Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  This time I was prepared. I pressed the button. A tiny receptacle whirred from the wall.

  “Please spit,” it said.

  “Gross,” said Maggie.

  “Would you settle for some hair?” I whispered. From my bag, I withdrew the tube Nicole had given me, extracted a few hair follicles and dumped them into the receptacle. They were sucked away and there was a whir.

  “Thank you, Dr. Crandall.”

  The interior doors parted.

  ***

  The lab was painted a bland beige meant to stay out of the way of any great thoughts. My flashlight played across smartscreens, centrifuges, quantum tunneling microscopes. A science geek’s Disneyland. Computer servers big as Frigidaires sat in a row, blinking stupidly.

  I threaded through the work stations. Opened drawers beneath the Formica tables. Nothing of value. Pens, notepads, accoutrements of the scientific method.

  Maggie’s hands were wrapped around her elbows.

  “Cold?” I whispered.

  “Terrified,” she answered.

  We moved to the back. The offices for the senior staff were glass cubes. The one labeled with Crandall’s name was the biggest. It still had a yellow strip of police tape across the door.

  The inside was spartan but disorganized. A plastic chromosome model hung on fishing line like a mobile. Books and papers were vaguely organized in tottering heaps. Data pebbles were strewn like M&Ms. This workaholic was a slob.

  I rifled through papers on the desk. They all contained the same indecipherable jargon. I wondered what I had hoped to find without Maggie’s help. “Can you access the database?” I asked. “We’re looking for a journal, calendar, diary, anything personal.”

  The smartscreen came to life, bathing the room in blue. “Searching,” she said.

  I hated the fact that every piece of evidence in this world was on the inside of a computer. Even in my era, I’d been a dinosaur to the younger CSI guys. I was from the school where you searched with your hands, your eyes, your wits. When your case-breaker was a greasy fingerprint, dried blood on an andiron, a kilo of cocaine in a false-bottomed drawer. Not some data file in cyberspace.

  As I waited, I looked around. The rear wall was dominated by an enormous dry-erase board system. When one of the four rectangular boards was filled, it could be lowered out of the way and a fresh one rotated down. Currently, all four sections were covered in equations dense enough to give Stephen Hawking a migraine.

  “Whoa,” said Maggie, behind me. “What’s this?”

  Imprinted in nasty red letters across the screen was:

  SURAZAL CORPORATION

  LEVEL ONE EYES ONLY

  PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD

  “Damn,” I said. “I’d hoped personal stuff might not be protected. Can you hack it?”

  Maggie chewed her lip. “It’s a risk. I don’t know their security architecture. If I try, and set off alarms, we won’t know it until we see them pointing their guns.”

  I could feel the Dean looking down again. When faced with the choice of extra risk or leaving empty-handed, pros also took the cautious route. Patience and control was how you stayed on the street instead of playing checkers in lock-up. But I wanted something for my trouble, even if it was a computer file. “Crandall told Nicole about a breakthrough the night he disappeared, right? It could be here.”

  “Even if it is, we might not be able to make heads or tails of it.”

  “What else do we have?”

  “Bupkus.”

  “So do it.”

  Maggie broke apart into a firestorm of glowing embers. Her nanobits swarmed her metal heart, lowering it onto the desk. They flitted away, dissolving. The globe just sat there, looking inert, and I almost panicked. Then her voice issued from the computer’s speaker:

  “It’s going to take a while. Hang loose.”

  Right. Hang loose. I eyed the doors.

  For all the crimes I’d seen, all the scumbags I’d dealt with, I’d thought it would’ve been harder to cross the line. But I’d taken to the shadows with an ease that was scary. I’d thought that bon mote about cops and crooks being only a hair’s breadth away from each other was bullshit, but here I was, my mind working like both at the same time. I wondered where that put me.

