The Ares Virus

by A P Bateman

  He had chosen a spot on the bank, which lay under the canopy of a large spruce. The ground beneath it was a combination of soft, dry earth and sand, and nothing grew within the radius of the tree's canopy. The tree cast a cool, dark shadow across the water and offered brief respite to the intense ache behind his eyes. The glare was gone, cast aside by the carpet of shadow, and he could make out a patch of weed just a few yards from the bank.

  He placed the tackle box down on the soft earth and started to put the rod together, slipping the two halves into place and twisting gently to align the eyes. The tiny reel was already attached and he set about carefully pulling the line through the thin metal eyes of the rod, ever watchful of snagging or tangling the line. His father had shown him the basic set up for light freshwater fishing and had taught him how to crimp the lead beads and tie the hook with a blood knot, but this was his first time fishing alone and away from the watchful supervision of his father. The process was time consuming, but after several fruitless attempts, he raised the rod, finally satisfied with the result. He fixed a bloodworm onto the hook, wiped the slime onto the leg of his pants and walked to the bank.

  His cast was raw and jerky and part of the worm flew off into the reeds, but for the best part, the hook, and at least part of the bait, were where he had intended it to be. He sat down on the ground with his legs up to his chest and the rod resting on his lap with the tip just a few inches from the glassy surface of the water. He was Tom Sauer, he was Huckleberry Finn. He was just an innocent boy enjoying the great outdoors and a glorious Saturday.

  He reached into the tackle box beside him and took out a plastic bottle of orange soda. Carefully, he balanced the rod in his lap and started to unscrew the bottle cap. The contents of the bottle fizzed and built up, threatening to spill from the cap. He quickly tightened the cap to save the contents, then felt the rod jolt in his hands. The tip sprung down and hit the water three times in quick succession. He dropped the bottle and caught hold of the rod with both hands. The tip of the rod bounced down again then went still. He waited, poised for the strike. He needed to get the hook embedded deeply into the fish’s mouth, not just have it bite and pull at the bait and make off with a free lunch. The rod jolted again and he started to count silently, mouthing the numbers, just as his father had taught him. One... Two ... Three! He struck quickly and firmly on the third bite, then screamed with delight as the line carved its way through the glassy water in smooth, labored arcs. The fish was running and it was now imperative the boy keep the line tight and avoid slackness otherwise the hook would simply pull out of the fish's mouth in the struggle. He watched the line and felt the continuous pressure on the rod. He didn't want to prolong the fight for his own gratification, simply land the creature and present it to his mother for her to cook. It would be his first fish on his own, and he so wanted his father's approval over the dinner table as they ate his catch. He had had a fish on the line before, but his father came to his aid and landed it for him. Like fathers do.

  The fish was big and strong. At least a four pounder. It was working its way back to the bank and the thick mass of reeds and the potential safety awaiting it. The boy knew this and was working the reel and walking the other way to keep the taught line from slackening off. He felt the line suddenly go slack as the fish swam with him. There was a brief moment of uncertainty in the boy's eyes, then the tip of the rod straightened and the line went still in the water. He wound the handle of the reel furiously, but to no avail. The line was coming in and the fish had gone. Suddenly there was a terrific pull on the line and the rod almost bent double. There was a flicker of excitement in the boy's eyes, then the realization that he had caught the hook in a heavy mass of weed. He knew what to do in order to prevent the line from snapping and straightened the rod until the line was entirely outstretched from the reel. He checked his footing, then slowly walked backwards and took in the slack line with the reel. The weed was extremely heavy and it was a long, steady process, but he heaved and pulled and finally got the weed to the bank where he could safely untangle the hook. He wound in the slack line as he walked back towards the edge of the water, then stopped abruptly in his tracks.

  The mass of weed had indeed been thick and heavy. But it was the bloated corpse that it had enveloped which had helped considerably to increase its weight. The corpse’s face looked lifelessly up at the boy. A gaping, ragged bullet hole in its forehead.

  EIGHTEEN

  Rob Stone sipped a mouthful of coffee and grimaced. It was warm but had sat on top of the machine hot plate for too long. It had gone bitter and tasted, albeit mildly, of tobacco. He placed the cup down on the desk and looked around the office. On the wall behind the vacant chair was a photograph from the academy with fresh-faced recruits grinning into the camera for the official end of training photograph. He tried hard to spot Captain Dolbeck but guessed that the photograph was at least twenty years old and that Dolbeck had not aged well. There was a stocky-looking guy in the second row which looked like a probable, but then again Dolbeck was a hell of a lot bigger than he had been twenty years ago and he knew that deskbound officers pile on the pounds after they hit forty. Dolbeck could have been anyone in the photograph.

  He turned his eyes to the commendations and newspaper cuttings on the far wall. Captain Dolbeck had obviously been around the block in the early part of his career and was still proud of those achievements. They were dated though, Stone noticed, indicating fewer glory days in the latter half of his career.

