Mount Dragon

by Douglas Preston

  “When is this scheduled to happen?” de Vaca asked.

  “August third.”

  De Vaca’s hands flew to her mouth. “But that’s this Friday!”

  Carson nodded. “We have to warn the authorities. Get them to stop the PurBlood rollout, and get help for the people here.”

  “And how the hell are we supposed to do that? The only long-distance phone lines out of here are the dedicated network leased lines to Boston. Even if we could get to those, who’d believe us?”

  Carson thought. “Maybe Scopes is already suffering the effects.”

  De Vaca snorted. “Even if he was, nobody would connect that with anything happening here.”

  He turned to her. “Maybe we’re worrying unnecessarily. If there’s a developing paranoia among all the Mount Dragon residents, wouldn’t it turn them against each other, canceling the threat?”

  She shook her head. “In this atmosphere? Not likely. Especially with someone as charismatic as Scopes’” running things. It’s a textbook setting for folie à deux.”

  “What?”

  “Shared insanity. Everyone acting out the same twisted fantasy. Or, as we called it in med school, a double-nut fruitcake.”

  Carson grimaced. “Great. That leaves us only one option. Get the hell out of here.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  De Vaca smirked, started to speak. Then she stopped and nudged his elbow. “Look over there.”

  Carson looked. Ahead of them lay the motor pool: half a dozen white Hummers in a gleaming row, standing like sentries and casting long shadows across the graveled lot.

  They walked closer to the vehicles with feigned nonchalance. “First,” Carson whispered, “we’d have to find the keys. Then, we’d have to drive out of the compound without anyone noticing.”

  Suddenly, de Vaca knelt beside him in the dust.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Tying my shoe.”

  “You’re wearing slip-ons!”

  De Vaca stood up. “I know that, idiot.” She dusted one knee, shook her hair back from her head and looked at him. “There isn’t a car made that I can’t hot-wire.”

  Carson looked at her.

  “I used to steal them.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Just for fun,” she added defensively.

  “Uh-huh. But these were once military vehicles, and this was once a top-secret facility. It won’t be like breaking into a Honda Civic.”

  De Vaca frowned, kicking the dust at her feet with the heel of one shoe.

  Carson spoke again. “On my first day here, Singer implied that the security is better than it looks. Even if we did bash through the perimeter fence, they’d be after us in a second and would just run us into the earth.”

  There was a long silence.

  “There are two other possibilities,” de Vaca said. “We could take the horses. Or we could walk.”

  Carson looked out over the vast, endless desert. “Only a fool would attempt something like that,” he said quietly.

  They both stood silently, looking out into the desert. Carson realized that, for the moment, he felt no fear: just an oppressive weight on his shoulders, as if he were supporting a terrific burden. He did not know if that meant he was brave or simply exhausted.

  “Teece was no fan of the product,” he said at last. “He told me as much in the sauna. I’ll bet his hasty departure had something to do with PurBlood. He probably had enough doubts about X-FLU to want to stall the release of our other products, at least until he was satisfied there was no flaw in our procedures. Or until he’d learned more about Burt.”

  As he was speaking, he noticed de Vaca suddenly become rigid. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered.

  There was the sound of footsteps; then the figure of Harper came down the covered walkway leading from the residency. Carson noticed a bulge under the scientist’s shirt where a large bandage was attached.

  Harper stopped. “Heading to dinner?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said Carson after a brief hesitation.

  “Come on, then.”

  The dining hall was crowded, and only a few tables remained vacant. Carson looked around him as they took their seats. Since Vanderwagon’s departure, Carson had taken to dining alone, well past the peak hour for dinner. Now he felt uneasy, seeing such a large number of Mount Dragon workers together at once. Could all these people really ... He pushed the thought from his mind.

  A waiter approached their table. As they gave their drink orders, Carson watched the waiter continually smooth an imaginary mustache: first the left side, then the right side, then the left, then the right. The skin of the man’s upper lip was red and raw from being continuously pawed at.

  “So!” said Harper as the waiter walked away. “What have you two been up to?”

  Carson barely heard the question. He had realized what else was contributing to his uneasiness.

  The atmosphere in the dining hall seemed hushed, almost furtive. The tables were full, people were eating, yet there were very few conversations going on. The diners seemed to be simply going through the motions of eating, as if from habit rather than hunger. The dying echoes of Harper’s question seemed to ring in three dozen water glasses. Christ, have I been asleep? Carson asked himself. How could I have missed this?

  Harper accepted his beer, while Carson and de Vaca drank club sodas.

  “On the wagon?” Harper asked, taking a long pull at his beer.

  Carson shook his head.

  “I still haven’t had an answer to my question,” Harper asked, smoothing his thinning brown hair with a restless hand. “I asked what you two have been up to lately.” He looked back and forth between them, his red eyes blinking rapidly.

  “Oh, nothing much,” said de Vaca, sitting very stiffly and looking down at her empty plate.

  “Nothing much?” repeated Harper, as if the words were new to him. “Nothing much. That seems odd. We’re working on the biggest project in GeneDyne’s history, and you guys haven’t been up to anything much.”

