Immortal

by Dean Crawford

  12

  BIO-SCIENCE DIVISION LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORIES, LOS ALAMOS

  Ethan Warner glanced nervously at Lopez before speaking.

  ‘Hiram Conley was suffering from an infection?’

  Tyler Willis nodded, gesturing to one wall of his office where a series of graphs and charts were pinned haphazardly.

  ‘I tracked the course of the infection over six weeks. Never seen anything like it, some kind of telomere mutating bacterium, not a virus. It shared similarities with Bacillus permians, but appeared to have evolved differently.’

  ‘Is it transmissible by air?’ Lopez asked, touching her face again.

  ‘No,’ Willis said firmly, ‘this isn’t something that’s easy to contract. What’s fascinating about it is that I was able to extract a genetic profile of the bacterium, and by tracing its mitochondrial signature I was able to ascertain that Hiram Conley had been suffering from this infection for something over one hundred fifty years.’

  Ethan thought for a moment.

  ‘So, what is it? Was this guy some kind of zombie or something?’

  Willis shook his head.

  ‘No, but that’s not the interesting part. The infection was starting to mutate again, and I was trying to find out what was happening when Hiram Conley was shot.’

  ‘How was the mutation affecting him?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘That’s the really interesting part,’ Willis said. ‘He was starting to fall apart and—’

  Ethan flinched as the deafening sound of an explosion rocked the office around them as though a truck had crashed right outside the walls and smashed its way across the compound.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Lopez shouted, yanking the office door open. ‘What the hell was that?’

  Ethan was right behind her, his ears ringing from the explosion.

  ‘Grenades,’ he said, recognizing their distinctive sound from his service with the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the infernal devices had thundered through caves in Tora Bora or were tossed into buildings as his men stormed Taliban strongholds. ‘Come on.’

  Ethan led the way at a run, unsure of what he would find as they burst out of the administrative building and into the bright sunlight outside. Instantly, Ethan saw the pall of oily black smoke rising from the laboratories opposite. Dozens of scientists in white coats were scattering across the lawns, shouting at each other and pointing uselessly at the destruction behind them.

  Ethan looked across the road as he heard a vehicle, and saw a battered old camper pull onto the main road and accelerate away toward the south. Lopez turned toward her car, but Ethan called out to her.

  ‘Get their plate and let them go! There could be casualties here!’

  Lopez obeyed without hesitation, squinting at the license plate of the van for a moment before joining Ethan to dash across to the panicked people.

  ‘Was there anybody inside?’ Ethan demanded, grabbing the arm of what looked like the most senior of them.

  ‘Two,’ the old man said, his features twisted with fury and fear. ‘Goddamned activist is still in there with one of my people.’

  Ethan didn’t wait to hear anything further, turning and plunging through the shattered glass of the entry cubicle and into the foyer. A galaxy of glass crystals twinkled on the blue carpets as he dashed forward toward a narrow corridor filled with a haze of swirling blue smoke. The thick taint of cordite stung his throat and seared his eyes, but he pushed on until he saw a poster warning of hazardous chemical spills. Ethan hesitated, sudden thoughts of infectious diseases and spores floating on the air flashing through his mind.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  He whirled as Lopez appeared behind him, a simple fabric mask covering her nose and mouth. She handed one to him. ‘I checked, no hazardous chemicals.’

  Ethan snapped the mask over his face and advanced further down the corridor. Ahead, another cubicle stood with its glass walls shattered by the shockwave of the detonation. Ethan recognized it as a pressure chamber of some kind as he passed through and into the laboratory beyond.

  His gaze was quickly drawn to the smoldering remains of what looked like two huge computer mainframes, sparks hissing and spitting from severed power mains and junctions.

  ‘Anybody here?’ Ethan shouted, not sure of how else to quickly locate any injured scientists still inside the lab.

  ‘Here!’

  The voice was feeble and coming from behind a row of worktops to Ethan’s left. He hurried across and saw a young woman in a white coat with what looked like a monkey wrapped in her arms.

