by Mark Alpert
The colonel paused for about ten seconds, letting the SecDef get a few words in. Then he interrupted, raising his voice by several decibels. “No, I don’t want any National Guardsmen. I want active-duty military units. The public disturbances in New York have reached crisis levels, and we need a combat-ready response team. In other words, the best soldiers you have.”
Grant paused again, but not for long. This time, he interrupted the SecDef immediately. “No, it isn’t rash. Federal law allows us to deploy active-duty troops to respond to an insurrection, and that’s what we’re facing in Manhattan tonight. Thousands of armed criminals are marching through the streets of East Harlem, and the local police can’t stop them.” Grant raised his voice another notch. “And here’s something else you should know. The vice president flew to New York earlier this evening to talk with the mayor about the crisis, but we lost radio contact with the veep and his security team after they arrived at Gracie Mansion. It’s possible that the rioters have reached the mayor’s residence and assaulted the authorities there.”
His smile broadened as he listened to the SecDef’s response, which must’ve been very stunned and apologetic. After ten more seconds, Grant leaned forward in his chair. “Very good, General. You have your orders. Please contact my office immediately if you run into any problems.”
Grant hung up the phone, then looked at Frazier. He was still smiling. “As you can see, we’ve come up with a cover story. You know, to explain what happened to the vice president and his Secret Service agents. They were killed, along with the mayor, when the rioters from East Harlem attacked Gracie Mansion.” He gave Frazier a conspiratorial wink. “Not bad, huh? Now everyone in Congress will be screaming for blood. They’ll let out a cheer when we put New York under martial law.”
Frazier tried to look happy about it, but he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. To tell the truth, he didn’t care about the vice president or the secretary of defense or any of the fucked-up political games that Colonel Grant liked to play. Frazier cared about the important things: duty, honor, loyalty, and above all, justice. He saw himself as a crusader, an instrument of justice, delivering swift punishment to everyone who’d ever fucked with him. He’d started this crusade back in Cassville, when he was just a teenager; before he left his hometown and joined the army, he beat the shit out of his drunk stepdad and his cocksucker uncle. He pulped the town’s perverted gym teacher too, putting him in the hospital. And in Afghanistan he did much worse to hundreds of deserving ragheads.
Now it was Powell’s turn.
“Sir, what’s Powell’s condition? Is he going to live?”
Grant stopped grinning. He let out a long breath and rolled his eyes. “You’ve already asked me that question three times tonight, Lieutenant.”
“I’m very sorry, sir. But a couple of hours ago you said the operation on Powell was touch and go, and so I wondered if anything has changed since then.”
“Nothing’s changed. He’s still on the operating table.” The colonel waved his hand to the left, in the direction of the Research Center’s operating theater. “That asshole Weinberg injected him with a new CRISPR treatment, and he thinks Powell will make it. But the other doctors aren’t so optimistic.”
“Why?”
“Powell’s hanging on by a thread, and they think he’ll die before the new genetic changes can take effect. They say he has only a twenty percent chance of survival. Maybe even less.”
Frazier nodded. This was good news. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t have to worry about Powell. The traitor would die a slow, painful death, and justice would be served.
But what if he beat the odds?
“Sir, what’s the plan if Powell lives?”
Grant frowned. All his good cheer was gone. “What do you want me to do, Frazier? Court-martial him? Put him in front of a firing squad?”
“He deserted his unit in Afghanistan. He sabotaged the FSU’s operations and destroyed our Bay Parkway checkpoint. And he killed twelve of my men.”
“Yes, yes, I know all that. But he’s still part of the Palindrome experiment, and he can still give us useful results. If he lives, we might learn how to improve the treatment.”
This was the answer Frazier had been afraid of. He didn’t like it one bit. Keeping Powell alive was a truly shitty idea. “What about security, sir? If Powell recovers, he’ll be a threat to everyone at this facility.”
“We’ve already prepared for that. The new CRISPR treatment for Powell includes the insertion of the Serenity sequence into his DNA. You know, the same genetic change we did to Hassan Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda fucker in the interrogation room. The treatment pacified the shit out of that raghead, so it should make Powell more obedient too.”
