Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

Manning scrabbled to her feet and somehow managed to keep from shrieking. Her skin tingled as though covered with miniature legs. No amount of brushing or slapping herself was going to deaden the sensation. She needed air and time for whatever multi-legged creatures wriggled over the remains to find themselves a new home.

  She looked at the body one last time to confirm the peri-mortem scarring in the right antecubital fossa, and hurried out of the tent. She immediately missed the shade. It had to be over a hundred degrees by now, the sand reflecting the heat in wavering ribbons that distorted the landscape. The news vans had returned to clog the small road at the blockade, but not in nearly the same numbers. Just a few vultures waiting for a good money shot of a corpse being carried out. By tomorrow, they would all be gone. Her site would be yesterday's news...at least until word of what they had learned of the bodies broke, and then it would be a frenzy the likes of which she couldn't imagine. That was, of course, if the news was ever disseminated for public consumption. Right now, Wilson Donner, the SAC of the Phoenix branch, had promised terminations and bodily harm to anyone who even started to feel loose-lipped. If she remembered correctly, he had promised to rip a new orifice into which a foot could be shoved.

  She chuckled aloud. A distant camera flashed at her, or perhaps it was just the sun reflecting from one of the vans. It really didn't matter.

  She heard the satellite phone ringing in the tent behind her and hurried to answer it. Her first thought was that it might be Marshall, which caused a momentary surge in excitement potentially unrelated to her case that she would have to analyze later. He was an annoying jackass, but in a cute way. She winced at the thought. She really needed to catch up on her sleep.

  Instead, it was Special Agent Nichols at the lab, who revealed they hadn't made any DNA matches on the corpses, despite how well their RFLP genomes had been produced. Considering there had been no progress outside of the facial reconstructions, it wasn't much of a surprise. What was, however, was that Nichols said they had been able to isolate the DNA of two distinct individuals from the blood on the scalpel that had been used to kill Emil Mondragon. Nichols qualified the news by suggesting that it might have been contaminated through sloppy collection methods.

  "Why would you say that?" Manning asked.

  "Do you think it's possible?"

  "Anything's possible, as we now know."

  "Then I wouldn't read too much into the results."

  "What aren't you saying?"

  "I'll send the results to the command laptop, but then I think we both have some real work to do. You want me to turn this illegally collected evidence back over to the Flagstaff PD?"

  Manning cringed. She should have never taken the chance. When she talked to Carver next, she was going to have a few choice words to share with him.

  She hung up the phone and went straight to the laptop. The file came through a moment later and she opened it to find a standard DNA analysis featuring the sample they had lifted from the scalpel on the left and the partial matches on the right. She sighed and shook her head. She was going to have more than a few words for Carver. Perhaps even a couple speculating about his potential canine heritage.

  A contaminated sample wasn't the only explanation for the results. She shivered at the insinuation, surprised Nichols had ruled out the other option so quickly. It was possible that with the amount of work under which the lab was laboring they had chosen not to expend the energy exploring what was surely a dead end, or maybe they hadn't wanted to involve themselves further with evidence from a case they weren't investigating. Either way, the task fell to her, and she was going to have to be very cautious how she approached it.

  After a lengthy internal debate during which she nearly chewed through the inside of her lower lip, she finally decided on the direct approach. She picked up the phone and dialed Carver. As soon as he answered, she started talking, rushing to purvey the results so she could carefully gauge his responses.

  "The lab in Phoenix was able to extract viable DNA from the scalpel," she said. "A second source other than Mondragon."

  "Hello to you too, Agent Manning," Carver said.

  "Just shut up and listen. They prepared the sample and ran it through the database. They found two partial matches. One was a ninety-nine point nine percent match. But before I tell you the details, I need to know if there's any chance at all the scalpel could have been contaminated. Was it possible you might have touched it before bagging it or somehow cut yourself on it? Anything?"

  "What are you suggesting?"

  "Answer the question."

  "No. There's no chance whatsoever that any of us contaminated the scalpel. We found it wedged in Mondragon's lap and bagged it ourselves. The correct way. No physical contact at all. Wolfe and I were the only ones who handled it in any fashion before we dropped it off with you. Now tell me why."

  "The ninety-nine percent match is you, Carver. Your DNA is on the scalpel."

  There was a long pause from the other end. She heard the windy sound of passing traffic, the faint rumble of a car engine, static.

  "Carver?" she asked.

  "Are you sure?" His voice was little more than a whisper.

  "Ninety-nine point nine percent."

  Another pause.

  "That's impossible," he said.

  "The results don't lie."

  "Your results are bunk, Manning. Someone must have altered them."

  "Because your DNA is just lying around everywhere."

  "It's obviously on record in the system. How hard would it be to access that information and arrange a match?"

  "Do you have an alibi for where you were when Mondragon was killed?"

  "Of course," he snapped. "Do you really think it's possible that I--?"

  "It's my job, Special Agent Carver."

  There was more silence. This time she waited him out.

