“Yes, Ms. Decker, you’ve paid for that privilege. And I’ll remind you that you signed a confidentiality statement to treat the contents of Sector C as private information, not to be shared with any sources.”
“If the CDC wants to know, I’ll tell them. Just as I intend to tell my ASTEAM colleagues. If you don’t like it, sue me. But I’ll remind you that my husband is a corporate lawyer—and quite a successful one, I might add. Besides, if you’re planning on getting rid of all your stock now anyway, what difference does it make?”
“As your husband would understand, Ms. Decker, companies work to multiyear plans. Just because a patent may not pay off for us this year doesn’t mean it won’t be successful two or three years down the road. Perhaps it’s best I cancel your hunt tomorrow as you don’t seem inclined to shoot anyway.”
Sylvia was stunned into silence.
The more Walt hid behind corporate strategy and confidentiality, the more Mike was determined to find out what he was hiding. The tiger had been their foot in the door—evidence of an early connection between the outbreak and Triple E’s animals. But he still had one ace up his sleeve. Something that had surfaced nearly two months ago when his shadows had helped him trace some random blips on the medical radar.
“While Donna and I came here specifically to identify Patient Zero,” Mike said, “I’ll also point out that I ran across some interesting statistics awhile back regarding Triple E workers. Seems a handful of your staff were some of the first admitted to hospitals with VTSE symptoms. We even found a death certificate for one worker a year-and-a-half ago that points to symptoms suspiciously similar to those of VTSE as the cause of death. That’s some pretty damn strong evidence that, one, Triple E is at Ground Zero, and two, the disease may be spread by more than simply eating infected meat or drinking contaminated milk.
“That means anyone working or—” he threw Sylvia an apologetic glance—“visiting here is likely exposed. If your clients are as elite as you say, the first one in your current batch who gets sick and finds out you knew about the disease before you sent out invitations to a hunt, is gonna sue your ass off. If more than one gets sick, they’ll bleed your company dry and it won’t matter how many patents you’ve got stacked up.”
Sylvia found her voice at that. “I’ve been exposed? I mean, really exposed? Not just ‘it’s possible that I ate something contaminated’ exposed? I didn’t think just being here meant I could get this VTSE thing. Oh my God. Tell me you’re kidding. Or at least exaggerating.”
“We don’t know exactly how it’s transmitted.” Donna’s jaw twitched, but her tone conveyed the proper mix of candidness tempered with compassion learned from her years of delivering hard news to owners of dying animals. “All we can say is the closer to the animals and their living quarters you are the higher the danger.”
Sylvia drew in on herself, trying to not be a part of the barn where particles of hay hung in the sunlight slotting through the high windows. Almost unconsciously, she shallowed her breathing, trying not to inhale any microscopic protein bits that could be swirling around with the hay dust kicked up by the shuffling of elephant feet or the snort of rhino snouts.
“You should never have come here,” Walt told her. “Those invitations went out only to clients who have hunted here before. To people most likely already exposed or sick or carriers.”
Retribution, Sylvia thought. The world getting back at her for trying to show up her about-to-be-ex husband. All she wanted was to make him pay for what he’d put her through. To show him that there were consequences even for successful, big-time lawyers when they treated others like dirt. That there was justice in life when you took the responsibility to see it carried through. But no. This was life’s lesson instead. That sinners with enough money could continue to sin freely and that their victims would always be victims, crushed beneath the indifferent world’s calloused heel.
Mike ignored Sylvia, leaving her to face her inner demons alone. There were more important matters to deal with now. Like Donna, he’d caught the admission Walt had intentionally thrown, not doubting for a second the man knew precisely what he was doing. Now Mike had to figure out to what purpose he was doing it. “Then you did know.”
“Our geneticists have been working on a cure for weeks.”
“So our tiger is Patient Zero,” Donna said.
