The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

It was the second kill since he’d accepted the seven-target job from DaCosta. The first had been simpler—the poisoning of a man in a wheelchair whose once brilliant mind was lost in the unlit labyrinth of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Two down, five to go.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Deck

  Saturday, August 28, 2:06 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 93 hours, 54 minutes E.S.T.

  “The Twins are still in the staff room,” said Otto. “They’re interviewing Bannerjee and their other spies. Before you ask, yes . . . Bannerjee and the others have been briefed. They should be wrapping up in a couple of hours. You could stay in the tank a bit longer if you’d like.”

  “No,” said Cyrus as he climbed out of the sensory deprivation tank. “I’m done.” He cut a sharp look at Otto. “What’s wrong?”

  “We lost another one,” said Otto as he held out a bathrobe.

  Water sluiced down Cyrus Jakoby’s legs to form a salty puddle on the floor. He turned and held his arms backward so Otto could slide the robe on.

  “Another what?”

  “Researcher. Daniel Horst.”

  “Virology?”

  “Epideminiology.”

  “How?”

  “He broke his bathroom mirror and cut his wrists,” said Otto. “He bled out in his tub.”

  Cyrus scowled as he padded barefoot to the workstation in the corner. He called up the staff directory, found Daniel Horst, and entered a password to access the man’s most recent psychological evaluations. Cyrus read through and his frown deepened.

  “It’s all in there,” said Otto mildly. “In the after-session notes. Both Hastings and Stenner remarked on Horst’s increased levels of stress, frequent headaches, nervousness, lack of direct eye contact. Plenty of signs of depression and diminished self-esteem. He was also a late-night regular at the staff bar every night. Classic stuff.”

  “We missed it,” said Cyrus.

  “We didn’t see it,” corrected Otto. “We’ve been otherwise occupied.”

  “It’s my fault. I’m weeks behind in reading the staff evaluations.”

  “Neither of us saw it for the same reason. We need to delegate more, Mr. Cyrus. We’re spreading ourselves too thin. If we try to do everything, then we’ll get sloppy.” He paused. “We need to process more of the SAMs into the Family. We need to put them to work.”

  “I wish Eighty-two . . .” Cyrus let it hang.

  “He’s not ready.”

  “The others are?”

  “Some are. Enough to take some pressure off of us.”

  Cyrus shrugged. “Horst’s death could be trouble.”

  “No. The cleaning woman who found him reported directly to the security shift supervisor, and he contacted me. I quarantined the cleaner. She’ll be on the next flight to the Hive. The security supervisor is one of the Haeckels, so there’s no problem with him keeping his mouth shut.”

  “Good, good,” Cyrus said distractedly. “Do we have a cover story for Horst being missing?”

  “He was needed at the Hive. A rumor can be started that he got a juicy promotion and went to the Hive to head up a new division. A component of the rumor will be that his apparent stress was him sweating whether he’d get the promotion or not. It’s worked before and the rumor does some good for morale and overall team efficiency.”

  Cyrus nodded. Staff sent to the Hive were never allowed to return to the Deck. Except for a special few—Otto and Cyrus, the SAMs, several of the Haeckels, and one or two key scientists—no one else was allowed to travel between the two facilities. No one outside that circle even knew where the other facility was. Disinformation was frequently seeded into the rumor mill. There was even an abiding belief that there was a Laboratory A somewhere in Mexico and a new facility set to open in Australia, though neither was true. It was useful to sustain the belief when it became necessary for staff members to disappear.

  This latest suicide was troubling. Suicides among the virology and epidemiology staff was very high. Drug addiction and alcoholism was even higher, though the recent increases in random urine and blood testing had decreased the risk of technicians staggering into a clean room while high. That had been a lesson they’d learned the hard way.

  “What was Horst working on?”

  “Tay-Sachs.”

  “Why the stress? Surely you vetted him for—”

  “We did. He’s not a Jew; he never had any significant Jewish friends, never dated a Jewish woman. His distrust of Jews was marked in his initial evaluations and recruitment interviews. He even scored in the high sevens for resentment against Jews for jobs and grants in his field.”

  “Then why was he depressed?”

  “Why do most of the suicide cases go soft on us? It’s always the same thing. Conscience. No matter what we do to prevent it, they reach a point where their vision and trust in the New Order is overmatched by fear.”

  “Fear of what?” Cyrus snapped.

  “Damnation, probably. In one form or another.”

  “Bullshit. We screen for atheism in every single member of the science staff.”

  “Most atheists are closet agnostics or disappointed believers.”

  “So?”

  “As you point out in so many of your staff speeches, Mr. Cyrus, we’re at war. The saying that there are no atheists in foxholes is more often true than not. Even if the belief is momentary and conditional.”

  “So . . . you’re saying that this is my fault?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Cyrus. I’m saying that this is evidence of the kind of inherent weakness that the Extinction Wave will wash away.”

  Cyrus cinched the robe more tightly around his waist and walked to the window. The view was that of the production tanks and the white-suited technicians who milled around them.

