Mutant

by Peter Clement

  His Caller ID–unit had given her away. What the hell, she thought, I might as well fill him in on Julie’s discovery now.

  Once she’d finished her account and explained what she had in mind for the Rodez samples, he said, “So your speculation turned out close to the mark after all. Congratulations, and please accept my apologies for criticizing you about it at the time.”

  His magnanimous response pleased her. To her surprise, he then stayed on the line, seeming in no hurry to get back to his guest. Rather he started asking questions about the implications of genetic vaccines, what she thought their presence in Oahu might mean, and how they could be connected to Rodez, or Taiwan even.

  She also noticed his voice quickly returning to its normal, nonaroused pitch. What must your bedmate think? she had the impulse to tease, but she behaved, glad to be out of the man’s private life. Focusing instead on answering his inquiries, she soon grew impatient, finding him slow on the uptake as she kept having to go over things two or three times. I guess I’ve gotten used to teaching the likes of Richard Steele, she thought. Not everyone can be as sharp and quick to the point as he is.

  Poor Steve, she mused when he finally let her off the line. I guess I’m really free of you. The realization left her feeling a mixture of sadness and relief, and she found it strange how ordinary he now seemed.

  Next she called Azrhan, to warn him that they’d have to clear the decks of all routine work on Monday.

  “That’s fine, Dr. Sullivan. Do you need me this weekend, to help get ready?” His tone remained impeccably neutral, the way it had since their confrontation four days ago.

  “Thanks, Azrhan, I could definitely use you tomorrow.” Her own reply smooth as glass, she rang off wondering if their relationship would ever be the same again.

  Dialing Steele’s cellular number she found herself looking forward to his reaction, anticipating that his excitement over Julie Carr’s discovery would match her own.

  “I’m sorry, but the person you have called is not available. Please leave a message,” intoned a computer.

  “Damn!” she exclaimed out loud, then realized that she’d recorded her disappointment at not reaching him. “Sorry, Richard. I’m such a foul mouth. Please give me a call. I’ve got big news.”

  She also felt a twinge of worry. He’d told her that he’d be driving up to Agrenomics today, in hope of getting some of the staff to talk with him. “I’ll spend a lunch hour with them. What could happen besides a little indigestion from eating at some greasy spoon?” she’d recalled him saying. An uneasy gnawing set itself up in her own stomach as she imagined him asking the wrong questions to the wrong person.

  She called his house.

  “Oh, it’s you, Dr. Sullivan,” greeted Martha, her tone disappointed as if she’d been hoping to hear from someone else.

  “Is Richard back yet?”

  “He phoned me this afternoon, saying not to worry, but that something had come up and he wouldn’t be home until very late. I thought it might be him calling now. Shall I have him phone you?”

  “Yes, please, as soon as he gets in. Let him know I’ll be up all night in the lab.”

  “Is it something serious?” she asked.

  “No, not at all.”

  The woman’s answering silence said she didn’t feel reassured. “That man! Telling me not to worry,” she grumbled after a few seconds.

  “I’m sure he’s okay, Martha.”

  An exasperated sigh came over the line. “Let’s both pray he is. And thanks, Dr. Sullivan. I’ll say you called.”

  Now, what the hell have you gotten yourself into, Richard? she fretted after hanging up. Absently looking out her window, she saw the sunset had narrowed to a thin line of fire, its northernmost point piercing a swell of purple and black thunderheads like a flaming lance hurled into their core. White lightning flickered out from around its point of impact as if it had set off a celestial short circuit.

  If you’re still out there, she thought, I hope you’ve at least found shelter from the storm.

  Chapter 15

  He hadn’t prepared for rain.

  The drops streamed down his face and got in his eyes, making it nearly impossible to see as he knelt in the darkness trying to cut through the fence with wire cutters. The wire proved to be much thicker than he’d thought, and he kept losing his grip on the handles as he strained to make each snip. He also couldn’t stop shivering. Despite his exertions, the combined effect of the wind and wet clothing compounded his loss of body heat.

