by Jon Land
Something else he hadn’t shared with Weeb Bochner.
* * *
Bochner wheeled his chair out from behind his desk and positioned it alongside the armchair in which Max was seated.
“You need to know this information is privileged,” Bochner continued, his voice deep and somber, “not just by blood, but also by law, like attorney-client. Everything we’re about to discuss stays between us, no paper or electronic trail whatsoever, and as far as the world knows you were never in this building. That includes the security tapes. I want you to understand that.”
“Understood.”
“First off, I got IDs on the shooters from Creedmoor. High-end mercs, each with a dishonorable discharge to his credit. Unfortunately, these are the kind of guys who don’t leave trails back to their employers. Given time, I might be able to come up with something, but time’s something I know you’re short on right now, so let’s just table that for now.”
“You did say ‘first off,’” Max said.
“I did at that,” Bochner nodded, his expression looking like a video frozen in the midst of buffering. “Because you suspected the attack on you at Creedmoor involved something from the past, I had to go back into the Younger family history, jumping off from what you provided me to look into your father. I was able to get some medical records, dating back a long time, along with the autopsy report following his death,” Bochner said, after another pause. “You would’ve been…”
“Seventeen, almost eighteen,” Max completed.
“A kid. Explains why you didn’t notice the signs.”
“Signs?”
“Your father, Pope.”
“He jumped out a window on the sixtieth floor of an office tower,” Max said, not bothering to disguise the bitterness in his voice. “I always figured it was because of the scandal that followed, the investigation that turned up the fact that he’d embezzled tens of millions of dollars from his company.”
“There’s more. He was sick, dying.”
Max felt his stomach drop, the same way he did when a big transport plane dropped straight out of the sky over an airfield to avoid taking enemy fire.
“I didn’t know,” he heard himself say.
“According to the autopsy report, it was some kind of blood cancer nobody could identify, or had ever seen before. He went all over the country, seeking out second opinions on both the diagnosis and potential courses of treatment, regardless of cost. From all I can gather, he spent a fortune on tests and specialists, keeping the transactions entirely off the books to prevent his insurance company, and business associates, from learning anything about what was happening to him, and that clearly included his family. It might also help explain the embezzlement. His last stop was a genetic testing lab right here in New York City, place called CyberGen. All those years ago, CyberGen was on the cutting edge of targeted treatment based on a specific patient’s individual DNA.”
“He was pulling out all the stops,” Max managed, through the thick clog building in his throat. “My father was never one to give up.”
“And yet he killed himself. How do you reconcile that?”
“I can’t. I never could. It never made any sense to me, any more than the embezzlement charges did, but I was too busy running away from my past.”
“I’m sorry, Pope.”
“For what?”
“Dredging up that past.”
“I asked you to do it.”
“This isn’t what I expected to find; I’m not sure what I expected to find.” Bochner looked down, as if to check the condition of the legs that had died half a world away. “And that’s not all.”
Max just looked at him. “I’m still listening, Weeb.”
“You know how I found CyberGen, hoss? I followed the money. Your father did a pretty damn good job of hiding his tracks—the truth, in other words. And his efforts would’ve held up to scrutiny a decade ago, but not today and not to a man with resources like mine. Payments were made through a shell company in the Bahamas and rerouted via wire transfers from offshore accounts in the Caymans where my company maintains close contacts. Your dad was one determined son of a bitch.”
Max almost smiled. “Indeed, he was.”
“The last transfers went to CyberGen. After that, nothing. CyberGen was Ben Younger’s last stop and, I’m guessing, his last hope.”
“Which didn’t pan out, obviously.”
Bochner wheeled himself slightly closer to Max. “I’m guessing you’re not one to believe in coincidences.”
“Like what, Weeb?”
“Like about a month after Ben Younger jumped out of that window, CyberGen blew up. Gas leak was blamed and left pretty much nothing behind. I got hold of the police and fire reports from the time. The explosion was caused by gas all right, but no evidence of the leak in question was ever found. So, if you ask me, somebody went through great lengths to destroy all of CyberGen’s records and killed twenty people in the process, including the geneticist your father was seeing, a doctor named Kirsch.”
“Dead end then.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“After Kirsch died, his daughter inherited his brownstone,” Bochner explained. “If he left anything behind about your father, that’s where you’ll find it.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Southern Lebanon
The plane General Malik had arranged for Vicky and Neal Van Royce landed at a tiny airport in Nabatieh, Lebanon, with a single runway barely long enough to accommodate it. Vicky had expected a minor Lebanese military escort to accompany them the rest of the way. But what looked to be an entire platoon was waiting for them on the tarmac. A whole convoy of trucks, Humvees with heavy machine guns poking out from their turrets, and a bevy of troops in full battle gear, to take them to a location in the barren reaches of Lebanon’s Nabatieh Governorate.
The commander was a tall man with a brusque, impatient demeanor who introduced himself as Major Mohammed el Musa. His face was dominated by a combination of scars that crisscrossed his cheeks and a neatly trimmed beard dotted with empty patches where more scar tissue pervaded. He had eyes that looked like pools of black ink spilled from a pen left sitting for too long, and the expression of a man already somewhere else in his mind.