  The door suddenly opened behind him and Stone looked around. Captain Dolbeck walked in, his head buried in the pages of an opened file. He was a big man, at least two-sixty, and most of it around his waist. His shoulders were fairly narrow and Stone changed his mind about Dolbeck being the stocky guy in the photograph.

  “Got it right here,” the captain paused. “Came through two days ago, just plain disappeared. Seems he had a woman on the side a couple of years ago. Got back with his wife and made another go of it, but when he didn't come home that night she just assumed he'd reverted to his old ways and gone off with some woman. She didn't even make the call until the next day.”

  Stone took the file from him and studied it. It was a desk report of incoming and outgoing calls and a list of everything that had been reported to the Montpelier Police Department two days previous.

  “So he's been missing for three days, not two?” Stone studied the list a while longer, then dropped it onto the desk. “Is he actually listed as a missing person then?”

  Dolbeck shrugged. “Kind of a grey area. Since the guy spent a while playing around behind his wife's back, we can't rule out that he's not just off having himself some fun.”

  “The guy's not some travelling salesman, he's a County Coroner. A professional. Surely that lends some weight?”

  “Well, sort of,” the police captain paused. “I mean, we're kind of worried now, responsible guy and all.”

  “So what happens now?” Stone asked.

  The police captain spread his hands. “We've got twenty two missing people on our books. That's the ones we haven't given up hope for. A lot of them are children and teenagers. They get the priority. Next come the women, you know, wives and girlfriends who've run away to avoid a pair of fists. They're lying low, but they're still our priority, whether they want to be found or not.” He put his arms above his head and stretched, straining the buttons on his shirt as he did so. “To be honest, with a grown male we don't do too much. If it looks real suspicious, like an assault or signs of a struggle, we look into it. Start an investigation. If the circumstances are not suspicious we post the details on the national database and wait for a lead to turn up. We can't go wasting our budget if the guy's just sinking his dick into some broad.” He shook his head despairingly. “Had some damned tramp in here a few days ago, seems his friend went missing. The desk sergeant asks for the missing guy's address, but he's told the guy was sleeping rough or sometimes used an old ramshackle cabin in the woods. How in Hell'
s name can you waste your time, money and officers looking for some hobo who has most probably drunk his way through a gallon of hooch and is sleeping it off in some barn somewhere? People just come in here and waste our time every day.”

  Stone remained silent. There was something he couldn't get out of his head and he was losing concentration because of it.

  “You OK?” Dolbeck stared at him.

  “Sure, just thinking about something.” He stood up, buttoned his jacket. “Thank you, Captain.” He held out his hand. “You've been a great help.”

  “He’ll turn up,” Dolbeck said. “The coroner. Not the homeless guy.”

  Stone nodded. But he managed to stop himself from telling the police captain not to count on it.

  As he stepped out into the low Vermont sun Stone felt the chill in the air. He reached for his sunglasses in his inside jacket pocket and slipped them on against the crystalline glare. A few leaves were falling and the sides of the roads were building up with crunchy mounds of yellow, red and brown. Across the street from him a few kids were rushing through the fallen leaves and laughing. Stone watched them play. Something had troubled him in Captain Dolbeck’s office and he needed clarity of mind to remember what it was. Approximately two hours after the county coroner had covered the remains of Professor Leipzig on the slab and forwarded his verdict to Sheriff Harper in down in Deal, nobody saw him again. He had disappeared. Sheriff Harper had concerns about the verdict and now those concerns could not be met.

  As Stone walked across the quiet Montpelier street Sheriff Harper’s words echoed in his ears. “Because the guy was travelling in the other direction… There's no way he'd drive through that barrier and onto the road below. Not a damn way in the world ...”

  NINETEEN

  The line was not connecting and Isobel had no alternative number on which she could reach Elizabeth Delaney. She had been calling all morning and now she was trying through the afternoon. She had been tempted to call the New York division of the bureau, but had not wanted to face an inquisition at the switchboard just to get through. She had no idea of how the system worked within the FBI and what questions would be asked of her, and she was not aware whether the division would know anything about her and the specific situation. She knew that Delaney was going to discuss the matter with David Stein, but what their next move was to be was beyond her reasoning.

  She felt scared and very much alone. The murder of the young girl from Washington had shaken her to the core and she desperately needed to speak to Delaney and let her know the connection. It couldn’t have been merely a coincidence. The odds were just too damn high. She pressed the redial button on her cell phone and waited. The screen came up with a message that the line was still busy and she threw the phone at the bed in frustration.

  She paced the room and contemplated going out. It was true she had earlier felt more comfortable being anonymous within a crowd, but that was before the news report. She knew it was serious now, knew with every fiber of her being that she was in grave danger.

  She picked up the cellphone and tried Delaney again, breathing a sigh of relief when she heard her friend’s voice. However, it was short lived as she realized it was an answer phone message. She left a curt message saying that she was worried and for her to call her back when she could.

  She understood that the FBI agent would be busy, but she was feeling out of the loop. She needed some control put back into the situation. She dropped her cell phone back onto the bed and picked up the remote control. There was nothing much on, so she just flicked through the channels and stared blankly at the screen. Her concentration wasn't really up to it, but she was glad of the distraction nevertheless.

