Immortal

by Dean Crawford

‘And did you find any?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Cutler said. ‘Anything left in that apartment was completely incinerated. If there was blood there its presence might be traceable but that’s all. There won’t be any means of identifying who it belonged to.’

  Jarvis drained his coffee and crushed the cup in his hand before looking at Cutler.

  ‘Tyler Willis was working on a project regarding a particular type of bacteria that can infect and live in the human body. The blood he took was from a man named Hiram Conley, who was subsequently killed in a fracas with state troopers outside Santa Fe. My problem is that Tyler Willis told only two people about the blood he took: Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. So, how could Donald Wolfe have known about that blood and sent your team down here, if he hadn’t himself been told by someone else where that blood was?’

  Butch Cutler opened his mouth to reply, then hesitated.

  ‘He must have been tipped off,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe by a concerned citizen?’

  ‘Not likely,’ Jarvis said. ‘Tyler Willis was conducting his work under the utmost secrecy – he hadn’t even told his own secretary what he was doing. Ethan Warner talks to him, the labs come under attack and then Tyler Willis goes missing. Warner searches for Willis and the chase leads to SkinGen, where’s he’s convinced Tyler is being held against his will. You guys then get another mysterious “tip-off from Donald Wolfe and Willis later turns up dead.’

  Cutler frowned as he thought.

  ‘Oppenheimer?’

  ‘The only way Donald Wolfe could have known about that blood is if either Tyler Willis or his abductor told him about it. Colonel Wolfe is involved in the homicide of Tyler Willis, either willfully or inadvertently.’

  Cutler slowly raised his hands to his face and drew them down his cheeks as Jarvis watched a terrible realization set in.

  ‘I called the bribe in to Wolfe,’ he said, and then a new horror blanched his face. ‘And I pulled Warner out of SkinGen. Tyler Willis might have been just a few yards away.’

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ Jarvis said, convinced that whatever Donald Wolfe was up to, Cutler almost certainly had nothing to do with it. ‘We need to get Wolfe in custody and out of the loop before he can cause any more damage.’

  ‘What do you mean? What’s he been doing?’

  Jarvis tossed the photographs of the SkinGen jet at Bethal airfield in Alaska, and explained the colonel’s missing flight hours.

  ‘He visited a place called Brevig Mission, right out on Alaska’s west coast, before flying from there direct to New York City. You got any idea why he might do that?’

  Cutler shook his head.

  ‘None whatsoever,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing up there that I’m aware of that would hold any interest for USAMRIID. Nothing that’s not already frozen under the permafrost anyway.’

  ‘So there may be something?’ Jarvis pressed.

  Cutler rolled his big shoulders in a shrug.

  ‘Most departments have at one time or another traveled to habitats bordering the Arctic Circle, mainly to study the victims of novel diseases. Their bodies are preserved by the cold when they’re interred, sealing in whatever killed them for future study.’

  Jarvis felt something cold slither through his veins as he considered what Cutler had said.

  ‘Like infectious diseases,’ he suggested. ‘The plague, for instance.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cutler nodded, ‘a whole bunch of viruses and bacterial infections.’

  Jarvis’s mind began racing as he plotted Colonel Wolfe’s movements in his mind.

  ‘Why is Donald Wolfe in New York City?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s there to present a key-note speech on population before the United Nation’s General Assembly. What he says will probably shape global pandemic policy for decades to come.’

  A vision of the United Nations building, set in the heart of one of the most populous cities on earth, flashed dark and foreboding through Jarvis’s mind.

  ‘How many nations will be attending?’ he asked.

  Again, Cutler shrugged. ‘All of ’em, I think. A hundred ninety-two.’

  Jarvis nodded slowly. It was a little-known fact that although Western nations generally guided UN policy, the United Nations was mostly representative of developing nations who outnumbered their developed brethren by two to one. Gripped by a sense of impending disaster, Jarvis leaned forward on the table.

