The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Hecate raised one delicate eyebrow.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Paris snapped. “I’m not being cheap or, god help us, ‘thrifty’ . . . it’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between necessary requests and his go-nowhere whims. Like the swimming pool filled with mercury.”

  Hecate finished her martini and stood up. She was exactly as tall as Paris—six feet on the dot—and had legs that been commented upon everywhere from Vogue to Maxim. The most common phrase in the magazines was “legs like alabaster.” Crap like that, which Hecate had found flattering when she was in her teens but now found trite. Her silver-white pubic hair was shaved to a tiny vee, and when she raised her leg to step into her panties the cabin lights sparkled on the golden rings in her labia. Her nipple rings were platinum. For her twenty-seventh birthday she was considering having her eyebrows pierced, though she was absolutely certain it would give Dad a coronary. As far as he knew, the Twins were completely without marks except for the starburst scars. He told them over and over again that purity was important, though none of his explanations as to why it was important made any rational sense. Something about keeping the channel open for the celestial god force that was supposed to flow through them.

  She pulled on a short pale green skirt and a white satin blouse that caught stray flickers of light when she moved. She sat down, snugged back into the deep cushions in one corner of the Lear, legs crossed, dangling a sandal from her big toe.

  The reference to the mercury pool was fair enough; it had been absurdly expensive—$5.35 per hundred grams—and yet startlingly beautiful. Ten thousand gallons of swirling liquid metal. The purchase of it through various companies they owned had caused a brief stock market run on the metal, and there was still speculation in some of the science trade journals that someone somewhere was developing something new that would wow the world.

  Hecate said, “By the time he’d gotten tired of the metal consciousness experiment the market price had gone up twenty-six cents an ounce. We made a killing.”

  “That’s hardly the point,” Paris said irritably. “It’s part of a pattern of deterioration and excess that’s making it harder and harder to separate his crazy bullshit from actual research.”

  “Which is why we pay Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to validate his work.”

  “The Three Stooges? They’re idiots.”

  Hecate gave her brother a tolerant smile and a mild shake of the head. “They’re not and you know it. They’re the best of the best.”

  Paris made a rude noise and threw back the last of his drink. “With Otto always at Dad’s side our three idiots can never get close. I think we need to invite him down to the Dragon Factory for a few days.”

  “Are you nuts? He’s been trying to find out where it is for years now. No way we can bring him there!”

  “It’s not like we’d send him a plane ticket, Paris. We’d go get him and control what he sees and knows. We could block out the windows on the jet, maybe slip him something so he’d sleep through the trip—something so that he wouldn’t know where the Dragon Factory was. But I really think some tropical air would do him good, and we’d have a chance to get some actual quality time with him. And maybe see if we can figure out if he’s totally bonkers or just half-crazy. We could show him the Berserkers and the stuff we have in development for the work camps. He’d—”

  There was a soft bing! sound, indicating that their plane was beginning its descent. A moment later Paris’s cell phone rang. He paced the length of the cabin, mostly listening, grunting now and then. He said, “Shit!” and disconnected. His face was flushed red.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hecate. “Who was that?”

  “Sunderland,” Paris said. “They’re having problems getting the computer system. Apparently they’re meeting more resistance than anticipated.”

  “He has the entire NSA!”

  “I know; I know.”

  Hecate bit her lip and looked out of the window for a long moment. “We need that system. Pangaea’s not good enough for the next phase. We need MindReader.”

  As brilliant as the Twins were, they could not take full responsibility for much of their transgenic work. Most of it was stolen. Pangaea, a computer system given to them by Alpha, was an advanced intruder model, and with it they had been able to infiltrate the mainframes of many of the world’s top genetics research labs and clone the databases. This gave them a bank of knowledge broader than anyone else’s, and broader by a couple orders of magnitude. However, Pangaea was not a new system and some of the modern firewalls were starting to give them trouble. The only computer system capable of slipping through those firewalls was MindReader, and it could more easily decrypt the data.

  They’d already tried putting a mole in the DMS to try to steal a Mind-Reader unit or obtain specs on it. They acted on a tip that there were some security holes in the organization, but they hit only brick walls and wasted over a million dollars that they would never see again. Using the Vice President had been Sunderland’s grand scheme, and he’d already banked a lot of Jakoby cash just to set it in motion. If the plan failed, there was no chance in hell of getting a refund from the fat blow-hard. That, they both agreed, was one of the downsides of being criminals. Unless you could pull a trigger on someone there was just no accountability, and Sunderland was not someone they could dispose of.

  “Well, there’s still the Denver thing,” Paris said after a long silence. “The way Dad reacted when we told him about it . . . there must be something amazing down there. Maybe even the schematics for Mind-Reader.”

  “More likely it’s early genetics research,” cautioned Hecate. “Could be a complete waste of time for us.”

