribanov’s office.
* * *
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dr. Jack Jerry had asked Cort Wesley and Jones hours earlier, standing somewhere around St. Louis on the map of the United States he’d drawn on his living room floor. “What a country!”
The room’s bright lighting revealed the cracks in Jerry’s greasepaint rodeo clown makeup, as if he’d been wearing it for too long. Cort Wesley focused on the black blotches, so far confined to Texas, where they were both big and dark.
“Maybe not so much anymore,” Jerry added sadly, as an afterthought. “Maybe never again.”
“Are you aware of what happened at the bioterrorism center on campus?” Jones asked him.
Jerry turned from Cort Wesley toward him. “Boom!” was all he said. “Bad, very bad—very, very bad. Now we can’t stop them. We were working on coming up with a way to stop them.”
“Stop what?”
“The invasion. That’s what this is—an invasion.” Jerry moved closer to Texas and began pointing downward at the darkest and largest blotches he’d drawn onto the floor. Cort Wesley noticed he was reluctant to step on them. “We were close to figuring out what created them, which is the key to figuring out how to stop them. Have to interrupt the breeding cycle, have to prevent them from reproducing. Before it’s too late, before they kill it all.”
Cort Wesley moved close enough to Jerry to make sure the man knew he was there. “All of what?”
“The land, the crops, the country, the world—take your pick.”
73
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“How exactly do you do it, Ranger?” Doc Whatley asked her, before he’d even said hello.
“Do what, Doc?”
“Come up with stuff that defies science, police work, and the Lord himself?”
“I’m guessing you’re referring to whatever you found in those grazing fields used by Karl Dakota and Christoph Ilg.”
“Same as what you found in Armand Bayou,” Whatley said, shaking his head. “Near mirror images. Confirmed the direction my thinking was going in, all right; you just got there ahead of me, ahead of everyone. Same tunnels dug under the surface by whatever was killing the grass in Armand Bayou and the other places, too. Nearby crops, too, creating conditions passed off to a blight.”
“I think I read about it.”
“No one pays much attention to such things until they become all-out scourges, Ranger,” interjected the man everyone in the Texas Rangers called Young Roger, “and that’s exactly where we’re headed with this now.”
Caitlin didn’t even know his last name. Young Roger was in his early thirties now, but didn’t look much older than Dylan. Though a Ranger himself, the title was mostly honorary, provided in recognition of the technological expertise he brought to the table which had helped the Rangers solve a number of Internet-based crimes, ranging from identity theft to credit card fraud to the busting of a major pedophile and kiddie porn ring. He worked out of all six
Ranger company offices on a rotating basis. Young Roger wore his hair too long and was never happier than when playing guitar for his band the Rats, whose independent record label had just released their first CD. Their alternative brand of music wasn’t the kind she preferred, but Dylan told her it was pretty good. Caitlin figured he had a crush on a gal guitarist named Patty.
Doc Whatley, meanwhile, had opened a volume of an ancient scientific encyclopedia set shelved behind his desk, which he claimed contained information that had yet to reach the Internet.
“Remember where we left off last time, Ranger?” he asked Caitlin, turning to a page he’d bookmarked.
“With bugs, as I recall, specifically that frass you found present on the corpses of those cattle that had been picked clean to the bone on Karl Dakota’s farm.”
“Beetles, specifically,” Young Roger elaborated for him. “Bess beetles, even more specifically.”
“Got a picture here of one to show you,” Whatley said, turning the book around so Caitlin could see.
The page he’d bookmarked featured a picture of a black tank of a bug so shiny it looked as if it was wearing a leather suit. The photo displayed was labeled “life size,” which put the bess beetle at over two inches in length.
“Big bastard, for sure,” Caitlin noted. “But what am I looking at here, exactly?”
“Your killer, Ranger.”
* * *
Caitlin was still staring at the picture of the bess beetle in Doc Whatley’s encyclopedia. “And this is what you figure wiped out those cattle where they stood?” she asked him.
“Multiplied by maybe a million, yes, I do.”
“Did you say a million, Doc?”
“That was my estimate, based on how the herd had no time to cluster defensively or even panic. These bugs just came out of the ground and took them as they stood.”
“Are you saying they were hiding there, disguising their approach, like predators?”
“Because that’s what they are,” Young Roger told her. “Predators—the perfect predator, especially given the genetic mutation they’ve undergone.”
“We can’t prove that at this stage, of course,” Doc Whatley interjected.
“But it’s the only thing that explains behavior that would otherwise be considered aberrant for this particular species,” Young Roger reminded. “Somebody took nature’s perfect organism and managed to turn them into monsters. Beetles are the most diverse group of any insect. There are over three hundred thousand species known to science, and probably many tens of thousands more that are still unknown. They’re found on land and in freshwater all over the world, in just about every habitat. Some species live on plants, others tunnel or burrow, some swim.”
“Did you say ‘swim’? A bug?”
Young Roger seemed not to hear her. “They live in families, communicate audibly, and eat voraciously.”
“Not cattle, though,” Caitlin raised. “Right?”
“Not under normal circumstances,” Doc Whatley told her.
“But these are not normal circumstances,” said Young Roger. “Not even close.”
“Because they’re mutations.”
“Their genetics have been altered. They’re bigger, faster, even smarter.”
“Smarter?”
“We didn’t find one single carcass in the whole grazing field where you found those cattle stripped down to the bone,” Doc Whatley said grimly.
