Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  All the fuss was absurd anyway. Mondani knew that the populace would be furious if they found out about the Compound’s projects, but that reaction could be tempered by what they heard, and when. Weren’t they the ones who allowed government bodies like the National Institutes of Health to throw away money on projects that sounded bad as proposals, appeared meaningless in practice, and had end results which were completely useless? It was all in the sell. Look at that crank at the University of Chicago for instance. Mondani fumed when he thought about buffoons like Allan Rechtschaffen, wasting fantastic amounts of money in scientific pursuits that would have given Nazi doctors pause. Rechtschaffen had spent the last few decades conducting sleep-deprivation experiments in rats. He planted wires in the rodents’ brains and put the little buggers on disks that were set over water tanks. When monitoring equipment showed the rats had entered the first stages of sleep, a mechanism caused the disk to rotate. The rats would have to scramble frantically on the disks to avoid falling off into the water. After many days of this treatment ulcerous sores appeared on their feet and tails, their hair fell out, and their body fat began to dissolve. Rechtschaffen summarized the results of his experiments by saying, “Rats die after 17 days of sleep deprivation. Thus, at least for the rat, sleep is absolutely essential.” Madness!

  Rechtschaffen’s abomination had cost the taxpayers literally millions of dollars, and there was no end in sight. Mondani was astounded to discover he actually agreed with animal rights organizations like PETA. He didn’t really give a winged fuck about the rats; they were, after all, vermin, but the financial waste of Rechtschaffen’s projects and similar animal experiments conducted in the hallowed halls of prestigious universities across America drove Mondani into a rage. There was so much good that could be done with that funding!

  Of course they wouldn’t be in this mess if Kennedy hadn’t forgotten to add to the list of things to be destroyed any living by-products of the experiments. Now that Clinton’s orders had the potential to be much more comprehensive, Hill and Norman were history even though the current President, like Kennedy, had no idea that living human beings were the results of the Compound’s work.

  Mondani didn’t want to get caught in the snares that had driven Zane mad. He would cover his ass and act now, following the rumored Executive Order almost to the letter. Hill and Norman would be located and returned to Compound West for brief study and then they would be put down before they could let the public know how far the Compound had gone. Let the rest of the world see the greatest breakthroughs in cloning technology appear outside the Compound in the years to come when someone cloned a pig or a cow or a sheep.

  The destruction of any past cloning experiments paid for by the public left Mondani free to pursue the creation and development of new clones and more powerful weapons systems and whatever else corpulent polymaths like Tupper could dream up using only funds raised by the Compound’s own investments and patent sales, not tax dollars. The finer the line, the easier it was to cross.

  With the tracking modules working intermittently and the promise of pending improvements on the horizon, Mondani had dispatched agents to the San Diego area to search for Jeannie Norman; teams of trackers and a number of scouts, semi-retired trackers who were getting on in years yet could still stalk a target and call in a location. During the brief periods the tracking modules actually worked, the Compound could pinpoint her location with no more accuracy than one hundred square miles. It was the same for William Hill, who was currently wandering the northeast. Norman would be an easy catch. For Hill, Mondani required a stronger hand.

  Sitting on either side of Tupper were Dick Richards and Richard Dicks, notorious assassins who worked for the Compound as file closers.

  Dick Richards was wearing a blue suit. He always wore a blue suit, just as Richard Dicks always wore gray. Richards’ hair was red, Dicks’ was pale blond, and both had their hair cut in the same generic federal agent style. They were the best hunters of the human animal Mondani had ever encountered, excluding Randall Kraft’s dark-skinned abomination, and Mondani excluded Godson every chance he got. Richards and Dicks were not rocket scientists, but they could take hit after hit and keep pursuing their target until the target was acquired.

  “You understand your orders?” Mondani asked.

  “Bring him back alive, if possible,” Dicks said.

  “If not, bring back his head,” Richards added. “Because you want his brain. And if we happen to cross paths with Ms. Norman during the search—”

  “Bring her in too,” Dicks concluded. “Alive.”

  Mondani nodded, and then glared when Tupper raised a hand like a child in school.