  “We should have tried harder to find the gene that controlled the conscience,” said Otto.

  “What I don’t understand—and I should understand, Otto—is why and how this happens when we systematically and exhaustively treated every person on the science team to deactivate VMAT2.”

  VMAT2—Vesicular Monoamine Transporter 2—was a membrane protein that transports monoamines like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine from cellular cytosol into synaptic vesicles. Geneticist Gene Hamer had pioneered the belief that the gene was more active in persons who held strong religious beliefs and less so in those who held little or no beliefs. Cyrus accepted this as likely and subscribed to several similar neurotheological views. He had spent years exploring the links between N, N-Dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland and spiritual beliefs.

  “None of the team should be capable of religious beliefs of any kind,” Cyrus said gruffly.

  “We’ve had this discussion before, Mr. Cyrus. You told me that you did not totally accept the ‘God gene’ theory.”

  “That’s not what I said, dammit,” Cyrus barked. He leaned close and shouted at Otto. “I said that I don’t believe it accounts for all faith. It doesn’t account for true faith. False faith may be controlled by genetics. Faith in ideals and deities that are clearly unrelated to the divine path of racial development. No one with a pure genetic line, no one who believes in the right and only way, requires a gene for faith. That’s a fundamental truth to faith itself. It’s the so-called mystery of faith that those Catholic swine have been beating themselves up over for two thousand years.”

  Otto wiped Cyrus’s spittle from his shirtfront.

  “As you say.”

  Cyrus leaned back, his eyes still hot and his face flushed.

  “The gene therapy must be flawed.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Otto neutrally. “That must be it.”

  “We’ll run the sequence again. We’ll do a new round of gene therapy.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I don’t want any more inconvenient attacks of conscience.”

  “God forbid,” said Otto with a smile. He left before Cyrus began throwing things.


  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Private airfield near Denver, Colorado

  Saturday, August 28, 2:29 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 93 hours, 31 minutes E.S.T.

  Top and Bunny met me as I got off the jet. They were dressed in black BDUs and wearing shoulder rigs but had no other obvious weapons. Neither of them looked very happy. There was a lot of that going around.

  Hanler shook hands all around but stayed with his plane as we headed to a small hangar at the edge of the field. There was a Mister Softee truck parked inside; however, the man who leaned against the rear corner didn’t look like he sold ice-cream cones for a living. He looked like the actor Ving Rhames, except for the artificial leg and the shrapnel scars on his face.

  “Cap’n,” said Top, “this is Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, head of field support for the Denver office.”

  Brick fit his name and he had a handshake that could crush half-inch pipe.

  “Good to meet you, Cap,” said Brick. “I’ve heard stories.”

  “You look like you could tell a few stories of your own, Gunny,” I said. “How’d you slip the NSA?” I asked.

  “They heard I was a cripple. Only sent two guys to pick me up.” He shrugged. “Didn’t go like they planned.”

  Bunny murmured, “Not handicapped—handi-capable.”

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  Brick shrugged. “Big Man back home said to give you whatever on the ground support I can manage. Deep Iron’s a half hour from here. I pretended to be a potential customer and asked if I could come out sometime this week. Asked what their hours are. They’re open now. Head of sales is on the grounds. Name’s Daniel Sloane. Here’s his info.” Brick handed me a slip of paper with contact numbers. Then he handed me a slim file folder. “This is basic stuff I pulled off their Web site. Specs and such.”

  “Good job.” I flipped open the folder, took a quick glance, and closed it. “I’ll read it on the way. How are we set for equipment? I have a handgun and two magazines. Can you load me up?”

  The big man grinned as he led us to the back of the truck and opened the door. The whole thing was a rolling arsenal. I saw just about every kind of firearm known to modern combat, from five-shot wheelguns to RPGs.

  “My-oh-my-oh-my,” Top said, breaking out into a big grin. “I’m so happy I could cry.”

  “It’s like Christmas, isn’t it?” said Bunny.

  A FEW MINUTES later we were cruising down an industrial side road that curved toward the snowcapped Rockies. Along the way we read and discussed the facility. Deep Iron was tucked away in the foothills of the Rockies southwest of Denver, built into a vast series of limestone caverns that honeycombed the region. Records were stored in various natural “floors” of the cavern system, and the highest security materials—meaning the stuff people were willing to pay the highest fees to squirrel away—were in the lowest levels, nearly a mile underground. I punched in the secure number for the DMS Warehouse back in Baltimore and asked to speak to the head of the computer division—Bug.

  He was born as Jerome Taylor but he’d been a computer geek so long even his family called him Bug. His understanding of anything with circuits and microchips bordered on the empathic.

  “Hey, Cap,” he said brightly, as if none of what was happening was any more real to him than the events in a video game. “What’s the haps?”

  “Bug, listen—Top, Bunny, and I are in Denver at a place called Deep Iron and—”

  “Oh, sure. Big storage facility. They filmed a couple of sci-fi movies there back in—”

  “That’s great,” I said, cutting him off before he could tell me details of everything from the source material of the films down to the Best Boy’s shoe size. He really was a geek’s geek and could probably give Hu a run for his money. “See if you can hack their computer system.”

