by Alex Archer
Csilla Polgár.
The woman looked much like she had when Annja last saw her, though there were several fresh bruises on her face. Like the others, Csilla was hooked up to both a pair of IVs and a blood pump, though in her case the pump unit hadn’t yet been switched on.
Annja stared at Csilla in disbelief, astounded that she was here rather than in police custody.
Inside her head the pieces of the puzzle began to click together.
Stone was running some kind of research and development operation to generate an expensive and much-desired product. That much was clear from what Stone had said back in Annja’s cell. Whether Stone was working on behalf of Giovanni Industries or just using them as a cover, Annja didn’t know.
The operation required something that was only found in a select group of women, and given what she was seeing around her, most likely found in the women’s blood. Extracting it was apparently an all-or-nothing process, otherwise Stone and company wouldn’t be kidnapping the women and then faking their deaths to keep anyone from looking for them.
The women, of course, were not dead, not yet at least, but there was little doubt in Annja’s mind that was how they’d end up once Stone took whatever it was she needed from them.
Radecki, and most likely the medical examiner, Petrova, were in on the operation. Annja was convinced of that. There was no way for them to have pulled this off without someone on the police force and in the medical examiner’s office. The autopsy reports she’d seen had been signed off by Petrova, so he was the logical culprit. Others might be involved as well, particularly within the police and other emergency services, though Annja had no way of knowing that for certain yet.
And she couldn’t prove anything. Like Novack before her, she’d be laughed out of the department if she went to the police now. She needed something concrete, something that would prove she wasn’t making wildcard accusations against a multibillion-dollar corporation with more lawyers than she could shake a stick at.
Annja’s gaze lifted from Csilla’s bed to the observation windows overlooking the medical facility.
She knew just where she could find what she needed.
26
Radecki sat at his desk, staring at the clock. He’d told the nurse to bring Creed’s sample directly to his office so he could personally oversee the processing of the test results.
That had been half an hour ago.
How long did it take to draw some blood? he wondered with more than a little impatience. Either the nurse was goofing off—something she’d pay dearly for if he found out that was the case—or something had gone wrong.
Given how much trouble Creed had been so far, Radecki would bet on the latter.
Best if he went down and had a look for himself.
Radecki opened the top drawer of his desk and removed the stun gun he kept there. He’d used it a couple of times to subdue some of the women they’d taken from the streets, and he liked the way it put down even the most aggressive targets. He thought it might be handy should Creed prove difficult. He slipped the weapon into his pocket, then got up and walked out of his office.
The halls were empty because the few employees working at this hour were assigned to the residential wing until the next shift. That was fine with him; he couldn’t stand interacting with the idiots Stone hired to handle the drudge work. How anyone could convince themselves that they were involved in legitimate research, given what they were doing to these women long-term, was beyond him, and yet those half-wits had apparently managed to do so. Radecki didn’t believe that self-delusion was an acceptable indulgence.
Many of the technicians had been promised a hefty bonus should they reach the stated goal of artificially replicating the catalyst in the patients’ blood. Radecki knew better. That bonus would never be awarded, never mind cashed. Success or failure, the working stiffs would end up with their contracts terminated in the most literal sense of the word, and he would be laughing as he cleaned up the mess.
He suspected that Stone would get rid of him as well, when the time came, so he’d taken steps to protect himself. The guards employed throughout the facility were his men, not hers. If worse came to worst, he was confident they would follow his orders rather than Stone’s. If the operational structure was ever put down on paper—which it wouldn’t be, not as long as Radecki was in charge of project security—Stone’s name would certainly be at the top of the chart. But as with many kingdoms down through the ages, the real power was not in the hands of the one sitting on the throne. Radecki played chancellor to Stone’s queen. He stood behind her, hidden in the shadows, and he was quite happy with the arrangement.
Lately, however, she’d started to make him nervous. He suspected that her behavior was a byproduct of the formulation they produced, one of the reasons he wasn’t in a hurry to try it out himself. Stone had first been exposed to the test product—a deep red cream that reminded Radecki of lotion—by accident, but when she’d seen how it rolled back the hands of time, making her skin look years younger, she had started using it on a regular basis.
And therein lay the rub.
From what he could tell, the cream was not only changing her on the outside—making her look like a woman two decades her junior—but it was changing her on the inside, as well. Now, he was no scientist, but even he knew that sudden, drastic changes, even beneficial ones, to any single aspect of a complex system had the potential to throw the entire thing out of whack. And he was starting to see that very thing with Stone. She was making brilliant leaps of deductive logic and advancing the project, yes, but she was far more short-tempered and aggressive, often to the point of violence, than she’d been six months ago.
The formulation was taking a toll.
