by Greg Cox
“I have to go now,” he told Williams. The longer they spoke, the more chance he stood of making a careless mistake and raising Williams’s suspicions. He glanced down at the Xeroxed document on the desk. “Expect the shipment at four-thirty tomorrow morning, your time.”
You can expect me there as well, he thought. Performing the necessary calculations in his head, he deduced that Williams, or his agents, would be meeting the flight roughly seventeen hours from now. Thankfully, Seven knew a faster way to get to Delhi, even if Roberta was in for a long flight. I imagine she’ll be very surprised to hear she’s going to India.
“Wait!” Williams interjected hurriedly, before Seven could hang up. “What about that uranium? I promised the director that I would remind you just how urgently we require that processed ore.”
Uranium? A startled expression transformed Seven’s ordinarily inscrutable features. He hadn’t seen anything about radioactive [83] materials among Offenhouse’s files, unless that particular cargo had been disguised somehow. He quickly leafed through the manifests until he found one highly suspicious item: a large shipment of lead “construction materials.” That must be it, he concluded, but what were Offenhouse—and Chrysalis—doing with potentially fissionable uranium? The discovery added an alarmingly nuclear dimension to what Seven already deemed to be an extremely hazardous situation.
Genetic engineering, germ warfare, nuclear proliferation. Sometimes, he brooded, it seems positively miraculous that humanity hasn’t destroyed itself already. ...
“Huh? Wha—?”
Ralph Offenhouse came out of a daze to find himself in his Brooklyn office, seated behind his desk. Groggy and confused, he blinked and shook his head, trying to clear the fog from his thoughts. A lingering sense of blissful well-being swiftly faded from his mind, giving way to uncertainty and bewilderment.
I must have fallen asleep at my desk, he guessed. The funny thing was, though, he had no memory of actually sitting down here, or even of turning on the lights. The last thing he remembered was climbing the stairs to his office; after that, his mind was blank. Weird, he thought. I haven’t been working that hard lately, have I?
For a second, he feared he’d had a stroke; heart disease ran in his family, so that wasn’t a completely unlikely scenario, even though he hadn’t even turned forty yet. He wiggled his fingers nervously, checking for paralysis or tremors. “Hello,” he whispered, making sure he could still speak.
Everything seemed to check out. What’s more, he didn’t feel weak or impaired. If anything, he felt more relaxed and better-rested than he had in weeks. He didn’t even have a hangover, which ruled out an uncharacteristic drinking binge. So what the hell happened to me? A thought occurred to him and he groped for his pistol, only to find it safely stowed away in his side pocket, right where it belonged. That’s a relief, he thought. Can’t be too careful these days, especially in this part of town.
[84] Raising a hand to wipe his brow, he caught a glimpse of his Rolex. Wait a second, what time is it? He peeked urgently at the face of the watch.
One-fifteen ... well after Williams at Chrysalis was supposed to call for an update on this morning’s shipment. “Damn,” he muttered. Had he missed the freaking call?
There was only one way to find out. Bending over, he pulled out the lower right-hand drawer on his desk. Inside, beneath a spare ashtray and a box of Kleenex, was what appeared to be an ordinary cigar box. He cleared the stuff on top, then lifted the lid of the box, revealing the tape recorder hidden inside. According to a numerical display on the machine, the machine had already taped one call tonight, even if Offenhouse had absolutely no memory of any such call. This keeps getting stranger and stranger, he thought. When he first started taping his calls, with an eye toward having something to hold over Chrysalis later on, he’d never thought he’d need the tapes to fill in a gaping hole in his own memory. How the heck did I end up with my own personal eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap?
He rewound the tape until the beginning of the last call, then hit Play. “Hello?” he heard his own voice say, then listened in amazement as he and that jittery Brit, Williams, carried on a conversation that Offenhouse didn’t recall at all. He was particularly surprised to hear himself tell Williams that those stupid centrifuge parts were on the way when he hadn’t yet managed to get any of those components at a decent price.
