Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  The plane was the same model as before, only the pilots were different and it was far more crowded this time. Hawthorne sat across one of the small tables from Locke, leaning over his laptop and scrolling through every iota of information they could find on Dreck-Windham while his partner dozed, mouth open, snoring to shame the engines. Wolfe and Kajika sat behind them, both worshipping steaming paper cups of coffee, from which thin flumes of steam rose through the holes in the plastic lids. Wolfe wore his sunglasses and Kajika looked as though he could use a pair. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids swollen and red. Carver and Ellie sat across the aisle from them, facing each other across the fold-out table.

  Wispy white clouds filled the windows, through which the ground was only sporadically visible.

  "So how much did you hear last night?" Carver asked. He tried to keep his voice low enough to intimate privacy, though he knew all of the others would be listening discreetly.

  "Enough to know someone's made a big mistake. My mother wasn't born until well after World War II. But I don't suppose that changes the current situation at all, does it?"

  "Ellie...I believe what Hawthorne said. It sounds way out there for sure, but there are things...things you don't know."

  "I don't want you to tell me anything else. I just want to go back to the way things were."

  Carver felt his phone vibrate under his jacket and pulled it out. On the screen was the text message he'd been expecting from Marshall.

  positive. exactly the same elaphas maximus at loci p11 to 22 on the x.

  He nodded and replaced the phone in his interior pocket.

  "That girl in the first bundle..." Carver said, trying to capture Ellie's stare to keep her from looking out the window. "You share the same DNA. Even at the point where her chromosomes have been replaced by those of an Asian elephant, Elaphas maximus."

  "An elephant?" Ellie laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That's why you needed the sample of my blood? So you could determine if I have elephant genes? I think you guys need to recalibrate your equipment."

  "I know how that must sound--"

  "You have no idea how crazy that sounds. Let's look at this objectively. Do I have a trunk? How about tusks? I know I don't have the figure I had in high school, but do I look like I weigh two tons? Don't answer that. Do I have gray, leathery skin?"

  "The mutation is on your X chromosome at a specific point where problems lead to deficiencies in sense of direction, dexterity, and non-verbal memory. I've given this a lot of thought since learning about Candace Thompson, your twin. I may be completely off base, but bear with me. What do we know about elephants? They're supposed to have amazing memories."

  "But I don't--"

  "Just follow me through this, okay? So what's the life cycle of an elephant. They live and graze in herds. They eventually understand it's time to die on an innate level when their teeth wear down to the point they can no longer chew the roughage needed to survive. And what happens then? They migrate away from the herd to their pre-designated spot to die, an elephant graveyard where they can lie down amidst the bones of their ancestors. It's one of the great natural phenomena. How do you think they know how to find this place? It's in their collective memory, passed down through generations in their genes." He was silent for a moment, watching her features for any sign she had taken the next logical leap. "And what do you do for a living, Ellie? What's your specialty?"

  She smiled faintly, her eyes far away. "I find ancient burial sites."

  "How do you know where to look? Where to start digging?"

  "I just...feel it," she said, meeting his gaze. "I stand there and imagine myself hundreds of years in the past, a part of a living society now long gone, and somehow I know where to find them."

  "Like yesterday," Carver said, remembering her crouched over what looked like the crown of a skull. There had been few false starts. Just the hole in the sand she had made with her hands. It seemed like months ago now.

  She nodded and turned to the window again, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes before they could run down her cheeks.

  "It's going to be all right," he said. "We'll get you through this."

  She just shook her head and stared out into the vast emptiness. He was trying to formulate something more reassuring to say when a ringing sound beneath his jacket startled him. The unfamiliar tone belonged to what he had come to think of as his company phone. The other agents all turned to him at the sound, waiting expectantly for him to answer.

  "Carver," he said into the phone.

  The voice on the other end was that of a little boy, right down to the slight lisp. "Now that you've been briefed, what do you think? Do you believe?"