He just hoped she could hold it together long enough to figure out how to artificially produce that one key ingredient. So far they’d been able to locate enough women with the genetic marker and harvest what they needed, but they couldn’t go on doing that forever. They were already finding it difficult to select appropriate targets, and if Novack and Creed were any indication, they couldn’t keep their operation hidden forever.
At least Novack was out of the way, he thought with a satisfied smile as he boarded the elevator. Soon Creed would be, too, and he could relax and wait for it all to be over.
Radecki took the elevator down two floors and got off on the lowest level of the complex, where the test subjects were held. At Creed’s cell he glanced in the window as he reached for his key card, only to have his heart skip a beat when he saw that Creed was no longer hanging from the hook where he’d left her.
He pulled out the stun gun and switched it on, then swiped the key through the card reader. When the lock clicked open he went through the door quickly, glancing to either side to keep from being ambushed.
The nurse he’d sent to take the blood sample, Phillips, lay on her side against the nearest wall, out of sight of anyone looking into the room from the hallway. She was still breathing and didn’t have any apparent injuries, so he didn’t give her more than a passing thought. He’d send someone down to help her back to the dormitory section and that would be that.
Right now, he had to find Creed.
The ropes that had bound her lay in the middle of the floor, neatly cut in two.
There was no sign of the prisoner herself.
Radecki cursed beneath his breath, then turned and hurried out of the room. He needed to find Creed before Stone realized she was missing. If Stone got it into her head to come down and question the prisoner and found Creed had escaped, all hell would break loose. It was just the kind of setback that might send her completely over the edge.
Any other escaped prisoner would make a beeline for the exit, if they could find it, that was, but he had a hunch Creed would be different. She’d been dogging their heels ever since she’d rescued one of their discarded subjects and he didn’t see any reason that she’d give up now. Not while she was right here, in the heart of their
operation.
If anything, he expected her to keep hunting for answers now that she was so close to them.
That meant she could be anywhere in the complex. The place was too big to search effectively on foot, but thankfully he didn’t have to resort to such extreme measures.
There were better, faster ways of searching the facility and they didn’t involve the chance of running into Stone in the process.
Radecki headed for the elevator and the security control center on level B.
27
Stone’s office.
That was where she would find the answers she needed; Annja was certain of it. Now all she had to do was get there.
She looked down at Csilla’s bruised face.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back for you,” she told her, taking the woman’s hand in her own and giving it a gentle squeeze. She had no idea if Csilla could hear her, but she didn’t feel right just leaving her alone without saying something. If Csilla was aware, even peripherally, beneath all the drugs she was being given, Annja didn’t want her to think she was being abandoned.
“I’m going to get some help, but I’ll be back,” Annja told her. “Just hold on.”
It was hard to turn around and walk away, but Annja did it anyway. If she was going to put a stop to this, she didn’t have a choice.
At the far end of the ward was another staircase, similar to the one she’d taken earlier. Annja hoped it would lead her to the offices overlooking that portion of the ward.
Her hunch proved correct.
Conscious that the clock had started ticking the moment she’d set foot outside her cell door, Annja hurried along the hallway, passing several doors until she came to the one she thought was Stone’s.
Taking the key card from around her neck, she slid it through the slot.
There was a low beep, but the signal light on the lock remained red instead of turning green. She tried it again, deliberately sliding the card at a slower pace, but ended with the same result.
The door stayed securely locked.
Annja worried that the card reader was tied into the security system and that repeat failures might trigger an alert of some kind, so she stopped trying after the second failed attempt.
The card would have made things easier, but she didn’t need it to get inside. She had her own special tool for that.
She shot a quick glance up and down the hall to be certain no one had come along while her attention had been on the lock. Then she called her sword to hand, pulling it from the otherwhere with just a thought. As always the weapon made her feel more powerful, more confident, and she felt her spirits pick up just by gripping the hilt in her hand. She put the tip of the sword into the space between the door and the jamb, right where the electronic lock was situated, and then she drove the weapon forward while bearing down to the left.
The blade went through the lock with ease, and the door popped open with sharp crack.
Annja glanced around, concerned that the sound might have been overheard, but when no one came to investigate she smiled in satisfaction and stepped inside the room, flipping the light switch with one hand while closing the door with the other. When she saw that she was alone in the room, she released her sword, sending it back to the otherwhere to wait until she needed it again.
The office was large, with an oversize desk, a couch with matching leather chairs and a bar. A door to the left of the desk opened onto a private bathroom. The back wall of the room was made of glass, and through it Annja could see the medical ward she’d left behind just moments before.
A switch near the desk controlled the window blinds, and Annja used it to cut off the view from downstairs. Once that was taken care of, she turned her attention to the desk in front of her.
