Deadly Genes td-117

by Warren Murphy

  That Chiun would wrap the injured area told Remo all he needed to know about the seriousness of the damage. Neither man said a word as the Master of Sinanju applied the last pieces of tape.

  "These wounds run deep in several places," Chiun said softly once he was done. "We must return home at once so that I might apply the proper balms."

  Remo nodded, climbing obediently down from the desk. "Just let me check one thing," he said.

  "Let others check." The aged Korean waved. He took Remo by the arm.

  "Chiun, I want to see what was so important to her. It'll only take a minute." There was urgency to his tone.

  The Master of Sinanju's grip was firm. With a troubled scowl, he released Remo's arm.

  "And I will get a mop to clean up behind you. Be quick about it," he pressed unhappily.

  They went back to Judith White's office.

  The computer was still on. Remo saw several floppy disks on the floor near her chair mat. They'd been dropped haphazardly to the rug.

  Remo glanced at the text on the monitor. There wasn't much there he recognized. There were some chemical formulations, only two of which he remembered from high-school chemistry. The rest was gibberish.

  Endless lines of letters on a pop-up window were separated by endless lines of dashes. He couldn't make head nor tail of that part of the screen.

  Remo was about to turn away when something at the top of one of the files caught his eye.

  It was a name. It had been used to label the last file that Judith White had pulled up from her hard drive.

  Remo was already light-headed from loss of blood. For a moment, he wasn't sure whether he was in worse shape than he thought. He might have become delusional without even realizing it.

  "Chiun," he called, voice hollow. "Take a look at this." He was staring at the screen.

  Face tight, the Master of Sinanju joined him behind Judith's desk. "What is it?" he asked impatiently.

  Remo's good arm reached out to the screen. His index finger extended to the glass.

  "What does that say?" he asked.

  Chiun's eyes narrowed as he scanned the line. No sooner had the words registered along his optic nerve than his eyes grew wide once more. And in their hazel depths was something almost bordering on fear.

  "How can this be?" he hissed. His face looked as if the lab computer were home to some manner of electronic ghost.

  Remo was lost for an explanation. He shook his head woodenly as he looked down at the screen. He read the words again, hoping they had changed. They had not.

  The name on the top of the computer file read simply, "Sheila Feinberg, BGSBS78."

  And a terror that he had thought long buried resurfaced in the cold, barren center of Remo Williams's soul.

  THEY WOULD BE FOLLOWING HER. If not Remo, others of his species.

  She'd been careless. In spite of her best efforts to quell her base urges, she had given herself away. Judith White tried not to make the same mistake as she zipped quickly along Beacon Street. She forced herself to drive the speed limit. Although every animal instinct within her screamed "Run," she resisted the impulse to pound the gas pedal to the floor. She didn't want to attract the attention of the local police.

  There were hunters everywhere.

  It was funny. She had seen them many times over the years-in real life, on TV-yet they'd never caused her such visceral dread before. Trucks drove rapidly past her, offering fleeting flashes of bright orange.

  At the moment, the men in khaki thought they were searching for her BBQs. She would be safe. Safe until word got out that it had been her all along.

  They would come after her then. She'd have no problem dealing with a few. She had done that before. But she couldn't possibly handle so many. Humanity would not take kindly to a new, superior species rising up in its midst.

  Drive slowly. Not too fast.

  She'd been like this for months. Her first meals had been indigents and whores. People decent society wouldn't miss. Their bodies were buried in the soft dirt floor basement of a warehouse off Eastern Avenue in Chelsea.

  So many bodies. So many she didn't really know how many there were. Nor did she care. They were only humans after all. Inferior to her in nearly every way. The only concern she'd ever felt as far as that other species was concerned was the fear of being discovered.

  Had it been this way for the first in her species? Judith White had mulled that question many times over the past few months. For though she was the first in many years, she was not the first ever.

  Dr. Sheila Feinberg, late of the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences, had actually been the first. It was the Feinberg Method that Judith had employed to achieve the state of perfection she now enjoyed.

