“Guess it has to be you,” he said.
“You still with us, Thibodeau?” Ricci asked over the comlink.
“Check,” he replied from the Two Shoulders camp.
“How about you, Pokey? Everything under control?”
“Yup.” Oskaboose’s voice now, from the gatehouse. “It’s a big mess, though.”
“Next time, I’ll try to be neater,” Ricci said. “Those two guards should be out for a while. Either one starts to squeal, hit him with some more DMSO. He’ll conk.”
“Got it.”
“I don’t want you or Harpswell taking your weapons off that third crack lookout. If anybody from the facility radios or approaches the booth, he’s your receptionist. Make sure he answers with a smile. And that he doesn’t forget what’ll happen to him if he says the wrong thing.”
“Got you again.”
Ricci paused a moment to order his thoughts. Then: “Doc?”
“I’m here.” This was the voice of Eric Oh, at the San Jose headquarters with Nimec and Megan the Merciless. “They just patched me into the A/V a minute or two ago.”
“Figured you could live without seeing the preliminaries,” Ricci said. “The signal clear at your end?”
“It’s a little scratchy, but they’re working to clean it up,” Eric said. “Where are you in the building right now? It looks like a kitchen.”
Ricci looked around, his helmet’s monocular NVD sight down over his right eye. Minus Oskaboose and Harpswell, his team had made their way through the opened freight entrance and then down a couple of dim and empty branching corridors, seeking the path of least resistance into the main section of the building. The first unlocked door had led them here. And a kitchen it was. A big one, too. Obviously, it produced food for the resident staff. There were heavy steel commercial appliances, walk-in refrigerators, triple-basin sinks, overhead grid hooks hung with cookware. Shelves stocked with seasonings, coffee, and other supplies.
For some incomprehensible reason, Ricci suddenly recalled his father’s preferred version of grace at the dinner table: Good friends, good food, good God, let’s eat. It had been years since that little snippet of his past had crested from the depths of memory.
“Yeah, Doc,” he said. “Hang tight, we’re moving.”
Ricci started toward a tall swing door at the far end of the room, leading his men down the aisle between a long cutting counter and a solid row of ovens, grills, and ranges.
A hurried glimpse beyond the door’s eye-level glass pane revealed the darkened commissary on the opposite side: tables and chairs; vending machines; convenience islands for napkins, condiments, and eating utensils.
Mundane. Commonplace. Like a high school cafeteria.
Ricci pushed through the door, his men at his heels, then saw the general employee entrance to the commissary to his left—double—swing doors this time—and hooked toward it.
He paused again at the doors, eased one of them open a crack with his gloved fingertips, and slowly leaned his head through the opening.
A hallway lined with doors stretched to either side. Name plaques on the doors, these were offices. And down at one end, he spotted something that simultaneously quickened his pulse and made his neck hairs bristle.
There were two signs on the wall, one above the other. The bottom sign was a simple arrow pointing to a cross corridor. The top sign displayed the biohazard symbol.
Ricci rapidly led his team along the darkened corridor and turned in the direction of the arrow marker, aware of the dull, leached-away sound of their footsteps between the thick concrete walls.
At the juncture with the connecting hall was another set of swing doors. Recessed ceiling fluorescents glowed in the passage beyond their windows.
Ricci ordered his men to fan out against the walls, then went to the double doors and carefully looked past the glass. The hall beyond seemed empty. He gently shouldered through the partition into the milky wash of light.
The doors lining the sides of this passage were no longer of the ordinary office building variety. These were metal-clad, bullet-resistant installations, most with swipe readers and entry-code keypads.
Instructing the others to follow close behind him, Ricci moved forward into the corridor.
“You have any pointers, Doc, let’s hear them,” he said into his helmet mike.
“My guess is you’re heading in the right direction. In general, bioengineering firms are laid out like any commercial or industrial facility. According to the stages of production, from start to finish—”
“You don’t warehouse the showroom-ready car with the parts that go into it.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, what else can you tell me?”
“The absolute best thing for us would be to find actual, preformulated inhibitors for the virus, chemical blockers that would prevent its binding proteins from attaching to Gordian’s cellular receptors. Failing that, we’d need to access Earthglow’s computerized gene banks to get the data on how the bug synthesizes its isoforms—”
A twinge of impatience. “Closer to English, Doc.”
“The proteins or peptides generated by alternative RNA splicing,” Eric said. “If we get those coded templates, we can use the information to derive our own inhibitors and stop the virus’s progress. But that could take a while, and Gordian’s condition doesn’t give us much—Wait, slow down, I want a look at that sign to your right.”
Ricci turned so his helmet camera was facing it.
The sign read:
FLOW CYTROMETRY
“Okay, thanks, that’s not what we need,” Eric said. “Back to what I started to explain, the inhibitors would be an end-stage product. Microencapsulated like the triggers that awakened the bug. And probably kept in the same area. Storage wouldn’t be complicated. The capsules are designed to have a long shelf life in a dry, clean, room-temperature environment.”
