Immortal

by Dean Crawford

  Lillian nodded.

  ‘And then he kills us both,’ she said. ‘Are there other people chasing this?’

  ‘Some,’ Willis admitted. ‘Very wealthy people, who had also read my published papers and were interested in investing in my work. I don’t have any names, but I did some research and know that they were part of something called the Bilderberg Group. You ever heard of them?’

  Lillian shook her head.

  ‘Wealthy individuals like Oppenheimer?’ she asked. ‘Pharmaceutical companies?’

  ‘No,’ Willis shook his head, ‘way bigger than that.’ He looked up at her. ‘And two detectives, government people or so they said. Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. They seemed solid, but I got jumped by Oppenheimer’s goons before I could tell them much.’

  ‘I think they were the ones looking for us here,’ Lillian confirmed, recalling the earlier altercation outside the laboratory.

  ‘You figured anything out yet?’ Willis asked her.

  Lillian glanced across at Hiram Conley’s remains.

  ‘Nothing adds up,’ she admitted. ‘What little blood I managed to extract shows signs of anemia, but there was nothing to explain the mummification of the remains, especially not overnight.’

  Willis nodded, his voice sounding dreamlike, as though he were struggling to connect his thought processes.

  ‘The anemia could be due to a mineral deficiency,’ he said. ‘I noticed it in Hiram’s blood pathology before he died. The mummification is almost certainly calcification.’

  Lillian blinked in surprise. Calcification was a conservative-transformative phenomenon by which a corpse could appear petrified when the skeleton rapidly absorbed calcium salts in the presence of bacterial decomposition of internal organs.

  ‘You think that the bacteria inside him affected his calcium levels in some way?’

  Willis shrugged lazily, his eyelids half closed.

  ‘Seems likely to me,’ he murmured. ‘If he was hosting a bacterial infection as I assume he was, then the bacteria must have themselves consumed resources. That’s how they live inside us symbiotically, consuming and replenishing. Maybe Hiram’s death starved them of whatever they needed, and his apparent mummification was the result?’

  Lillian nodded, glancing again at the corpse.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she whispered, and then looked down at Willis.

  His eyes were closed, and as she watched his breathing slowed gently until his chest stopped moving. Lillian stared at his serene features for a long moment, and then moved away from his body.

  The door to the laboratory opened and the guard walked back in carrying a tray of food. Lillian looked across at him and wiped a tear from her eye.

  ‘You’re too late,’ she said softly. ‘Oppenheimer must have cut him deeper than he realized.’

  The guard took one look at Willis’s inert body, dropped the tray and dashed away.

  33

  SANTA FE

  11.36 p.m.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Ethan stood in a hotel room on the city’s south side, looking at the twinkling lights outside his window as he listened to Doug Jarvis on the other end of the line back in Washington DC.

  ‘Your man Oppenheimer has friends in high places, Ethan. A guy turned up yesterday in the offices here from USAMRIID, some big-shot who’s rated the situation down in Santa Fe as a potential toxic hazard. They’re trying to get jurisdiction of the case and have pushed the DIA and our own medical outfit, NCMI, out of the way.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If this was a disease it would have spread by now. The apartment block Tyler Willis lived in is home to hundreds of people.’

  ‘It’s not just that, Ethan,’ Doug said. ‘The high and mighty here at the DIA aren’t best pleased with your investigation down there. They need someone who can work under the radar, not start gunfights and blow up apartment blocks.’

  ‘We didn’t do the shooting or the blowing up of anything, Doug. Whoever hit that building was either trying to take Willis out, take us out or destroy evidence. Maybe all three. Fact is, they did a damned good job. We’ve got nothing much left to go on without Willis, and Saffron Oppenheimer’s little gang will be almost impossible to find out in the Pecos.’

  Ethan waited for a long moment until he heard Doug sigh on the other end of the line.

  ‘There’s not much that I can do this end except keep my boss out of the loop and hope you two can come up with something before USAMRIID really start putting the heat on. You sure you haven’t got anything else there?’

