Immune

by Richard Phillips

“Don’t worry. I can’t read your thoughts. It’s more of a feel and amplify your feelings thing.” Once again, Eduardo smiled. “Now, let’s find out what Garfield Kromly truly fears.”

  There was really only one thing that Kromly truly feared and nobody else knew about it. It happened a little over five years ago and had been the subject of his nightmares ever since.

  As Pam’s breast cancer spread throughout her body, her other organs had begun to fail. At the end, her lungs had filled with fluid, leaving her terrified, struggling for every little gulp of air. Garfield had sat beside her, holding her hand, hating himself for not being able to do something to help her. If only he could have breathed for her, just to ease her passage, but he couldn’t. His lovely Pam had lingered for days before finally gasping out her last breath.

  The terror Garfield had seen in her face those last terrible days haunted his dreams, leaving him gasping in rhythm with his wife when he awakened, as if he could unwind her fear by absorbing it into himself.

  Suddenly, Garfield’s world shifted. He was back in the Bethesda Naval Hospital, only this time he was laying in bed beside his wife. She looked at him hopefully, mouthing the words “Please help me.”

  Instinctively, he knew that his wish had been granted, that every lungful of air he inhaled would go directly to his wife.

  Kromly struggled to inhale, but he couldn’t. Pam was next to him, looking at him, counting on him, and he couldn’t take a breath.

  With panic rising in his chest, he worked his lungs. Nothing. It was as if he had stuck his head into a vacuum chamber. No amount of effort yielded the slightest amount of air intake. The hope that had shown in Pam’s eyes only moments ago faded, leaving only a terror they both shared. Horror filled his soul.

  Garfield Kromly screamed, the sound filling the hunting cabin and leaching out through the window pane, through the crack beneath the door.

  “What did the Ripper take?”

  Disorientation made Kromly dizzy. “Fuck you.”

  He was back in the hospital, but this time Pam was whimpering. Garfield reached for her hand but something held him down. If only he could breathe, Pam would get air. He pulled with his lungs, but something covered his face. Someone was holding a plastic bag over his head. Eduardo’s blurred face peered in at him, the thin smile crinkling his lips through the translucent plastic.

  Can’t breathe. God help me. Can’t breathe.

  Glancing to his left, Garfield could see Pam, her head now encased in another plastic bag, her wide eyes staring into his. Fear leached into his soul.

  “What was in the packet?”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Kromly panted, struggling to rise despite the agony in his arms. What the fuck was Eduardo Montenegro?

  Back to dreamland. Again and again. Each time the hallucinations grew worse, his fear amplified until finally he found himself unable to stop shaking. The visions had morphed into an unearthly mixture of nightmare and reality. Pam was here in the cabin, lying on the cot across from the spot where he sat tied to the chair.

  And, amid the rising liquid terror that threatened to drown him, Eduardo was there, asking his questions.

  When Garfield Kromly finally began to talk, he told everything he knew about the disk. Where it came from. The strange code embedded into the GPS satellite signal. How he had arranged to pass the disk on the Washington Mall. Everything.

  Pam disappeared and Garfield found he could breathe again, although tears had cut streaks down his cheeks and left his shirt collar damp.

  Eduardo leaned in close. “One more question, then I’ll release you from all the nightmares.”

  Kromly was numb. “Ask.”

  “You know the Ripper. Where is he going?”

  If he could have managed it, Kromly would have smiled. If Eduardo wanted to meet the Reaper, then Garfield was happy to send him. Hell. He just wished he could be there to watch.

  “He’ll go to the place where the GPS signal is uplinked. The GPS master control station at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.”

  Eduardo nodded, then rose and walked out of Kromly’s field of view.

  Behind him, Garfield heard a familiar sound, Saran Wrap being pulled from a roll. Then as Eduardo began methodically wrapping the clear plastic wrap around and around the CIA trainer’s head, a new set of horrifying images writhed into Kromly’s mind.

