Immortal

by Dean Crawford

  John Cochrane spoke over the barrel of his rifle.

  ‘You sayin’ this is bacteria we’ve got?’

  ‘You don’t know about that?’ Ethan inquired.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what we don’t know,’ Ellison Thorne cut across them. ‘What we do know is that we need to get back to where this all started, and you’re in our way.’

  ‘Doing that doesn’t make any sense,’ Ethan protested. ‘If you don’t know what’s happened to you in the first place, then running back to those caves might not do anything for you at all.’

  ‘It’ll do a damned sight more than standing here listenin’ to your balderdash, boy!’ Ellison boomed, losing patience and turning to Copthorne. ‘Bind them up good, Corporal, then we move out!’

  Ethan saw Copthorne hesitating, as though he wasn’t sure that by following Ellison’s order he could be sending himself to his doom.

  ‘I don’t know, Ellison,’ Copthorne said. ‘What if there’s a bit of truth in all he’s sayin’?’

  Ethan didn’t wait for Ellison to answer.

  ‘There’s more to this than just all of you,’ he said urgently. ‘Jeb Oppenheimer is an old man himself. It’s not going to be enough for him to just arrest his aging. He’ll be like all of you, frozen in time as you were back in 1862.’ Ethan looked at Copthorne, guessing his age. ‘I’d bet that being stuck aged sixty or so for a century and a half isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?’

  Copthorne raised an eyebrow. ‘You wouldn’t believe the goddamned arthritis, and—’

  ‘Better alive than dead,’ Ellison Thorne cut his corporal off with a sharp glance. ‘We don’t have time for this. Sooner or later we’ll be tracked down, and out here we’re sitting ducks. Either you’re in or you’re out.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Lopez said. ‘There’s a bigger problem. Jeb Oppenheimer’s plan is to genetically modify the bacteria that you carry, so that it can rejuvenate the carrier instead of just delaying their aging.’

  A moment of silence fell over the soldiers as they digested this new piece of information.

  ‘Is that true?’ Kip Wren asked.

  ‘As far as we can tell.’ Ethan nodded. ‘A drug that inhibits aging would be valuable enough, but Oppenheimer’s not doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He wants to be young again and will stop at nothing to achieve it. His plan is to stop his own aging in its tracks, before working out how to reverse it. If he succeeds . . .’

  Nathaniel McQuire figured it out quickly enough. ‘He’ll make sure that only people like him, the rich and the powerful, will have the drug.’

  ‘And everyone else will grow old and die,’ Copthorne said. ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Ethan took a pace closer to Ellison and looked up at the man who towered over him.

  ‘You’ve got a chance to do something more, something better with your lives than just exist. If this bacteria gets into Oppenheimer’s hands we’re all dead regardless. But if we can shut the caves down, hide them from existence, then Oppenheimer won’t be able to finish his crazed little scheme, and from what I’ve seen he’ll be dead before the end of next year. Problem solved.’

  Ellison Thorne glared down at him.

  ‘And when you shut those caves down, what happens to us?’

  Ethan held his gaze for a moment before speaking.

  ‘You die,’ he said finally, looking at the other soldiers, ‘and countless millions of others live. You’ve already lived the lives of three men each, and whatever bacteria is in your bodies or whatever Jeb Oppenheimer might achieve, it’s too late for you to reverse what’s begun. Hiram Conley was mummified overnight after he died. None of you can survive much longer. It’s your choice: save yourselves and maybe risk Jeb Oppenheimer locating you and sacrificing the lives of millions of people, or sacrifice yourselves for the chance to stop him.’

  Lopez moved to stand beside Ethan. Ellison Thorne was now silhouetted against a horizon glowing with the first light of dawn.

  ‘This is your chance to stop running,’ Ethan said, ‘and start fighting back. This is your chance to do the right thing, Ellison.’

  The soldiers looked at each other for a long moment, before looking at Ellison Thorne. Slowly, the big man lowered his rifle.

  56

  SANTA FE POLICE DEPARTMENT

  CAMINO ENTRADA

  6.35 a.m.

  ‘Hands up! Stay still!’