  Dr. Feinberg's case had been accidental. She had been a mousy little scientist, a Goody Two-shoes who had never been involved in anything vile or depraved. When she had ingested tiger DNA as proof that it was not harmful to a doubting audience, she'd never anticipated that the chemical reaction between her saliva, the DNA itself and the packing gel around the test tube would cause a change. Judith knew. She had gone into her experiments with both eyes wide open. She wanted the result she had gotten. Craved it.

  But although she wanted the result of the experiments, she had not necessarily counted on this particular outcome.

  A car came straight toward her. Judith snapped from her reverie, cutting her wheel sharply, swerving back into her own lane.

  The driver of the other car leaned on his horn as he sped past her, flinging out his middle finger as the vehicles nearly collided.

  Concentrate, concentrate.

  She drove out of the city. Out toward I-90. Although technically the first of mankind to change, Sheila Feinberg shouldn't have really counted as the first. She couldn't anticipate nor could she control what she had become. And she would have changed back eventually.

  An accident. All just a stupid accident. Accident!

  On the highway now, Judith swerved again. She pulled away from the rear bumper of the car ahead of her at the last possible moment.

  Think! Think! She fought to stay in the right lane. The effects were temporary in the first experiment. An instability on the microcellular level. Unlike her hapless predecessor, Judith had found a way to stabilize the receptor strands of DNA to eliminate rejection. Using a simple form of bacteria-which was perhaps the first form of life ever to evolve on Earth Judith had piggybacked the new genetic programming onto the old. In this way, the new DNA-bacteria hybrid was able to rewrite the original codes. And unlike Sheila Feinberg, Judith White hadn't settled for mere tiger genes. Although she did largely use them in the earliest stages of her experimentation, she was more than that now.

  Much more.

  Lights flashing behind her. A state police cruiser. For a moment, she wrestled with the notion of trying to outrun it.

  Rational thought fought back irrational desire. To flee would invite more cruisers. They would empty the nearest state police barracks for the high-speed chase. They would catch her eventually. Too many of them then. Better to stop now. Only one officer to deal with. Two at most.

  Judith steered the car into the breakdown lane. The cruiser tucked in neatly behind her.

  Traffic whizzed by, seemingly at lightning speed. Taillights glowed as the speeding Massachusetts drivers continued the three-mile-long slowdown that began whenever a state police cruiser was spotted.

  For a moment, Judith wrestled with the idea of trying to charm her way through, accept the ticket and go on.

  The cop stayed in his car. It seemed to take forever.

  Did he know? Had Remo alerted them already? Judith licked her lips in nervous anticipation. The officer was talking on his car radio. She could see him clearly in her rearview mirror.

  Was he receiving instructions? Waiting for backup?

  Judith glanced to her right. A brush-covered hill rose beyond the passenger's-side window. At the top was a thick growth of trees.

&
nbsp; Safety. The trees were a haven. The cruiser, the trooper, his fellow officers-if they came-they were a danger. They would do her harm.

  A steady hand reached for the keys dangling from the steering column. Judith switched off the idling engine.

  The officer seemed to take this as a signal. He got slowly out of his own car. Lights flashed around him as he made his way up to Judith's car. As he walked, he hitched up his belt with practiced arrogance.

  His beefy red face was unreadable as he stepped up beside her window.

  "Good morning, ma'am," the state policeman said.

  They were his last words.

  A hand lashed out through the open window, clamping roughly around the lower part of the man's thick neck. Eyes bulged at the sudden, intense pressure.

  The officer scrabbled for his gun. Too late.

  The other hand was out, grabbing at his jaw, forcing it upward. The wide area from Adam's apple to chin was exposed. Into this opening lunged Judith White, fangs bared.

  Growling low, she latched on to a huge portion of flesh. With a jerk of her head, she wrenched it loose. Most of his throat was pulled free of his neck. Part of his tongue was dragged down from his mouth.