  “If I might reiterate my earlier warning,” Tupper said meekly, “About Jeannie?”

  “On a first-name basis now, are you?” Mondani asked. Tupper looked confused. The fatboy was a mastermind, but even masterminds can be a big pain in the ass. “Not now,” Mondani said, waving away Tupper’s suggestion.

  Tupper tried again, his voice smaller than before. “But, there is a slight danger—”

  “Doctor Tupper, really!” Mondani was getting irritated.

  “Hey, hang fire there, Big Doc,” Dicks said to Mondani.

  “Yeah,” Richards echoed, “If Little Doc thinks there are potential dangers in this assignment we want to hear about them.”

  Mondani didn’t want every tracker and file closer knowing every detail about every target out there. Containment of information was vital. He thought one of Zane’s greatest mistakes was telling everyone within earshot about all of the Compounds’ fuck-ups. As far as he was concerned, information on current targets was need-to-know only. Teams tracking Jeannie Norman knew nothing of William Hill. Why should they?

  Earlier, Tupper had indicated he was for full disclosure as a safety measure, in case a team tracking Jeannie ran into the hillbilly. Mondani had nixed that suggestion, asking Tupper what the chances were of Hill and Norman crossing each other’s paths. Being a weirdo, Tupper gave an answer that was typically bizarre, wishful thinking aside. “About the same as the chances of a meteorite shaped like Ross Perot’s head falling out of the sky and killing him.”

  Mondani had hoped Tupper had quashed his own argument, but Tupper had then started spouting off about the mysteries of synchronicity, telling Mondani that Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel The Wreck of the Titan predated the Titanic disaster by fourteen years and foresaw an ‘unsinkable’ luxury liner of the same approximate length and displacement as the White Star Line’s ill-fated steamer, carrying many of the upper class elite on a maiden voyage in the month of April, during which the Titan struck an iceberg at the speed of twenty-five knots in an attempt to make a record crossing, two knots faster than the Titanic when she was stove by the ice. The fictional ship went down with a great loss of life because there simply weren’t enough lifeboats on board.

  “A rare, rare case, Doctor,” Mondani had said.

  Tupper had squinted, rubbed the oily bulb of his nose with greasy fingers and said, “What about the bullet that found its target twenty years after it was fired? In Honey Grove, Texas, eighteen ninety-three, one Henry Ziegland took part in a duel with the brother of a woman who killed herself after Henry dumped her. The brother’s bullet grazed Ziegland’s cheek and buried itself in a tree. The brother thought he’d killed Ziegland and committed suicide. Twenty years later in nineteen thirteen, Ziegland wanted to cut down that same tree and unwisely decided that he could do the job easier with dynamite. The resulting explosion launched the bullet out of the tree and into Ziegland’s head, killing him.”

  Mondani had looked unimpressed and shook his head, but Tupper had pressed on.

  “In nineteen forty-six a Miss Mildred West took a week-long vacation from her job writing obituaries for The Alton Evening Telegraph. For the first time since anyone at the paper could remember, there were no reported deaths in the city of thirty-two thousand, which had an average mortality rate of ten deaths per week. In n
ineteen seventy-four, a Mrs. Willard Lovell of Berkeley accidentally got locked out of her house when the front door closed on her. She spent some time trying to get in without success when the mailman appeared with a letter from her brother in Seattle who had stayed with her not long beforehand. Along with a letter to Mrs. Lovell was an item her brother had borrowed and was now returning, a spare key to the front door. And what about the case of El Paso County Highway Patrolman Allen Falby and a businessman named Alfred Smith? Falby, a motorcycle cop, had been trying to overtake a speeding truck that slowed for a turn. The bike crashed into the truck’s tailgate and Falby ended up on the ground, one leg gashed, his blood pumping out of an artery. Before Falby could bleed to death passerby Smith appeared on the scene, knowing enough to make a tourniquet out of his tie, saving Falby’s life. Five years later, at Christmas, Falby was recovered and back out on patrol when he received a call to investigate an accident on U.S. 80. Falby reached the site before a dispatched ambulance and found that a car had impacted a tree. Falby found an unconscious man behind the wheel and saw that the man’s right leg was soaked in blood from a severed artery. Falby pulled the man out of the wreck and applied a tourniquet to the victim’s leg, saving his life. Only then did Falby recognize the injured man as Alfred Smith, the same individual who had saved Falby from an identical and potentially deadly wound.” Tupper had chuckled and added, “Falby later said of the two incidents, ‘It all goes to prove that one good tourniquet deserves another.’ And that is why I must impress upon you the significance and the danger of synchronicity. Nothing must be left to chance.”

