Ancestor

by Scott Sigler

And she wasn’t quite sure why.

  NOVEMBER 11: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

  Implantation +2 Days

  COLONEL PAUL FISCHER stood on the edge of a Brazilian rain forest, staring up into the dark canopy. Never in all his days had he felt this drained, this utterly exhausted. His feet hurt. His eyes burned. This kind of sleep deprivation and world-hopping schedule would grind a twentysomething into the ground, and Paul was pushing fifty.

  Amgen had built its xenotransplantation facility in the middle of the deep jungle. A stunning view surrounded the compound, mostly because there were no roads to tarnish the tree line. Amgen had used helicopters to bring everything in and out. Behind Paul, the special threats CBRN team was moving through the compound, completing their mission of seizing the facility and shutting down Amgen’s research.

  A bird sailed from one tree to another. Paul wondered what kind it was. Maybe after all this crap was over he could retire, come back down here and spend months cataloging all the bird species just for the fun of it. Before he could contemplate retirement, however, he had to finish the job.

  Approaching footsteps called his attention away. He turned to face the approaching special threats soldier. This one was bigger than most and put off a more frightening vibe than anyone Paul had ever known. He wore a MOPP suit without the hood, exposing his thin blond buzz cut and a mass of scar tissue where his right ear should have been. The man carried an FN P90 in his right hand and a sat-phone in his left.

  “Colonel Fischer, sir.”

  Fischer tried in vain to remember the man’s name, then cheated and looked at the name patch on the man’s left breast. “What is it, Sergeant O’Doyle?”

  “Mister Longworth would like a status report.” O’Doyle handed over the sat-phone. Paul took it. O’Doyle took a step forward and stared out at the tree line, both hands now on the P90 submachine gun.

  Paul lifted the sat-phone. It felt like it weighed eight thousand pounds. “This is Fischer.”

  “Colonel,” Murray Longworth said. “How’s it look?”

  “We’ve secured the place. No biohazard warnings, everything looks fine.” Of course everything looked fine. The Novozyme accident had been a fluke. Paul and the special threats team had flown to four continents and shut down five facilities in the last three days, and he’d known there wouldn’t be an issue as long as no one was dumb enough to put up a fight.

  “Nice work, Colonel,” Longworth said. “The only one left is Genada, wherever the hell they went.”

  “Any progress on that?”

  “Nothing,” Longworth said. “Like they vanished. Colding is good.”

  Paul nodded to no one. Colding was good. Back when they’d worked together in USAMRIID, Paul had never suspected just how good Colding could be. “Nothing on freezing Genada’s accounts? Can’t we flush them out that way?”

  “Switzerland, Cayman Islands and China refuse to cooperate with that. All three countries believe the ecoterrorist attack was real, and that Genada is out of the game. Danté Paglione does a lot of business in those countries, so they won’t freeze his assets unless we have something concrete to show that Genada is still doing xenotransplantation research. Keep digging, Colonel. Find me something tangible to take to those governments. Anything from the Russians on Poriskova?”

  “Nothing yet, sir,” Paul said. “But their effort is encouraging.”

  For over a year, Paul had been trying to get the Russians’ help in tracking down Galina Poriskova, former Genada employee and whistle-blower. Russian authorities had been mostly unresponsive, but all of that had changed in the last three days. Several Russian agencies had called Paul directly, asking what he needed and how they could help. Near as Paul could estimate, the Russians had at least fifty investigators searching for any sign of Poriskova.

  “Well, that’s something,” Longworth said. “How long until they find her?”

  “They think maybe four or five days.”

  “Good. I’ll keep bird-dogging on my end. I have Interpol and other agencies cooperating. We’ll figure this out, Colonel, just stick with it.”

  “Yes sir,” Paul said, then handed the sat-phone to O’Doyle. Paul wondered just how tired he had to sound if Murray Longworth felt the need to bust out a pep talk. But however tired he sounded, it wasn’t half as tired as he felt.