  "I was at the site with you, Manning. After that we picked up Ms. Archer at her motel following the break-in. I was with Special Agent Wolfe the entire time. Do you want me to put him on the phone?"

  "That's not necessary," she said. "I just wanted to hear it from you. I'll forward the data to Marshall. I'm sure he'll be able to verify its authenticity. Maybe he can even run through it again for himself."

  The other end of the line grew so quiet, she thought he might have hung up.

  "So what does it mean?" he finally asked. The tone in his voice made it sound like he had been thinking aloud, but she answered anyway.

  "It means that either someone's gone to great lengths to try to frame you for Mondragon's murder, or your identical twin killed him."

  She forced a laugh. He didn't.

  "You said there was another match," he said, his voice soft, far away.

  "Yeah. Just not quite as close as yours."

  "Who?"

  "Another man from the federal database. The former Deputy Director of the FBI, in fact."

  She thought she heard Carver draw a sharp intake of breath.

  "Jack Warren."

  III

  Monroe, Washington

  Kajika felt caged. The longer he spent in the hotel room, the more it started to seem as though it was shrinking, constricting. He had grown accustomed to the desert. Sure, his trailer wasn't much larger than the two rooms combined, but he hardly spent any time inside of it. Even the world through the windows here was smothering. The clouds were lead weights sinking inexorably to the ground, and the fog now hid the river and the surrounding hills, leaving only a stretch of parking lot and the bland rooftops of the surrounding buildings. He remembered Washington well. After all, he had spent nearly his entire adult life here, but it had never felt like home. When he had left Arizona at seventeen, he had done so at a sprint, never looking back at a place that had seemed oppressive, the reservation a vulture-ravaged carcass sprawled on the sand that no one was likely to come along and bury anytime soon. It took coming back again for him to realize where his home truly was. He would have given a vital organ to go
back there right this very second.

  He massaged his temples, trying to assuage the beast inside his head that was trying to force its way out through his skull. It was the price he paid for attempting to hide from his responsibility, he supposed. He was a lot of things, but apparently not much of a drinker.

  The television had served as a momentary distraction. He liked Drew Carey, but he was no Bob Barker. Even sleep had proven elusive, perhaps due to the intimidating, hairy man sitting in the corner of the room who always seemed to be looking at him over the top of the computer screen when Kajika glanced in his direction. There was something about the man's eyes that reminded him of those mangy coyotes back in the Verde River Valley, maybe not physically, but what was behind them, something starving, teetering on the brink of attacking anything that moved, regardless of the consequences.

  Kajika wasn't a stupid man by any stretch. It was readily apparent something was wrong with these people. They were products of a similar experiment to the one Tobin had helped conduct on those little girls. They were a strange hybrid of man and animal, a consequence of genetic tinkering he found both oddly intriguing and frightening at the same time. No one was telling him anything, though, forcing him to piece together what was happening. They thought the snakehead retrovirus had been modified for use on humans, targeting specific chromosomes to replace sections with animal DNA. Not phenotypical changes that were visibly expressed, but functional alterations meant to produce a master race that could be hidden in plain sight. Nothing so garish as the Aryan blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Children of the Corn ideal. A species more than human, yet capable of existing in their midst.

  He thought of the girl who had bitten the rat, how Tobin had said it spasmed before dying on the ground before her. They weren't just manufacturing a better species to coexist in harmony. They were creating one to prey upon humanity, to exterminate it.

  The room felt suddenly cold, the air heavy. He needed to get out of there, but one look at the man behind the laptop and he decided better of even broaching the subject. After a couple slow, deep breaths, he rose from the bed and removed an eight-dollar bottle of spring water from the minibar. He sat back down and inhaled several gulps. It tasted like it came from the tap, but at least it was cold. The FBI could bill him for it for all he cared. For a second it even made him feel a little better, a little more in control of his life.

  He still didn't understand how any of this related to HydroGen. It wasn't as though an infected fish could transmit the retrovirus to a human host by ingestion. Once it was cooked, the virus was a goner. Even sushi wasn't a viable option considering it had to be kept cold to prevent spoilage. Could they have just wanted proprietary access to the triple protein coat he and Tobin had designed for the viral envelope? Their patent expired within the year and it would soon be readily available to anyone who wanted it. So if the fish weren't being utilized as a vector of transmission and the purchase of the facility wasn't solely to buy the rights to the protein coat, then why did they need HydroGen? It couldn't be just for the lab or the equipment. For what Dreck-Windham had paid him, they could have built a chain of well-equipped labs all across the country. What was he missing, and why had it cost his father's life?

  The thought of his father's death filled him with sorrow, to which he now added a generous helping of guilt. It was because of the life he had chosen that his father was dead, a life his father had never supported, and one that Kajika would now never be able to justify to him. He would never have the chance to make things right with the only man whose approval he had ever sought.

  This self-pitying crap was accomplishing nothing. He got up and paced from room to room, but that was even less productive. When they had said he was going to Seattle with them, why hadn't he just said "no thanks?" Had he even considered that option? Damned beer. What the hell was wrong with him?

