Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  He didn’t recall the takeoff, but that the jet was now airborne was indisputable.

  He was alone in the cabin. Recessed spotlights in the arched ceiling cast hard white circles on a chair, a countertop, the floor, and diffused an eerie glow throughout the cabin. Though Allen had flown in a number of private jets—Lears, Hawkers, Gulfstreams—he’d seen none quite like this. The cabin resembled a living room with all the accoutrements of a modern, expensive bachelor pad: The laptop and printer he’d seen earlier. The plasma—now off. DVD player, stereo components. Weights. An extremely comfortable-looking leather chair.

  All the comforts of home, with a cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.

  But it was not a home, Allen felt, as much as it was a lair. And he was the hapless victim, waiting for a creature to return for its feast of human flesh.

  The cockpit door opened behind him, then clicked shut. An inky shadow fell over him, and Atropos stepped into view. His Windbreaker removed, a dark green T-shirt clung to the ripples and bulges of his torso and biceps. His face was so taut it might have been forged in steel. He glared at Allen with eyes that revealed nothing but hate.

  A cold pressure gripped Allen’s jaw. Atropos had seized him, so blindingly fast that Allen wondered if he’d blacked out for a moment. The pressure increased until Allen thought his oral cavity would implode. Atropos slowly pulled his hand back. The fake beard peeled away from Allen’s cheeks, breaking free of the spirit gum. The adhesive stretched and snapped like skin. Atropos tossed the hair aside.

  Allen tasted blood, salty, coppery. His teeth had lacerated the insides of his cheeks. A gentle probe with his tongue hinted that a few molars may have buckled under the pressure as well.

  No words passed between them. The other’s cool application of pain, his own refusal to acknowledge it, conveyed mutual disrespect. Beyond that, Allen had nothing to say. Would he plead for life? He’d have better luck negotiating with a frenzied shark. Would he threaten the man, something along the lines of “You won’t get away with this!” Frankly, Allen suspected that Atropos would get away with murdering him, just as he had gotten away with it before. And more important, Atropos believed he’d get away with it, so saying otherwise amounted to groveling. And groveling was something Allen would not do.

  Atropos turned. He rolled away the punching bag and gripped the body bag in two hands, then dragged it to within three feet of Allen. Crouching, he unzipped the bag and spread it open.

  Allen’s breath went away. He wanted to scream but found nothing in him to let out. The plane seemed to plunge a thousand feet, spinning, spinning … Colors washed away. The pain brought him back. He studied the mess in the bag and raised his eyes to Atropos. He knew then that this went beyond Karl Litt, beyond his virus, beyond anything so … widespread.

  This was personal.

  sixty-six

  From where Stephen and Julia watched, the airport security’s search resembled a nocturnal sweep of still waters for a drowning victim. Spotlights cut through the black night to pan the tarmac in looping circles. Trucks trolleyed between the parked planes, invisible except for their amber flashers and the cone-shaped projections of searchlights.

  Across an untamed field, beyond perimeter fencing and an unlighted street, the van sat unnoticed, positioned so both occupants could observe the airport grounds through the windshield. Inside, Julia used binoculars to track the trucks’ activity. The short nail of her right index finger scraped nervously up and down the binoculars’ pebbled surface. She panned right, to where two Chattanooga police cruisers formed a crude V in front of the last hangar. Their headlamps illuminated a man dressed in mechanic’s overalls. He seemed to be pantomiming the entire gun battle with wildly exaggerated arm movements.

  “A witness,” she said coolly.

  Though she hadn’t realized it at the time, the sound of Allen’s scream outside the hangar had propelled her into what Donnelley used to call Full Battle Mode. It was a state of heightened awareness, when every synapse sparked for only one purpose: to survive. Muscles moved, seemingly on their own and aided by healthy doses of adrenaline, to aim a firearm with point-blank accuracy or move her out of harm’s way. It was like a drug, and coming down was hard. After having functioned at 200 percent, even briefly, both mind and body plunged into exhaustion. Soldiers knew it. And cops. Donnelley had been both, and he’d taught Julia how to control the descent, to keep the specter of danger alive in her mind even after its white-hot breath had cooled from her skin, until she was truly safe and ready to rest. Such thoughts fooled the body to attentiveness and tricked the adrenal gland into doling out enough super-juice to keep the mind alert. By giving that specter the cold, impassive face of Atropos, she now found keeping it alive disturbingly easy.