  NOVEMBER 11: GALLERY AND/OR JUGGS

  Implantation +2 Days

  ANDY CROSTHWAITE SHIFTED his brown grocery bag to his left hand, sighed contentedly, and punched in the code 0-0-0-0 on the security room door. Inside, the familiar rack of weapons was waiting for him.

  Real weapons that could do real damage.

  Not that the Beretta 96 was a toy. The magazine held eleven .40-caliber rounds, plus one in the chamber (Andy always had one in the chamber), for twelve shots of solid stopping power. It wasn’t his favorite, but the 96 was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

  Still, he far preferred the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Magnus provided the .40-caliber variant, providing for consistent ammo with the Beretta sidearms. The MP5s had thirty-round magazines and fired at eight hundred rounds a minute. Accurate at a hundred meters, the thing turned deer into hamburger-on-the-hoof and killed humans dead.

  Andy pulled one of the MP5s out of the rack and carried it over to the security monitor table. He tossed down his tattered brown paper bag. It landed on its side and tipped, spilling copies of Juggs and Gallery across the desktop.

  He sat, hands caressing the weapon’s well-known curves and angles. He’d break it down, clean it and put it back together. At least it was something to do while taking his completely unnecessary shift. What a fucking joke. No one was going to find them here.

  He scanned the monitors anyway. The desk setup looked identical to the one on Baffin Island. More of Magnus’s consistency. Why pay money to train people on multiple systems when you can just train them once and install the same system in all locations? Made sense. Everything Magnus did made sense.

  Andy checked the infrared feeds of the area surrounding the mansion and the hangar. The infrared worked just fine—and showed nothing. He switched back to the black-and-white pictures of the grounds, the inside of the mansion. Several of the little five-inch monitors were blacked out—typical Colding, no monitoring private rooms except for that suicidal Chinese bitch.

  But what about the mythical Room 17? Sara’s room. Yep, the camera was off.

  He set the MP5 on the desktop, then flipped a switch. Sure enough, the screen lit up, showing the inside of Sara Purinam’s room. There she was, on her bed. Too dark, though. He scanned the controls … ah yes, night vision. He pushed a button and saw Sara Purinam’s naked upper body gleam in green-tinged glory. Just a B-cup, but he’d still do her.

  She, however, would not do him. The dyke.

  “Paybacks are a bitch, you tall twat.”

  He watched her sleep. He would keep an eye on her, wait for her to slip up. One way or another, figuratively or literally, Sara Purinam was going to get fucked.

  NOVEMBER 12: THE THING IN THE CAR

  Implantation +3 Days

  THE NEXT MORNING, Colding, Clayton and Sara rode along in Clayton’s Humvee. No Nuge that morning, but regardless, Colding kept his window rolled up tight.

  They reached the fork that led to the harbor. This time Clayton took the road on the left. More trees, more snow, more collapsed houses. Five minutes later the trees ended, giving way to the old town. Clayton pulled into the town center, a stone-paved circle about fifty yards in diameter. Some of the snow-dusted stones were broken or just plain missing. A few small trees grew up through some of the gaps.

  An old well made up of the same broken stones sat smack in the circle’s center. Some of the stones had crumbled away and lay on the ground like rotted-out teeth. The well looked like some B-movie version of a trapdoor to hell.

  Clayton stopped the Hummer. The three of them got out and started walking.

  “Welcome to downtown
Black Manitou,” Clayton said. “I’m sure a city boy like you will feel right at home, eh?”

  “Sure,” Colding said. “I’ll bet the opera house is right over the next hill.” The town’s structures were in marginally better shape than the dilapidated houses out in the woods. Buildings lined the paved area like numbers on a clock. With due north at noon, ten o’clock was the gothic, black-stone church. The thick building dominated the town circle, squatting down like a granite bulldog. It seemed to have so much weight the rest of the town might rise up at any moment, the light end of a lopsided teeter-totter. The few windows looked original, their glass visibly warped, giving the solid structure an almost fluid appearance. A bell tower (noticeably absent a bell) rose like a pinnacle from the steep slate roof.

  Clayton pointed to a green building about twenty feet from the church at the eight o’clock position. The window was still decorated with a faded yellow banner cut in the shape of a star that said GROUND CHUCK ON SALE! Inside, Colding saw empty racks and shelves.

