Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  Macbeth was attractive—handsome, not pretty—with auburn hair and emerald eyes. She was independently wealthy, having inherited several Caribbean hotels, but she’d still chosen to follow the feminist trail her mother had blazed as a forensic pathologist. Gill sensed the Russian appraising her, and hoped she would compare favorably to Robert’s dead wife.

  “Robert blamed himself, of course, for what happened to Jane, and when the Headhunter case came along, it brewed up a perfect storm,” said Joe. “The killer was hacking the heads off women and sending Robert photos of them mounted on poles to taunt him. Eventually, panic fueled a riot in the streets, and there were calls for Robert’s head. When he couldn’t stop the killings, his remorse got mixed up with unresolved guilt about Jane. Those demons, combined with too much booze and Benzedrine, pushed him to the brink, and he ended up sticking his revolver in his mouth.”

  “Thank God you’re so big,” said Gill.

  “It was just a greenhouse door.”

  “Joke all you want, but Robert wouldn’t be alive today if not for you.”

  Joe shrugged again, embarrassed by her words. “Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “I was lured back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

  “By what?”

  “An offer I couldn’t refuse. The end of Communism exposed a plague of serial psychos. Chikatilo—the Rostov Ripper. Ryakhovsky—the Hippopotamus. Onoprienko—the Terminator. Pichushkin—the Chessboard Killer.”

  “Was that the guy trying to kill one person for each square on a chessboard?” asked Gill.

  “Yes,” Joe replied. “The new Kremlin asked me back to head up a state-of-the-art lab. It was an opportunity to rub Communist noses in my Western success, and to go home a hero. Revenge and ego satisfaction make a potent cocktail.”

  “So what brings you back here?”

  “The Winter Olympics in 2014 will be in Sochi, Russia. Terrorism is now a global business, so we’re sharing information we’ve gathered with Special X. We help them now, and later they’ll help us. With the added perks that I get to ski Whistler and see Robert again.”

  The BMW drove through the forest of Stanley Park, almost an island of evergreens caught in the throat of the harbor. Recently, the city had suffered a freak windstorm that had leveled trees faster than loggers with chainsaws. It would take generations for the park to recover. Ahead, the necklace of lights outlining Lions Gate Bridge was marred by dozens of burnt-out bulbs. At least those would get replaced for all the wallets coming to town.

  “How’s Robert now?”

  “All patched up,” said Gill. “He has Katt, and me, to fill the void.”

  “And no Headhunter.”

  “Actually, it’s worse. Now he’s hunting a monster who threatens to be his nemesis.”

  “Mephisto.”

  “You know about him?”

  “From what Robert says in his emails, they’ve battled twice. First, when Mephisto kidnapped a member of Special X—”

  “Corporal Nick Craven,” Gill offered.

  “—and began cutting him to pieces. From what I recall, he refused to stop until Robert found some sort of Scottish artifact. Was it something linked to Stonehenge?”

  She nodded. “The Silver Skull.”

  “Why did Mephisto want that?”

  “Only he knows for sure. But from what Special X was able to put together, Robert concluded that he was interested in the zodiac inscription on the skull, said to be the secret of the stones. It most likely has something to do with human sacrifice. Stonehenge has a Slaughter Stone outside the main circle, and the idea of sacrificing virgins to the summer solstice would be right up Mephisto’s alley.”

  “Mephisto sounds like a nasty piece of work.”

  “According to the psych profile Special X worked up on him, he has a narcissistic personality disorder with psychopathic features, paranoid traits, ego-syntonic aggression, and a complete lack of conscience. It’s a mouthful, but it basically means he’s a megalomaniac of Olympic proportions. His obsessive-compulsive need for power manifests itself in delusions of greatness. All through Nick Craven’s captivity, Mephisto wore the tartan of a Scottish laird. He’s a borderline psychotic, and he relishes cruelty. Like Brady with Hindley and Bernardo with Homolka, he lured a woman named Donella into his fantasy. She played the role of his Celtic highland queen and mutilated Nick on his command.”

  “How did he get so warped?”

