The Lupin Project

by Allan Leverone

  But it had gotten the enraged Frank Toler off his case and out of his office, and that had seemed critically important at the time. Then, to Jason’s utter amazement, Toler had left the facility. He said he was returning home to get some sleep.

  After the carnage and bloodshed he’d just witnessed.

  Jason didn’t know if he would ever be able to sleep again, but it certainly wasn’t going to happen last night. So he stayed at the facility, drinking coffee and pretending to catch up on his research notes while replaying the horrific mental image of the boy’s mangled corpse lying bloodied and torn on the forest floor over and over in his head.

  What the hell was he doing? No matter how hard he tried, there was simply no way Jason Greeley could absolve himself of blame for the blood that had been spilled, for the life that had been lost. He wasn’t like Colonel Toler. He couldn’t simply rationalize away the death of another human being as the price of scientific progress.

  Jason had begun the Lupin Project with visions of all the good that could come from his research decades down the line when it was perfected. Hostages rescued, lost children found, wounded soldiers recovered on the battlefield. The possibilities were limitless.

  But with the attendance of the bland-faced men at nearly every Project Evaluation Day, Jason had begun to suspect that the actual real-world applications of his neural conditioning research would be much different. Much darker. The presence of these men made their intentions impossible to ignore, as much as he wanted to.

  Jason hated that he had to worry about the world outside his lab, about the intentions of the bland-faced men. He was a researcher, goddammit. A scientist. Let others less invested in the application of scientific method determine the uses for the progress Jason made. He would move on to the next experiment, the next barrier to be breached, the next breakthrough.

  That was what he’d always believed. But last night’s awful trauma had done something to Jason. It flipped some invisible switch in a way that nothing else could have. It opened his eyes to his own complicity in evil, and evil was the only way to describe what had happened in that remote section of forest behind the Tamerlane Research Facility.

  So sleep had been impossible for Jason Greeley. Instead of even trying, he pretended to work while waiting for daybreak, so he could begin walking the security fence in an effort to determine how the hell his animals had gotten loose to cause so much chaos.

  ***

  Finding the breach took hours. The facility grounds were massive, encircled by a barbed-wire-topped chain-link security fence that twisted and turned through some of the roughest, most thickly forested terrain Jason had even seen. The trees were tall and old, the underbrush often nearly impenetrable, and the ground rough, strewn with rocks and granite boulders.

  And he was sixty-six years old and nobody’s idea of an athlete. Trying to fight his way through the forest would have been extremely tiring on a beautiful summer day; doing it on a couple of hours sleep in the late-November chill sapped his energy and beat him down.

  Toler was punishing him; there was no question about that. Although the actual staffing of Tamerlane was low given the size of the facility, there were nevertheless a small number of full-time maintenance people who could have been tasked with locating the breach in the fence. It would have made much more sense to put those people to work out here rather than wasting Jason’s time, because once the hole was discovered, Jason would have to use his walkie-talkie to relay the location of the breach to Toler, who would then dispatch the maintenance guys to repair the damage.

  On the other hand, given the disaster that had unfolded last night and Jason’s building crisis of confidence in his work, this assignment—as undesirable as it was—offered him a temporary respite from his unending barrage of self-recrimination regarding the role he’d played in the boy’s death.

  Around two o’clock in the afternoon Jason finally found the breach. A dead tree had fallen directly on top of the fence, crushing an entire length of chain-link and ripping two sections completely apart from top to bottom.

  He leaned against one of the still-standing trees and examined the damage, breathing heavily from the exertion of his hike. The fact that a falling tree had damaged the security fence wasn’t terribly surprising—there were literally millions of trees in this damned wilderness. They had to be toppling over constantly, and it was only a matter of time before one of them dropped onto the fence. It was actually a little surprising it hadn’t happened before now.

  That wasn’t what bothered Jason. What bothered him was something he hadn’t considered until this morning. He’d had plenty of time to think while struggling through the solitude of the forest, and an uneasy feeling had begun to develop as he considered last night’s bizarre scenario.

  How had the wolf pack managed to take advantage of the opening in the fence so quickly? How had they known about the damage in the first place? The facility inhabited thousands of acres of wilderness, and the odds that any of the wolves would have been within earshot when the tree fell were miniscule.

  And even if you could chalk it up to a lucky—or unlucky, depending on your perspective—coincidence, why had the animals immediately fled the facility? And what had led them to the kids necking in the car?

  The events of last night had unfolded quickly. They had to have. An electric current ran through the fence at all times as a security measure, tripping an alarm when the current was interrupted. Jason had checked the computerized log this morning before setting out to find the breach, and the alarm had sounded just a couple of hours before Toler’s angry middle-of-the-night phone call to him.

  It wasn’t a lot of time, but the level of sophistication exhibited by the wolves in their attack was stunning. If Jason hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. The big log dragged behind the car to prevent the kids from leaving. The cognitive ability it must have taken for the animals to lure their victim out of the relative safety of his vehicle. The unspoken communication such teamwork would have required.

