Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  “But—“

  “Listen to me,” he told her, his voice gaining some urgency. “We do not have much time. You need to tell me your name and who sent you here.” He nodded at the microscope, and his eye caught on the bone shard. “You brought that girl back here for a reason. Why? Tell me what you know. What do you think’s going on here?”

  “Why should I tell you?” Angel snapped. “Why should I believe a word you’re saying? I don’t even know who you are! And I still don’t believe you didn’t kill those people. I saw it with my own eyes! You’re just saying that to trick me into trusting you.”

  “You do need to trust me.” He inhaled deeply and frowned. “I don’t work for the people who run this factory, the ones who killed their employees and ordered the others dead. I did what I could to save the villagers. Now, you can either choose to believe me or not, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other because you will tell me what you know.” He gestured at the door behind him. “If you wish to save your life and hers, if you want to save a lot more lives than just your own, then, please, tell me who sent you here and why.”

  Angel blinked numbly at him for a moment before it sunk in. He was asking for her help, begging for it.

  Or, maybe, another voice inside her head warned, that’s just what he wants you to believe.

  Chapter Forty Five

  ”What I’m about to tell you,” he said, sweeping around the corner of the bench, “is off the record.”

  “Off the record?” She stared warily at his hands as he approached, afraid that he was going to strike her. She didn’t like how unreadable his face was.

  “You’re a reporter, right? Then you know what that means.” He waited until she nodded before continuing. “So you also know that means you agree you can’t publish any part of this conversation or any of the details. Not . . . yet, anyway. I need your word on this.”

  “And I need your word you’ll let us go.”

  “I already gave it to you.”

  “Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

  He sighed. “You can at least tell me your name, right? What news organization do you work for, and how did you know about this place?”

  She stared at him for a moment, hoping for a sign that might dispel her doubts. How could she trust him? Why should she?

  “Look, lady, I can’t tell you anything until I know who I’m talking to.”

  “That goes both ways.”

  He continued to stare at her without saying anything, and Angel knew that he had her backed into a corner. He would extract the information from her sooner or later, by force or finesse, whether he was being honest about his intentions or not. Her only hope of learning anything — even if she had no way of verifying any of it herself — would be to do as he said.

  “It’s Angel.” She shook her head and turned back to the microscope so he wouldn’t see the turmoil on her face. And because she needed time to think. “Angelique de l’Enfantine. I’m a medical investigative reporter.”

  “Yes, I guess you are,” he said after a moment.

  She pulled away from the instrument and saw that he was on his phone. He held it up next to her and nodded. “This picture they have of you on the Newsweek site doesn’t do you justice.”

  She turned back to the instrument, blushing despite herself. He was obviously trying to keep her off balance by stroking her sense of self-image. Such attempts usually had the opposite effect on her, making her question the speaker’s motives. And yet, she found herself desperately wanting to believe what he’d told her. She wanted to believe that the villagers were still alive.

  All but Jian, she reminded herself. And his death is your fault, because you made him go to Bairin Zouqi so he wasn’t in Baoyang for the evacuation.

  “You’re from France originally, Miss de l’Enfantine?”

  Missus, she silently corrected. “I-I moved to the United States after my second year at Sorbonne, transferred to Stanford. The French medical training program is much more de rigueur than America’s, but I needed to get away from—“ She stopped herself from finishing.

  “Away from what?”

  “Rien. Nothing.”

  “So, you’re a medical doctor?”

  “My parents died during the third year of my residency, and I just . . . . I couldn’t finish.” Why are you telling him all this? “I moved back to France with my husband and became a reporter instead. Freelance. I like to pick my assignments, sell my stories to whomever I choose.”

  “Husband?”

  She didn’t answer the implied question.

  “I see.”

  The vials clinked together as he picked up the plastic rack box from the benchtop. “And what is this?”

  “I don’t know. I found it in that room over there.” She pointed. “Some kind of stem cell . . . stuff. Cells maybe, or not. I don’t know exactly. Each bottle is labeled with a different tissue type: liver, heart, bone, skin—“

  She stopped herself with a gasp as she realized something. “Bone! Oh, mon dieu! I should have seen it before.”

  Fumbling for the glass slide on the microscope, she asked him if he could find some saline solution. “Look in the cabinet behind me. Quickly!”

  He did as she asked, surprising her with his willingness. “How did you know about this place?” he asked.

  She extracted an unused slide from the box and scraped some of the bone shavings onto it. “I’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn to talk. You still haven’t told me your name. Who do you work for?”

  “Not until you tell me how you knew about this operation. You were supposed to meet with the accident investigator, but the crash was never publicized. Nobody knew about it. How did you?”

  “Rumors,” she lied. “I was on another story on Huangxia Island when I heard about the train crash. I was told there might be a survivor.”

  She could hear him rummaging about behind her and wondered if he bought her deception.

  “Will this do?” he asked. He dropped a liter bag of Ringer-Locke’s solution onto the table. “There’s a whole case of it down there.”