  “We don’t know,” said Gill. “Malignant narcissists usually harbor a massive inferiority complex from some childhood trauma. He may have been rejected, abandoned, teased, bullied, or sexually abused. Whatever it was, it must have been severe for him to overcompensate in such a vicious way. Mephisto isn’t the stereotypical asylum Napoleon, with one hand stuck in his shirt. He kills for his delusions of greatness.”

  “What happened to Craven?” asked Joe.

  “He was saved by Robert and an American sheriff’s deputy named Jenna Bond.”

  “So Craven can ID Mephisto?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so can you, I believe?”

  Gill nodded. “And so can Jenna’s daughter, Becky Bond. Mephisto grabbed Becky for a series of bizarre experiments, and he lured me to his clinic on Ebbtide Island. The same island he had used for his first psychotic scheme.”

  “To thumb his nose at Robert, I assume?”

  “Precisely. What a megalomaniac craves is a worthy challenger to defeat. A Moriarty needs his Holmes. A Mephisto needs his DeClercq.”

  “What sort of clinic was it?”

  “I had a nip and a tuck. The clinic was supposed to be a recovery spa, but that was just the front. Behind the façade was a sick laboratory for human experimentation, just as his own slick façade hides as cold-blooded a reptile as a man can be.”

  “A chameleon?”

  “Who changes his skin with each psychotic scheme. For the Silver Skull, he wrapped himself in the tartan of a Scottish clan. For the clinic, it was Egyptology and a plot that was somehow tied to a reverse Fountain of Youth.”

  “What is he? A mad Indiana Jones?”

  “You don’t take the name of the devil unless devilry is what you’re plotting. Role-playing is how a malignant narcissist conquers his mental demons. Mephisto creates a subjective image of himself and inhabits it so completely that those around him are tricked into responding to his delusion objectively.”

  “The ultimate self-absorption. So where is Mephisto now?”

  “Who knows? He escaped again.” Gill turned the BMW off Marine Drive and followed a road down through the dark trees to a house fronting the ocean. “The only thing we do know is that one day, Mephisto will return for revenge.”

  “With another grandiose plot?”

  “And a new delusion.”

  “It could be worse,” said Joe.

  “How?”

  The Russian tapped the briefcase at his feet.

  “He could be armed with this.”

  Biohazard

  Beyond the glass of DeClercq’s seaside home, silver moonlight sparkled on the ripples of Burrard Inlet. Topping a knoll on the beach was a driftwood chair and an antique sundial. Each sweep of the beacon from nearby Lighthouse Park caught the words etched around the metal face: “The Time Is Later Than You Think.”

  Though it was cold and stark out there, inside the blazing fireplace cast warmth and cheer. The hearth was flanked by two overstuffed chairs, the Holmes and the Watson. The Katt of old had always claimed the Holmes chair—“I’m more flamboyant”—thereby relegating the chief superintendent—“You’re staid and dependable”—to the role of sidekick. Tonight, however, the teenager was curled up in the doctor’s seat, having said to DeClercq, “You’re the great detective. How arrogant I was to usurp your sleuthful throne.”

  Would wonders never cease?

  After cleaning up, grooming, and tending to Waif, they’d spent the night making pizza and gingerbread men. Now they sat in the armchairs by the fire, wat
ching a Monty Python skit on TV and killing themselves with laughter. So there’d be no jealousy, Katt had Catnip, the resident cat, snuggled in her lap and Napoleon, the German shepherd, at her feet. DeClercq cradled the blind stray in the crook of his arm.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  On the threshold stood Joseph Avacomovitch. He was about to embrace the Mountie in the bear hug that Gill had turned down when he saw the scruffy cat. Instead of crushing it, the long-parted friends opted to shake hands. With a flick of his eyes, Joe glanced over Robert’s shoulder at the greenhouse door through which he had crashed all those years ago.

  “Long time, no see,” the cop said.

  “Too long,” said the Russian.

  Closing the door on winter, Joe and Gill hung up their coats and trailed the Mountie along the hall to the living room that overlooked the ocean.

