Yuri’s hands plucked and clawed at him with no more effectiveness than paper fists. Their flutterings delighted Terry, and a triumphant snarl emerged from a dark, primitive recess that he’d never tapped before. He drove toward an unknown climax, blind to everything but an urgency to reach some end point, perhaps feel the structures of the neck implode into fragments, or life drain from the struggling body beneath him. He didn’t think this out, rather intuited it, the way a predator feels exhilaration as its jaws open for the kill.
Suddenly his own head was yanked backward by the hair, and the cold muzzle of a silver-plated pistol rammed into the hollow under his mandible. “Drop him!” the previously missing driver screamed into his ear.
Terry’s rush to finish off his prey shattered in an instant. He recoiled from the maroon, bloated features of Yuri’s face, repelling himself away from them as much as letting the driver pull him off. Nor did he resist when his captor shoved him face down in the snow and pinned him with a knee between the shoulder blades. Spitting out the particles of ice rammed into his mouth, he strained to watch Yuri. He had flopped face-up on the ground and, cradling his throat, struggled to breathe. Each respiration emitted a sickening rasp. Gradually the hideous sounds subsided, his color returned to normal, and he struggled to his feet.
He walked over to where Terry lay, grabbed his hand, and ripped off the glove. “Spread your fingers!” he said, sliding the sleeve of the snow suit half way up Terry’s forearm.
Terry felt a surge of defiance. “Fuck you!”
“Spread them, Ryder,” the man repeated, his voice startlingly soft.
Terry dropped his face back into the cold snow, and again the rage drained away, this time sucked out of him by the unexpected gentleness of Yuri’s tone. He felt quivery inside, as emptied of all his strength as if he’d just run a marathon. Not that he hadn’t been in a fight before. After spending half his life entering the most remote zones on the planet, it went with the turf that some local war lord had challenged him a time or two. But he usually fought reluctantly, calculated his moves with cold logic, not anger, and drew first blood only when necessary. Tonight he’d been glutted with a new appetite that went beyond winning--a lust for the slaughter itself. Even the aftertaste of it horrified him.
Gingerly he held out his hand, fingers spread, and stared at it.
The driver fetched a small headlamp from the carryall of his machine and switched it on.
Snowflakes burned Terry’s skin as they touched down and caught among the tiny hairs standing erect on his flesh. Melting into a minute arabesque of water, the droplets reflected pinpoints of light, their shimmer the result of an ever so slight but undeniable tremor.
Chapter 28
That same hour, Thursday, January 29, 2009, 4:05 A.M. MST
Wey Chen gripped the steering wheel, driving fast and fighting the pull of half-foot drifts that snaked across the road.
Her pock-cheeked passenger raised the muzzle of his gun to her temple.
Ignoring him, she strained forward, peering up into the night. Wind squalls obliterated visibility directly in front of her, but the light from her high beams glinted off power lines strung along either side of the highway. Staying between them kept her on course and out of the ditch.
Should a car be coming in the other direction, however, I’ll be a dead Peking duck.
If the man at her side didn’t shoot her first.
“To begin with, the American evades our trap at the airport,” he said in Cantonese. “Did someone give him a heads up, I wonder?”
Wey Chen sighed in a show of exasperation. “I came here to help you set him up--”
“Then two men escape the facility, after having sneaked in the back door to look at holograms, all before we managed to flatten the place.”
As his team had run for their vehicles just prior to the explosion, he’d heard a skidoo take off into the night and seen that there were two riders on it. She issued another sigh. “You can’t assume those two men were our targets--”
“Who other than the Russian knows how to hack into the projector, and who other than your Dr. Terry Ryder would want to see those images?”
“We probably scared off two researchers who were working late to prepare for Ryder’s visit.” Say anything, anything at all. Just create a bubble of doubt in the man’s mind and make him back off. But why had that idiot Yuri taken Ryder to the center in the first place?
“They were our targets!” He’d leaned to within an inch of her ear, and the shrillness of his voice made her wince. “So where do I look for an informant other than to you?”
“If you shoot me, our superiors will feed you a bowl of rice and a bullet--”
He cocked the pistol. The click sounded as loud as if her skull had cracked open. “Let’s see. Do I suspect one of my own men? Agents I’ve trusted with my life for years?” His voice grew increasingly louder, the way of all control freaks when you challenge their authority. “Or do I go after an outsider thrust into our group barely twelve hours ago, one who’s had personal dealings with both targets, and who knows how to contact them.”
She steered with one hand, and reached into her coat pocket with the other.
“Freeze!” He grabbed her wrist.
“Even in Cantonese, you sound like an American cop,” she said, and managed to pull out her phone despite his strong grip. “See? No gun.”
He released her arm.
She pressed DIAL. It was still keyed to call the number that she’d entered in the holograph theater. When telling a lie, always begin with the truth, her masters had taught her. “The facility is blown, along with all connections to our labs,” she said the second her director picked up. “But these incompetents you call agents missed both targets, and are blaming me, especially pock-face. Rein him in. I haven’t time for such nonsense.” Then she shoved the instrument at her interrogator. “Check the evidence,” she said. “Ask our chief how the FBI is reporting my work in Maine.”
