by Jon Land
“I think,” Beekman started, before his thoughts betrayed him. “I think…”
As his voice drifted off, Denton heard a sound like popcorn crackling inside a microwave, at the same time the crack lines in the polymer seemed to consume the wall. Then it erupted in a storm of marble-sized shards that sprayed the room like shrapnel.
Denton took Beekman with him to the floor. “I see what you mean by immeasurable power, Professor,” Denton said when the shower of shards passed, sliding off him.
“No, you don’t,” Beekman said, still trembling. “You have no idea. None of us does.”
FORTY
New York City
“Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Whitlow,” Max said to the daughter of the late geneticist, Dr. Franklin Kirsch.
“Call me Laurie, please, Mr. Borgia. Outside, you said this was about my father?”
Max nodded. “My father was a patient of his. And call me Max, please.”
“I see,” Laurie Whitlow said, even though it was clear she didn’t.
She closed the door behind them and ushered Max from the foyer into a den looking down over the street, dominated by a big widescreen television built into an elegantly paneled wall that otherwise looked untouched. Max had the feeling the brownstone was pretty much as Kirsch must’ve left it, the design and layout clearly dated.
Max had been waiting on the stoop of the West Side brownstone when Laurie Whitlow got home from teaching at PS 11, William T. Harris Elementary School, in Chelsea. According to Weeb Bochner, Whitlow had spent her entire teaching career at that school, nearly twenty years now and ten since her father’s death. Max could only imagine what the three-story brownstone might be worth today and figured the taxes alone might well have eaten up a teacher’s normal salary. Given what Bochner had learned about Kirsch’s considerable investments, and the hefty insurance settlement his daughter and sole heir had received following the explosion that had leveled CyberGen, though, meant money should never be a problem for her.
Max noted a number of framed photos picturing Kirsch with a woman who must’ve been Laurie Whitlow’s mother. The resemblance was uncanny, both women with a mousy look and cursed with stout frames that made them look overweight, even though they weren’t. Both women’s straight hair hung limply to their shoulders, as if Laurie were purposely imitating her mother’s style.
“Please,” she said, offering him a chair, “sit down.”
Max pointed to one of the pictures as he did so. “Your parents?”
Whitlow nodded. “That one was taken just before the divorce. My mother died a year before the explosion took my father. Cancer.”
“That’s what my father was seeing yours about, Laurie,” Max said, as she took a seat on the matching leather couch adjoining his chair, laying a shoulder bag alongside her. “A rare type in the blood family of the disease.”
“Is he…”
“He died. About the same time as your father.”
“Oh,” Laurie Whitlow managed.
“No records kept by CyberGen survived the explosion. I thought maybe your father kept his most important files elsewhere, that you may have by chance retrieved, hopefully the ones concerning my father. Something. Anything,” he added, sounding just desperate enough. “Because if I happened to inherit that particular gene from my father,” Max continued, letting his thought dangle.
“You could’ve just called. Saved yourself the bother of a visit.”
“No bother. And I wouldn’t have known what to say on the phone.”
“Unfortunately, the result’s the same: Any records my father may have kept were moved out years ago, all his papers. He was a hoarder when it came to such things. They were overrunning the whole house.”
“Did you put them in storage?”
“No, I had them all destroyed. Didn’t see the point of paying the hefty storage fees for all those boxes. The NYPD had already had their go at them, the FBI too. All part of their routine investigations, they said. I was too numb to care.”
“I understand. But CyberGen must have had some means to back up their records.”
“Believe it or not, all the company’s assets, including any records they may have stored or backed up elsewhere, are still tied up in litigation.”
“After all these years? You’re kidding.”
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, Max.” Whitlow dragged her phone from a pocket in her bag and jogged it to life. “Can you give me your number, just in case I come up with something?”
“Of course.”
Max recited a dummy number, while sweeping his eyes about the room. The shelves were dominated by a collection of figurines, all animals that were comparable in size and all formed of beautiful porcelain.
“My father gave one to me on my birthday, each and every one,” Whitlow said, noting his interest. One of our most cherished traditions.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“June fourth.”
“Beautiful,” Max said, reaching for one of the elegantly fashioned figures, a horse. He turned it upside down, so he could better regard the tiny sticker he’d spotted. “My father and I used to climb mountains together. Our goal was to scale the highest peak on each continent, but he died before we could finish.”
Whitlow’s eyes teared up, as Max replaced the horse on the table. “When I was a little girl, my father and I used to go to the Bronx Zoo all the time. Some of my happiest memories.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Likewise.”
Max rose stiffly. “Thank you for your time.”
“I wish I could’ve been more helpful. I’ll call if I think of anything.”
“Please.”
* * *
Max waited until he was well down the block, out of sight from the brownstone, before stopping to call Weeb Bochner.
“How’d it go, hoss?”
“Write this down,” Max said, spelling out the name of a store listed on the sticker on the underside of the horse figurine he’d inspected. “I think it’s a high-end collectibles store. Find out if they’ve been shipping animal figurines around June fourth for the past ten years to Laurie Whitlow at the address of her father’s brownstone.”