  It all added up to much more than the typical hunting behavior exhibited by these natural predators in the wild. Wild wolves tended to work together in teams to bring down prey much larger than themselves, but last night’s scene had been much more complex than that.

  The wolves were developing independent thought processes and planning mechanisms far beyond their natural ability to do so. And those advances were occurring at the same time Jason’s ability to control and manage them was deteriorating.

  It was a dangerous and terrifying combination.

  From a research perspective, the question was simple: why was this happening? Way back at the beginning of his project, Jason had implanted chips directly into the brains of the animals, sophisticated electronic devices that had formed the basis for his entire project. The chips were used to communicate with the animals from a distance as well as to stimulate the sections of the brain that controlled cognitive functioning.

  The combination resulted in animals who learned quickly, who retained the information they learned, and who could think and reason on their own, although at a much more primitive level than humans could do.

  Or so Jason had thought.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  The research scientist in him found the puzzle fascinating at the same time his human side recognized that things were spiraling out of control.

  It was not a comforting feeling.

  He reached into his backpack and grabbed a water bottle. Chugged some and then replaced it in the pack, picking up his walkie-talkie. He lifted it to his face and said, “Greeley to Base. Come in.”

  For a moment nothing happened and then a crackle of static was followed by Toler’s gruff voice. “This is Base. Did you finally find the breach?”

  Finally? Jason took a moment to tamp down on his irritation and then answered. “Yes. It’s a gaping hole in the fence, almost wide enough to drive a truck through. It would have been more than
sufficient as an escape route for the wolves.”

  He hoped it wouldn’t occur to his boss to ask any of the questions he’d been puzzling over. As head researcher on the Lupin Project, Jason would be expected to provide answers to behavior that, at this point, was inexplicable. And, worse, he knew Toler would not accept “I don’t know” as a legitimate response.

  If the questions had occurred to Toler, though, he kept them to himself. “Good,” he said. “Give me the coordinates and I’ll get a maintenance team out there to repair the damage. In the meantime, get back here immediately. We’ve got work to do.”

  Jason dropped his head. His exhaustion was complete, and what passed for daylight under the bleak gray skies was disappearing rapidly. He’d be lucky to make it back to the facility before dark. All he had been thinking about was getting in his car and driving home, maybe having a couple of drinks before dropping into bed and hopefully avoiding a whopper of a nightmare if he was even lucky enough to fall asleep.

  Now it seemed sleep was going to have to wait.

  “Roger that,” he said resignedly. He didn’t bother arguing with Toler, or complaining, because nothing he could say would make a damned bit of difference to his boss. Frank Toler was the most stubborn, pig-headed—and downright mean—individual Jason had ever encountered, and he ran his facility with an iron fist. If Toler said there was work to do, Jason would simply have to suck it up and do the work.

  He sighed deeply, and then dropped the walkie into the backpack and zipped it up. He shrugged it onto his shoulders and began trudging in the direction of the facility.

  ***

  “Hurry up!” Colonel Toler barked from Jason’s office doorway as the exhausted researcher dropped into his office chair. “We have to get moving right now. We should have been on the road fifteen minutes ago. There’s nothing we can do about that lost time now, but we can’t afford to fall any farther behind.”

  “Get on the road? What are you talking about? I can’t ‘get on the road,’ I need to go home and get some sleep.” Normally Jason treated the man who controlled the purse strings for his research funding with nothing but the utmost deference, but he was too tired and too shaken up by the speed at which his life’s work was swirling down the toilet to give much thought to the niceties of social convention.

  Anger smoldered in Toler’s gaze. “You can and you will. It’s your project that’s gotten us into hot water. It’s your carelessness that put us in the tenuous position we now occupy. Don’t you understand? After last night’s goat fuck, everything is at risk. Everything. Our jobs. Our careers. Hell, even our freedom.”

  Jason couldn’t understand how a tree falling onto the security fence could be interpreted as his carelessness, but he’d never seen his superior so furious, so he swallowed his pride and bit back his own angry retort.

  Instead, he said, “Fine. Why are we in such a big hurry? Where do we have to go?”

  “We’re in a hurry because we’re running out of time to tie up a loose end, and in doing so, maybe avoid prison time.”

  “Loose end? I’m sorry, Colonel, but I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “You don’t have to understand, you just have to follow me. As I said before, this situation is entirely your fault, so you’re going to help rectify things.” Toler spun on his heel and marched out of Jason’s office. The forceful clomp-clomp-clomp of combat boots echoing down the empty hallway emphasized the colonel’s determination to do…something. Jason still wasn’t sure what.

  It was clear, though, that the boss was far too upset to offer any more than insults and finger pointing, and Jason got the strong sense that things were going to turn a whole lot nastier if Toler was forced to retrace his steps. So he blew out a breath in frustration, ran a hand through his greasy hair, and then hurried out the door to catch up.

