"Her!" Stefan shouted. He gestured at Duke, directing him to the woman. "Go get her and bring her here. The one that just woke up! Goddamn it! Hurry!"
The man obeyed, quickly threading his way through the figures, avoiding their touch as much as possible, as if he now believed they were contagious. He got no closer than several arm lengths away from her before he shouted at her to follow him. Jabbering back at him in Arabic, it was clear she didn't understand, neither his words nor the affliction that had struck so many of the people surrounding her.
"Grab her!" Stefan shouted. "Bring her here."
Duke hesitated, then did so, grabbing the sleeve of her burka. She shouted at him but didn't resist.
"You're on speaker," Stefan said.
"Good," Kurtz said. "Now, I want you to pay close attention, because this is what happens when you do not follow instructions. Is the person there?"
"Yes, she's here."
They all turned to the woman, who was wringing her hands and mumbling. Her face was covered, except for the eyes, but they were filled with confusion.
Everyone waited, but nothing happened at first.
"This is absurd!" Stefan said. "What are we supposed to—"
The woman abruptly stopped praying. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she arched her back. Her body started to shake.
"What's happening?" Maria Pernaud cried.
The woman toppled to the ground like a hewn tree. Yet after she hit, she continued to shake. Agonized sounds erupted through her lips, followed by a bloody froth.
"Stop it!" Angel cried. "Kurtz, stop it! Okay! Please, we will do as you ask! Just, please, do not do this!"
The woman began to scream, a high-pitched wail that rose until it was drowned out by the blood flooding into her mouth. She writhed on the ground, fingers clutching at the grass, yanking fistfuls of it out by the roots. Blood streamed from her nose and eyes.
"Help her!" Maria screamed. She tried to back away, like the rest of them were doing. "Oh, god! What is happening? Help her! Make it stop!"
But nobody wanted to touch her.
"The process is irreversible," Kurtz said.
The woman's body spasmed one last time, then stilled. Liquid soaked through her burka and seeped into the ground. Her entire body seemed to collapse all at once, leaving nothing but a shallow mound of fabric vaguely reminiscent of a human being.
"I warned you," Kurtz said. "This is what will happen to the rest of them, if you do not agree to the terms of the exchange. You will also find that any blood samples removed from this individual will likewise be useless to you now. Any product administered into her has been destroyed."
Several of the scientists had fallen to their knees in shock, crying, gasping for air. They had never seen anything like this before.
"Now, as to what I've done to the rest of your guests, do not worry. They are unharmed and will remain unharmed for now. I have simply placed them into a sort of . . . stasis. A holding state, if you will. They will remain in this state as long as this negotiation continues to move toward a suitable resolution. Then I will release them. If, however, you do not—"
"Stasis? How?" Stefan demanded.
"Tsk, tsk. Trade secret. If I were to tell you, I'd lose all my negotiating leverage now, don't you agree?"
"I don't negotiate with people over the phone," Stefan snapped. "You want to talk, we meet in person. Where are you? Answer me, or else this conversation is over!"
"You don't want to hang up on me, Herr Nordqvist," Kurtz warned. "I can assure you, the consequences would be catastrophic. And now I am referring not just to my property, but also to your man in my custody."
"We don't need him!"
"Then I will take him as payment for the loss of the woman."
"No!" Angel screamed.
"Is it really worth their lives, Herr Nordqvist, to satisfy your selfish needs?"
"How do you know what I want?"
"The same thing you've always wanted. It's how you made your fortune—"
"You son of a bitch!"
Kurtz chuckled. "Let's dispense with the false outrage, Herr Nordqvist. It never suited you. We both know what you really are."
"Not anymore! Maybe once, years ago, but now—"
"Ah, a changed man? What a romantic notion. But we both know it's a lie."
Stefan glared at the phone, his face turning deep red with fury. He refused to look anywhere else, especially at Angel.
"Why do you need them back?" he growled.
"We were in the middle of an important experiment; your interference has seriously jeopardized its integrity. But should you immediately comply with our demands, I don't see why we might not be able to recover some useful information from it. In exchange for your cooperation, we will return your colleague to you, alive."
"Fuck you."
"Very well. Every two minutes from this point forward that you do not cooperate, another person will die, just like the one you just witnessed. And another. And another. Wait too long, and they will all be dead. And you will still have nothing but a huge mess on your hands that will need to be explained to the local authorities."
"And you will have nothing, either!"
"Tick tock."
Stefan looked to Angel for help, but there was nothing she could offer that he didn't already know. They had no choice. They had to comply.
Or did they?
No matter what happened, the refugees would end up dead anyway, whether in their hands or Kurtz's. There was no way his people would allow them to live. They were a liability, just as the Baoyang villagers had been.
She swept her gaze out over the field, searching. But there were too many people out there, too many hiding places for Kurtz's resonance uncoupler.
She turned back to Stefan and made a gesture, covering her ears with her hands, then putting a finger to her mouth. He nodded that he understood and activated the privacy setting on the phone.
"Stall," she whispered.
"What?"
"Tell him we agree."
"I will not!"
"You must keep him busy! I will be back."
