What was downstairs in Spears’s lab right now was better than a nuclear bomb. It was a means of turning a war before the first shots were even fired, and ending one in such a way that the enemy would never rise again. Victory was obtained not when the last enemy fell, but when he no longer had the will to fight. The Japanese did not surrender because we wiped them out. They gave up because they were afraid, and these were people who flew missions with the sole intention of killing themselves, not a society prone to weakness. They ceded because we put the fear of God into them. We showed them in one decisive measure that we had the power and the resolve to annihilate each and every one of them and that we were willing to do whatever it took to win the war. We instilled fear in the fearless, and in so doing broke them like so many willful children. Fear was the most powerful weapon any army could wield, more powerful than an arsenal of warheads aimed at every population center. And fear was what former Brigadier General Franklin Spears would soon be able to provide for the country to which he had devoted his life, and for which his son, whether wittingly or not, had sacrificed his own.
The bodies in the lab were equipped with evolutionary enhancements that could turn even the meekest grunt into a killing machine capable of laying waste to an entire battalion with his bare hands. Their muscles were denser, more heavily concentrated with actin and myosin contractile proteins, which made them stronger than their human and Neanderthal contemporaries, and capable of reaching speeds previously undreamt of. That same muscular enhancement gave their jaws the tensile strength of a bear trap. They had predatory eyes adapted to complete darkness, like those of wolves, and blood thinners in their saliva that were potent enough to cause a man to bleed out inside his own body without shedding a single drop of blood. They were designed to be killers. He understood how the species had survived for as long as it had, but would never be able to comprehend why it had never become the dominant species. It should have wiped out its competition with little effort. But that was of no consequence now.
Spears allowed himself a smile as he imagined a single Green Beret with the creature’s physical attributes crawling into a sandstone crevice in Afghanistan at sundown and emerging under the blood-red dawn with the bodies of a dozen Taliban tied to a rope like trout on a stringer. The image changed to that of a dozen marines standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Great Wall at their backs as the ground trembled and the air shivered with the war cries of thousands of Chinese streaming across a battlefield soon to be littered with their corpses.
They stood at the precipice of a new era that would be defined by the bold actions of brave men.
The Spears Era, as he now thought of it.
There was only one thing standing in his way,
The missing cargo.
He needed to capture it before it fell into the wrong hands.
Preferably alive, but, in reality, that was no longer his concern.
Soon enough they would amass an army that would force America’s enemies to tremble in fear.
SEVENTEEN
Seattle, Washington
10:12 p.m. PST
Sturm jerked her head up when it bounced from the passenger side window. She hadn’t even felt herself dozing off. She surreptitiously wiped the corner of her mouth and glanced toward the driver’s seat, where Henley stared straight ahead with a smirk on his face.
“Glad I could provide some amusement.”
“I’ll take it where I can get it.”
He slowed the cruiser and eased it over the curb. Sturm hopped out, stomped at the pins and needles in her right foot, and crossed through the headlights to open the gate. Once the patrol car passed through, she closed it again and climbed back into her seat. Her head throbbed and the edges of her vision contracted in time with the pulse in her temples. She’d been burning the candle at both ends for too long. Between the overtime on her night job and the increased demand for her services at the CSRT with this new case, something had to give, and she feared it would be her body that relented first.
She popped a Sudafed and swallowed it dry. At least that ought to perk her up enough to get her through the next couple of hours underground, even if it left her shaky.
Henley pretended he didn’t see as he guided the tires through the ruts toward the demolished buildings.
“Two more nights,” he said. The words were meant to be reassuring, but all she felt was despair. “Two more nights and we can go back to holding up the counter at Denny’s and waiting for domestic disturbance calls.”
He parked the car, climbed out, and stretched his arms over his head as he did every night. Sturm fought the urge to claw out his eyes. Every little thing he did grated on her nerves, despite the fact that he was making an obvious effort to be patient with her situation. While she appreciated it, she didn’t want any special treatment. She’d succeed on her own, without anyone going easy on her, like she always had.
“You think the mayor’s going to invite us to his fancy shindig?” he asked. “You know, to reward us for making our city safe for the rich again?”
“We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have us serving appetizers and champagne in uniform.”
Henley chuckled. “I’m sure the thought’s crossed his mind.”
While he completed his stretching routine, Sturm looked to the north, where she could see the glow of the klieg lights directed at the Dragnet. She’d spent the entire day aboard that vile vessel, unloading festering fish one at a time, visually scouring each and every one of them for teeth marks and congealed blood from the victims. After being buried in carcasses and molested by flies for two straight days in that freezer, which had turned into a suffocating hotbox, the bodies of the victims had become like balloons filled with cottage cheese. Not that she got to work on them. While the paid portion of the team did all of the cool stuff, like performing tests on the wounds and the remaining blood and tissue, she had sorted through fish that had begun to decompose to such an extent that their scales fell off, their skin slid across the pungent meat and tore with the slightest pressure, and their eyes leaked a slimy sludge that reminded her of pus. Even after searching and removing every last mackerel, pollock, and cod, they hadn’t found a single shred of evidence. There were no prints, no hairs, no fibers. Like aboard the Scourge, there hadn’t been a single clue as to what or who had slain the men, other than the wounds on the necks of the corpses, which, at this point in the game, were all they had to go on.