“You suggesting they hauled their dead away?”
“Ingested would be more likely,” Young Roger answered before Whatley had the chance. “And we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.”
“What’s that?” Caitlin asked him.
“Reproduction.”
74
MANHATTAN, KANSAS
“Colonies,” Dr. Jack Jerry had continued from behind his greasepaint. “Based on the geographical proximities of the seven attacks we were studying, I estimated there were as few as three, as many as five, but that number is certain to multiply. Beetles have four different stages in their life cycle. Adult female beetles mate and lay eggs. The eggs hatch into a larval stage that is wingless. The larvae feed and grow and eventually change into a pupal stage. The pupa doesn’t move or feed but eventually transforms into an adult beetle. Female beetles usually lay dozens to hundreds of eggs, reproduction timed to match the time of most available food. Some beetles collect a supply of food for their larvae and lay the egg in the ball of food. Some scavenger beetles even feed their babies.”
“Like you said,” managed Cort Wesley, trying to make sense of it all, “the perfect organism.”
“Did I say that?” Jerry asked, looking genuinely confused. “When did I say that?”
“You said hundreds of eggs,” interjected Jones, his voice growing impatient.
“I don’t remember saying that, either.”
“How many females in each colony?” Jones asked Jerry.
“What colonies?” the man asked, growing more confused by the moment.
“As many as five,” Cort Wesley reminded, “as few as three.”
“Based on crop ingestions and frass samples taken throughout the state, in the hot zones we identified denoting the largest infestations…” Jerry started, but then his eyes grew distant and confused. “Where was I?”
“Talking about crop ingestions and frass samples.”
“Oh yes, based on those, I estimated the population of each colony to be between a hundred thousand at the low end and several million at the high, maybe tens of millions by now, allowing for further anticipated growth.”
“Wait a minute,” said Jones, moving from California to West Texas on the elegantly drawn floor map, “are you saying each of these dark blotches across the state of Texas represents as many as ten million of these things?”
“Not at all. Sorry to give you that impression. I meant tens of millions.”
“Plural,” Cort Wesley noted.
Jerry took a single step to the side on his floor map, placing him closer to Kansas City now. “These beetles only do three things: eat, screw, move, then eat, screw, and move again. At each stop more females lay their eggs, and the eggs grow into larvae, and the larvae grow into pupae, and the pupa becomes an adult beetle. So each stop on the map represents another potential colony.” Jerry suddenly rotated his gaze between Cort Wesley and Jones, as if seeing them for the first time. “Who are you again?”
Jones flashed the badge dangling from his neck. “Homeland Security.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not so long as you keep cooperating, Doctor.”
“Cooperating about what?”
Cort Wesley wandered closer to Texas on the floor map, from Minnesota. He found himself standing over the general area of Armand Bayou, the site from which Luke’s classmates had gone missing. Not too far to the southwest was one of the tar-black blotches denoting one of the colonies Jack Jerry had described.
“Dr. Jerry?”
“That’s me!” the man beamed, swinging toward him.
“Have you ever worked the Texas rodeo circuit?”
“A few times. At least, I think I have.”
“Because I think I’ve seen you in action. Maybe at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo or the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo,” Cort Wesley said, raising the two best-known ones.
“I believe I’ve worked both.”
“There you go, sir. You’re damn good, too.”
“Why, thank you!” Jerry told him, beaming again.
“I do have a question.”
“About rodeos?”
“About this map,” Cort Wesley said, and stepped aside so Jerry could see him point downward. “This area around Armand Bayou, right here, just above this colony you’ve got just to the south of it. If there were a bunch of kids sleeping outside for the night right in the colony’s path…”
“There wouldn’t be anything left of them but bones, come morning.” Jerry’s expression brightened, becoming almost ch
ildlike. “So you’ve seen me perform.”
“I have indeed,” Cort Wesley lied.
“And I was good?”
“Best in the show.”
Jerry’s smile slipped off his face, even his clown makeup and painted red lips seeming to droop. “I think something bad happened.” He twisted his gaze out the window at the phalanx of police cars. “I think there’s been some trouble.”
“It appears that way,” Cort Wesley nodded.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Jerry said, his voice so somber it started to crack. “There’s going to be more.”
75
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Here’s my question,” Caitlin said to both Doc Whatley and Young Roger. “Since when did beetles become carnivorous? I knew they ate plants, but flesh?”
“Actually,” said Young Roger, clubbing his hair back into a ponytail and using a rubber band to hold it in place there, “they eat all sorts of things.”
“Depending on the species, of course,” Whatley interjected. “And, judging from the frass I had analyzed, this is the beetle the species we’re dealing with most closely resembles.”
Caitlin followed his finger back to the encyclopedia and the picture of what looked like a giant insect encased in a shiny shell of armor.
“Odontotaenius disjunctus,” Whatley continued, “the familiar bessbug, native to the eastern US and Canada, but common pretty much everywhere. They’re normally wood burrowers, but the frass I examined indicates they’ve been living underground instead, likely having adapted, since the colony’s large numbers would’ve made securing enough stray logs impossible.”
“In other words,” Young Roger interrupted, “they’ve adapted to their environment. Very common for insect species, which explains how they managed to outlive the dinosaurs.” He looked toward the medical examiner. “You want to tell her the real fun part, Doc, or should I?”
“Patience, son,” Whatley told him. “Now, according to what I’ve been able to gather from the frass, this species crossbred with the coleoptera beetle more common in these parts.”