In addition to the Lebanese troops, Vicky spotted a man wearing an Israeli Defense Forces uniform standing off by himself and holding his stare on her. She nodded his way, but the man didn’t acknowledge her beyond his steely gaze.
“A bit more than we were expecting,” Vicky said, as she surveyed the scene, falling into step alongside Musa and Van Royce en route to the armored Humvee.
“Precautions,” the major said gruffly.
“And do those precautions include a member of the IDF?” she asked, looking toward the man she was certain was Israeli army.
“His name is Raviv. He says he’s a captain, but I suspect his rank is actually much higher. Our nations are working cooperatively on this, Doctor, given that we may share an unprecedented threat. It’s better if we leave things at that.”
“Rather unprecedented, though.”
“There’s good reason for the exception, as the two of you will soon see for yourselves.”
“Major?” Van Royce posed, slowing and then swiftly resuming his pace when Musa kept right on going.
Musa responded without regarding either one of them. “The facility in question doesn’t exist. It was originally a bio-weapons facility mothballed when the Israelis learned of its existence and threatened to bomb it and the surrounding countryside. It remained dormant for a long stretch, until a private pharmaceutical concern decided it was the perfect place to house their research and development division.”
“What triggered the alert?”
“A worker who fled the facility is now hospitalized in a Bedouin village between our current position and the facility itself further to the south. He’s a Turkish native who’s been identified as a Muslim Western intelligence operative
out of Germany who’d managed to infiltrate a team of scientists believed to be connected to the terrorist group the New Islamic Front. The facility in southern Lebanon was a virtual dead zone when it came to issuing reports, but something must’ve spooked him enough to make a run for it.”
They reached the Humvee but stopped short of climbing into it.
“The village elders called us. This would have been eighteen hours ago now. The village itself has now been quarantined, more of my men having established a perimeter. Nobody in, nobody out.”
Vicky felt the familiar tug of unease inside her. “Is that a normal response?”
“For this particular set of circumstances, it was.”
“And why is that exactly?” from Van Royce.
“I’m not authorized—”
“—to say,” Vicky completed. “What are you authorized to say?”
“I’m authorized to take you to the village and the facility located further to the south that we’ve also secured a one-mile radius around. The order is up to you.”
“Then let’s start with the village,” Vicky told him.
* * *
Abu Siddar was like any number of quaint, desert-based villages she’d visited over the years, dominated by a ramshackle sprawl of shacks, shanties, and modest houses. But a smattering of small satellite dishes dotted the rooftops, and power lines weaved a twisting path from poles fed by what must’ve been underground power lines.
Over the course of the drive, Major Musa had explained this particular village supplied a number of workers to Lebanon’s high-tech industry sprouting in the directorate’s capital of Nabatieh, specifically Sadel Tech, a company owned and operated by an offshoot of this particular Bedouin tribe based in Israel. The company’s location required residents to take a pair of buses on a circuitous ninety-minute drive both ways every day. The irony being that Abu Siddar lacked sufficient electricity at night to power either the small satellite dishes or the laptops on which residents brought home their work. A pair of propane-fueled generators alleviated the resulting strain somewhat, while the village remained otherwise suspended between the past and the present, even as it fought to claw its way toward the future.
Their convoy was passed through a hastily erected checkpoint manned by more Lebanese soldiers and motored on toward Abu Siddar where, much to Vicky’s surprise, they were met by a woman.
“Rabaa al-Hawashleh,” she greeted, extending a hand toward Vicky first, as if seeing them as kindred spirits.
Vicky recalled Bedouin society as being both tribal and patriarchal, but al-Hawashleh had apparently inherited her position of sheikh from her late father.
“Dr. Victoria Tanoury.”
“You’re from the WHO? An American with a Lebanese name?”
“We are, and I am, yes.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place. Follow me.”
* * *
They walked under the protective umbrella of Musa and a hefty complement of his troops, steering toward a freestanding structure set off by itself and marked with the familiar symbol of the Red Cross over the door. The Israeli officer who called himself Raviv remained behind, still having not uttered a single word to either Vicky or Van Royce.
A pair of Lebanese soldiers, assault rifles shouldered over full hazmat gear, stood guard on either side of the clinic entrance.
“We were told someone who fled a former bio-weapons facility found his way here,” Vicky said, her voice crackling slightly.
“El al-Lacosh, as we call it,” al-Hawashleh told her. “We were able to ascertain that from the security badge he was still wearing from the private concern he was supposedly working for.”
“Supposedly?”
“Our government has since contacted this research and development’s concern home office. Apparently, they know nothing of its existence and claim the government was the victim of some sort of ruse. And the subject in question didn’t find his way here,” al-Hawashleh corrected. “We found him in the desert a few miles away.”
“Back in America, I was practically raised by a Lebanese woman,” Vicky told her, “so I speak Arabic quite well. But the phrase El al-Lacosh, that’s one I’m unfamiliar with.”
“That because it’s an old, colloquial term, Doctor,” al-Hawashleh told her. “Roughly translated, it means ‘the house of evil.’”
