The Lupin Project

by Allan Leverone

  Ten feet from the office door he pulled one piece of steak from the bag and then dumped the remainder onto the lab floor. He tossed the bag to the side and smiled ruefully. The blood leaking out of it would fit right in with all the wolf blood that had been spilled. It was beginning to congeal on the floor, as well as many of the walls and equipment surfaces.

  Blood was practically everywhere, and that fact seemed oddly appropriate.

  Thick black smoke had begun to poison the air, a roiling cloud of regret, and Jason found himself coughing uncontrollably. Much of the lab was comprised of stainless steel and other materials that would resist burning, but between drywall, wood, chemicals, lab supplies and who knew what else, Jason guessed he was breathing a toxic stew that would likely kill within minutes.

  He kept moving, stumbling to his office. He grasped the doorknob and yanked and peered around the door at the wolf pack that had been the centerpiece of his professional existence for the better part of the last decade. The animals appeared restless and were still clustered around the body of Colonel Toler. The man who had ruined so many lives was now nothing more than an unrecognizable lump of blood, gristle and tissue, and the wolves sniffed and picked at the remains like a family snacking on Thanksgiving leftovers.

  At the sound of the door opening, heads snapped up and turned in Jason’s direction. The growling/snarling/yapping resumed, and big wolf paws scrabbled on the tile floor as the pack stumbled across the office, trying to run but weaving and bumping into one another, tripping over each other as the deterioration of their muscle control continued to intensify.

  Jason held the piece of steak in front of the door and tossed it across the lab, where it landed next to the rest of the meat he had dumped onto the floor. Dakota reached the doorway first. He crashed into the jamb with one big shoulder, bounced off and continued into the lab, leaping onto the steak as if he hadn’t eaten in three days.

  The rest of the pack was right behind him, and they began jockeying for position, snapping at one another and attempting to drag pieces of steak away from the others.

  Jason’s heart broke as he watched. He hoped the animals wouldn’t suffer. He wasn’t a religious man, but he prayed now, not for himself but for his animals, that they would succumb to the air quality before burning to death. The temperature in the lab was rising quickly, skyrocketing, walls and ceiling ablaze, the yellow-orange flames so bright they were difficult to look at, even through the curtain of smoke.

  He turned away, still coughing and choking but now crying as well. He closed his office door against the poisonous air, knowing the action would buy him only a few minutes against the now out-of-control conflagration.

  Hopefully a few minutes would be enough.

  He moved behind his desk and pushed at Toler’s grisly remains with his boot, trying to give himself enough room to sit down in his blood-soaked chair. The dead man moved slowly, with extreme reluctance, as if determined to fuck with Jason one last time.

  Finally he had gained enough room to sit at his desk. He felt blood soaking through his trousers and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach as he yanked his computer’s power cord out of the wall. He pulled open a desk drawer and removed a small screwdriver, then began unscrewing the computer case. When he had removed the cover, he tossed it into a corner of the office and began working to remove the hard drive.

  Moments later he held it in his hands. This small metallic box was all he had to show for a lifetime’s worth of scientific endeavor. All of his work, all the twenty-hour days and the seven day weeks and the endless research and animal training and the demonstrations he had given to the grim-faced men in the anonymous-looking suits, all of it was captured inside this tiny metal box, and none of it would ever see the light of day.

  It was absurd. It was almost funny, in an I-have-to-laugh-or-else-I’ll-blow-my-goddamn-brains-out kind of way.

  The smoke had begun seeping into the office, leaking under, over and around the door, and the brief respite Jason had gotten from the heat and the fetid air was coming to an abrupt end.

  He swept his arm across the desk, dumping what was left of the computer onto the floor with a crash, along with his blotter, pens and pencils, a couple of scholarly texts he hadn’t gotten around to putting away, and assorted other detritus of a ruined career. Then he placed the hard drive squarely in the middle of the desk surface.

  He began shaking violently as he considered what he had to do next.

  He wished he could have a drink before continuing.

  He swallowed heavily and spun in his chair to face the corpse of Colonel Toler. The wolves had done a number on the body, chewing down to the bone on virtually every portion of the body they’d been able to access.

  Jason swallowed again and then puked, the contents of his guts erupting without warning and splattering all over the dead man, as well as onto the office floor and the back wall. The brownish-yellow stomach acid mixed with the reddish-brown of drying blood and the grey-white of human tissue and bone to create a disgusting palette of chaos and death.

  A more appropriate expression of what Jason had wrought here at Tamerlane he could not have imagined.

  Get yourself under control, he scolded. You’re almost finished. A couple more minutes, and then nothing will matter. A couple more minutes and you can puke up your stomach lining if you need to. He reached for the pistol that had fallen from Toler’s hand as he was being ravaged by the wolf pack, lifting it off the floor and almost dropping it immediately thanks to the slime of blood and gore coating its surface.

  Jason had never handled a gun before, and it felt even heavier and more deadly than he would have expected. He wiped it on his pant leg, removing as much of the slickness and gristle as he could, and then gazed at it curiously as the roar of the fire continued to build outside his closed door. The heat was practically unbearable.

