by Jacob Hammes
“One more thing,” Cynthia said before he managed to leave. Stewart stopped short, but didn’t bother turning around. “I’m going to make you pay for this. I’ll be the one to kill you.”
Stewart said nothing. Instead, his shoulders rose and fell in a light chuckle. The door shut as he moved his foot and walked down the long corridor to his conveniently parked vehicle. The team didn’t bother chasing him, nor did they bother watching him leave. They didn’t doubt what he said about having gunmen waiting for them outside. Calling the police would simply endanger their lives and that of others.
The NSA agents were waiting outside. They let themselves in, informed the entire team they had heard everything, and told Gregory they would be suspending operations on the case until the head of the NSA could figure out what to do.
The entire case, or their entire world, had just collapsed in on them.
Chapter 16
Sheila walked in unannounced. She didn’t notice the obvious tension in the room until she looked up at everyone. The faces they gave her didn’t conform to what she figured she would be greeted with—something like joy.
“That’s nice,” Sheila said quietly. “Should I go then?”
“Yes,” Gregory’s voice was shaking. “We’ve got bigger problems right now than listening to you drone on about what the analysts have found.”
“But I’ve got some good stuff,” Sheila said, but was waved off by Gregory immediately.
“We have no time,” he roared. “We just had a run-in with a man strapped down with C4—the very same man who supposedly died in Nigeria and who, I’m pretty sure, killed Brenda.”
Sheila readjusted her spectacles. She had her head pointed toward the ground as she resigned herself to the fact that there were, indeed, more important things going on. Something like an internal struggle was tearing her apart, though, and she refused to budge. In fact, her shoulders moved to the side, but her feet stayed firmly planted where they were.
“Well?” he whispered. “You can leave any time.”
“You don’t want to miss what I’m going to tell you,” she said softly. “You might be upset, hell you might fire me, but this is probably the most important thing you’ve ever been told and I’m going to tell you, goddamnit.”
Gregory looked taken aback. For just a moment, he felt a surge of rage inside of him that told everyone he was going to physically throw her out through the doors. Then, just as quickly as the rage had appeared, it went away. He calmed down, his shoulders slumped and he stood reluctantly back behind his podium.
“Go ahead,” he said solemnly. “All we have is time now, anyway.”
“Maybe you don’t have as much time as you think,” Sheila said, her features pained. “I’ve been digging deeper into this box and its history. More, I’ve been doing some independent research on the Cerberus Project that was happening around the end of World War 2. There are some strange accounts that have been documented in old history papers that just went unclassified a few years ago. One in particular struck me as odd.
“It was about a guy who was treating the wounded. He was just like any other doctor, except he was in on this project from the get-go. He wanted to keep the project going but changed his mind after a particular incident.”
“So what was the incident, pray tell?” Cynthia’s mood was cold. “I’d love to hear it.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic,” Sheila went on, “but it might help shed light on what’s going on. You see, the doctor was bitten by a man he was treating. He told the doctor he didn’t know where he was or even who he was before they decided to strap him down. He was begging for some answers, asking the doctor how he had gotten in that predicament in the first place.
“He was dying, so the doctors didn’t think twice about it. Unfortunately, the man who was taking care of him was bitten. It was presumed that the bite was a mixture of self-defense and madness from the fact that he was on his last legs. Whatever the case, the guy croaked shortly after—executed by those who were sworn to help him.”
“Sounds like he was justified in his bite,” David said. “What’s the point?”
“The point is that no other doctors, staff, or patients could take that machine,” Sheila went on. “They all said the machine made them feel crazy, if you remember. This guy got locked in with one of the experiments and his entire persona changed. After the first one, he simply became immune to the side effects.
“Documents tell me he spent quite a few sessions in the room with the machine, watching patients as they were shocked to death.”
“Sounds like a freak,” Gregory said angrily. “More mumbo jumbo, too.”
“Please,” Sheila went on. “What happened next was more interesting than that. The doctor’s moods changed, his personal appearance changed, too. Others reported he began speaking with a strange accent he had never used before, that his grip was tight as steel, and that he became smarter than anyone on the team in just a very short time.”
There were no quirky remarks to this news.
“He needed more sleep at first, but then his colleagues started noticing he hardly ever rested. Instead, he would stay in the lab for days on end, collecting data from all the experiments while simultaneously conducting his own.”
“So the machine made him go nuts?” Cynthia said. “That’s the same thing that happened to our little girl—the one we should be out looking for. She had a large dose of that machine and now she can’t even remember who she is.”
“Not the same thing,” Sheila announced. “As I said, he became smarter, more agile—adept in studies he had never had a knack for before. He was, for all intents and purposes, a better man.”
“The machine makes people react differently?” David wondered. “Some people might benefit from it?”
“No,” Sheila said flatly. “If you recall, I said the doctor had been bitten before these strange coincidences were taking place.”
“A bite,” Cynthia said, mulling over the thoughts in her head. “A bite which may have transferred some disease?”