“And why am I doing this?”
“Because she told me her father used to give her one on her birthday every year. But my count puts her collection at forty-two, her age today. So who’s been sending them to her these past ten years?”
* * *
Max was sitting in a coffee shop an hour later, when Bochner called him back.
“You’d make a good detective, Commander.”
“What’d you find?”
“Return address for the ten figurines shipped over the past ten years was a post office box in Canada. British Columbia, specifically, middle of nowhere. Closest city is Vancouver.”
“It’s a start.”
“It’s more than that, hoss. Got a pen handy?”
* * *
Laurie Whitlow stepped out of the shower stall and wrapped a towel about herself, still unnerved by the man who’d come poking around about her father. She couldn’t tell how much of his story was genuine, further unsettling her and wondering what the true purpose behind his sudden interest in her father had been.
She stepped into her bedroom and recorded a pair of blurs at the edge of her consciousness, before a pair of big men wearing ski masks grabbed her forcibly by either arm. Her towel fell to the floor and Whitlow found herself staring at a third man, just as big, standing in front of her and grinning through his mask.
FORTY-ONE
Western Iraq
“We have a problem,” the scrambled voice on the other end of the satellite phone told Mohammed al-Qadir.
“I do not have time for your problems.”
“This isn’t my problem, it’s our problem. Yours, in point of fact.”
“God does not deal in facts, God deals in faith.”
“You really don’t know what’s been
happening, do you?”
Al-Qadir was pacing in the mosque located in his headquarters hidden beneath the Iraqi desert. He prayed five times a day no matter the circumstances, especially now when he needed Allah more than ever. One of his top commanders had taken sick upon returning from a mission in the field. He was getting worse by the hour, and al-Qadir was starting to believe that God was all that could have him.
“I know the final battle for the soul of the world approaches. I know all has gone exactly as God willed.”
“You may want to rethink such assurances.” Even scrambled, the sharpness of the voice’s criticism was evident. “A plague has begun to spread through the Middle East and we’ve lost contact with the facility in southern Lebanon.”
“As God wills, then,” al-Qadir said, not bothering to mention that his sick commander had fallen ill after paying a visit to that same facility, a facility that had been producing the means by which his forces would seize power the world over.
“God has nothing to do with this. There is evidence that a pathogen escaped the lab, but it doesn’t at all fit the parameters of what we’ve spent so long developing.”
“We don’t control fate, ours or any. You’d be wise to remember that.”
“Just as you’d be wise to realize that something has gone terribly wrong here. We had a systematic, painstaking plan of how the pathogen was to be released. But this one barely resembles what we set out to create and it’s gotten loose all on its own.”
“These deaths being an unexpected reward for my service to the one true God.”
“That’s just it,” the scrambled voice said softer. “The victims aren’t dying. I’ve been made privy to the World Health Organization reports. The victims near death’s door, but don’t pass through it, undergoing some kind of transformation instead.”
“Into what?” al-Qadir asked, unable to hide the surprise in his voice, thinking of his own commander with hardened, smoke-colored flesh now lying atop a mattress on the floor in another chamber, bleeding from his eyes, ears, and nose.
“Unknown, at this point. The reporting on the specifics is vague and noncommittal.”
Al-Qadir stopped pacing. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“I believe that was my point to you.”
“No. You feel there is a plan that was to proceed by our making. But it was never ours, it was always God’s to do with as He wished. Such is the problem with men like you. You seek to control that which you cannot and never could. You seek to master fate itself, instead of serving it as I do. Whatever is happening is happening through His divine providence and we must embrace that. We are being given a final test before the End of Days are upon us.”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said,” the scrambled voice snapped. “Whatever escaped that lab is already spreading beyond control, and there’s no reason to expect we are going to be spared.”
“As God wills, then.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” al-Qadir said staunchly, “it’s a plan.”
FORTY-TWO
The Mediterranean Sea
“What are you holding back from me?” Father Jimenez asked the mysterious, flat-featured man he’d come to know as Red, as the military jet began its descent over the Mediterranean.
“Ever play show-and-tell as a kid, Father?”
“Of course.”
“We’ve had our fill of telling already,” Red said, looking like a two-dimensional figure come to life in the shading cast by the tinted windows. “Time to get on with the showing. What’s the opening line of the Bible, Father?”
“‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’”
“And that’s where we’re going, Father, in a manner of speaking.” Red hesitated, as if weighing how much to say. “This is right up your alley.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because your job is to investigate inexplicable phenomena. Believe me when I tell you, that’s what we’re facing in the Middle East right now.”
Jimenez bristled. “I’ve spent the last ten years of my life watching people’s retched lives collapse under the weight of supposed miracles that were nothing more than those same people wanting their faith to be rewarded. Because if that happened, then there was hope for them, for all of us. But there isn’t. You know what a true miracle would’ve been? Not an eclipse in Nigeria, but the members of my team coming back to life, or time rewound so the massacre never happened in the first place. But the world doesn’t work that way.”