  16

  The Jeep bounced and slid, tires spinning in the slop that had begun to accumulate on top of the frozen ground. Backing out the narrow trail under these conditions was a chore, and Alicia could see that Rob wasn’t comfortable setting much more than a walking pace, even with the four-wheel-drive engaged. The last thing they needed was to slide into a tree and be forced to walk to town in the rapidly intensifying snowstorm.

  “I’m sorry about Eddie,” she said quietly. She didn’t want to disrupt his concentration but the silence inside the Jeep felt stifling.

  “I know you are,” Rob said. “Thank you. And thanks for coming with me. I’m not sure what exactly I hoped to accomplish out here, but I’m glad I got to see the place where it happened.”

  “I think we accomplished something pretty significant, actually. That swatch of denim is proof that backs up my account of what happened last night. Once we show it to the authorities, they’ll have no choice but to take me seriously, especially when combined with the missing-persons report your parents filed.”

  Across the front seat, Rob shook his head. In the gathering darkness, Alicia would never have seen it if she hadn’t been looking right at him. “We can’t hand it over to the police.”

  “I know what we talked about, but what else are we going to do? It’s evidence of a crime, Rob. Of course we have to give it to them. I understand you’re skeptical, but—”

  “Listen to me,” he said. He spoke softly but with conviction. “I already told you what happened when my parents called the cops: nothing. And the chief gave you the brush-off last night, despite the fact that even the most casual of searches by the responding officer should have turned up the blood-soaked scrap of jeans we found after barely five minutes of looking.”

  He breathed deeply. “Alicia, if we bring this evidence to the New Quebec Police, and they’re involved in whatever the hell is going on, what do you think is going to happen?”

  She bit her lip and said nothing.

  “It’s going to disappear and never be seen again, that’s what’ll happen. You’re right about one thing; it’s the only direct proof we have that your story isn’t bullshit. If we hand it over and it vanishes, we’re screwed.”

  The Jeep dropped into hidden ridges in the trail, slipping and sliding but making steady progress toward Route 9. The thick canopy provided by the forest made the rate of snowfall extremely uneven: virtually nil in some spots, thick and heavy in others.

  Alicia shook her head. “You really think the police would go so far as to destroy evidence?”

  “If they’re involved in something dirty and now a local kid is dead, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’ll have no choice. They’ll do whatever it takes to save their own asses.”

  “What are we going to do, then?” she said. “The piece of material by itself is useless unless we can get it into the hands of someone who can use it as part of a real investigation.”

  “I don’t know. All I know is I don’t trust the New Quebec Police Department as far as I can throw them.”

  “What about the State Police? I did a research project on them last year and if I remember correctly, the nearest State Police barracks is in Concord. What if we drive down there and tell our story to them? If we do that we can cut the local police right out of the equation.”

  “I don’t think it would matter, honestly.”

  “You don’t really think the State Police are involved, too, do you? They’re fifty miles away, Rob, let’s not get paranoid. At least not any more than we already are.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m sure the State cops aren’t involved in whatever’s going on in New Quebec. But think about the scenario. Two New Quebec kids come bursting into the Concord barracks, ranting and raving about wild wolves and a murder and some unproven conspiracy involving the local cops. On top of that, all they have to back up their claims is a tiny piece of denim that could have come from anywhere. What’s the first thing the Staties are going to do?”

  She closed her eyes, the horror washing over her again. Every time she thought she might be recovering a little from the sick feeling in her stom
ach, circumstances brought it rushing back even worse. “The first thing they would do is call the New Quebec police.”

  “Exactly. And the New Quebec cops feed the Staties some bullshit story, then they come and collect us. What do you think happens next, if there really is something fishy going on in New Quebec?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “But I don’t think I want to find out.”

  “Exactly. And neither do I.”

  “So we’ve circled back to the same question: what do we do?”

  “I have no idea yet. But we’ll figure something out. Right now, though, we need to get out of this weather. Conditions are getting shitty in a hurry.”

  Out the rear window, Alicia thought she could see the snowy surface of Route 9 growing steadily larger in the distance. They were almost back to the road.

  A moment later they emerged through the thick underbrush. The Jeep slid to a stop as Rob checked for traffic. Alicia hadn’t thought anything could compare to the relief she felt last night when she finally walked into the New Quebec police station, but the feeling was just as strong now. Claustrophobia had threatened to overtake her in the darkness, with the snow falling all around them, in the location where her date had been torn to pieces less than twenty-four hours ago.

  Rob backed onto the empty road and shifted out of reverse. “Finally, we can move forward,” he said. “I think if you added together every time I’ve driven in reverse since getting my license, it still wouldn’t equal the distance we just went.” His attempt to lighten the mood was obvious and transparent and poorly executed.

  And Alicia didn’t think she could possibly appreciate the effort more. She smiled at him across the seat even though by now it was so dark he couldn’t tell. The Jeep’s wheels spun briefly on the slick pavement, and then the vehicle surged forward, fishtailing before straightening.