The Eden Plague

by David VanDyke

  “You still teaching at that gun club?” I asked.

  “Yep. Certified Master Instructor, senior Range Safety Officer, all that. Once the relic holding the top job finally retires or croaks, I’ll be in charge of all range operations. Nice and cushy.” He paused, chewed his lip. “Too cushy. Run your van into the barn, will you?”

  I did that, as he opened and closed the big door behind me. There was a Jeep Cherokee, a Land Rover and a Porsche Cayenne parked inside. I bet the Porsche was Spooky’s. He always had champagne tastes.

  As we walked out the side, man-sized door, I said, “Well, if what I got to tell you don’t get your cushy butt off the couch, I don’t know what will.”

  We went into the cabin, grabbed a couple of cold ones out of the fridge – him a beer, me a diet peach iced tea. We sat down in the dim glow from the coals of the fireplace, no artificial lights on. I breathed in the familiar, comforting smells of canvas and wool, old fish and deer’s blood, wood and smoke.

  I set my tea on a side table next to my elbow and stared across at Zeke. “I only want to tell this once, so can we get Spooky and anyone else you got around in here? He needs to hear it too.”

  “It’s just Spooky and me so far.” He pulled a little sport walkie out of his jacket pocket and keyed the mike twice, then twice more. Private code for ‘bring it in,’ I guessed.

  A minute or so later I felt the faint stir of air that accompanied a door opening, but try as I might I didn’t hear a thing until the hot pot in the kitchen started boiling. I saw Tran moving around in the next room with a stainless steel tea ball. I heard him pour and he came in with the mug, sat down across from me.

  His face was sharp and closed, wary as always. He wasn’t my friend, but he was Zeke’s, and that was good enough for now.

  I told them the story, then, from the open door at my house to departure from Quantico, leaving nothing out but some of my private thoughts. Tran’s face showed nothing. Zeke’s more open countenance showed doubt and wonder. He ran his left hand repeatedly over his face, smoothing his beard, his eyes distant, thinking. I was sure his mind was running down some of the same tracks mine had, and he would come to some of the same conclusions pretty soon. Now I would see what these guys were made of.

  Zeke got up and began pacing. Spooky nodded at me, then slipped out of the cabin again, probably to make another sweep. I would have bet cash money there was nothing to worry about out there, but he wasn’t taking any chances. I hoped he had swept my van for bugs, too.

  “Got anything to eat?” I asked, uneasy in the silence.

  “Yeah…” We went into the kitchen and he turned on the little light over the stove. He pulled out a fragrant pot of something from the fridge, set it on a gas burner and lit it. “Cass sends her love. And her stew.”

  I laughed. “Ditto, and I’ll enjoy the stew.” Then my face fell. “Maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned me.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m out of the habit of lying to my wife.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell her precisely where you were going.”

  “I’m not that out of practice. I just told her I had to help you out for a few days, and I couldn’t tell her where. She’s a Special Forces wife. She understands.”

  He got out a loaf of bread and sliced it up, next to a bowl of butter. We waited for the stew to warm up, and for my story to sink in.

  He opened his mouth a couple of times to speak, then closed it, false starts. Finally he said, “All right. So you say you got this XH in you, whatever it is. So you can heal like magic, almost, if you’re the same as Elise now. If it doesn’t take longer to get to its full strength. If it doesn’t have some unknown freaky side effect. And you can pass it in a bite. But maybe you’ll turn into a werewolf when the moon is full, or maybe you’ll burn up your years of life, or maybe you’ll get a taste for blood and go Dracula on our asses, or who knows. But I have to see it for myself. I mean, I wanna believe you, man, but…”

  “Trust but verify, right? Yeah, I figured. Well, as far as I know it doesn’t protect from pain, so pardon me if I don’t chop off a pinky. This ought to do.” I picked up a paring knife, put my hand down on the butcher-block counter, palm up. I stabbed the tip into the meaty part of my left hand. I had some callus on it from working the bags, but I made a pretty deep little cut and a welling of purplish blood. I held it over the sink and dripped for a minute, just for proof.

  I could feel something happening, a nervous surge, like a jolt of adrenaline. My mouth started watering, and I had a definite attack of the munchies. I buttered a piece of bread one-handed and ate it, which calmed them down for a bit.

  After a couple minutes of waiting, I ran my hand under the cold tap, rubbing the spot with my other hand until it was completely clean. I held it out for his inspection.

  He grabbed it and looked closely, pulling my hand over under the stove light. The wound was gone.

  The stew was starting to smell really good.

  “And all that happens besides the healing is you get hungry?”