  “Yes. Thanks. One’ll do.” The solution was meant for intravenous rehydration, but all she needed was a couple milliliters of an isotonic liquid to resuspend the dry bone shavings. She inserted a new syringe into one of the injection ports on the bag and withdrew a fresh syringeful, then added a drop to the new slide with the bone shavings and slipped it onto the microscope.

  “So, rumors, eh? Curious.” The doubt was thick in his voice. “And a train crash isn’t exactly a medical story, is it? What made you decide to investigate it?”

  “One might characterize surviving a crash as a medical miracle, no?” She tapped the microscope stage to encourage mixing.

  “Even we didn’t know about the girl. We assumed everyone had died.”

  The anger returned at the callousness in his voice. Whether or not he had actually saved the villagers, he seemed to show no remorse for what had happened to the train passengers.

  “Who are you working for?” he asked.

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m freelance.”

  “And I don’t believe you. Stories don’t just spontaneously pop into your head out of the ether. Someone had to have given you a heads up. I need to know who.”

  The Huangxia story did, she thought idly. Then drew back as she realized that someone must have sent that tweet across her Twitter feed. She’d never really wondered who it might be or why, but now it seemed glaringly obvious that she had been meant to bite on it. Had it been Cheong?

  She moved the slide around until she found a sliver, then concentrated on adjusting the focus. “Why were you sterilizing the crash site? What evidence were you removing?”

  When he didn’t answer right away, she looked up at him. “Who do you work for?” she demanded. “If not for this company, then who?”

  “I can’t tell you everything, okay? I can say, confidentially, that I work for an American
government agency investigating groups who have been linked to potential terrorist organizations and activities around the world.”

  “Terrorist?” She thought about what Cheong had said in Shanghai about groups wanting to bring about the end of the world. Was the man talking about 6X or the groups they claimed to be trying to thwart?

  What if they’re the same?

  But then again, when Angel had mentioned the Americans at the site, Cheong had seemed genuinely surprised. Did that mean he hadn’t known about them? Or had his surprise been because she had? And even if he hadn’t known, it didn’t mean 6X wasn’t part of the cover up. It was possible the group was involved in terrorist activities — perhaps even with this particular company — without Cheong’s knowledge.

  That might also explain why the video she’d sent to him hadn’t been aired. Maybe he had tried to clear it with his superiors and they had said no.

  “An American group investigating terrorism. Sounds like the CIA,” she said. It certainly seemed like that’s where he was leading her without actually stating it. “Is that who you work for, the CIA? NSA?”

  “I didn’t say that. And, no, I’m not a spy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I can say that with all honesty.”

  Angel sniffed. The man’s word still meant very little to her. And yet, she needed to give him something if she hoped to get anything in return.

  “If you’re investigating terrorism, then maybe you’re familiar with an apocalyptic group called 6X? It stands for the Sixth Extinction. They believe the world is experiencing another mass extinction event and that this one will include our own.”

  “Not familiar with them. Are they the ones who hired you?”

  The drop on the slide had turned pink from the reconstituted blood on the bone. There was a lot of debris in the field— platelets, the remnants of dead blood cells. But there were also a couple of those small dark—

  viruses, they look like giant viruses

  —objects floating around after being released from the redissolved clotted blood. They, too, were moving, though only very listlessly at first. Their presence confirmed that that the bone sample had contained them, too.

  “What’s your name?” she asked again.

  “It’s better that you don’t know it.”

  She’d half expected such an answer, but it still irritated her. She’d told him hers. Nevertheless, the detail was practically irrelevant.

  The tiny objects from the bone were beginning to awaken. She pushed the stool back and gestured for him to look.

  He hesitated, studying her face carefully before acquiescing, and once more his willingness to make himself vulnerable to her, to give her a chance to attack him or escape, struck her as odd. Maybe he’d seen something in her that convinced him she wasn’t going to do anything rash. The thought to do something had certainly crossed her mind. She could run, but then there was the man out in the hallway, and as angry as he was at her, he’d probably shoot first, then ask questions.

  “What am I looking at?” he asked. “What are those things? Are they . . . ? Wait, are they moving?”

  “Keep watching. There’s more.”

  She told him what she was doing as she placed a drop of the black solution from one of the differentiated vials to the drop on the slide. The two liquids merged. She wasn’t absolutely certain what might happen, but she had an idea, and her prediction turned out to be correct when he jerked upright a moment later.

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed. “Those things are alive!” It was the first emotion she had seen him express since his sudden arrival. “What are they? Bacteria? Holy hell! Are they infectious?”

  He wiped his hands on his pants.

  She pushed her way back in and looked for herself. The new objects had swarmed over the debris, just as she’d seen before, but now they were vibrating with such frenzy that she couldn’t even focus the objective. The difference between these and the inert ones labeled HEPATOCYTES, the ones she had looked at earlier, was that these had come from the bottle labeled OSTEOCYTES. In other words, bone instead of liver. Whatever they were doing, it had no doubt been triggered by the presence of the bone fragment.