  "Yeah. I believe, but I still have questions."

  "I don't provide the answers," a teenage girl with a Valley lilt said. "I give the orders. The rest is up to you."

  "Who are you?"

  "In due time."

  "You're the Colonel, aren't you? The one Hawthorne told me about."

  The haughty, deep laugh of an obese man was the response. "There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The man to whom you refer died a long time ago with his wife, but we're wasting time on small talk."

  "So why did you call?"

  "To make sure you were one hundred percent on board," an elderly woman said. "There's no turning back now."

  "I'm prepared to do what needs to be done."

  "Are you prepared to kill, Special Agent Carver?"

  "If I must, but only after exhausting all other options."

  "You're a mouse scurrying down a snake hole. There are no other options. The people waiting for you will not hesitate. They will show no mercy."

  "I think they'll find I'm willing to do the same."

  "Now that you know Schwartz wasn't quite the monster you believed him to be and you killed him anyway, you'll hesitate," a man with a Brooklyn accent said. "And then they'll have you."

  "If this is a pep talk, you really need to work on your motivational skills."

  "You won't find any of this amusing when you're strapped to a table being bled dry."

  "I don't find this remotely amusing now," Carver said. "In fact, I think you're deliberately misleading me, or at least withholding crucial information. Still."

  "You know what you need to know. Anything more would be a hindrance."

  "Why did you really call?"

  "So suspicious, my boy. You have an incoming file. Open it when you hang up."

  Carver brought the phone away from his ear and noticed a new icon representing the file.

  "One more thing, Special Agent Carver," a young girl said. He pictured the words coming from Jasmine Rivers's dead mouth. "Look across from you and answer me one question." Carver stared at Ellie. "Does the fisherman spare a thought for the worm while prying the hook from the mouth of a trophy bass?"

  The call was terminated with a click, and Carver realized he was holding his breath. When Ellie turned to face him, he hurriedly composed himself and hoped she hadn't seen the flash of surprise in his eyes. He should have known all along. That's why they had brought him in from the start. He was the hook and she was the bait. They were going to flush out Heidlmann even if it meant her life. And his.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Nothing." He tried to force a smile. "You should try to get a little more sleep. You look exhausted."

  "That bad, huh?"

  "I didn't mean--"

  She smiled and he couldn't help but relax a little. In that moment they were both teenagers again and he felt that awkward stammering coming on, his heart beating against his ribcage.

  "I was just giving you a hard time, Paxton." She turned away again with a coy grin and closed her eyes.

  The phone grew heavy in his hand, forcing him to study the screen. The new file icon was right in the center. After a brief pause, he tapped the display with his fingertip. A picture immediately opened and filled the small rectangle. He turned the phone sideways to acc
ommodate the orientation. The subject was the recently deceased corpse of Edgar Ross. It was a similar photo to the ones he had already seen: massive unkempt beard; long, scraggily hair; blood smeared across his face; dirt beneath his head. Carver tapped the arrow underneath the image and a second picture replaced the first. Still Edgar Ross, but from a different angle, this one from the side as though the cameraman had been lying on the ground beside the body. It showed Ross's face in profile, allowing him to see what had been obscured by the sheer amounts of blood and hair. He looked across the aisle toward the front of the plane. Hawthorne was silhouetted against the clouds beyond the window. His hair was far shorter and he lacked the rugged beard, but the lines were right. Carver wouldn't have been able to tell from any other angle. The man on the phone had known as much.

  He tried to imagine Hawthorne crouched on bloodstained concrete with severed limbs dangling from the ceiling and bones mounded in the corner, gnawing on the meat of a human thigh while flies swarmed his head, and was surprised by how quickly and easily the image came to him.

  VIII

  Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory

  Centennial, Colorado

  The sun had risen, though Marshall could only tell by the distant rumble of traffic. He was about to get up to stretch his legs when his phone rang.

  "Marshall," he answered through a yawn.