  Ethan looked down at the bed where a photograph lay on the sheet. He picked it up, looking at the faded image of the group of Civil War soldiers.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant Zamora’s off duty and is meeting us here shortly. He’s got some kind of information for us that he couldn’t share while USAMRIID were on site at SkinGen. Listen, Doug, can you have a dig around for me, see why it is they’re coming down hard on us? They have no real connection professionally with SkinGen Corp, except maybe to monitor their work as part of their remit. Jeb Oppenheimer was talking about plans for population control and eugenics. He seems to think that money can buy him anything at all, and why the hell else would USAMRIID personnel be visiting him down here in Santa Fe?’

  ‘I’m already on it,’ Jarvis replied. ‘SkinGen doesn’t do work into infectious diseases, especially not for the military. According to SkinGen’s spokesperson, Donald Wolfe stayed overnight on Jeb Oppenheimer’s yacht before flying direct to DC this morning on a SkinGen jet and then on to Manhattan afterward, or so he told Director Mitchell.’

  ‘So?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘So I started wondering why someone at USAMRIID would be hanging around Jeb Oppenheimer, flying aboard his jets and such like instead of taking a military transport. I sneaked a peak at the flight plans filed by the pilots of the SkinGen jet. Turns out that it took off fifteen hours earlier than he’s saying. Wherever the hell he went it wasn’t direct to DC. Seems like Wolfe’s used his authority to conceal the aircraft’s true flight path. Whatever the hell this guy’s up to, he’s hiding it from both the DIA and USAMRIID. I might be able to twist a few arms at the National Security Agency and get some surveillance, see where he’s really been.’

  ‘At least it’ll be something we can work with,’ Ethan said. ‘Let me know.’

  He hung up, looked at the photograph again and then out the window across the city to where the Sangre de Cristo mountains loomed in the lonely darkness beyond.

  New Mexico was a huge state largely filled with desert and nothing much else. To survive out in the wilderness men would need specific skills to be able to live off the land with minimal support. He thought back to his days in the Marine Corps with the 15th Expeditionary Unit, and the skills they’d employed.

  On November 25, 2001, the 15th MEU Special Operations Command launched an amphibious assault over four hundred miles into Afghanistan, with Ethan’s own platoon attached to a Marine Recon patrol. Landing at an airbase southwest of Kandahar, they had established Camp Rhino, America’s first forward operating base and conventional ground presence in Afghanistan. Deploying again in 2003, Ethan’s platoon, again supporting Marine Recons, crossed the border into southern Iraq and secured the ports of Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr in order to destroy Iraqi resistance and enable follow-on humanitarian assistance to begin.

  Ethan had, with his men, learned several important lessons during the initial infiltration into Afghanistan that had helped them upon arrival in Iraq. Chiefly, that the desert might be extremely hot during the day but it becomes extremely cold during the night. Water, though scarce on the surface, was available at depth beneath the dunes and wadis, if you knew where to look for the telltale signs of old river courses betraying the presence of rare downpours and the subterranean aquifers they fed. The ports secured in Iraq had revealed another useful quirk of desert life: the presence of coastal water produces morning mist as the sun r
ises, which can be captured in suspended plastic bags as moisture, providing limited additional water to troops in time of dire need. But the most important lesson of all, above anything else, was local knowledge. Befriending native Bedouin tribes, trackers and guides had taught Ethan more about desert survival in three months than he’d learned with the Corps in three years.

  He looked out into the darkness. A small group of seven men could conceivably live indefinitely off the land without betraying even the slightest hint of their presence. They would only be forced into urban areas to buy medicines. Obtaining food, water and shelter would not require assistance, especially if they did not age.

  But an old man, one like Hiram Conley, might tire of such a lifestyle. Ethan remembered what Tyler Willis had said: whatever had kept them alive for so long had not made them younger, it had only halted cellular senescence. They had become frozen at whatever age they were when they encountered whatever it was that had given them the gift of immortality. That meant that Hiram Conley had been around sixty years old ever since the Civil War, which for his era was virtually geriatric. He may have been suffering from various age-related ailments already, and thus cursed with having to endure them forever. Ethan figured that a century and a half of chronic arthritis would be enough to make anyone throw in the towel, immortal or not.

