by C. G. Cooper
“I think what Scarfe said was wrong,” he said desperately. “I don’t think there’s anything hereditary about it. I have a feeling you agree.”
“I think there’s something wrong with the vaccines,” she said plainly. And an ironic chuckle came forth. “Which kinda sucks, you know? You find yourself assaulted by a bunch of crackpots if you even dip your toe into those waters. But I have to go where the evidence leads me. And there isn’t much of it. But based on my epigenetic research, I think something in the vaccines switches off whatever series or combination of genes is responsible for the development of the leg muscles.”
He took a deep breath. “Dr. Newman, I’ve been asked by the government to investigate the supposed link between autism and vaccines. It’s my considered opinion that there is no link. But I think that the government is responsible for perpetuating the autism rumor.”
“Why would they?” Her face transformed with the sudden realization. “Unless it’s to call attention away from...”
“I was called to investigate something that isn’t there. A red herring. I give them my report. People don’t trust it. Another report is called for in a couple of years. And again and again. And every time, attention is called to a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s a ruse to cover what’s really going on. This.” He pointed to the stroller. “And thousands more like her. I don’t know why or how it happens. All I know is that it happens. And every time someone goes public with it—”
“That someone dies,” she finished.
“Yes,” he said, letting go of a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “You were onto something with your research. The scandal, the denying of grants, even the dissolution of your marriage may have been a calculated plot to destroy your work.”
He put his hands to his temples and turned his head up, squinting at the sun. He wanted to scream at an empty sky. A chuckle started in his throat and then a crazy laugh burbled out of him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m acting like a melodramatic actress from a silent film. But I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
“Dr. Knight,” she said calmly, “you never asked me how I found you.”
“I found you,” he said. “Mina, she gave me your number.”
The woman smiled and shook her head slowly. “No, Doctor. Mina told me of your work. I told her to contact you on my behalf. Stem cells, Dr. Knight. I know that there’s hope for Jocelyn. I know you have the power to help her and others like her. I can give you my research, what little I have left of it.”
“No,” he said, and it tore him open to say it. “I can’t. I mean, I don’t have my research. It was confiscated.”
“I know,” she said. “Maybe I can help you get it back.”
“Maybe,” he echoed dubiously. “I don’t know.”
He looked at her. There was something familiar in the way her upper lip curled when she offered a smile. Or was it the way her hair spilled around the arms of her glasses as they rested atop her head? There was a little bit of Sarah there, or was he just imagining through his grief and confusion?
“It’s OK not to know,” she said.
He knew this. He told her he knew it. What he didn’t tell her was that somewhere along the line, he’d forgotten it.
25
When he got back to his office, an alert had appeared at the bottom of his computer screen: You have 1 message. Its icon was Mina’s avatar. He clicked on it. It automatically began a video chat connection. His camera lit up, giving him the eerie feeling that his life was under someone else’s control.
After a moment, she picked up, audio-only. “You alone?”
“I’ve got my staff here–what’s left of them, anyway. So, you’re a woman?”
A pause. “Yeah. They shouldn’t be hearing this.”
“More cloak and dagger stuff?”
“Um, excuse me,” she said, “I’ve been doing a little back channel research here. You have no idea what I’ve managed to uncover, Doctor.”
“Who are you anyway?”
“I’m a concerned citizen. That’s all you need to know.”
“How do I know you’re on the level?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “I’m talking to you over a Dark Web connection. I’m feeding you information regarding stuff that involves government corruption and possibly murder. What else? Oh yeah, I know you were busted for doing stem cell research.”
He sat forward in his seat. “How did you know that?”
“Never mind that for now. Are you convinced I know what I’m talking about?”
“Go on,” he said reluctantly.
“You know about the Panamanian Flu, right?”
“It’s only all over the news,” he said.
“I’ve just been privy to the latest report from the CDC, released secretly three days ago. It gives a timeline of six months to kill off twenty-percent of the population. Panamanian Flu is a hybridized version of influenza. It was engineered to spread easily but act slowly. The flu only causes serious illness and death in the host several weeks after infection to maximize the amount of time the host is spreading the virus.”
She sounded like she was reading.
“The strain,” she continued, “can quite literally be weaponized by turning its host into a human bomb. It doesn’t spread from person to person. It spreads from person to people. When the host dies, the virus erupts from the host’s cells in a volcanic explosion and, like dandelion seeds in the wind, travels to new hosts. Couple this with a highly mobile population, and we are sure to have the virus spread to all corners of the earth in short order, if it hasn’t already.”
“OK,” he said. “What does this have to do with anything I’ve been investigating?”