“Syphilis causes brain damage,” Marcus said. “Maybe it could have been transferred via bite, and then changed his thought pattern?”
“No,” Sheila said, somewhat excitedly. “I know because he lived for another ten years before meeting an unexpected demise.”
“Would this demise have something to do with messed up organs and natural causes?” Gregory was starting to catch onto something.
“Yes,” Sheila announced. “And he was in the care of the man who bought the patents for the Cerberus project.”
“So now we have more reason to believe that disease is involved?” Gregory speculated out loud.
“Maybe,” Sheila said curiously. “I’m not sure what sort of disease would directly infect person after person, yet have absolutely no documented cases due to either its rarity or ability to hide. I’ve had the entire floor looking up other documented cases. The dozen or so we discovered have no research available. They simply buried the men and women and forgot an illness had ever happened. It’s making the search rather difficult.”
“I know this sounds crazy,” Phillip said from the far back of the room. “But this sort of sounds like lycanthropy to me.”
“The mythical disease which turns people into werewolves?” Cynthia said disdainfully. “How is this even comparable?”
“It’s comparable because it’s highly reclusive, it uses the host, changes the body, and seems to stem from one source.”
“More like vampirism,” Cynthia scoffed. “At least then we’d have a reason to be worried.”
“It’s pretty farfetched,” Gregory said. “We’re looking at myth—something that has never been discovered, but has been infecting people under our noses for years now?”
“How else can you describe what’s been going on?” Sheila said. “You think that none of this is connected?”
Gregory thought critically. He didn’t honestly know what to do, let alone
think. There were too many variables for him to figure out on the spot. He needed to use his big brain and even bigger payroll to figure this out.
Marcus, on the other hand, was all in. He knew something about this case was different than all the rest. It had a particular stink to it. It was one that stuck in his nose and reminded him every minute that he was close to a breakthrough.
“You can use this,” he said quietly, looking at no one in particular. “You can pitch this to the NSA gurus next door and get us back on the case.”
“What are you blabbing about,” Gregory said, looking sideways at Marcus. “We were taken off. You heard it as well as I did—they don’t want our help anymore.”
“But think of the possibilities,” Marcus said excitedly. “Tell them that some unknown disease is turning people into parasites. Let them know they’re dealing with some sort of new species of human. Tell them anything that will get us back on the case!”
“How about I tell them that we found Dracula and his seven cousins?” Gregory was getting frustrated. “This is all wish wash. It’s a bunch of garbage we’re coming up with on the spot because we want to be put back on the case. They’re not going to go for this type of trash. That I can guarantee.”
“Maybe they will when I give you the final bit of news,” Sheila said, clicking through a text message she had just received while shoving the entire room into another round of dead silence. “The company Lambert Frederickson owns holds two subsidiary pieces of property at different places in the United States. One is North Brother Island. I doubt you’ve heard of the place, unless you’ve watched a horror film on it.
“What once was a hospital in the middle of the New York Harbor is now a run-down, abandoned ghost house. It was used to house patients of leprosy and smallpox, which is no wonder why it ended up going belly-up. Now, the only things allowed on the island are researchers and birds. I can’t say much for the researchers, but the birds are another story.
“The second property is in Washington State and it’s a utility. It’s a hydro-electric dam on the Snoqualmie River, just downstream from a small waterfall.”
“So what’s so special about either of these?” Marcus was hoping for some information that would give them enough sway to be reinstated on the case. “I’m really not interested in whether or not Lambert used to own a farm in the middle of Detroit, either.”
“You’ll be interested to know that all mined materials from Nigeria have been shipped to the location in Washington.”
Marcus pondered the implications for a moment. He was still missing pieces in this jigsaw, but everything seemed to be painting a picture now. Though it was vague, he could tell there was a bigger picture he wasn’t yet seeing.
“So you’re saying the mines have been operating as usual, or that they used to send materials to Washington?”
“I’m saying,” Sheila held up the phone so everyone could see. There was a picture of an invoice on it labeling a package to be delivered to an address in Snoqualmie, Washington. “There are some sort of materials making it all the way back to the United States, and then to Washington, that have been shipped all the way from Nigeria. And the bird sanctuary in New York—it’s been experiencing strange power spikes since the late nineties. There have been documented cases of the surrounding area being plagued with communications disruptions.
“Unless you believe the ghost stories, I’d say this is too coincidental to pass up.”
Marcus felt a sudden urge to jump and shout. He couldn’t accuse anyone of anything at this point, but he would bet his last dollar that Stewart had been sending materials back under Lambert’s nose without him ever knowing about it.
“Oh man,” Phillip said, wide-eyed. “You have to get us back on this case.”
“For Brenda,” Cynthia said coldly.
“For Henry.” Marcus knew the old man wasn’t dying, but he had been close enough.
“For the security of the United States as a whole,” Gregory said, sighing and rubbing his temples. “We had better get to work on this or else we’re never going to get the green light. Sheila, congratulations on your promotion to UOD field agent—keep digging up everything you can on this could-be body snatcher. Are you any good with a gun?”
