The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  Laura nodded. “He’d think you’re crazy.”

  She stared out at the traffic. They’d come over the 59th Street Bridge—now the Ed Koch Bridge—from Long Island City, a total of maybe three miles that was taking forever.

  “If you think the traffic’s bad now,” Stahlman said, “wait till this afternoon when the president visits.”

  “That’s today?” She’d known he was coming to town but thought he arrived tomorrow.

  “Noonish. A quick trip to the UN and then he’s settling in for the weekend. A super gridlock alert.”

  “Worse than this?”

  “You have no idea. Luckily, we’ll be out of here before it gets started.”

  Still staring out the window, she noticed something.

  “We’re heading west on Sixtieth. I thought the rule was ‘evens run east.’ ”

  “Every rule has exceptions.”

  The driver took them across Park Avenue, up Madison, then back onto Park—beautiful this time of year with the planters in its central divide still awash with color. They had to wait in line while the limos ahead of them disgorged their well-heeled passengers in front of the Loews Regency New York Hotel.

  Laura said, “Every time I see ‘Loews’ I expect a movie theater.”

  “It’s a beautiful old-style hotel. The Tisch family runs it.”

  The limo passed the hotel entrance and pulled to the curb before a blue awning emblazoned with The Regency Bar & Grill. Laura automatically reached for the door handle but Stahlman tapped her shoulder.

  “Uh-uh. Let the driver do his job.”

  So she waited until he hurried around and opened the door. As he took her hand to help her out, she thought, I could get used to this.

  No, not really. She wasn’t comfortable with people fussing over her. It seemed like giving up control and she liked control. She was damn well capable of opening a car door and stepping out herself.

  Laura found the crowded interior of the Regency Bar & Grill about as impressive as the exterior, which was not all that much: chrome lighting fixtures, beige upholstery on the padded chairs, and a very busy carpet. But the atmosphere was redolent of ambition and acquisitiveness.

  “During the mid-seventies,” Stahlman said, once they were seated, “when New York was on the edge of collapse and default, the money men and power brokers met here to figure ways to save the city. Those were the original power breakfasts.”

  Laura was only half listening. She was staring at a man with a salt-and-pepper beard two tables away in earnest conversation with a younger man with long sideburns.

  “Is that …?”

  Stahlman craned his neck. “Looks like Steven Spielberg and Colin Farrell. And I believe that’s Glenn Close back by the wall.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m officially impressed. But where’s our guest?”

  “He’ll arrive in about a minute. My guess is he’s been here, watching for our arrival, waiting for us to be seated before making his entrance. Speak of the devil, here he is now.”

  The first thing Laura noticed about the man in the gray suit was his belly, preceding him into the room like a spinnaker. He had a shock of white hair combed straight back until it curled up at his collar. He grinned as he paused at this table and that to shake hands with this one or pat that one on the shoulder.

  “The grand entrance,” Stahlman whispered out of the side of his mouth as he rose. “Willard! Been a long time!”

  They shook hands, Laura was introduced, coffee was poured, small talk was generated while menus were perused. Laura suppressed a gasp as she saw the prices. She ordered some berries and kept drinking coffee, while Stahlman ordered a three-egg omelet and Beasley had eggs Benedict with all the trimmings.

  Finally Stahlman broached the subject that had brought them all together.

  “Ah, yes,” Beasley said in a deep voice. “The Modern Motherhood Clinics. I keep a journal and it took only a brief look to bring it all back. In March of 1990 the city was approached by an obstetrician named Emily Jacobi. Dr. Jacobi’s credentials were impeccable: Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, glowing recommendations, and a string of articles in peer-reviewed obstetrical journals. She was representing the Horace B. Gilmartin Foundation to set up inner-city prenatal clinics around the country. With no cost to the city—the foundation would foot the entire bill—how could I say no? We settled on Bed-Stuy as the site and I ushered it through.”

  “So the city had nothing to do with running the clinics?” Laura said.

  “Oh, well, the Department of Health folks had their noses a bit out of joint since Doctor Jacobi would be calling the shots and not them, but they did their due diligence and begrudgingly admitted how impressed they were with her dedication. She oversaw ten clinics around the country and made regular stops here until she quit.”

  “Quit?” Laura said. “Any reason why?”

  Beasley waved his hands. “That happened during the Bloomberg years, long after my time. I understand she died of a brain tumor shortly after, so I assume the discovery of her condition precipitated her departure.”

  Laura could understand that. But what she didn’t understand …

  “Was there anything unusual about Doctor Jacobi’s approach to prenatal care, anything to set Modern Motherhood apart from other prenatal care clinics? Any special medications or the like?”

  Beasley shoved in a huge, Hollandaise-coated forkful of eggs Benedict and chewed awhile before answering.

  “Not really,” he said after a convulsive swallow. “The vitamin shots were a sticking point at first, but that got sorted out.”

  Laura straightened in her chair. Injections?

  “What kind of vitamins?”

  He shrugged. “B-complex and such, I imagine. Doctor Jacobi had wanted to make them mandatory but our health department honchos said pills would do the same. Jacobi said pills allowed her no control over whether the vitamins would be getting into the mothers in the proper amounts, whereas with the shots she could be sure. They finally agreed on making the shots optional.”