* * *
During daylight hours, the village maintained sufficient electricity to fully power the clinic currently being guarded by the Lebanese soldiers wearing biohazard suits. Inside, Vicky and Van Royce pulled similar garb up over their clothes and tested their respirators.
“Right this way,” al-Hawashleh said stiffly, having pulled biohazard gear over her clothes as well.
“You’re a doctor?”
“You sound surprised. What I trust won’t surprise you is what you’re about to see, given your familiarity with the infection’s symptoms.”
Her words aimed toward Vicky, as she ushered them down a hall sheathed in clear plastic toward a single examination room.
“As I mentioned, we know he came from the pharmaceutical facility to the south because he was still wearing his ID badge. He was already showing symptoms then, and the infection has progressed steadily since, his symptoms worsening in a pattern and extreme that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or studied before,” al-Hawashleh said, passing the badge in question from her glove to Vicky’s.
“Gunther Brune,” Vicky recited, reading off the laminated tag that featured a young face with thick hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “Have you been able to speak to him?”
Al-Hawashleh pulled back another sheet of dangling plastic draped over the door. “It’s better that you see for yourself,” she said, and pushed the door open.
* * *
beep … beep … beep …
Vicky heard the steady whir and wheeze of the various machines to which Gunther Brune was hooked up, as she approached the bed. The patient was covered up to his neck by a pair of sheets sandwiching a thin blanket, leaving only his head exposed.
She heard her own breath picking up inside her helmet. Brune’s thick hair and beard were gone; so were his eyebrows. The shading of his skin was eerily akin to the patient she’d examined in the Jordanian village three days before; a dull, grayish ash color. Whereas the gray tones of that patient’s skin had been mixed with pale patches of flesh, though, Brune’s entire face looked coated in ash segmented into jagged, irregular patches separated by what looked liked stitching dug into the skin. His eyes were mere slits, unseeing by all accounts through pools of what looked like spilled black paint, showing nothing of the whites or what passed for pupils whatsoever.
Vicky checked the readouts on the monitoring machines, figuring such advanced equipment must’ve been provided by one of the many humanitarian aid charities familiar to the region. She blinked rapidly and swabbed a sleeve across her facemask to make sure she was seeing the readouts right, because they were … blank. Reading all zeroes, as if Gunther Brune was already dead.
“His flesh has become too rigid and coarse for the leads to penetrate,” al-Hawashleh explained.
Vicky had a strong sense of what awaited her examination before she touched the fingertips of her right hazmat glove to the ash-toned flesh. It was hard and rigid to the touch, no give or depression at all when she pressed. More like touching bone than skin.
Or stone. That’s what Vicky thought in that moment. Stone. As if that’s what the German’s skin was turning into.
“Medusa,” she heard Van Royce say through the microphone built into her helmet.
She looked his way.
“The Gorgon,” Van Royce continued, “monster from Greek mythology punished for neglecting her vows of celibacy when she married Poseidon. Her punishment was a head of snakes and eyes that turned anyone who looked at her to stone. Medusa,” he repeated, moving up closer to Brune on the other side of the bed. “If I didn’t know better…”
“We don’t know anythi
ng,” Vicky said and looked back toward al-Hawashleh. “I want to take flesh and blood samples from beneath this hardened shell.”
Al-Hawashleh reached back to a wheeled tray and trapped a thick, knobby syringe between her gloved fingers. “Ten-gauge, thickest we have on hand.”
Before taking it from her, she started to gently ease back the bedcovers. In that moment, she thought the liquid slits Gunther Brune had left for eyes shifted a bit, giving her the sense he was following her motions.
A trick of the light, that’s what it had to be, Vicky thought, but the condition of his mouth was anything but that. His lips were gone, or had receded in place of a gaping mouth squeezed so full of teeth, no exposed gums were visible either. The teeth were of varying sizes, the largest seeming to pulse, leading Vicky to recall the fresh set of teeth that was emerging in the Jordanian patient’s mouth.
Vicky forced herself to stop regarding them and folded the covers back further to expose Brune’s arms and torso. Found them utterly bare, the flesh having hardened to the same shell-like consistency of his face. The pattern his hardened, ash-colored flesh had divided itself into reminded Vicky of a jigsaw puzzle with evident seams left between the fit-together pieces. His chest rose and fell slightly in rhythm with his splotchy, irregular breathing that came in fits and starts as if retarded by the excess weight of the chest cavity.
She approximated the position of the vein where the bend between his forearm and elbow should have been, and took the ten-gauge syringe in her grasp. Easing the needle inward with pressure on the plunger.
Brune’s eyes shifted again, narrowing into even tighter slits, seeming to scold her; she was certain of it this time.
Vicky gave the plunger a bit more pressure and the ten-gauge needle snapped, broke off, and rattled against the floor surface.
“We brought in a portable MRI scanner,” al-Hawashleh reported, “but it couldn’t penetrate the increased hardening condition of his flesh.”
Vicky was familiar with several diseases, most notably the autoimmune condition scleroderma, known to cause hardening of the skin as well as internal organs. But even at its most advanced stages, neither that, nor any other known infection, microbe, virus, bacteria, or autoimmune response, had ever been known to produce symptoms this extreme.