“But what if it doesn’t work?”
“Lieutenant? Just drop it. If Powell survives, we’ll take the necessary precautions and increase the security of the labs. We have bigger things to worry about right now.” Grant stared at him hard. “Speaking of which, I want you to go see Weinberg. That asshole won’t stop bothering me.”
The sudden change of subject flustered Frazier. He felt confused and disappointed. “See Weinberg? About what?”
The colonel lowered his head and focused on one of the papers on his desk. It looked like a memo of some kind. “Remember how Weinberg interrupted the inspection tour for the veep? Well, it’s the same damn thing. He wants to tell me something about Raza Khan, the crippled kid, but I don’t have the time to listen to his bullshit.”
“So you want me to talk to him?”
Grant nodded without looking up. “You’ve seen the Jenna Khan file, so you already know the relevant facts about her brother. Just listen to what Weinberg has to say about him and then write it all down for me in a report. I’ll take a look at it when I get a chance. It’s more efficient that way.”
Frazier didn’t buy it. First of all, Grant had never asked him to be his goddamn secretary before. Second, the colonel was so obsessive about Palindrome that it was completely out of character for him to dodge a conversation about it. And third, Frazier remembered what had happened to Grant when Weinberg interrupted the inspection tour an hour ago. The colonel had started acting jittery and frantic, like a cornered animal. Something had terrified him, and it was connected to that crippled freak, that fucking Raza Khan.
Grant picked up a pen and held it over the memo, but his hand shook so badly that he couldn’t write anything. Just thinking about the cripple had scared the hell out of him. After a few seconds he raised his head and scowled. “What the fuck are you waiting for? Go talk to Weinberg. He’s in Room Seventeen.”
Frazier nodded and walked out of the office. He was going to take care of the problem for Grant. He intended to find out what that Khan freak was doing to the colonel. And then Frazier was going to put an end to it. Permanently.
* * *
Room 17 was on the same corridor as the operating theater where the doctors were working on Derek Powell. Frazier marched down the hall, looking straight ahead, intending to go directly to his meeting with Dr. Weinberg. But at the last moment he stopped, just ten feet short of his destination, and opened the door to the operating theater instead.
He stepped into the gallery, which was like an auditorium where the seats curved around the glass-walled operating room. But Frazier was the only spectator to this operation. On the other side of the glass, a dozen doctors and nurses bent over the enormous body on the table. In the narrow gaps between their surgical gowns and caps, Frazier could see Powell’s split-open torso, its flesh peeled back to expose his lungs and intestines.
Frazier moved across the gallery, trying to get a good look at Powell’s face, but it was hard to see anything with all the doctors scurrying around the table and blocking his view. Frazier got a glimpse of the operating room’s monitors, though, and he liked what he saw. Powell’s heart rate was weak and his blood pressure barely detectable. His vital signs were close to flatlining.
I hope you’re suffering,
Powell. I hope you burn in hell.
Frazier propped his fists against the glass. He wished he could break into the operating room and deliver the fatal blow himself. All he needed to do was shatter the glass and shove the doctors aside. Then he’d thrust his hands into the incision they’d made and rip out the traitor’s heart.
But no. That would mean violating Colonel Grant’s orders. If Frazier did that, he’d be a traitor too. He’d be just as bad as Powell.
So he lowered his arms and stepped backward, moving away from the glass. He would let nature take its course and kill Powell slowly. Room 17 was right next door, so maybe Frazier would hear it happen. When Powell’s vitals flatlined, maybe the high-pitched buzz of the monitors would penetrate the walls.
Frazier left the gallery and went back to the corridor. He took two big strides, then opened the door to Weinberg’s laboratory.
