The tent was a flurry of activity. A long row of tables had been set up directly over the yellow lines of the highway that separated the two lanes of traffic. Atop the tables were diagnostic equipment and computer terminals. A dozen agents in biosuits moved about, busy with various tasks.
A stout one with thick-rimmed glasses beneath his biohelmet greeted Riggs as they entered.
“Where’s the body?” Riggs asked.
The agent led them through the back flap of the tent to where the ambulance had launched itself into the ravine. The broken guardrail was a twisted wreck of metal and mud. Several high-wattage lights were positioned around a small crane that had been secured to the cliff face, a single black rope hanging from its end.
“Please tell me this isn’t the only way down,” said Carter.
The agent looked apologetic. “Winds out of this ravine are too high for a helicopter to get you down there safely. And we couldn’t find an access road. For the time being, the rope is it.”
Frank slowly stepped to the edge and looked over the side. It was a long way to the bottom. There were two small teams of agents already down there examining the bodies. The ambulance lay upside down, so broken and crunched it only vaguely resembled a vehicle at all.
Frank bit his bottom lip. Any height over ten feet caused the hair on the back of his neck to stand up. He backed away from the ledge, feeling dizzy.
“You okay, Frank?” Carter said.
“Fine.”
Without a word Riggs grabbed a harness and began putting it on. He was rappelling down the line before Carter and Frank had their harnesses secured.
Frank was the last to go. He stood at the cliff’s precipice for several minutes, gathering his courage.
The agent with the glasses stood behind him, watching and waiting. “Do you need any help, sir?” he said finally.
When Frank didn’t answer, the agent poked him. “Sir? The line—do you need assistance down the line?”
Frank looked at him. “No,” he said with a grin. “I’m just not a fan of heights, is all.”
The agent nodded. “Nothing to be ashamed of, sir. I know the feeling. My wife is afraid of spiders. Screams like a little girl whenever she sees one.
Frank forced a smile. “Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.”
He stepped over the lip of the ledge and let gravity pull him downward.
At the bottom another agent took him to where Jonathan’s body had been laid. Riggs and another agent were squatting over the body when Frank arrived.
Frank had treated wounded soldiers before. In the Middle East, when the threat of biological weapons was no longer a concern, the military had put him in a triage hospital assisting surgeons. It had been squeamish work, young soldiers victimized by roadside bombs and mortar shells, and Frank had worked hard to erase the images from his memory.
All those images came back the moment Frank saw the kid in scrubs, lying there on the ravine floor in a mangled, bloody mess.
“This is nothing,” the agent beside him said. “You should see the other guy.” He pointed to a group of agents about twenty yards off. “Went through the windshield, then right onto the rocks. Ker-splat.”
Riggs shined his penlight on the body. “You said he had a prior wound?”
The agent knelt beside him. “Yes, sir. Here in the abdomen. These bandages were still attached to his waist and look about a day old, is my guess.”
Frank got down and took a closer look. “Looks like a surgical wound.”
The agent nodded. “No question. You can still see the sutures.” He inserted his fingers into Jonathan’s side and pulled back a flap of skin. The sutures were there all right, but most were broken and hung limply from the flesh.
Carter, looking sick, turned away and walked off to watch from a distance.
“Peeps, you getting all this?” said Riggs.
“Affirmative,” his voice said. “And I’ve lost my appetite.”
Riggs turned to Frank. “Why would someone need surgery here?”
Frank snapped his flashlight to the side of his helmet and pulled the wound apart to get a look inside. It didn’t take long to confirm his suspicion. “Kidney transplant,” he said.
“Transplant?” said Riggs. “I thought the kidneys were higher in the abdomen.”
“They are. Traditionally, we think of transplants involving the removal of one organ and replacing it with another. That’s not the case with kidneys. The old kidneys remain. The new kidney is simply placed below them, closer to the groin. Look, you can see the sutures from the urethra to the bladder.”
The agent took a closer look. “He’s right.”
Riggs looked also, then turned to the agent. “And you’re sure he was infected with the virus?”
“Not just infected, sir. The kid was swimming with it. Very high concentration. I’ve never seen a reading like that. The ambulance drivers didn’t have a chance.”
Riggs stood. “What do you think, Frank?”
Frank shrugged. “It’s possible he got the virus from the kidney. That happened a few years ago in Atlanta. A girl dies in an auto accident and since she was a donor, her kidneys, liver, and heart were transplanted into four people waiting for a match. A few days later one of the transplantees is dead and the other three are in critical condition. Turns out the girl was a carrier of West Nile virus but had not yet shown any of the symptoms. So her organs infected the organ recipients. Doctors were doing more harm than good.”
“So whoever gave him this kidney could be a carrier of V16?”
“Maybe. But if that’s true, I’d like to know how he survived this long. If the virus came from an infected donor, the kidney should have killed him almost instantly. What’s more likely is that the virus he’s carrying was engineered for him, since neither the kidney nor the virus seem to be the cause of death.”
Riggs turned to the agent. “And he had no identification?”
“No, sir.”