  The colonel’s gun was a Beretta M9. Jason knew that because Toler had told him once. It was all he knew about the damned thing and more than he had ever cared to know, right up until this minute. His knowledge of weaponry was limited but one thing he knew was that most guns had a safety. Presumably this one did as well. A sick feeling ran through him for a moment as he realized he had no idea where on the damned thing the safety might be located, or how to turn it off.

  If he couldn’t fire the pistol, everything he was trying to accomplish might well prove fruitless. He swept his gaze over the gun, wondering what he would do if he couldn’t figure out how to work the weapon.

  There. Above the handle. A lever-looking device that he guessed might be the safety.

  But was he right? What if he flicked the switch and it wasn’t the safety? What then?

  He was sweating heavily, mostly from the intense heat but also from the rising sense of panic that threatened to overwhelm him. His hands were shaking and his lips and throat were parched, and he was so goddamned nervous, and—

  Wait a second. The colonel had fired the gun at Dakota just as the wolves were swarming over him. It had then fallen from his hand.

  The safety—if there even was one—should still be off.

  The gun should be ready to fire.

  He rose from the chair, his pants slimy, sticky with drying blood. He hefted the weapon, aiming it as squarely as he could with his shaking hands at the hard drive. He was no computer expert, but he’d read once that the way to render the information on a hard drive inaccessible was to drill a half dozen or so holes through the disk in random locations.

  He had no drill and didn’t know where to find one, although the maintenance offices in the basement would probably be the best bet. But he shouldn’t need one. Bullet holes should accomplish the same thing. The holes, combined with the melting that would occur from the fire sweeping through Tamerlane, should prevent anyone from ever accessing his data and attempting to duplicate his neural conditioning work.

  At least, that was his theory.

  It was the best he could come up with und
er the circumstances.

  He squeezed the trigger and blasted a shot into the hard drive. The gun roared and kicked and the impact of the slug caused the metal box to skitter off the desk and into the corner of the office.

  Jason walked to the corner and bent over the hard drive. The slug had torn a good-sized hole into it.

  He left it where it was and fired again. Another jagged hole.

  Again.

  And again, and again, until the small metal box was nothing more than a sharp-edged ruin; a thick slice of metallic Swiss cheese.

  Then Jason dropped the gun onto the floor.

  He returned to his desk, sat back down in his chair and waited for the end. It wouldn’t be long now.

  35

  The arrest of New Quebec Police Chief Chris Haviland seemed more like a made-for-TV spectacle than a serious law enforcement action.

  At least that was how it struck Alicia. Bright sunshine and blue, cloudless skies provided a stark contrast to the howling winds and blowing snow of the last couple of days. Television trucks seemed to be parked everywhere, their satellite dishes and extendable antennae making it appear as though the police department parking lot had been invaded by a swarm of gigantic cockroaches.

  Manchester’s WENH 11 Eyewitness News van took up the most prominent position, in the center of the lot, directly across from the station’s glass double doors. They had broken the story two nights ago of the secret experiments taking place at the Tamerlane Research Facility a couple of miles north of town, experiments that had gotten out of hand and resulted in the death of a local teen followed by a desperate cover-up attempt by Tamerlane’s administrator.

  A cover-up allegedly aided and abetted by Chief Haviland.

  WENH had then broken a followup story just hours later. With their news van already in New Quebec at the height of the late-November blizzard to broadcast a live interview with the eyewitness to Edward Senna’s death, WENH had been first on the scene of a massive fire at the Tamerlane Facility. They’d aired dramatic video of flames leaping into the snowy skies.

  Today would be the third newsworthy event coming out of a tiny town few had ever heard of until a couple of days ago. The storm’s departure meant WENH would not get an exclusive, but they had managed to obtain the best filming location in anticipation of today’s impending arrest.

  Alicia stood close to Rob and swept a gaze over the cluster of news vans. “Ironic, don’t you think?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your dad said he couldn’t get a single news organization to pay attention to him until you sent him Dr. Greeley’s files. Now the same people that ignored him are jockeying for position to get the best shot of Chief Haviland’s arrest.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is kind of ironic, now that you mention it.”

  “Are your parents here?” A large crowd had gathered—large by New Quebec standards, anyway—and Alicia thought she could pick out just about everyone she had ever known while growing up here.

  Rob shook his head. “Nah. They didn’t want to be anywhere near this place. Even if Haviland played nothing more than a minor role in Eddie’s death, my dad didn’t trust himself not to go after the guy when they brought him out in handcuffs.”

  “Speaking of which,” Alicia said, and nodded toward the police station entrance.

  The glass doors opened at the front of the building and the chief exited, his hands cuffed behind his back. A New Hampshire State Police trooper flanked the chief on either side, each with a hand on his elbow. Assorted other men and women—attorneys or law enforcement representatives looking for a little camera time, Alicia assumed—formed a ragged ring around the star of the show.

  “I’ve known Chief Haviland, at least a little, since I was in first grade,” Alicia said. “He came to school and spoke to my class about the role of the police in keeping kids safe. It’s hard to believe he was mixed up with killers at Tamerlane.”