  “That used to be Betty’s,” Clayton said. “Combination grocery and hardware store. She was still here when Danté bought everyone out.”

  At seven o’clock, the road out of town ran between Betty’s and a red building with a moth-eaten moose head hung over the door. One glass eye was long since missing. Shreds of moose fur hung down like demonic streamers.

  “That was Sven Ballantine’s hunter’s shop,” Clayton said. “He ran it during deer season. Magnus and that surly little prick Andy Crosthwaite came up about five years ago and went wild, killed every last deer. Cut their heads off, took a picture right by that well.”

  “Jesus,” Colding said. “I didn’t know Magnus was such a conservationist.”

  “Pissed me off to no end, eh? Deer been here since 1948, when an ice bridge connected da island and da mainland. Deer just walked over.”

  Colding gave Clayton an untrusting look. “An ice bridge?”

  “Yep.”

  “From the mainland,” Sara said. “Three hours away.”

  “Yep.”

  Sara shook her head. “Clayton, you are so full of shit you’d float. It can’t get cold enough to make ice cover that much open water.”

  Clayton hawked a loogie and spat it on one of the mottled paving stones. “You’ll see ice everywhere in another week. In a normal winter, Rapleje Bay will have ice two feet thick by da end of November. This winter? Gonna be cold. Maybe coldest ever.”

  He gestured at a rustic building made of hewn logs and rough wooden beams sitting at about four o’clock, directly across from the church. Other than the church, it was the town’s only two-story building. “Da mansion you’re staying at was for da rich folk, but plenty of regular people came to Black Manitou Lodge here to hunt and relax.”

  A few more wooden buildings dotted the town circle. All had peeling paint. Some sagged under rotted, moss-covered roofs. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  “Clayton,” Sara said. “I think you forgot that thing in the car.”

  The old man looked at her, then nodded. “By gosh, I think you’re right, eh? Be back in a jiffy.”

  Clayton turned and walked quickly to the Hummer.

  Colding looked at Sara. “The thing?”

  “The thing,” she said. “In the car.”

  Clayton reached the Hummer, got in, started it up, then drove down the road right out of town.

  Colding watched the black vehicle vanish into the woods, heading for the mansion. “You told Clayton to strand us?”

  Sara nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Huh. Wouldn’t the joke be better if you were in the vehicle with him?”

  “No joke this time. I wanted your undivided attention.”

  He looked at her, looked close. The pissyness was gone. She seemed all-business.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “Almost right. I’m the one who’s going to listen. You’re going to tell me some things. How you came to work for Genada, how you found me and my crew and why you had that one amazing night with me then vanished.”

  “Sara, we—”

  “Now, P. J. You will tell me now. We had a connection. I thought I was being a girly-girl about that, deluding myself, but in the past couple of days I’m pretty sure my initial instinct with you was right. We did connect, didn’t we?”

  He could lie. Just say no, walk back to the mansion and be done with it. Instead, he nodded.

  She smiled a little. Some of the tension seemed to drain out of her. “Good. That’s good. So make like a stoolie and spill.”

  He looked around the town. They really were in the middle of nowhere. At least a thirty-minute walk back to the mansion.

  Fuck it. Why not?

  “I was in the army. Used to work for USAMRIID, the army’s division to protect servicepeople from biological threats. I met my wife there. Clarissa. She was a virologist. We were married for two years, then there was … an accident. Have you heard of H5N1?”

  Sara shook her head.

  “Bird flu. Terrorist cell was trying to bring it into America the old-fashioned way—by infecting their own people and shipping them over. CIA caught them. USAMRIID was called in to see if we could help the carriers. Long story short, proper restraint precautions were not followed. The guy in charge, Colonel Paul Fischer, he decided to treat the carriers like human beings instead of the terrorist animals they were. One of them … one of them got loose, tore off my wife’s mask and … coughed and spit in her face.”

  Sara’s eyes widened with fear. She was probably imagining herself in Clarissa’s shoes. Trying to, anyway—who could really know what it felt like to have someone breathe death in your face?