  He snorted. “Don’t insult me.”

  I laughed. “What I need are floor plans for the whole place. And I need an exact location for anything related to Haeckel. Dr. Hu has the basic info, but I want you to go deeper and download everything to my PDA.”

  “How soon?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  It took nine.

  When he called back he said, “Okay, you have the floor plans and a searchable database of all clients. There’s only one Haeckel in their directory. First name Heinrich. It’s an oversized bin, thirty by forty feet, located on J-level.”

  I pulled up the schematic on my PDA and cursed silently. J-level was all the way at the bottom, a mile straight down.

  “What can you get me about what’s stored there?”

  “Minute,” he said, and I could hear him tapping keys. “Okay, the main hard drive says ‘records,’ but there’s a separate database for inspections and that specifies the contents as file boxes times three hundred fifty-one. The bin has two doors—both locked by the estate attorneys. Contents are listed as mixed paper records. One box is listed as MF. My guess is that’s microfiche or microfilm.”

  “Any idea what they’re records of?”

  “Nope. It says the boxes were sealed by Haeckel prior to his death and there was a provision in his will that they not be opened except by a proven family member. No living family is listed, though. His estate provides for storage and oversight of the whole thing by a law firm. An inspection of the seals is required every year. Looks like it’s an attorney who checks the seals. Several attorneys over the years, all from the same firm. Birkhauser and Bernhardt of Denver. The seals are also witnessed by a representative of Deep Iron. Looks like it’s still there because they haven’t found an heir. I’ll hack the law firm and see if they have anything.”

  I thanked him and brought Top and Bunny up to speed.

  “No heir,” mused Top, “except for Gunnar Haeckel, who is apparently back from the dead and hunting unicorns in South America. Funny old world.”

  Bunny grinned. “I wouldn’t give this job up for anything.”

  “We’re here,” said Brick.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia

  Saturday, August 28, 2:31 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 93 hours, 29 minutes

  “Hey, Jude,” said Tom Ito, “remember that virus you were asking about before? The one that was there and then up and vanished?”

  “Sure, what about it?”

  “It’s back. Log onto the e-mail screens.”

  Judah swiveled in his chair and began hammering keys on his laptop. The set of screens used by the secretaries for handling e-mail, newsletters, and alerts popped us as cascading windows.

  Ito leaned over his shoulder. “Look for auto-response e-mails. See, there’s eight of them. The virus is in there.”

  Judah quarantined the e-mails and ran virus detection software. A pop-up screen flashed a warning. Judah loaded an isolation program and used it to open one of the infected e-mails. The software allowed them to view the content and its code with a heavy firewall to prevent data spillover into the main system.

  The e-mail content said that the outgoing CDC Alert e-mail was undeliverable because the recipient e-mail box was full. That happened a lot. However, the software detected Trojan horse—a form of mal-ware that appeared to perform a desirable function in the target operating system but which actually served other agendas, ranging from collecting information such as credit card numbers and keystrokes to outright damage to the computer. A lot of “free” software and goodies on the Internet, including many screen savers, casino betting sites, porn, and offers for coupon printouts uploaded Trojan horses to users. On the business and government level they were common.

  “Trojan?” asked Ito.

  “Looks like. Can’t block the sender, though, because it’s really using replies to our own mailing list to send it.”

  “Maybe someone hijacked some of our subscribers and is using their addresses.”

&
nbsp; “Probably.” Judah frowned. “Okay, we’re going to have to identify the bounce-back e-mails and then block those subscribers. Send a message to everyone.”

  Ito headed back to his cubicle to work on it while Judah uploaded info on the virus to US-CERT—the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of Homeland Security. The CDC was a government organization, and though this was very low-level stuff, it was technically a cyberattack. Someone over at CERT would take any warnings of a new virus and add it to the database. If a trend was found an alert would be sent, and very often CERT would provide updates to various operating systems that would protect against further incidents. It was routine and Judah had sent a hundred similar e-mails over the last few years.

  That should have done it.

  It didn’t.

  There were no additional e-mail bounce-backs that day. None the next. Had Judah been able to match the current e-mail with the ones that had appeared—and then vanished—from the computers earlier he would have seen that the bounce-back e-mail addresses were not the same. Nor was the content, nor the Trojan horse. The senders of the e-mails were cautious.

  When similar e-mail problems occurred at offices of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main office and many regional offices of the World Health Organization, the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response and a dozen other health crisis management organizations, there were no alarms rung. Each group received a completely different kind of e-mail from all the others. There was no actual damage done, and other than minor irritation there was no real reaction. Viruses and spam e-mails are too common.

  The real threats had not yet been sent.

  The Extinction Clock still had ninety-three hours and twenty-nine minutes to go.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Deep Iron Storage Facility, Colorado

  Saturday, August 28, 3:11 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 49 minutes E.S.T.