“Hang on,” she said. “Get this. It says here that the epidemic is occurring ahead of schedule. Then it goes into a little recent history. Apparently, the British army was testing what was to become the Panamanian Flu in the jungles of Belize. A rogue officer of the British army tried to destroy the experiments but failed. He was killed, but his actions inadvertently led to the premature release of the flu virus strain H1N1/3, the Panamanian Flu.” Mina’s monotone recitation of the grisly facts was making Knight’s skin crawl. “The report ends with a prediction that should the world find itself in the grips of a global pandemic, it would be the worst humanity has ever seen, one that will paralyze the international community in a matter of months.”
“Right, I got it. Starvation and pestilence. The end times, behold a pale horse and all that. I still don’t see what this has to do with what I’ve been working on.”
“Vaccines,” she said calmly, as if he was supposed to glean the answer from a single word.
He waited for her to finish, then said, “Vaccines what?”
“You’re, like, a genius, right? Or you’re supposed to be?”
“Who are you?” he retorted sourly.
“I’m telling you something you should have figured out by now, genius. I’m telling you it all ties in somehow. I don’t know how. If I knew, I would tell you. All I can say is that wherever you look at a story of tainted vaccines, a story about Panamanian Flu comes up. It doesn’t matter where you look. One thing leads to another. Then, bam, Panamanian Flu. It’s uncanny.”
“Uncanny?” Knight echoed. “Aren’t you a little young to be using that word?”
“Don’t believe me?” she said, sounding legitimately annoyed. “Look for Dr. Eric Baron. He’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“And who is Eric Baron?”
“First of all, that’s not his real name. Second, he was a scientist who worked for the CIA back in sixties. Ever hear of Project Wildfire?”
“No.”
“No one else has, either. I can’t get any more out of Dr. Baron. Maybe you can.”
“And how can I find him?”
“I’m not giving you his address. Go to the UK. He’ll find you.”
Knight threw his head back and laughed.
&n
bsp; “Did I say something hilarious?” Mina asked.
“You want me to just pick up and go to the UK to meet with some phantom source?”
“All right, smart guy, you want a little more? Your friend Darla Newman and he were colleagues. He gave her kid the vaccine that paralyzed her.”
“What?” he answered incredulously. He’d stopped laughing.
“You want to ask her? Go ahead. Ask her what happened to the guy who gave her daughter a vaccine that was supposed to make her smart but just wound up making her disabled. Go on.”
Knight remembered Darla Newman’s words regarding her daughter: “She goes from gifted class to gifted class, unable to make any lasting friends.”
“That’s all I could get out of him,” said Mina. “Happy now? I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
“I have to go,” he said suddenly. He needed to see the woman and her child again.
“Now you’re motivated.”
“Shut up,” he said. “How the hell do I turn you off?”
“Talk soon, Dr. Knight,” said Mina, and the call disconnected.
Talk soon. She sounded like she was smiling when she said it.
He googled the White Pages site for Darla Newman’s address. There was one just two miles away. He didn’t want to do it, but catching her unawares might help.
It just might get her to talk a little more this time, because he needed answers.
26
He pulled up to a modest ranch home covered partially in green growth, as if it had been dipped into a giant vat of the stuff. It was the type of abode that was built economically in the post-war era of quick and cheap, designed to show off equal parts modernity, efficiency, and prosperity, but displaying none of these things, and surrounded by cloned specimens.
As he approached, he remained focused. This was another problem for Alex Knight. That’s all it would be. Another puzzle that had a solution lurking inside a tangled web. He’d work it like he worked everything: by sifting through chunks of seemingly unrelated data, trying to find the patterns.
Her front door was open. The jamb was splintered.
Adrenaline leaves one with little time to consider things rationally. Knight entered the house, his heart pounding. He called out for her. For anyone.
The place was devoid of life. A chair had been overturned. A phone ripped out of the wall. A lamp knocked to its side on top of a couch stand.
He stopped before a small circle of what appeared to be blood on the kitchen floor. A carving knife lay several feet away.
His heart froze at the sight in the hallway leading off the kitchen: an overturned stroller and a Barbie doll nearby, lying on its own hair.
Something like panic scorched through his veins.
He searched the room for any tangibles clues left from the struggle, anything that would tell the rest of the story. A functional computer sat on the corner. Its surface was littered with the debris of someone’s paper life. He scanned the documents, moving aside one from atop another with his knuckle. A stapled bundle of papers with a cover page titled “On the Epigenetic Origins of Sudden Onset Hereditary Paralysis.” But it was the byline that caught Knight’s attention: Eric C. Baron, PhD.
There were four or five thick, dusty books on the shelf above the PC. Three were computer user manuals. Two others sat with a space between and were bound in leather. The spines read Chemical Induced Chromosomal Mutations in Cyanobactor Filaments in Lichen, Vols. I & II by Darla Newman, M.S.
Underneath those was a sticky note attached to the shelf that read “Eric Baron.” And a phone number.
He grabbed the sticky note from the shelf and stuck it to the Baron dissertation, then tucked it under his arm while he searched for more clues.
