The Lupin Project

by Allan Leverone

  Besides, Jason was sixty-six, Toler probably forty-five and in great shape. What was he going to do, outrun the younger man? Outrun a bullet?

  Jason waited for Toler to scream, or to shoot him, or to ask what the hell was happening in the lab, but for a long moment he did none of those things. For a long moment he did nothing at all.

  Then he spoke. “Where is it?” he said. His gun was still pointed squarely at Jason’s midsection.

  “Where is what?”

  “I know you’re preparing a whistleblower document filled with lies and false accusations. I want to know where it is so I can destroy it.”

  Jason swayed and nearly fell as he felt his knees weaken. He couldn’t imagine any benefit to answering the question so he kept his mouth shut. He stared at Toler with what he hoped—but doubted—was an expression of defiance.

  Toler leaned forward over the desk and brandished his gun, stabbing it in Jason’s direction like a sword. “I asked you a question, Doctor. I expect an answer. And, by the way, I’d like to remind you that you signed a binding non-disclosure agreement when you hired on at Tamerlane.”

  Jason’s jaw dropped. All that was happening, with the Lupin Project falling apart around them, the facility falling apart around them, and Colonel Toler was worried about an eight-year-old NDA?

  Ting, ting, ting. The frantic howling reached a fever pitch and Jason knew they were nearly out of time.

  “You’re too late,” he said, screwing up his courage and wincing against the gunshot that would end his life. He hoped he wouldn’t see it coming. “I already sent it. And I’ll never tell you to whom.”

  An enraged Frank Toler tried to step forward to get at Jason and nearly tumbled headfirst over the desk. A quick search of Jason’s Internet browser history would reveal to whom the document had gone, but the furious Toler was beyond thinking that clearly.

  The colonel began to scream, some of the words unintelligible but liberally sprinkled with vile threats. He stepped to his right to move around the desk and toward Jason, and Jason began to suspect Toler meant to beat him senseless before killing him.

  He kept his hands raised and took a step backward toward the door just as a loud animal squeal of pain reverberated through the building, followed immediately by the heavy thump-screech of oversized paws scrabbling on the lab’s bloody tile floor.

  The first wolf had broken free of the cage.

  Others would follow.

  Toler seemed not to notice. He thumped a knee against the corner of Jason’s desk and swore loudly but kept coming.

  Jason turned his head toward the lab to see Dakota, the biggest wolf and the pack’s Alpha, charging toward the office, snarling and flinging bloody mucus in all directions as he shook his head violently left and right as if gesturing an emphatic “No!” The next wolf was already squeezing through the narrow opening in the side of the cage, squealing as Dakota had at the sharp tines gashing its body on the way through.

  Dakota scrambled and staggered toward the office. The graceful loping stride typical of the wild wolf was long gone, lost in the animal’s descent into rabid madness. He was big, well over one hundred pounds, and muscular, and Jason stepped aside just Dakota barreled through the office door.

  The animal’s momentum took him straight at Toler, who reacted more quickly that Jason would have expected, or could have accomplished were he in the colonel’s shoes. He turned the gun away from Jason and toward Dakota, and squeezed off a shot in a fraction of a second.

  The slug thudded into the wolf’s chest, and Dakota squealed but kept coming. He was already into his leap when the bullet struck home and he crashed directly into Colonel Toler, the brute force carrying both of them into the back office wall. They crashed into the wall and fell to the floor in a bloody tangle.

  Toler was still screaming but now it was in fear and pain as Dakota snarled and snapped at the colonel’s face, his powerful jaws ripping off a thick strip of skin and muscle and gristle from the top of Toler’s head and down the side of his skull.

  The colonel fired again, not aiming at anything, simply squeezing the trigger reflexively, and a bullet whizzed past Jason’s head and thudded into the wall next to the office door.