Chapter 17
The day passed with no success. Everyone worked until late that evening before deciding it was best to get a fresh start in the morning. They wanted to visit the hospital where Brenda was being treated, too, but they were turned away at the door. Regardless of what type of identification they held out, they were refused admittance.
Stephen was the only one allowed inside the room with her. He came out once to greet everyone and tell them that she was fighting valiantly, but his eyes were hollow and cold. He knew she was dying and there was nothing that he could do to fix it. It was a stark reminder that they truly did serve on a dangerous field of battle. They could be called upon at any time to die and every single one of them would be proud to answer the call.
It still didn’t make the loss any easier. Marcus tried his hardest to push her out of his mind, but her beautiful smile, green-blue eyes, and blonde hair kept coming back to haunt him. Two of their teammates had been taken out of the fight during dangerous missions. The first perpetrator had been taken down by Marcus himself, but now who could he blame? There had been no witnesses as to who had planted the explosives, or who had been the one to pull the trigger.
Marcus blamed Stewart. He figured it was the best bet anyway, seeing as how the man had walked into their office strapped down with the same type of explosive. If Lambert was alive, which Marcus doubted severely, then he would most likely be against whatever Stewart was up to. That meant they may still have an ally on the inside, though the shot was a long one.
He drove the long way home and pulled into his garage at a little past nine at night. He was tired. Mentally, he was worse than he thought possible. Marcus could hardly think about all the implications that had arisen that day. In fact, he didn’t want to think about anything. Instead, he rode the elevator to his floor, opened the apartment, and threw his coat on the floor right there in the entryway.
It only took him a moment to smell the aroma of old food and cold perfume. At first he couldn’t put two and two together. He had totally forgotten Julie would be there, sitting in his house and waiting for him to get home. A wave of anticipation flowed over him while anxiety simultaneously filled the little crevices he hadn’t known could be filled. He poked his head around the corner of the entryway, anticipating a woman with an angry face and a glass full of wine.
Instead he saw a woman with a gorgeous, albeit sleeping, face lying on his couch. One of her perfect legs poked out from beneath a throw blanket he usually kept on the back of his dark leather sofa. Her fine blonde hair was tied in a tight pony tail and most of her clothing was on the floor. Marcus couldn’t help but pity himself for just a moment—he had missed out on a good night with his lover. The pity, however, was quickly replaced with worry over everything else. The cold reality washed over him and a stoic face replaced the one of love.
Everyone he loved ended up suffering. His first wife, his best friend Bishop, and Brenda. Marcus could only wonder if Julie would suffer the same fate. He didn’t want to see her hurt, or dead. It had been so long since he had opened up to anyone, for fear they would leave him alone again, he didn’t know what he should anticipate.
Instead of wracking his brain, he crept quietly in through the spacious living room. Over the dark hardwood floors and beautiful white carpets, past the glass and marble coffee table, and to Julie’s side he snuck. Finally, he was just near her sleeping form, hoping he could bend down and pick her up without a problem. He hadn’t seen the glass full of wine resting on the floor just by the couch, nor anticipated that it would be there.
With the slightest tap of his foot, the very tall and very full glass fell over and exploded. Julie jumped audibly, clenching her fists into balls and swatted Marcus directly in his open cr
otch. He gasped, cursed out loud, and fell to his knees.
It took her a second to come back to reality, groggy from sleep. Her surprise didn’t go away. Instead, it was replaced with a different type—concern and laughter, both coming at the same time. Weary with sleep, she burst into a fit of giggles that made Marcus wonder why he had come home in the first place.
“I knew I should have let you worry about me,” he said, sincere frustration lacing his voice. “I come home to a woman who leaves my nice glasses lying on the floor and punches me in the nuts.”
Her giggles turned into full on laughter at the sight of him and his anger. She took his face in her hands as he made to start picking up pieces of glass and pulled him in close. Even though she had been asleep, her breath smelled nice. In fact, it was too much for Marcus to force himself away from. He couldn’t resist falling into a long kiss with Julie.
“Sorry, baby,” she whispered. “I can’t believe you scared me so bad.”
“I can’t believe you hit me in the groin,” Marcus replied, grabbing at his bruised privates. “I’ll remember that in case anyone ever breaks into the house—put you closest to the door.”
“How is your case going?” Julie threw him off. He had momentarily forgotten all about the torture he had been enduring for the last few days.
“Not good,” he said, averting his eyes. As he walked to the kitchen to grab some cleaning utensils, he started elaborating. “We lost another agent— Brenda. Someone I’ve worked closely with for years. She was involved in some sort of car bombing up north a ways. She’s not expected to make it through the night, but she’s a fighter and we’re all rooting for her.”
Julie was silent. The realization that no matter how hard her day had been, his was worse had just sank in. She didn’t have words of sympathy which were appropriate for such devastating news. Instead, she curled her feet up beneath her and gasped, grabbed her hair and whispered an apology.