TWENTY-TWO
Seattle, Washington
8:00 a.m. PST
Spears stood beside Cranston’s body and rested his hand on the soldier’s cold forearm. His team of scientists had removed it from the bag and placed it supine on a stainless steel autopsy table with deep gutters along the sides. They formed a line at the back of the room in white lab coats and smocks, with plastic shields over their faces, their hands clasped in front of them, waiting patiently for Spears to do whatever it was he was going to do. Even he didn’t know at this point. All he could do was grind his teeth and stare through the scarlet film that had descended over his vision.
Cranston’s lifeless brown eyes looked through him as though he wasn’t even there. Death hadn’t released him from the suffering he must have endured during his final moments. The pain was etched into his face: in the tight lines at the corners of his eyes; in his taut lips, which stretched back from his bared, blood-crusted teeth; in the savage wound on the side of his neck that opened wide into an agonized red scream that exposed tendons and severed muscles.
The face he saw on the corpse wasn’t that of a man he hardly knew, but that of his son.
His enemy had bested him yet again.
“Sir,” one of the pathologists said, cautiously placing a hand on his shoulder. “We really need to begin while the remains are still…fresh.”
A stress tick tugged at the corner of Spears’s mouth. He turned and looked the pathologist dead in the eyes. The much smaller man squirmed under the intensity of his gaze like a worm on a hook, but held his ground. Spears growled, spun to his right, and heaved a tray draped with sterile instruments across the room. They clattered to the floor and skittered up against the wall. Spears stood there, shoulders heaving, fists clenched, and then whirled without a word and stormed out of the room.
“Sir?” the pathologist called from behind him.
Spears stopped just outside the cold room, his back to the man, and waited.
“What would you like is to do with the body when we’re finished.”
The screeching of his grinding teeth marred the tense silence while he formulated his reply.
“Incinerate it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Spears’s footsteps echoed down the hallway ahead of him over the subdued sound of tearing fabric as the scientists commenced their task. He passed the pressurized doorways to the labs that housed tissue samples and cultures, scanning electron microscopes and all sorts of equipment he had signed the checks for without caring about or understanding their functions, and the room with the refrigerated drawers where the bullet-riddled corpses of the Siberian monsters now dwelled. He managed to contain the scream building in his chest until the elevator doors closed, then bellowed at the top of his lungs. By the time the sliding doors opened into his office, which monopolized nearly the entire sixth floor, he was physically and emotionally spent. He shuffled around his desk, stood with his back to the room, and surveyed the industrial wasteland below him through the smoked glass. On a clear day, he could see the distant cone of Mt. Rainier, but today, dark clouds boiled on the horizon, stabbing each other with forks of lightning, mirroring the turmoil inside of him.
The phone on his antique maple desk, which was rumored to have once been used by the General George S. Patton, buzzed once, then again. He sat down in the chair and pressed the speaker button.
“Yes,” he answered, making no effort to hide his irritation.
“Sir,” a man’s voice said. “I have what you asked for.”
Spears pressed the release button for the magnetic lock under his desk drawer and unlocked the door with a thud.
Ritter walked into the office and strode directly toward the desk. He set a rubber-banded tube that looked like a roll of old, yellowed wrapping paper on the blotter. Spears slid the computer monitor and the keyboard to one side and the framed picture of Nelson and him on the deck of a sport boat, smiles on their faces, a marlin held high between them, to the other. He unrolled the blueprints and turned them around so he could better see them. The pages were cracked and stained, the architect’s work fading as the chalky blue powder dissociated from the crisp paper. Ritter leaned over the desk without asking permission, and tapped his finger on the center of the middle of the three buildings.
“That’s the conveyor chute right there,” he said. “You can see where the chutes run through all three of the levels. The problem is that with the aboveground floors demolished, we have no idea where those chutes run now, or even if they’re still patent. Which I sincerely doubt.”
“Things were built to last back then,” Spears said. “You saw how well the basements held up to the demolition.”
“True. But even hardened steel can’t stand up to thousands of tons of rubble being dropped right onto it.”
“For now, we have to assume that every branch is still viable until proven otherwise. How many are we looking at?”
“It appears as though there were four separate packaging or canning units on each of the three floors. The fish were unloaded from the boats and processed in the building to the north. From there, they were sent through one of two chutes on each level, for a total of six from the first building to the second. Additional tubes led from each of the canning units to the floor beneath it, then, ultimately, to a central conveyor. That’s where we found Cranston last night. From there, everything was funneled into the basement, where the cans were sorted by hand, boxed, and carted into the shipping and warehousing facility to the south. And over here? You can see that a single conveyor led from each floor of the middle building into the warehouse for disposal of the rejects.”
“So we’re potentially dealing with more than twenty separate tunnels through the ruins.”
“Assuming they weren’t flattened when the building was leveled.”
“If they had been, our target wouldn’t have been able to get away, would it?”
“No, sir.”