Walt laughed. “The tiger? You’ve been living out in the middle of nowhere for way too long if you believe the rest of the world operates on such simple terms. Simple clues lead to simple results, right? You think we’re keeping our research secret just so we can make a fast buck before we’re found out. Sure we want to make a living, be guaranteed a future before this hand plays itself out. But the truth isn’t clean, it isn’t simple and it isn’t anywhere near what you think it to be.”
“Enlighten us.”
A slow, almost sad, smile slid across Walt’s face as he fingered the security alarm on the phone in his pocket. One tap for yellow: Be prepared, find and shadow the CXOs, lock down traffic in and out. He hoped these three would stay calm and accept the consequences of sticking their rube noses into matters far beyond their limited comprehension. He didn’t want to escalate to red.
“Follow me—to Sector C.”
Chapter Forty-One
WALT SLID BEHIND THE WHEEL OF one of the runabouts Mike had seen scattered about the property. The vehicle was the perfect size for light off-road duty—a small four-stroke engine, four seats and an open cargo bay in the back for feed and supplies. They drove around the southern perimeter for quite some way before they pulled up to a massive gate chained and padlocked. A small space in the posts had been cut out to allow people on this side of the gate to see through to that side of the gate to make sure animals weren’t grazing or otherwise congregating in the immediate area before the gate was opened. Finger notches had been fashioned into the cutout chunk of post so the chunk could be easily removed and replaced, making it difficult for any unauthorized person who happened on the gate to find the viewing window. Triple E took its privacy very seriously.
Walt peered through the hole, punched the code on the digital padlock and cracked the gate. “There’s a watchtower to the left,” he told his guests. “Get inside quickly.”
Mike, Donna and Sylvia sidled past Walt into a narrow chute sided by a heavy rail fence that safely funneled them toward the watchtower. Using the fence itself for the back wall, the watchtower was built from the same sturdy posts. With an 8x10 footprint, the structure boasted two stories, though the upper loft as seen from below was little more than an observation platform with a few cushions, a low-hanging roof and an iron grill for a window. For some reason, it reminded Mike of a shark cage. The lower story had a crude toilet, camp stove, propane tank, cupboard and a couple of folding chairs. By the door stood a large tranq rifle with a boxful of darts and several bottles of tranquilizer beside it.
Donna picked up one of the bottles and read the label. “Ketamine. That’s powerful stuff. I didn’t know they made it in this concentration.”
Walt grinned. “It’s a custom blend. We pay extra so we can get enough juice in a single dart to have an effect.”
“An effect on what?” Mike asked.
Walt opened the cupboard, taking out a pair of binoculars and a case that looked like a small radio. “Cover your ears,” he advised before touching a button on the case that generated a very loud, eerie whistle that carried a half a mile or more. Then Walt climbed a few rungs of the ladder to the loft till he could see clearly out the barred window and peered through the binoculars. It was only a matter of moments before he smiled.
At first Donna thought her muscle tremors had started to affect her feet. It took a moment for her to realize that the trembling came from underfoot, that the ground itself was quivering. She’d been around enough cows to know what that meant, and in a moment a muffled rolling thunder confirmed a herd of some sort was headed their way. A big herd by the sound of it.
Wa
lt motioned his guests up the ladder. The loft offered precious little space, but Donna, Mike and Sylvia quickly scrambled up and sorted themselves till they were sitting cross-legged on the platform, their faces nearly pressed against the bars.
“My God,” Donna breathed.
Sylvia grabbed the vet’s arm. “What are they?”
Nine animals, not the large herd Donna had envisioned, lumbered up to the watchtower and milled about, obviously looking for the meal that usually accompanied the whistle.
One of the six taller beasts, the hump above its hairy shoulder nearly reaching the height of their platform, lifted an inquisitive trunk toward their window. Too thick to worm its way through the bars, the prehensile tip felt its way over the grate, snuffling at the strangers inside. A dense topknot of fat and tousled hair dipped in and out of view as it swung its head and worked its trunk about. The tip of an ivory tusk clattered along the bars when it turned away, losing interest when no treats were offered.