  A knock at the door broke his reverie, and he opened it to see Lopez standing with Zamora in the corridor outside.

  ‘Thanks for coming over,’ Ethan said to Zamora as he bid them inside, noticing that the officer had removed the sling from his arm.

  ‘No problem,’ Zamora replied, ‘although I can only speak to you now in an unofficial capacity. Something’s going on at town hall and it stinks.’

  ‘They’ve shut you down?’ Ethan asked, closing the door.

  ‘USAMRIID’s taken over,’ Lopez said as she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Butch Cutler’s got a small army of guys crawling over what’s left of Tyler Willis’s apartment, searching for traces of chemicals.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense. If we’re assuming that for some reason Jeb Oppenheimer or someone within SkinGen decided to blow up the apartment, then why would USAMRIID be in there looking for chemicals? Forensics would be able to detect any kind of explosives or accelerants used in the attack.’

  ‘Maybe SkinGen didn’t make the hit,’ Lopez suggested.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Zamora took out a photograph, a black-and-white mugshot. A strikingly handsome man stared at the camera, a height chart on the wall behind him.

  ‘You’re looking at a man named Lee Carson,’ Zamora said, ‘arrested for drunk and disorderly outside a bootlegger’s called Old Wayne’s in Albuquerque. Yesterday, a call came in from Jay’s Bar and Grill in La Cienega, south of Santa Fe. A girl who works there reported a man who came in by the name of Lee Carson, whose hand appeared to be suffering from some kind of wasting disease. I recognized it as the same affliction being suffered by Hiram Conley when I encountered him out Glorietta way.’

  Ethan felt a pulse of excitement.

  ‘He’s one of the others that Willis mentioned? Can we be sure?’

  ‘The girl described Lee Carson as about twenty-five years of age,’ Zamora said, and then gestured to the mugshot. ‘That was taken in 1929. Old Wayne’s was shut down during the great Depression, long before World War Two.’

  Ethan stared at the photograph again.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said finally.

  Turning, he picked up the old photograph of the seven soldiers standing beside the cart in 1862, and scanned their faces. Within seconds he saw what he was looking for, and handed the photograph to Lopez.

  ‘Second from right, the one with the hat on,’ he said.

  Lopez stared at the picture, and Ethan saw her jaw drop.

  ‘He’s there,’ she said in a whisper. ‘This photograph is over a hundred fifty years old.’

  Ethan looked at Zamora.

  ‘These people, survivors, whatever they are, must be in contact with each other. They must be experiencing some kind of reaction. Tyler Willis said they were suffering from a bacterial infection. If we assume that they were all infected at the same time, then they’ll all be showing these kinds of afflictions. Maybe that’s why Hiram Conley came out of hiding: he knew he was dying and needed help. It’s the only reason these people would reveal their secret.’

  Zamora caught on to where Ethan was going.

  ‘They’ll rally together and try to find a solution,’ he said. ‘They’ll seek out medication, a cure.’

  ‘The question is where?’ Ethan pondered out loud.

  Zamora was about to answer when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, answered, and his face fell as he listened. Slowly, he lowered the phone to his side and looked at Ethan.

  ‘They’ve found Tyler Willis’s body.’

  34

  LOS ALAMOS

  NEW MEXICO

  11.58 p.m.

  Ethan rode in the passenger seat of Zamora’s patrol car as they drove up to the police cordon. Two ambulances and a pair of squad cars were parked, their strobe lights flashing in the night and reflecting off trees and bushes lining the side of a lonely track. Behind them, the main road ran north past the Los Alamos National Laboratory, not more than two hundred yards away, where Ethan had first met both Tyler Willis and Saffron Oppenheimer.

  ‘Keep your heads down,’ Zamora said. ‘Let’s not upset anyone.’

  ‘Are USAMRIID on site already?’ Ethan asked in amazement, spotting a large vehicle bearing the department’s distinctive badges parked further down the track.