  And then the next wolf charged into the office, moving as if shot out of a cannon, and then another, and another behind him. The wolves were snapping at each other and stumbling just as Dakota had been, but they followed the millions of years of predatory instinct imprinted on their DNA, moving toward their injured and bleeding prey and attacking without hesitation or remorse or conscious thought.

  Toler’s screams turned to pleading gibberish, and then almost immediately to liquid-sounding gurgles, and as the last of the wolves scrambled into the office and charged behind the desk to join in the fray, the colonel fell silent. His gun dropped heavily to the floor, and as Jason stepped backward through the door and into the lab, the only sound was the snarling of wolves and the tearing of fresh meat.

  He pulled the door tightly closed, making sure it was latched.

  Then he double-checked.

  Then he sank to the floor with his back to the outer office wall. He was familiar with the expression “shell-shocked” and while he knew the definition, had never really understood its meaning.

  Now he understood.

  31

  Rob Senna’s cell phone chirped a little after one a.m.

  It was a single shrill “bleep,” the tone he had programmed on his iPhone as an alert for Facebook messaging. Someone was contacting him.

  It wasn’t particularly surprising; his message activity had exploded over the last few hours. New Quebec was a small town, isolated and close-knit, and it hadn’t taken long for word to spread that Eddie was missing. Rob had begun receiving messages of concern and offers of help from old high school friends, parents of those friends, acquaintances, and many more from concerned local residents he barely even knew.

  Under normal circumstances, Rob wasn’t a big Facebook user. He would log in to his account once or twice a week, maybe update his status or load a photo or scroll through his news feed to catch up with friends at different schools.

  Tonight was different. Given the current situation, he had paid very close attention both to his Facebook messages and his cell phone text-messaging app. The expressions of concern were touching, and he intended to answer all of them when time permitted, but he was hoping against hope to hear from his father that he had been successful in attracting the interest of someone in the news media.

  And if it happened, Rob didn’t think his father would try to call. He doubted his dad would want to discuss the matter in front of the dozen or more Senna relatives still undoubtedly camped out inside their house. Doing so would cause endless well-intentioned questions and would only add to his mother’s stress.

  Instead, Rob was almost certain his dad would contact him via some type of messaging.

  So when the phone trilled, Rob didn’t hesitate. He snatched it up and stabbed at the “Messenger” button. Alicia had been pretending to sleep, fully dressed and on top of the bed’s threadbare covers, while he paced as quietly as he could around the tiny room. Now she sat up, exactly as she had done every other time he’d received a similar notification. She stared, wide-eyed, waiting to find out if this was the news they were both hoping for.

  The screen flashed on and Rob’s first reaction was disappointment. The message wasn’t from his father. In fact, it was just another in the long string of messages from people he didn’t know. In this case, the sender wasn’t even a Facebook friend.

  But this message was different. All the other notifications from people he didn’t know—and most of the ones from those he did know—began with expressions of support: “Thinking of you,” or “How can I help?” or “Best of luck.”

  This one said nothing of the kind. The small strip below the sender’s identification—Dr. Jason Greeley, a name Rob didn’t recognize and had never heard before—was written in all caps and co
nveyed a deeply unsettling vibe: REGARDING YOUR BROTHER’S DISAPPEARANCE.

  Rob knew he should slide his phone into his pocket and resume pacing. The headline gave him a sick feeling, something he didn’t need right now as he tried to keep his and Alicia’s spirits from plummeting even farther than they already had.

  It was obvious nothing good would come from opening the message.

  He would ignore it. Forget about it and resume waiting for contact from his dad.

  Even as he was thinking exactly that, he opened the message and started reading. The act was almost instinctual.

  A moment later Alicia said, “Well? What does it say?”

  Rob raised his eyes from his phone and glanced across the room. Her posture was rigid and her eyes fearful. The stress was wearing on her just as much as it was on him. More, probably, considering she was the target of the lunatic who had already tried to kill them twice.

  He cleared his throat. “You need to see this.”