The little group leaned forward against the bars, watching as the odd elephant touched its trunk to the fringe of chestnut hair on the back of one of its companions and they went off together to explore for stray bits of fruits or vegetables the keepers might have left.
The other four elephants—Mike refused to identify them as anything else despite the mounting evidence to the contrary—bunched themselves close to the watchtower door. After the first shock at seeing them, Mike took a moment to really study them. Of the four, not one of them seemed particularly healthy. A thin-haired specimen with its eyes nearly closed rocked front to back, butting its head repeatedly into the chain link fence. A second elephant paced in a mindless circle, its halting gait threatening to pitch it to its knees with every lap. Another’s small ears flapped and twitched while its trunk darted about like a writhing snake. The fourth, the shortest, couldn’t seem to keep its balance, stumbling about while apparently trying to simply stand still. Beneath stretched skin and ragged patches of hair, the long curves of their ribs were clearly visible.
Staying a little apart—either not as curious or not inclined to be as social—three smaller beasts pawed the ground expectantly. Smaller, Mike thought, only in comparison to the others since the smallest of the three was easily larger than any of the bulls he’d seen in the past few days. The stocky bodies and double horns—a long and graceful one at the tip of the snout and a stubbier one nearer the eyes—easily identified them as rhinos. But the short dark fur with a heavier mane matting the neck and shoulders of the larger of the trio hinted at the impossible.
On closer observation, it was clear the rhinos were in no better shape than the elephants. One of them stood with feet splayed apart, its head low to the ground, moaning softly to itself. Another simply collapsed to its knees while they watched, its entire body trembling beneath its gray-brown coat.
Sick or not the beasts, to Donna’s eyes, were an absolute miracle. She’d seen paintings and artists’ renderings of the scene below. Woolly rhinos grazing with mammoths. But it couldn’t really be. Could it? Hybrids, maybe. Or gene manipulation. Designer animals like zebra-striped kangaroos and bald yaks—such were becoming popular at fairs, though few of them that had been extensively spliced together seemed to survive into adulthood. But to engineer for the height and sheer mass of these animals, let alone the fur and the sweeping tusks and horns would surely take more than a handful of years tickling genes. What was it Sherlock Holmes had posited? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
“Now do you understand what we’re about?” Walt asked. Standing on the first floor he wasn’t looking out at the animals, he was looking up at his guests, watching their faces, observing their reactions.
“They’re not really…” Donna’s voice trailed off, the idea too insane to even voice.
“Animals from the Ice Age? Extinct? We’ve resurrected them through cloning. The animals you see below are carbon copies of beasts that walked the earth more than 10,000 years ago. The mammoth’s genome was sequenced nearly 20 years ago. The woolly rhino’s a dozen years back. Other research teams are still trying to accomplish what Triple E did a decade ago: create a successful zygote from preserved tissue taken from specimens dredged up from the frozen tundra. We don’t delude ourselves; our work will be replicated soon enough if other teams don’t already have viable embryos incubating or growing in surrogates. What keeps us a step ahead is that we’ve already harvested eggs and sperm from those adolescents you see down there. We’ve mated them in vitro and already have a second generation of megabeasts in the virtual womb. A true, genetically diverse population that we now hold the patent to.”
“You can patent them?” Mike asked in disbelief.
“In the U.S., yes. These animals wouldn’t exist without mechanical intervention, which makes them products of human engineering, not nature. I’m sure the patent will be challenged as soon as other teams run up against it, but for now exclusive rights to any megabeast born using our process belongs to Triple E. That’s what we’re protecting.”
“Protecting?” Sylvia found her voice at last. “But you’ll be killing them.” She stabbed a finger toward the animals below.