  ‘They were already in Santa Fe,’ Zamora said, winding down his window as a police officer approached them on foot. ‘Wouldn’t have taken them long to get here.’

  The officer recognized Zamora and waved them through. They parked before getting out and walking toward the scene of the crime.

  ‘Not far from the research center,’ Lopez said uneasily. ‘You think that maybe we were wrong and Saffron Oppenheimer got her hands on Willis?’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘No, but maybe that’s what the perpetrators would like us to think.’

  They had almost reached the cordon when Butch Cutler saw them coming, turning from looking at what was obviously a body lying in the dirt to stride toward them, one hand pointing at Ethan.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’ve turned up,’ he snapped. ‘Trouble seems to follow you.’

  Ethan ducked under the cordon along with Lopez and Zamora.

  ‘Think you’ll find it’s the other way round,’ he said, not letting Cutler intimidate him. ‘When was he discovered?’

  Cutler glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Two hours ago by a local resident out walking her dog. The mutt found the body, she called the police.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Lopez asked.

  Cutler turned his fearsome gaze in her direction.

  ‘Looks like a mugging or similar,’ he replied. ‘He’s been beaten up and stabbed, no cash or belongings on him.’

  ‘You got any idea who might have done this?’ Zamora asked, rubbing his temples.

  Butch Cutler nodded slowly. ‘Some.’

  ‘Jeb Oppenheimer,’ Ethan said to Cutler, trying to control the surge of fury now coursing through his veins. ‘We were in the SkinGen building when Tyler Willis was there and you had us pulled out.’

  ‘You had no damned right to be there,’ Cutler shot back, jabbing a finger into Ethan’s chest.

  Ethan reacted without conscious thought, swatting Cutler’s hand aside and whipping his left palm up toward the USAMRIID chiefs jaw. Cutler spun aside from the blow and was about to counter when Lopez leapt between them.

  ‘Cut it out!’

  Ethan stood, fists clenched, looking over the top of Lopez’s head at Cutler.

  ‘Sooner or later, this screw-up is going to bring you down,’ he hissed.

/>   Cutler smiled coldly.

  ‘Just as your deft handiwork is getting you thrown out of the county?’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ Zamora said, trying to ease the situation. ‘Can we see the body?’

  Cutler scowled, but reluctantly gestured for them to pass through. Ethan walked past him, Lopez deliberately keeping herself between them as they moved toward the body lying on the soil nearby.

  Willis lay on his back, his shirt stained with blood from what looked like an incision in his chest. His eyes were closed and his features seemed peaceful, but his eyes were heavily bruised from what appeared to be blunt-force trauma, his left temple a bloody mess and one of his teeth missing.

  ‘We know he was at SkinGen,’ Lopez said. ‘One of Oppenheimer’s men could have done this to him. The cut’s too clinical, too clean to be a stab wound.’

  Ethan looked at the remains for a few moments and then across at Cutler, his rage now withered.

  ‘Have forensics been called?’

  ‘On their way,’ Cutler said.

  ‘This was done purposefully,’ Ethan said, gesturing to Willis’s corpse. ‘Somebody wanted to send a message that anybody doing research into aging could end up like this.’

  Butch Cutler winced.

  ‘Only if you’re assuming SkinGen’s involvement, which we’re not right now. This has no bearing on Jeb Oppenheimer whatsoever.’

  ‘This man was in his hands when he died,’ Ethan insisted.

  ‘So you allege,’ Cutler said, and turned to face him. ‘But what is an absolute fact is that the last people known for sure to have seen Tyler Willis alive is the pair of you.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘We interviewed him,’ he said. ‘Then Saffron Oppenheimer and her band of merry men tried to blow up the Aspen Center. We’ve been working with Officer Zamora here ever since.’

  Cutler shook his head.

  ‘Taking a blade to a corpse wouldn’t take long,’ he growled. ‘What’s to say you didn’t do it, if circumstantial evidence is enough for you to accuse SkinGen of corporate homicide?’