  Stephen said nothing. His attention was riveted on the trucks and their lights. If, by chance, Allen wasn’t on the Cessna, Atropos would have dumped his body somewhere between the hangars and his jet— precisely where the searchers were looking now.

  After the jet took off, Stephen and Julia had no time to scout the area. On the other side of the terminal, three trucks had converged from various points and sped toward them. They’d barely made it to the alley ahead of the trucks, and through the hangar to the van in the parking lot ahead of the men who’d clambered from them.

  Julia lowered the binoculars and went to a memory: Allen’s attempt to speak while Atropos was gripping his neck. What had he tried to say? She moved her mouth silently, visualizing Allen’s face. He had been grimacing in pain. Would that have distorted his lip movements enough to prevent her from deciphering his words? His jaw had moved twice, indicating a two-syllable word or two monosyllabic words. She went through the alphabet, comparing the movements of her mouth to his.

  She was thinking of words that started with s when she felt a tug at the binoculars. She let Stephen take them. Stress etched furrows into the flesh around his eyes, on his cheeks above the beard, on his forehead.

  She touched his arm. “We’ll get him back.”

  His eyes remained glued to the search area. One of the cops had broken away from the illuminated witness to wave his flashlight beam over the tarmac behind the cars.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Alive.”

  He lowered the binoculars to glare at her. “You don’t know that.” Cold. Angry. He lifted the binoculars again and scanned out the windshield.

  “They took him, Stephen. They took him for a reason. They’ll ransom him for the chip. They’ll keep him alive until they have it in their hands. That buys us time to figure out a way to get him back.”

  They watched as the cops climbed into their cruisers and drove single file toward the terminal. The search trucks switched off their lights and followed, leaving the area dark except for a bold strip of light falling from the slightly open hangar doors, through which the dungareed mechanic disappeared. In another minute, that light also winked out.

  “Why don’t we just turn over the chip?” Stephen asked, surveying the darkness outside.

  “Because that won’t save him.” Julia shifted in her chair so she was fully facing him, one leg tucked under herself. “That chip is evidence of something. I wish I knew what, exactly. But I’ll bet it’s not something these guys need to complete whatever it is they’re doing. They want the chip only because it’s evidence they don’t want getting in the wrong hands. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen them. At least, some of them. We’re as much a liability as the chip is. They’re out to destroy us and the chip. They think they’re going to use Allen to get the three of us and the chip all at once.”

  “So we’re all dead.” Stephen’s deep, unwavering voice made the proclamation sound as though it had already happened.

  “No,” she said. She tried to back it up with a powerful fact. All she could say was, “Just … no.”

  A wry smile bent the hair around his mouth. “You have another plan, I suppose?”

  “Look, they took the gaunt
let too,” she said. “It’s on the plane, has to be. That means we can track it.”

  “Then what?”

  “We go get Allen.” This time she did sound certain.

  Stephen looked out the windshield at the dark airport. He closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer. She thought he’d fallen into a kind of trance and would be like that for some time; then he looked at her again. His face still harbored searing concern, but a measure of peace had returned to his eyes.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” he said, keying the van to life and slamming it into gear.

  sixty-seven

  “He’s coming here?” Litt pointed the double lenses of his sunglasses at Gregor. His high forehead crinkled as he raised what would have been his eyebrows had they not fallen out years ago.

  “Should be in tomorrow,” Gregor confirmed.

  “But … why?”

  “He said these targets injured him.”