That’s not me, Offenhouse realized, with a certainty that came from somewhere deep inside him. The voice on the tape sounded exactly like him, but he knew somehow, on an almost subconscious level, that he had never said those words. Somebody else had taken his place. Doped me probably, he guessed, then pretended to be me on the phone. Somebody who now knew all about the shipment flying out of Kennedy in less than an hour.
His heart pounding all of a sudden, he switched off the recorder and grabbed the phone, hastily dialing his contact at Chrysalis. “Williams?” he said a few moments later. “This is Offenhouse. I think we have a problem. ...”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOMEWHERE ABOVE EUROPE
MAY 16, 1974
“OUCH!” ROBERTA EXCLAIMED as Takagi pricked her upper arm with his hypodermic needle. She flinched involuntarily, then flashed the young scientist a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I don’t like needles, which is pretty funny for a biochemist, I guess.”
“Not at all,” he assured her, deftly withdrawing the hypo. He leaned over Roberta, bracing himself with one hand against the back of her first-class seat, just in case the plane they were travelling on encountered any unexpected turbulence. As midair inoculations went, his technique was smooth and almost painless. “I don’t like getting shots myself, but these vaccinations are a good idea, considering where we’re going.”
“Wherever that may be,” she said ingenuously, even though she knew full well that this jet was ultimately bound for Delhi. When they’d compared notes late last night, Seven had given her as much of the itinerary as he’d managed to glean from that guy Offenhouse’s files, but, of course, she had to play dumb as far as Takagi and Lozinak were concerned. There was a smallpox epidemic in India a few months ago, she recalled, which probably explains their insistence on these shots.
Unless, that is, this had something to do with the secret germ warfare program Seven suspected. She still found it hard to believe that her two new friends, Walter and Viktor, could possibly be involved in [86] something so sinister and barbaric. Breeding superbabies was one thing, that was arguably a positive goal, but growing bacteria by the ton? How did that fit into the utopian vision of what Seven had called the Chrysalis Project?
The shades had been drawn over all the windows in the passenger compartment of Chrysalis’s private jet, presumably to prevent “Ronnie Neary” from tracking the plane’s progress over Europe and Asia. The pressurized cabin smelt faintly of cigarettes, but at least she had plenty of legroom. With only four passengers aboard—herself, Takagi, Lozinak, and the huge Latino, whose name she had learned was Carlos—they each had a row of plush leather seats to themselves, with another row to spare for Isis and her molded plastic carrying case. First-class all the way; Chrysalis clearly had money to burn, not to mention a need-to-know mentality bordering on the paranoid. I hope they’re not planning on blindfolding me once we get to Delhi, she thought.
“That’s all,” Takagi announced cheerfully Placing a rubber tip over the point of his hypo, he returned the syringe to the black leather doctor’s kit resting on the seat next to Roberta’s. He then buckled himself into his own seat, across the aisle from hers. “You might as well get comfortable,” he warned her. “We have a long flight ahead.”
Tell me about it, Roberta thought glumly It was at least a seven-hour trip from Rome to Delhi. Rolling down the sleeve of her blouse, she snuck a peek at her wristwatch. After arriving from New York, the plane had departed Rome at about four P.M., which meant she still had about six-and-a-half hours to go. She tried to calculate their arrival time in Delhi, but the tricky time differences just made her he
ad spin. Probably just as well, she concluded. Ronnie Neary would have no idea how long this trip was supposed to last.
“You sure you can’t tell me where we’re going?” she pleaded, intent on staying in character. “It seems to me that I’ve taken a lot on faith at this point.” She gave Takagi the most plaintive expression she could muster. “So when are you folks going to start to trust me?”
The amiable Japanese researcher squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s not that we don’t trust you,” he insisted. “It’s just that, [87] well—” He chewed nervously on his lower lip as he struggled to find the right words. “I mean, you know, the way things are—”
“No,” Carlos grunted from the seat behind her. “Don’t tell her anything.” The unsmiling Latino had been introduced to Roberta as Lozinak’s bodyguard and “security consultant.” In turn, she’d pretended not to have seen him before, since Ronnie Neary would never have noticed being followed all over Rome by the huge, silent phantom. Pretty darn careless of me, she admitted, but, hey, I’m just a whiz-kid geneticist with no street smarts.
