And he swiveled around and leaped from the railing.
“Call in the divers,” I shouted to the officers behind me.
I rushed up to the railing, just in time to see Stefan’s body swallowed by the blue-black waters below.
“Get the divers!” I shouted again. But I knew that bodies were rarely recovered once those currents got a hold of them, and swept them out into the ocean. Give me your tired, your hungry, your dead…
Jenna was at my side, her arm around my waist.
“There are others like him,” Amos said. “It’s hard to hate them, isn’t it, despite all the harm they have done. Now you see what we are up against—my people have been fighting them for years. I didn’t think Stefan was one of them—he was so gentle. He found me… They hold a grudge against the world itself…”
That made me think of Bonnie—likely there was no one else like Stefan out stalking today, but it still made sense to keep her protected, or as protected as anyone could be from reeds with poison bees that killed you on the spot.
I put my hand in my pocket, reaching for the phone, but I got glass instead—glass crushed into lots of little pieces, mixed with some of my blood now.
I took out my bleeding fingers.
“You OK, honey?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah, I was hoping to recover maybe a fingerprint or some DNA from this glass,” I said. “Came from Stefan’s apartment. I must have smashed it in the commotion—it’s far too contaminated for any decent DNA samples now…”
I took off my jacket, and shook the pocket over the East River.
A cloud of glass shards went down slowly, glittering in the sunlight, tinkling in the breeze like a distant flute…
And a rash of russet butterflies rose up to greet us, and proceeded to the sky.
CODA
The sun shone on the Serpentine.
“Phil. Good of you to join me.” Mallory shook my hand, then gestured to the lake. “She’s at her best in September, like England herself, wouldn’t you agree? The tourists are back home, all except the true believers. Shall we take advantage and stroll the shore?”
I nodded. “More than one good reason to be out of the office.”
Mallory grunted in agreement. “They’re yanking me out of the investigation now, just as you predicted. I’m not supposed to be working on this anymore, effective the day before yesterday.”
“You outlasted me by at least two months.”
“We do things with more deliberation here,” Mallory said, ruefully. “Precious little to work on, anyway. Dave Spencer’s DNA disintegrated into its component compounds—just a broken jumble of molecules now. The rat cells weren’t viable in the long run either. Dead ends, all.”
“Same with our samples,” I said. “The Antonescu gene hypermutated itself out of existence. Not surprising it had such a short shelf life—it wasn’t intended for rodents.”
“Barrel of murders gets your name on a non-existent gene,” Mallory said. “I guess there’s a logic in that.”
I shrugged. “The glory’s even more fleeting than the gene. With the gag orders they slapped on us, I doubt that anyone other than a handful of people will even recognize Antonescu’s name a year from now. His work was so shadowy, our theories so bizarre, that he never really came across as more than an oddity in the public’s awareness.”
“He preferred to do most of his dirty work through others.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Joey Beiler killed Tesa and Debbie. He apparently wasn’t Neanderthal. I don’t know what his problem was. But he was a master of accents—he sounded Cockney to me, Brooklyn to Tesa, and he must have been charming when he wanted to. He gained Debbie’s confidence. He spent lots of time in her apartment. Logging on to someone’s computer account is easy in circumstances like that. He used it to send that bogus story to The New York Times about my Department cracking down on my investigation—except there was enough stupidity in the Department that the story wasn’t completely bogus—and then he killed Debbie and Tesa to cover his tracks. And then Antonescu must have had him killed in turn. No loose ends—just like the self-destructing DNA.”
“You said Beiler—if he’s the guy your people found in the park—died of some kind of drug overdose. Hard to imagine he would just stand still, long enough for someone like Antonescu to creep up and slide a needle into him.”
“Who knows if a needle delivered the drug.” I had told Mallory about the bee-darts. “And no doubt Antonescu had lots of people working for him—and most, like Joey Beiler, probably didn’t look the least bit Neanderthal…”
Mallory’s face tightened.
“I wasn’t implying that Amanda was working for Antonescu,” I began. “Hell, he was the one who likely tried to kill her—his forte was darts—”
“I know,” Mallory said. “I mean, I know you weren’t suggesting that Amanda was one of them—one of the demented Neanderthals. It’s clear from poor Pedro’s Tocharian translations that Neanderthals came—come—in many moral dimensions, just as we do. Many physical dimensions, too.”
I thought about Pedro. “Lum and Pedro were also Antonescu casualties, either direct hits or otherwise.”
Mallory nodded, absently. He was still thinking of Amanda. “She can be of help to us,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“How are we going to fight this?” he asked. “The virus in the labs is dead, but it’s still out here in the world. We can’t rely on our superiors, or the super-agencies. They’ll bungle it, like they do most everything else.”
“Ever been to Lancaster in the Fall? Amos tells me the caffeinated apples are delicious—a special hybrid that goes back millennia…”
The Silk Code Page 30