Red looked almost frustrated. “Then tell me how it does work, Father? Start with what we both witnessed in Brazil.”
Jimenez nodded, glad for the opportunity to return to the scientific dogma with which he was infinitely more comfortable. “An ordinary meteor strike couldn’t cause that kind of mass destruction. It would take an asteroid of a mass and speed capable of generating an explosion measured in kilotons upon impact and, as I’ve already explained, that doesn’t conform in any way to what I found at the blast site.”
“Go back to the beginning, Father,” Red said, instead of arguing his point.
“As in God creating the heavens and earth.”
“Another word for what?”
“The birth of the Universe.”
“As in the Big Bang, the single largest release of energy for the last fourteen billion years or so. Molecules formed of light and dark matter colliding with each other to create a force that can’t be measured or comprehended.”
“What does the Big Bang have to do with all this?”
“Go back to all those light and dark particles colliding. Only they didn’t all hang around, did they?”
“Yes, they did. But we can only quantify half of them, the light ones. The dark matter is still there, all around us. We just can’t see or measure it. Maybe isolate it for a thousandth of a second inside a particle accelerator, but that’s about it.”
Red was nodding now. “I think you’re starting to get the point.”
Jimenez felt the jet’s landing gear engage. “I am?”
Red had turned his gaze out the window, toward the sea below. “Nigeria and Brazil. Both sites struck by phenomena that weren’t meteors at all according to all the rudimentary principles of geophysics and astrophysics. Right?”
Jimenez shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Don’t suppose. You’re a scientist. Consider the data. But you’re also a priest. So consider the underlying context of that data. Think like a priest.”
“Light and dark matter. Good and evil,” Jimenez said, as if drawing a likeness between them.
“Now, think like a scientist.”
“What happened to all the dark matter, the residue?”
“Say it splintered off,” Red picked up. “Blown into the celestial ether billions of years ago. Spending those billions of years roaming the darkest reaches of the Universe, following the lines, curves, and folds in space. What would happen? Tell me.”
“Speaking as a scientist or a priest?”
“Both.”
“It could, would, inevitably come back. Billions of years to circle back.”
“Exactly,” Red nodded, almost buoyant for that brief moment at the conclusion he’d wanted Jimenez to reach, the connection he wanted the priest to make. “Nigeria, Brazil, the Yucatán in Mexico sixty-five million years ago.”
“You’re talking about the meteor strike that brought on the Ice Age,” Jimenez said, suddenly feeling chilled again.
“And something else, Father: What if evil, the ultimate evil as detailed in the Bible, exists to destroy all life, as we know it? I’m not a religious man, but I go where the road leads me and, in this case, the signposts couldn’t be any clearer.”
“Care to point them out to me?”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do, Father.”
FORTY-THREE
Southern Lebanon
The former Lebanese military bio-weapons complex, what the doc
tor in the Lebanese village had called El al-Lacosh, or House of Evil, was a sprawling single-level, sand-colored building that looked as if it had sprouted from the desert floor. That single floor had almost surely been constructed over any number of comparably sized levels beneath the earth. The heavy security fence that enclosed its perimeter was similarly sand-colored and the one thing that gave away the facility’s presence.
The convoy rumbled through an open gate blown weakly back and forth by the wind. The entrance to the building was ajar too, a big dark gaping mouth open to the night beyond. No signs of life whatsoever, or death for that matter. Just nothing.
The wind increased, kicking up miniature funnel clouds as the four Humvees drew to a halt abreast of one another.
“Let’s have a look inside,” Major Musa said to Vicky.
* * *
She was on her own now. A helicopter had been dispatched to the Bedouin village of Abu Siddar to rush Neal Van Royce to a hospital in Beirut, memory of the sight of his hand being snapped off and blood shooting out from the stump making Vicky feel queasy.
His attacker, the German intelligence operative Gunther Brune, had no longer appeared to be human. Barely alive, according to his vitals, and yet capable of incredible physical feats of strength and speed. Vicky had been searching her mind and experience for a plausible scientific explanation for what she’d witnessed, but had so far drawn a complete blank. She could only hope the answers she was looking for rested in this former bio-weapons facility, reconfigured under the guise of a pharmaceutical concern by the terrorist group Gunther Brune had managed to infiltrate.
El al-Lacosh …
The House of Evil.
Before entering the facility, Vicky redonned her biohazard gear, accompanied this time by Major Musa and four of his men because they’d only brought six of the suits with them. The remaining soldiers would stand guard inside the fence line and contact them immediately if any additional parties arrived on the scene.
With Vicky trailing him, Musa moved toward the Israeli officer named Raviv. “I’ve already ordered my men to shoot anything that comes out that’s not us,” Musa said, the Humvees already positioning themselves so their turret-mounted heavy machine guns were poised directly before the doors. “If we don’t come out, and you can’t reach us, you know what to do,” speaking to him for the first time since Vicky’s arrival in Lebanon.