  The desk sergeant reacted instantaneously, a heavy-looking pistol whipping from its holster to point directly at Saffron Oppenheimer as she strode through the doors of the station as though it belonged to her. She raised her hands above her head as through a door poured a frenzied mass of officers. Before she knew it she was face down on the cold tiles, a thick forearm pinning her neck and chest to the ground as cuffs were snapped around her wrists. Pain bolted through her shoulders as she was yanked to her feet and hustled past the front desk and into the depths of the police department, surrounded by the black-shirted bodies of the police officers.

  ‘I want to see Lieutenant Zamora,’ she said as she was shoved along.

  One of the officers grunted a reply. Moments later she was propelled into an interview room and searched, a USB hard drive lodged in her pocket was taken from her before she was dumped down into a chair behind a bare desk that was bolted to the floor. The cuffs were looped through a steel chain welded to the legs of the desk, and locked in place.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked a female officer.

  Saffron shook her head, watching as the woman left and shut the door behind her. Ten long, slow minutes passed as she sat alone in the room, barely able to hear the sounds of officers passing by outside the door. Then, finally, a man walked in. He had the deep tan and grizzled gray hair of the seasoned New Mexico trooper, and for some reason she was relieved when he closed the interview room door and sat down opposite her.

  ‘My name is Lieutenant Enrico Zamora,’ he said. ‘You asked to see me?’

  Saffron nodded.

  ‘You’ve seen the hard drive?’

  ‘My colleagues are examining the contents as we speak,’ Zamora said. ‘Right now, I’m trying to understand what it all means.’

  ‘Have you seen the CCTV imagery, taken from the Aspen Center’s data banks when I raided their laboratory?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zamora said. ‘You’d placed it first on the list of files. It shows a man named Tyler Willis being dragged from the Bio-Science Division building by four men.’

  ‘Who had removed their disguises, so it should be easy to identify them,’ Saffron said. ‘They were working for Jeb Oppenheimer of SkinGen. Jeb, my grandfather, was responsible for the abduction and murder of Tyler Willis, and the abduction of a woman named Lillian Cruz. He is still holding her against her will.’

  Lieutenant Zamora scribbled in his notebook as he spoke.

  ‘And you’re telling us all of this now. Why?’

  Saffron quickly explained to Zamora the evidence that Jeb Oppenheimer held, of her role in the death of an activist years before, and how he had used it in order to force her into attacking rival companies and obtaining data that had put SkinGen years ahead of the competition. Zamora listened to every word of it before speaking.

  ‘And you’re coming clean now in order to bring him down?’

  Saffron shook her head.

  ‘Jeb is hunting people out in the desert near Carlsbad,’ she said. ‘One of them is a friend of yours, Ethan Warner.’

  Zamora’s eyes locked onto Saffron’s. ‘Ethan’s out near Carlsbad?’

  ‘Listen to me. Ethan Warner’s partner, Nicola Lopez, she’s being paid by Jeb Oppenheimer to betray Ethan. I saw them meet, and when I confronted her about it she freaked.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ Zamora asked her.

  Saffron raised her left arm slightly and ducked her head, biting the fabric of her sleeve and yanking it up her arm. The sleeve was stained with blood and clogged with fragments of scorched skin. The underside of her
arm was a ragged, bloody mess of welts and blisters where the fire had burned her.

  ‘This is what she did to me. I barely got out of there alive,’ Saffron said, her voice taut against the pain.

  Zamora stared at the hideous wounds and then got up from the desk, opened the door and shouted down the corridor outside.

  ‘We need a medic down here, right now!’

  He walked back to the desk, leaving the door open.

  ‘I need you to tell me exactly what they’re up to out there,’ he said. ‘Does it have anything to do with a man named Hiram Conley?’

  Saffron sighed as she realized that Zamora knew more than she had suspected.

  ‘There are a group of men who live out in the Pecos and they’ve been there for a very long time. For some reason, these guys don’t age. They’re the same age now as they were when serving in the Civil War Jeb Oppenheimer wants to experiment on them to produce a drug that prevents aging in human beings, and sell it to the rich and powerful while withholding it from the poor. His plan is to breed people that he considers underachievers out of the population.’

  Zamora nodded.

  ‘That’s what Ethan believed,’ he said. ‘But without proof, I can’t go in there and arrest Jeb Oppenheimer or search for evidence that he’s involved in anything.’

