Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “You don’t want me to run it?”

  “Of course I want you to run it, but I’m not losing any sleep over it. If you don’t run it, Tatiana will, and Caipi will scoop you again. I’ll just sell my take to The New Yorker. Either way, I get paid and I have an exclusive for an important world event. But I have a feeling that in a few minutes I’m not going to be able to speak to you at all, so I’ll do that when I get back.”

  “Look, I really don’t think—”

  As if on cue, the connection cut off. Marianne tried to reconnect, but there was no internet to connect to. Not on the hotel wifi and not through her phone.

  Inwardly, however, she exulted. Her story was safely filed. Nothing that they did now would change that. They could take her camera and her notes with no consequences whatsoever. And if they decided to silence her completely… well, Vaidal would take that as a sign that she was on to something and run the story. No one was going to stop it.

  Now, it was time to speak to Veronika.

  ***

  Terrence Vaidal sat back and cursed Marianne. When she was on staff, she acted out in every way possible up to and including having an affair with the husband of one of the owners of the media conglomerate that owned Update!

  Fortunately for her, the old bat had never found out what her much younger husband was up to, because that was one transgression Vaidal would have been powerless to shield Marianne from. It would have been the end of her career in media. In fact, the next one the guy dallied with was still blacklisted.

  He thought that after she resigned to go freelance, his Marianne-Caruso-related ulcers would subside, but every so often, she did something like this.

  Granted, it was never quite like this… but the sensation was familiar.

  Real journalism was about triple-checking every fact, vetting every source, making sure you were printing something as close to the truth as you could. Opinion pieces were all very well, but news had to be based on fact, not speculation or personal preference.

  He watched the video again, trying to decide if it was real or if it was something Marianne had somehow faked. That, in its turn, led him down the path of trying to remember if Marianne had seemed out of sorts. Had he done anything to make her mad? Might she have picked up some addiction? PTSD from the Timeless affair?

  He didn’t think so.

  While he pondered, a clock ticked in his head, counting down the minutes until Firminha Barbosa at Caipi published Tatiana Close’s story. She would, of course, no questions asked, and it would soon syndicate around the world.

  If Marianne was telling the truth and not suffering some kind of psychotic episode.

  “Damn the woman,” he said to himself. But that was unhelpful. The clock kept ticking. “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” Vaidal pressed on the button that summoned his assistant. It was an affectation, a remnant from an earlier time, but since it was a time he considered more elegant than the current age—an era in which some poor misguided souls actively looked down upon elegance as a tool of the oppressor—he welcomed it.

  Sarah popped her head in. “Get me Lola. Tell her she’s going to hate what I’m about to ask.”

  Lola was as blond and bubbly and uninteresting as Marianne was bewitching, but she was just as good a journalist, which was all that mattered. Well, all that mattered with Lola… Marianne had already made it very clear that nothing more would happen between them.

  She sat down, knowing that Vaidal liked to speak first. She generally let him get the gushers off his chest before contributing sound ideas.

  “I need you to edit and frame something Marianne sent us.”

  “Marianne Caruso? You’re going to lay hands on Marianne’s copy? Like more than just a copy-edit?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll murder you. Worse, once she’s murdered you and I get your job, she will never sell us anything else again.”

  Vaidal shrugged. “Oh, come off it. Marianne isn’t that difficult to work with.” He let Lola fume a little. Her hatred of her predecessor as Update!’s star journo was natural. All she ever heard since she’d crossed the street from WSJ was Marianne this, and Marianne that. “That’s a risk I have to take. This is a time-sensitive piece and Marianne had to do a rush job on it. Plus we need to make it extremely clear that we didn’t generate this content but purchased it as is from il Gran Caruso.”

  “Okay. Now you’re making me curious. What did she come up with this time?”

  “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

  “Bit of a waste of time calling me up here, then, wasn’t it?”

  “I have to show you a video first.”

  ***

  Veronica Bee raised her head as Marianne crashed into her room.

  “You should really lock your door, Ronnie,” she admonished.

  “In a hotel? Why? The likelihood of an occupied room being attacked in a hotel is…”

  “Spare me the lecture,” Marianne said. “There’s something you need to see.”

  Ronnie watched the video Marianne had shot in silence. Then she looked up.

  “So you want to know how they faked it, and who did it? I won’t really be able to tell you much until the internet comes back.”

  “It’s not coming back.”

  Ronnie frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because that video isn’t faked. I filmed it myself.”

  Veronica leaned back on her chair. “Are you going to start on me, too? Just because I’m not cut out to be a fashion journalist, you guys don’t all need to treat me like dirt.”

  Marianne gaped at her. “I’m actually not kidding. Look, I was nearly killed by one of those things. The person filming is me.” Then she glared back at the research assistant, a woman who’d been allowed on this trip partly because YekLab was paying for it but mostly because Marianne had vouched for her. “But if you think I’m messing with you, fine. I’ll do the rest of this alone.”

  Veronica gaped. “You’re telling me I should believe this?”

  “I’m telling you it’s real. I was there and I need to know what we’re looking at here.”

  “You promise me this isn’t a setup?”