  I wandered to the boards. The equations might as well have been Martian. I examined the buttons that controlled the boards, ran my finger over the green one. It must have been more sensitive than it looked, because with a whisper, the top panel rotated down into third place, the lowest one swung up to cover the second, and I found myself looking at the bare drywall beneath.

  Something about it looked wrong.

  Then a printer rattled to life and I went back to the desk. Pages pumped out. Maggie’s globe swarmed with fireflies again. A moment later she was back in the flesh, so to speak.

  “You make a great inside man,” I said. Then I saw the look on her face. “Maggie?”

  She went to a stool and sat, staring into space. “Bastards,” she whispered. She pointed to the pages issuing from the printer:

  SURAZAL CORPORATION

  LEVEL ONE EYES ONLY CLEARANCE

  PROGRESS REPORT:

  August 17, 2054

  ***************************

  ** NORM YOUTHING PROJECT **

  ***************************

  And like that, I understood.

  I understood what was so important about Dr. Morris Crandall. Why Gavin had been unwilling to talk about what Surazal had discovered about the Shift. Why Nicole had come to me, instead of an experienced gumshoe.

  It was, quite simply, the other side of the coin. A DNA retrovirus appears with the ability to bring people back from the dead and make them grow younger. So why couldn’t that same DNA be harnessed? Finessed a little? Engineered into a treatment for norms?

  A treatment to keep them young?

  The only thing that had ever leveled the playing field between kings and peasants was death. It didn’t matter how rich you got, or how powerful, or how many empires you built or stole, you couldn’t conquer death. Alexander, Caesar, Hussein, Rockefeller or Gates—all had to die and give the next despot his shot at the pie.

  Until now. This changed everything, literally everything. Forever.

  A medical solution to death would be the single most valuable product in history. Whoever controlled it would have power unlike any that had come before. Benevolently used, it could be an incredible gift. Imagine Salk, Einstein or Da Vinci continuing their work for centuries instead of decades. But Stalin killed over ten million people in twenty-four years. Imagine if he had a thousand years to work with.

  What would Surazal do with a millennia?

  “They don’t want to cure the Shift,” said Maggie. “They want to control it. For themselves. And they’ve got carte blanche,” said Maggie. “Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

  She was right. The city was their Petri dish. They had a global monopoly on reborn DNA. The rest of the world had literally walled themselves off from it in terror. There’d be no competitors. No international scientists racing for the same prize. Worse, there’d been no oversight as well, no congressional committees or U.N. boards of review.

  Then something turned in my mind and another piece fell into place.

  “Almost,” I said. “Somebody decided that Surazal having control over the aging process ain’t such a great idea.”

  Then Maggie got it too. “Whoever’s killing the scientists! That’s the motive! They’re trying to stop the research!”

  “That’s why Surazal tried to handle it quietly. They can’t risk the exposure.”

  “Guess it also explains Nicole’s visit,” said Maggie.

  I thought about Bart. My friend might’ve been pressured into throwing the gig my way, or he might have honestly thought he was doing his old partner a favor. Either way, he’d been played as much as I had.

  Maggie was reading the report. “They’ve got a prototype. ‘Retrozine.’”
/>
  “Catchy. Does it work?”

  “It’s still unstable.”

  There was a rustle behind us. Crandall’s papers had shifted in a breeze. I rescued some pages dangling precariously on the edge of the desk.

  Maggie’s brow darkened as she read more. “They’ve been testing it on people, Donner!”

  “The homeless and addicts, I’ll wager. People no one will bother looking for.”

  “God! If I’m reading this right, these test subjects…” She looked at me. “Some of them youthed so fast, Donner, they practically melted.”

  Another rustle, and this time the papers toppled to the floor. Irritated, I snatched them up and looked for a makeshift paperweight to keep them in place.

  Then I stopped.

  “What?” said Maggie.

  “Don’t move.” I waved my palm in the air over the stack of papers.

  “Who you waving to?”

  “Air,” I said. “There’s a breeze.”

  “So?”

  “So where’s it coming from?”