The craters on his face flushed more scarlet than the rest of his skin, and in the dim glow of the dash lights he looked speckled, like some exotic lizard.
He snatched the phone from her, and rattled off that very question.
The muzzle of the gun lowered as he listened to the reply.
She thought of the man on the other end of the line. Always so proper, that one, belt buckle and buttons polished, even when discussing murder. But his cologne never could mask the sour odor of his sweat and perpetual fear. He suddenly seemed a pathetically small tyrant in a giant machine of control freaks, power-junkies, and torturers. Soon she would bring the whole churning, conniving monstrosity down and snag them all in its works. The uniform that he fussed over with such coquettish pride wouldn’t help him then.
“Well?” she demanded when pock-face stiffly thanked his master and flipped the phone closed.
He’d retreated into a stony silence.
“What’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation saying, according to our very own informants,” she pressed.
He gritted his teeth rather than admit the answer.
The grinding noise of enamel against gold set her on edge. “I’m waiting.”
“Okay! They’re already calling it the Wells Beach massacre. Eight of our agents dead, all shot. Two in their cars, two in a boat, and four in front of the house where the target was hiding. But all because a lone woman protecting her brat had time to fight before you finally gunned her down. What took so long--”
“What else is the FBI saying?” She hurled the question at him, intent on maximum intimidation. But he and his bunch were battle-hardened killers, not as naive or easy to intimidate as the ones sent to Wells Beach.
He turned sullen. “Again, the same as you.”
“Which is?” She wasn’t letting him off the hook.
He swallowed, completely cowed, the barrel of his gun having drifted down to point at her foot. “That the target had been wounded, because they found pools of her blood in the
house, along with remnants of gauze and bandages she’d used to patch herself up. And that the trail of blood then led to the edge of the mud flats, into the water.
“And what is the significance of that particular site?”
He swallowed again. “It’s exactly where you said you shot her and the girl.”
“And what did the FBI conclude?”
Another swallow. “Their bodies sank in the bog.”
“So we’re okay, you and me?”
“Yes,” he mumbled, the gun now pointing at his own foot.
“Pardon?” Give him that final don’t-ever-fuck-with-me-again thrust.
“Yes. We’re okay.”
“And you believe me now when I say that the two rookies on my team turned tail when the shooting started?”
“Yes!” He’d begun to sound impatient.
She drove in silence. Mustn’t push him too far.
He slumped back in the seat and fell into a deep sulk, his hatred of her curdling the air between them.
Her mind flashed on two boys as they knelt at the end of a pier, and a smell of brine tainted with fish rot wafted up from the mud flats below, the stink filling her nostrils. In an instant she was ripped from the winter night and forced to once more stand over them, staring down at their upturned, youthful faces. Both pleaded for mercy and held their hands out to her, beseeching that she spare their lives. So recently had those fingers left the plow handle and turned to the gun that calluses were still visible on their palmer surface. She’d initially chosen them to help her because they ought to have been the most compliant and gullible. But then they too grew suspicious.
She gripped the wheel of the car all the harder, digging her nails into the flesh of her own palms, until pain pulled her out of the flashback, returning her to the storm and a blind drive into a white oblivion. She wished one of the approaching fire trucks would loom out of the flurries and finish her.
But she couldn’t afford the luxury.
A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed no headlights, just a chalky wake of swirling snow. Little comfort. If his henchmen were about to descend on her, she’d not see them in this whiteout until they were on her bumper. With so many of them having fanned out on different roads, all trying to intercept the skidoo, they might have succeeded. If Yuri’s in the clutches of that bunch--
She shut down her racing doubts.
Stay focused and carry out the plan. Jade’s life was at stake.
Her nostrils filled with a new odor, one of human rot. In front of her appeared the expressionless, wrinkled face of the old lady, ghost of her first kill. Its flesh hung flaccid from protruding cheek bones, and the head nodded at her like a malevolent dash ornament. Except by now, after many visits over the years, the fire of those black eyes seared all the way into Wey Chen’s soul.
* * * *
Yuri and his driver crouched between their two skidoos, using them as a windbreak. They’d produced a tiny camp stove from one of the carryalls, and were nursing a pot of melted snow to a boil. The glow to the south pulsed as ferociously as ever, despite the chorus of sirens that had shrieked toward it over a half hour ago. Snow squalls made it impossible to see ten feet in every other direction. With their tracks covered, he had insisted it best to stay put.
Terry paced to and fro, wearing a path in the snow as he talked by cell phone with select members of his team.
“No tricks, Ryder,” Yuri had warned, “and stay in earshot. I prefer you alive, but one word about me being here or any attempt to have your friends trace our location, I will kill you.” His dazzling smile, cast in the glow of a circular blue flame from the stove, clashed with the quiet menace in his voice.
When it came to the issue of evading capture, Terry took him at his word and limited the conversation strictly to scientific matters. “As for human trials, if we can find volunteers, I’d first go with immunosuppressants--prednisone, anti-rejection drugs, anything to dampen down the antibody response and stop the collateral damage. Even radiation therapy. The report out of Honolulu is that radiation sickness has actually halted the advance of tremors in some victims . . .”