  Carson nodded, wishing Harper wouldn’t talk so loudly. Even if they could steal a Hummer, what would they say when they got to civilization? Who would believe two wild-eyed people, driving out of the desert? They needed to download proof onto some kind of transportable media and take it with them. But did they dare leave X-FLU in the hands of a lot of people who were going insane by degrees? Not that there was much good they could do if they stayed. Unless they could somehow get the proof to Levine. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to transmit gigabytes of data across the net, it would be noticed, but—

  He felt a hand twisting the material of his shirtfront. Harper had balled it into his fist.

  “I’m talking to you, asshole,” he said, pulling Carson forward in his seat.

  Carson began to rise in protest when he felt a meaningful pressure on one forearm.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. De Vaca’s pressure on his forearm eased.

  “Why are you ignoring me?” Harper asked loudly. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”

  “Really, George, I’m sorry. I was just thinking about other things.”

  “We’ve been so busy recently,” said de Vaca, desperately trying to put a bright note in her voice. “We’ve got a lot to think about.”

  Carson felt the grip tighten further. “You just said you were doing nothing much. You said it, I know you said it. So which is it?” Carson glanced around. People at nearby tables were looking at them, and though the gazes were dull and vacant, they still held the kind of slack anticipation he hadn’t seen since a bar fight he’d witnessed a long time ago.

  “George,” de Vaca said, “I heard you made an important breakthrough the other day.”

  “What?” Harper asked.

  “That’s what Dr. Singer told me. He said you’d made extraordinary progress.”

  Harper dropped his hand, immediately forgetting Carson. “John said that? I’m
not surprised.”

  De Vaca smiled and laid her hand on Harper’s arm. “And you know, I was very impressed with how you handled Vanderwagon.”

  Harper sat back, looking at her. “Thanks,” he said at last.

  “I should have mentioned it earlier. It was thoughtless of me not to. I’m so sorry.”

  Carson watched as de Vaca looked into Harper’s eyes, an expression of sympathy and understanding on her face. Then, significantly, her eyes dropped to Harper’s hands. Unaware of the suggestion she was planting, Harper looked down and began examining his nails.

  “Look at that,” he said. “There’s dirt here. Shit. With all the germs in this place, you have to take precautions.”

  Without another word, he pushed his chair back and headed for the men’s room.

  Carson breathed out. “Jesus,” he whispered. The scientists at the surrounding tables had returned to their meals, but a strange feeling remained in the air: a close, listening silence.

  “I guess coming here was a bad idea,” de Vaca murmured. “I’m not hungry, anyway.”

  Carson tried to steady his breathing, closing his eyes for a moment. As soon as he did so, the world seemed to sink away beneath his feet. Christ, he was tired.

  “I can’t think any more,” he said. “Let’s meet in the radiology lab at midnight. Meanwhile, try to get some sleep.”

  De Vaca snorted. “Are you crazy? How can I sleep?”

  Carson glanced at her. “You aren’t going to get another chance,” he said.

  Charles Levine stared at the blue folder in his hand, lavishly stamped and embossed, a large signature scrawled across the seal. He began to open it, then stopped. He already knew what it would say. He turned to throw it in the wastebasket, but realized that, too, was unnecessary. Destroying the document would not make its substance go away.

  He looked out of his open door, past the boxes and moving crates, into the empty outer office. Just a week before, Ray had been sitting there, calmly fielding calls and turning away the zealots. Ray had been loyal to the end, unlike so many of his other colleagues and foundation members. How could his life’s work be compromised so utterly, eclipsed in such a short space of time?

  He sat down in his chair, gazing with vacant eyes at the single unpacked item on his desk: his notebook computer, still powered up and connected to the campus network. Not so many days before, he’d cast his line into the deep, cold waters of that network, fishing for help in his crusade. Instead, he’d hooked a leviathan; a murderous kraken that had devastated everything he cared about.

  His biggest mistake had been underestimating Brent Scopes. Or, perhaps, overestimating him. The Scopes he knew would not have fought him in this way. Perhaps, Levine thought, he himself had been guilty—guilty of hyperbole, of leaping to conclusions, perhaps even unethical conduct, breaking into the GeneDyne net as he had. He had provoked Scopes. But for Scopes to calculatingly sully the memory of his murdered father—it was inexcusable, sociopathic. Always, in the back of his mind, Levine had kept the memory of their friendship—a friendship of profound, intellectual intensity that he could never replace. He had never gotten over the loss, and somehow he believed Scopes felt the same way.

  But it was now obvious that he must have been wrong.

  Levine’s eyes wandered over the empty shelves, the open filing cabinets, the gray clouds of disturbed dust settling sluggishly through the still air. Losing his foundation, his reputation, and his tenure changed everything. It had made his choices very simple; it had, in fact, narrowed them to one. And out of that choice, the outline of a plan began to take shape in his mind.