  Tiring of the young man, Mondani had simply asked Tupper to shut up.

  Even now Mondani refused to believe that Hill’s pursuers might run into Norman. But then, his two best file closers weren’t as expendable as the average tracker, and if Richards and Dicks couldn’t keep a secret, nobody could.

  He shrugged and gestured to the pudgy young man. “You have the floor, Mister Tupper.”

  Tupper stood and walked a few feet away, organizing his thoughts. Then he faced the file closers. “Gentlemen, even though you may never encounter Ms. Norman, I think a few precautions are in order. We know that Doctor Eicher, to put it in layman’s terms, played cut and paste with Jeannie Norman’s DNA. What we do not know is . . . exactly what Eicher created in Jeannie Norman.”

  Mondani groaned. He hated theatrics like this.

  “She may simply be an average woman with an alarming streak of bad luck,” Tupper said. “Then again, she may not be entirely human.”

  Dicks looked alarmed. “What, has she got animal DNA or some shit like that?”

  “Yeah,” Richards added, “Is she some kind of mutant freak thing that’s gonna morph into a seven-foot tall ass-kicking she-creature if we corner her?” He looked at Dicks and said, “I saw that on cable, you know, that flick with the blonde with the nice rack?”

  “Oh shit, yeah,” Dicks said.

  Tupper looked utterly confused.

  “Seriously, Little Doc,” Dicks said with a laugh, “Has she got secret powers that she unleashes on the unsuspecting?”

  “As a matter of fact, she does,” Tupper said with a quick grin.

  Richards said, “Get the fuck outta here.”

  Dicks said, “You’re shitting me.”

  “Jeannie Norman does have a secret weapon,” Tupper said again in all seriousness. “You can’t see it, feel it, hear it or smell it. You can’t remove it from her and you can’t demand that she drop it at gunpoint.”

  He now had the attention of the two men. Mondani was looking at the ceiling. He thought Tupper’s little theory was a bit of a stretch.

  “Eicher cut and pasted Ms. Norman’s DNA. Here in our tissue bank we have samples of what Eicher started with and what his end result was. He started with the DNA of one normal woman. He removed portions of that DNA and inserted numerous other bits and pieces, if you will, the sources of which have not all been identified. Did you know there is no record of her ever getting sick? No bouts with the flu or common childhood viruses. None. That in itself is extraordinary. Until we can say definitively exactly what constitutes Ms. Norman’s make up, it might be prudent to assume that her whole is greater than the sum of her parts.”

  Dicks and Richards gave Tupper blank stares, and the young doctor plodded on.

  “One thing we are quite certain of is that Eicher managed to boost Ms. Norman’s pheromones into something never before seen in a human being.”

  Dicks and Richards gave Tupper blank stares.

  “Pheromones,” Tupper repeated. “They are chemical messages that can strongly attract, or repel. In Ms. Norman’s case, since Eicher wanted to duplicate as much as possible certain attributes of Marilyn Monroe that are for the most part impossible to define, he made changes at a cellular level. He changed the shape of her nose, the color of her hair. Little things like that. And he somehow boosted both the strength and output of her pheromones. In the wild, animals can attract each other over very great distances by releasing almost infinitely small amounts of certain pheromones into the air or water. These chemical neon-signs signal things such as availability and arousal and can trigger sexual excitement.”

  Dicks was flabbergasted. “Are you trying to say that if I was mentally prepared to ignore any sexpot act she could still get to me just by releasing a smell?”

  “No,” Tupper snapped. “What I am saying is that I could isolate her in one room and have her pee in a specimen bottle, then I could carry that bottle into a separate room where you were waiting, hold that bottle under your nose, and you’d go utterly berserk.”