  “I swear. I’m not messing with you.”

  The researcher took a few moments to gather her thoughts. Marianne knew just how easily someone like her would get bullied in an office like Update!’s. She wasn’t physically unattractive, but she was… bland. That wasn’t the problem, however. The problem was that she insisted on making a statement with her clothes and hairstyle, and that statement was: ‘I demand to be evaluated only on my mind, so I dress in what appear to be burlap sacks and cut my hair short despite not having the best face for it in the hope that you will look beyond it.’ The effect was awful, especially if one lived in New York and worked in media. The worst part about it was that it was the result of special effort to look like crap. Had she worn jeans and t-shirts, not only would she have been more comfortable, but also looked about a million times better. And shoulder-length hair would have been a titanic improvement.

  Finally, the researcher nodded. “I guess I should trust you.”

  “Yes, you should. Now what do you think of that?”

  “Wow. A dinosaur, no doubt about it.”

  Marianne shook her head. “But what about the feathers? Isn’t it like some kind of flying dragon thing? Look, the dead one we saw when we got out of the room has feathers, too.”

  “Those feathers aren’t to fly with. Don’t be silly.”

  Marianne bit back the grin that was trying to get out. For a woman who wanted to be loved for her personality, there were a few things that needed ironing out.

  If Veronica noticed her words might have been offensive, she didn’t show it. She just went on. “A lot of dinosaurs had feathers. In fact, dinosaurs still exist, except we call them birds. Now I think I saw a decent angle on that one a few minutes ago, let me rewind. There, I think I could probably identify it from that shot.”

  “No, you can
’t. Network’s down, remember?” Besides, at least now she knew it was a dinosaur. That made her story even more significant… especially if Vaidal ran it before Caipi did.

  “Pfft. Who needs the internet? I’ll check the database.”

  “You have a database about dinosaurs?”

  “I have gigs and gigs of Wikepedia copied onto a hard drive, even managed to keep the hyperlinks by reprogramming a browser with the address lookup instructions. You never know when you’ll need to research without a connection. In fact, I’m pretty sure the most important things you’ll ever need to know will happen when you have no internet.” As she spoke, Veronica rifled through her bag, discarding thumb drives and discs until she came to the one she wanted. “Here we go. Now that thing looks like one of the later dinosaurs, doesn’t it? So… Cretaceous, most likely.”

  The researcher began flipping through drawings at high speed, not spending more than a few seconds on each.

  “This one… no.”

  Marianne let her work and paced around the room, wondering if she was making a huge mistake, but desperate to know what she’d stumbled on. Ten minutes later, Ronnie exclaimed, “Ah. This is you, isn’t it, dearie… Marianne, we found him. Deinonychus.” She read the description. “Ooh. You were a bit of an asshole, weren’t you?”

  “I hope you’re talking to the dinosaur. No, scratch that, I hope you’re not talking to the dinosaur.”

  “Lay off,” Ronnie said. “Have a look.” She turned the laptop towards Marianne and smiled. The thing on the screen looked very similar to the one that had terrorized the product launch.

  “The colors are wrong. The one I saw was brighter.”

  “These things lived a hundred million years ago, Marianne. The only reason we know about them is because of calcified impressions in rock. So scientists pretty much had to guess at coloration.”

  “But there’s a real one. A living one, I mean. I saw it myself.”

  “Then someone built it in a lab. Probably using the creatures from Antarctica as a basis.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Just a conspiracy theory based on some leaked footage from an Argentine Antarctic base that failed a couple of years ago. There’s people who say it was attacked by a huge dinosaur and a bunch of little ones.”

  “Sounds like a Godzilla movie.”

  “That’s what they claim, yeah,” Ronnie replied. “I didn’t believe it… especially the parts of Russians being present and stealing some eggs. But now…”

  “You think they’re engineering this stuff?”

  “Remember that question I told you to ask about CRISPR?”

  “Yeah, worked like a charm, by the way. I’ll show you the woman’s face sometime. It’s on the video. Priceless.”

  “Well, once you know what DNA you want to build, CRISPR is part of the toolbox that allows you to build it. It’s the scissors, if you like, clipping strands.” She studied the picture of the dinosaur and then looked at the video. “They don’t have an original genome, of course, so they probably looked at the characteristics they wanted and built up those things. But why anyone would create a Deinonychus is beyond me. It’s just a bigger, meaner version of velociraptor… you know, the one in Jurassic Park…”

  “I know what a velociraptor is,” Marianne replied, trying not to let her impatience show. She’d been this close to winning a Pulitzer, but the geek squad still treated her like a dumb ornament. In fairness, though, Ronnie was right about Marianne knowing velociraptors because of Jurassic Park.

  “Well, this one is worse. One of the killing machines of its age. With a claw specially designed to disembowel things. Why would they want this?”

  “Terror weapon? Super soldier? Because someone went nuts in the lab and decided he wanted to watch the world burn? It’s our job to find out.”

  Ronnie’s eyes widened. “You mean…”

  “Of course I do. That’s what a real journalist does. You go after the story, and you don’t stop until your readers get answers.” Marianne held Ronnie’s gaze. “Now, you told me you were going to get information about YekLab, the background and the corporate structure.”