  Only this time, his beloved Pamela was not there to slowly suffocate with him.

  142

  Phil Rabin opened his front door, then paused, staring down at the DHL package propped against his step. He’d heard the doorbell, but he hadn’t seen the truck. Funny. He normally noticed everything. He didn’t even know they delivered on Thanksgiving Day.

  Walking into his study, he turned the express-delivery package in his hand. About the size of an encyclopedia. But it didn’t weigh enough to be a book. The ink of the handwritten return address had been smudged into illegibility. Oh well. If he wanted to find out who it was from, he was going to have to open the damn thing.

  Tearing open the box’s pull strip, Phil dumped the contents onto his desk, a sealed manila envelope and a Polaroid photo. Did they still make those cameras?

  Picking up the photograph, Phil sat down. As editor of the New York Post, he didn’t associate with anyone from the Times. But that didn’t mean he didn’t recognize their Pulitzer Prize winners, even a dead one. Freddy Hagerman.

  Holding the photo up to the light, Phil examined it more closely.

  It was Freddy Hagerman all right, sitting up in bed, clad only in a nightgown, the bed sheets thrown back to reveal his bare legs. The left one ended in a bandaged stump, just above where the knee should have been.

  Across the back of the photo, a simple message had been scrawled in black marker.

  “I can’t trust my editor. Thought you might be interested in a story that cost me a leg. F. H.”

  The brown envelope drew his attention. Slitting the top with a letter opener, he removed an unlabeled compact disk. There was nothing else.

  Sliding the disk into his computer, Phil scanned the contents. A text document labeled “Story,” a sound file, and an images folder.

  Curiosity thoroughly aroused, Phil played the sound file first. At first he thought he must have gotten a bad recording, with just some poor-quality background noise. Then the screaming began, first from a single voice, quickly joined by others. The horrible chorus grew in volume, barely recognizable as human, then wavered and died out. Perhaps a minute passed in relative silence before a new round of terrible howls filled the tape.

  Even with no narrative on the tape to explain it, by the time he finished listening, every hair on Phil’s body was standing at full attention, held in the grasp of tight little goose bumps that would not fade.

  Opening the “Story” file, Phil began reading.

  It was a full-blown report, complete with Freddy Hagerman’s byline, already formatted for print. Before he had finished the first five paragraphs, Phil found himself flipping back and forth between the words and the photographs in the images directory.

  Somehow, Freddy Hagerman had stumbled on a gallery of horrors worthy of Hitler’s Germany. But this one was financed and operated by the United States government, a deep black program performing nanite experimentation on human subjects. And although Phil believed strongly in protecting legitimately classified information, his principal belief was in the importance of the first amendment to the constitution. It was no accident that the founders had placed it first in the Bill of Rights.

  The experimentation in this report could not be explained as a noble attempt to cure children of terminal diseases, as Freddy’s first Pulitzer-winning story had been undercut.

  In the tunnels below Henderson House, subjects had been collected from society’s castaways. From the severely retarded and unwanted. From the homeless. From society’s dregs, the disappearance of which would go as unnoticed as their existence. The only other requirement for admittance to
the program was that the person be horribly disfigured or missing limbs, things that went beyond the capabilities of current nanite treatments to repair.

  Not only had Freddy taken pictures inside the place, he had managed to get pictures of highly classified documents detailing the program objectives.

  The program’s goal was to reprogram the nanomachines to better understand human DNA, producing an upgrade that could understand the original blueprint, then fix any flaws, repairing anything that differed from the ideal. The very idea of such a master blueprint made Phil sick at his stomach. Unfortunately, the actual experimental results were far worse.

  The new nanites were capable of being reprogrammed, an item which, by itself, would have been worthy of a front-page news story. Each nanite was a relatively simple machine, certainly lacking the sophisticated processing to understand human DNA. But the nanites didn’t operate that way. Using a principal called swarm computing, the individuals passed information amongst themselves similar to colonies of ants or bees. And, when done correctly, this swarm acquired much greater computational capacity, something like a hive mind.