  “Shit!” he said, the cutters once more slipping from his grasp. He felt more miserable by the second.

  It had seemed such a good idea in the afternoon when he returned to his car determined to find out what lay below that metal cover. He drove over to the railyard as he’d planned, but on the way spotted a general store that catered to farmers. There he bought heavy-duty wire cutters, a crowbar, and a flashlight, the clerk eyeing him suspiciously as he checked the items through. While topping up his gas tank at a nearby service station, he also purchased a disposable camera with a flash. Picking up wet-weather gear had never crossed his mind at the time, not with the sky a magnificent blue spotted by little more than a few puffy, nonthreatening clouds.

  Nor had he thought he should be in any hurry to get back to the greenhouses. Nightfall would be best, he figured. He might get away with wandering around the perimeter of the place behaving like a bird-watcher in broad daylight, but snipping his way in required the cover of darkness.

  At the railway yard he had posed as a train buff with his camera as a prop and struck up a conversation with the yardmen. He even popped a few photos of the rusting diesel switcher as it rumbled to and fro to complete the illusion, and before long turned the conversation to a topic he figured they’d bite at. “So, who uses railcars to ship stuff these days? I hear branch lines are dying out.”

  A wiry, gray-haired man who wore an engineer’s cap shoved well back on a wizened forehead had glared at him from eye sockets as deep as a pair of wrinkled leather pouches. “Are you a reporter?” he demanded.

  “No, I’m a doctor. I just like trains.”

  “It’s those reporters that are always predictin’ the end of the railroads,” he declared sullenly.

  Steele commiserated, and added the consolation that at least one new company seemed to have given them business, gesturing with his thumb in the general direction of Agrenomics.

  One of the younger men let out a snort of derision. “Not anymore. We hauled our last shipment out of there a week ago. And it wasn’t much of a contract this time, since we didn’t send it very far. Plugged it into a local freight headed for Queens.”

  “They used to ship more?” Steele prodded.

  “Oh, yeah. Once a week pretty well all winter,” continued the youth, “and those cars we hooked into transcontinental freights, heading south or southwest. I remember because we always had to fill out waybills labeling them as hazardous products.”

  “Really? What kind of stuff would an outfit like them ship that would be dangerous?”

  “Maybe he’s one of them environmentalists,” interrupted the old man, glaring at him again. “Don’t tell him nuthin’.”

  “Oh, put a plug in it, Dusty,” said the youth, giving Steele a wink. “Or you’ll make the doc here think there’s something to hide.”

  The old man scowled at his junior but kept quiet.

  The youth leaned toward Steele. “Dusty’s been suspicious of outsiders coming around ever since steam gave way to diesel. He figures all change is for the worse, and that people asking questions is the surest way to stir it up.”

  “So what does Agrenomics ship?” Steele pressed, trying to sound innocently curious.

  The young man shrugged. “What farmers always use—products to make their crops yield more—except this time it’s that genetically modified stuff that’s been in all the papers lately. It don’t bother me none. I figure those guys over there know what they’re doin
g, and they’re super careful, telling us to classify it in the same category as pesticides as far as handling instructions go, just to be safe. In other words, it’s nothing you’d want to take a bath in, but probably no worse than a lot of the other toxic shit we haul.”

  A half hour later Steele had pulled into the parking lot of the roadside restaurant he saw earlier near Agrenomics. After ordering a beer for himself, the only person he managed to show his scar to and talk about Pizza Face with turned out to be the barman. “I never saw a guy who looked like that,” he said, studying the composite drawing that Steele had handed him. “But I don’t much see anybody come in from there anymore.”

  “Really?” said Steele, sounding incredulous and looking around at the neon and Western decor of the place. “But why?” he demanded, as if people who wouldn’t hang out in such a fine saloon must be crazy.

