He took out his wallet to remove a credit card. He heard car doors open, and in less time than it took him to draw his next breath, two men were five feet from him, one in front and one to his right side. The Expedition was between them and the 7-Eleven. They both wore baggy Levi’s low on their hips, new Timberland boots, shiny Redskins jackets, and black ski masks. Gangbangers. Both held guns—Beretta 9mms. Thumb-sized silencers extended from the muzzles of both pistols.
Muggers must be doing better these days, he thought. Berettas cost as much as his SIG. And silencers? Another thousand per gun on the street, easy. Lathrop kept eye contact with them. He was not all that alarmed. For one thing, he was too tired for this. For another, he had been in many worse situations.
“Give me the wallet.” The man in front spoke calmly, no tension in his voice. Doesn’t sound like a gangbanger, Lathrop thought. The robber held out his left hand, palm up. He had brown leather gloves on, but between jacket cuff and glove Lathrop glimpsed black skin and the gleam of a blade-thin gold watch. Lathrop saw the man glance up at the security camera that covered this section of pump island. With any luck, Lathrop thought, the clerk inside would see what was happening and call 911. On the other hand, with the way things had been going lately, such a clerk was more likely to be mesmerized by iPhone porn.
“Relax, guys.” Lathrop still wasn’t particularly upset. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had guns pointed at me. Let’s do this the easy way. I’m going to hand over my wallet to you slowly. Is that all right?”
“Give it up.” The man’s calm was the third strange thing Lathrop noted. The first had been the expensive Berettas. The second had been the robber looking straight at the security camera. Why on earth would he do that, even with a mask on? And now, third, was how this man talked. From his days in intelligence Lathrop knew that you could tell a great many things from the way someone spoke, even a single sentence.
Holding the wallet between his thumb and forefinger, Lathrop extended his right arm slowly. The man in front of him didn’t move, but the man off to one side reached in and took the wallet.
“There. See—no muss, no fuss.” Lathrop’s voice remained calm, easy. He had no thought of reaching for his own SIG. For one thing, they could shoot him ten times each before he cleared the holster. No, a wallet was not worth getting shot for. It was just a typical D.C. mugging, like dozens or maybe even scores that happened every day in the beleaguered city. A bit unusual out here, but this was an isolated store with easy getaway routes. Nothing special, so don’t make anything special of it. Though why these guys would choose to do it under the bright lights of the gas pump island, with surveillance cameras watching their every move, was beyond him. But then, armed robbers were not generally known for their intellectual prowess.
“You good?” one said to the other.
“All good.”
The first one turned back to Lathrop. “Your cellphone.”
“Excuse me?”
“Give me your cellphone.” The man still spoke slowly and clearly, as if he had all the time in the world. They might have been chatting at a cocktail party, so relaxed was his voice. Lathrop had heard such a voice before. People who worked for him in the field, the ones who did the wet work, often had such voices. They could crush skulls and slit throats and feel not one flicker of remorse. In a way it was not their fault. Their brains were wired wrong. No true feelings of any kind, in fact. They inhabited an emotional wasteland where only two colors existed: black and red.
“You want my cellphone?” Lathrop pretended to sound astonished, but that was just a play for time. The wallet meant nothing. The cellphone meant a great deal, a mother lode of data that could confer tremendous power on anyone who knew what it was and how to use it.
The man smacked the butt of his Beretta into Lathrop’s face, gashing his right cheek to the bone. The impact stunned Lathrop but did not knock him out.
“I hate repeating myself, Mr. Lathrop. Give me the phone. Like you said, easy or hard. It’s all the same to us.”
They know my name. And they said my name. From the confrontation’s first moment, a part of Lathrop’s brain had detached itself and begun calculating odds, probabilities, and permutations. Until now, this whole meeting had been nothing serious. In an instant that had changed and, at last, Lathrop’s pulse rate went up and he felt the hot surge of adrenaline through his body.