  Just half an hour later, Katt went to bed. She had sleep to catch up on before the morning’s early start. They’d stop by the vet’s to board both cats, then follow the Sea to Sky Highway up Howe Sound to Squamish and into the mountains to Whistler. The drive would normally take an hour and a half, but snow was in the forecast.

  A heavy snowfall.

  With whiteout conditions.

  The kind of weather known to cut Whistler off from the rest of the world.

  “So,” said Robert, “let’s see the DVD.”

  Joseph opened his briefcase and fished out the disk. As Robert fed it into the player, the forensic scientist cautioned, “A stiff drink will help us watch it.”

  “Name your poison.”

  “Vodka.”

  “Gill?”

  “Are you having one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then make it three.”

  The Mountie went to the fridge for a chilled bottle and poured three shots.

  “Za vashe zdorov’ye!” said Joe, raising his glass.

  “To your health!” echoed Robert.

  “Cheers!” said Gill.

  As they watched, a black man with ruby red eyes shambled, shambled, lurched, and shambled toward the camera. Blood trickled from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and bubbled through his pores from hemorrhages under his skin. Dissolving flesh hung from his bones, while his sagging face detached from his skull.

  It could have been a schlocky Hollywood zombie movie.

  But it wasn’t.

  “September 1976,” said Joe. “The first recorded outbreak of Ebola Zaire, along the Congo River in the rainforest of Central Africa.”

  The oozing man shuffled up an aisle squeezed by hospital beds filled with thrashing wretches in the grip of seizures. Gore pooled underneath them and inched across the floor. The lurching zombie slopped through the slime and stalked the camera out the door.

  The living dead terrorized the street beyond, crawling among the corpses and clutching at those not yet infected. Women wailed in anguish and yanked out their hair. Babies cried for mothers who lay dying in the blood-soaked dirt. If they ever offered an Oscar for hell on earth, this place would win it hands down.

  “Ebola Zaire is a perfect parasite,” said Joe. “It assaults every part of the body, except skeletal muscle and bone. The virus lives to replicate itself, and it turns each victim into a seething bio-bomb. Spread around the globe, it would kill off 90 percent of the world’s population in six weeks.”

  All of a sudden, the horror movie morphed into a science fiction film. Astronauts in biohazard suits, their heads sheathed in breathing equipment, filled the screen. They roamed the village collecting samples from the dead while their flesh liquefied into red gumbo.

  A tiny Soviet emblem adorned each man’s shoulder.

  “The Vektor compound in Siberia,” said Joe as the DVD switched scenes again, this time to a labyrinth of tunnels sealed by airlocks. “In the 1980s, forty thousand scientists worked for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s biological weaponry agency. They had access to ten thousand viruses, including 140 strains of smallpox and three kinds of Ebola. The Ebola Zaire strain came from the village we just saw.”

  “Black biology,” commented Gill.

  The Russian nodded.

  “Ebola’s weakness is twofold. First, it kills too quickly, eating up bodies from brain to skin before victims can infect enough new hosts to sustain an epidemic. Second, like the AIDS virus, it spreads solely by direct contact with infected body fluids. To address this, the virologist you see here—Vladimir Grof—created an airborne strain.”

  “How?” asked Gill, about to drain her glass.

  “He began by thinking about the worst scourge in history: smallpox. That disease has a longer incubation period and a much lower kill rate than Ebola, but it spreads more easily. Grof realized that if he could combine the virulence of Ebola with the infectiousness of smallpox, he would have a supervirus without compare. He found a way to insert Ebola genes into a smallpox shell to create a hybrid that could be spread by air.”

  “Phew!” said Gill. “What happened to Grof?”

  The previous scenes had shown him going about his work in a secret lab at the Vektor compound, weaponizing viral agents for the Soviet military. In the scenes they were watching now, he’d become a living skeleton, his Slavic face merely angles of skin and skull.

  “A Vektor virus wormed into his heart,” said Joe. “This footage was taken shortly before he died. During the Soviet era, Grof had had it all. A dacha on the Black Sea and a hunting lodge in the Urals. But with the fall of Communism, he lost everything. Suddenly, he was working in a crumbling lab and went months without getting paid. He blamed American capitalists for his decline. For revenge, he sold his supervirus—in the form of three aerosol bombs—to a bioterrorist.”