"Where are you going?"
"No time!"
"I will keep my word," Kurtz pressed on, either unaware that he couldn't hear them plotting or not caring. Stefan tapped his phone, but Kurtz was still speaking. "We are not the bad guys you think we are. We're just . . . misunderstood. Our objectives and our approach, they are all far too advanced for most people to comprehend. But they will eventually. Soon, I think. Then you'll see that we are not the devil."
"You are murderers!" Angel shouted. She had already started separating herself from the group, making her way to the field. "You murdered all those people in China!"
"Pushing the boundaries of technology and the human body always requires sacrifice. Our volunteers are heroes. But the outcome for them is no different a fate than if we hadn't—"
"They are not volunteers! They do not know what you are doing to them!"
"Speaking of which, two minutes have passed."
There was a cry, and a man standing nearby collapsed to his knees. His fingers dug into his eyes. The scream rose until he toppled onto his back.
The scientists started to scream again in terror. But within seconds, the man was dead, his body dissolving.
"You bastard!" Angel yelled.
"You have two minutes to comply."
Angel was tempted to rip the phone out of Stefan's grip, but she knew her time was short, and she realized with sudden clarity that Kurtz was actually distracting her. He must have guessed that she'd know about the resonance uncoupler. He was trying to keep her from looking for it. He was doing this through the device, so she had to find it and destroy it before he killed again.
"Our work," Kurtz went on, oblivious to the horror he was inflicting, "will usher in a new age of limitless human potential, one in which disease and injury are no longer concerns. We will possess greater physical and mental capabilities than any of
our ancestors. One day, hopefully very soon, humanity may even achieve immortality."
Angel had heard it all before. That madman Aston had told her all the same things, back in the factory in China. Even as he forced her to perform that inhumane surgery on Jamie, without anesthesia, he had tried to convince her that theirs was a noble calling. Angel had believed him insane then. But it now seemed the craziness was completely systemic, infecting anyone associated with the technology.
The man on the phone was determined to make his case, and Stefan was just as determined to argue it. The rest of them were still in a daze over the senseless murders they had just witnessed. Having seen firsthand such horrors before, only Angel remained clearheaded. Only she knew what needed to be done to stop it.
She needed to find that box.
She quickly backed away, edging toward the field where a hundred people still stood, stock still and unable to escape the shackles inside their own bodies.
Duke looked over at her with eyes glassy with shock and frowned. She held a finger to her lips, urging him not to say anything.
She estimated she had only a few more seconds to find the transmitter before he took another sacrifice. Once she had the box and destroyed it, only then would Kurtz's threat be neutralized.
But they would still need to pretend compliance. The charade needed to be perpetuated until Norstrom was safely back home.
Kurtz's voice faded the farther away she got. He was still rationalizing the company's work. "If you try to stop us, we will simply move on, find new subjects elsewhere. You can't stop us. What I really wish is for you to understand. Once you do, you'll agree that our work is just too important for all of mankind to just abandon."
Angel couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Let us see if he is so brash after I find his uncoupler," she murmured.
Another two minutes had passed, and he hadn't taken another life. It seemed Nordqvist was able to keep him distracted.
She ran to the edge of the track and swept her gaze over the crowd. She remembered how odd it had been seeing Jamie sitting catatonic in the hallway, like her brain had been shut off. Seeing a hundred people in the same state sent shivers up her spine. But there was no obvious device in view and, as far as she could tell, nothing large enough to hide it.
One of the lab coats was wandering aimlessly through the group, feebly attempting to rouse the refugees with a gentle shake of the arm or snapped fingers. Angel ran over to him and asked where their personal effects had been taken. He pointed in the direction of the vehicles and said that everything was still on the buses.
Too far, she realized. Back in China, Aston had mentioned the signal's range to her, part of his insane gloating. She couldn't remember the exact figure he'd quoted, but it had been short. Fifty sounded right. But had it been feet or meters?
Aston was American. He would have meant feet.
Or was it yards?
In either case, meters or yards, the buses were much too far away, perhaps a hundred meters by her eye, certainly far beyond the range needed to affect the people standing farthest away. No, the transmitter had to be somewhere among them.
Her eyes slid over to the barbecue tent. It had power and was centrally located.
She began to work her way through the unmoving forms, continuing to scour the scene as she went. On the other side of the field, a scream rose and another body fell. Angel wanted to cry out, to make Kurtz stop. But she couldn't afford to waste any time.
She ran from person to person, feeling their unblinking eyes on her, and it made her flesh crawl. Did they actually see her? Would they remember her once they were released from this state?
There was nothing on the ground but scattered plates and dropped food. Cups emptied of water. No backpacks. It was like a statuary in a neglected churchyard.
She searched the cook tent, flipping tables and pulling open boxes. But she found nothing. The grill had been shut off. The tables were covered with both clean and used plates and bottles of water. Most of the platters of food were empty. Flies fed on the scraps, unharassed.
A young woman entered the tent and exclaimed in surprise when she saw Angel, as if she hadn't expected her to move. "What is happening?" she asked in a hushed voice. In her hand was a small plastic caddy filled with syringes and needles. Several of the blood tubes were filled. "They are all frozen like ice. What's wrong with them?"