Like the interrogation rooms and the operating theater, Room 17 was divided into two sections that were separated by a big window, a sheet of glass five feet high and eight feet across. Frazier stepped into the observers’ section, a smallish space crowded with computer screens and laser printers. Dr. Weinberg sat in the middle of all the hardware and stared at one of the screens, which displayed a dozen white horizontal lines, all jiggling in elaborate patterns. Weinberg was studying their movements so carefully that he didn’t hear Frazier enter the room. The guy just sat there, frozen, his eyes fixed on the screen. Annoyed, Frazier was about to yell at the asshole to get his attention, but then he noticed something disturbing on the other side of the glass.
Raza Khan sprawled in a wheelchair in the patients’ section of the lab. His body was twisted and tiny, a stunted figure inside a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit. His head had been shaved, and a tangled mane of silver wires ran between his skull and a large, boxy machine behind his wheelchair. Each wire was attached to an electrode pasted to the kid’s bare scalp.
Frazier recognized the equipment, because the Palindrome researchers had used it on him too. It was an EEG—an electroencephalograph—a machine that records the brain’s electrical activity. The scientists had attached Frazier to the machine before and after each round of CRISPR injections to find out if the treatments were boosting his brainpower. But the EEG hooked up to Raza Khan seemed more advanced than the ones Frazier had seen before. The electrodes covered every square centimeter of the boy’s skull. They were so thickly clustered, they looked like a swarm of silver bees.
This sight, though, wasn’t the most disturbing one in the laboratory. There was another patient connected to the EEG, an old, dumpy man sitting on a stool to the left of Raza’s wheelchair. His nearly bald scalp was covered with electrodes too, and his face was badly bruised, but Frazier recognized him from a picture in the Jenna Khan file. It was Hamid Khan, Raza’s and Jenna’s father.
Hamid wasn’t supposed to be here. He’d been assigned to the General Detention Facility on the other side of Rikers Island, so his presence in the Research Center was a cause for concern. But the truly alarming thing about him was that he wore a pair of khakis and a blue polo shirt. Someone had given him street clothes to wear instead of his prison jumpsuit.
Frazier shook his head. This was un-fucking-believable.
“Hey, Weinberg!” He stomped toward the asshole and grabbed his shoulder. “What the fuck is going on here?”
The guy didn’t respond. He just kept staring at the lines on his computer screen. Frazier had to spin the asshole’s chair around and get in his face. “Hey, I’m talking to you! Why did you bring the cripple’s father to the lab? And where the hell did he get those clothes?”
Weinberg looked at him blankly. His eyes were unfocused, and his skin was very pale. “You’re Lieutenant Rick Frazier, Palindrome Subject Number Twenty-Three.”
Frazier wanted to slap him. “Answer the question, shithead! Why is Hamid Khan here?”
“I’m analyzing the cognitive abilities of his son, Raza Khan. Raza was never officially a subject of the Palindrome tests, but Dr. Jenna Khan developed an unauthorized CRISPR treatment for him in an attempt to cure his genetic disorder.”
Weinberg spoke in a weird monotone, slow and emotionless. He sounded exhausted and almost robotic, which was probably the result of spending way too many hours in the laboratory. But Frazier didn’t care how tired the guy was. He wanted an explanation, and so far he wasn’t getting it. He tightened his grip on Weinberg’s shoulder.
“Listen to me! Did you request Hamid’s transfer from the General Detention Facility?”
Weinberg nodded. “I needed him to participate in a new test I devised.”
“A test? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Jenna Khan’s treatment of her brother was very different from all the other Palindrome therapies. It was intended to repair the flawed gene that had caused his paralysis, but it unexpectedly changed many other genes involved in the nervous system. In particular, it altered the genes that control the transmission of signals in the brain. And those altered genes have become much more active in the past twenty-four hours, most likely because they were triggered by the boy’s intense fear and stress.” He pointed at the jagged lines at the top of his computer screen. “These are the brain waves from Raza’s frontal lobe. Notice how powerful and coordinated they are. Now look at this.” He pointed at another set of lines at the bottom of the screen. “These are Hamid’s brain waves. You see how Raza’s oscillations mimic his father’s?”
Frazier stared at the lines, but he couldn’t make any sense of them. And it was a waste of time anyway. Weinberg was just trying to distract him. Frazier leaned his weight on the bastard’s shoulder, pinning him to his chair. “Goddamn it! I don’t give a fuck about his brain waves! Who authorized you to transfer Hamid and bring him here? It wasn’t Colonel Grant, was it?”