  Efforts to train the Henderson House nano-swarms to understand human DNA had so far produced disastrous results. While the nanites had learned to regenerate new limbs and organs, their learning was more complicated than just training a neural network. The objective was to make them understand the goal, then let them teach themselves to accomplish it.

  The self-teaching process involved a complicated system of trial, error, and feedback. And despite numerous attempts at retraining, the nano-swarm view of making humans better by adding or replacing parts had produced things that bore little resemblance to humans.

  In experiment after experiment, the human subjects had been turned into the stuff of nightmares, with extra internal and external organs, limbs where no limb should be, extra mouths, eyes on stalk-like appendages that could have been fingers.

  Worse yet, the nano-swarms kept learning, changing their designs as they learned. The effect on the poor subjects was terrifying, producing mind-altering pain as the reconstruction process continued.

  Phil finished examining the pictures, glancing down at the trashcan into which he had just hurled the contents of his stomach. Suppressing a desire for two packets of Alka-Seltzer, Phil picked up his cell phone and pressed the first number on speed dial.

  “Hello?”

  “John. It’s Phil. I want you to recall whoever you need. Tonight we’re rolling out with a special edition.”

  “On Thanksgiving Day?” Annoyance crept into his production specialist’s voice.

  “Don’t argue, just do it. And make it fast.” Phil hung up without waiting for a response.

  As he ejected the CD from his computer, Phil experienced something that most newspaper editors rarely experience: the feeling of having just been handed a story that was about to leap from the front page of his paper onto every broadcast news program in the country. Hell—in the world.

  As he began to shut down his laptop, his eyes settled on the last photograph he had been viewing. On a pad just outside Henderson House, Dr. Donald Stephenson had just stepped out of a government helicopter.

  Sliding the disk into his jacket pocket, Phil Rabin pointed at the screen and smiled.

  “Gotcha.”

  143

  Military bases in the continental United States had never been this easy to penetrate, but alert forces had been stretched by an extended period of overdeployment. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken their toll on the US military. As great as the all-volunteer force had been under Ronald Reagan, that force had always been a mighty war axe, something designed to smite the country’s opponents with overwhelming combat power, rapidly destroying all resistance before being returned to the shed to be sharpened and hung back on the wall to await its next use.

  For years now, this awesome force had been used like a hatchet, thousands of small little strokes steadily dulling its blade, no downtime allotted for resharpening. A new political philosophy for the use of America’s military had emerged in Washington, a violation of the Powell Doctrine that Jack called the Strategy of Underwhelming Combat Power, a term that yielded the unfortunate acronym “SUC Power.”

  Schriever Air Force Base had not escaped this drag on combat readiness. Although the gates were heavily guarded, with their ID checkpoints and random vehicle searches, the huge extent of perimeter fencing was thinly patrolled. For that, Janet was thankful. It kept some brave young American servicemen away from her Jack, allowing them to live to fight for their country on another day. After all, this was Thanksgiving Day, an unusually warm one that should have them out on their porches visiting friends and family.

  Jack cut out a two-foot square section of the chain-link fencing, flapped it upward, and guided them through before dropping the section back into place. A thin crescent moon smiled upward, like the mouth of the Cheshire Cat, providing just enough illumination for Janet to see without the aid of the compact night-vision goggles in her backpack.

  In front of her, Jack paused, examining what lay ahead with those strange eyes of his. Then he was moving again, down across the valley, toward the far tree line.

  Her baby kicked in her stomach, but Janet ignored it. Jack needed her attention on the here and now, not on the impetuous child in her belly, no matter how wonderful it was.

  Each military base had its oddities, and those could be exploited. Command and control centers were always heavily guarded. But the antennas that performed the actual satellite uplinks were largely ignored. Manned facilities required guards, unmanned equipment didn’t. It was an un-chanted mantra.