“All right, all right.” Lathrop let his eyes go vague and wavered on his feet, pretending to be more concussed than he was. “It’s in the car.”
He watched the other man’s eyes flick sideways just once, as Lathrop had known they would. It wasn’t much, but it was the only opening he was going to get. He ducked and wrapped his left hand around the other man’s gun, covering the cocked trigger so that it could not drop and fire a round. He shoved up and pivoted to put that man between him and the other one. At the same time he drew his own weapon from the shoulder holster under his left armpit. He always kept a round in the chamber, and a SIG Sauer has no safety to release. All he had to do was point and pull the trigger. His index finger found it and he was an instant from firing when the man head-butted him so viciously that he lost consciousness for several seconds. When he came back, he was sitting on the pavement, leaning against his Accord’s rear quarter panel. Blood was pouring from his shattered nose and now he saw four men instead of two, but two were twin images and he knew it was a real concussion this time.
Still not hurrying, not moving like someone who wanted to do damage unnecessarily, the man leaned down and removed Lathrop’s cellphone from his inside pocket.
“Any more in the car?” Asking his partner.
“No.”
“You good, then?”
“All good.”
The man who had butted him looked down and Lathrop’s vision cleared. He was watching the other man’s eyes, which showed nothing more than the attention of a craftsman doing a job of work, as he fired two times into the center of Lathrop’s chest, the silenced Beretta making small sounds, like a child’s hands clapping. But the impacts: punches of a giant fist. Then pain, and then astonishment. They have the wallet. And phone. Why shoot?
But then, why not? In certain circles, murder had long since ceased being the greatest sin. Why didn’t matter anymore. Killing might be for fun, or to satisfy curiosity, or to pass a gang initiation, or for no more reason than a sneeze or a random thought. But not gangbangers, these. He kept his eyes on the other man’s, settling deeper into shock, a slow falling away, numb, his visual field graying, contracting. His brain produced no coherent thoughts but there were feelings too fast even for the shock to intercept, neurons firing and synapses sparking, and still the astonishment, blended now with an oceanic sadness as though watching the departure of a loved one who would never be seen again, but not regret, not one hint of it. David Lathrop had long since made his peace with death, and had tried to live each day of his life in such a way that when death came he would be able to greet it, if not with open arms, then at least without fear. The only thing he had always known about this moment was that he would never know when it would come.
The man then aimed his gun at Lathrop’s forehead, slightly left of center, and pulled the trigger. The last thing Lathrop saw was the Expedition’s license plate. The car was as immaculate as if it had just rolled off a showroom floor, but the license plate’s numbers were completely obscured by a layer of what looked like dried mud. They had done things like that in Baghdad and Kabul and Karachi. He understood.
THIRTY-THREE
Dr. Casey—it’s just after midnight. If you get this message before you go home, could you please come down to 4?
There’s something I think you should see before tomorrow.
Lew Casey stared at the handwritten note on his desk. It was 2:17 A.M. He had been at BARDA since 6:30 the previous morning and, except for two catnaps, had been working the whole time. He always came in earlier than those who worked for him, and he never left until a
ll of them had gone home for the day. He would not go home now until he’d answered Evvie Flemmer’s request for him to visit BSL-4 one more time. Her tone seemed bright with the promise of good news.
He picked up the note, put it back down, went into the small bathroom that adjoined his office, and splashed cold water on his face and neck. Drying off, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked so ghastly that he laughed out loud. His pale skin was sheet-white, making the dark circles under his eyes look almost black. He hadn’t shaved since the night before last, and his cheeks bristled with wiry red stubble.
“You look like the living dead.” He made a face, went, “Boooooo,” laughed, shook his head.
Fatigue does strange things to the human brain, Lewis.
Especially to one not exceptionally sharp to begin with.
Knock it off. You do that when you’re tired. Your brain is still goddamned fine.
Then why haven’t you cracked this thing wide open? It’s not like those soldiers don’t need a cure.
