“Holy cow. What a mess. What happened?”
“Let’s just say the place had the kind of guard who doesn’t take days off.”
“Does it hurt? Looks like it does.”
“I’ve had worse.” Redlaw winced as he used his left hand to pull the lever that closed the bus doors. Then he stamped on the clutch, ground gears, and drew away from the kerb. “I see you’ve got all our supplies. Excellent.”
“Yeah, don’t worry, I made good use of the time,” Tina said.
Redlaw was driving an unfamiliar vehicle on the wrong side of a very snowy road, so he was too preoccupied to notice the small, hopeful smile that creased the corners of Tina’s mouth as she uttered these words.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
FARTHINGALE BLINKED SLOWLY.
“Run that by me again.”
The very frightened Porphyrian technician on the other end of the line swallowed hard, collected himself, and said, “They’re gone, sir. And two of us are down. Down as in dead. I... I was one of the lucky ones. I got out in time and I ran and hid and they missed me. But they went crazy. I mean plain fucking bat-shit berserk. It was horrible. A slaughter.”
“Be very exact,” Farthingale said. “Team Red Eye held you all at gunpoint...”
“Yes, sir.” The technician’s name was Dale Postma and he was a 26-year-old MIT graduate. “They were kind of nice about it. Polite, almost. At the start. They were all, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’ve got to do this. Co-operate and no one’ll get hurt.’ They had their gear on, their weapons. We weren’t about to argue, not with a bunch of trained, armed killers. We’re lab geeks, for Christ’s sake. We did as we were told.”
“And what they were demanding from you was a fresh dose of PP-66.”
“Yeah, and Dr Istamboulian, he said he didn’t think that was a good idea so soon after the last dose, and one of the Red Eyes, Abbotts I think it was, he said something like, ‘That’s not your decision to make, doc,’ and threatened to put a bullet in his head. So Istamboulian backed down, because who the hell wouldn’t, and we all trooped along to the treatment chamber...”
“Yes, yes,” said Farthingale impatiently. “I get it. You dosed them up, like the meek little lambs you are. Then what?”
“We gave them their forty minutes, went back in...”
“You didn’t think to contact me during that time? It never once occurred to any of you that it might be worth informing me, your boss, about this unhappy turn of events?”
“We were instructed not to. She said they’d know if we had and we would pay for it. And anyway, we assumed there wouldn’t be much you could do about it even if you did know.”
“She? Warrant Officer Berger?”
“She was the ringleader, sir,” said Postma. “You could tell. The others were all looking to her for guidance, answering to her. Even Giacoia, though he outranks her.”
The bitch, thought Farthingale. So that was why she had kept on about Jacobsen during the conference call when he’d given the team their notice. He’d had a sneaking suspicion there was something going on between those two.
Berger had lost her sweetheart and wanted someone to pay for it.
“And once the PP-66 was in their systems,” he said, “they reacted how?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. They broke the restraints. Literally just snapped them. And two of them, Abbotts and Lim, threw themselves at the nearest of us, the ones at the front who’d gone in first... Dr Istamboulian... Oh, God... The noise. Flesh being torn open. Jesus, it sounded like canvas ripping. And blood hitting the floor, like from a hose. And then they started drinking it. They were insane, all of them. Their eyes completely red, glowing almost, like the eyes of demons.”
“Postma, get a hold of yourself. ‘Demons’, indeed.”
“Hey, Mr Farthingale, I’ve just watched two people I’ve known and worked with months get pulled to pieces and—and eaten, right before my eyes. Don’t tell me to get a fucking hold of myself. You get a fucking hold of yourself!”
“A little respect for your—”
“Know what? Screw you. Screw respect.” Postma was gibbering, on the verge of hysteria, his voice ragged-edged. “This whole crazy-ass project of yours, making humans vampires for a day—I always wondered if it wasn’t the worst idea ever. Now I know.”