As he strode into the center of the room, his eyes turned to the doorway. A neighbor had walked into the middle of the street and was staring at him, a cellphone to her ear.
Shit!
He heard the woman’s voice rise. “I can see him!”
He made his way to the back of the house. There he found himself in a child’s room. There were modifications to the bed: silver bars that would eventually help the child climb in and out. The window here was just large enough for him to squeeze through.
Sirens began to wail somewhere close by.
Knight ran through backyards and tangled woods. He ran until his chest felt like it would burst.
27
It was over now. He wouldn’t be going back to the NIH. At least not for the function he originally filled. It occurred to him now that he had indeed been placed there. Stone hadn’t hired him; Stone had shoehorned him into it for reasons known only to Stone.
It was this anger fueling Knight’s flight now as he anxiously entered the Thurgood Marshall Airport departures area.
He could buy all his physical necessities either here or at Heathrow. He could even buy clothes. The simple provisions didn’t concern him at the moment. Right now, for all he knew, he was a wanted man. They could be tracking now, but he didn’t care. All he wanted was answers.
He booked his flight to the UK, all the while enduring the suspicious looks and questions after he told the girl he had no baggage to check.
With nothing else to do but sit and wait for boarding time, Knight made his way to a Starbucks and sat down. Coffee would be a bad idea. He needed to eat, but he felt like he couldn’t hold anything down. So, that left him sitting with one knee bobbing up and down.
Relax, Knight, he told himself. You’re not exactly melting in with the crowd.
Someone sneezed.
Eeek-chew!
Like a cat, his ears pricked up, and he instinctively picked up his head to periscope across the wide stretch of pavilion.
It couldn’t be her.
He saw a woman walking quickly toward the boarding area. Her hair was short, jet black. She wore a dark blue business suit and carried an attaché case. She walked as if bent toward a singular purpose.
There was something about her. And then there was the sneeze.
She was Sarah’s height and approximate weight. But the hair was wrong. And her manner of walking. Sarah was graceful in her body, not stiff and formal.
The impossibility nagged at him now. It nagged him so much that he got up and followed the stranger to her gate.
He found his pace quickening. As if he didn’t already look suspicious, traveling impulsively without baggage and acting like a nervous wreck. Now he was going after a woman in a way that looked a lot like a chase.
Her gait picked up as well. Like she could feel his presence stalking her.
He slowed as she approached the boarding station. The woman walked swiftly past the other passengers, presenting something to the guard, who ushered her through without a word.
He watched her disappear down the corridor. It wasn’t his gate, but the flight she boarded was bound for Heathrow.
As he nervously made his way to the boarding area, he became aware of the swiveling heads of security guards. Perhaps it was paranoia. Or perhaps someone, Darla Newman’s neighbor maybe, had tipped off the cops with an accurate description. Prickles of danger danced along his arms and legs. Professional trackers could be creeping right behind him in lock step.
As if he needed anything to amplify the suspicions of airport security, he jumped at the sudden sound of an email alert on his phone. He took it out and puzzled over the sender’s name: Dracula’s Guest. Having vaguely remembered reading Dracula in his youth, it only took a moment of thought to realize this was Mina’s little joke. He opened the email. The subject line read “A little in-flight reading for ya ;)” and contained a link to an article.
He clicked it and a PDF file downloaded to his phone. He then put his phone away for the time being.
It was boarding time.
He approached the watchful eyes of the ticket taker.
28
Another checkpoint cleared, he thought, walking through the cylindrical tunnel that connected to the plane.
Another thought came on the heels of the first: Y’aint outta the woods yet. An alert or an APB could come through. He pictured taking a seat and getting situated, only to have a swarm of armed guards rush into the cabin, and felt sick.
The wait for takeoff was interminable. But the plane was soon in the air, and for the first time in what seemed like a week, he let out a breath and allowed himself to relax. He put all thought of landing out of his mind for now. He’d deal with his problems when the time came.
He remembered the email from Mina and almost ignored it. Nope. His brain wouldn’t allow it.
He sighed and pulled out his phone. He opened the document and began to read. It was a manifesto of sorts, titled “’Tis Time to Part.” Its authorship was attributed to The Patriot.
He recognized the line from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. OK, so this was going to be some bit of nutcase radical propaganda. Add it to the pile with the others, Knight thought.
With nothing else on hand to distract him for the next eight hours, he’d at least kill a few minutes with this. He began to read...
’Tis Time to Part
Our daughters have lost the ability to walk.
And so it begins, with the realization that we must do everything in our power to resist the power of the sinister forces that seek to destroy our children, molecule by molecule.
When a human-controlled system becomes overwrought by its own purpose – when purpose overtakes those souls who’ve made it their duty to keep the welfare of humanity in their care – that system is obsolete and must be replaced.