by Jude Hardin
He rambled on about some of the particular successes he’d had with animal trials, about curing addiction in white mice and epilepsy in Rhesus monkeys, and some other stunning results that Diana found hard to believe.
“So what went wrong with the human trials?” she said.
“You know, it was just a glitch, and it only affected one percent of the test subjects. One little hiccup, and the FDA pulls the plug on everything. I’ll never trust anyone from the government again. They lied to me, and you’re lying to me. If I give myself up, you’ll make sure I spend the rest of my life in prison. And after today, I might even end up on death row. So forget about your little deals, sweetheart. Not going to happen.”
Diana was pretty sure she knew what the one little hiccup was. U-3 was turning one percent of the people who took it into crazed, flesh-eating monsters. Like Kyle Lofton. Like the three wackos she and Colt had encountered last night. At least three, maybe four. They weren’t sure about the guy who’d been smashed by the garage door.
She did a little math in her head. According to Lenny, approximately one percent of the population was adversely affected by the drug, and there were six hundred and twelve residents in Sycamore Bluff. That meant that approximately six people were at risk of turning into one of those shambling blithering corpses on steroids, and at least four of them were dead already. Kyle Lofton, Bill Lott, and the unidentified attackers in the town hall building. Of course, approximately was the key word, but with a little luck maybe there were only two more sloffs to go.
Diana knew for a fact that at least one of those two had turned already, because of the attack Colt reported in the alley behind Town Hall. No telling how many residents that one had dined on so far, she thought.
“I have a question,” she said. “When you started the human trials, how long was it before people started turning into cannibalistic killers?”
“I didn’t say anything about that,” Lenny said. “How did you know about that?”
Lenny seemed confused, as if parts of his and Diana’s conversation hadn’t happened. As if the neurons in his brain weren’t firing properly. He was having problems with cognition, and his speech had become slurred. Only slightly, but enough to notice. Diana wondered if he had taken some of the pills himself.
“There have been more cases here in Sycamore Bluff,” she said, repeating what she’d told him earlier. “Kyle Lofton wasn’t the only one. My partner and I encountered several of them last night. And there are more. At least one that we know of that’s still at large, and at least one more after that if your statistics are correct.”
“It takes between three and six months for the symptoms to start showing up,” Lenny said. “And then it all comes on very rapidly. I didn’t want this to happen. If Davidson had told me about the Kyle Lofton incident—”
“Are you talking about Colonel David A. Davidson, the executive officer at Grissom Air Reserve Base?” Diana said.
Lenny’s tremors had nearly subsided, but now they flared up again. He was obviously aggravated at himself for slipping up and mentioning Davidson’s name.
“Are you going to walk into that lounge like I told you to?” he said. “Or am I going to have to shoot you and drag you in there? Lace your fingers together and put your hands behind your head, and then turn around and walk that way.”
“Last chance, Lenny. This is your last chance to avoid dying today.”
“Move!” he shouted.
Diana laced her fingers together and put her hands behind her head. When she was about two feet from the entrance to the employee lounge, she spun on the ball of her left foot and side-kicked the pistol out of Lenny’s hand with her right. Lenny wore a stunned expression for approximately one second, which was the amount of time it took Diana to recover from the kick and drive her fist into his trachea. He fell to his knees and then to his side, gasping, gurgling, clutching at his throat. Diana knew that his heart might keep beating for another minute or so, but she didn’t have time to stand around and watch him die. She grabbed the pistols, one in each hand, and sprinted down the hallway toward the west wing, hoping Nicholas Colt was still alive, knowing in her heart that he probably was not.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
As it turned out, The Unnamed Man with Connections, as he called himself, was possessed with an incredible amount of physical strength. He picked Colt up from the floor, all one hundred and seventy pounds of him, and placed him on the conference table, with no more effort than he might have used hefting a bag of groceries. He grabbed Colt’s backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out the bottle of bourbon. Held it up and looked at it, screwed the cap off, took a drink, and nodded approvingly. He recapped the bottle and set it on the counter, opened the emergency door, and slung the backpack outside. All of its remaining contents flew out and scattered to the ground.
“There,” he said. “Now we can get down to business.”
He pulled a roll of duct tape from his own backpack and bound Colt’s wrists and ankles, sweat dripping from his face as he worked. Colt tried to resist at first, but The Unnamed Man with Connections put a stop to that with an elbow to the jaw. It was a crushing blow that nearly knocked Colt unconscious. Now the room was spinning and his vision was blurred, and the bone in his left thigh felt as though someone had chewed into it with a power drill. It was a debilitating pain that radiated through his entire body, a level of suffering he would never forget. It was the worst pain of his life.
He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and tried to think of something good, something that might take him away from this anguish for just a moment. He thought about the day he and Juliet signed the final adoption papers for Brittney, the joy they felt over suddenly being the parents of a very extraordinary fifteen-year-old girl. He thought about how peaceful it had been that evening, sitting on the bank there at Lake Barkley, strumming his guitar, watching his wife and daughter cast their lines into the still water. He’d offered to take Brittney anywhere in the world to celebrate their new status as a family, and she’d chosen to go fishing at the lake. That’s just the way she was. She enjoyed simple pleasures, just spending time together. Now Colt wondered if he would ever see Brittney again, or Juliet. Probably not, he thought. Not this side of Heaven.