“Nothing personal,” Takagi added hastily. “Our friend Carlos is just very conscientious when it comes to security.” He shrugged sheepishly, then made a painfully obvious attempt to change the subject. “Did you know that Carlos is literally one-of-a-kind? He was the subject of one of our very first attempts at adult transgenic therapy. DNA from the African mountain gorilla was spliced into his chromosomal sequence, causing increased muscular and a skeletal development. Really! Believe it or not, he used to be my size, back when we first sprung him from some awful Cuban prison.”
Ohmigosh, Roberta thought in amazement. The big bruiser really is part gorilla! She had to resist a sudden temptation to peek over the back of her seat to take a closer look. I knew it! So what does that make him anyway? A Homo simian?
“Unfortunately,” Takagi confessed, a note of regret slipping into his voice, “on the whole, the experiment was not a tremendous success. Of the fifty initial subjects, all rescued from life sentences in prisons throughout the world, only Carlos survived the entire procedure, and he ended up sterile, pretty much killing any chance of passing on his newly acquired characteristics that way.”
Carlos growled warningly from the backseat, suggesting that the tactless Japanese scientist was perhaps treading upon a touchy area. Roberta could see where the ape-man might be sensitive about certain issues. “Still, we’ve made enormous progress since then,” Takagi added.
Such as? Roberta wanted to press Walter for more details, but she also remembered that Ronnie Neary still hadn’t gotten an answer to her [88] original query. “That’s all very fascinating,” she admitted, “but you can’t distract me that easily. All I want to know is where this darn plane is flying to?”
Takagi’s lips parted encouragingly, but, before he could speak up, an older, Ukrainian-accented voice interrupted from one of the seats in front of Roberta. “My apologies,” Dr. Lozinak said slowly but firmly. “We have indeed asked much of you, but you must grant us this much more. Please believe me, it is much safer for everyone if you do not learn the actual location of our primary facility until we have all arrived safely at our destination.”
“Good,” Carlos growled in agreement, his voice several octaves lower than Lurch on The Addams Family. Roberta had noticed the claw marks on the bodyguard’s face when they met at the airport. Evidence, no doubt, of a recent run-in with a certain feisty black feline, and proof, as far as Roberta was concerned, that the surly Missing Link was indeed the culprit who had invaded her hotel room, bugged her phone, and rifled through her things. Like I wouldn’t notice traces of such obvious snooping! she thought indignantly I bet I would have found that bug all on my own, even if Isis hadn’t raised a fuss about the phone the minute I came through the door. Fortunately, she and Seven hardly needed phones when they could use their servos as communicators—and without paying long-distance fees.
“Sorry,” Takagi said with an apologetic shrug. “But Dr. Lozinak is right.”
Frustrated, Roberta fought down an urge to swear out loud. “What exactly are you afraid of?” she asked, figuring she could probably press the issue a little further without blowing her cover. “That someone’s going to interrogate me as soon as we get off the plane?”
“Perhaps,” Lozinak admitted. She couldn’t see his face from where she was sitting, but she could imagine the sober, slightly rueful expression on the older scientist’s grandfatherly features. “Or we could—what is the English phrase?—lose trace of you somewhere between the airport and our base. Please understand, by informing you prematurely, we would be risking not only ourselves, but also our colleagues at the project, and all we have worked for these many years.” He [89] paused, probably to let his careful explanation sink deeper into Dr. Neary’s consciousness. “You see, it is not a decision we can take lightly.”
“Oh,” Roberta said weakly. “I guess when you put it that way—” She let her voice trail off, making a strategic decision to let the matter slide. After all, she reminded herself, she already knew a lot more than any of her fellow passengers realized, including the fact that Seven would be waiting to greet the plane in Delhi.