"Were you here when this happened?" Angel demanded. "Did you see where it started?"
"That side, I think." She pointed toward one edge of the crowd. "Some people there just stopped moving. It spread from there."
"Show me. Hurry!"
They ran over to another tent, but Angel didn't find anything resembling the device, and she began to worry that its appearance might have been modified. It might now be smaller. Maybe its range was longer. It might also run on a battery.
A cell phone? Could it be?
She stepped around the woman, looking for anyone with a phone in their hand. But the daylight was nearly gone, and it was getting too hard to see.
The wind was blowing, and on it she heard the mechanical whine of a bus engine. The last one was finally arriving. Through the center of the barn, she caught a glimpse of it as it rose up over the distant ridge, still more than a kilometer away.
"What are you doing?" Duke demanded, appearing unexpectedly before her. He raised his arm, refusing to let her pass.
"Stop that bus before it gets too close!"
"You're not going anywhere," he snarled and shoved her beneath one of the sun shades.
"Get out of my way, Duke!"
"Not until you tell me what you're—"
She pushed him as hard as she could, and he stepped backward, pinwheeling his arms. His feet tangled in an electrical cord. "You stupid bitch!" he screamed as he caught himself.
"Get out of my way!"
"What are you looking for?" He lunged, surprising her. She slipped on the slick grass as she batted his arms away and ended up pulling him down. He crashed into a table, knocking plates and more food onto the ground, then bouncing off one of the motionless refugees. The man flinched and stepped back, reflexively catching himself. But as soon as he regained his balance, he stopped moving. His stare went back to being vacant, locked on some distant unseen horizon.
Angel sprinted toward Stefan, zeroing in on the phone in his hand. It was his phone, she realized. That was how Kurtz was doing all this!
"Stop her!" Duke shouted. "It's her, Stefan! She's working with him. She did this!"
Stefan raised his head and peered about him. He saw Angel running toward him and shouted at her.
"Shut off your phone!" she screamed.
Two of the male scientists broke out of the group and started to run toward her.
"Hang up!" she yelled, waving them off. "Hang up the phone!"
She was almost to the dirt track now, and a boy sitting quietly with a plate on his lap suddenly started to scream in pain. Angel skidded to a stop, shocked that Kurtz would choose to take the life of a child. The boy's head canted backward and he fell onto his side, writhing and trembling.
"Stop it! Stop it!" Angel screamed. "Hang—"
She was slammed from behind. She hit the gravel hard and slid, twisting around. Duke was there, trying to grab her. She knocked away his hands.
"Who are you?" Duke grunted. His breath was hot against her neck.
She fought back, slapping at him and yelling. He was shorter but much heavier than she, and he forced her arms down, again demanding that he answer him.
"What the hell is going on here?" Stefan shouted. His voice sounded far away. Angel saw him coming toward them out of the corner of her eye. He was walking quickly, the phone still held up to his ear. "Let her up! Duke!"
"Hang up, Stefan!"
"Who are you?" Duke screamed.
"Let me go!" she cried. "I need to—"
Another terrified shriek pierced the air, this time from the other end of the field. Angel struggled to see
. It was too soon for another. The boy was still alive and Kurtz was taking another, and two minutes hadn't passed!
She tried to push Duke away, but he refused to move.
Then came another scream, closer this time, blood-curdling. It sounded like Maria.
"I said, who the fuck are you?" Duke growled at her. "What were you doing out there? What were you looking for?"
He wrestled her over onto her stomach, pinning her arms beneath her.
"Dammit, Duke! What the hell is going on here?" Stefan cried. "Let her up!"
And yet another scream came, only this one was right behind her. The weight on her back suddenly vanished, and something wet spattered onto her face and neck. The scream receded, accompanied by the sounds of a struggle and scuffling feet. Beneath it, Angel heard an eerie chorus of hisses that froze the blood in her veins.
Then she was lifted up off the ground and flung like a ragdoll toward the barn.
Chapter Twenty Four
Angel hit the concrete hard, skinning her palms and elbows. Her momentum carried her inside the barn, where she slammed her head onto a support column. She let out a dazed cry and tried to stand. The world tilted, wrenching her feet out from under her.
"Get up!" Stefan shouted.
Strange, Angel thought. He sounds like he is underwater.
There were other sounds now, garbled shouts and soft smacks, like several people were fighting each other. Was Duke attacking Stefan now? What was happening? Something had come over the scientist, some sort of mania.
Her arms felt so weak, her knees like rubber. Behind her, the sounds of struggling grew louder, more and more defined as the ringing in her ears began to clear. Shapes flitted past, people running, yelling. There were angry shouts, pleading shouts, screams of terror. The buzzing was fading, but there was that other noise now, that hissing, like a leaky boiler or a blown tire. It grew ever louder, more insistent. Organic, human. Evil.
What the hell is that?
She raised her hand to her neck and wiped away the wetness. When she pulled it away, she couldn't understand why it was so red. Had she skinned her palms that badly?
Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2) Page 15