  The main GPS uplink antenna was an excellent example. It was hardwired to the GPS control center by a cable that ran adjacent to the metal maintenance building two hundred yards from the base of the dish.

  Keeping to the deep shadows, they moved around the back side of the building, opposite the antenna, pausing at a padlocked door. With a quick twist of the pry bar, Jack jimmied the lock, then pushed the sliding door open along its track, revealing a forty-by-thirty-foot interior space. The twin beams from Janet and Jack’s LED flashlights sizzled into the darkness, illuminating a largely empty room that housed an assortment of tools and equipment, including four large spools of cable and a small forklift. Just to the left of the doorway, a steel-case desk snuggled up against the wall, its office chair tilting slightly to the right, missing one of its four rolling casters.

  Janet scanned the room, quickly locating the electrical panel along the left wall. As Jack closed the door behind them, Janet walked to the panel, pressed downward on the latch, and popped open the cover.

  The building was fused for both 220 and 110 volt circuits. She smiled. They had chosen wisely. This was the perfect spot to set up their wireless access point. The heavy voltage circuitry drove the motors that directed the massive GPS antenna. With a door on the side opposite the GPS control antenna, the building gave excellent concealment for their computational needs. It allowed Janet to establish secure communications with Heather McFarland and the Smythe twins while Jack did the heavy lifting at the antenna itself.

  Janet ripped the corner from a cardboard box, folded it three times, and slid it under the chair leg. Plugging her laptop’s power supply into one of the 110V outlets, she set it on the desk and sat down. As the laptop struggled to wakefulness, she glanced over at Jack. He held a backpack that contained another laptop, just purchased at a Colorado Springs RadioShack, along with an assortment of electronic supplies that would soon be put to good use splicing into the GPS control cable.

  Jack pulled out his walkie-talkie. “Commo check.”

  Janet extracted her own walkie-talkie from the laptop bag. It was amazing what you could pick up at RadioShack. A pair of 900 megahertz, frequency-hopping walky-talkies with over ten billion frequencies, all for just a couple hundred dollars. Certainly adequate for secure communications during the amount of time she was going to be separated from
Jack.

  Thumbing the press-to-talk button on the side, she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips. “Ground control to Major Tom.”

  “Very funny,” Jack said into his radio, his words coming through her speaker loud and clear.

  “Time to test our link to Mother.”

  Janet typed in her login password, letting the laptop finish loading its startup programs. In their magical fashion, the McFarland and Smythe triumvirate had uploaded a new program to her computer along with instructions for its use. It was a chat program, very similar to the Voice over IP, or VoIP, applications that had become so common these days. Only this was Voice over QT, the quantum twin components creating perfectly secure, delay-free conversation, irrespective of distance.

  She launched the application, waiting as the image of a whirling maelstrom dissolved into the control panel. Janet had to admit. Even under extreme pressure, those kids had panache.

  The user interface was elegant in its simplicity, an image of a speaker and microphone above a single large button marked speakerphone. Janet clicked the speakerphone button, its image clicking down and locking into position.

  “Heather, Mark, Jennifer? This is Janet Johnson,” she said, using the name they had known her by. “Can you hear me?”

  After a short pause, Heather McFarland’s voice played through the computer speakers. “We’re all here.”

  “Mind if we ask where here is?”

  A pause, some mumbling barely audible in the background. “Fair enough. We’re in Colombia, at the hacienda of Don Espeñosa.”

  Janet glanced at Jack, whose left eyebrow had risen, crinkling his forehead.

  “The drug lord?”

  “That’s right. At the moment, he’s tied up in a chair across from Mark. He was our test subject for the nanite deprogramming.”

  Jack held up a finger.

  “One second, Heather. Jack wants to say something.”

  Leaning in close, Jack’s voice was serious. “Pay close attention. We don’t have much time, but it’s critical that you do exactly as I say. You listening?”