  ‘Whatever Wolfe is planning, it’s not pretty,’ he said finally. ‘I’m going to need your help to stop him.’

  Cutler gathered himself together and looked at Jarvis with a steady eye.

  ‘What do you need me to do?’

  54

  BREVIG MISSION

  ALASKA

  17 May

  A brutally cold wind swept in off the peninsula, chased by the feeble light of the midnight sun just below the horizon as FBI Special Agent Pete Devereux led three men across the tundra. The small town of Brevig Mission with its spindly church shrank behind them in the strange blue shadows cast across the snow fields. Devereux was following an Inuit guide who was almost entirely concealed by thick coats and a fur-lined hood.

  Devereux’s voice seemed weak as it was snapped away by the wind.

  ‘You sure they were out here?’ he asked, shouting to be heard.

  The Inuit nodded, gesturing ahead of them.

  ‘They were here. Two men. They did not ask the elders to dig here, and refused to talk to us.’

  Devereux looked out across the frozen wastes to where magnificent mountains crouched against the cold vista. He was about to say there was nothing to see when he spotted a series of geometric shapes huddled in a small knot amidst rippling clumps of hardy grass. A different kind of chill enveloped him as he realized what they were.

  Gravestones.

  The Inuit led the FBI team to the edge of the stones, and pointed to a spot on the ground some ten feet away.

  ‘This is where the man was working. He had tents and a vehicle. He stayed for a few days, and then he must have died here because another man came and took the tents away.’

  Devereux looked at the ground. Half hidden by snow and ice he could just see where tent posts had been driven into the permafrost. Trampled, muddled snow and ice betrayed the presence of men in the last few days. His eye traced the ghostly outline of the tent, and he realized it had surrounded a single grave. Treading carefully, Devereux stepped across the snow and looked down at the grave. He lifted one foot and placed it on the earth in front of the gravestone, and instantly felt it give slightly beneath him.

  Devereux turned to his companions.

  ‘Unpack the shovels.’

  The Inuit tracker looked at him, his tiny eyes squinting against the bitter wind and little specks of ice encrusting his eyelashes.

  ‘This is not proper,’ he said. ‘You disrespect our people by digging here.’

  Devereux shook his head as one of the agents began handing out shovels.

  ‘It’s not our choice,’ he said. ‘Your people have already been disrespected, we’re just trying to put it right. We’ve been ordered to do this for public safety. Whatever the people here were doing, it may not have been safe.’

  The Inuit frowned.

  ‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

  Devereux stared at the Inuit as the agents behind him began driving their shovels into the icy earth. He was about to join them when, over the shoulder of the Inuit, he saw the town of Brevig Mission in the distance. The church spire of the Lutheran Memorial Church caught his attention. With a sudden jolt of memory, he recalled seeing an entire graveyard behind the church as they’d passed by.

  Devereux whirled around to look at the gravestones behind him. His eyes flicked across them one by one, and the dates leapt out at him. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. They stretched away until they were too far to be read.

  Beside him, another FBI agent drove his shovel into the snow. Devereux grabbed his arm and held it fast. The agent looked
at him quizzically.

  ‘C’mon, Pete, let’s get this over with. It’s goddamn freezing out here.’

  Devereux turned to the Inuit guide.

  ‘These people, they all died at the same time?’

  The Inuit nodded. ‘They all got sick.’

  ‘How many?’ Devereux asked.

  ‘Half of the town died. It killed them very quickly, just a few days.’

  Devereux turned to the agents behind him.

  ‘Get the bio-suits out and have this area cordoned off right away.’

  As the agents hurried to carry out his orders, Devereux turned to the Inuit.

  ‘What killed these people?’ he asked.

  ‘The great sickness,’ he replied. ‘You call it the Spanish Flu.’