  He walked to the bed. Sat on the edge and waited for her to move next to him. Then they read the message together.

  ***

  They sat without speaking for a long time after reading. The message was long and detailed and horrible.

  “Oh my God,” Alicia whispered. Her eyes were haunted and her lower lip trembled as she looked up at Rob. “If even half the stuff this guy wrote is true, it’s no wonder the director of Tamerlane is so desperate to shut me up. Mind-controlled wolves? Secret experiments? Buying off New Quebec’s chief of police? Disposing of poor Eddie’s body and destroying evidence?”

  Rob nodded. “You’re the key to all of this. Your eyewitness testimony as to the events of last night ties all of this man’s charges—” he gestured at the phone’s screen—“together. Without you, everything here represents nothing more than the paranoid ramblings of a disillusioned employee, a researcher whose project failed and who is now trying to discredit his boss.”

  “I’ll never be safe,” she whispered. “Ever. This man, this Colonel Toler, will never stop coming after me if I’m that much of a threat to him.”

  “No,” Rob said. “That’s not true. Information is power, and with what we have here, we can put Toler away. By the time he gets out of prison he’ll be a doddering old man who’s no threat to you or anyone else.”

  “If we survive the night. Who knows where this guy is? He could be right outside the door!”

  Rob shook his head. “Let’s not panic. Nothing’s changed. Nobody knows where you are, remember? I didn’t even tell my parents which motel we’re in. You felt safe here before I got this message, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, but her face had gone white and here eyes were red and wet.

  “You’re every bit as safe now as you were then.”

  She nodded again but still seemed unconvinced. Rob didn’t blame her. The seriousness of the charges Dr. Greeley had outlined in his zip file was overwhelming.

  “What happens now?” she whispered.

  “I need to get this file to my dad. He’s obviously not having any luck trying to snag a sympathetic reporter, otherwise we would have heard from him. But if he approaches someone armed with all of this, I have a feeling that situation will change very quickly, and for the better.”

  32

  Jason Greeley sat slumped against the wall outside his office for such a long time he thought he might have fallen asleep for a few minutes. He’d been running for so long on adrenaline that now, with Toler gone, his nervous energy had evaporated. All his energy had evaporated. His arms and legs felt wooden and heavy, and he wondered whether he would be able to stand when the time came.

  Or whether he even wanted to. His sadness and sense of loss threatened to overwhelm him. A lifetime’s worth of work in the field of animal neural conditioning had led him straight down a rabbit hole, and what had emerged on the other side was death and destruction and chaos.

  Jason had never intended for his work to be co-opted by the military and/or intelligence communities. His goals for the Lupin Project had been humanitarian in nature, to use his research into wolf brains as a springboard leading to further advances that would translate, eventually, into human applications. His vision for neural conditioning had been a world where mental illness was a thing of the past, where neuromuscular disorders were eradicated, and where the elderly no longer risked an agonizing descent into the private hell of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Frank Toler had encouraged these fictions while at the same time coordinating every step of the way with the bland-faced CIA/NSA representatives. The colonel had had no intention of ever utilizing Jason’s work for the purposes he’d claimed to support.

  Hell, for all Jason knew, maybe the damage to the security fence had been Toler’s doing. Maybe his “cleanup crew” had felled that tree in the forest intentionally. Maybe Toler had wanted the wolves to escape. Maybe he’d been attempting some kind of lethal real-world experiment using Jason’s technology, an experiment that had gone horribly wrong.

  Or perhaps not gone wrong at all.

  Everybody knew the CIA was in the assassination business. Maybe Toler had gotten exactly the result he wanted with the death of that poor boy in the forest. Sure, the colonel had badly bungled the aftermath, but what was experimentation really besides trial-and-error? Maybe Jason’s misgivings abut the Lupin Project and his increasingly vocal insistence that they pull the plug on it had forced Toler’s and the CIA’s hands before they were ready, and this disaster had been the result.