“What about his prints?”
“We’re scanning those now, sir. If he’s on any database, we’ll know about it shortly.”
“Good. In the meantime, I want a tissue sample from the kidney. Scan it and compare it to the other samples you’ve taken.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I want someone to contact every hospital in a fifty-mile radius to see if anyone is missing a transplant patient. If this kid was given a kidney in the last forty-eight hours, he should still be in the hospital. No one would have discharged him. So he’s missing from somewhere. I want to know where.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can check,” said Frank, “but I’ll be surprised if this surgery was performed at any hospital.”
“What makes you say so?” said Riggs.
“Look here at his arms. These injection wounds. See the sores here? The kid was an addict, heroin probably. And some of these sores don’t look very old. Few weeks, maybe.”
“What are you saying, a hospital wouldn’t treat a heroin addict?”
“Not for an organ transplant, it wouldn’t. You’ve got to be clean to qualify. The demand for organs is too high to give them to people who won’t take care of them properly. It’s why so many people die of cirrhosis; they can’t give up alcohol long enough to qualify for a new liver.”
Riggs squatted in the dirt and examined the boy’s arms.
“And look at his feet,” said Frank. “Multiple lacerations, mud, thorns. The kid was running from something and didn’t have time to grab his shoes. Who runs away from a hospital?”
Riggs looked at the agent. “Who saw the accident and called the ambulance?”
“County said a sheriff’s deputy called it in.”
“We got a name?” said Riggs.
The agent checked his notes. “Deputy Melvin Dixon.”
“I want a written report from that guy as soon as possible. What he saw. Where this kid came from. Every detail.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ant I want him brought in. He probably didn’t contract anything, or he’d be just as dead as these two, but I want to do a full scan nonetheless. Just to be sure.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wait a second,” said Frank. He was kneeling over the kid. “There’s something here on the back of his neck.”
He turned the head further to allow Riggs and the agent to see.
Riggs got down again and shined his flashlight. “Those are stitches,” he said.
The wound on the back of the boy’s neck was two inches long and ran down the center, beginning just below the hair line.
“What is that?” the agent said.
“It’s too clean a cut to be an injury,” said Frank. “It looks like another surgical wound.” He held out a hand. “Let me borrow your scissors.”
The agent reached into his medical bag and produced a pair of surgical scissors.
Frank delicately cut away each of the sutures. The wound parted a half inch, and all three men saw it at once. Deep within the flesh of the kid’s neck was a tiny blinking light.
18
BLOOD
Frank got out of the helicopter as soon as it landed at the helipad above the BHA’s underground facility. Orderlies were there waiting for him, and they helped Frank pull the three gurneys out of the helicopter. Strapped to each gurney was a body bag. As the blades of the helicopter began to slow, Frank and the orderlies wheeled the gurneys to the elevator and down into Level 4.
According to the federal database, the boy’s fingerprints matched those of Jonathan Fox, age fifteen. Jonathan had been arrested last year in Los Angeles for drug possession and had been ordered to serve community service. That service was never served, and the court had no address on record for the kid. Homeless, Frank figured.
Once inside Level 4, Frank asked the orderlies to take the ambulance driver and the EMT to the morgue. He wheeled Jonathan into a separate room, opened the bag, and examined the body.
With the right equipment at his disposal Frank was able to widen the wound on the back of Jonathan’s neck.
The blinking light came from a computer chip attached to the base of Jonathan’s brain stem. A dozen or so fiber-optic lines reached from the chip and disappeared into the neural tissue.
It took a little doing, but Frank was able to remove the chip without damaging it. He put it under a microscope and looked for manufacturing markings or anything that would help him determine the chip’s origins. He found nothing helpful.
The only explanation he could think of, and it made no sense to him, was that the Healers had put this into the boy. The glaringly obvious clue was the presence of the virus. But why the Healers would transplant an organ into Jonathan or insert a computer chip into the base of his brain, Frank could only guess.
He put the chip in a small glass containment canister, then called the agency’s mortician, who would conduct a more thorough examination of the body.
The next morning he placed the canister onto Peeps’s desk. “You ever seen a chip like this before?”
“Please don’t tell me that’s what you found inside that guy.”
Frank waited. Peeps sighed, took the canister, and put it under a magnifying glass attached to a swiveling arm on his desk.
“Hmm. I’ve never seen a design like this. Whatever it is, it looks like it holds a buttload of memory.”
“You mean it stores data?” said Frank. “I thought chips were only processors.”
“Shows what you know.” Peeps maneuvered the canister so that the chip caught the light differently. “Wait a second,” he said. “This could be a biomedical chip—you know, what you might find in a robotic prosthesis, triggered by enzymes or hormones or neural electrodes, stuff like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘triggered’?”
Peeps shrugged. “Well, a chip like this is normally dormant in the body. You could say it’s currently turned off. It only becomes activated when it comes in contact with, for lack of a better word, a specific internal juice. If it’s hit by a certain hormone, for example, it becomes operational.”
“And does what?”