They had made several casts of the jaws, which were being cross-referenced against every possible database and were now being tested by engineers using hydraulic clamps to estimate the force of the bites. The results of the tests performed on the saliva extracted from the wounds were a little more encouraging, but still couldn’t point them in the direction of a viable biological suspect. Sequencing the DNA had been next to impossible as it was diluted with the blood of the victims and degraded by the acidic pH in the saliva to such a degree that they couldn’t conclusively determine anything beyond the fact that it belonged to a higher order of mammal. The only thing they could state with authority was that the Draculin-like anticoagulatory protein complex was present in large quantities. Whether they were a component of the saliva or not, they had reached the victims’ bloodstreams in sufficient concentrations that the men would have eventually bled out through the walls of their vessels, even if they hadn’t exsanguinated first. There still wasn’t enough information to formalize a working hypothesis. All they knew without a doubt was that it was only a matter of time before word leaked to the media and they had reporters crawling all over them. Thus far, they had been able to keep a lid on their investigation, and the mayor and various federal agencies had exerted their influence to control the flow of information, but they all knew they were on borrowed time. Their mandate was simple:
Track down whatever killed these men and do so in a hurry.
The problem they were all skirting around was that they had reason to believe that whatever it was was now on the main
land, which meant that it could be anywhere. And if it killed again before they were able to find it…
She shoved that thought aside and returned to the here and now. Henley was staring curiously at her as though waiting for an answer to a question she hadn’t heard him pose.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” she said, and brushed past him toward the entrance to the demolished warehouse.
There was a long hesitation before she heard his footsteps on the weeds behind her.
* * *
They split up at the first fork, as was their routine. Sturm could still hear the scuffing sounds of Henley’s passage on the other side of a crumbling brick wall, where rats gnawed at the exposed lumber. Soon enough, she wouldn’t be able to hear him at all as he branched deeper into the ruins, stranding her alone in a heavy silence marred only by her heavy breathing, the groaning of the settling structure, and the slithering of sand and powdered cement through the rubble. She could still identify the spot on the dusty floor where the doll had once been. Part of her expected it to return one of these nights like the denizens of the darkness, and while she was relieved that it hadn’t, it was a link to the young girl who had lost it, whom she feared she might never be able to exorcise from her thoughts.
She passed the first alcove without any sign of the people she had rousted so many times. Maybe they had finally moved on. Maybe they had settled into a shelter and were taking the first steps toward reclaiming their lives aboveground. Maybe something good had actually come from this most heinous of assignments.
Sturm clung to that hope as she crawled from one bleak building to the next. After so many hours in the hold of the Dragnet, these dank rooms no longer had the power to make her retch. Perspective. It was like walking through a meadow of wildflowers by comparison, which was why she was unprepared for what her beam settled upon through a tent formed by fallen timber, which braced chunks of concrete and bricks like an igloo.
Her light cast shadows from the pale white fingers of a hand that was partially clenched as though holding an invisible ball. A ribbon of blood wound around the wrist like a bracelet.
She leaned her head toward the transceiver affixed to her shoulder and pressed the button to transmit.
“Henley. You need to get over here.”
“You need backup?”
“Just get over here. I’m about halfway through the canning factory.”
He said something else, but the words drifted off into the darkness, unacknowledged, as she lowered herself to the ground and shined her flashlight under the cribbing. She followed the length of a flannel-clad arm to the shoulder and the side of the head. The man’s dark hair was mussed and tangled, the side of his face smeared with grime and speckled with blood. She nearly had to climb in on top of him to see his face. His tattered lips framed his open mouth, the front teeth chipped. His nose was visibly broken and his wide green eyes stared up into the rubble. She recognized them immediately from the night before. This was the man with whom she had spoken through the fence, the man who had warned her—
Sturm gasped and scrambled away from the body.
The neck.
The man’s neck had been torn open in the exact same fashion as the crew of the Dragnet.
Her back met the decomposing plaster wall and she let out a shriek. She clumsily drew her sidearm and pointed it into the hole, where her flashlight beam trembled from side to side, animating the lifeless fingers as though they pawed at the air.
She willed her hands to still and took several slow, measured breaths. When the initial shock waned and she gathered her wits, she tapped into her training as a criminalist and evaluated the scene with the necessary detachment. The patina of dust and dirt on the ground was disturbed where she had crawled into the rubble. It was a mistake, but not necessarily a critical one. She could still see the markings where the body had been dragged down the corridor from the direction of the third building, to her right. The smears of blood on the smooth bricks were dry and brown, reminiscent of strokes by a damp paint brush. There were no arterial spurts or spatters, nor did a cursory inspection reveal there to be any on the walls. The man hadn’t been killed here, but rather dragged to this particular point from wherever he had been slain.