  Jason’s pulse was racing and so was his mind. This was a ridiculous theory. His exhaustion, combined with the extreme stress, was making him paranoid.

  Or was it?

  Colonel Frank Toler was duplicitous; Jason had known that almost from the start of the project.

  He was also unstable and dangerous; Jason had suspected as much for a long time, and the colonel had proven his suspicions to be accurate in epic fashion with his pair of murder attempts just minutes apart this afternoon.

  Jason recalled wondering how the wolf pack had managed to find the gaping hole in the security fence so easily and so quickly. Recalled his confusion at finding the headset out of place in his lab, tossed casually onto a countertop, when he always replaced his equipment in its storage locker following its use.

  And then there was the whole matter of Toler’s “cleanup crew.” Its very existence was evidence of sinister intent, and the fact he’d been so prepared to call them, with the boy’s body still cooling on the ground, suggested a lack of surprise on the colonel’s part regarding the boy’s death. Jason’s shock had been so great he’d barely remembered to breathe.

  He chuckled, the sound desperate and somehow alien. He was becoming a raging paranoiac; ranting and raving inside his own mind about CIA murder conspiracies. What was next? A tin-foil hat? Unbidden memories of alien abduction and experimentation? Voices inside his head demanding he stalk Hollywood celebrities?

  He realized he was sweating profusely and breathing heavily, panting as if he had just run a marathon. It occurred to Jason that he was having a panic attack, and he found that oddly humorous.

  Probably he was just being paranoid about Toler and the CIA and the theory that the boy’s death had been something other than a tragic accident. It was likely nothing more than his overstressed brain trying to deal with his own culpability in the tragedy.

  But in any event, the reason behind the tragedy didn’t matter. The question was at this point purely an academic one. Toler was dead and the Lupin Project had become radioactive.

  It had exploded in Jason’s face.

  It had to be stopped.

  And Jason realized with more than a little surprise he now had the energy to do what came next. He pushed himself to his feet and a wave of dizziness washed over him. He bent at the waist, hands on his knees, like a shortstop awaiting the next pitch. After a moment and a few deep breaths, the dizzy sensation eased. Jason knew it would soon return but he didn’t care. All he needed was a lit
tle time, and not even very much of it.

  He shuffled to his closed office door and pressed the side of his head against it. Muffled growls and the sound of tearing flesh and wolves sparring over morsels of food floated through the metal and Jason shuddered. Obviously, his office was now inaccessible; he would have to use Toler’s. It should only take a couple of minutes to complete the call he needed to make.

  ***

  “New Quebec Fire Department. What is the nature of your emergency?” The voice floated through the telephone receiver heavy with sleep and Jason was reminded of his own exhaustion.

  “No, no” he said. “There’s no emergency.” He tried to imagine how a maintenance technician would sound on the phone and couldn’t come up with a damned thing. He decided just to wing it and hope for the best. “My name is Jason Greeley and I’m in charge of facilities maintenance here at the Tamerlane Research Facility. You know, out beyond the northern edge of New Quebec.”

  “Uh…okay. Is there something I can help you with? You know you’ve reached the fire department, right?”

  “Yes, I do know that, and again, I’m sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to notify you that we’ve discovered a potential issue with the fire suppression system here at Tamerlane. We’ll be conducting tests on the system for the next several hours. You may receive alarms or other notifications indicating that the Tamerlane fire suppression system is offline. Please be assured this situation is intentional on our part, and will be rectified once our testing is complete.”

  “Who did you say you were again?” The fog of sleepy confusion had disappeared from the voice, replaced with an edge of suspicion.

  “My name is Jason Greeley, and I’m the head of facilities maintenance here at Tamerlane.” He wondered whether the New Quebec Fire Department would have a flow chart listing the management structure at Tamerlane, and if they did, whether the man on the other end of the line would bother to check it. It was something he should have thought of before making the call, but there was nothing he could do about that possibility now.