Spears studied each of the pages, one by one, memorizing each of the levels before shoving the pages away. If any of those chutes had remained patent during the collapse, the blueprints would be all but useless to them. They could lead to only God knew where.
“If I many, sir…” Ritter cleared his throat. “Why don’t we just napalm the place and be done with it?”
“Ask the goddamn mayor and the governor.”
“Sir?”
“There’s no problem here, soldier. We’ll handle everything tonight. By tomorrow morning, this situation will be resolved.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We still have preparations to make.”
Spears spun his chair around until it again faced the window and the coming storm.
Ritter turned and started for the door.
“One second,” Spears said, watching the low-lying clouds roll over the rooftops like smoke. He smiled. “There’s something…special…I need you to track down for me.”
* * *
Four blocks away, Porter sat in his Crown Vic, scrolling through the deposition of one former Brigadier General Franklin Spears on his dashboard computer monitor. The president of Phobos had confirmed that he had bought a place for one of his men on the Scourge at the last second. This man, an honorably discharged Marine lieutenant named Daniel Abrams, had been responsible for supervising the transportation of the bodies of a failed Siberian expedition back to the United States. Neither Abrams nor the cargo had been noted anywhere on the ship’s manifest. Spears believed that the hurried arrangement was the cause of the oversight, but Porter wasn’t so easily fooled. It had been a cash transaction that the captain of the Scourge had never intended to declare. This accounted for the additional man found dead on the ship, if not the crates of corpses that Porter hadn’t seen on the ship either at sea or after docking. Another cash transaction, or perhaps an arrangement of a more political nature, must have taken care of the discrete transfer. The remains were in the process of being returned to their families, however, a fa
ct that was corroborated by the CDC, who still had them quarantined.
He opened the file he had on Daniel Abrams and stared at the man’s face on the screen. They had stumbled upon the man’s body in the hold, he was certain of it. This was the man that had been stuffed into the cage and torn apart, the one whose disfigurement, Porter had speculated at the time, had been inflicted for personal or emotional reasons.
Maybe it was a reach, but his instincts insisted otherwise. Whatever had been in that cage…whatever was hiding down there in the ruins right now…this man he was looking at had been transporting it across the Pacific inside that cage, which meant that not only had Spears seen it, he had been responsible for trying to smuggle it into the country.
So what was it? Had it killed Spears’s son and his expedition party long before any of this started?
All of the evidence pointed to the involvement of Phobos, and, specifically, to its founder on an intimately personal level. Not only did Spears know exactly what they were up against, he had placed himself in a position to resolve the problem without any oversight and with the utmost secrecy.
Porter accessed the FBI file on Spears. The details were sparse, the majority classified, but there was still a picture. He stared into the face of the man who had evicted him from his own crime scene last night.
There was no doubt this was personal for Spears.
And now it was personal for Porter, as well.
Spears may have the entire government in his pocket, but Porter refused to be coerced or intimidated. This was his investigation and he would see it through to its ultimate resolution. Regardless of the cost.
He looked long and hard into the cold, calculating eyes of the older man on the monitor.
“Make no mistake,” he said. “You’re mine, motherfucker.”
TWENTY-THREE
Seattle, Washington
10:06 a.m. PST
Maybe she was losing her mind. Henley made no secret of his opinions on the matter. He hadn’t believed her when she told him what she’d seen down there in the tunnel. They had argued to the point that he’d finally thrown up his arms in futility and driven them back to the station without even glancing over at her from behind the wheel. Perhaps he was right. Everything did look different under the light of day. She’d never been so exhausted. Her eyes stung from the lack of sleep and her mind felt sluggish, as though the neural synapses fired through molasses. Maybe the two had conspired against her and she hadn’t really seen anything at all, let alone what she thought she had. But she was certain of it. If she closed her eyes, she could still clearly recall the blur of nearly translucent white skin, the filthy bare foot, and the very same baby doll she had seen night after night elsewhere in the maze before it disappeared. And damned if she wasn’t going to prove it, if only to herself, which was why she now stood outside the construction zone, her fingers laced through the chain link fence, watching as the workers attacked the project on two fronts.
One group hastily erected a new fence around the perimeter of the cultural center, sealing it off from the ruins around it, while the other planted paving stones and laid sod. There was a semi parked in the side lot, its open trailer revealing table and chair legs and what looked like the framework for several portable gazebo-type tents. And none of the people appeared to have the slightest clue as to what had transpired beneath their feet mere hours ago. They worked in flannel or bare-backed, with work gloves and without, laughing, laboring, often lounging, as though there was nothing wrong with the world, as though the rain had washed away the evils of the previous night.
Sturm had tried to sleep to no avail, the thoughts in her head ricocheting against each other like billiard balls. She had showered, changed into a clean uniform, and waited for a call from the CSRT that never came. She should have taken advantage of the opportunity to rest, if not to sleep, and yet here she was, a full pot of coffee later, hands shaking, preparing to do the most idiotic thing she could possibly imagine.