  She glanced at Stahlman and found him looking back. They both knew their next avenue of investigation: What was in those injections? Anything besides vitamins?

  Stahlman said, “We couldn’t learn a whole lot about the operations of the clinics, but apparently they closed up after Doctor Jacobi’s departure. What happened?”

  “Again, none of this happened on my watch, but I keep my ear to the ground and as I recall, everyone received pink slips one day and the places closed a week later. All ten of them around the country. Without any warning, the foundation pulled the financial rug out from under the whole operation.”

  A foundation that no longer seemed to exist. Stahlman had called Hari Tate yesterday and she was already on it.

  “A shame too,” Beasley added. “The MM Clinics showed a lower infant mortality rate than our city clinics or even private care.”

  Now that was interesting. The injections?

  “Say, Clay,” Beasley said, “if you decide to go ahead with your own prenatal plans, I’m doing some consulting in the private sector now. I’ll be glad to help you set things up—you know, grease the chute on permits and such.”

  “That’s good to know, Willard. Never hurts to have an insider in your corner.”

  As Beasley ordered a brioche to finish off breakfast, Laura’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Sneaking a look she saw Hari Tate’s name and excused herself.

  “Hari,” Laura said, stepping out onto Park Avenue. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Good thoughts, of course,” she said.

  “Of course. I suppose you’ve dismantled the financial workings of the Horace B. Gilmartin Foundation already.”

  “All done.”

  Laura had been kidding. “What? You’re amazing.”

  “I am. I’m even more amazing when there’s nothing to dismantle.”

  Laura’s nape tightened. “What do you mean?�
�

  “I’ll explain in person. When and where?”

  “You can’t tell me over the phone?”

  “Oh, no, my dear. Because there’s so much more—and less—to this than you can imagine.”

  2

  LANGE-TÜR BUNKER

  Maureen LaVelle yawned. She’d been up very late reading Luis Montero’s research data on his crew of nadaný. She’d started out thinking of them as melis kids but had found a certain elegance in the nadaný appellation. After a few hours of sleep in one of the dorm rooms, she’d returned to her computer terminal to pore over the data.

  Greve sat across the conference table from her now. He’d been up and down and in and out all night, mostly on the phone, haranguing this department and that department at the DIA to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

  “You know,” she said, “this Montero fellow is doing excellent work. I think it might be smart for us to—”

  “—leave him alone and let him do the work for us?”

  Apparently they were thinking along similar lines, which Maureen found disturbing. She did not want to think like Benjamin Greve.

  “Yes. Exactly. The guy’s brilliant. We wait until he’s exhausted his resources or hits a wall with the nadaný, then we sweep in and take it from there. It’s much safer than what you’re planning and, though not exactly legal, a lot less il legal.”

  “First off, I don’t approve of using this foreign word to refer to our children.”

  “I really don’t give a damn,” she said. She was too tired to argue.

  He blinked. “Well, then …”

  “And they’re not our children. They have their own mothers and fathers.”

  “But they’d be just ordinary humans without us. We made them what they are—special.”

  “Yes, we mutated them.” Saying those words aloud turned her stomach, but that was exactly what they had done. “I don’t know what kind of crime that is, but there’s got to be a law against it somewhere. And now you want to compound the situation by opening us to kidnapping and false imprisonment and who knows what other federal charges.”

  That excuse for a smile. “In for a dime, in for a dollar, Doctor LaVelle. Besides, I am the federal government.”

  Mad-mad-mad … truly mad.

  “How did you find DIA agents willing to abduct these people without warrants?”

  “As I believe I told you yesterday, they’re outside contractors.”

  “You mean, like Blackwater?”

  “Quite a bit unlike Blackwater. Blackwater is a PMC. This group—Septimus Security—is much smaller.”

  “No one from the old crew is left?”

  “Well, Stonington is still here.”

  Stonington had been the chief technician forever.

  “Couldn’t get along without him, I suppose. You still have your office here?”

  Back in the day, he used to stay here for weeks straight. He’d commandeered one of the rooms as a remote office, a satellite of his official space down in Anacostia.

  “Of course. I need it now more than ever since I’m in charge now. In fact, I handpicked everyone else who works here.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “After we closed the clinics, DoD lost interest in Lange-Tür. For obvious reasons, they can’t shut it down, but they didn’t want to devote any more personnel. I volunteered to stay on and suggested a skeleton crew manned by Septimus Security. So Synapse—via one of DIA’s shells—hired them.”

  “How many bones in this skeleton?”

  “Only eight at the moment: two topside, two down here, and four off.”

  “And they’re okay with abducting the nadaný?”

  “They do whatever I tell them. But that will be another crew with a better skill set than these men. And by the way, I prefer the term ‘apprehending.’ ”

  “Really, Greve?” This scared her. “Seriously?”

  “Here’s the thing, Maureen,” he said, getting all sincere. “This is the chance to justify all that money we spent. We wanted to make them smarter, we wanted to give them higher intelligence. Instead we gave them more. We gave them super powers.”