  “Yeah, so far, just like I told you Elise did. She was tore up and she wolfed down four or five pounds of food like it was nothing, and a quart of orange juice, and I bet she needed more. It must take energy and building blocks – sugars, protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, stuff like that. Just like recovering from a hard workout but ten thousand times more and faster.”

  “Not much of a downside, if you get your bum knee and your bad back and your concussions and whatall fixed.” He licked his lips. “I wonder about Ricky.”

  I raised my eyebrows, shrugged sympathetically. Ricky was his son. He must be about eleven, and he had muscular dystrophy. Duchenne’s. He would already be in a powered wheelchair. I’d volunteered at a Jerry’ Kids’ camp a few times, so I knew. I also knew that pretty soon he wouldn’t even be able to use his hands to control the chair. By twenty or twenty-five he would be almost helpless, probably bedridden. Most people with DMD didn’t make it to thirty. It made me feel a little guilty, because it smacked of manipulation, holding out a cure for his son.

  Zeke wondered, “But what happens if it heals him, then whatever ticking time bomb of a side effect is even worse? Until we know that, we can’t even try. What if it didn’t cure him, but did…whatever? Turned him into a monster? His mother would never forgive me.”

  “You’re starting to get it, what I’ve been agonizing over. We have to know what the downside is. And there’s only one person I know of that knows anything.”

  “This Elise Wallis woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we have to find her and spring her.” He made it sound like running to the store to pick up a quart of milk.

  I frowned. “Spring her, I can see. But how do we find her? I’m just an operator, and a pretty fine stitch. You’re an A-team leader, hell you were what do they call it, a detachment commander? There are a couple more guys I could call that I can count on, but nobody with the skills and contacts to find someone like that, just from a name.”

  Zeke smiled, wicked. “Spooky does. His company also does corporate intel.”

  “Cool.” And it was. It was a ray of hope.

  -8-

  We got up at dawn the next morning. At least, Zeke and I did. Spooky was already up and around somewhere. That guy didn’t seem to sleep. Zeke talked to him for a minute before we started our morning run, out of my earshot. I wasn’t really one of the team. Not yet. All I’d done was fast-rope down to a bad situation and save Zeke’s life on a Kandahar mountainside, and knock off a bunch of Taliban. I hadn’t done any ops with him.

  Zeke and I walked down a trail that connected to a jogging loop. I hadn’t run for exercise since the IED, and I was eager to see how healed up I actually was. Zeke was an indifferent runner, and he was getting kind of flabby, but I guess he wanted to see too. We started off slow, real slow, just a little airborne shuffle, but pretty soon I had to hold down my pace. After about a mile, Zeke slowed to a walk, huffing.
/>   “Go on, man. I’m out of shape. I’ll make the circuit at my own speed.”

  I nodded, then took off at an easy run. Soon I was feeling really good, kind of high. Runner’s high, I guess. The second mile took me around past the cabin, and I kept on going, waving at Spooky, looking out the upper barn window. I sped up again, stretching out. I breathed deeply and easily, and felt like I used to, before the explosion that broke my body. Better, even. I felt like I was in my teens again, qualifying for track and field. I might have had a shot at the Olympics if I hadn’t enlisted in a fit of patriotic fervor. I was pretty sure I was running at nearly a four-minute-mile pace.

  Fantastic. Whatever the downside, this made it all seem worthwhile.

  I lapped Zeke in the last quarter-mile, blasting past him to the cabin, then jogging back, cooling down. I walked the last couple of hundred yards along with him.

  He looked at me sideways, like I had two heads. “Holy crap. Holy crap,” he kept repeating.

  “I try not to put those words together anymore, but I agree with the sentiment,” I answered dryly. “I am a bit hungry, about what I expected. And thirsty.” I ran my head under the outside water pump, then took a bunch of swallows. It tasted metallic. I pumped it a few more times for Zeke, then we walked over to the barn to see what Spooky was doing.

  Inside, we found another vehicle, a Toyota SUV, and another, younger man of about twenty-five. He was talking to Tran, and looked a lot like him, at least to my eyes. I was saved from a charge of racial insensitivity by the introduction.

  “Vinny Nguyen,” the man said.

  Spooky gave him a glare.

  “Or Nguyen Van Vinh, if you ask honorable Uncle-san here.”

  Double glare.

  “I work tech and IT for Brownstone.” At my blank look he went on, “The security contractor. Uncle Spoo-”

  Spooky lashed out like a striking snake, to slap Vinny on the back of the head. “You have not earned the right to call me that,” he said harshly.

  “Uncle Tran Pham,” Vinny started again, heavily, with a careful sideways look at his uncle, “called me last night and said I’d be helping out. With something. Which he hasn’t explained yet. Nor has he told me how much it pays, or how long the job is, or anything that normal people get to know when they do a job.” He crossed his arms to glare back at Spooky.