  Rob nodded. “Nobody seems to believe Haviland was directly involved in the project with the wolves that killed Eddie, but I’m sure the authorities are hoping he can answer some of their questions. It seems everyone who was directly involved is dead. The Tamerlane administrator and the research scientist in charge—Dr. Greeley, the guy who sent me all the files—were apparently both killed in the fire. It was intensely hot due to chemicals stored there and the heat destroyed most of the evidence they could have pulled from the facility.”

  Reporters shouted questions at the police chief as the ring of people moved in fits and starts toward a state police cruiser parked at the base of the walkway, just in front of the WENH van. No one answered any of the questions, no one even acknowledged them, but that didn’t deter the reporters from shouting more.

  “How are your parents doing?” Alicia asked quietly.

  “About how you’d expect after losing a son. My dad’s proud of the fact that he died trying to save you, and that he helped expose…whatever the hell was happening at Tamerlane. But none of it will bring back Eddie, and my dad is just beginning the grieving process. My mom is devastated.”

  “What about you? Your folks lost a son, but you lost a brother. That’s gotta be almost as difficult.”

  Rob shrugged. Alicia didn’t think she had seen him smile since the arrival of the news van outside the Sleepy Logger Motel. “I was close to Eddie, closer than you might expect considering the difference in our ages. So it’s going to take some time. I’ll never fully get over losing him. At least I hope I don’t. I want to feel that pain because I want to be sure to keep his memory alive.”

  Alicia felt her eyes begin to fill with tears as Rob continued. “I think Eddie would be pleased to know that he played a critical role in uncovering the stench that was festering inside Tamerlane, even if he played that role unwittingly. I think he would be proud of the fact that he helped expose their secret work, and that what happened to him can never happen to anyone else.”

  The troopers escorted Chief Haviland to the idling cruiser and ushered him inside, and then the driver began moving slowly through the crowded lot toward Route 9, hazard lights flashing. The car hit the road and accelerated south, TV cameras tracking its progress until it turned a corner and disappeared out of sight.

  EPILOGUE

  Lee Collins punched the digits on his telephone with a vehemence normally reserved for drivers who had cut him off in traffic. As the CIA’s Director of Special Projects, he had suffered through a spectacularly bad week with the flameout—literally—of the Lupin Project up in northern New Hampshire.

  As if the project’s abrupt and total failure wasn’t bad enough, the Tamerlane facility’s director had compounded the problem by exhibiting a total disregard for operational awareness—not to mention common sense—in dealing with the death of the New Quebec teenager. These sorts of things needed to be handled forcefully but quietly, and judging by the news reports coming out of New Quebec, Colonel Toler’s actions had been anything but quiet. Lee would have liked to say he was surprised, but he’d never trusted Toler and had always viewed the man as a loose cannon, which was why he had been assigned to a location so far off the beaten path in the first place.

  Then there was the treachery of the goddamned research scientist, who had released much of his classified project notes and other materials to the news media before torching the facility, killing himself and Toler in the process. But Greeley had been clever: he’d obviously been concerned about the sudden degradation in his ability to control the wolves, as well as their deteriorating motor skills. So he’d released no specific information that could be used to restart the project in the future, should anyone decide to make the attempt.

  All of that material he’d destroyed.

  The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, the sort of mess you always ran the risk of suffering when you entrusted highly sensitive research projects to dumbass civilians and unstable loons like Toler.

  But the Lupin Project hadn’t been a total loss, the efforts of its primary re
searcher notwithstanding. Doctor Greeley had made significant progress with his wolf pack in the area of neural conditioning—better progress, in fact, than Lee had expected him to—before the wolves’ conditions had suddenly and so dramatically deteriorated. It was that tantalizing progress that made Greeley’s destruction of critical research material so damned frustrating.

  Lee sighed impatiently as the telephone line rang in his ear. He’d been around a long time, and one of the first things he learned as Director of Special Projects many years ago was always to hedge his bets. In this case, hedging his bets had meant installing software to duplicate every file the good doctor saved on his Tamerlane computer the moment he saved it. The software then sent those files to a secure CIA server at Langley.

  Lee had also overseen the installation of hidden video cameras throughout Tamerlane, a modification to the architectural blueprints that was so secret, even Colonel Toler hadn’t been aware of it. Lee Collins was a big believer in not putting all his eggs in one basket. In the case of the Lupin Project, that second basket was a facility strikingly similar to Tamerlane, but located far away from New Hampshire in the Arizona desert.

  At last, Lee’s call was answered. A gravelly voice on the other end of the line said, “Mittenberg.”

  “Hello Joel, this is Lee. I’ve finished uploading all the Lupin Project materials to your server. Have you had a chance to look them over?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  “Well, as you might imagine, the scientific stuff is all gobbledygook to me, but the research scientist I hired—who, incidentally, is quite familiar with Dr. Greeley’s work—has already taken a cursory glance at much of the work as well.”

  “And what was his reaction?”

  “He’s excited, sir. He says that based on his first look, he should have no trouble replicating the doctor’s work. He says it’s revolutionary stuff, and while it’s much too soon to hazard a guess as to whether he can determine what caused the brains of Greeley’s wolves to deteriorate, he is anxious to get started.”