  Ethan rounded the corner of the workbench. ‘Are you okay?’

  Before the woman could answer, another woman leapt up from behind the far end of the bench with a sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘Freeze, hero.’

  Ethan obeyed, standing silent and looking at the young girl glaring at him from behind the barrel of the shotgun. The girl glanced at Lopez. ‘You, Chiquita, on your knees and face the wall.’

  Lopez blinked.

  ‘Kiss my ass you little bit—’

  ‘Lopez,’ Ethan warned quietly, ‘be a good girl and shut up, okay? The gun’s pointing at me.’ Lopez, scowling, turned her back and knelt facing the wall. Ethan looked at the girl standing not ten feet away. Her belligerence had flickered, momentarily stunned by Lopez’s hostility. He edged forward.

  ‘This lady is injured,’ he said carefully. ‘We need to get her out of here and—’

  ‘The lady is fine and so is the fucking monkey,’ the girl hissed. ‘Shut up and follow me.’

  Ethan shrugged and followed the girl, noting the hard line of her jaw and the thick blonde hair tied up behind her head. She was wearing the cloak of the fearless eco-warrior, but Ethan could see she was gripping the shotgun so tightly her knuckles were white and the barrel of the weapon was trembling.

  ‘Easy,’ he said soothingly. ‘No need to let this get out of control.’

  ‘Out of control?’ she spat. ‘Not the sharpest blade in the kitchen, are you?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The girl gestured to the shattered bulk of the computer servers.

  ‘I want you to crawl behind that and look for anything rolling around back there.’

  ‘Such as?’ Ethan asked, maneuvering himself alongside the server. The girl kept the shotgun trained on him.

  ‘Things that go bang,’ she hissed at him with a humorless smile.

  Shit. Ethan guessed that the grenade he had heard had done the damage to the server and that there must be another one that had failed to detonate. Thoughts crashed through his mind. If it was a fused grenade then it had a three-second delay from releasing the pin. Most modern grenades were highly reliable, unless you were unlucky like some Marines who had served in the jungles of Vietnam, where wiry bushes and twigs had pulled the pins from where they hung on the soldiers’ belt-kits. The girl watching over him wouldn’t likely have access to modern military-grade munitions. That would mean the grenades were probably old, maybe even vintage, black-market devices crudely reactivated using gunpowder and improvised fuses. Unreliable. Volatile. Sensitive to movement.

  Ethan knelt down and peered behind the server, flinching as showers of sparks splashed and crackled round him. Through the acrid wisps of blue smoke he saw the grenade lying three feet away from his grasp, faintly illuminated by shafts of light beaming through the wall behind where shrapnel had punched through to the outside world. Prefabricated double-skin aluminum walls, no insulation.

  ‘I can see it,’ he coughed to the girl standing watch over him.

  ‘Good,’ the girl shot back. Ethan heard her call out to Lopez and the scientist. ‘Get out of here, all of you!’ Then back to him. ‘You, get off your knees and out of there.’

  Ethan scrambled to his feet and backed away as the girl jabbed the shotgun at him, prodding him back into the lab as she moved to look down the back of the server. Ethan glanced over his shoulder to see Lopez herding the scientist out of t
he labs and away down the corridor.

  ‘You’re trapped,’ he said to the girl. ‘The servers are destroyed, so whatever you’ve come here to do, you’ve done. Why not put the weapon down while you still can, before the police get here?’

  The girl looked at him for a brief moment, as though considering the suggestion, before shaking it off.

  ‘The police are otherwise occupied,’ she said tartly, ‘and we’re done here.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Ethan chuckled. ‘And what the hell are you going to—’

  Ethan whirled as the girl swung the shotgun to point at his head, and in a fraction of a second he knew she was going to pull the trigger. With an instinct born of self-preservation his legs propelled him without conscious thought sideways as he dove for cover behind one of the benches. The shotgun blasted a round over his head and smashed the ceiling above where he’d been standing. Ethan hit the tiled floor hard on his knees and elbows, sprawling as he did so. He squinted through swirling smoke to see the girl take several steps back from the servers and then point the shotgun at the grenade and fire again. A deafening blast ripped through the frame of the servers amid a spray of sparks and clouds of blue smoke from burning relay circuits.