  “You told me you didn’t need it, and to research competitive beauty products instead. That no one was interested in the corporate stuff, so we didn’t need to spend time on it.”

  “Turns out I was wrong. So you didn’t do that research?”

  “Actually, I did. I just didn’t show it to you, even though I really wanted to.”

  “Really wanted to? Why?”

  “Because the lab facility you visited used to belong to the Soviet military. It’s the site of the most famous biological warfare accident in history, the Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak.”

  “You should have told me that.”

  “You told me not to,” Ronnie retorted.

  “I know. But sometimes you have to disobey orders in order to be effective at your job. Ask Vaidal sometime… he’s the one who taught me that and he’s been regretting it ever since.”

  Ronnie shrugged. “It’s too late for that, but I also found out that there’s no real records about who owns YekLab. This isn’t just the usual Russian obfuscation of ownership to protect oligarchs. This is deeper-level stuff; none of the holding companies involved seems to really exist—if you follow the trail deep enough it goes up in smoke. So I’d say yes, it’s a covert operation, but I’m not sure whose it might be.”

  “And they grow the dinosaurs in the basement, or wherever they used to grow the Anthrax.”

  “I doubt it. If they’re growing dinosaurs, they’re doing it at their complex in Gora Yezhovaya.” She held up a hand. “It’s the only other asset listed to this company, and it’s perfect. Here’s a picture of it from above, a bunch of enormous buildings on a huge complex in the mountains. Other than skiers in winter and an occasional hiker, it’s out of sight. Look at this place here. I don’t know of too many other buildings with that kind of footprint.”

  Marianne’s heart sank. “We can’t get there. They’ll never let me out of the city on a plane, not until the fuss over the lab dies down, and Russia’s too big to drive across.”

  “No need to take a plane. This place is just about sixty miles away. It’s the skiing spot for Yekaterinburg people. We can rent a car and be there in an hour.”

  Marianne thought about it. It was four in the afternoon already, but daylight lasted a long time in Russia in July. They had time to drive out there, have a look and get back to the hotel before nightfall. If they could get a car in time.

  “How do you rent a car in this place?” she said.

  Ronnie smiled. “Leave that to me.”

  ***

  “And did you see how I took out the one on the second floor?” Ivan said. “Boom, boom, two shots to the head and it came down the stairs. One dead ugly dinosaur.”

  “Yeah, you almost dropped it on top of us,” Yuri replied dourly. “But you’re right about the shooting. Did you see the one that charged at me from behind the filing cabinets?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone run so fast,” Ivan replied. They all laughed.

  Max smiled as he drove. The adrenalin had long since worn off, and they’d spent the rest of the day in debriefing. Yuri had been in combat—if you could really call that glorified hunting expedition combat—for the first time, while Ivan and Vasily had only limited live-fire experience. Max, of course, had been in Chechnya quite often, both in open conflict and in very unofficial incursions. His incursions tended to happen at night, though, so it was a nice change to be able to see what he was doing and to be allowed to discuss it with his men.

  After they’d been debriefed, they’d each been taken back to barracks individually. As the officer, Max had been the last to be liberated from the officials, and was delighted to find that his troops had waited for him before going to lunch. They were good guys.

  So they’d liberated a Tigr from the motor pool and headed back towards the city. There was a
service station on Route 352 near Tatavuy that served food that was both affordable enough for the enlisted men and almost edible.

  An orange Lada Niva approached along the other lane, and Max looked to see who’d be driving something that loud.

  He almost steered them into the trees as he realized that the driver was none other than the dark-haired journalist from the lab. What was she doing?

  His heart sank as he realized that the only thing along this highway was Gora Yezhovaya… and he didn’t think she would be attempting to ski there. July wasn’t the best skiing month. She must have been on her way to the facility, and would probably get herself into big trouble.

  That was too bad, but he shrugged. She would probably get deported and never be allowed back into Russia, but she was no longer his problem. He’d already done what he could for her when his men secured the main lab building in Yekaterinburg.

  The next car that passed caught his eye because it was a black sedan with dark-tinted windows. The kind that the FSB drove.

  He couldn’t see the driver as the car passed, but he just managed to catch a glimpse of the passenger.

  Selene Grosjean. The witch woman.

  Following Marianne.

  That was bad. It was one thing for a journalist to run afoul of the guards outside the complex, get themselves arrested and be deported through official channels with a note of complaint to their government, and quite another for the charming Miss Caruso to fall into the clutches of the FSB or whatever dark agency Miss Grosjean worked for. When those people grabbed you, you just disappeared from the face of the earth, never to be heard from again.

  He hit the brakes and, when the speed was low enough, pulled the handbrake and executed a neat U-turn on the two-lane blacktop.

  “What the hell?” one of his men yelled.

  “Sorry guys,” Max replied, “lunch is going to have to wait.”

  They groaned. “What? Why?” came from every seat but his.

  “Remember the pretty reporter from the lab?”

  “Which one, the tall one or the short one?” Max had no doubt that the men had already discussed in graphic detail what they’d do to each of them if they weren’t completely unobtainable.