Surprisingly, Weinberg didn’t yelp or whimper. Even though Frazier was applying enough pressure to dislocate the guy’s arm, he didn’t seem afraid or even the least bit upset. He kept his eyes on the computer screen, almost in a trance, as if the jiggling lines had hypnotized him. “No one authorized me. I did it because Raza asked me to.”
“What?” Frazier was so irritated, he started shaking the guy. He shoved him backward, and the chair nearly tipped over. “That freak can’t even talk!”
Despite the rough treatment, Weinberg’s face stayed blank. Very slowly, he raised his arm toward the big window and pointed at the crippled kid in the wheelchair. “He’s learned to communicate without words. Go see for yourself.”
Frazier let go of Weinberg’s shoulder. Enough with the shaking—he was going to pound the crazy fucker’s skull. But as Frazier cocked his fist and took aim, he glimpsed a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked through the window at the other section of the lab and saw Hamid Khan wave at him. The old man smiled, and the electrodes on his head gleamed under the room’s fluorescent lights.
This was too much. Frazier forgot about Weinberg and moved toward the sheet of glass. To the left of the window was a door that connected the lab’s two sections, and luckily it was unlocked. Frazier flung the door open and strode into the patients’ section, stopping in front of Hamid and his freakish kid.
They looked ridiculous, the dumpy Pakistani and the cripple wearing identical caps of electrodes, with all the wires running back to the boxy machine behind them. Frazier’s mind took a sudden leap, and he thought of the beauty salon in Cassville where his grandmother used to get her hair done, all the old ladies sitting in a row, each with a domed hair dryer over her head. That’s what the electrode caps looked like, silver domes for withered biddies with dead white hair. But Frazier clenched his teeth and shook his head, and the memory dissolved. This was no time for distractions. He needed to keep his mind on a tight leash, keep it focused.
He pointed at Hamid. “Who gave you those clothes?”
The old man smiled again. It wasn’t a pleased or amused smile. He was just doing it to be polite. “Dr. Weinberg g
ave me these pants and this shirt. But please, sir, don’t be angry with him. It’s not his fault that he broke the rules.”
“And why the hell did he give them to you?” Frazier bent over him. “Why do you need to wear street clothes for a fucking EEG test?”
“You’re right, I don’t need them for this test. I’ll need them afterward. In a few minutes, Dr. Weinberg is going to help me leave this jail. He said we’ll have a better chance of getting past the guards if I’m not wearing a prisoner’s uniform.”
Hamid’s voice never rose or quavered. He made his confession in a casual, offhand way, still smiling politely. Frazier looked over his shoulder at Weinberg, who’d gone back to staring at his computer screen. “Jesus Christ! He’s planning to help you escape?”
“Yes, sir. But as I said, it’s not Dr. Weinberg’s fault.” Hamid pointed at his son. “Raza is telling him what to do.”
Frazier stood up straight and forced himself to look at the cripple. The kid hadn’t moved an inch in the past five minutes. His bony torso leaned against the armrest of his wheelchair, his back arched and his clawlike hands resting in his lap. His head hung backward at a painfully sharp angle, and his mouth was open so wide that Frazier could see all the way down to his tonsils. The only sign of life was in his eyes, which stared back at Frazier, tracking him carefully. But other than that, the kid was a vegetable.
Frazier turned back to Hamid. “I got some news for you, raghead. Your boy ain’t giving instructions to anyone. He’s a few cans short of a six-pack, if you know what I mean.”
Hamid stopped smiling. At least he knew when he was being insulted. “Raza is already very angry at you. And you’re making it worse.”
“Oh yeah? That’s too bad.” Now it was Frazier’s turn to smile. He leaned over the wheelchair and reached for the thick mane of wires extending from the electrodes on Raza’s head. “But hey, I think I see what the problem is. These wires are probably bothering him. It’s time to disconnect, don’t you think?”