  “Layoffs!” the barkeep growled, imbuing the word with the rich contempt he obviously felt it deserved. He stood about six foot two, wore a blue denim shirt with cutoff sleeves, and had a motorcycle tattooed over a Confederate flag on one of his considerable biceps. His name tag read TEX; his accent said Brooklyn. “They started handing them out two weeks ago all of a sudden-like with no warning. Everybody’s been told it’s just a summer schedule, but nobody believes that. One of the women in their finance office says that despite all the hoopla when the place first opened, they never really got the volume of business she’d been led to expect. Hell, why should I be surprised? Half the biotech stocks I own tanked last March and still haven’t recovered.” If there’d been a spittoon in the place, Steele felt the man would have used it to put a period on the end of this bit of insight.

  “Do they still use security guards?” Steele asked. “Maybe one of them can tell me more about the guy who set his dogs on me.”

  “They mostly work at night, and never come in here anyway. They seem to have kept their jobs a bit longer than the others, at least until last week. I go by the place on my way home at night, and see their vans parked in the lot. Since Friday though, it looks as if even they’ve been cut back. There’s only been one vehicle left in front.”

  Steele returned to his car, where he used his cellular to call home and warn Martha that he’d be late. Then he drove back to where a country road crossed the rail line leading to Agrenomics and parked. So they’re shutting down, he mused, sifting through everything else he’d heard in the course of the afternoon. And I suppose it could be because they’re broke. What the rail men said about shipments falling off certainly jibed with the bookkeeper’s lament about there being no new business. But the timing of the layoffs intrigued him.

  He opened the door, got out, and stretched his legs. All around him blue fingers of dusk extended into the golden swirl of insects lingering over the fields. A pair of birds darted between the streaks of dark and light, the flash of their wings catching his attention and the occasional chirp of their evening song breaking the silence. Folding his arms and leaning against the car, he watched the creatures dive and swoop for a few seconds, still ruminating about Agrenomics.

  The attack on him had occurred seventeen days ago. McKnight had showed up here asking questions a few days later. They’d started issuing the pink slips right on the heels of that visit. Coincidence again? Maybe. “But not bloody likely,” he muttered. Because if they were involved, McKnight would have rattled the hell out of them. Because even though I’d survived, they’d have felt secure that nobody, let alone Kathleen Sullivan, could subsequently link Pizza Face with them. Then a homicide detective arrives asking about a security guard with acne scars in connection with an attempt on my life.

  His heart quickened. That’s why they’re clearing everyone out so fast. They don’t want anyone around in case the cops come back and somebody lets something slip. He pushed away from the car and started to pace, certain that he’d just seen through Agrenomics’s attempt to cover their tracks. Not an admission of guilt, he knew, but behavior suggesting that they had something to hide.

  About that moment he noticed the rounded brow of a black cloud begin to peer at him over the horizon. But flushed with a sense that he’d somehow gained a step on whoever wanted him dead and might gain yet another if he found out what lay beneath the greenhouses, he’d refused even to consider putting off his planned sortie on account of a possible storm. Especially one that doesn’t look like it will amount to much, he told himself at the time.

  The rain continued pelting him as he struggled to sever yet another stubborn link of wire. Goes to show what I know about weather, he thought, blinking fiercely and trying to squeeze yet more runoff from his eyes.

  The floodlight nearest him stood more than a hundred feet away, just inside the perimeter, leaving virtually no illumination where he worked. Yet he didn’t want to risk using his flashlight, still convinced that simply because he hadn’t seen any sign of surveillance didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He knew that the digital cameras they’d installed at the hospital could function in almost no light; and one of the technicians had showed how their computerized zoom could zero in on a face half a mile away.

  Above him the lightning cracked and seared the air, each discharge so close on top of the other that the thunder seemed continuous. His forearms began to quiver with each use of the cutters, his strength sapped by the force it took to cut the steel strands. He started wondering if a bolt from on high might strike the fence and put him out of his misery when the blades suddenly bit through a particularly recalcitrant link. The handles snapped shut, his knuckles rammed together, and he gave a howl of pain that most certainly would have alerted any guards patrolling the main building had it been a clear and silent night. Massaging his fingers as the pain receded, he all at once considered the storm a blessing.