  “Those black things I added from the bottle? I don’t know if they’re viruses or what, but I do know that some of them were already in the bone and dried blood. That means they were inside the person this bone came from before the crash.”

  “You think they were extracted out of the crash victims?”

  She held up the bottle. “I think they were being injected with them. They’re not natural, or at least not like anything natural I’ve ever seen before.”

  “That’s why they had us burn everything,” the man whispered. “Evidence of what they had done. That explains the . . . experiment.”

  “What experiment?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  Angel held up the full syringe. “This came out of the undifferentiated bottle from Jamie’s box. Plus, there were no other bottles in her box, so I don’t think she’d been injected with them yet. If this was all some kind of experiment, then she might have been some kind of negative control.”

  The man stared at her in unmasked disbelief. “I didn’t understand most of that. What do you mean she hadn’t been injected yet?”

  “When we were at the hospital, she kept saying that something got inside of her, through the wound from the bone. I didn’t . . . believe her. I thought she was a little crazy, or maybe in shock. But now I think she was right. Whatever these things are,” she said, gesturing at the box. “They got inside of her from this piece of bone. They’ve been doing something to her body.”

  “Making her sick? Is that why she’s—“

  Angel shook her head. “No. She has other problems. She needs surgery for her injuries. It’s something else, I think, something she showed me earlier today. These things are—“ She paused and shook her head. “They’re doing something to her, changing her body somehow, altering its ability to heal.”

  “Healing! That’s what Aston was talking about.”

  “Who’s Aston?”

  “Someone I’m hoping you never meet. Are they contagious?”

  “Infectious? No, I don’t think so. Maybe.” Angel abruptly stood up. She’d wasted too much time. Out in the hallway was a girl who needed medical care, and here she was chasing theories down rabbit holes. “I need to check on Jamie.”

  The man grabbed her arm to stop her, and in that moment all of the doubt flooded back in again. He had duped her into revealing everything she knew. He really was a bad man, and she’d been a fool to believe him.

  “Nobody else knows who I really am,” he told her, keeping his voice low. “That man out there is just a hired hand, meant to follow orders without asking questions. He knows I’ve been trying to get answers behind the company’s back, but that’s as far as his involvement goes. And as far as my trust in him extends, as well.”

  Angel blinked stupidly. She was relieved to hear him tell her this, but also confused that he would entrust her with this secret. And yet she still knew nothing about him or whether anything he said was true. It could all be an elaborate charade.

  She started to gather some syringes and needles. “I-I need to draw some of her blood. I want to see if they’re in there.”

  He pulled out his pistol and gestured toward the door with it. “Okay, but remember, you need to act like you’re my prisoner. It’s very important that you look plenty scared.”

  She nodded. As far as appearing frightened, looking down the barrel of his pistol, she didn’t have to act at all to make it convincing.

  Chapter Forty Six

  ”Twenty minutes, sir,” the pilot announced.

  Alvin Cheong sucked in a deep breath and stretched. His brain felt too big for his skull, and his stomach was more-than-slightly upset. He’d drunk more of the whiskey than he had a right to. One of the curses of being Asian was a genetic predisposition to intoxication caused by a polymorphism of the ALDH gene
involved in alcohol metabolism. It also made his skin flush, sometimes uncomfortably. Though he had an affinity for the taste, he abhorred the physical results, which was probably how he’d managed to avoid becoming a full-fledged alcoholic over the years.

  Nevertheless, at the moment, he was grateful for the whiskey’s inebriating effect, as it had lessened the tedium of sorting through the papers and helped shorten the duration of the flight. And as he gazed upon the neatly arranged stacks with a level of muted satisfaction, it also helped dull the disappointment he felt at gaining so little additional insight into the relationship between the woman he’d entrusted to verify his team’s suspicions and the two men to which she’d been most close as an adult. What’s more, Cheong had been unable to dig up any more information about David Eitan’s invention or the person or persons who had expressed interest in it once upon a time.

  To another man, these details might have seemed insignificant, but Alvin Cheong’s mind kept returning to them time and again.

  He knew he had only just begun to scratch the surface in his quest to understand the woman better. His team still had thousands of photographs and the encrypted files on her laptop to sift through. And his assistant in DC still hadn’t gotten back to him, which itself was a bit troubling. But then again, he tended to immerse himself so deeply into his roles that he sometimes forgot to surface as regularly as Cheong would have liked.

  The photographer persona had been one such example. Cheong had balked at the cost of the cameras DeBryan had purchased for the charade, but he’d insisted that anything cheaper and Missus de l’Enfantine would have seen right through the guise. And the boys he’d hired to rough him up on the island had been unnecessarily careless with the expensive equipment. One of the camera bodies and a lens had been damaged beyond repair. They were fifteen grand worth of junk now.

  Worthless, just like this bottle, Cheong thought, tipping the neck of the Macallan over his glass. He reconsidered, then angled the bottle away and decanted the remaining eight thousand dollars of rare amber liquid down the drain of the bar. It’s just money, after all. It’ll all be useless soon enough.