  Judith forced her hands into both sides of the opening, ripping outward as if tearing at a giftwrapped package. The trooper's neck burst apart. Blood dripped inside the opening like a trickling waterfall at the back of a damp cave.

  The officer staggered back, gun long forgotten. He fumbled at his throat, feeling only an enormous wet hollow where it had once been.

  As he dropped, Judith sprang from the car. Strong hands wrapped around the remains of the man's neck. Judith twisted savagely. Through the opening, she could see the white spine crack. The man grew limp.

  Finishing him off was not a bow to compassion. If the man was alive when backup came, he could in his dying moments point out the direction she'd gone.

  She only realized how far her rational mind had gone when she glanced up. The faces of passing motorists were utterly horrified.

  They saw her. Clearly.

  Think, think! It was as if she had to force her mind to do what had always come naturally to her. She was now making the same demands of herself her parents had made so many years before.

  Judith quickly pulled the keys from the ignition. There was no fumbling. Just rapid, concise movements.

  Racing to the rear of the vehicle, she popped the trunk. She gathered several large black cases into her arms.

  They might not be enough. But they were all she had.

  Leaving the dead state trooper and sickened passersby behind her, Judith loped up the grassy roadside hill.

  A moment later, she vanished into the dense woods.

  "SHEILA FEINBERG?" Smith asked, his lemony voice bordering on squeezed incredulity. "Are you certain?"

  "Smitty, I can read," Remo replied aridly.

  "Tell me what it says precisely on the computer screen," Smith instructed. "But please do not touch anything."

  They both knew that Remo was not particularly skilled when it came to dealing with machines. Although Smith knew it was logically impossible to destroy all information on a computer by pressing a single button, he would never put it past Remo to find such a doomsday switch.

  "The top one of those little separate box things-you know, the ones with the little box in the upper left corner?"

  "The window," Smith explained.

  "Yeah, that," Remo said. "It's just full of letters and dashes. G dash C G dash G T dash A. C dash G. It looks like it goes on like that forever."

  "It has," Smith said somberly. "At least since life began on Earth. That sounds like a base pairing sequence in a double helix."

  "That's DNA, right?" Remo asked.

  "Yes," Smith said, concerned. "Two polynucleotide chains are twisted into a coil to form the helix. A common representation would be a spiral staircase, with each rung holding the genetic information for a single base pair."

  "The letters and the dashes," Remo offered.

  "Precisely," Smith said. "Remo, this is not unusual in and of itself. Any genetics laboratory would have this sort of information on hand."

  "Top flap of the file," Remo said, reading off the screen. "Sheila Feinberg, BGSBS78. I'll bet you a duck dinner not everyone has that on hand."

  "Seventy-eight," Smith repeated slowly. "Obviously that indicates the year of the accident concerning Dr. Feinberg."

  "Accident?" Remo mocked. "Smitty, in case you forgot, Sheila Feinberg turned herself and a dozen other people into half-human-half-tiger mutants, she and her pride ran through Boston chewing up half the town and she capped off kitty's night out by kidnapping me and trying to turn me into her personal stud in order to create some new generation of ueber-mutant. Accident is to Sheila Feinberg what sobriety was to Dean Martin."

  Remo's voice rose in intensity as he ran through the litany of offenses Sheila Feinberg had committed against both the natural order and against him personally. For Smith, noticeably absent from Remo's list was the fact that Dr. Feinberg had nearly killed him in her initial attack.

  Remo hadn't suspected a thing when she cornered him in a car in Boston. His stomach had been ripped open and its contents nearly removed. Only Chiun's expert ministrations had saved his life. But even with the Master of Sinanju's aid, Remo's body had gone into shock after the incident. He had completely lost his Sinanju skills. They had resurfaced barely in time to save his life.

  Afterward, it had taken Remo many long months to fully recover from his physical wounds. Smith hoped that the psychological ones were healed, as well.

  "Remo," the CURE director said evenly. "It was not my intention to diminish the significance of those events. We all went through a lot back then."

