by Roland Smith
“What’s going on?” Dylan asked sleepily. With his backpack still strapped on, he looked like an upside-down turtle.
“I think we should have reminded each other to take our packs off before going to sleep,” Marty said.
“I left mine on intentionally in case we had to make a run for it,” Dylan said. “What were you two talking about?”
“Grace found a dead guy.”
“Where?” Dylan jumped to his feet and sloughed off his pack.
Grace pointed. “Over by that shelter.”
Marty followed Dylan over to the crude shelter, then wished he hadn’t.
“Jeez,” Dylan said, covering his nose and turning away.
Marty forced himself to look. Heat, humidity, insects, and a few animals had been at the unfortunate Raul, but the manner of his death was still obvious. There was a perfect hole in his right temple. On the ground, five feet away from the body, was a brass bullet casing glittering in a shaft of morning sunlight.
“Shot,” Marty said. “Murdered.”
There were footprints all around the body, which Marty was happy to examine so he didn’t have to look at Raul. He pointed at one.
“That has to be at least a size fifteen,” he said.
“Wolfe?”
“Unless Bigfoot is wearing boots, yeah. And here are Luther’s prints.”
“What about this one?” Dylan asked, pointing.
“Not as big as Wolfe’s, and the sole has a different pattern.”
Grace had joined them. “Butch McCall?”
“I guess if Yvonne is here, he could be here, too,” Marty admitted.
“We need to bury Raul,” Grace said.
“Easier said than done, considering we don’t have a shovel,” Marty said. “But let me check on the trail behind us first. If Yvonne is coming up on us, we’re going to have to leave him where he lies.”
“We’ll start while you check,” Dylan said, scratching at the ground with a large stick.
Marty left them to their digging and launched the dragonspy. He was pretty sure that Yvonne and her gang weren’t hot on their trail. She would have had to get across the river just like they had, and he doubted she was going to play Tarzan, which meant she and her crew would have to cross somewhere else and backtrack to pick up the trail on the other side. Marty flew the bot along the trail in the direction of the river. As it had been last night, the trail was easy to follow because whoever had nabbed Luther and Wolfe was no longer trying to hide their tracks.
There was no sign of anyone else on the trail. When Marty reached the river, he flew the dragonspy downstream for several miles expecting to find Yvonne and the men looking for a crossing, or better yet drowned, but they weren’t there.
Maybe they did drown and got swept away. He smiled to himself. I’m beginning to think like Grace.
“Hey!” Dylan shouted. “We’re almost done.”
Marty looked over at them. Grace and Dylan were covered in wet mulch. He wasn’t surprised. No matter where you dug in the rain forest, the water table was only a few inches beneath the surface.
“That’s probably as deep as you can go. I’ll help you move him in a minute. We’ll have to cover him with sticks and logs.”
He didn’t mention that he didn’t think covering Raul up, or even burying him, would stop the animals from getting to him. The burial was more for them than it was for Raul. It was the decent thing to do.
As the sun rose, Travis Wolfe was sitting calmly on the bench in the back of his cage, just as he had been sitting the night before when the sun had set. It looked as if he hadn’t moved during the night, but nothing could be further from the truth. He had spent the entire night getting to know his mutant neighbors.
For the first part of the night, the bearcat had spent his time pacing back and forth in a rage, napping, and reaching his long sharp claws through the wire mesh trying to shred Wolfe to pieces. Fortunately, the mesh only allowed a couple of feet of leg and claw into Wolfe’s personal space. All Wolfe had to do to avoid being mauled was lean to his right, but not too far, because the chupacabra, or Nine, was on the other side waiting for him to make a mistake.
Unlike the bearcat, Nine never left his bench, or napped. He simply stared at Wolfe with his intelligent reddish-yellow eyes, as if he were contemplating how he was going to prepare him for breakfast.