She felt a stab of envy, directed at her aloof and enigmatic supervisor. Unlike her, Seven wouldn’t need to cool his heels aboard a jet for seven hours just to get to far-off India. Transporters have definitely spoiled me for air travel, she realized. What I wouldn’t give for a cloud of glowing blue smoke right about now!
Isis must have been thinking along the same lines, because she suddenly let out an ear-piercing wail from the confines of her cramped plastic carrier. No surprise; Carlos had earlier insisted that the cat remain locked up for the duration of the flight. Despite the feline’s innumerable snubs and slights, Roberta couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy for the claustrophobic kitty-cat.
I know how she feels, the young woman thought. A paperback copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull rested in her lap, its slender spine and meager page count suddenly striking her as grossly insufficient to get her through the tedious journey ahead. I should’ve brought something longer, she realized.
A lot longer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BALAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
DELHI, INDIA
MAY 17, 1974
THE METAL DETECTORS at the entrance to the International Arrivals and Departures terminal were a fairly recent innovation, being a necessary response to the recent global epidemic of skyjackings. Gary Seven handed a blue-clad airport security guard his servo, along with a key ring and a handful of small change, before stepping through the primitive scanning device. Circumstances, it seemed, were going out of their way to remind him of the twentieth century’s penchant for senseless violence. And these people think they have the wisdom to rewrite their own DNA? he marveled, incredulous. They can barely keep the skies free of terrorism and extortion.
More or less indistinguishable from a fountain pen, the servo elicited no suspicions on the part of the security officer, who blithely handed Seven’s personal articles back to him. Tucking them back into the pockets of his gray suit, Seven walked calmly but briskly toward the gate mentioned in Ralph Offenhouse’s files, following signs printed in both Hindi and English. It was a little after four A.M. In theory, the plane would be arriving from Rome in less than half an hour, bearing, among other things, Roberta Lincoln and her newfound associates, not to mention a supply of processed uranium intended for purposes unknown.
[91] Despite the early hour, the terminal was a typically Indian scene of hubbub and congestion. Milling families bid farewell to departing relatives with variable combinations of tears and jubilation, while those stuck waiting for flights slumped in worn plastic seats, dozing uncomfortably or struggling to stay awake. Irate flyers, perhaps discovering that their flights had been delayed and/or overbooked, argued loudly with airline personnel at the check-in counters in front of several of the gates. Worn-out babies cried incessantly,
and a Hindi pop tune blared over the din, showing little consideration for those unlucky travelers hoping to catch a little shut-eye before boarding their planes, and the spicy scent of hot chai tea rose from more than one cup or thermos bottle clutched in the grip of a prospective passenger.
For himself, Seven was intensely grateful that he’d been able to bypass a grueling fourteen-hour flight from America, thanks to his matter-transmission vault. I could transport from Vulcan to Alpha Centauri, he marveled, in a fraction of the time it takes a primitive 747 to fly halfway around this planet.
Unfortunately for the mass of late-night flyers, none of the cafeterias, snack shops, or newsstands had opened for business yet. Weaving his way through the packed terminal, while doing his best to ignore the nerve-fraying crowding and commotion, Seven reached the designated gate within minutes. Since this was strictly a private flight, there were no airline employees in attendance. Rows of seated passengers, most likely waiting for the next scheduled departure from this gate, flanked the unmanned check-in station guarding the closed door that blocked access to the jetway. Peering through wide glass windows, Seven saw that the plane from New York had already landed. A BAX-146 jetliner, he guessed, taxiing toward the terminal. The jet was painted a bright shade of orange, contrasting sharply with the cobalt blue insignia adorning the plane’s tail fin. The stylized logo resembled a butterfly spreading its wings. Newly hatched from a chrysalis, he surmised, recalling the name of the mysterious organization Offenhouse fronted for. A chrysalis, of course, was another name for the cocoon in which a caterpillar metamorphosed into a butterfly. An appropriate symbol for an outfit that appeared to [92] be dabbling in genengineering, he decided, and not quite so obvious as, say, a double helix.