  "Don't tell me I woke you." He recognized Manning's voice right away.

  "You kidding? I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep for a week. You got something new for me?"

  "I was hoping you could help me out."

  "Sorry. I must not have heard you right. Inner ear thing. What did you say?"

  "I said I need your help."

  "That must have hurt."

  "You have no idea." He almost thought he detected the trace of a smile in her voice. "I figure you might be able to save me some time here. So far none of my stiffs are matching by their DNA in any of the missing persons databases, and I figure if the facial reconstruction program worked once...."

  "No problem."

  "So can I send these pictures to the same email address?"

  "Yeah," Marshall said. "That will work perfectly. Just give me a little time to play with them, okay?"

  "Take whatever time you need. I'll be out here pulling corpses out of the sand until the Second Coming."

  "You finding anything interesting?"

  "Mummified murder victims aren't interesting enough for you?"

  "You know what I'm saying."

  "Nothing useful anyway. All we have are authentic five hundred year-old Inca blankets from Peru and obsidian figurines we speculate to be first century Maya, which seems a little odd. Neither society occupied the same space at the same time. All we can say with any certainty is that the bat and the tapir certainly mean something to someone."

  "What about the bodies I heard they found in that smokehouse?"

  "Not my assignment, but between us, I heard they were able to fingerprint the stiffs, but haven't been able to find any matches."

  "Surprise, surprise."

  Manning ended the call after he pledged to start the facial reconstructions as soon as he hung up. She was starting to warm to him. Must be his natural charm, he thought. He was debating the logistics of even attempting to propose a long-distance relationship when her email came through. The first set of images was taken at night under bright halogens, creating awkward shadows, but there were enough of them from different angles that he figured he could make it work. This one was clearly male as evidenced by the thick, broad mandible and prominent zygomatic arches. The hair was shorter, but still shaggy. Clumps were missing in obvious sections, but there was no sign of pattern baldness. The pictures gave him the creeps. With the brown skin stretched to the point of tearing, pulling the eyelids away from the empty sockets and the lips from the bared teeth, the man appeared to be growling. More files came in after the first, but he could only do them one at a time, so he opened the program and began with the male subject.

  After clipping each section of the face from the best pictures of each, he resized and fit them into his template. The skeletal face was incomplete, but at least he had all of the major landmarks in place. Skin tone, eye color, and the actual non-dyed hair color would have helped tremendously for the final image, yet those were variables that could always be changed regardless. He started the reconstruction and took a short walk to get his blood flowing again.

  A couple minutes later, he returned to find the reconstruction complete. He opened the image and drew a sharp breath.

  He'd seen that face before. Very recently.

  He had to be sure.

  An internet search produced what he was looking for right off the bat. The first match was at the Rocky Mountain News website. He followed the link, which took him to a page with a color photograph and an article straight out of the paper only two days prior. The caption read: man suspected in murders of four girls killed by federal agent.

  Beneath, was a picture of Tobin Schwartz.

  IX

  Redmond, Washington

  Carver received Marshall's call shortly after landing at Sea-Tac. He wished the news had surprised him, but after the last couple of days it was going to take a lot more than that. It made sense in retrospect. The overt hostility directed at him regarding Schwartz from both Hawthorne and the strange, changing voice on the phone. The way neither Hawthorne nor Locke appeared remotely interested in watching Schwartz's message in Kajika's trailer. They had already known, as it seemed was the case with just about everything. Schwartz hadn't been infected with the retrovirus at all. The changes had been in his genes all along and he simply hadn't known. Carver wondered if it had been Hawthorne's responsibility to keep tabs on Schwartz, and how the agent was dealing with such a miserable failure.

  Worse, Carver was struggling with his own involvement. He had shot and killed a marginally guilty man, who had presumably broken into his townhouse in hopes of soliciting help, and found only death. He couldn't afford to let it consume him now, not while he still had Ellie's life in his hands. There would be plenty of time for that later. Every day for the rest of his life, he suspected.