Ricci hastened down the passage. “What am I keeping my eyes out for?”
“Signs with terms like coacervation or fluid-bed coating or hot melt systems. The microencapsulation units themselves consist of several large-batch tanks or chambers—usually acrylic, stainless steel, or some combination of the two—joined by pumping systems: ducts, blowers, et cetera. There would have to be a compressed air source. Computer panel controls. The materials used would be—”
Oh suddenly broke off his sentence. From his monitor thousands of miles away, he could see what Ricci had just spotted ahead of him at an intersection in the hall. It had pushed his heart up into his throat.
Ricci knew at a glance that the guards who’d appeared in the passage had better stuff than the perimeter security crew.
They had turned the corner in his direction just as he’d approached it and paused to motion Rosander over with the telescopic probe. Three men in light gray uniforms with submachine guns over their shoulders and the unmistakable look of quality troops.
Before either group could react, they found themselves facing each other across a straight length of hall, separated by four or five yards with no available cover ... and no choice except to engage.
Swiftly rasing his weapon, its MEMS touch control on its lethal setting, Ricci had the briefest instant to once again recall the Cape Green maneuvers with that strange sensation of events doubling back on themselves.
The thought had not quite fled his mind as he opened fire, ordering his men to spread out and do the same.
The guard he’d targeted was only a little slower to trigger his own gun. He collapsed to the floor, his uniform blouse chewed and bloody, his rifle dropping from his hand.
Ricci saw a second guard train his subgun on one of the men behind him, instantly swung his around, and triggered another burst, a five-shot salvo. But this time, the guard managed to squeeze out a volley before falling onto his back, and he kept shooting even afterward, scattering a gale of ammunition across the hall. Ricci heard a grunt of pain from over his shoulder, didn’t turn. Couldn’t. He
wanted that son of a bitch on the floor finished.
He angled the VVRS down and fired again, and so did another member of the insertion team. Red exploded from the guard’s belly, he rolled over and there was red splashed on his back from the exit wounds, and then he flopped a little and lay still.
More gunfire from Ricci’s left, more from his rear, and he turned to see the third guard shiver in place a moment and then spill loosely off his feet.
Okay, he thought. Okay, that’s all of them.
He spun around to see who’d been hit. Grillo. On his back, blood streaming from his throat. Simmons and Beatty were kneeling over him, getting off the helmet, opening the collar of his jacket, but he wasn’t moving, and his open eyes had the look Ricci knew came with the touch of death.
Ricci rushed over to his body, crouched, touched the pulse point on his neck, Grillo’s blood oozing over his gloves.
He tilted his face up to his men, tried not to let the clenching he felt inside show.
“Nothing we can do for him,” he said. “And we have to get out of this damned hallway while we can.”
The lightest of sleepers, Kuhl answered the telephone in time to clip its first ring. “What is it?” he said.
He listened to the report from his security officer, then flung off his blanket.
“Where in the building?” he said.
He listened again.
“Send reinforcements to the area,” he said. He decided that he had best notify DeVane. “I’m coming immediately.”
“Doc, I’ve got to hear from you!” Ricci snapped over the comlink. His team was speeding along the corridor, away from the section where the firefight had broken out.
Silence.
“Come on, Doc, I mean now—”
“Tom, listen, it’s me.”
“Pete, where the hell is he? We’re running blind here.”
“I know. Eric saw the whole thing. The shooting. What happened to Grillo. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“Then pull him together—”
“Tom, for God’s sake, we know your situation.” It was Megan, her voice tense. “Give him half a second—”
“I’m all right,” Eric’s voice broke in. “Sorry. I ... I just ...”
“Later,” Ricci said. “We’re coming up to another cross hall. A bunch of signs. Can you read them?”
“No, you’re moving too fast, the picture’s blurry ... jolting...”
“I’m going to stop and let you take a look. But we don’t have long. I don’t know who might’ve heard those guns.”
“Understood.”
Ricci signaled a halt, then craned his head toward the signs, turning it to allow the helmet’s digicam to pan across his visual path.
“You see them okay?” he said.
“Yes ... Wait. The sign on your left. No, the next one over ... okay, right there.”
Ricci’s eyes held on the sign. It said:
AQUEOUS PHASE SEPARATION
“Doc?” Ricci urged.
“That’s it. A synonym for the gelatin microencapsulation process,” Eric said. “The academic term.”
Ricci swung his gaze to the left. A steel door barred the way about three feet down the corridor junction. This had a biometric hand scanner rather than the swipe card reader. The level of security was escalating, itself a strong indication he was getting hot. And while he’d expected to encounter biometrics and come prepared with ways to fool them, the deceptions took time, and speed now took precedence over delicacy.
He turned to his men. “They know we’re here, no point tiptoeing,” he said. “We blow our way in.”
Johan Stuzinski was a specialist in the field of bioinformatics—the use of statistical and computational analytic techniques to predict the function of encoded proteins within genetic material, based solely on DNA sequence data. The applications of this discipline in terms of human genome research included the identification of proteins within chromosomes that caused inherited diseases and inherited predispositions toward diseases that might be triggered by environmental, dietary, and other external factors.