  Colding continued. He couldn’t stop himself now. “They brought Clarissa to an ICU. She caught pneumonia, got through that, but the bird flu gave her viral myocarditis.”

  “Which is?”

  “Viral infection of the heart. Came on particularly fast for her. Damaged the muscle tissue, made her heart weak, made it swell. Basically destroyed it.”

  Sara’s hand went to her mouth. She was such a tomboy, but that gesture of empathy for a dead woman she’d never met ached with femininity. “Couldn’t they give her a transplant?”

  “She still had the virus in her system. There was no way to be sure it wouldn’t just infect the new heart. They … they can’t afford to waste replacement organs on someone who’s a risk.”

  “Because of the shortage of organs,” Sara said, nodding a little. Sadness filled her eyes.

  “They put her on a ventilator. After a couple of days they … well, they told me there was no hope for recovery. She was in so much pain, so weak. She slipped under before we could make a decision. So I had to make it for her. I knew she wouldn’t have wanted to suffer, and it was only a matter of time.”

  He had to stop for a second. He hadn’t talked about it, to anyone, not since it happened. Doing so dredged up vivid memories, like it was happening all over again. Clarissa’s hands, so weak they couldn’t hold his, so he held hers. Before they put her on the ventilator, he’d told her it would be okay. She’d answered in her weak voice that he was being stupid—she knew what was happening inside her body. Better than anyone, probably, because she was dying from something she’d studied for a decade.

  Sara reached out and touched his upper arm. “You ended it for her? You took away her pain?”

  He nodded. The tears were coming now. He couldn’t stop them anymore. Her eyes still closed, eyes that would never open again. The nurse pulling the IVs, removing the breathing tube. Her breaths coming in tiny, shallow gasps. The nurse walking out, shutting the door, leaving the two of them together to ride it out to the end. Till death do them part.

  Sara’s hand on his arm, gently sliding up and down. “What did you do then?”

  More memories, just as vivid. The rage he’d felt. All his sorrow and hurt channeled into pure aggression.

  “I got in my car and went to see Fischer.”r />
  “To talk to him?”

  “No,” Colding said. “To kill him. I tackled him as soon as I saw him, really fucked up his knee. His face was a sheet of blood by the time they pulled me off. Army was going to court-martial me, but Fischer pulled strings. Got me a dishonorable discharge, and I was out.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Nothing,” Colding said. “Sat on my ass for six months. Got fat. Felt sorry for myself. Collected unemployment. Missed my wife. Then Danté Paglione called me. Genada was trying to solve the organ-shortage problem. They had multiple lines of experimentation, but one involved getting women to carry transgenic animal pregnancies.”

  “Carry … are you kidding me? Is that even legal?”

  “No. A Genada scientist named Galina Poriskova ratted out the experiment to Fischer. Danté had a second line of research that would solve the organ-shortage problem forever, but if Fischer busted them for the human experiments, that second line would never be completed. I offered to come aboard, but only if Danté scrapped the human experimentation for good. Wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but Danté needed me. I knew how Fischer worked, how USAMRIID operated. Danté shut down the experiments. By the time Fischer got to Genada, there was no evidence of wrongdoing.”

  “Danté is smart,” Sara said. “Ruthless, but smart. Hire the guy who would do anything to stop people from dying the way his wife died, right?”

  “Transparent as hell, but also dead-on.”

  “And Tim? How did he come into the picture?”

  “He did some contracting for USAMRIID,” Colding said. “Research stuff. That’s where I met him. He was a double PhD candidate in genetics and bioinformatics. I know some of the science, but needed my own guy to make sure Genada was staying honest. I hired him to come along for the cleanup. Once Galina left, Danté threw money at him to make him stay and replace her.”

  “But how did Danté find you? How did he know about you, and Fischer, about your wife?”

  “Same way he found you when I had the idea for the C-5. Magnus and Danté have a high-level contact. From the NSA, I think. The contact can get at all kinds of service records, and more. We found you, found out you were behind on payments for your 747. Then I came to talk to you and what happened … happened.”