  ‘You’ve got video of Jeb’s men abducting Tyler Willis!’ Saffron snapped in disbelief. ‘What more do you want, a gilt-edged invitation?’

  ‘The law doesn’t work like that,’ Zamora shot back. ‘Just because you say those men are working for Jeb Oppenheimer doesn’t mean that we can prove it is so. The video footage is evidence enough to apprehend the men, if we can find them, but it’s not enough to issue a warrant for Jeb Oppenheimer’s arrest.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Saffron shook her head. ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you that right now, Jeb Oppenheimer could be torturing people to get what he wants. I heard what happened to Tyler Willis. Are you going to stand by and let the same happen to that medical examiner?’

  Zamora shook his head.

  ‘Not for a moment, but we have to take this one step at a time. Where exactly were Warner and Lopez heading?’

  ‘You’ll never find them without me there,’ Saffron replied quickly. ‘It’s too remote, and the place they’re searching for too small to find.’

  Zamora leaned on the desk, glaring down at her.

  ‘We have patrol teams and we can call in helicopters,’ he growled. ‘You give me a twenty-square-mile radius and we’ll have Oppenheimer’s men in custody within the hour. You hold out on me, and I’ll make damned sure you spend the next twenty years looking at the walls of rooms just like this one.’

  Saffron bolted out of her chair, the chains around her wrists yanking painfully.

  ‘I’m already going to be doing that!’ she shouted. ‘This isn’t about me!’

  ‘How can I be sure of that, after the stunts you’ve pulled over the years?’

  She glared at him.

  ‘For a moment there I thought you were probably smarter than the rest of your team,’ she snarled. ‘Your patrol cars and goddamn helicopters will be useless in finding those men out there, and most likely Ethan and Lopez.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Because they’ll be underground.’

  Zamora was about to ask how she knew this when the desk sergeant hurried into the room with a phone in his hand.

  ‘Enrico, there’s a guy from the DIA on the phone. You need to listen to this, believe me.’

  Zamora frowned as he took the phone.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Douglas Jarvis, DIA, Washington DC. I’m calling regarding an urgent matter involving a man named Jeb Oppenheimer of SkinGen Corp out of Santa Fe. Are you familiar with the man?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ Zamora said carefully as he glanced at Saffron. ‘What can I help you with?’

  ‘Sir, our agency has evidence from Butch Cutler at USAMRIID suggesting that SkinGen may have in its possession a Level-Four bio-hazard material obtained illegally from a cemetery in Alaska. We also believe that it is the intention of Jeb Oppenheimer to genetically modify this material to create a pandemic specifically designed to target the populations of developing nations and reduce, or eradicate, their populations. We need your men to obtain a warrant immediately for the arrest of Jeb Oppenheimer and a search of all SkinGen premises.’

  Lieutenant Zamora stood for a long moment in the center of the room and tried to digest the magnitude of what he had just heard.

  ‘You’re sure?’ he asked, and felt stupid for having done so.

  ‘Believe me,’ came the reply, ‘I wouldn’t be making these claims if I wasn’t positive. I’m on my way to the United Nations building as we speak, and I’m awaiting a call from the FBI agents on site in Alaska to confirm the exact nature of the hazardous materials.’

  ‘I have Saffron Oppenheimer in custody,’ Zamora said. ‘You may want to speak to her.’

  Zamora handed Saffron the phone, and watched and listened as Doug Jarvis filled her in on her grandfather’s activities. Slowly the color drained from Saffron’s face, tears welling in her eyes. She let the phone fall from her ear to clatter onto the table and looked up at Zamora in disbelief.

  ‘We must hurry.’

  57

  MUDGETTS WILDERNESS STUDY AREA, NEW MEXICO

  7.07 a.m.

  ‘Great work, genius.’

  Lopez’s voice sounded tiny in the dawn as the rising sun illuminated the endless plains and steeply rolling hills of the New Mexico wilderness. Ethan winced, shuffling about on the hard desert floor as the bark of the tree to which he was bound dug into the skin of his back.

  ‘I tried to reason with them,’ he shot back, looking over his shoulder to where Lopez was bound on the other side of the trunk. ‘It’s not like we’re their enemy. But they’re facing death whichever way they go and I guess Ellison Thorne doesn’t like outsiders.’