  Devereux stood rooted to the spot as the man’s words echoed through his skull, provoking memories of long forgotten stories learned at high school and from television documentaries. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been an extremely severe influenza pandemic that spread across the entire globe during the aftermath of World War One. Most victims had been healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affected juveniles or the elderly. Lasting three years, the pandemic killed between fifty and one hundred million people, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. At least five hundred million people had been infected. Although little was known about the geographical origin of the disease, it had been concluded that it killed via what was known as a cytokine storm, a massively excessive response of the human body’s immune system. The influenza’s modus operandi explained its severe nature and the age of its victims. The strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children, middle-aged and elderly adults resulted in fewer deaths.

  ‘It killed half of the town?’ he asked the Inuit.

  ‘More than that. This town was known as Teller Mission at the time. It lost eighty-five percent of its population in less than a week.’

  Devereux turned and watched as his agents, now dressed in bio-suits, began digging down into the hard soil, making far greater progress than could be expected through permafrost; evidently the soil had already been turned over recently.

  ‘You think the man died here because he dug up the body?’ the Inuit asked.

  Devereux nodded but did not reply as he slipped on his own bio-hazard suit. Another, more insidious suspicion had already crept into his mind as he watched his men digging deeper and deeper into the frozen soil until suddenly one of the shovels hit something. Devereux waved the Inuit back from the grave.

  ‘Stay upwind of us,’ he said, acutely aware of the possibility of airborne infection.

  Devereux approached the grave, coming to stand on the edge. He looked down into the depths of the freezing earth and felt a primal fear creeping through his veins. The muddied corpse of a woman who had clearly been dead for at least a century stared up at him, gruesomely preserved by the rock-hard permafrost in which she had been interred. Devereux’s men backed nervously away from the body, covering their noses and coughing as a pungent waft of putrefaction spilled onto the cold air.

  ‘Looks normal enough to me,’ one of the agents said, ‘for somebody who’s been dead a hundred years.’

  Devereux nodded thoughtfully, and was about to turn away when a sudden thought occurred to him.

  ‘A hundred years,’ he echoed. ‘If she’s been here that long, then why is she stinking like she died yesterday?’

  A silence enveloped the men for a moment, and then Devereux grabbed a shovel and stepped back to the edge of the grave. He plunged the shovel down into the earth alongside the body of the woman, and then hauled back on the handle, prizing her rigid body free of the earth and tipping it up against the side of the grave before driving the shovel into the earth behind her to pin her in place.

  ‘Give me another shovel here!’ he said urgently.

  An agent passed him a shovel, and Devereux scraped away at the loose soil beneath where the woman’s corpse had lain. As the soil fell away, the stench became overpowering and a patch of flesh appeared. Devereux scraped furiously until half of another body was revealed encased in soil.

  The face of a man stared back up at him. One eye was open, the eyeball rolled up and the white exposed. Soil smudged his face and filled his slackly hanging mouth, and through the dirt Devereux could see blood staining his shirt. What bothered him more was that the man was wearing a modern fleece, thick boots and a digital watch on his left wrist.

  ‘Er, boss,’ said one of the agents beside Devereux, ‘that ain’t no 1918 corpse.’

  Devereux nodded, his voice a ghostly whisper above the buffeting winds.

  ‘That’s not what bothers me,’ he replied. ‘What I want to know is: what the hell were they doing with that original, infected corpse?’

  Beside them, the Inuit pointed toward the distant airstrip and made a sweeping gesture with his hands up into the sky.

  ‘The other man who came here, he fly away with bits of the body.’

  Devereux pulled a photograph from his pocket, one sent to him by the DIA, and showed it to the Inuit. The native nodded vigorously and pointed at the image. Devereux pulled out a satellite phone from his jacket and punched in a number as he wondered what kind of unimaginable shit-storm was going to go down at the Pentagon when they found out that Colonel Donald Wolfe had apparently turned into an international terrorist.

  55

  MUDGETTS WILDERNESS STUDY AREA, NEW MEXICO

  5.12 a.m.

  ‘Pull off the main road here.’