The fruits of this research promise to revolutionize modern medicine by helping scientists design drugs and therapies that target these culprit proteins, attacking or even eliminating the causes of health disorders at the cellular—in truth, the molecular—roots. If cures or vastly superior treatments for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, the muscular dystrophies, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and countless other maladies that have plagued mankind throughout history are found in the coming decades, it will be through application of genomic discoveries.
The very best in his field, Johan Stuzinski could have lent his expertise to any of hundreds of medical research establishments and pharmaceutical firms performing meaningful work toward improving the human condition in the twenty-first century and beyond. In January 2000, Stuzinski was offered a management position with a generous salary and benefit package by Sobel Genetics, a leader in the search for genome-based therapies. Though he came close to taking the job, Stuzinski had simultaneously received another proposal from Earthglow, a Canadian firm whose goals were considerably more obscure, even a bit irregular, as he chose to think of them. But its hiring executive had promised him various under-the-table, and thus nontaxable, financial perquisites that were communicated with subtle inferences. A nod and a wink, so to speak.
After some consideration, he had called Sobel to decline their proposition, packed his bags for Ontario, and gladly put on his moral blinders. He kept his eyes on his narrow portion of the work being conducted at the facility, rarely allowed himself to consider its eventual application, and very definitely never questioned the presence of the rather menacing armed guards who patrolled certain parts of the facility.
In that way, Stuzinski was exactly like hundreds of other top-caliber professionals who had come to lend their exceptional skills to Earthglow’s operations. He was like them in another way, as well: When the sounds of racing footsteps, dull claps that may have been gunfire, and something that could perhaps have been a small explosion distantly reached his apartment in the complex’s living quarters in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, rousing him from sleep, he got out of bed only to make sure his door was locked and then somewhat nervously stayed put.
Until and unless it became a direct threat to him, Johan Stuzinski’s attitude was that whatever might be happening outside was none of his personal business.
“You six stay here and cover the entry.” Ricci motioned to Barnes, Seybold, Beatty, Carlysle, Perry, and Newell. “Watch yourselves. That boom must’ve set off alarms everywhere. We don’t know what kind of manpower’s headed this way.”
The men nodded in unison. They were standing near the blown, broken remains of the security door in the smoke and haze left by the detonation of their breaching charges.
Ricci looked at their faces a moment, then turned to the other four members of his team. “Okay, here we go,” he said and led them through the ruptured entrance.
In Earthglow’s main security station, Kuhl studied the flashing light on his electronic display’s building schematic. The blast’s location supported what he had already construed about the goal of the intruders. And the connection between their goal and identity was like a match brightly struck in his mind.
His eyes went from the screen to his chief lieutenant. “Keep abreast of developments at the penetration site,” Kuhl said, thinking of the alternate path he could take to investigate the target area. “I will be in contact.”
He did not await the lieutenant’s nod of acknowledgment before leaving the room.
Looking up the corridor, Seybold realized he’d not only cut the opposition’s numeric advantage but dramatically shifted it to his own band.
It was a thing that gave him some relief, a thing he’d trained for, prepared for. But he was still human, and the violations combat weapons inflicted on human flesh sickened him.
Five or six of the guards were down in gr
otesque positions, sheeted in blood, the floor around them slick with blood. Some were screaming in pain. Another guard was pinned to the wall like an insect caught on a fly strip, drenched with superadhesive, his limbs tangled by the impact that hurled him against it, strips of skin flapping off his cheek where he’d torn himself from the concrete in a blind panic. Yet another guard stared dazedly on his knees at a baseball-sized hole in his abdomen.
Seybold had a bare moment to register the damage. The rest of the guards were advancing past the sprawl of bodies, their weapons stuttering, and it was his job to stop them.
He took a deep breath of air, slung the Benelli over his back, then gripped his baby VVRS in his hands and fired a tight burst. To his left and right, hunkered close to the walls on either side of the exploded steel door, his companions were also firing their weapons.
More guards went down, and then another came running forward in a kind of wrathful, aggressive hurtle, yelling at the top of his lungs, his gun blazing away. A couple of feet to Seybold’s left, Beatty grunted and was slammed back against the wall, smearing it with blood as he sank to the floor. Then bullets rippled from one of the other men’s VVRS rifles, and the charging guard spun around in a circle and fell dead, his weapon slipping from his fingers, clutching his chest with both hands.
That left two of them. One dove onto his belly to present a low target, skidding over the blood of his companions, sustained fire pouring from his weapon. Carlysle and Newell trained their guns on him and fired in concert, a brief chop. These were men whose partnership went back, and it showed in their expert performance. The guard jerked once on the floor and then ceased to move.
A single guard remained now, and he was unwilling to commit suicide. He turned down the hall, running, his uniform splashed with blood that may or may not have been his own.
Bio-Strike (2000) Page 35