He’d called there first, to confirm what he’d already figured must be the case, and astonished colleagues on the wards by predicting what they were just beginning to observe. The hope in Carla’s voice as she described how the numbness and shaking in her arms hadn’t progressed over the last thirty-six hours was a miracle in itself. “You were an annoying nag, Ryder, but so right not to let me give up,” she said, sounding practically buoyant. “But I’m damned tired of kneeling before the porcelain goddess.”
“Nag? Little ol’ me?” he’d replied, not about to say anything that would dampen her rising spirits. In his mind’s eye, however, he saw the white worms swell and the destruction of her brain resume, once the effects of radiation wore off.
“I want you in my arms, soonest!” she’d added, and hung up.
The naysayers of his team were already jumping into the discussion, tumbling over each other to troubleshoot the idea of using immunosuppression.
“What if the causative organism is still on board?”
“The benefits will only be temporary if it keeps reprogramming the host’s DNA.”
“And with decreased immunity, soon that microbe will sweep through the victims, unchecked . . .”
While they talked, Terry summoned all his powers of concentration not to imagine claspers, tentacles, and blobs coiling their way through his own brain. They’re not worms, he kept telling himself. They’re not even alive.
But how are you going to get rid of them, his inner skeptic fired back. Pick out the boogers with a pair of micro-tweezers?
“I didn’t see any microbes,” he said, zeroing back in on the conversation at hand. “Even if they’re there, immunosuppression will buy time to find the right anti-microbials. I suggest we also get to work and isolate the altered host DNA that produces the rogue proteins, then design drugs to shut it down. At least we’d stop the process where it stands.”
“That could take months, even years, Terry. Look at the hunt for similar drugs against AIDS.”
“Enough with the negatives! Has anybody got a better suggestion?”
That silenced them.
He hung up.
Yuri shook his head. “Sure you should even be making those kinds of judgment calls, Ryder?”
Terry stiffened. He’d been asking himself that same question.
“Rage, flying off on tangents--it’s a recipe for disaster, ” Yuri added.
You got that right, Terry thought, but wasn’t about to defend his actions to the likes of Yuri. “Your point?”
Yuri shrugged. “Nothing much. Just that there’s millions of others out there hiding their nascent infections, from world leaders to people who work with lug wrenches, all covering up little slips. Think of it--everyone with a finger on a switch, button, or trigger and liable to give the wrong order, say the wrong word, insult the wrong despot, derail a train, even launch a war. But hey, so what if you send the world to its destruction piecemeal, one mistake at a time--”
“Suck rocks!”
“You’re thinking the wrong movie, Ryder.”
“What the hell are you talking about--”
“SHAKES! I’m listening to your end of the conversation with those high-powered buddies of yours, and it hits me. You’re thinking the wrong movie.”
Terry knelt beside him. “Movie?”
Yuri dumped a small packet of tea leaves into the roiling water and eyed him with that smug, know-it-all smile of his. “Maybe this isn’t about some unknown, totally new organism, like in Andromeda Strain, or Outbreak.
“I’ll break your nose if you don’t start making sense.”
Yuri scowled, and absently touched his neck. “Hey, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep twelve moves ahead on this one--”
“Oh, brother--”
“Twelve moves ahead--that’s how Anna described you--a real hot shot at seeing
microbes and figuring out disease patterns. ‘Always twelve moves ahead in out-thinking the competition,’ she’d put it. Well, I guess she oversold your skills--”
“Yuri, I’m in no mood for a pissing contest--”
“Think Awakenings, hot shot. Robin Williams plays Oliver Sachs, and Robert De Niro is the patient.”
Terry remembered. It had been a schmaltzy film about people who fell into a coma between 1915 and 1926 during a mysterious epidemic of what came to be named encephalitis lethargica. No cases like it had ever occurred before, nor did a similar outbreak appear since. Decades later, in the late sixties, Dr. Oliver Sachs, a clinical researcher at the time, recognized the frozen, immobile posture of such patients for an extreme state of parkinsonian rigidity, and brought them out of it, a least temporarily, by administering dopamine, the treatment of choice for Parkinson’s Disease. However, even today, no one knew for certain what had caused the original condition. Some scientists suggested it may have been a delayed autoimmune response to a previous infectious agent, given that many of the victims had become symptomatic about a year after having survived some bug or other--scarlet fever, diphtheria, even the Spanish flu. But no clear relationship to any one organism could ever be established. “Go on,” Terry said, wary, yet intrigued. At the same time his impatience with Yuri brimmed near the flash point.
“Sure, but try to keep up. In the 1920s, long before electron microscopes, scientists had no idea how an infection, such as influenza from a year earlier, could produce such a delayed, yet devastating response. Even Sachs couldn’t figure a mechanism to explain the destruction of the brain’s capacity to make dopamine. Seeing those white protein deposits tonight made me wonder if it might not have been something like them . . .”
The Darkness Drops Page 37