  “Donner, now’s not the time to investigate the building’s ventilation system.”

  I walked back to the boards. I stood in front of the exposed segment of the wall that the dry-erase boards had covered before I’d rotated them away. I waved my hand again.

  “The breeze is coming from here.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “I’m not even going to—”

  I stuck my hand through the wall. Maggie yelped. I pulled my hand back. “Tingles.”

  She came over to me. “Holy shit.” She touched it and her finger and the wall rippled slightly. “It’s a hologram.”

  “Can you short it out?”

  She gave me a dubious look, but reached out again. Energy pulsed down her arm. A two-meter section of the wall disappeared. In its place was a standard air duct.

  “There’s your air source,” said Maggie, amused.

  I examined the grill. It looked ordinary enough. “A hologram of a wall over an air duct?” I said. “What the hell for?”

  I grabbed the edges of the grill. It groaned in protest, buckled, then popped free in my hand. I put it on the floor and lit the duct with my flashlight. It was large, obviously a main conduit. It receded for about ten feet, then took a ninety degree turn to the left. I handed Maggie the flashlight, waved my open palm in invitation at the vent.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. I am not going into there.”

  “Trust me. I have a hunch. After you.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Age before beauty,” she said.

  I gave her a look.

  “Fine,” she said, crawling in. “Grumpy old fuck.”

  ***

  We wriggled forward on elbows and knees. I tried not to stare at Maggie’s bottom as it swished in front of me. A couple turns later, we reached another grill. Maggie played the beam through the slits into the darkness beyond.

  “Some kind of larger space.” She moved the light some more, trying to find edges. “Fifteen by fifteen, I’d say.”

  “A store room?”

  “This vent’s the only access.”

  “What’s a room doing back here?”

  “My guess is, under this chic morphinium shell is an older building. Probably extensively remodeled. Sometimes, when the architects lay out new floor plans, little useless trapped spaces like this happen.”

  “Useless,” I murmured.

  She gave the grill a shove and it clattered away into the darkness. We climbed in.

  A foldable cot sat against a stack of supply bins, surrounded by empty wrappers and energy bars. A smartscreen was propped up amidst a mess of clothing. A hot plate, a couple lanterns.

  “A rat’s nest,” said Maggie.

  “For a human rat,” I responded.

  A whimper came from behind some boxes. I pushed them aside. A bespectacled man in suspenders and tweed pants cowered on thin haunches. Greasy strands of hair were plastered across his bald pate. The man blinked in the flashlight’s glare.

  “Dr. Crandall, I presume?” said Maggie.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Be glad you can’t smell, Maggie. This guy hasn’t had a bath in weeks.”

  ***

  Back in the lab, we sat him in a chair. Maggie gave him a paper cup from a cooler. He drank greedily. Then he scanned his office like a worker reorienting himself after a long vacation. I put the smartscreen on the desk.

  “No one’s touched a thing,” Crandall said.

  Crandall blinked, heavy-lidded. The scientist was all angles. Sharp cheekbones and elbows and size thirteen feet. Somehow, the lanky frame held together. He had the air of a person so obsessed with his work that all other concerns, even food, were phantoms in the wind.

  “I don’t suppose either of you has a cigarette,” he said.

  “They’re illegal,” I said.

  Crandall chuckled without moving his face. “A condemned man always gets a last cigarette.”

  “My name’s Donner. I was hired to find you, not kill you.”

  “Donner. A detective, you say?” Crandall appeared to mull that over, disturbed.

  Maggie whispered in my ear. “How do we explain this?”

  “Explain what?”

  “Finding Crandall here! I doubt this Struldbrug dame will let us off the hook for breaking and entering just because we found the guy.”

  “You think I’m going to turn this guy over to Nicole after what we found out about the Retrozine?”

  “Then what are we going to do with him?”

  “Right now I want answers. We’ll figure the rest out later.”

  “Well, hurry it up, ace. If security makes half-hourly rounds, our goose is cooked.”

