Greg Bear

by Vitals (v5)

  34

  8:00 p.m., AUGUST 14 • MANHATTAN

  THE JENNER BUILDING, “ANTHRAX CENTRAL”

  We drove down the wide alley behind the gray cube. I saw the steel door Ben had described, covered with acid swaths of graffiti. At a honk, the door was pushed open from the inside. Breaker and two other agents got out of our cars and conferred with figures from inside the building, wearing white decontamination suits. They gestured and talked for some time.

  I looked through the window at the blank expanse of stone and concrete rising to a sunny morning sky. New York was putting on its best face. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  My entire self had shrunk to a little point. Exhausted, wrung out, the point was vaguely aware of the past, intensely connected with the present, unwilling to consider the future. It was only loosely related to the former Prince Hal and all his desires.

  I was an animal, a cat, a bear, a rabbit. I did not want to be human.

  Breaker returned to the car and tapped the glass. The driver rolled my window down, and Breaker leaned over. “We’re clear, but our opposition within the Agency and the rest of the government could join the party at any minute, so we have to move fast. Offense has finished, security is in, and a technical team will be here soon to back you up. Ready?”

  I nodded, lying.

  Breaker opened the door. Ben got out on the other side and puffed his cheeks, sucking in some courage from the air. “I do not want to go back in there,” he said. “That means I have to.”

  “Right,” Breaker said. Not a smile between them. A rigor and honor thing I certainly did not feel.

  I was terrified, but I would do it for Rob.

  We walked through the steel door. Immediately inside, four men in white-plastic suits with clear flexible helmets helped us put on similar outfits and attached our tanks. We had three hours of air, assuming moderate exertion.

  I looked around the loading dock as the men adjusted my straps. Directly ahead, the big aquariums Ben had described had been shot up and drained, leaving the dock floor wet and smelling of saltwater. To the right, I counted twenty bodies arranged in rows under white sheets. A man in a transparent plastic outfit was dousing them with antiseptic from a pump cylinder, like a gardener spraying lilies.

  I was ready. One of the white-plastic suits gave me a gloved thumbs-up.

  “Can you hear me?” Ben asked. His voice was a little muffled, but carried clearly enough.

  Everyone I saw looked pasty and unhappy, and no wonder. We rely on our little bacterial allies. They do a lot of work for us. They are vigilant defenders as well as, at times, harsh judges. Now we were trying to get along without these support systems. We had turned our guts into war zones.

  Breaker took us up the steel steps to the platform. I looked through the shattered glass of the nearest aquarium. Slime and big black lumps rose from a thin slick of water.

  “What was this?” Breaker asked, too loud, like someone speaking while wearing headphones. He pointed at the slime.

  “Little Mothers of the World?” I guessed, and shrugged my shoulders.

  “I still don’t get the crap about ‘Little Mothers,’ “ Ben said.

  “Bacterial colonies from the sea—those black lumps could be stromatolites. Golokhov wanted to study how bacteria form communities. Maybe it was mystical, like keeping the bones of a saint. Maybe he thought we’re all just evolved super-colonies of bacteria, spaceships for bacteria, with no will of our own. That sort of crap.”

  A formal young woman with an experienced no-nonsense face and buzz-trimmed inch-long hair met with our group. She carried an assault rifle with a prominent clip. “Secret Service, Nancy Delbarco,” she said through her plastic hood. “Follow me.” Her eyes were focused and unemotional, but her lips, tight and grim, betrayed her. She was scared, too.

  “We’ve restored some power,” she told us, as we marched behind the shattered aquariums. “The elevators are still out. Each floor has its own power supply, but some cables were cut and generators sabotaged. Right here”—she pointed at the concrete floor—“we’re above three levels of basement, going down about fifty feet. We haven’t explored the lowest level, but it seems to be mostly storage and infrastructure—air-conditioning, steam plant, water, the pumps that maintained the aquariums. There are subway tunnels below that, so we’ve had trains halted until we certify the building is not rigged to blow.”

  “How many died?” I asked.

  “Enough,” Delbarco said in a tone that implied it was a rude question. “I don’t know how long we can stay. There could be an opposition team arriving any minute, and we certainly don’t want to get involved in another firefight.”

