“You were saying?” Nathan had turned back to his desk and waited for the younger man to finish his thought.
“Dr. Martin, I don’t think this is an arbovirus,” Adam said softly, staring at an electron micrograph. “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. Definitely not an arbovirus. It’s too big and much too complex.” Sabritas awkwardly bent over Martin’s desk sharing the photograph.
“What? Just give me the file. I can’t see it from way over there.” Nathan was more annoyed than concerned. A six-sided wheel with what looked like arms at each corner stared back at him. It took about five seconds for his brain to process what he was seeing, but it took his stomach less than one. A wave of nausea hit him, and he dropped the file. It hit his knee and fell to the floor.
“Have you seen anything like . . . Are you okay?”
Martin was light-headed, and his mind was racing. “This has got to be a mistake,” he mumbled as he felt the wheel of karma turn. He reached for the file, but Adam had already scooped it up.
“I take it you know what this is,” Adam said seriously.
“Let me see it again.” Martin’s heart was palpitating, but his mind was clearing.
Adam fumbled with the pages for a moment and handed his boss the electron micrograph. The picture hadn’t changed. There were four more pictures of the virus, and each showed the six-sided wheel with short arms. Martin checked the file numbers and found that they all matched. It was too much to hope that a clerical error had been made.
“Hold this for me,” said Martin, passing the file back to Adam. Martin retrieved the old EDH1 file, and after several minutes of rifling through its pages, he threw it back onto the desk. “No goddamn pictures,” he said, turning to his computer and pounding away at the keys.
Adam cautiously walked around the desk and watched with growing concern as his boss punished the keyboard.
Finally, Martin stopped; he had found another hexagon with six arms. A fist tightened in his chest, but the angina wasn’t what concerned him.
“They’re close, but not the same,” Adam said. Martin jumped a little, having for the moment forgotten his protégé. “Look, this Colorado virus has much smaller appendages.” Adam shoved the file in Martin’s face. “I’d guess that it has less nuclear material as well, but they’re definitely related. This one has to be a mutation of the one on the screen.” Adam made the obvious connection, but Martin had stopped listening. “We have a problem, don’t we?”
Martin didn’t answer. Instead, he picked up the phone. “Martha,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically controlled and business-like, “I need you to get me William Branch. He’s assistant director of the FBI in Washington. You should have his number. Tell him it’s an emergency.” Martin hung up the phone.
Adam was afraid to move or speak. He thought he had seen Nathan Martin in every conceivable mood, but never before had he seen him like this.
“She knew.” Martin said to himself.
Amanda slid off the high-back aluminum chair and into her parka. Out of habit, she had signed off, but it probably wasn’t necessary. She walked up to the counter of the Internet café and gave the night clerk a ten-dollar bill. She had worn gloves since she had come in, and the bill was clean. She had every expectation that within a very short period of time, it would be confiscated as evidence, and she didn’t want things to be too easy for the FBI. She had signed in using her real name. No sense in disguising that. Everything else, however, was artifice.
Kurt Campion, the night clerk for Missy’s All-Nite Internet, could only stare. Not many coeds used the café this late, and he’d never seen one that looked like Amanda Flynn.
Amanda smiled at Kurt, and she had the attention of every atom in his body.
“You a student here?” he asked awkwardly while slowly making change.
“Yes, I am. I transferred here from Texas this semester.” She used her sweetest voice and projected the image of an innocent, carefree small-town girl who had no idea just how attractive she was.
Kurt could hardly breathe. Nearly twenty-one, he was, and would always be, the quintessential geek, and beautiful women didn’t give geeks the time of day. At least, none had ever given Kurt the time of day. “Um, I’m in . . . computer engineering,” Kurt said. “I got this job because I can fix just about anything in here. Besides, it’s quiet enough that I can write my code.”
Amanda glanced over his shoulder; his laptop was paused on a fantasy role-playing game. Kurt followed her gaze. “Oh, that’s the latest version of The End of Time—”
Before Kurt could explain all the secrets and intricacies of the game, and conveniently slip in the fact that he was the first person ever to become The Grand Executioner, Amanda cut him off. “I think games like that have led to the dissolution of American society.”
Crestfallen, Kurt’s eyes dropped. “Seven-fifty is your change.”
Amanda took the money from the sad college student. She didn’t like embarrassing him, but it was important that he remember the image of a twenty-year-old sociology major, five foot two, with short brown hair and stunning green eyes. In twenty, maybe thirty minutes, Kurt was going to get a visit from the FBI, and they would have a seven-year-old photograph of a five-foot-seven blonde with blue eyes who would now be thirty-seven. They would try to convince Kurt that the stuck-up bitch was actually Amanda. In the end, they would conclude that Kurt was an unreliable witness or that Amanda had used a stand-in—either way, the confusion would work to her advantage.
“’Bye,” she said politely and walked out the door, swinging a book bag over one shoulder. Outside, Boulder, Colorado, was cold, quiet, and asleep. Constitution Avenue, the university’s main drag, was completely deserted, and Amanda’s clogs echoed off the storefronts. She continued up the street as far as the main campus. Comfortable that her deception was now complete, she turned onto Peak Street. Her five-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked in front of a Starbucks, and she quickly got in.