Sturm crouched and scrutinized the dust. There were hundreds of footprints trampled one on top of the other, surely some of them her own, rendering the individual tracks indistinct. Perhaps they would be able to isolate some clear prints when they discovered where the man had been killed, but, for now, her priority was to preserve the integrity of the scene for proper evaluation. She had already fouled a large portion of the area immediately around her, but her initial reaction wasn’t an uncommon one. She’d take her lumps when the crime scene response team arrived. At least she had recognized what she had found quickly enough to avoid doing irreparable damage.
She swung around and shined her light into Henley’s face at the sound of his approach.
“Stay right there,” she snapped. “Don’t move.”
He stopped dead in his tracks to her left and raised a hand across his brow to shield his eyes from the glare.
“What’s going on?” He started to move forward again, but she halted him with her palm before he could get any closer. “Jesus. What is that? A hand?”
“Call it in.”
“That wasn’t here last night, was it?”
“Just call it in, for Christ’s sake!”
Without moving her feet, she lowered herself to her haunches and shined her beam into the recess. The man’s body stretched away from her. He had been dragged feet-first into the hole, with his arms trailing behind him. His well-worn boots stood at forty-five-degree angles to the floor. Between them, she saw the mouth of a dark tunnel leading deeper into the building, beyond her light’s reach.
EIGHTEEN
Seattle, Washington
11:16 p.m. PST
“You’re certain he was killed all the way over here?” Porter said.
“Unless someone else was,” Galiardi said.
“That’s a cheery thought.”
“We haven’t received the results from the blood test comparisons, but I’m comfortable working under the assumption that the man was killed here, dragged across the field and down into the building through what’s left of that window over there.”
Porter looked across the field of weeds, where the trampled path through the vegetation was still apparent. He could barely see the collapsed frame of what had once been a ground floor window and was now little more than a slit that didn’t look large enough for him to squirm through on his belly. The lights from those working inside barely illuminated the window with the strength of a candle’s glow, despite the sheer wattage spotlighting the chamber where they had found the man’s remains. Outside was a different story. Two police cruisers had been pulled around to the side of the old market and parked side-by-side with the high beams directed at its northern brick façade at such an angle that they were nearly invisible from the street. Galiardi had pitched a fit at not being able to erect the sodium halide domes by which she was accustomed to working, but she had been rebuked every bit as firmly as he had. This investigation was to be conducted with the utmost discretion, and wrapped up with all due haste. There was to be no contact with the media whatsoever. His SAC had gone so far as to say that if he caught even of whiff of the story on the news, he’d make sure Porter ended up working the reservations out of the South Dakota field office. It was an idle threat, Porter knew, but that didn’t change the nature of the assignment. There was to be no negative publicity surrounding the waterfront renovation project. Too much money had already been invested for largely lackluster results, and even more would still have to be raised. Taxpayer money. And taxpayers meant voters. None of the parties involved with the project—be it the mayor, the governor, or the congressmen who backed the initiative—could allow themselves to be attached to a public relations fiasco of such titanic proportions. If rumors that a body—let a
lone a second—had been discovered leaked to the press, this ship would sink in a hurry. As it was, the powers-that-be had yet to be informed of the prospect that whatever had slaughtered the men aboard the Scourge and the Dragnet might be loose on the mainland. They needed concrete proof of that before they opened that can of worms, which Porter supposed they now had. He’d deal with that soon enough. For now, they would treat this as the simple death of an indigent and go from there. Let the mayor make the call about where the body had been found. Or if it had been found at all. No one seemed too concerned about the niggling little details surrounding the murder of a man they suspected no one would ever miss. Or care about, for that matter.
Porter turned his attention back to the scene before him and returned his focus from the politics to the job at hand. The crime scene investigators already had a good half-hour jump on him, and appeared to have made the most of that time. They had already marked the point where the victim had scaled the fence and dropped down into the mid with two small, numbered pink flags. The impressions matched the victim’s boots perfectly. The line of trampled vegetation between that point and where Porter now stood had yet to spring back into place. Each of the man’s footfalls was marked by another pink flag. The distance between them, the deep toe divots and lack of heel contact, suggested that the man had hit the ground and broken into a sprint. He had been overcome near the base of the brick wall, where the disturbed detritus indicated that he had been attacked while trying to scurry through a crumbled section of brickwork into the building’s basement. A starburst of black blood marred the dirt and weeds. Arterial spurts painted the ancient bricks. The standing puddle where he had fallen was diluted with rainwater, which continued to drip from the eave above with a metronomic plopping sound. The streaks on the ground and the flattened weeds diminished as they neared the ruins where the body had been discovered.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 11