  Maybe if he just opened the door and stormed out onto the balcony Locke wouldn't make a move to stop him.

  He looked at the agent, who smiled and shook his head as if reading Kajika's thoughts. With a sigh of resignation, he plopped down on the bed again.

  The bathroom door opened and Ellie emerged from a cloud of steam that fogged the mirror over the sink. She was wearing clean clothes nearly identical to the dirty ones bundled under her arm. After forcing them into her bag, she sat down on the end of the bed beside him. They stared at the television together in silence for ten minutes before she finally looked at him.

  "I never did get a chance to ask you how you found the body," she said.

  "I was collecting rattlesnakes for their skins, if you can believe that. It seems like so long ago now. One made a break for it, and next thing I know I'm digging up a mummy." He smiled faintly. "Kind of wishing I'd never done that right about now."

  "If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. I still would have been called in, and it still would have come back to you. We'd still be sitting here just like we are now, having this same conversation."

  "I like that," he said. "It makes it sound like this whole mess is fate's fault instead of mine."

  "I'm not a big fan of fate."

  "At this moment, neither am I," Kajika said. This time his smile was genuine. "So what do you make of all this?"

  "I'm way out of my element here. You're the genetics expert, what do you think?"

  "I think there's somebody really twisted out there trying to build a better mousetrap using human parts. Truthfully, I think they've already figured out how to do it. They've been experimenting for nearly seventy years and they finally have the formula they want. I think all of the death, all of the bodies, are just the result of tidying up the experimental stage before moving into mass production and launching the product. I just can't figure out how they hope to distribute it. Any virus, even with a protective protein coat, can only survive so long outside of its ideal environment. And it isn't like you'll be able to find people willing to line up for their injection of some nasty virus they know absolutely nothing about."

  His brow furrowed. Something about that last sentence set off bells in his head, but he couldn't quite grasp why.

  "I don't understand that either. I mean, I haven't gone to a doctor's office in years. I take vitamins, but no prescription medications. Surely there are millions of people just like me."

  "I wouldn't imagine they're as concerned with infecting adults like us as they are with getting the virus into children, who are still developing, still growing. We're talking about initiating changes that need to develop inside the body, with the body, changes in structure and function, in hormones and pheromones. And children get shots all the time. There are inoculations for everything now: polio, rubella, measles, mumps. Heck, how long will it be before they have a cure for the common cold?"

  And there it was.

  "Holy shit," he whispered.

  "What?" Ellie asked. "What is it?"

  His own words echoed in his head. And it isn't like you'll be able to find people willing to line up for their injection of some nasty virus they know absolutely nothing about.

  But you could, couldn't you? You could find millions of people willing to do just that.

  IV

  Washington

  Carver disconnected the call and stared ahead in silence. He couldn't breathe. Wolfe glanced back at him in the rear view mirror, or so it appeared. Once. Then again. The sound of keystrokes was conspicuously absent from the passenger seat. He thought Hawthorne might have tilted the laptop screen just enough to possibly see into the back seat were there a reflection. The world blew past in blurs of greens and golds, separating itself from Carver, who no longer felt as though he was a part of it. His arms and legs were heavy, the Beretta under his arm even more so.

  He watched the men in front of him, waiting for one of them to speak, but neither said a word.

  Manning's news made his head feel light, disconnected. She was right. If the results were accurate, then he was definitely being victimized by an elaborat
e ploy to frame him, perhaps to get him out of the way. Had he come too close to the truth? Did they need him otherwise occupied or incarcerated to buy themselves just a little more time? He secretly hoped that was the case. The alternative was more than he could bear. He couldn't have a twin. It was simply impossible. He loved and trusted his mother, the life she had created for him. There was no way his entire life could have been a lie. He thought of what Hawthorne had said. The twins had been placed with new parents sympathetic to their plight, their unique heritage, often with single mothers. Most of the children had been too young to remember their abduction or the deaths of their biological parents. They had been raised in the southwest where they could be closely monitored to ensure their safety. Like Ellie, who had lived mere miles from him, whose twin had been exhumed only yesterday. There had been six pairs of twins: Hawthorne, Locke, Ellie, Schwartz, and he could only assume Wolfe. All of whom had been drawn together into this nightmare. Was it so hard to believe he could be the sixth?

  And he thought of Jack, whose DNA matched his as a father's might. Jack, who had been there for every important moment in his life, whom he had grown to think of as a surrogate father. The man who had watched over him as his mother's oldest and dearest friend for longer than he could remember, a man who had lived and worked more than a thousand miles away, but had made the trip to see them at least six times each and every year. The man who had brought him into the FBI and to the brink of this revelation, who had fed him just enough information about the other agents to allow him to make the next leaps of logic on his own.

  All of the parents of the twins had been killed during the abductions in 1979, the year he was born, with the exception of one. The man he knew as the Colonel. The mysterious superior on the other end of the company phone, whose voice had been deliberately modified. Why? It was a secure connection and they used scramblers to mask the signal. No one could have eavesdropped. The clandestine charade was for his benefit. So he wouldn't recognize the voice on the phone.