“Well, that’s the sixty-five-thousand-dollar question. Chips do what they’re designed for. Some chips, for example, can notify diabetics that they’re running low on insulin. Could be anything.”
“Can you find out what’s on it? Can you access the data?”
Peeps shook his head. “Not without the trigger. I have to turn it on first. I can hook it up to my system, but without the trigger, it’ll do nothing.”
“Then we need to find the trigger.”
Peeps chuckled. “That would require that we take samples of this kid, his blood or his bile or whatever, and then drop each of those samples onto the chip in the hope that it would do something, spark something, initiate some process. And good luck finding someone willing to do that.”
Frank smiled and patted Peeps on the shoulder. “Thanks, Peeps. I knew I could count on you. If you need any help, let me know.” He walked away, leaving the canister in Peeps’s hand.
Frank returned to the locker room, prepared to enter Level 4, and found Director Irving there waiting for him.
“Frank, a moment of your time please.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I’d like you to go back up to the crash site this morning. Find the deputy who saw the accident. Get a full report from him. I’d like to know exactly where this Jonathan Fox came from. Maybe the deputy saw something that could lead us in the right direction.”
“That’s a good idea, sir, but might I suggest that another member of the team go in my place? I was going to examine the body to—”
“Someone else can do that,” Irving said impatiently. “That kid was infected, Frank, and you’re our specialist on this V16 business. I want you handling it.”
“All right. Who should I take with with me, sir?”
“Take with you?”
Frank wrinkled his brow, unsure. “Would you prefer I go alone?”
“What? Alone? No, no, of course not. Take . . . Carter. Take Agent Carter with you. But just the two of you. And leave immediately. Not a word of this to anyone. This whole kidney transplant business makes me nervous, Frank. I don’t want to increase the anxiety around here until we know what we’re up against.” He tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, suddenly distracted.
Frank waited a moment, expecting more instructions, as Irving stared absently at the floor. After a silence, Frank asked tentatively, “Will that be all, sir?”
Irving started, as if he had forgotten Frank was standing there. “All? Yes, yes, that will be all. Do that for me, Frank.” Then without another word he walked away.
Frank watched him go, noticing a slight tremble in Irving’s hands.
The Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, which had jurisdiction over Agoura Hills and was located north of Los Angeles in Calabasas, was little more than a few desks, a watercooler, and stacks of unfiled paperwork. Frank and Carter found Deputy Melvin Dixon at a table finishing off a jelly doughnut.
Carter flashed his badge. “Deputy Dixon, my name is Special Agent Carter of the Biohazard Agency. This is Agent Hartman. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”
Dixon wiped his hands with a napkin. “About what?”
“The accident you witnessed last night.”
Dixon moved his tongue inside his mouth, dislodging a doughnut crumb wedged in his teeth, and shook his head mournfully. “Most gruesome, awful thing I ever saw in my life. Kid came out of nowhere. The truck didn’t have time to swerve or anything. And the sound when the truck hit him. You know that sound, like when you got a bunch of sticks in your hands and you break them over your knee? Terrible. Just terrible.”
“Why was the victim in the street?” Carter asked.
Dixon leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. “Well, I can’t be sure, because this kid, uh, the victim as you call him, he said something to me I couldn�
�t hear. I think he wanted me to help him. I think a man might’ve been chasing him.”
Carter perked up. “A man?”
“Big fellah. About so tall.” He held his hand above his head to suggest the man’s height. “Fast too.”
Carter and Frank exchanged glances.
“You say this man was chasing the victim?” said Carter.
“Maybe. Hard to say. They could’ve been together. I can’t be sure.”
“What happened to him?” said Carter. “The tall one, what did he do after the accident?”
“Ran off into the woods. Fast as anything.”
“Did you report any of this to the BHA?” asked Frank.
Dixon wiped his face again with the napkin. “Not yet. After the accident my shift ended. And a good thing, too. It spooked me bad, as you can guess. But I’ll write up a report for you, if you like.”
“Tell us more about the tall man,” said Carter. “Did you follow this guy into the woods?”
Dixon blushed. “Well, I had to stay with the crash victim. The ambulance was on its way and all. And the kid was there in the street. I had to block traffic. By the time the ambulance came and went, I figured the tall man would be long gone.”
“Can you show us where this happened?” said Carter.
Dixon grabbed his wide-brimmed hat, and they followed his police cruiser to where the truck had hit Jonathan. Dixon got out, recounted the event, and showed Frank and Carter the tire marks.
“He came up right here,” he said, pointing at the spot on the embankment where Jonathan had surfaced. “He looked like a ghost, all cut up and white as death. And the tall man,” he pointed across the clearing, “he ran off through the trees there.”
“And you found the EMT also?” said Carter.
Dixon nodded. “When the ambulance didn’t show up at the hospital, County had me head up that way to see what happened. I found the EMT on the side of the road and then I found where the ambulance drove off the cliff.” He shook his head. “I swear I’ve never had a night like that, more than I ever wanted to see.”
“And you never touched any of the victims?” said Frank.
Invasive Procedures Page 17