  The tiny cell phone beeped out a short, somewhat irritating tune and she picked it up. There was a message telling her that she had received a text message and she scrolled through the options to get to it.

  Isobel - can't get to you for a while - meetings all day. Will meet you tonight at a bar called Sullivan's between W 50 & W 51 on 9th Ave. Meet me @ 7 - it will be crowded and safe –E

  TWENTY

  Rob Stone had dropped the hire car back at the airport and was aboard a 737 to Dulles. He would arrive back in Washington DC at three-forty-five and get to his next objective by four- thirty. The aircraft was running at half capacity and he carried no luggage. Security was tougher these days, since nine-eleven, but he would show his credentials and be given priority. He expected to walk straight along the concourse and right out the door at arrivals.

  He sifted through the thickening file in front of him and made the occasional note in the margin. He had removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie. To the cabin crew and his fellow passengers he looked like just another young businessman who most probably spent a lot of his downtime at the gym. He was clean cut and smart looking but in an ex-military kind of way. His glossy black hair was shaved down to an even half-inch all over but a little shorter at the back and sides. He wore an old Rolex diver’s wristwatch and no other jewelry. The watch had belonged to his late father and was over twenty years old, but looked barely any different to its modern counterpart. His forearms bore a couple of light scars and the veins stood out as he turned the pages of the file. He looked serious, but the glint in his eye, as he asked the flight attendant for a drink, was kind and showed that there was an underlying sense of humor in there somewhere.

  His briefing had been short and had come from the very top. The director had chosen him for the task. And now there were three people in the loop. Himself, the director of the Secret Service and the President of the United States. His investigation was in to a disbanded CIA assassination program. He was the second person to start this investigation, the first had been killed in the process. His investigation landed him to the door of the bioresearch facility. Here, his brief changed. He was to investigate the bioresearch facility's security. From this brief he was to surmise the likelihood of the outbreak of a major pandemic and to re-evaluate the facility's security procedures. He was to investigate the facility's contact with the combined military and intelligence services and proportion control of the project. Any development was to be shared equally with the intelligence community for the continued development and benefit of the country, and not one specific agency.

  However, there had seemed to be an anomaly within the facility's fraternization and one particular agency was receiving more information and applying more technical support towards the project than any other. That agency was the CIA. He had started with this anomaly and it had led him away from the CIA as an agency and towards two people in particular. What were the chances of a connection between the assassination program, a particular CIA employee and the bioresearch facility? He couldn't ignore the facts, but with every day of the investigation the neck of the funnel was tightening. It was now time to take the hunt to the door.

  As he predicted, Stone left the airport quickly and was at his car twenty minutes after disembarking the plane.

  The car was a black ’68 Mustang GT-390 and had been maintained to possibly better than its original condition. That was because the Ford line pumped so many units out that this iconic car was finished in a hurry to meet with supply and demand. This car, however, was pristine in every way and benefited from many modern extras, painstakingly fitted by its owner. Modern magnetic front and rear dampers and servo-assisted ABS brakes from Brembo to assist not only the handling but stopping. Holly carbs and a Garrett supercharger, and the gearbox from a '69 Shelby Cobra to cope with the extra horsepower and performance.

  The gearbox was slick and smoothly changed down through the cogs as Rob Stone swung off the road and into the bioresearch facility’s entrance. He floored the throttle and corrected the wheel as the rear wheels dug into the tarmac and left a couple of thick black lines in the car's wake. He was lifted by the boyish display and enjoyed the sensation of becoming braced tightly into the seat. He neared the first security booth and lifted his right foot off the throttle. It was back to busine
ss now and he settled back into his role of the consummate professional, though he was always glad of a brief respite.

  The V8 rumbled and popped on tick over and he flashed a current security pass at the guard. The guard looked at the car, Stone suspected schoolboy admiration, although he was plaintively aware that you either loved or loathed this sort of vehicle. He was under no illusion that his choice of vehicle had been immature at best. But it was a lesson taught to him by his father. You make the most of life and seize it. You enjoy what you have. His father never uttered those words, nor any to that effect. He simply punched the clock his entire life and dropped down dead four days after his retirement. The watch had been a gift to his father from Stone’s mother. He had coveted one all his life, and she marked his retirement by buying one for him, because she knew he never would. It had been a secondhand purchase from a quality jeweler and she had paid in installments for the entire year before picking it up the day before his final shift.

  “Robert Stone, United States Secret Service.”

  The guard studied the pass and then handed it back to him. “And your business, Sir?”

  “I'm here to see Doctor McCray.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. But he'll see me.” He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a folded piece of paper and passed it to the guard. “He has no choice.”

  The guard studied the paper for a long while, then folded it back in half and handed it over. “Go right in, Agent Stone. I'll call ahead and get things rolling.” He lifted the red and yellow striped barrier and stood back to allow him through. “You have a nice day, Sir.”