  “We’re still not in complete control either at the top or locally,” Breaker said.

  “Garvey?” Ben asked.

  “His bosses have influence,” Breaker conceded.

  Delbarco led us up a long flight of stairs. The lighting was dismal. The painted steel stair treads showed shiny wear patterns. Peering up past the center railing, I could see all the way to the top of the building—sixteen stories.

  “The first four floors are vats and steel culture tanks, like a brewery,” Delbarco said. “Most haven’t been used for a long time. It’s difficult to conceive why they would need so much tagging material, but we could be making a bad guess. The techs will get samples when they arrive.”

  “That was what my brother wanted,” I said absently.

  Three floors. It was tough getting enough air in the hood, but I was doing okay. Ben was working to conceal his condition, or lack of it.

  Delbarco pushed open the door on the fourth floor. We walked over a shiny, vitreous blue-gray floor between shadowed rows of steel vats, the largest twenty feet high and ten feet wide, surrounded by cooling coils and forests and arches of color-coded piping. At the opposite end, a glass-walled laboratory stood empty, its benches sparkling clean and cabinets bare. Two of the wide panes of glass had been shot out and lay in jagged shards all over the floor.

  A body lay slumped against the only intact pane: a slender young woman in her late teens, a small hole dimpling her forehead and a puddle of blood under her thighs. She had once had the intense, lean beauty of an Eastern Bloc gymnast. She wore denim overalls and a red T-shirt.

  Delbarco walked past the corpse. “We’ve got some children, live children, quite a few of them, on the eighth floor,” she said. “They don’t have weapons, none we can see at any rate, so we’re just . . . working around them for the moment.”

  I thought of Nicolae Ceausescu, former dictator of Romania, recruiting his core bodyguards from orphanages, raising kids from childhood to serve in a kind of Praetorian Guard. He had been deposed and executed in 1989. His kids had supported him fanatically to the very end. They had had to be put down like rabid dogs.

  “I’d like to see the children,” I said. “Are they under supervision?”

  “No. As I said, we’re leaving them alone for now. They could be booby-trapped or contaminated.” She was eager to change the subject. “We don’t think there’s been any real activity in most of the building for some time. Even most of the lighting fixtures have had their bulbs pulled out.”

  “I need to see the kids,” I insisted. “I want to know how they were being used.”

  Delbarco reluctantly agreed. I was the expert, and she had her orders, even though it could be her funeral as well. So I was actually in charge. I didn’t like it.

  We all followed Breaker to the next floor. In the stairwell, we walked around another body, a young man no more than twenty years old, sprawled faceup and studying the next flight of stairs with relaxed dismay. He had made random finger-twitch scrawls, then started to write two letters in a river of his own blood as it dripped from tread to tread. The letters were Cyrillic, K and AA. Perhaps he was writing his name, perhaps a farewell to friends.

  “Where are the defense troops?” Ben asked.

  “We pulled them out once the building was secure
. We’re shorthanded everywhere,” Breaker said.

  The eighth floor looked like a state hospital suddenly fallen on hard times. A deserted reception desk stood at the center of a semicircular room. Six hallways radiated outward like a sunburst in the surrounding square of the floor plan. At the end of one corridor, in the blinking glare of a single fluorescent light, I saw a gymnasium: pommel horse, stacked play mats, parallel bars, hanging rings.

  “We don’t want to be here too long,” Delbarco said.

  No sunshine. No windows. Never a chance to go outdoors.

  I turned left and walked down a hall, stopped, looked into the first open door. Lights flickered in broken ceiling fixtures. Scattered papers, a kicked-in television, blood tracked and smeared by boots. A Come to Middle Earth poster from the 1960s competed with kids’ drawings of dragons, a hook-nosed witch, airplanes. Below them, a white-enameled iron bed frame supported a bare mattress, the sheets torn off and coiled on the floor. In one corner, someone had left a small pile of yellow turds. Broken glass everywhere.