  Through the haze and a fine hail of plaster chunks Ethan saw the girl suddenly dash out of sight behind the server, her small frame squeezing through the narrow gap. Ethan scrambled to his feet and rushed to the wall as sparks showered down around him, just in time to see the girl’s feet vanish through a ragged hole torn into the building’s aluminum skin. He took a deep breath and pushed his way behind the server, heading for the hole, when the barrel of the shotgun appeared suddenly through the gap and a voice hissed at him, ‘Don’t even think about it, hero.’

  Ethan cursed silently to himself as he dragged himself backwards out of the gap and then turned to sprint through the laboratory.

  13

  ‘She’s gone.’

  Lieutenant Enrico Zamora was outside the laboratories as Ethan burst out into the bright sunlight. A small fleet of patrol cars and ambulances, supported by two fire trucks, had arrived to line the edge of the main road, their lights flashing as though a traveling fairground had pulled up in town.

  Ethan glanced at the paramedics treating the injured scientists before looking at Zamora.

  ‘She can’t have gotten far,’ he said. ‘She must be in the woods somewhere.’

  ‘You got a description of her?’

  Ethan described the girl, and was surprised when Zamora unfolded a picture from his jacket pocket and showed it to him.

  ‘That’s her.’ Ethan nodded. ‘No doubt about it. Who is she?’

  ‘Her name’s Saffron,’ Zamora replied. ‘One of these here anti-vivisectionists who insist on attacking laboratories having anything to do with animal studies.’

  ‘She wasn’t alone,’ Ethan said. ‘You get a trace on the van we saw?’

  The officer nodded as he slipped the photograph back into his pocket.

  ‘Found abandoned a few miles from here. Looks like they probably switched vehicles, took those darned apes with them too. We’re guessing they’ll pick up Saffron somewhere on the ways round.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘Doesn’t make any sense. They hit the labs to free the monkeys, that I can deal with. But why all the attention on the computer servers?’

  Zamora shrugged.

  ‘Who knows what these tree-huggers have got inside their heads, aside from dope and dumb dreams. We left the world in their hands, we’d be living in caves and praying to rocks by th’end of the year.’

  ‘What happened to you guys anyway?’ Ethan asked. ‘It took almost half an hour for the first patrol cars to get here.’

  ‘False alarm,’ Zamora replied. ‘Looks like it was done on purpose to divert resources away from Los Alamos.’

  Ethan glanced across at the administrative building.

  ‘They knew what they were doing,’ he said.

  ‘Any luck with Tyler Willis?’ Zamora asked.

  ‘Some,’ Ethan said, ‘we’ll finish questioning him before we leave, see if he knows anything about the people who hit the building here.’

  Zamora was about to reply when Lopez joined them.

  ‘That could prove tricky,’ she said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because he’s taken off,’ Lopez said. ‘I’ve checked both buildings twice and nobody’s seen him since the blasts. His car’s gone too.’

  Ethan rubbed his temples before glancing at Zamora.

  ‘Can you get a trace on his vehicle for us?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied and hurried away.

  ‘Why would Willis do that?’ Ethan wondered out loud. ‘He could be in danger, he said it himself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lopez muttered. ‘In danger of losing money. We know what he was doing here, researching something that may help people to double their lifespans. He’d already set himself up in business to profit from the technology, even though he hadn’t figured out how it worked yet.’

  Ethan rolled the thought around in his mind for a moment.

  ‘You think somebody else wants his work held up?’

  ‘All’s fair in love and cut-throat business,’ Lopez said. ‘These scientists work for the laboratories but they often found companies based on their research, patenting their drugs and genes and things. Willis could have rivals, enemies even, people who know what he’s up to and want to get the jump on him. It would explain the need for these activists to hit the computer servers as well as free the animals.’

  ‘Hired help,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Which means conspiracy, criminal damage, even attempted homicide. We need to find out if Saffron is working for anybody and put the screws into them to see what they sing about.’