  “Maybe,” Paris said diffidently. One of the many goals of Sunderland’s gambit with the Vice President was to keep the DMS too busy to notice anything happening in Denver. The discovery of a trove of old records belonging to one of Alpha’s oldest colleagues was huge. The Twins had long suspected that Alpha had ties to groups who had pioneered genetic research, and the existence of a legendary trove of data based on covert mass human testing had long been the Holy Grail of black market genetics. No one knew exactly what was in it, but since the 1970s more than a dozen people had been murdered during the search for it. Alpha had mentioned it several times and had slyly gotten the Twins to look for it, but when they said that they thought they had a solid lead on it in a records storage facility near Denver, Alpha had tried to play it down as a whim that had passed. The Twins hadn’t believed him. There had been a moment of naked hunger in Alpha’s eyes that had electrified them.

  The Twins were using this trip to visit Alpha as a way of distracting him and the Sunderland gambit as a way of distracting the DMS. If everything went according to plan, then Paris and Hecate would have the contents of those records by the time they returned to the Dragon Factory.

  “You’re right. When it comes right down to it,” Hecate said with a smile, “it’s not like we don’t have a Plan B. Or a Plan C.”

  “Or Plan D,” he said brightly.

  She held up her glass and he reached over to clink.

  Paris took her glass and refilled it.

  “Why does Dad need the new sequencers?” asked Hecate.

  “He wouldn’t say, of course. He never does unless he can stage a big reveal. God, he treats this like a fucking game show sometimes. When I pushed for an explanation he just rattled off some mumbo jumbo that wasn’t even real science. He refuses to tell me anything specific unless you’re there. He wants both halves of the Arcturian Collective to bear witness.”

  “ ‘The Arcturian Collective’? Is that our new name?”

  Paris nodded and sipped his vodka.

  “Well,” Hecate said, “it’s better than the Star Children. That one sounded like a late-seventies glam rock band. I keep hoping he’ll settle on Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

  Despite his sour mood, Paris grinned. “How about the
Space Oddities?”

  “Now that,” Hecate said, “would be too close to truth in advertising.”

  They both burst out laughing. The girl moaned and turned over in her sleep. Hecate got tired of looking at her and pulled a sheet over her, a sneer touching the corners of Hecate’s mouth. How could she have thought those big cow breasts were attractive?

  Paris made fresh drinks and handed one to her.

  “You don’t think he suspects,” Hecate asked softly, “do you?”

  “Suspects what we’re doing or what we have planned for him?”

  “Either. Both.”

  Paris shrugged. “With him it’s hard to know,” he admitted. “Dad thinks he’s still in charge. But really—does it matter? By the time he could find out for sure it’ll be too late for him to do anything about it.”

  Their jet dropped its flaps and began a long, slow descent toward the desert.

  Chapter Seven

  The Akpro-Missérété Commune, Ouémé, the Republic of Benin

  Eleven days ago

  Dr. Panjay stepped out of the tent and pulled off her mask to reveal a face that was deeply troubled and deeply afraid. She peeled off her Latex gloves and her hands were shaking so badly she missed the biowaste bin on the first try. She heard the tent flap rustle and turned to see her colleague Dr. Smithwick come out into the dusty afternoon sunlight. Despite his sunburn, Smithwick was white as a ghost. He stood next to Panjay and removed his blood-smeared gloves and threw them, his mask and apron into the biowaste bin.

  “You see why I asked you to come here? To see for yourself?” Panjay looked up into his face. “Thomas . . . what are we going to do?”

  He shook his head. “I . . . don’t know. Aside from sending samples and our notes . . . I don’t know what we can do. This is beyond me, Rina.”

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. “But . . . perhaps I should have prepared you better.”

  Smithwick looked back at the big tent. With the flap closed he could not see the rows upon rows of cots, each one occupied by a farmer from the Ouémé River basin. Sixty-two people.

  “Is this every case?” he asked.

  She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. These are the healthiest cases.”

  “I . . . don’t understand. . . .”

  “Since I came here three weeks ago we’ve had three hundred people present with symptoms. Most of them have hemoglobin levels in the range of six to eight grams per deciliter with a high reticulocyte count. Some have demonstrated features of hyposplenism Howell-Jolly bodies.”

  “You tested them all?”

  “Yes . . . and five hundred other people chosen at random from the same towns or farms. Every single one of them showed signs of sickles hemoglobin. I tested their Hb S in sodium dithionite, and in every case the Hb had a turbid appearance.”

  “Christ!”

  “Not everyone has active symptoms, but when symptoms present we’re seeing a wide range of them. We’ve seen ischemia resulting in avascular necrosis; there have been cases of priapism and infarction of the penis in males of all ages; bacterial bone infections . . . the list is endless. Every symptom in the book. Even symptoms typically common in different strains are showing up in the same patients, including strokes due to vascular narrowing of blood vessels. There have been nineteen cases of cerebral infarction in children and widespread cerebral hemorrhaging in adults. And we’ve had increased occurrences of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae in any patient who had undergone surgery. And not just splenectomies—I mean any surgery.”

  “What are the primary causes of death?”

  “Renal failure,” she said. “Across the board.”

  Her words hit Smithwick like a series of punches. He staggered back and had to grab a slender tree for support.

  “All of them?”

  “Every one. Every person.”

  “That’s not possible.” He licked his lips. “Do you have a map? Can you show me where the cases were reported?”