She waited until there was no one between her and her goal, then hurried through the gate and made a beeline for the southern access point to the underground warrens. If anyone saw her, they paid her no mind. When she reached the building, she glanced back one final time to make sure she hadn’t attracted unwanted attention, then scurried into the small hole.
Day instantaneously became night. She had expected to find thin columns of light piercing the rubble overhead, but the darkness was complete. As it had been every other time she’s been down here. She clicked on her flashlight, shined it deeper into the darkness, and started the trek she had learned by rote. Even though she and Henley always parted ways, she could sense his absence. Her breathing grew fast and shallow. She unsnapped her holster and drew her pistol just far enough to clench the grip in her fist. Her light trembled as she swept it from one side of the corridor to the other, across the scarred walls and into rooms where she expected to see something streaking toward her at any second. She wished some brave homeless people had returned during the night. Any human presence around her would have been comforting. As it was, her skin prickled as though beneath the scrutiny of unseen eyes and her breath was too loud in her own ears. Even her softly placed footsteps sounded like the clop of horseshoes.
What was she doing down here? Nobody knew where she was. If anything happened to her, no one would hear her cries for help and it would be hours before anyone noticed she was missing at roll call, let alone decided to come looking for her.
It was too late to turn around now, even if she wanted to. She had already crossed into the second building, and if there was something hiding in the rubble, it undoubtedly already knew she was here. She gave up all pretense and drew her weapon, bracing it on her left forearm for stability and holding the flashlight backhanded. With as badly as she was shaking, she couldn’t have knocked a tin can from a fence post at five feet. She had to pause to steady her nerves before pressing onward.
She could hear the attenuated sounds of the workers banging and clanging topside as though from a great distance. The ground shivered ever so slightly underfoot with their exertions and dirt cascaded from the fallen roof. She passed the point where they had found the homeless man’s body and was nearly to the third building when she noticed a riot of footprints in the dust to the side of the main path. She traced them with her beam to the right, to the base of a pile of cracked concrete that led upward to a black gap in the rubble. From this angle, her light barely penetrated the orifice.
The concrete dust on the ground at her feet was beaded and crusted with blood. She shined the beam to either side of her, and then toward the ceiling. The spatters on the timber were still fresh enough that the swollen droplets still glistened. With all of the people that had been down here last night, there’s no way they would have missed this. Something had happened after they left.
She remembered feeling as though she were being used as bait, that someone had been out there, waiting to converge on her position from the darkness. But who were they and whose blood was this? There was far too much blood for whoever was attacked to have survived. She thought of the figure she had seen, the one carrying the doll. Was that who had been slain? Had she blown her only opportunity to save that person’s life?
There was only one way to find out.
She climbed up the fractured concrete and shined her light into the dark tunnel. There were brownish smears of blood all over the ground and droplets dried to the slanted ceiling. She smelled death and knew what she would find at the other end.
Sturm drew a deep breath, glanced behind her to make sure that no one had crept up on her, and then plunged into the hole.
* * *
The walls of the narrow tunnel closed in on her. For a moment, she feared she might get stuck or lost or any number of horrible things might happen to her. She started to hyperventilate. The terror kicked in and she crawled madly, banging her head, scraping her hands and knees. She felt the ceiling lift from on top of her head and tumbled ou
t onto the ground in a small domed chamber. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she nearly sobbed with relief. She stood and turned her beam upon the walls in an effort to gather her bearings. A large metal chute was crumpled against the wall to her left. She could tell where it had once connected to the rear wall and the ceiling by the mouths of the smaller tubes. Rollers from a conveyor belt were scattered across the floor. The gears that had once driven the contraption were smashed and partially buried under debris to her right. The ground beside them was black with blood, as though whoever had been attacked at the other end of the tunnel had crawled in here to finish bleeding out. She had expected to find the body based on the intensity of the smell, but there was so little air circulation in this small chamber that it trapped the horrible stench, hoarding it for the green-eyed flies that spun lazily around her.
She stepped to the side of the room to preserve whatever footprints might be in the middle and eased around the circumference until she could better see. There were no spatters; only a wide black amoeba that confirmed her theory. The dust was disturbed, but not in such a way that she could tell how the victim had been positioned. She saw boot prints beside it, and the broad smears where the corpse had been dragged back toward the tunnel from which she had emerged.
Why had whatever happened down here not been reported?
She was just about to call it in herself, but thought better of it. Since she was off-duty, there was no way she would be able to justify why she was in there. And something about the whole scenario felt wrong. The way the crime scene unit had been rushed from the site…the way she and Henley had been left down here alone after the homeless man had been murdered…the riot of footprints that had led her here…the whole thing reeked of a cover up in high places. If that was the case, then was there anyone out there who she could actually trust? And if they had truly been willing to use her as bait last night, would they even care?
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 14