Wolfe felt sorry for both animals. As the results of genetic experimentation, neither one of them belonged on earth, or anywhere else in the universe. But of the two, he felt sorrier for Nine. The chupacabra seemed to be completely aware of the fact that he was different somehow.
Wolfe had no doubt that before Noah finally murdered him, he would be given a demonstration of Nine’s capabilities, and Noah’s ability to control the beast. He might even use Nine to execute him.
Wolfe had been around animals his entire life, in captivity and in the wild. In many ways he was more comfortable around animals than he was around people. He would have preferred not to be stuck in a cage of his own between two mutants, but overnight he had decided to work with the situation.
First, he’d started talking to the bearcat in a soothing tone. It hadn’t worked right away, of course, but after a while the bearcat’s attacks had become less intense, and Wolfe had begun phase two.
Wolfe was thirsty and hungry. His wrists were still shackled by flex cuffs, but at least they were bound in front of him instead of behind his back, which would have made things difficult.
There was nothing he could do about the hunger unless he wanted to eat the rotting meat Butch had dumped into the cage. But he could slake his thirst. He had jumped off his perch, gotten onto his knees in front of the water bowl, and had scooped water into his mouth with his hands. He’d felt better after drinking. He had looked down at the rancid meat, covered with flies. The bearcat had watched him closely.
When Butch had pushed him into the cage the day before, Wolfe had noticed that the bearcat had no meat in his cage. He figured the animal must have gulped his meal down in two bites. Nine hadn’t even sniffed his meat. It still lay in a flyblown pile like Wolfe’s.
Wolfe had looked at the bearcat. “You want some meat?”
The bearcat had snarled.
“I’ll take that as a polite yes.”
Wolfe had tossed a small ball of tainted meat through the mesh. Two hours later, the bearcat was catching the meat balls in the air. Wolfe didn’t think they were friends yet, but they had made progress.
An hour after sunrise, he heard someone whistling. A second later, Butch McCall was standing in front of his cage.
“Good morning, Travis. Did you sleep good?”
Wolfe didn’t take the bait.
“Dr. Blackwood would like you to join him for breakfa —” Butch looked down at the empty food tray. “Oh, I see you’ve already eaten. Was that to your liking?”
Wolfe just looked at him. The big idiot was having so much fun, he hadn’t noticed that the bearcat wasn’t trying to get at Wolfe through the mesh.
“Doesn’t matter if you’re full,” Butch continued. “You still have to go to breakfast.” He punched in a number on the keypad. The door clicked open.
Wolfe jumped off the bench.
Butch stepped back from the door and drew his pistol.
Wolfe smiled. “I appreciate that, Butch.”
“Appreciate what?”
“The compliment.” Wolfe nodded at the gun. “And the respect. Here I am handcuffed after spending the night locked in a cage, and you think you need a gun to control me.”
Butch frowned. “Move it.”
Butch walked Wolfe down the path to the pool, where they found Noah Blackwood sitting at a beautifully set table, cracking open a soft-boiled egg with a silver knife. He was dressed in his signature starched safari suit with every white hair on his head and face perfectly in place. Butch sat Wolfe down in the chair opposite Noah. The table was set for one.
Noah looked at his gold watch. “Fifteen min
utes, Butch,” he said.
Butch hesitated, then turned and walked back down the path.
Noah scooped out half of the soft-boiled egg with a silver spoon, popped it into his mouth, then dabbed the yellow yoke off his beard with a white cloth napkin. Apparently, Wolfe had been invited to watch Noah eat breakfast, not to partake.
“I’m sorry we have to continue our conversation in these short snippets of time,” Noah said. “But I’m so extraordinarily busy right now. On the bright side, the time it’s taking me to explain things is prolonging your life.”
Noah forked the other half of the soft-boiled egg into his mouth, then started cracking the second egg. There were four eggs all together, along with a stack of toast, a plate of bacon, coffee, juice, butter, and assorted crystal containers of jam and jelly. Wolfe wondered how Noah managed to keep himself fit eating like this.