“You voiced no such concerns when you signed up for the position and took the very handsome salary I was offering.”
“I got student debt up the wazoo. I need every fucking cent I can get. And the jobs market being how it is, even for biotech grads, hell, I’d have applied to work in a North Korean bacteriological weapons plant if I’d known they were recruiting. Probably be safer there than here, what’s more.”
“Just tell me,” Farthingale said. “Red Eye have gone now? They’re outdoors? All five of them?”
“Like I said. I heard them leave while I was hiding in the back of one of the supply closets. They took the elevator to ground level.”
“But it’s broad daylight.”
“If they’re all wrapped up, they should be okay.”
“What I mean is, they haven’t got the Hummer. They’re roaming the streets in the daytime in full military get-up, carrying weapons. Aren’t they worried about being spotted?”
“I don’t think they’re worried about anything much. I think they’re beyond that. They just want out. They got some piece of business they want to finish, I don’t know what.”
I do, thought Farthingale.
“And God help any poor bastard who gets in their way,” Postma added.
FARTHINGALE DIDN’T FEEL like smashing up the phone this time, or indeed smashing anything else. He was too numbed, too appalled. He sat at his desk, head in hands, and tried to process what he’d just learned.
A mutiny. That was the only word for it. Team Red Eye had rebelled.
He knew who they were after. He knew why. But that didn’t help. They were welcome to kill Redlaw any time. Just not right now. Not like this. If the President should find out—
No, there was no if about it.
When the President found out that Team Red Eye was on the loose and out of control, he, Farthingale, would be in the deepest shit imaginable. Those threats about Guantanamo, they were probably exaggeration, a bit of presidential posturing. Being leader of the free world was like having the biggest dick on the planet, and what good was that if you couldn’t take it out and wave it in people’s faces every once in a while?
So, okay, maybe not incarceration in Gitmo, but there would be severe consequences, no question about that. Red Eye had gone rogue, and it wasn’t Farthingale’s fault, but it would be the final straw as far as the President was concerned. Some kind of massive public prosecution would ensue. He would hang Farthingale out to dry.
You’ve pissed off the wrong man, you entitled, old-money prick.
That was the trouble with these fucking liberals, Farthingale thought. They couldn’t handle moral compromise. They had this la-la-land view of right and wrong. Everything was either the one or the other, nothing in between. They didn’t seem to appreciate that technological advances and business ventures all carried potential blowback. No reward without risk. A liberal—and the incumbent, with his healthcare reform bill and heavy tax-and-spend regime, was one, in spite of what the White House press officers and spin doctors said—was always looking for the easy way, the ingratiating, consensual way, the path of least resistance.
Resistance, though, was the only true test of a theory or a doctrine. Everything worth having needed to go through a painful but necessary refining process first, and fallout, collateral damage, could not always be avoided.
The development of Porphyrian itself was a perfect case in point.
The genesis of the project had come as a consequence of Farthingale’s ITP diagnosis. He had been brooding on the now suddenly very personal issue of diseases of the blood and had started to wonder if vampirism held the key. A series of te
ntative connections had begun clicking inside his head.
Vampires lived on blood. They thrived on it. It somehow helped them be the physically superior predators they were. Was there something in the vampire metabolism that transformed blood into a sort of super-elixir, granting them strength, endurance and longevity? And if so, could it be harnessed to enhance people as well? Fix human frailties and illnesses?
It certainly seemed like an avenue of research worth pursuing. There was money to be made there, potentially quite a lot of it. More significantly, there was the possibility of a cure for his condition.
The family motto. Sanguis ordo est. Blood is order.
But perhaps blood was also profit.
The first hurdle was sourcing vampire DNA. Farthingale owned several pharmaceutical companies whose R&D departments he could commandeer for whatever purpose he saw fit, but there was little the men and women in white coats could do unless they had the necessary materials to work with.