Colt opened his eyes and viewed his captor through a prism of tears. The Unnamed Man with Connections was chomping on a piece of spearmint gum that didn’t quite mask the tobacco on his breath.
“I didn’t have to shoot you,” he said. “That was your fault, for not doing what I told you to do. Now you’ve lost quite a bit of blood, and I’m going to have to hurry up and interrogate you before you die on me. All this could have been avoided, if only you had cooperated.”
“I didn’t cooperate then, and I’m not going to cooperate now,” Colt said. “So don’t waste your time. Just go ahead and kill me.”
Colt meant what he said. That’s how bad he was hurting.
“Oh, you’ll cooperate,” The Unnamed Man with Connections said. “You’re not the professional you think you are. I can tell. You’re probably a freelancer, right? Regardless, I really don’t think it’s going to take much to break you.”
The man’s Spanish accent had disappeared, somehow, as though he’d been faking it before. Or maybe he was faking an American accent now. He certainly appeared to be of Castilian descent, with the dark hair and the almond-shaped eyes and the olive complexion. Colt imagined that women found him very attractive.
“My partner will be here any second, pretty boy,” Colt said. “Then we’ll see who breaks.”
Colt was about to pass out from the pain in his leg, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
The Unnamed Man with Connections lit a cigarette. He took a couple of puffs, and nonchalantly blew the smoke in Colt’s face. He then threaded the fingers of his left hand through Colt’s hairline, got a tight grip so Colt couldn’t turn his head away, held the cigarette like a pencil with his right hand and eased the hot end of it into C
olt’s left nostril. Colt felt the hairs singe first, and then he felt the gut wrenching onslaught of sheer agony as the delicate mucosal tissue sizzled under the heat of the smoldering tobacco ember.
Colt started grunting and thrashing, but his efforts to resist were futile. He was helpless, and it was obvious that The Unnamed Man with Connections would show no mercy. In fact, the coldhearted sadist was actually laughing now. He was as ruthless as they came.
The torture continued for what seemed like an eternity. In reality, it had lasted maybe ten seconds. The Unnamed Man with Connections finally pulled the blistering hot Marlboro out of Colt’s nostril and backed away. He casually took a drag on the cigarette, as if all this was part of his everyday routine. He walked over to the counter and picked up one of the cups of coffee Colt had poured.
“Cold,” he said. He dumped it in the sink, lifted the pot, refilled the cup and took another sip. “Ah. That’s better.”
Colt knew now that he was going to die. He just wanted it to happen as soon as possible. He wanted to be put out of his misery.
“Kill me,” he said.
“I’m going to kill you, but first you’re going to tell me some things. If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll make it quick.”
Tears streamed down the side of Colt’s face. He didn’t want to give in to this punk, this cutthroat thug, but he couldn’t take it anymore. The pain in his leg and the pain in his nose had converged in the center of his chest, a screaming ball of rusty barbed wire dipped in molten lava. He couldn’t think past the agony. He just wanted it to be over.
“Ask me anything you want,” Colt said, grunting the words out from the deepest part of his roiling gut. “Just make the pain go away. I’m begging you.”
#
When Diana got to the intersection where she and Colt had first entered The Factory, she stopped running and crept down the west wing hallway, staying close to the wall and checking doors as she went.
She had no idea where Colt was, or even if he was still in the building. If he was alive—which was a big if—then someone might have taken him to a different location to interrogate him. Somewhere away from The Factory. She doubted it, but it was possible. At this point, she needed to anticipate every contingency, even if the odds were against it. This was what she was trained to do, and she needed to do it right. If not, today would be her day to die, just as it had been Lenny’s. At this stage of the game, there was no margin for error.
She holstered her pistol and kept the one she’d gotten from Lenny at the ready. She tried Colt’s cell phone, but as she expected the call went straight to voice mail.
She checked the janitor’s closet and the reference manual depository and several small offices. Nothing. But when she came to the door marked CONFERENCE ROOM, she heard voices. One of them was a very distressed Nicholas Colt. The other she couldn’t place, although it sounded eerily familiar.
Deep, smooth, confident.
She thought about it, and then she realized that the man talking to Colt sounded an awful lot like Henry Parker. But it wasn’t, of course. It was her mind playing tricks on her again.
She listened carefully, intent on estimating the bad guy’s relative position by the direction his voice was coming from.
“Please,” Colt said. “Just make it go away.”
“Okay. Here we go. Question number one: who sent you here?”
“You were right. I’m just a freelancer. I’m nobody. I work part time for a United Stated government agency called The Circle. Totally off the radar. They work twenty-four-seven to eliminate security threats that the general population never hears about. Terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, computer espionage, whatever.”