You’re close, though.
Yeah. Big deal. What’s that old saying about close? Horseshoes and hand grenades? Close doesn’t cut it, Lewis.
He would just have to work more, work harder. As Evvie Flemmer was doing. He’d lost track of the last time she had been out of the building. If she could stay at it, so could he.
Forty-five minutes later, he stood in the decon shower, blowers drying his suit after their chemical bath. The fans stopped and the lights on the ingress panel turned green. Casey punched the big red button, the automatic doors slid open, he stepped through, and they closed again. Evvie turned from the lab bench where she had been working.
“Hello, Evvie. Don’t you ever go home?”
“I prefer it here, sir. Turn around and I’ll connect you.”
Casey turned, felt her connect the lab’s air hose, felt her depower his PLSS unit, felt her pull him over to the EM. He had wanted to tell her something, but through his fog of fatigue he could not remember what. No matter; it would come back to him.
“What’s so exciting that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
“You have to see for yourself, sir. Just stand by while I get the viewing field calibrated.”
He waited, half asleep on his feet, while Evvie bent over the instrument, twisting dials, adjusting settings with the big dials. It seemed to be taking longer than usual.
“Damn.” Evvie’s voice sounded edgy with fatigue. “I’m sorry, sir. I messed it up. I’ll have to recalibrate. Just… bear with me. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
“No problem, Evvie. We have all night.” He yawned, swayed, the need for sleep pulling him down like weight in water. He tried to focus on what she was doing, but her big suit blocked his view and there wasn’t room to stand beside her. So he remained where he was and…
Casey’s head snapped up. He had fallen asleep on his feet. But something else was happening. His vision was blurring and he was having difficulty breathing. Evvie Flemmer wasn’t bent over the electron microscope. He turned quickly, but his balance was off and he almost fell over. Careful. You breach this suit, you’re a dead man.
There she was, over by the air lock’s door.
“Evvie?” It seemed to take immense effort to say that one word. The exertion left him panting like a sprinter. His vision blurred again, graying. His heart was starting to race. “Evvie!”
She stood there, arms hanging loosely at her sides, watching him without expression. Studying him, as one might study a lab specimen. He began to gasp, hyperventilating, his heart going tachycardic, pushing up past 180 beats per minute.
Suddenly, he understood. His air supply had failed. He reached for the hose behind his shoulder, but the effort knocked him off balance and he nearly fell again. Then he grabbed at the PLSS unit on the waist belt of his suit, found the on/off switch, but nothing happened. His vision was contracting, his accelerated breathing burning up what little oxygen was left in his Chemturion. The carbon dioxide levels in the suit and in his body spiked and the laboratory began to spin around him. He lost his balance, fell, hit the floor hard on his back.
Stunned, he lay where he had fallen, arms waving feebly beside his body. He saw Evvie Flemmer come to stand beside him. She bent over slightly and he could see her face, calm, in her eyes only the pure curiosity of a scientist witnessing a mildly interesting event. Then Evvie did the strangest thing.
She smiled.
His lips began to turn blue and his pupils dilated. He could still think, but his feet and hands and lips were numb and his vision was failing, dimming, as though he were sinking deeper and deeper into darkening water.
“Evvie.”
He was not even sure he had spoken aloud.
She watched Casey dying, but the dual distortions of their plastic hoods made his face blurry and indistinct. It could have been the face of another man, thick-necked and hairy as an ape, who did unspeakable things to her year after year in a scorching Oklahoma trailer while her mother watched. She looked at their pictures every day, to keep fresh in her mind the horror of her father’s life in McAlester, Oklahoma’s maximum-security penitentiary. “Short eyes,” the other prisoners called despised child molesters, and she had researched in great detail the things those other prisoners did to such deviants. She kept her mother’s picture, too, the morgue photo, so that she could relish the horror of that woman’s existence as well, not in prison but in hell, where she had surely gone after hanging herself before their child-abuse trial was over.