  He renewed his attack on the fence, and within twenty minutes had finished snipping out the side and the top of a two-foot square, enough to fold back an opening he could squeeze under. Grabbing his crowbar and flashlight, he crawled through, his body sliding easily over the wet mud. Timing his use of the flashlight to the lightning, he found the metal cover in short order. Taking the crowbar in both hands, he slipped the tip of its curved end under the rectangle’s edge and pried upward with all his might.

  At first nothing budged. He gave another heave, and slowly it gave. Purchasing better leverage, he managed to slide the heavy slab a few inches off the opening.

  No light came from the space below. Immediately he leaned over the dark slit and risked shining a beam from his flashlight into it.

  Stairs. Heading perpendicular from the fence. But leading down to what?

  Fearing he may already have set off some alarm by breaking the opening’s seal, he figured he had very little time. See what I can and get out, he told himself, starting to count seconds in his head.

  Wrestling the cover to one side, he gave himself enough room to get in and, again using his torch, descended about a dozen steps. He found himself in a low corridor still leading in a direction that would take him under the greenhouse; twenty feet farther he came to a larger passageway at a ninety-degree angle to the one he was in. It, too, had no lights, but using his beam, he saw to the right that it ran as far as he could see. To the left he could make out a door where it ended about a hundred and fifty yards away. But not just any door. It looked like a hatch, the kind he’d expect to see on a submarine. And in the upper half he could see what appeared to be a window.

  His count reached fifteen. He estimated the distance from the main building gave him less than sixty seconds more before the guards arrived. He started to sprint toward the door, determined to at least get a peek at what lay on the other side.

  Chapter 16

  “One steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats . . .” Resetting the clock in his head, he ticked off the seconds the same way he kept track of time while pumping a heart in ER. Racing at three strides a steamboat , he got twenty yards when his left calf muscles shot into spasm and snapped his tendons taut with t
he force of a rack.

  “Shit!” he cried, stumbling forward and feeling as if someone had kicked him from behind. Staying on his feet, he continued to run but with a limp, and when his count reached fifteen, he’d barely covered half the distance. I won’t beat the guards at this rate, he thought, not if they’re already on the way.

  As he hobbled along he looked for another passage leading off to the left hoping there might be a quicker way out for him. He saw none. In fact, there were no other exits or corridors leading anywhere. Strange, he thought, such a long tunnel with nothing but a solitary door at its end. As if they wanted as much distance as possible between what went on behind it and the main building. His curiosity soared, the count reached twentyfive, and his wet soles squeaked noisily as they slipped on the linoleum.

  Overhead he spotted a tiny light glowing red as an ember in the darkness. Directing his flashlight toward it he illuminated a camera pointing straight at him. Well, if the guards didn’t know they had an intruder before, they do now. He quickened his pace, the rock-hard contraction in his bad leg tightening with every step, and his breathing growing ragged.

  Drawing close to the door he focused his erratically weaving beam of light on the handle and caught sight of a number pad. He knew similar locks in the hospital took a four-digit code to open and quickly resigned himself that there’d be no getting in without the combination. He pulled from his pocket the camera he’d bought that afternoon.

  There still weren’t any sounds of approaching guards in the corridor behind him. Maybe they’re coming up to where I cut the fence from the outside, he thought. I’m trapped if they do. What then? A bullet in the head . . . or would they call the police and charge me with breaking and entering? A felony conviction would leave him without a license to practice medicine. If it weren’t for Chet, he lamented, he’d rather the bullet.

  At forty steamboats he reached the door. The thick window appeared to be made of Plexiglas and it distorted his light as he played it around the interior of the room inside. He made out lockers, benches, and a cart stacked with what seemed like surgeons’ greens along with boxes of disposable latex gloves. It looked like the changing room of an OR.