  From the end of the hall came singing, thin but lovely—a young boy or girl. It sounded like a Russian folk song. Closer, I heard crying. I walked past two closed doors, half-expecting a teenager with an Uzi to come leering out and spray us with bullets. Or for the ceiling to crack open and pour down gallons of tagging solution mixed with needles, piercing our suits. Anything was possible. I had been through too much to disbelieve.

  The door to my right opened on a room full of steel bathtubs—hydrotherapy, I guessed, but then I saw the tubs were crusted with a dry yellow paste. I was glad to be in the suit and unable to smell the outside air.

  This was what Tammy had described to Ben and Rob—a training area. A bathhouse of bacterial indoctrination. Mrs. Golokhova had had to make do, however; she wasn’t able to afford space on the world’s biggest cruise ship. Did she keep up any contact at all with her husband?

  I couldn’t picture them lingering over long phone calls like separated lovers.

  I slowed at the sound of footsteps. A black girl in a long white gown emerged from a door in the middle of the hall. She was accompanied by a toddler with a thin face and long, silky blond hair, clinging with white fists to her ragged nightgown. They stared at me with suspicious, puffy eyes.

  The older girl barked something in Russian. I looked at Ben, a few paces behind me. He shook his head.

  I waved my hands at the girl, no savvy, and stared at her bare forearms. Long pink scars reached from her wrists to at least her elbows, where they vanished beneath wide, flopping sleeves. In her long brown fingers she clutched a plastic ampoule with a dangling tube attached to an IV needle.

  Three more children emerged from other doors in the hall and walked forward, wary but curious.

  The black girl shook her head, then pointed her fingers into her mouth, eyes staring defiantly: Food, you son of a bitch, get it?

  A boy of eight or nine padded across the floor in rubber-soled slippers. Yellow strips like plasterboard patches crisscrossed his shaven crown. His eyes were angelically calm, and he grinned as his slippers alternately slapped and squeaked on the hard blue floor.

  Ben touched my elbow, giving me a start. “Let’s go,” he said. “Nothing we can do, and no sense taking risks. We don’t know what was going on here.”

  I could hazard a guess. The older children, Mrs. Golokhova’s assistants, the same ones who had come out to see Ben and Rob in the loading dock, must have tried to protect the younger. The first team in had killed everyone on the lower floors. Not that many, I guessed; a small operation.

  “Mrs. Golokhova was still doing research. She maintained her own runners and subjects,” I said. I shouted to Breaker and Delbarco, “Can you get some food for these kids?”

  The black girl glared at us critically from a distance of ten feet. She seemed reluctant to come closer, as reluctant as I was to have her so near. I studied her skin, finely wrinkled, her knowing, weary eyes, and was suddenly not at all certain of her age.

  She tried me again with another imperative string of Russian. I could only lift my shoulders in ignorance. Disgusted, she flung her ampoule, needle swinging. It bounced off my plastic-sleeved arm and rolled on the floor. I searched the arm frantically for tears as she laughed.

  “Let’s go,” Ben said, pulling me back.

  The children darted into their rooms. I heard giggles and small, frightened voices whispering, whimpering.

  We climbed past nine, ten, eleven, stopping briefly to examine each floor. More vats, steel-walled isolation cubicles, huge but stripped labs, their doors welded shut, their shadowy interiors visible only through dusty acrylic windows. Storerooms full of hundreds of filing cabinets toppled over and cleaned out, steel drums filled with old ashes, plastic barrels, empty chemical bottles and glassware stacked high in Dumpsters, martial rows of old black typewriters, an IBM 360 half-covered by a ripped and age-browned plastic tarp, broken crates.

  On twelve, a dark storage room had been piled high with empty plastic coffins. An obese male in a black windbreaker lay facedown in the middle of the nested coffins. He had been shot in the back.

  Ben walked around the darkening pond of blood—an awful lot of blood—and rolled the body over with one foot. It was wearing green loose-fit Dockers, and under the unzipped jacket, a blue golf shirt.

  “Norton Crenshaw,” Ben said. “Hello, Melon.”

  “Satisfied?” Delbarco asked.

  “Fuck, no,” Ben said. He made a quick reconnaissance of the rest of the room, pulled over a stack of coffins with hollow, reverberating booms, no joy. We walked quickly back to the stairs.