  “Injured him? How?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  They were standing in one of the base’s former hangars; like the others, it had been converted into a climate-controlled warehouse. A completely new building had been constructed within the interior walls of the fabricated steel hangar, leaving a rusty shell over a clean, poured-cement structure. The low hum of air conditioners filled the air and never ceased. An overhead door built into a hangar door rattled open, and an electric forklift glided in, carrying a pallet of boxes. On each were labels bearing a bar code, the name and address of a hospital or clinical laboratory, and several biohazard stickers. Litt watched the driver deposit the pallet and back through the door. A man approached the pallet and began cutting away a membrane of clear plastic that encased the boxes.

  Litt spoke without looking away from the worker. “Why here, Gregor? We don’t invite people here.”

  “I’m going to tell Atropos no? If you are worried about confidentiality, Karl, don’t be. His reputation is everything he has, and it’s impeccable. He doesn’t divulge targets or clients, let alone anything about his clients. And my job has always been to protect this compound. You know I take that seriously. I would never have agreed to his coming if I thought it would jeopardize us in any way.”

  Litt still looked unsure.

  Gregor continued, “People do come here, suppliers, workers. We have to trust some people, hoping none do what Despesorio did. Atropos is more trustworthy than any of these others, I promise.”

  He could not tell Karl that it had been he, Gregor, who had first broached the idea of Atropos’s bringing Allen Parker to them. Parker was meaningless to Gregor, but an opportunity to meet the renowned Atropos? He fought to keep the smile off his face. He had brilliantly convinced Atropos that making Parker pay horribly for the injury he had inflicted was a matter of personal integrity and restitution.

  Gregor wondered what sort of harm Atropos had suffered—he sounded fine; but the fact that he possessed a deep hatred for his targets was clear. Ah, the injury did not matter. The important thing was that Gregor was going to meet the man himself.

  He remembered when Karl had once, out of curiosity, examined his bedroom, gazing at his images of assassins like Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski and Joseph Testa and brutal warlords like Genghis Kahn and Stalin; touching his replica of the rifle that had killed JFK; looking over his bookcase of the underground series How to Kill and biographies of spies and military titans. Karl had dubbed him a “death groupie,” and Gregor had taken offense. It was simply that he appreciated the skills required to take a life and get away with it.

  However, he was hoping Atropos would allow a photograph of the two together. Maybe that did make him a groupie.

  Litt interrupted his thoughts. “Atropos has one of the targets?”

  “Dr. Parker, apparently.”

  “Alive?”

  “For now.”

  Litt watched the worker pull a box off the top and walk it over to a counter. A woman sitting at a computer monitor scanned the bar code and stared intently at the information that popped onto her screen. Her fingers flittered over a keyboard, and she reassessed the monitor’s information. The worker strode back toward the mound.

  “What do you think he wants from us?”

  “We did explain a little about Despesorio’s condition, just so he was prepared,” Gregor ventured. “He knows the kind of work we do.”

  The employee started to pull down another box. Litt raised his hand and snapped his fingers. It was a fleshless sound, like striking bone against bone. The man looked. Litt waved him over.

  “You think he wants a demonstration?”

  “I’m guessing he wants Parker to get the same treatment. Maybe then he’ll take him back and exchange him for the memory chip.”

  The worker approached with the box. He set it at Litt’s feet and used a box cutter to open it. Litt crouched, opened the flaps, and extracted a clear plastic envelope. Inside was a card stained with three circles of brownish blood. Information on the card identified the blood’s donor: a newborn boy named Joseph. His mother’s name, address, and social security number. Litt nodded.

  “Every year, these Guthrie cards become more uniform,” he said. “Another few years, not only every state but every country will use the same blood spot forms. Makes our job much easier.” He slipped the card back among the hundreds of others in the box, then nodded at the worker, who hoisted it up and carried it toward the counter and the woman.

  Litt stood, stretched his back, and looked at Gregor. “So one more field test?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Since you invited him, you do the honors.”

  Gregor sniffed and wiped at his nose. “I was just getting over the last one.”

  Litt ignored him. “Are you familiar with the Balinese tiger?” he asked.