  She nodded. “I knew you’d want to see it, so I have it already prepared.”

  Rina Panjay led the way through the nearly deserted village. The only sound they heard was that of quiet weeping from people huddled around fresh graves in the cemetery and a single high keening moan of loss echoing from a child’s bedroom where a desolated mother sat clutching a doll to her chest as she rocked back and forth. Panjay’s eyes were red from all the tears she had wept for this village over the last few weeks. She felt used, destroyed, totally helpless.

  They entered the small World Health Organization blockhouse that normally served as the hospital for this rural corner of Ouémé. There were no patients in the hospital now—everyone had been moved to the big tent that had been erected in the middle of a field far from town and well away from the water supply.

  There was a large map of the district that was littered with hundreds of colored pins tacked to the wall. The rest of that wall and some of the next was covered floor to ceiling with printouts of digital photographs of the victims. These, too, were color coded by pins. Victims without active symptoms had white pins. Victims with active symptoms had red pins. The dead were marked with black pins. Panjay pointed to a spot on the map. “This is where the first case was reported. The next was here, the next here.” She tapped the pins as she spoke and Smithwick’s face, already ashen, went paler still.

  “No . . . ,” he said.

  Panjay lowered her hand. The pins on the map said all that was necessary. The pattern was clear. A first-year medical student could understand the implications, though to a seasoned WHO epidemiologist like Thomas Smithwick it was so clear that it screamed at him.

  “This is impossible, Rina,” he said. “What you’re describing can’t be sickle-cell. You must have made a mistake. The samples must have been contaminated.”

  She gave a weary shake of her head. “No. I had the results checked at three different labs. That’s why I called you. I don’t know what to do . . . this isn’t something I’m trained for.”

  It was true, Rina Sanjay was an excellent young doctor, fresh from her internship at UCLA Medical Center and a brief stint as an ER doctor in Philadelphia’s Northeastern Hospital. She could do anything from deliver a baby, to diagnose HIV, to perform minor surgeries for wound repair. But all of the tests said the same thing: sickle-cell anemia. A genetic disorder.

  Smithwick on the other hand had spent twenty-six years with the World Health Organization. He had been in the trenches in the fight against the spread of HIV throughout Africa. He’d worked on two of the most recent Ebola outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In any other circumstance he was the wrong specialist to call in for something like this.

  “What you’re describing is impossible,” he insisted. “Sickle-cell is not a communicable disease. It’s strictly genetic. But this . . . this . . .” He waved his hands at the map. “This map suggests the spread of a communicable disease.”

  Rina Panjay said nothing.

  “It’s impossible,” Smithwick said again. “Genetic diseases are not communicable.”

  “Could it have mutated?”

  “So fast? And to this degree of virulence?” He shook his head. “No . . . there’s just no way that could happen. Not in ten thousand generations of mutation.”

  “Then how could it happen?” she asked.

  The air between them crackled with tension as Smithwick fought against the words that were forming on his tongue. The answer was as simple as it was preposterous. As simple as it was grotesque.

  Smithwick said, “It’s theoretically possible to do it. Deliberately. In a lab. Gene therapy and some host, perhaps a virus . . . but there would be no point. Gene therapy has a purpose, a goal. This doesn’t. This is . . .” He fished for a word.

  “Evil?” she suggested.

  He was a long time answering, then nodded. “If this is something someone has done . . . then it could only have been created for one purpose. To do harm. To intent
ionally do harm.”

  Dr. Panjay looked at the map and then her eyes moved across the hundreds of color photographs pinned to the wall. Many of the pictures were of people she knew. Over fifty were from this village. Everyone in the village she had tested had come up positive for this new strain of sickle-cell. Every single person.

  “We have to inform WHO,” Panjay said. “We have to warn them—”

  “No,” Smithwick interrupted. “We have to warn everyone.”

  He stared at the pins.

  “Everyone,” he repeated softly, but in his heart he was terrified that they were already too late. Far too late.

  Chapter Eight

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 8:25 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 35 minutes

  Things are seldom what they seem. After leaving the cemetery I drove eight blocks, doing double backs and sudden turns and all of the other stunts that cops learn from crooks about losing a tail. Nothing. Nobody was tailing me. I was sure of that.

  “Ah, shit,” I said aloud, and immediately pulled off the street into a parking lot of a big strip mall. Couple of things to remember about the NSA: they weren’t stupid, not on their worst days . . . and they weren’t clumsy.

  I got out of the car, locked it, and ran like a son of a bitch.

  They weren’t tailing me because they didn’t need to. I hadn’t seen one or heard one, but I’d bet my complete collection of Muddy Waters on vinyl that one of Slab-face’s boys had put a tracer on my car. Either they were tracking me in the hopes that I’d lead them somewhere sensitive to the DMS or they were herding me toward an ambush point. I didn’t wait around to find out. I ran.

  They were already closing in on me. Two blocks from where I dumped the Explorer I rounded a corner and there was a black car cruising the street, heading in the direction I’d just come from. As it passed I flicked a glance at it and looked right into the surprised face of Agent John Andrews. Slab-face.