“Are you hungry?” Noah asked.
Wolfe nodded.
“Good,” Noah said, and continued eating. “How old do you think I am?”
“Where’s Luther?” Wolfe asked.
“We aren’t going to get very far if you keep answering my questions with questions.”
“According to you, it’s to my advantage to prolong this conversation as much as I can.”
Noah smiled. “Good point. I’ll make a deal with you.”
“What kind of deal?”
“I’ll tell you where Luther is, and everyone else. In return, you’ll have to choose which one of them dies first.”
Wolfe kept his face expressionless. “What do you mean, ‘everyone else’?”
“Sylvia and Timothy, for starters.”
“You have them?” Wolfe said, trying to hide his relief.
“Yes. And they’re fine, along with Laurel Lee, Robert Lansa, his son, Buckley Johnson, and Flanna Brenna.”
“You shot Sylvia and Timothy’s helicopter down,” Wolfe said.
“Not personally, no, but it was done on my orders.”
“Butch?”
Blackwood nodded. “They were lucky to have survived.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because they had heard a rumor about this compound and were getting too close.”
Wolfe stared at him. It was all beginning to make sense now. Sylvia and Timothy would have followed this trail to the ends of the earth.
“What about Grace, Marty, and Dylan?” Wolfe asked.
“They remain at large,” Noah said. “As do the hatchlings, Ted Bronson, and the man he picked up downriver. Who is he, by the way?”
Wolfe saw no sense in lying. “He’s an FBI agent.”
Noah laughed as if he didn’t believe him.
Wolfe didn’t care if he believed him or not. “What do you mean by ‘at large’?”
“I shut down all communications as a security precaution once we had most of you in hand. The kids and Bronson might have been captured by now and could be on their way here. Or they could be dead.”
“You’d have your own granddaughter murdered?”
“Technically, she is not my granddaughter,” Noah said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve told you everything I’m going to tell you about your friends,” Noah said, raising his voice. “We’re back to my original question. How old do you think I am?”
Wolfe had no idea why Noah was asking this, and thought about diverting the conversation again, but he didn’t. He knew when to push Noah’s buttons, and how, but now was not the time.
“I’d say you’re sixty.”
Blackwood flashed him a dazzling smile. “You’d be off by twenty years. I’m eighty years old. I was born here in 1934, two years after my parents arrived.”
Wolfe stared at him. Even with plastic surgery, there was no way Noah was eighty.
“My real name is Heinrich Kurtz,” Noah continued. “My parents were geneticists. They were good friends with Adolf Hitler. One of the first things he did when he came to power was to send my parents here and fund their research. They and their team of scientists arrived on a freighter filled with equipment and gold bullion.”
“Why here?” Wolfe asked.
“Like I said, they knew Hitler well. They knew things were going to go sideways in Germany. They didn’t want their research to get caught up in their old friend Adolf’s madness. They needed isolation and a population of people that no one cared about to experiment on. They ended up finding a population of people that no one even knew about.”
“The Trips,” Wolfe said, feeling sick to his stomach. If Blackwood had offered him an egg, he didn’t think he’d have been able to keep it down.
“Is that what you call them?” Noah asked with a smile. “Marvelous!”
“So your parents were Nazis,” Wolfe said, which wiped the smile off Noah’s face.
“Technically, yes, but they weren’t practicing Nazis. Hitler waged his war and forgot all about the Kurtzes and our research project.”
“And you waged war on the indigenous population down here,” Wolfe said.
“Harsh,” Noah said. “And predictably narrow-minded. The Trips, as you call them, are much better off now than they would have been if we had left them alone. But I’m not going to get into a debate about this. That’s not why I have you up here.”
Wolfe took a calming breath and reminded himself that this was Noah’s show, not his. “Fine,” he said.
“As to my age,” Noah continued, “my mother discovered a longevity gene. The fountain of youth, if you will, or so she believed, and it turns out she was correct, at least in my case.”