“Damn him,” she said after strapping in. Her breath frosted the windshield. It had been a mistake to contact Martin, a mistake to believe that an ass like him could ever change. Now more than ever, she would have to cover her tracks, which meant leaving her apartment, her job, and ultimately her car behind.
She started the car, and as it heated up, so did she. For more than three months, she had cooperated with them. She had submitted to dozens of their intrusive follow-up exams and had answered thousands of pointless questions, but it never seemed to be enough. They wanted something she couldn’t give them. “That’s not entirely true,” she whispered. She could have given them something; she could have given them the whole truth. It wouldn’t have answered any of their questions, but it would have told them that they were asking all the wrong questions.
It was Martin who first suspected that she wasn’t completely forthcoming. “Bastard,” she said, without fogging the windshield. “He’s responsible for all this.” That wasn’t entirely true, either. He simply wouldn’t let it go; he wouldn’t let her go. He refused to accept the fact that he would never have his answers. It was more than just professional responsibility. Somehow it had become personal challenge. He would know her secret or he would destroy her life. As it turned out, it wasn’t her life that had been destroyed. She had no regrets about what she had done; she was well past feeling regret by that point. They had put her in a no-win situation, and they were the ones who had lost. For six years, they had hunted her, and up until this morning, the trail had grown decidedly cold. She put the car in gear and pulled out into the empty street, passing a deli on the left. Above the door was a large sign with the words Martin’s Deli painted across it.
“Can’t shake you, can I,” she said while turning south. There was no point in returning to her apartment; she had planned for this eventuality and had everything she needed in the backseat. Her life in Boulder was over, and so were six years of relative normality.
She drove in silence; radios only ann
oyed her. When the car was warm, she shimmied out of her parka and tossed it onto the crowded back seat. She had one stop to make, and then she would be on her way back to Colorado Springs, a place she had hoped never to see again. She wondered halfseriously if it was the karmic center of the whole universe, or just hers. She had grown up in Aspen—not the famous resort, but a small farming community east of both Boulder and Denver—but it was Colorado Springs where she had lived and been happy. She had gone to school there, met and married her husband there, had a son there, and finally buried them both there.
The car bounced over a frozen mound of snow, and the wheel jerked in Amanda’s hand. Even her car was reluctant. “Easy girl,” she said. “We still have to see Auntie Em before we go.”
Regency Care Center was the only medical facility in Thompson County, and the only place Emily Elizabeth Larson would consider living. At 72, she was Amanda’s oldest living relative; in fact, she was Amanda’s only living relative. She had retired from her professorship, sold her home in Enid, Oklahoma, moved back to Aspen Springs, Colorado, broken her hip, and had surgery all in the span of one very stressful month.
Amanda made the sixty-mile drive from Boulder back to her hometown several times in the last few weeks despite the obvious risk. Normally, it took less than an hour over the new highway, but this morning she took the old route. It was a shorter distance, but took a half hour longer because most of it was over one-lane roads that wound down Kenner Pass. She had avoided these roads for eight years; bad memories lay ahead, but she had to face them before she faced the future.
The road finally began to level off and Amanda could hear the swollen Kenner River as it flowed parallel to the gravel road. A few more bends in the road and then there it was, looming above her: the bridge. It was an old steel structure with dark rust stains at each rivet site. It hadn’t received a lot of attention in the eight years since she was last at this spot, but it still appeared solid. The river had become popular with kayakers as it plunged more than a hundred feet in the last quarter mile before passing under the span; Amanda could see several cars parked in the makeshift gravel lot just to the left of the bridge. It bothered her that people were here now, and that this place, which had become a nexus for her family, had now become a recreation destination for others.
She let the Jeep coast into the lot and it finally come to rest in front of a tree that was perched precariously over the narrow gorge. By all rights, she should have this place to herself; she shouldn’t have to listen to the sounds of yelling and laughter while she faced her past. It was not quite dawn so no one had entered the rapids. It wouldn’t take much to make them leave, she thought. She could feel the six people crawling through the trees down to the water’s edge; they were so full of life and excitement in a place where she had only known death and misery. She climbed out of the car and walked out to the road and up to the bridge. She saw the kayakers carefully climbing down the path, each carrying a small boat and dressed in a thick wet suit.
Her father had died at this very spot almost thirty years ago. He had been a small, mean-spirited man whose attitude permeated their tiny house like a bad smell. One of her earliest memories was of him towering over her screaming that she was a burden he had never asked for. He died the day after her ninth birthday; the official story was that he had been changing a tire when a half-drunk lawyer plowed into the back of his car, apparently throwing him into the river below. It took them three days to find and recover his body. Amanda never believed the official story. Somehow, she knew that her father had jumped into the river long before the drunk ever showed up, and that the only time in his life he had ever been lucky was after he was dead.