  "Yeah, I know," Remo sighed, his voice softening. "This whole thing's put me on edge."

  "That is not surprising," Smith said. "Given the fact that Dr. Feinberg's name has turned up after all this time." Smith allowed a thoughtful hum. "Let me check something," he announced all at once.

  There followed several minutes of rapid typing. Remo stood behind Judith White's desk the entire time. At the office door, the Master of Sinanju stood at attention, a watchful sentry.

  Chiun was guarding Remo against attack. The thought that this tiny figure-charged with frail determination-would place himself in the path of a perceived danger swelled Remo's heart.

  In spite of the dull ache in his shoulder, Remo felt a little better by the time Smith returned to the phone.

  "There is a link," Smith exhaled. It was obvious from his tone that he hoped he wouldn't find one. "After the incident with Sheila Feinberg, the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences was sold at auction. Thanks to Feinberg, for much less than it was worth. It became a teaching institution for a time until it was bought up by a fledgling genetics firm in the mid-1980s. It has followed a circuitous path since then, but suffice it to say that the current company of BostonBio is the owner of all that once was BGSBS."

  "That would include the Feinberg info?" Remo said.

  "Assuming it was not destroyed, yes," Smith replied.

  "I guarantee you it wasn't destroyed."

  Smith was never one to shrink from cold facts. Although he had wished it weren't so, it appeared as if the experiments of years before had resurfaced once again.

  "It all begins to make sense now," Smith admitted.

  "You're casting a pretty broad definitional net to say that any of this makes sense, Smitty," Remo replied.

  "Remo, where did you last see Dr. White?" Smith pressed.

  "Jumping out a three-story window," he answered dryly. "But Chiun saw her driving out of the lot here about twenty minutes ago. I assume it was her own car."

  "I will put out an APB to the local and state police," Smith said.

  "Tell them to arm themselves with bear traps and elephant guns," Remo warned him. "She's strong as an ox and quick as a cobra."

  "I will alert them to use extreme cauti
on," Smith said. "In the meantime, I will dispatch an FBI team to BostonBio to see if anything can be learned from the remaining files. There is nothing more you can do there. If she turns up anywhere, I will call you at home."

  "Yeah, we'd better get going. Chiun's itching to whip up some ancient Korean poultice for me. Probably bat dung mixed with mouse spit."

  "Why?" Smith said. The light dawned even as he asked the question. "You weren't injured?"

  "It's nothing, Smitty," Remo assured him wearily. "Flesh wound. She took me by surprise. I just need a little time to mend, that's all. Call me if you hear anything."

  Before Smith could press further, Remo hung up the phone. As he did so, Chiun turned around, face impassive.

  "You are not as well as you have led Smith to believe," he said seriously.

  "I feel fine," Remo dismissed. "And I don't need two Henny Pennys getting all worked up over nothing."

  Chiun didn't argue. At the moment, he was more concerned with getting Remo back home.

  As if leading a lost child, he took Remo by the wrist. Walking carefully, he escorted his pupil to the lab door.

  The proof to both men that Remo was not as well as he boasted was that he allowed Chiun to guide him.

  Chapter 24

  Two more bodies turned up over the next two days. One in Waltham, west of Boston, the other in Lexington.

  By this point, it was no longer a mystery who was really to blame for the previous victims. The BBQs were exonerated. The police were now searching for Dr. Judith White.

  BostonBio's history was exhumed and dissected by a slavering press. BGSBS might have been a different corporate entity, but the genetics firm was up to the same horrid business as its predecessor.

  State, federal and local agencies, along with families of Judith White's victims, filed lawsuits against BostonBio. The company's stock plummeted. Because of the dreadful events swirling around the now discredited BBQ project, BostonBio had taken a giant leap toward bankruptcy.

  And through all of the tumult and acrimonious public debate, Judith White continued to elude authorities.

  Day had bled into night once more, and in his office at Folcroft Sanitarium, a weary Harold Smith fruitlessly scanned the latest news digests as they came in.