  After dark, Mount Dragon became home to a thousand shadows. The covered walkways and stark multifaceted buildings glowed a pale blue in the light of a setting crescent moon. The rare footfall, the crunch of gravel, served only to magnify the silence and utter loneliness. Beyond the thin necklace of lights that illuminated the perimeter fence, a vast darkness took over, flowing on for a hundred miles in all directions, unvexed by light or campfire.

  Carson moved through the shadows toward the radiology lab. Nobody was outside, and the residency compound was quiet, but the silence only increased his nervousness. He had chosen the radiology lab because it had been supplanted by new facilities inside the Fever Tank and was hardly ever used, and because it was the only low-security lab with full network access. But now he wasn’t so sure his choice had been a good one. The lab was off the normal track, behind the machine shop, and if he ran into anyone he’d have a difficult time explaining his presence.

  He cracked open the door to the lab, then paused. A pale light glowed from inside the room, and he heard the rustle of movement.

  “Jesus, Carson, you scared the shit out of me.” It was de Vaca, a pallid phantom silhouetted in the glow of the computer screen. She motioned him inside.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered, slipping into a seat next to her.

  “I got here early. Listen, I thought of a way we could check all this out. See if we’re really right about PurBlood.” She was whispering fast as she typed. “We get weekly physicals, right?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  De Vaca looked at him. “Well? Don’t you get it? We can check the taps.”

  Comprehension dawned on Carson. The physicals included spinal taps. They could check the cerebrospinal fluid for elevated levels of dopamine and serotonin.

  “But we can’t access those records,” he objected.

  “Cabrón, you’re miles behind. I already have. I worked in Medical my first week here, remember? My network privileges for the medical file servers were never revoked.” In the reflected light of the terminal, her cheekbones were two sharp ridges of blue against black. “I began by checking a few records, but there’s just too much data to poke around in. So I ran an SQL query against the medical database.”

  ”What does it do? List the amount of dopamine and serotonin in everyone’s system?”

  De Vaca shook her head. “Neurotransmitters wouldn’t show up in a spinal tap. But their breakdown products—their major metabolites—would. Homovanillic acid is the break-down product of dopamine, and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid is the breakdown product of serotonin. So I told the program to look for those. And, just as a control, I told the program to tabulate MHPG and VMA, which are the breakdown products of another neurotransmitter, norepinephrine. That way, we’ll have something to measure the results against.”

  “And?” Carson prompted.

  “Don’t know yet. Here it comes now.”

  The screen filled.

  MHPG

  HVA

  VMA

  5-HIAA

  Aaron

  1

  6

  1

  5

  Alberts

  1

  9

  1

  10

  Bowman

  1

  12

  1

  9

  Bunoz

  1

  7

  1

  6

  Carson

  1

  1

  1

  1

  Cristoferi

  1

  8

  1

  5

  Davidoff

  1

  8

  1

  8

  De Vaca

  1

  1

  1

  1

  Donergan

  1

  10

  1

  8

  Ducely

  1

  7

  1

  9

  Engies

  1

  7

  1

  6

  MORE SCREENS AVAILABLE

  “My God,” Carson muttered.

  De Vaca nodded grimly. “Look at the HVA and 5-HIAA counts. In every case, levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain are many times above normal.”

  C
arson paged down through the rest of the list. “Look at Nye!” he said suddenly, pointing to the screen. “Dopamine metabolites, fourteen times normal. Serotonin metabolites, twelve times normal.”

  “With levels like that, dangerously paranoid, perhaps presenting as schizophrenia,” de Vaca said. “I’ll bet he perceived Teece as a threat to Mount Dragon—or perhaps to himself—and set a trap for him out in the desert. I wonder if that bastard Marr was in on it. You were right when you said killing Teece was crazy.”

  Carson glanced at her. “How come these abnormal readings weren’t flagged before?”

  “Because you wouldn’t be checking levels of neurotransmitters in a place like Mount Dragon. They look for antibodies, viral contamination, stuff like that. Besides, we’re talking about nanograms per milliliter. Unless you’re specifically looking for these, metabolites, you aren’t going to find them.”

  Carson shook his head in disbelief. “Isn’t there anything we could do to counteract the adverse effects?”

  “Hard to say. You could try a dopamine receptor antagonist, like chlorpromazine. Or imipramine, which blocks the transport of serotonin. But with levels this high, I doubt you’d see much improvement. We don’t even know if the process can be reversed. And that’s assuming there were sufficient stocks of both drugs on hand, and we found a way to administer it to every person on-site.”

  Carson continued to stare at the screen in horrified fascination. Then, suddenly, his hands moved onto the keyboard, copying the data to a file on the terminal’s local drive. Then he cleared the screen and quit the program.

  De Vaca turned. “What the hell are you doing?” she hissed.

  “We’ve seen enough,” Carson replied. “Scopes was a beta-tester too, remember? If he sees us at this, we’re cooked.” He logged de Vaca off the terminal and entered his own password at the GeneDyne security screen. As he waited for the logon messages to scroll past, he fished two writeable compact discs from his pocket.

  “I went back to the library and downloaded the most important data onto these CDs: the video, the filtration data, my on-line X-FLU logs, Burt’s notes. Now, I’m going to add this CSF data to—”