Stacks of file folders and photocopied articles from scientific journals lay in messy piles atop its surface, right next to the computer keyboard and flat-screen monitor. Annja picked up a few of the articles and glanced at the front pages, noting that they had titles like “A Multi-trait Meta-analysis for Detecting Pleiotropic Polymorphism” and “Integrating Multiple Genomic Data Elements to Predict Disease-Causing Nucleotide Variants in Exome Sequencing Trials.”
Nothing like some light reading for the afternoon, she thought sourly.
The articles weren’t going to be any help. They were clearly referencing genetic studies of some kind or another, but they weren’t proof that Stone was kidnapping women and killing them.
She tossed the papers back down on the desk, and in doing so must have accidentally nudged the mouse because the computer screen came out of sleep mode.
Intrigued, Annja pulled out the desk chair and sat down. She dug through the stacks of paper on the desktop until she found the mouse, and then began clicking through the files, looking for anything interesting.
Stone had left several windows open, so Annja started with those. The first few files were spreadsheets showing purchase orders and budget expenditures. She glanced at them but quickly moved on. Next up were half a dozen scientific papers, all focused on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. She stopped there for a moment, trying to make a connection between the missing women and MCD, but eventually moved on because she just wasn’t seeing it.
That was when she found the video.
It had been paused halfway through and showed a weary-looking Stone sitting in front of the camera. Intrigued, Annja clicked Play.
“...morphed into a new formation before failing entirely. I’m directing the staff to focus on the left-hand peptide chain, hoping that running its characteristics to ground can give us some insight on the right-hand chain, which is the important one.”
Annja used the mouse to slide the control back to the starting point.
The video stuttered for a moment and then smoothed out.
“This is update number three hundred and forty-seven,” Stone began. “Thursday evening, just after midnight.”
Day before yesterday, Annja thought. She kept watching.
“Our attempts to artificially replicate and stabilize the prion continue to meet with failure, but I’m determined to push through to the end. Today’s activities centered on getting the left-hand chain of the prion molecule to stabilize...”
Stone went on for several minutes, summarizing the steps her team had taken in the lab that afternoon.
Annja slid the control forward to a spot later in the video and let it play again.
Stone was still speaking but had moved from science to marketing. “Supplies are low—I understand that—but as I’ve told you, I cannot speed up the process any more than I already have. We have a full complement of donors at the moment, so we should be able to continue producing what we need for the next several weeks. In the meantime, we’re searching for additional carriers we can bring into the program.
“We’re close to a breakthrough—I know it. I just need a few more weeks. I will have better news in my next update.”
With that, the video ended.
Annja right-clicked on the file and called up its properties. When she followed the path it had been saved under, she discovered that it was stored in a folder marked...Project Báthory.
Why am I not surprised?
She followed the path to the folder where the video was stored and discovered more than three hundred additional video files.
Each of the files was named with a six-digit number that corresponded with the date on which the video was recorded. A few had an asterisk at the end of the numeric sequences, separating them from the rest. Annja found the first of those, dated over three years ago, and opened it.
Stone’s face filled the screen, and Annja gasped in surprise when she saw it.
In this video Stone looked ten years older than she had in the more recent one. She had deep lines on her face, crow’s-feet around her eyes and her hair looked limp and lifeless—a far cry from the smooth skin and vibrant hair that Stone exhibited now.
It was as i
f they were two separate people.
“Personal update number one,” Stone said, and Annja thought she could hear a quaver in the woman’s voice.
“It has been twelve hours since I accidentally exposed myself to the Báthory prion taken from the test subjects. I’ve decided to make these personal diary entries to correspond with my official updates in order to document any changes that might occur as a result of the exposure.
“My vital signs are all steady at this time. I’ve ordered a full blood panel to be taken so it can be used as a baseline comparative moving forward. I’ll keep track of any issues I encounter where and when possible.”
Stone looked away from the camera, and a moment later the video ended.
Annja’s thoughts churned as she closed that video and selected another. This one was also marked with an asterisk, but it was dated six weeks after the one she’d just viewed.
It began the same way, but in this video Stone’s condition had markedly improved. She not only looked better, but her energy levels were practically off the charts.
“I feel fantastic! Better than I have in years, actually.” Stone was sitting at her desk, smiling at the camera. Gone were the lines on her face and the tired, exhausted look in her eyes. She practically sparkled with vitality.
“My most recent blood test shows that the prion is activated and is replicating damaged tissue at a startling rate. I feel as if I’ve lost ten years overnight, as if I could get up and run a marathon right now with no training whatsoever. My thought processes are clearer, with less distractions, too. Better yet, I’ve experienced no ill effects.
“Given these results, I’ve created a temporary delivery vehicle in the form of a body lotion and have decided to continue treating myself moving forward. If we can find a way to bottle this, we’ll be billionaires overnight.”