  Lopez pointed out a dust track illuminated by the weak beams of the GMC’s headlights and Ethan turned off the highway and onto the track, the vehicle bucking and loud knocking sounds emanating from the suspension. Lopez put the map she had been consulting into her pocket.

  ‘This is about as far as we can go in the truck,’ she said.

  Ethan slowed down as the vehicle struggled through ruts in the sand, then killed the headlights and turned off the engine.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘A few miles north of the main entrance to Carlsbad Caverns,’ Lopez said, ‘just on the edge of the park. This is the area where Ruby Lily said the soldiers have been seen in the past.’

  Ethan climbed out of the truck and peered out into the darkness. The whisper of bat’s wings fluttered through the night sky above.

  ‘We need high ground and we need some light, or we’ll miss them when they come through.’

  Lopez scanned her map again and orientated herself to their position.

  ‘Out that way,’ she said, pointing into the night, ‘there’s an old river course that’s carved a valley. We can climb to the top of the ridge and hopefully spot them as they come in.’

  Ethan grabbed his Bergen from the back of the truck and checked his pistol before setting off. Lopez followed behind, whispering urgently.

  ‘There’s hundreds of square miles of desert to cover,’ she said. ‘And we don’t even know which cave they’re heading for.’

  Ethan spoke between breaths as they hiked up the steep hillside.

  ‘They’ll most likely pick the route of least resistance, following key features like dry river beds. As for the cave, we’ll just have to make sure we don’t expose ourselves until they find it.’

  ‘That could be harder than you think,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘They’re experts at living out here and can probably move undetected far better than we can. Following them unobserved will be tricky at best, impossible at worst.’

  Ethan shrugged, striding toward the top of the ridge.

  ‘Maybe, but at least there’s no chance of them knowing we’re here ahead of them. The greatest weapon we have right now is surprise. As long as we’ve got that, there’s no chance of them finding us first.’

  Ethan climbed the last few steps and reached the top of the hill to come face to face with a bayonet pointed unwaveringly at his face. Ethan looked past the bayonet an
d the gaping muzzle of the long-barreled rifle and straight into the eyes of the big man he’d last seen at Sedillo Park, fleeing the scene of Lee Carson’s murder. Ellison Thorne.

  Lopez walked straight into his back as he froze, the steel of the bayonet scant inches from his face. For a brief moment he thought that Ellison might simply pull the trigger, but then his gravelly voice growled in the darkness.

  ‘Sound travels a ways at night, specially when you’re jawing like old women.’

  Before Ethan could react, four more men appeared from where they were crouching amongst the scrub, their weapons trained on Ethan and Lopez. He could see that they were carrying pouches of ammunition, water bottles and leather sacks filled with what looked like sticks of dynamite.

  ‘You’ll be droppin’ your weapons now,’ Thorne said.

  Ethan didn’t move.

  ‘We’re not carrying,’ he lied smoothly. ‘How did you get here so fast?’

  Soft chuckles of disdain rippled through the men as they looked at Ethan. Ellison Thorne smiled coldly.

  ‘You’ve never heard of horses then?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Plenty for the takin’ if’n you know where to look. Much better than that noisy old bucket you came clattering out here in.’

  ‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Ethan said quickly. ‘We already know who you are.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Your name is Ellison Thorne,’ Ethan said. ‘Your companions here are Nathanial McQuire, Kip Wren, Edward Copthorne and John Cochrane. Every last one of you was alive in 1862.’

  There was a silence on the hillside as the men stared at Ethan. One of them, a young man whom Ethan assumed was McQuire, spoke up.

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘Tyler Willis,’ Ethan answered. ‘Hiram Conley went to him for help when something began happening to him, when he began aging. Lee Carson wanted to do the same, didn’t he, but you wouldn’t let him because you know that Jeb Oppenheimer at SkinGen is hunting you. The man’s insane, wants to patent the bacteria that caused this and sell it to the wealthy elite while the rest of the world is forced to cease reproducing.’