  “Learning anything?” I asked Ben.

  “Too damned much,” he said.

  Forty years ago, the Jenner Building had held one of the biggest CBW operations in the entire United States. Right in the middle of Manhattan.

  Creating Manhattan Candidates.

  “You’re going to have to rewrite all your books,” I told Ben as we climbed.

  “No joke,” he said. “This makes Enigma look like a wet firecracker.”

  The door to the fifteenth floor had been blasted wide open. Scorch marks and smoke decorated the walls around the door and the ceiling at the top of the stairwell. Beyond the blasted door stood another, smaller door, intact, made of blond fir or spruce and decorated with carved flowers and bas-relief saplings. Two spotlights guttered in the cove ceiling over the door. The carvings cast alternating, lopsided shadows.

  Ben pushed the wooden door. It creaked open, and we entered a room about forty feet square, filled with toppled chairs, rucked and twisted rugs, off-kilter paintings of landscapes—a beautiful lake (Baikal?), mountains, quaint log cabins in forests. Bookshelves, some upright and some pulled over, books piled between an intervening chair and the inlaid parquet floor. A long oak dining table was covered with thick, leather-bound photo albums, some lying open, others in stacks. One stack had toppled and upset a silver candelabra.

  “It’s an apartment,” Breaker said. “Someone lived here.”

  A gallery of life-size heroic painted portraits glowered down from the rear wall, draped in velvet curtains and hung with pulls of tasseled gold cord. It could have been the living room of a well-off Russian expatriate, a personal shrine to a glorious past.

  Ben flipped through one of the open albums. He spun it around and studied a few pages of mounted photos, then whistled in amazement. “Let’s take these,” he said. “All of them.”

  Breaker gave him a quizzical look. “I thought we were here for biological specimens.”

  “I had a maiden aunt who kept our family’s photographs,” Ben said. “She pasted them in albums and typed up labels with names and dates and places. Everyone sent her copies. She worked at it until she died. She was our archivist.”

  Breaker was still not convinced.

  “Just take them,” Ben insisted. “If we don’t, we may never understand what happened.”

  Breaker looked at me. “Take t
hem,” I said.

  Three technicians in isolation suits finally arrived, out of breath, lugging aluminum cases. Delbarco spoke with them in low tones in the living room while Ben, Breaker, and I explored further.

  Ben found a bathroom. He opened the heavy white-painted door, peered around it, then advanced to a claw-foot tub. The tub was surrounded by a daisy-print shower curtain. He gripped the curtain and gave me a sad, reluctant look through his plastic hood.

  “Time’s a-wasting,” I said.

  “Fuck that,” he said. “That’s what Melon said.”

  Ben pulled back the curtain with a shing of steel rings. A body lay in the white-enamel tub, curled in a frail, angular tangle of arms and legs. The wizened face appeared to float, like a lolling puppet’s, above one end of an ill-fitting, calf-length black dress. Wide milky eyes stared up at the tiled ceiling with a squirrel-monkey expression of disappointment and surprise.

  “Mrs. Golokhova, I presume,” Ben said. “Come pay your respects,” he insisted. Breaker and I stepped forward. “The wife of our secret master. I guess she didn’t want to be kicked out of her home.”

  She had apparently shot herself in the temple with a small, ivory-handled revolver, still clutched in one gnarled hand. The hand rested against the side of the tub, pistol hanging from stiff white fingers.

  She was supposed to live forever. Perhaps her husband had promised her that much as a reward for being a guinea pig, for years of madness.

  Ben backed away. “There’s nothing here for me,” he told Delbarco on the way out of the bathroom. “But let’s get those photos.”

  “I’d like tissue samples from her,” I told Delbarco. She passed the request to the technicians. They went to work quickly, pulling the body from the tub and laying it out on the tile floor.

  I left the bathroom before I could see more.

  Breaker took two albums. I grabbed three. Ben carried four. That was less than a third of them, but they were thick and heavy, and Delbarco warned us we didn’t want to be too burdened in case we had to move fast.

  “One more floor,” Delbarco said, eyelids heavy, as if she had already seen far too much. “Prepare yourselves, gentlemen. This one takes the cake.”