“The two actions are mutually exclusive,” Walt explained. He had rehearsed this speech many times over in anticipation of the questions the press was likely to challenge him with when Triple E went public, and his words were patient and measured. “Those specimens have fulfilled their biological directive to reproduce—in spades, I might add. With our help, the number of offspring they’ll produce through our process will far exceed the number they could naturally hope to produce on their own. Biologically speaking, there is nothing more those animals have to offer. Granted, we would have liked them to mature a bit more, especially grow out their tusks and horns, before offering them to our hunters. But under the circumstances, we’ve had to rush them into their secondary market.”
“That’s just a pretty euphemism for the hunts, isn’t it?” Sylvia’s voice rose in indignation. “What you’re talking about is immoral exploitation. Killing live animals for no other reason than that you can.”
“How is what we’re doing anything more wrong, Ms. Decker, than what is happening in the beef industry? But putting that argument aside, you do understand that the research, the facilities, even the costs of keeping the numbers of animals that we do have to be funded somehow. If you can come up with a better compromise to bring extinct animals back into our lives, I’m open to hear it.”
“You assume there’s a need to bring them back,” Donna broke in. “I don’t expect you actually envision releasing vast herds of mammoths onto the plains to compete with commercial ranchers. Hell, the government rounds up surplus mustangs and wild burros every year because there aren’t enough natural resources to sustain them. Even the bison haven’t made a comeback. As Sylvia pointed out, raising them simply to have enough to kill is exploitation, not philanthropic efforts to rewild a species where there’s hope for it to survive.”
“More to the point,” Mike said, “what happens now? Those animals out there are obviously diseased. I take it you’ll keep your embryos frozen, or whatever you do with them, until this current epidemic is over?”
“No.” Donna’s eyes widened in comprehension. “The epidemic started with these animals, didn’t it? That’s what you meant when you said it wasn’t the tiger, that the truth wasn’t simple. They brought the disease with them. The deviant prions were in the genetic makeup of one of the original animals, weren’t they, and when you cloned it, you cloned the disease right along with it.”
“You mean it’s a disease from the Ice Age?” Sylvia was doing her best to keep up. “And it’s killing them all over again?”
“That’s as succinct an explanation as I’ve heard, Ms. Decker,” Walt said. “Only our geneticists think it isn’t just a disease from the Ice Age but the disease that wiped out all of the megabeasts.”
Donna caught Mike’s hand and
felt her frightened grip returned as they absorbed the implications of Walt’s statement.
”Why did the mammoths and saber-tooths and dire wolves die out?” Walt asked. “Overhunting and global warming have long been the popular theories. But global warming is only part of the answer. The inciting incident, if you will. It seems prions stay stable more often in colder climates. As the climate warmed, it triggered mutations in some prions and then encouraged those mutations to spread. The disease jumped species, and soon you got a true pandemic creeping across the continents.”
“Just like today.” Mike said.
“No. Whole herds numbering in the tens of millions were killed off 10,000 years ago in the northern ranges, but it took hundreds of years to do it. Smaller varieties of those species in the southern climes never came in contact with their doomed cousins. They flourished and eventually overran the north as those regions warmed and the prionic diseases ran their course.
“But today… today we have mass transit and instant delivery. If it continues, it won’t take even a single generation for mass extinction, and the devastation will be worldwide. Maybe a few pockets of people and animals in the deserts and rainforests will survive to start over again. Maybe. And maybe it won’t take another 10,000 years to get civilization back to the point we’re at now.”
“And you did this.” Donna was still trying to process the enormity of it.
“And we’re fixing it.”
“Thousands dead. Maybe millions before it’s all over, even if a cure were released today. More species wiped out. You can’t ‘fix’ anything.”
“You blame us for all this? We just happened to be the first to successfully do what dozens of universities and research labs the world over have been trying to do for years. If cloning a mammoth or woolly rhino or short-faced bear was inevitable, so was cloning one with this genetic disorder. We just happened to have the bad luck to be the first to do both.”
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