“And why was a freelance operative from this government agency sent to Sycamore Bluff, Indiana?”
“There was a problem here a while back,” Colt said. “A murder-suicide. The man responsible had former ties with a crime cartel in Central America, an outfit with connections to Muslim extremists further south. We just wanted to make sure he hadn’t tried to get anything started here, any sort of anti-government movement, and we wanted to make sure he wasn’t sending messages regarding the top secret Sycamore Bluff experiment to the cartel.”
“You said Muslim extremists further south. Further south where?”
“They call it the tri-border area. It’s—”
“Yes. I’m familiar with that part of South America. So how does one get involved with this agency, The Circle?”
“It wasn’t something I chose, initially,” Colt said.
Diana could tell Nicholas was struggling to keep it together. She could hear the pain and the terror in his voice. He was suffering greatly. Still, she couldn’t believe he was spilling his guts like this. Whatever else occurred behind the conference room door from this point forward, Diana knew now that the day would not end well for Nicholas Colt. He had betrayed the organization, and the punishment for that was unequivocal. The punishment for that was immediate termination, no questions asked.
And it was Diana’s sworn duty to carry out the execution.
“They contacted me,” Colt continued. “Or rather, one of their operatives did. I was instrumental in bringing down a right-wing militia group a few years ago, and The Circle targeted me for recruitment after that. I didn’t know anything about it until the day this operative showed up at my door. There was quite a bit of money involved. Now they contact me from time to time for assistance. Actually, this is only the second job I’ve worked on.”
“How do they contact you? They call you on the phone? Send you an email? What?”
Diana had heard enough. She stepped back and kicked the door in and trained her pistol on the man across the room. He was standing in front of a white countertop. There was a sink and a coffeemaker and a small refrigerator. He had drawn his own pistol. He’d done it quickly, and he held it steadily. It was aimed at Diana’s chest, just as her gun was aimed at his.
They stood there at a stalemate, staring at each other. This man wasn’t going to be nearly as easy to dispatch as Lenny had been. Diana knew a pro when she saw one, and this guy was a pro.
Like the man on the second floor of the town hall building last night, the man she faced now was incredibly good looking. The hair, the complexion, the facial features. The body. And like the man from last night, he was a dead ringer for Henry Parker.
Only more so.
But of course it couldn’t be Henry. It was an illusion, just as before. Diana was losing her mind. That was all there was to it.
That’s what she thought, until the man spoke.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “It’s me. Oh my god, Diana, what are you doing here?”
The voice.
Don’t be stupid. It’s not him.
“I don’t know who you are,” Diana said. “But you’ve got no business calling me sweetheart. Drop the weapon, now.”
“It’s me,” the man repeated. “Henry Parker. Fate has brought us together once again. There’s no denying it this time. We were meant to be together. Follow me out of here tonight, and I’ll show you the world. You don’t have to work for The Circle anymore. I know how to get away from them now. I’ve done it. I’ll show you how.”
Nicholas Colt was on the conference table, on his back, writhing and moaning and turning side-to-side. His wrists and ankles had been bound with silver duct tape, and a steady stream of dark red blood trickled from a hole in his left thigh. The left side of his nose was inflamed and blistered, and a bubbly mixture of blood, pus, and snot oozed from the nostril on that side. He was obviously in excruciating pain.
Diana blinked several times, trying to convince herself that this was not Henry Parker, that the resemblance was coincidental, just as it had been with the man last night.
But this man knew her name. And there was the voice. Now that she was in the same room with him, there was no mistaking that voice.
“How did you do it?” Diana said. “I shot you in the head. There
was blood. I killed the two CIAO officers who were interrogating you. I didn’t imagine all that. You were dead, Henry. I killed you.”
“Don’t be silly, Di. Things aren’t always as they seem in our profession. You know that as well as I do. We’re pretty good at creating illusions when we want to. In fact, we’re masters at it. Lower your weapon, and I’ll lower mine, and then we can talk this over.”
“That’s my partner on the table,” Diana said. “You shot him, and you tortured him. Why? You already know everything he knows, and more. Do you just enjoy inflicting pain on people? Is that who you really are? And you expect me to run away with you now?”
“Of course I don’t enjoy inflicting pain on people. It’s just business, Di. I’m with a different organization now, and we need to know how much The Circle knows about us. That’s what I was getting to, before you so rudely busted in here and interrupted my interrogation.”
“What organization? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, it’s an outfit you’re probably familiar with. In fact, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of us, although the United States intelligence reports have been sketchy up to now, and that’s the way we intend for them to stay. I want you to brace yourself, because this is going to come as quite a shock.”
“Drop the gun, Henry.”
“Does the name Sergio Del Chivo mean anything to you? Of course it does. The Director filled you in on his organization a long time ago. You knew the operatives from The Circle who were investigating them, and you even had access to some of the intelligence. What you didn’t know was that I was really on their side the whole time, and for very good reason. You want to know why? Just say the word and I’ll tell you. But don’t think about it too long, because we don’t have a lot of time.”