  ‘I got some descriptions from the scientists before the paramedics got to work on them,’ Lopez said. ‘It’s not much, but Zamora reckons he knows at least one of the activists, a Colin Manx. Trouble is they’re hard to pin down. According to local police they live rough out in the badlands, never staying in one place for long.’

  Ethan surveyed the scene for a moment, thinking hard. Activists like Saffron and Colin Manx were opportunists, ordinary people who rarely had access to major weapons or possessed tactical skills. The likelihood that they had achieved what amounted to a carefully planned strike on a difficult-to-access laboratory told Ethan that, somewhere along the line, there had to be money involved and, more importantly, motive. Freeing monkeys was one thing, but deliberately destroying scientific evidence and endeavor out of sheer spite was another. Ethan had looked into the eyes of Saffron, and whatever he had seen dwelling there did not match her actions. Aggressive? Yes. Desperate? Certainly. Spiteful? Definitely not. She could have killed someone during her attack but had studiously avoided doing so.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Lopez asked curiously.

  Ethan turned to her.

  ‘I’ll look into Hiram Conley at the town hall and see what I can find. Willis mentioned that there were other people suffering from the same infection as Conley, so I might even find evidence of them there along with Conley’s aliases. I want you to start looking for Colin Manx and Tyler Willis. We need to find them before whoever organized this attack gets to them.’

  14

  BREVIG MISSION

  ALASKA

  Donald Wolfe looked out of the window of the Beech aircraft as it descended toward a runway that skirted the bleak waters of Lost River Shoal. To the west, vast mountain ranges towered across the horizon, their lofty peaks swathed in snow, while to the east the slate-gray surface of the Bering Sea churned with flecks of white foam.

  The aircraft thumped down onto the gravel runway before taxiing to a holding area at the northern end of the field. There was no control tower or terminal, just grim-looking shacks and a small town crouched low against the bitter Arctic winds.

  Wolfe opened the door of the aircraft and stepped out. His nose instantly became numb and fr
ost encrusted his eyebrows as he pulled his hood up against the bitter wind. It wasn’t snowing, but the ground underfoot was rock-solid permafrost, bitter tundra and clumps of wiry grass that stretched away as far as the eye could see.

  ‘Mister Wolfe?’

  A young man approached him from where he had been waiting beside a quad bike. In the distance, Wolfe could see people watching them, native Inuit families who lived in this remotest of outposts far from even the most rudimentary of luxuries like electricity and drive-ins.

  ‘You are?’ Wolfe inquired.

  ‘Jason Moore, sir. It’s an honor to have you here and—’

  ‘Cut the bullshit,’ Wolfe snapped. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘The station is out on the tundra,’ Moore said quickly. ‘We’ll have to hurry. The light won’t last much longer and you’ll need it to fly out again as the runway only has emergency lighting.’

  Wolfe nodded as they walked across to the quad bike. Moore started it and Wolfe took his place on the pillion seat. The ride out across the tundra took almost twenty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. The searing cold bit deep into Wolfe’s bones, creeping through his joints to chill the blood in his veins. By the time he’d first glimpsed through the misty air the tents dwarfed by the vast plains, he could no longer feel his hands or feet and his face was aching.

  Moore pulled up alongside two large tents that rumbled in the wind blustering across the plains. Wolfe slowly clambered off the bike, his limbs as stiff as wood as he turned full circle, examining the terrain around them. It was brutally cold, and entirely devoid of life. Satisfied, Wolfe followed Moore into the larger of the two tents.

  The interior was filled with the hiss and roar of gas fires that billowed clouds of trembling heat. Wolfe gasped, tearing open his thick coat to let the blasts of warm air touch his face and body, wriggling his fingers and toes as they came painfully alive.

  Ahead, he could see a clear plastic partition within the tent which was sealed around the edges. Jason Moore was already donning a Level-B HazMat suit and pulling on oversized rubber gloves and boots. Sitting beside him on chairs were another suit and two helmets with sealable neck linings and respirators.