  Gregor shook his head.

  “It was a phenomenal creature. Quite similar to Siberians and Bengals. Fewer stripes, darker in color. But the most impressive distinction of the Balinese was the way it dispatched its foes. Not its prey, you understand—its enemies, such as other tigers encroaching on its territory, depleting its food supply, flirting with its ladies, that sort of thing.” He tugged away a wrinkle in his pant leg, then began chafing the backs of his hands. “After roaring its displeasure, the thing would attack the intruder. An opponent who fell without inflicting serious injury was allowed to die swiftly, usually by having its throat torn out.” He smiled, a lipless upturning of the dark line that was his mouth. “On the other hand, an opponent that fought well, perhaps even injuring the resident tiger but not besting it, was fated to a slow, excruciating death. Purely punitive.”

  He pushed an errant length of hair back off his face. His narrow fingertips found something on his scalp to scratch at while he talked. “After incapacitating its rival, the victor would back off, sometimes for days. When the loser seemed to gain some strength, the victor swept in, slashed at it, mauled it further—then moved away again. Often, the superior tiger would wait until its foe had recouped most of its strength before moving in to cut it down again. This amusement could last for weeks. The defeated tiger eventually starved or bled to death. Or grew too weak to fight off the scavengers vying for its flesh, and gave itself over to them. An ignominious end to the noblest of creatures.”

  Gregor frowned at the abrasion Litt’s fingers had caused on his scalp. It looked ready to bleed. He patted the pockets of his camo outfit, looking for a cigarette. “Atropos is a Balinese tiger,” he said. “Is that it?”

  Litt shrugged. “Him, you, me. The desire for revenge is common to man. The harder the payback the better. But for an animal … That’s what makes the Balinese so fascinating.”

  Gregor found a nearly empty pack of cigarettes in a pocket by his knee. He fiddled with it, anxious to leave the smoke-free warehouse. “You think Atropos is playing with Parker?”

  “Of course. It’s what I would do.” He looked at his fingers and wiped them on his lab coat, leaving faint red streaks.r />
  “Will we be ready for him?”

  “What do you have on Parker?”

  Sticking the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, Gregor pulled out his BlackBerry. He tapped the screen and used his thumbs to key something in, then handed it to Litt. Litt looked at it, and together they walked to the woman at the monitor. Litt showed her the screen. She squinted at it, typed, squinted, typed. She waited, then nodded.

  “Get it,” Litt instructed. To Gregor, he said, “Like ordering up a chocolate malt.”

  Gregor patted him on the back. “Years of hard work, my friend.”

  “Who’d have thought, huh?”

  “I never doubted.”

  “Never?”

  “Why do you think I gave you my shoes?” He winked and started for the exit, patting his pockets again. Halfway there, he stopped. “Karl … why past tense? What became of the Balinese tiger?”

  “The last one was shot in 1937.”

  Gregor was thinking about that when Litt added, “I didn’t do it.”

  sixty-eight

  Julia climbed into the back of the van to set up the

  satellite-tracking device, and Stephen drove slowly away from the airport. At her direction, he maneuvered the van erratically from lane to lane, down alleyways and in looping patterns around blocks. She called it dry cleaning, designed to spot and shake any tails they may have picked up at the airport.

  She let out a heavy groan, and his stomach tightened. “What is it?”

  “I was able to tap into a satellite, no problem. But the plane’s altitude is throwing everything off. Maps are scrolling into place, but I can’t get a lock on the device itself.”

  “You can’t track it?”

  “I can, but I’ll have only a general idea of where it is until it lands again. My laptop is only loaded with software for land-based operations.”

  “Is there software for tracking planes? Can you get it?”

  “I don’t dare try, after what Kendrick Reynolds did. Accessing the Bureau’s system might bring half the force down on us.”

  She made it sound as certain as skipping into the FBI’s headquarters in Quantico. It was a different world, when you had to be as cautious electronically as you were physically. Crossing the road without looking could get you killed in either world.