Luckily, he knew a man who could help. At that time, Nathaniel Lambourne was keeping a vampire captive on the grounds of his own home. He was using the creature, nicknamed Subject V, as a guinea pig to determine the effects of the hormone vasopressin on the undead physiology.
At Farthingale’s request, Lambourne sent over samples of tissue and bone marrow extracted from Subject V. All he asked in return was a 5% stake in any marketable discoveries Farthingale’s people made from these specimens. Farthingale beat him down to 3.5%. That was how things operated between himself, Lambourne and Uona. Nothing was ever for free. None of them knew the meaning of the words favour or goodwill gesture. Their three-way relationship rested on a bed of mutual mistrust and common financial interest.
Farthingale appointed Ghazar Istamboulian, an Armenian expat with PhDs in pharmacology and applied genetics, to head up the project. Dr Istamboulian was the one who dubbed the project ‘Porphyrian’, after the rare blood disorder porphyria, the symptoms of which had once led it to be linked with vampirism. Superstitious peasants in the Middle Ages would have looked at a porphyria sufferer, whose teeth and urine exhibited a reddish fluorescence thanks to a build-up of excess blood pigmentation, and who was experiencing a degree of photosensitivity so acute that it could cause skin blistering, and might easily have concluded that some local undead bloodsucker had recently paid this person a call. The presentation matched the folklore uncannily well. They might even have decided that the best therapy was a stake through the heart. Dr Istamboulian considered the choice of name a neat ironic flourish.
He and his colleagues tinkered with the Subject V samples and, step by step, moved closer to a positive outcome. It just wasn’t the outcome Farthingale had been hoping for.
“Such is the way of these things,” Dr Istamboulian wrote in one of his monthly status-report memos to Farthingale. “You search for one result, by chance you hit upon another. Charles Goodyear was looking for a more malleable and durable form of rubber and clumsily spilled a mixture of rubber, sulphur and lead onto a stove. Hey presto, vulcanisation. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity after he left uranium rock and a photographic plate together in a drawer for a week. It wasn’t planned, just a happy accident. Alexander Fleming didn’t clean up his lab bench one day, and came back to find a bactericidal fungus had grown on some of his cultures—penicillin. With Porphyrian, we’re not finding anything that can make improvements specific to blood chemistry or the immune system. What we are finding is something that promises to generate an overall improvement in human physiological capacity. We have synthesised a version of the vampire DNA that temporarily overwrites the recipient’s DNA. We can piggyback it onto a fast-acting retrovirus to disperse it through the body in just a matter of minutes, and install a self-destruct enzyme in the package to eradicate its effects after a set period, perhaps in the region of twenty-four hours. Piece of cake, as you Americans say.”
Tests on rhesus monkeys were showing a marked uptick in reaction times, reflexes and exteroception and proprioception—awareness of surroundings and self.
“Aggression, too, unfortunately,” Dr Istamboulian wrote. “Put two of them in a cage, and unless they’re a close pair bond, chances are that pretty soon you’ll be left with only one monkey. We have to keep fine-tuning. There must be some way to tone down the violent tendencies the formula excites. It’s simply a question of snipping out the pertinent parts of the genome and dovetailing the joins.”
After sixty-five near-misses, he was convinced that he had finally cracked the problem.
“If the dosages are carefully measured and controlled,” he told Farthingale, “I can foresee no downside. The bloodthirstiness can be held at bay. There will be aggression, yes, but not of the counterproductive kind. It will remain within acceptable parameters. I mean acceptable in a combat context, where a degree of hyper-stimulation is desirable—and combat, after all, is the venue most suited to what we’ve created. In that sense, Porphyrian is the ideal tool for the job.”
Which it had been, until the people presently receiving the treatment had decided to take matters into their own hands. The now late Dr Istamboulian had learned to his cost that however closely you monitored and regulated an experiment, there was always an element of unpredictability. In this instance it was human nature, emotion trumping discipline.
The upshot for Farthingale was that he was facing ruin at every conceivable level.