  But it was Crandall who started the questioning. “You say hired,” he said. “Who hired you? Gavin?”

  “Nicole Struldbrug.”

  Amusement narrowed his eyes. It was nothing pleasant. More like the satisfaction a kid gets from frying ants with a magnifying glass. “With the largest private security force in the country, she hires a private eye.”

  “No one was getting anywhere.”

  “Probably because it never entered anyone’s mind you’d disappear on purpose,” Maggie said. I shook my head. Then she smacked her forehead. “The security disk! It wasn’t changed to hide the real time you left the building. It was to hide the fact that—”

  “You didn’t leave at all,” I finished.

  “Which means—”

  “I doctored the disk,” said the scientist, looking pleased with himself.

  Crandall was a victim of the same affliction as Dr. Gavin—the arrogance of the brilliant, based on the premise that every obstacle in life could be out-maneuvered by a superior mind.

  I hoped he never had to out-think a plasma rifle.

  “I supervised the architect when he remodeled the lab,” said Crandall. “I knew about the hidden space. I came out at night, read my assistants’ notes, followed their progress. Do you know I could hear their conversations through the vent?” He sniffed. “I had no idea they despised me.”

  “Why hide?” I asked.

  “When Dr. Smythe was murdered, I wasn’t left much choice. Someone was assassinating members of our team.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Crandall was silent.

  “Why not go to the company for protection? Or the police?”

  More silence. My bad feeling had turned into a nasty burning in the pit of my stomach. An act as extreme as hiding from everyone, for a whole month—the man had to have an extreme reason. “Who’s trying to kill you, Doctor?”

  His lips pruned up. “You’ve found me, fine. Return me to my employer and collect your little fee.”

  “Hakuri’s dead.”

  He shook his head. “I heard. From talk in the lab.”

  No option but to go for the heavy artillery. “Retrozine,” I said, smiling. “Great name.”

  The change in his face was astonishing. The prune dropped open to
reveal scummy teeth.

  “The youthing drug you’ve been testing.”

  “On people,” said Maggie.

  “Oh my God. Listen to me—”

  Before Crandall could finish, someone spoke from behind us.

  “Morris, honey, there you are!”

  She stood silhouetted in the door in a worsted wool suit. The cream blouse was open to display a clasp of diamonds at her throat. Her brassy mane had been tucked up in a bun. Pale yellow kid leather gloves matched the handkerchief tucked in her breast pocket.

  The three monstrosities in composite armor behind her held Thompson submachine guns—the kind with the round, oversized Type-C magazine made famous by gangster movies. The kind that took two hands to fire, went rat-a-tat-tat and spit shell casings everywhere. The kind that chewed you into hamburger.

  Nicole waggled a finger at Crandall. “You had me very worried, Doctor.” She turned to me. “Hey, Donner.”

  “Ms. Struldbrug.”

  “Nicole, please. We’re all friends here.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  “Brought along your talking mannequin, I see.”

  Maggie flinched.

  “Nicole,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  “Now, baby, that was my line.” She sashayed toward us. I moved forward to meet her. The outer lab was a less confined space. If things went south I’d want as much room as possible. Crandall and Maggie stayed close behind.

  “If you’d wanted to see the lab,” said Nicole, “all you had to do was ask.”

  “I did. Dr. Gavin doesn’t like me very much.”

  She flicked cold eyes at Crandall, then past him to the open vent. “Been hiding in the walls, have we, doctor? I suppose you consider that clever.” She ran a finger across the man’s grizzled jaw. He flinched at her touch, as I had done. “Welcome back.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Crandall whispered.

  She didn’t even bother to feign hurt or shock. “I’ve been trying to save you.”

  “Like you saved Smythe? And Hakuri?”

  Nicole tapped her shoe impatiently. “Why would I kill my own scientists? Especially when they’re on the verge of a breakthrough?” To me: “You believe me at least, don’t you?”