  “Sure, I’d go berserk if somebody did that to me,” Dicks said. “Nobody’s holding any bottles of piss under my fucking nose.”

  “Damn straight,” Richards said.

  “You’re missing the point,” Tupper said, his frustration growing.

  Dicks gave a confused shrug. “So, she can just walk into a room full of men and every guy will get a woody?”

  “A what?” Tupper asked.

  “Jesus,” Richards enthused, “imagine the tips she’d rake in if she was a dancer in a titty-bar? All the horny bastards tossing cash at her. Damn!”

  Tupper shook his head.

  “I guess she’s a real piece of ass,” Dicks said with a grin.

  Richards gave a lewd chuckle. “So Little Doc, that’s what you meant by saying her hole is greater than the sum of her parts, huh?”

  “Listen, gentlemen, please.” Tupper’s frustration was growing. “I theorize that her pheromones are so strong they not only create outrageous urges to mate, but such an overpowering desire to be the only sire of her brood, as it were, that it could lead to violence, the clash of two rutting wild beasts fighting to the death for the right to mate with this eligible female.”

  “That is just a theory at this point,” Mondani interjected.

  Tupper looked at him. “I’ve studied all the information we have on Jeannie Norman. There are documented instances in which Doctor Eicher went into fantastic rages that seemed to be overblown fits of jealousy, in Jeannie Norman’s youth during her stay in the Compound. He was overly protective of her from the start. In viewing the videotapes Eicher took during her teenage years, she appears bruised from open-handed slaps on more than one occasion. Only Eicher could have done that, because our research into his life after he left the Compound indicates Jeannie rarely had any contact with outsiders, save for her schoolmates, and I think Eicher intentionally chose an all-girl school for her. There were rare times when he did take her out in the public eye. Even though he was her doctor and could do everything a General Practitioner could do, he could not be her dentist or her ophthalmologist, and a thorough check of the records of her visits to such places shows two anomalies. One, her vision was always perfect and she never needed braces or suffered a single cavity, and two, during these visits there were always an unusually high number of outbursts, be they verbal or physical, by males in the vicinity. A
nd then there is the news footage we acquired in 1990. Ms. Norman took part in a contest in Hollywood and won a cash prize as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. During that event there were fist fights and a riot that spilled from the venue out onto the street. It took fifteen police officers over an hour to control and calm the crowd. One elderly judge of the contest was felled by an aneurysm and a post-mortem revealed that he ejaculated as he expired. Not an uncommon occurrence in a violent death, but it still makes one wonder. All of this evidence has led me to believe that Ms. Norman, through no fault of her own, is a very dangerous woman.”

  “Jeez,” Dicks said, “Now I really want to meet her.”

  “Well,” Richards said to Tupper, “I’m sure we can bear up, Doctor, should the situation arise. We are, after all, highly skilled professionals in this line of work.” He gave Dicks a you believe this shit? face.

  “Oh, I’m certain you could resist her charms,” Tupper agreed. “If you were a homosexual.”

  Richards’ head snapped around so fast it was a wonder he didn’t get whiplash. “Huh?”

  “A homosexual in theory could resist her,” Tupper explained. “She is, after all, triggering natural urges. I have long advocated sending a gay team into the field to bring her back.”

  “What are you suggesting Little Doc?” Richards shot back.

  Dicks was staying neutral on this one. He knew Richards really had a thing about fags.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Tupper said, “except, perhaps, caution.”

  Dicks stood up. “None of this really matters anyway. We’re after Hill, not Norman. The odds of running into her are pretty slim.”

  “Never doubt the power of synchronicity,” Tupper said.

  Mondani sat at his desk, one hand covering his face as he massaged his temples with finger and thumb.

  Dicks looked confused.

  Richards stood as well, and asked, “Any words of wisdom about Hill?”

  With some amusement Tupper said, “Mr. Hill may be the only heterosexual male I know of who could resist Ms. Norman’s phenomenal charms. A lifetime of struggling against his own violent impulses may give him the strength to overcome any like feelings Ms. Norman may stir.”