  There had been two unmarked sedans waiting for them on the tarmac, twin black Caprices that now sat invisibly in the packed parking lot of a shopping mall two miles from the off-ramp to State Route 203, which led from suburban Redmond to the HydroGen facilities. The company gave public tours only with advance reservation. Carver didn't press the issue with the woman on the phone for fear of drawing undue attention, though he imagined whoever they were hoping to find already knew they were there. The initial visit was intended to be a scouting mission anyway. With the satellite images of the property and the surrounding acreage and Kajika's somewhat dated memories, they still should be able to get close enough to determine what they truly needed to know: where they would be able to breach the security during the coming night.

  For now, the plan was simple. The adjacent land to the southwest was designated park space, bisected by the Skykomish River. Recreational trails wound through fir forests thick with ferns. The hills were steep and appeared to provide reasonable cover to within a quarter mile of the fence enclosing HydroGen's property. Kajika described the barrier as nine-foot chain-link capped with coiled concertine wire and swiveling perimeter security cameras every hundred feet. When asked why such security was necessary for a glorified fish farm, Kajika explained that the business of genetics was cutthroat and significant advances in biotechnology could simultaneously cause one company to prosper and a competitor to crumble. He said they even tried motion sensors, but between the coyotes, bears, and hikers straying from the paths on the refuge, they were being set off so frequently that they were all but useless. Carver knew they couldn't count on finding the same security intact, especially if their suspicions were correct, but at least it was something to go on.

  Carver, Hawthorne, and Kajika had been outfitted in hiking g
ear from the L.L. Bean store in the mall. Baggy khaki shorts with innumerable pockets, flannel shirts, wool socks, and hiking boots that cost more than all the shoes in Carver's closet combined. Carver and Hawthorne had been prepared to roll the clothing in the gutter to create the illusion of frequent wear, but Kajika insisted they would stand out more if they did. Redmond was an upscale suburb of Seattle. People tended to their hiking gear as they would their golf or tennis apparel. So they had merely clipped the tags and changed into their new wardrobe. Carver wore a khaki baseball cap down low across his brow to shield his face if he looked down. Hawthorne had a floppy-brimmed hat that reminded Carver of those he had seen in old pictures on the heads of soldiers in Vietnam, only gray with a white band around the seam rather than camouflaged. Kajika wore a black snow cap under which he could tuck his braid, stating it wasn't an unusual sight around these parts, even in the summer months. They each had a backpack between their feet on the floorboards, stuffed with bottled water, granola they would never eat, and a pair of binoculars.

  Locke drove while Wolfe waited with Ellie back at the mall. He would drop them off in the dirt lot at the base of the trailhead and return when he received the call. Their goal was to be back at the car in under two hours. There were still many preparations to be made.

  The hike was more strenuous than they had initially anticipated, due in large measure to the fact that none of them had truly slept in days, though no one complained. The forest was thick and lush, a byproduct of the eternal rains, which fortunately had spared them this day. Low-lying clouds turned the world a uniform gray, and a dark mist swarmed them like gnats. They followed the well-manicured path through firs culturing moss, every inch of the ground beneath occupied by ferns, which lent an almost primordial appearance to the trek as though traveling back in time. The climb grew steeper as they approached the Skykomish River. It chuckled down below them as they mounted the bridge crossing fifty feet above, reminding them that one misstep and their bodies would be feeding crabs in the Puget Sound. The path leveled out past the bridge, and had only begun a slow descent into a valley when Kajika led them from the maintained trail onto a thinner branch that followed the topography of the hills down to the right. The wet ferns soaked the bottoms of their shorts and their socks. Carver's toes were pruned inside his boots and his leg hairs stood uncomfortably erect. After half a mile, Kajika slowed their pace and stopped behind a stand of evergreens. He nodded past the screen of vegetation to signify their journey was at an end.