  She couldn’t help a sharp, bitter laugh. “Hardly ‘super.’ ”

  “Not now, not yet. But with our help, who knows? Look how this Montero fellow has increased some of their powers just by creating feedback loops.”

  “Which is why we should let him go on increasing their powers.”

  “He’s not moving fast enough.”

  “You’re forgetting that Montero has their cooperation. We won’t. Right now they want to see how far they can push their powers and they’ve devoted themselves to it. We lock them up here and the only thing they’ll be devoted to is getting the hell out.”

  “Ah, but we have something Montero doesn’t have. We have melis. What will fresh doses of melis do to their powers, ay? A potentiating effect, maybe? Ever think of that?”

  Well, no, she hadn’t. But it wasn’t a very good thought. Melis had wrought changes in the developing fetuses, but it had never shown any effect whatsoever in a fully formed mammal. However, she saw no reason not to try it on the nadaný.

  What interested Maureen more—much more—was the genetic aspect. Montero had sequenced the DNA of a few nadaný and found no changes. But that didn’t mean changes didn’t exist. And if they did exist, were they germline changes that could be passed on to offspring? And if so, what if two telekinetics like, say, Ellis and Tanisha, were to mate? Would their children be able to move mountains?

  Listen to me … I sound like a bloody Nazi … planning a master race.

  Maureen sighed. This wasn’t who she’d wanted to be, thought she’d ever be. The transformation had been slow, but she knew the exact moment it had begun: when she’d seen what lay behind those locked doors at the back end of the bunker.

  Even so, Greve’s plan sickened a deep part of her, but she saw no way to stop it.

  He said, “I want to go over some priorities with you.”

  “Like what?”

  “More like who. The warehouse Stahlman is using is too secure. Short of a full-frontal assault—which is not feasible—we’re going to have to depend on opportunity outside the warehouse. We won’t be able to corral all of them, so which ones do we designate as high value?”

  Maureen mentally reviewed the list. “Ruth Jones, the teleporter, would seem to have the highest value, followed by the invisible woman, Anulka. In fact, I’d rank them both at the top. Even if those are the only two we bring in, it’s still a win. They have the most extraordinary powers.”

  Greve nodded as he scribbled on a yellow pad. “Agreed. But there’s one with even greater value.”

  Maureen frowned, then realized who he meant. Of course.

  “Marie Novotna.”

  “Exactly. With her we can track down and build our own inventory—as many as we want.”

  He talked about the nadaný as if they were widgets.

  She said, “We’ll want one of the telekinetics.”

  “Absolutely. We’ll skip that teen, Sela. She has potential but I don’t want to have to deal with Amber Alerts and all that nonsense if we grab her. And I see no use in wasting our time with this Igdalia girl. No one knows her talent or even if she has one.”

  “Apparently Marie Novotna says she does.”

  “Fine. Let Montero keep her and find out what she can do, if anything.”

  “The levitator?”

  “We definitely want him.”

  She shook her head. What were they going to do with all these nadaný?

  “Marie should not be a problem. But how are you going to keep Ruth Jones from teleporting herself to safety any time she wishes?”

  “It’s all been worked out. I came up with an ingenious solution.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at his unabashed ego. “ ‘Ingenious’ … really.”

  “Yes, really. You’ll agree when you see.”

  She could wait. “Wh
en do these abductions begin?”

  “Apprehensions. And they start today—as soon as the teams are in place.”

  “Why the big rush?”

  “Because last night someone from the CIA accessed Max Osterhagen’s file in the Operation Paperclip archive.”

  Maureen straightened in her seat. “The CIA? Why on Earth—?”

  “I have no idea. This Clayton Stahlman has no known connection to the agency nor to the individual who did the search.”

  “High level or low?”

  “Mid. The deputy director of the Office of Transnational Issues in the Manhattan office.”

  “Manhattan again.”

  “Yes. It can’t be a coincidence. That’s why I’m pushing up the timetable. I want our kids out of circulation and safely ensconced here as quickly as possible. The sooner we have them, the sooner we can pursue our own agenda with them.”

  “You mean your agenda.”

  He shrugged. “No difference. Like it or not, we’re in this together. You’re in too deep to back out.”

  She knew that. She also knew that, much to her dismay, she wouldn’t back out now even if she could.

  She thought about the Ghost Story question and how her answer hadn’t changed because of this new info. In fact it had only further solidified.

  “Tell me, Greve. What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  He blinked. Obviously he hadn’t expected the question. Who would?

  “Let me think about that. It’s hard to remember anything I’m sufficiently ashamed of to classify as ‘worst.’ ”

  Typical … soooooo typical.

  “Oh, wait. This is ugly, but … when I was a kid, I was playing with my pet cat when it bit me. In a fit of rage I broke its neck.”

  “Your own cat?”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  Pretty awful but she’d expected worse from him.

  3

  QUEENS

  Rick had been waiting for Laura to return from her power breakfast to fill him in on what she’d learned about Modern Motherhood, but before she could start, Luis burst into Stahlman’s office and couldn’t contain himself.