Amanda noticed that the group of kayakers had stopped on the path and were staring up at her. Her first thought was to scare them back to their cars so that she could be alone in this terrible place, but after a moment of contemplation, she turned away and walked further up the bridge. The last time she had been here, there were police crawling down that very same path. The memory teased at her, but she wasn’t ready to relive that evening; still, the face of an impossibly young state trooper, and the images of flashlight beams whipping through the air, seeped through her mental walls. It had been more than a month after her husband and son’s funeral, and she had resolved to join them, but a despondent farmer with his own impossibly heavy burden had gotten to the bridge before her.
The pain of their loss could only echo in her empty heart; a distant reminder of a life she had once lived. A life that now she both cherished and reviled, a life stolen by nothing more significant than a flu virus. A simple set of proteins and a strand of DNA had hollowed her out and remade her into something she had never imagined, or wanted. Something that for the last six years she had kept hidden from the world, and herself.
She watched the water cascade off the large rocks below for another five minutes before the first kayaker entered the water with a triumphant yell. She took that as her cue to leave. This place had no memory of her, her father, her family; it was nothing more than a metal bridge and a small, inconsequential river.
The blisters were back; they always came back when he was frustrated. It had been over six weeks since he had arrived in this frozen corner of hell, and he had almost nothing to show for it. Time wasn’t running out anymore, it had already run out. Klaus was more than two weeks overdue, but he couldn’t make himself leave.
It doesn’t really matter, he thought. What are they going to do, start without me? The thought made him laugh.
They could try to kill me. That thought didn’t make him laugh. They had made it quite clear that while they did need him, they didn’t necessarily need him alive. But trying to kill him would be a major inconvenience, and he was balancing that against extra time. Soon, however, the balance would tip.
The professional inside told him to leave—to pack up, and slip away before anyone even knew that he had been there. He had already completed his primary objective, and his remaining responsibility could be completed anywhere. He knew that the risk of discovery, capture, and failure grew with each passing moment, but still he stayed. He had to find her. He had to know who Amanda Flynn was, and what she had become.
From the moment he learned of her existence, the significance of Amanda grew in his mind; he tried to convince the planners that she posed an unacceptable risk to the mission, but no one listened. He was told that she would die along with everyone else, and that he should let them worry about the overall strategy. For the first time in his professional life, he seriously considered using his considerable talents against those who had engaged him. The only thing that stopped him was the undeniable and inconvenient truth that, for a while, he needed their logistical support. They were fools, but well funded and organized fools. He turned his back to the shaded window and tried to suppress his growing anger. When all of this was over, he would pay them a visit and extract from their flesh the three weeks he had wasted trying to find Amanda.
They weren’t really fools; he admitted after his frustration began to ebb. They were simply focused on the singular opportunity that had fallen into their collective laps, and they would not tolerate any distractions. He couldn’t fault them for not seeing Amanda’s unique potential, or threat; it required his particular, unique perspective to fully appreciate it. Maybe, for a while, he would spare them. Still, they could have helped him; they had the resources, and with just a little assistance both of their objectives would have been completed by now. The thought of their intransigence forced his anger to the surface again. Maybe a visit to their dirty smelly homes was in order, but only after he found Amanda.
His problem was that he had no idea how to find someone who did not want to be found. He had never been an intelligence officer. His instructors had taught him a hundred different ways to kill a man, but not a single way to find this very special woman. All he had was a name, a ten-year-old address, and a vague description. The name turned out to be wrong, probably misspelled s
omewhere down the long line of information. Amanda Lynn was actually Amanda Flynn. It had taken him two weeks to find that simple error; somebody who knew what he was doing would probably have picked it up in a day. The address he had been given was now an office building. Her old house had become a victim of something the newspapers had called the Sunshine Project, urban renewal by any other name. The description was equally unhelpful, fitting about every third woman in Colorado Springs. His only lead was a dangerous one: Greg and Lisa Flynn, Amanda’s in-laws.
He had watched the Flynns for weeks now and couldn’t find an opening. He was certain that they knew where Amanda was, or at the very least how to contact her, but he didn’t know how to enlist their cooperation, something he would need if he proved to be correct. It would have been so much easier if he could just break in and take what he needed from them, but if he did that, one, if not both of the Flynns, would have to die, and that would ruin everything. All he wanted was to spend a moment with their daughter-in-law. That’s all he would need, just one moment, and then he would know.
He shivered under the thick blankets as much out of frustration as fever. It was always the same, first the blisters, then the fever, and finally the madness. He could live with the blisters and fever, but when the madness came, it enveloped him completely, obliterating any sense of purpose or urgency, and he could ill afford that now. Over the years, he had learned how to control it; delay it would be a more accurate description. The problem was that every time he denied the madness, it only came back stronger. He tried to clear his head, but it resisted. Flashes of his parents assaulted his mind: his mother beating him after he had been expelled from school because he had hurt another student; his father unceremoniously dumping him on a train that would take him to the military school that would “straighten” him out. The images of his early years flowed through his mind and he smiled, wondering if that foolish man and his wife ever realized what type of creature they had brought into this world. Maybe on their deathbeds, they had been graced with the knowledge that they had played a part in creating the most powerful being that had ever inhabited this planet.
Hybrid Page 3