  ‘Thanks, Sherlock,’ Lopez muttered, struggling to escape from the thick ropes that bound her wrists and ankles and wrapped around them both to secure them to the tree. ‘We’re pretty useless without your pistol and cell phone too.’

  Ethan squinted out to the east, seeing the glow of the sun nestling just below the rugged horizon. Bats fluttered across the dawn sky above him as he struggled to escape from his bonds and figure out just how long it had been since Ellison Thorne and his men had tied them to the tree. Thirty minutes? Maybe forty, no more. Forty minutes on foot, on this kind of terrain, would take them maybe two miles, three if they were pushing it. From what he’d seen, most of the soldiers were suffering from some kind of debilitating illness that prevented them from pushing their bodies too hard. Two miles then, a fifteen-minute run in this kind of terrain if he could only get free from the ropes.

  Ethan froze as a noise from somewhere further down the hill caught his attention, a rustle of some kind that seemed immediately out of place in the silence of the dawn. He recalled seeing a number of small caves down on the hillside from when they’d ascended, the caves probably amplifying the sounds of movement.

  ‘Stay still,’ he whispered to Lopez.

  Lopez fell silent as Ethan listened to the breeze in the leaves above them. Something else, the soft but unmistakable crunch of a footfall, carefully made but audible in the otherwise quiet morning air. Ethan moved only his eyes, keeping his head still as he searched for the source of the movement.

  He wasn’t expecting the voice that broke the morning stillness with a cackle of delight.

  ‘Now, this is a sight to behold.’

  Ethan saw a craggy head appear over the brow of the hill to his right, as Butch Cutler puffed his way up to the tree and squatted down alongside them, wiping sweat from his brow.

  ‘Fine mornin’, Mister Warner,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I see you’re in control of things as ever, keeping momentum in your investigation, so to speak.’

  ‘I’d have been happy to see just about any other
face but yours, Cutler,’ Ethan said. ‘How about you stop showboating and cut these ropes?’

  ‘Seems a shame to,’ Cutler said, ‘without first recording the event for posterity.’

  Cutler stood and pulled a digital camera from the rucksack on his back, snapping a shot of Ethan and Lopez scowling before exchanging the camera for a large knife. He knelt down alongside Ethan and held the blade to his face.

  ‘You’re lucky I don’t take bribes from men like Jeb Oppenheimer,’ he said quietly. ‘Right now, I could have earned me a dime or two.’

  Ethan glanced at the blade flashing in the sunlight, and then Cutler whipped the weapon in a vicious downward stroke, the ropes wrapped around the tree parting as he sawed through them. A minute or two of frenzied hacking and Ethan and Lopez were free.

  ‘That’s one you owe me,’ Cutler said as he slipped the knife into its sheath at his belt.

  ‘How did you find us?’ Ethan asked, looking around for Cutler’s men as he stood and rubbed his wrists where the ropes had bitten into his skin.

  ‘I was a ranger, remember?’ Cutler replied, somewhat annoyed. ‘I found that little camp of hippies easily enough and they told me what happened. I drove down this way, the GMC you’d taken was parked down the road from here and you left a trail like a herd of bison through a wheat field. A blind four-year-old could have tracked you down.’

  ‘I meant who did you speak to?’ Ethan said. ‘Saffron Oppenheimer?’

  ‘No, your buddy from the DIA. You’ve got some powerful friends in the capital.’

  ‘Doug’s here?’ Lopez asked in surprise.

  ‘He’s on his way to New York, so he said.’

  ‘Which is why you’re here on your own,’ Lopez surmised.

  ‘Sure is,’ Cutler replied. ‘Doug filled me in on everything, asked me to come out here and make sure his little golden boy wasn’t being bullied by the natives.’

  Ethan thought for a moment.

  ‘What did you mean about bribes from Oppenheimer?’ he asked.

  Cutler smiled a cold grin.

  ‘The devious old bastard approached me in Santa Fe,’ he said. ‘Got his heavies to come up to my hotel room and organize a little chat. I went along with it of course, but not with any intention of following through. He wanted me to turn on my own boss, and forward anything I found directly to him instead.’