“What are you talking about?”
Noah fixed his blue eyes on him. “I’m a human clone.”
Wolfe stared back at him. “That’s impossible.”
“I suspect I was the first human clone,” Blackwood said. “The second clone is a man you know. Or at least a man you’ve seen. We call him Mr. Zwilling.”
“I don’t know anyone named Zwilling.”
“Oh, but you do,” Noah said. “Do you speak German?”
“No.”
“Zwilling is the German word for ‘twin.’ ”
“So that’s how you often seem to be in two places at once. You have a doppelgänger,” Wolfe said.
“That’s not exactly accurate. A doppelgänger is usually defined as a sinister double. Mr. Zwilling is anything but sinister. And I don’t have a double. I made a double when I was twenty years old.”
Wolfe wanted to get up and walk back to his cage. He was sick of looking at Noah, sick of listening to him. But his curiosity compelled him to stay. “Mr. Zwilling is at the Seattle Ark,” Wolfe said.
“He’s always at one of my Arks. He hasn’t been down here in years. He’s such a pro at handling the media.”
“He’s sixty and you’re eighty, but he looks just like you. How does that work?”
“You always were bright,” Noah said. “Mr. Zwilling doesn’t have the longevity gene. We tried to give it to him, but it didn’t take. I’m not sure why. But he’s been very useful none the less. Not surprisingly, he loves animals just as much as I do.”
Wolfe had to will himself not to roll his eyes. Blackwood didn’t love animals; he collected them.
“Zwilling and I honed our skills with wildlife right here at the compound,” Noah said. “But I digress. I was talking to you about cloning. I made a second clone, whom you also know. Or knew.”
Wolfe’s empty stomach heaved. He shook his head. “No. No. No.”
“Rose,” Noah said.
Wolfe rested his head on his cuffed hands. Rose had rarely talked about her childhood, but when she had, it had always been about the mother she’d never known. She had asked Noah, her father, a thousand times who her mother was. He’d always refused to talk about it. Now Wolfe knew why.
“Rose had the longevity gene,” Noah said. “But you cut her long life short. In a way, when you killed her, you killed me.”
“I didn’t kill her, Noah. She was kill
ed by Mokélé-mbembé.”
“You stole her from me. Rose was my creation. You took her to the Congo. If you had left her at the Ark, she would still be alive. She’d be alive for many years to come.”
There was no point in telling him that Rose had loathed him and couldn’t wait to get beyond his smothering control. Noah had to know this already. Rose would have been completely horrified to learn that she was Noah Blackwood’s clone. Unless she had known, and not told him.
“My mistake was making Rose leave here too soon,” Noah continued. “I should have waited to take her to the Ark when she was older.”
Wolfe did not want to hear any more about clones. It was too painful to even think about. “Why did you even build the Arks?” he asked. “You appear to have everything you need here.”
“I had the compound and the gold, but gold is worthless unless you use it. Zwilling and I were good with animals. I needed genetic material to expand my work and complete the experiments begun by my parents. I needed to turn the gold into cash.”
“Your parents are dead?”
“Decades ago. Everyone who came here is dead. The longevity gene can only be inserted at conception. My parents didn’t get to see that their fountain of youth was real. In fact, none of the original researchers lived to see it.” A melancholy look crossed Noah’s face. “One problem with living for an indefinite period is that all your friends, family, and colleagues die before you.”
“So you decided to make new friends and a new family by cloning yourself.”
Noah gave him a sad smile. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“What are you going to do with us?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But I certainly can’t let any of you go. You’re here for the duration. But in your case, that will not be long.”
“Dad!”
Wolfe turned around. He recognized the voice. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. It was Grace. It was Rose. But it was neither. The black haired, robin’s-egg-blue-eyed doppelgänger was a girl of eight or nine. She ran ahead of Butch McCall, jumped into Noah’s lap, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a loud kiss on his cheek.
“Scratchy whiskers,” she scolded.