Get a grip on the situation, he told himself. Reassert control.
He tried patching into Team Red Eye’s comms channel via his PC. He could speak to the soldiers. A bit of sweet-talking, the dangling of substantial bribes, and he could maybe head them off before they did anything he might regret.
He couldn’t get through. No signal currently being received, read the onscreen message.
The helmet cameras were off, too. The bastards had completely divorced themselves from him.
Of course they had.
Farthingale felt alone, and helpless, and foolish. These were unfamiliar sensations, alien, unpleasant.
It was, he decided, time to call in the lawyers. And the accountants. And the PR flacks. Circle the wagons. Get ready for the coming shitstorm.
But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so yet. It would be tantamount to admitting defeat.
Something might still turn up. The “luck of the loaded” might still hold.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE SCHOOL BUS reversed up to the loading bay on the factory’s north side.
As Redlaw and Tina stepped out, a gunshot erupted. A ricochet pinged off the raised concrete dock. Tina could have sworn the bullet whistled past her ear with millimetres to spare.
Redlaw dropped into a crouch, whipping out his Cindermaker. He backed away, pushing Tina behind him, getting them both to cover round the front of the bus.
“Sorry!” someone called out from inside the factory. “Are you okay? Tell me I didn’t hit anybody.”
“Who the hell is that?” Redlaw barked.
“It’s me. Mary-Jo.”
“And why in God’s name are you shooting at us?”
“I didn’t mean to,” the vampire replied plaintively. “I was keeping watch, and I just thought, this rifle was laying around, and I’ve fired a gun before, and if those vampire killers happened to turn up before you did...”
Redlaw stood and clambered up onto the dock. Mary-Jo Schaeffer hung back in the shelter of the large entranceway, whose retractable steel door had long ago been dismantled and taken away for scrap. She was petite, and Colonel Jacobsen’s Colt AR-15 looked huge in her hands.
“I’ve been on ranges a few times,” she said. “Notched up some hours.”
“Handguns?”
“Yeah.”
“No experience with semiautomatic assault weapons?”
“No.”
“Idiot.” Redlaw snatched the rifle out of her hands. “You could have taken my head off.”
“I didn’t realise the trigger was so sensitive
,” Mary-Jo protested.
“Or, apparently, that there was a round in the breech.”
“I said sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ is no good to a corpse.”
Mary-Jo looked crestfallen. Harsh words from her shtriga. They stung.
Tina felt the tiniest bit of sympathy for her. “She thought she was doing the right thing, Redlaw. No need for the verbal bitch-slap.”
“Would you rather it was a physical bitch-slap?”
“Just saying.”
“Well, don’t,” snapped Redlaw. “If you want to be useful, why not start daylight-proofing the bus? Paper over every inch of window on the inside. Leave a slot on the front windscreen so that I can see out when I’m driving. Think you can handle that?”
“I think I’m probably up to it,” Tina drawled. “And what’ll you be doing while I’m being handicrafts queen?”
“There’s an exsanguinated corpse on the premises. I’m going to chop off its head to make sure it stays dead.”
“Oh.”
“Unless you’d care to swap? I’d gladly mess around with scissors and tape instead.”
“No. No, I’m good.”
“Thought so.”
REDLAW USED JACOBSEN’S own combat knife to hack through the corpse’s neck. It was a grisly task, but he was used to it. Muscle and gristle cleaved easily under a ten-inch carbon-and-chromium-steel blade. There was very little mess until near the end, when he parted two cervical vertebrae and a trickle of colourless cerebrospinal fluid leaked out.
He wiped the knife clean on Jacobsen’s fatigues. Nice piece of kit. Jacobsen wouldn’t be needing it any more. Redlaw attached its sheath to his belt and slotted the knife there for safekeeping.
TINA WAS THOROUGH with the bus windows. She secured each sheet of cartridge paper into place with a double thickness of tape. She trimmed the paper to fit perfectly.
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