  “Who?” asked the Mountie.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  “Seattle,” answered Joe.

  “How did he smuggle it in?”

  “By diplomatic pouch. You see, the fall of the Soviet Union had created a new threat from broke, disgruntled Biopreparat scientists looking to sell their toxic wares to hostile states. To stop that, Washington funded several make-work projects through Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Ironically, Grof was sent to America as an example of the program’s success. He used the opportunity to transact his revenge.”

  “So you know what he sold and where he sold it, but not who the buyer was. How did you find out as much as you did?” asked Robert.

  “He boasted about it before he died. We know the transaction took place, but we don’t know why the bombs were never used.”

  Joe paused to let Gill and Robert take in all he’d just told them.

  “Now here’s the nightmare scenario,” he continued. “Nowhere on earth is more than twenty-some hours away by plane. Nothing gathers an international crowd like the Olympics. If a bioterrorist were to release Grof’s supervirus at Whistler in February—or at Sochi in 2014—he’d essentially create thousands of human time bombs, people carrying a potential airborne pandemic to all four corners of the globe.”

  Nightmare indeed, thought Robert.

  He made a mental note to discuss Grof’s Frankenvirus with Zinc and Nick at the next day’s security powwow.

  In a post-9/11 world, Robert knew, it was madness to hold the Winter Olympics at a site where the venues stretched over a hundred miles. It was going to cost a fortune in taxpayer money to police the games, what with skating down near the American border, curling and hockey in Vancouver, snowboarding up on the North Shore mountains, and the alpine events off hell and gone along one of the world’s most precarious roads. To make the games palatable to the Canadian public, security had originally been budgeted at a laughable $175 million. But those costs had soon skyrocketed to around a billion dollars. And then the bottom had crumbled away from the national treasury, which left taxpayers barely able to afford to protect the actual games. There was simply no money in the kitty for preliminary tryouts like those being held at Whistl
er over the next few days.

  As fate would have it, this was also the week that VISU, the RCMP-led Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, was fine-tuning its multi-threat detection system in downtown Vancouver. Called Safesite, this system boasts an array of sensors that can monitor entire city blocks and sniff out forty chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. If a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda wanted to attack the Olympics with sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, or ricin, or with a “dirty bomb” of radioactive waste, the target would be Vancouver, not Whistler. That’s why all but a few of the Olympic defenders were now on a test run in Lotusland.

  In tough economic times, hard choices had to be made. Until security ramped up for the actual games, still two months away, Whistler had let down its guard.

  Hell Dorado

  Whistler

  Mephisto’s inspiration had come from Dactylella, a carnivorous fungus. The fungus looped its many threads into nooses. If a roundworm stuck its head into one of the holes, the ring tightened, strangling it like a hangman’s rope. Then a penetration tube emerged from the thread to pierce the body of the worm and suck out nutriments. Sated, the fungus released its prey.

  Good idea, Mephisto had thought.

  And voilà.

  The metal strangling device he’d created resembled a dog collar attached to a four-foot chain ending with a hook. The inside of the collar was ringed with a circular razor blade.

  “How does it work?” Scarlett asked.

  They had just returned to the mountainside chalet overlooking the El Dorado Resort, where they’d baited the trap designed to hook DeClercq.

  The psycho demonstrated. The loop constricted when he yanked the leash.

  “Wicked!” she replied.

  “And this,” her boss added, “I created for you. I got the idea from Jivaro headhunters.” Mephisto handed her the weapon.

  The Ice Pick Killer’s eyes widened with admiration as she grasped how it worked.

  “Wicked!” she repeated.

  Her new favorite word, it seemed.

  The most diabolic weapon, however, had come not from his brain but from Vladimir Grof. The two had linked up on the Internet, that godsend of sexual perverts and worldwide terrorists. What began with a discussion of biological plagues—with the Russian in Siberia and Mephisto in the United States—had eventually culminated in a face-to-face meeting. That meeting took place in a Seattle hotel room, on a sunny autumn morning when Scotch mist swirled over streets bustling with weekenders going about their chores.