Casey said something. She saw his lips move but could not hear him. Over the years she had come to dread every minute they spent together, what with all his touching and petting, stroking and pressing and cooing. Her revulsion was sometimes so violent that she barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting. It had taken almost unimaginable strength not to scream and claw the old devil’s eyes out, but she had managed it. Had to, really. No other choice. There was too much at stake. And oh, how she had laughed inside when the code finally came to go forward: Take out the trash.
After a while she walked to the lab’s primary incubator, a stainless steel box the size of a refrigerator. The unit had an exterior glass door and four separate interior chambers with their own hermetic glass doors. The chambers allowed microenvironment management. In each one, the type and intensity of light, mixture of atmospheric gases, temperature, humidity, ionization, electromagnetic fields, pressure, and other factors could be precisely controlled.
All the chambers contained petri dishes in which bacteria were growing—these were the colonies of ACE that Lew Casey had been working with. The genetically disrupted bacteria showed as bright red and green and orange splotches on the tea-colored agar growth medium in the dishes. Flemmer removed from her biosuit’s thigh pocket a slim, three-inch-long, battery-powered bulb capable of emitting intense ultraviolet radiation.
She pushed a button on the unit’s base and it glowed with harsh blue light. She opened the door to the top incubator chamber, passed the UV wand over the cultures, and closed the door. She repeated the action in the other chambers. She closed the incubator’s main door, pocketed the wand, and looked around the lab. Nothing appeared out of order, other than Lew Casey lying on the floor. She left him in the lab, deconned, went up to his office, and retrieved the note she had left for him earlier; given the hour, she was confident no one else would have seen it. They would find him tomorrow and it would be an obvious accident, stress and exhaustion and the debilitating emphysema all combining to produce tragedy.
For too much of her life Evvie Flemmer had lived alone in places without light, small dark rooms and apartments with alley views. Now she would change her appearance and her fingerprints with the best plastic surgery money could buy. Slim and beautified, she would purchase a villa in the south of France—Provence, nothing splashy, but spacious and very old. It would have thick stone walls covered with stucco the color of cream, laced with green ivy. The orchard trees would be heavy with
pears hanging like great drops of gold. Best of all, there would be light. The villa would have tall windows through which pure light would stream and collect in bright pools on floors of ancient oak. She would never live in darkness again. And this she knew: there would be no fear of the purifying light of Provence. Jocelene Alameda Tremaine would never fear anything. That was the name she had given Mr. Adelheid for her new identity. So Jocelene, not Evvie, would soon be enjoying Dom Pérignon in the master suite of a superyacht named Lebens Leben, sailing east into the sunrise of a new life.
THIRTY-FOUR
HALLIE AND CAHNER MADE IT BACK TO ROARING RIVER CAMP, the place they had last seen Bowman; both of them were staggering with fatigue. Without even speaking, too tired to fix food, they found sleeping spots and collapsed into their bags.
Hours later, she was dreaming of Bowman again. He was leaning over her face, fingertips brushing her cheek, whispering something, his lips touching hers. His hand moved down along her neck, slipped under the sleeping bag, and settled on her chest, cupping her breast. She moved under his hand, moaning, as his fingertips caressed.
Please, she said in her dream. Please yes.
But his hand slid away and she dropped back down into sleep.
“Hallie.”
Bowman?
“Hallie, wake up, I have something for you.”
Groggy, she opened her eyes. Her sleeping area was illuminated by the glow from a helmet light, but it wasn’t Bowman’s. It was Al Cahner’s. He was down on one knee beside her sleeping bag, holding a steaming mug. “I thought you might like some tea,” he said, putting his face close to hers so that he didn’t have to shout.
She came fully awake, pushed the sleeping bag down, and sat up. She took the proffered mug and sipped.
“Careful, it’s hot,” Cahner warned.
The Deep Zone Page 26