  Tran snapped, “This is not normal job. Maybe pay a lot, maybe pay nothing. I don’t call you as a favor to you, I call you because you are family and supposed to be trusted. If you can keep your mouth closed. Do not shame me in front of my commander and his comrade.” Spooky might speak English pretty well, but his heart was still in the mountains of Viet Nam, and his diction tended to fall apart under stress.

  It occurred to me that he and my dad would get along famously.

  Vinny dropped his eyes, the rebelliousness of youth warring with his family, his inherited culture and the force of Tran’s personality. The latter bunch won, and he nodded his agreement. “Okay, okay. What do I need to do?”

  Tran pointed at Zeke. “You do what he tell you to. He your boss now.”

  Zeke nodded, said to Vinny, “We need to research someone – who he was, who he is, where he works, where he might be now, everything. And we can’t be noticed. There’s big mojo against us, maybe even NSA, so it has to be very clean and light. You up for that?”

  “Duh. Nothin’ to it.”

  I noticed they had already set up some kind of satellite antenna and a control box up in the barn loft, aimed at the roof. Looking closer, I saw the ceiling looked different above it.

  “Plastic, invisible to the satellite signal,” said Zeke, following my gaze.

  A cable trailed from the setup down to the floor nearby. The two Nguyens quickly set up a couple of tables and started breaking out computers and mysterious electronic boxes from the Pelican cases in the back of the Toyota.

  By the time Zeke and I were done showering and cooking breakfast, the electronic setup was done. We carried the food out to them and everyone ate while Vinny started on his hacking and cracking. I wrote down everything I knew and could think of that would help, which was little enough. I kept myself busy by breaking out my own laptop and doing some general searches – the police blotters near where I lived, anything on my street, Trey’s name, innocuous things like that. I got nothing, so after an hour or so I went back to the cabin to help Zeke with some home repairs, make-work while the wiz kid did his thing.

  By lunchtime Vinh had a preliminary outline. “All right, here’s the gist. Is this your girl?” He showed me a picture of Elise, with longer hair.

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  “Okay, Elise Wallis is straight up until about five years ago, when she gets diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She gets treatment, goes into remission, finishes her Master’s in microbiology at Texas A&M, gets hired by the CDC – Centers for Disease Control. Cancer comes back with a vengeance after about two years just as she’s finishing up her PhD, at which point she goes on disability and into aggressive treatment, which fails this time. So she’s in hospice, and a month later, she gets hired.” Vinny had a smug look as he spun around in his chair.

  “Hired by who? Not the Agency, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”

  “Nope,” he grinned. “By a little company called Integrated National Strategies, Inc. get it? INS-INC, in-synch! Like the old boy band.” He laughed uproariously and spun again, until Spooky stopped the chair with his foot and a hard look.

  “All right. It’s indistinguishable from about a hundred little consulting companies that usually hover around the big defense contractors looking for scraps, usually because they have some Federal set-aside – Service Disabled Veteran Owned, or Minority, or Women-owned, like that. Except this company isn’t a set-aside, and they have never subcontracted with a big company. In fact, I can’t find who pays them, but they seem to have about fifteen employees…most of whom have worked in the black world before.”

  “Huh,” said Zeke. “So Elise isn’t working directly for the Agency…but indirectly…”

  “Right,” answered Vinny. “These guys got ‘Separate Cell’ and ‘Plausible Deniability’ written all over them. There’s probably only one guy in the company that really knows what’s going on and reports to their masters. The rest just do what the nice people that are paying them gobs of money tell them to.”

  I said, “That means when she said ‘company,’ she meant a real company, not ‘Company,’ not Agency. That means we actually don’t even know who they are working for. Could be anyone in the black world – could be any government agency, could be a corporation, a rich individual…could be one canny operator that got ahold of this treatment, and is trying to develop it or market it or whatever…Vinny, what kind of people do they have working for them?”

  “Umm…if you can believe their online resumes, looks like a CEO, two program managers, an HR director, an executive assistant, an IT guy, a special security officer – that’s for clearances and information, not physical security. Six personal security specialists – there are your door-kickers and shooters. All of those have military or law enforcement backgrounds…Special Forces, Ranger, Airborne, Force Recon, sniper…Texas Ranger…if they aren’t BSing, a bunch of badasses.” He tossed a pile of stapled papers down on the table. “Figured you’d want to see these. Their dossiers.”

  “Anyone named Jenkins?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he picked one of the packets up. “Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Fourth, one of the program managers. Yale grad, BA business, MBA, recruited by these guys straight out of school. Old money, family has investments and concerns up in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Lumber, shipping, some other stuff. Probably being groomed for bigger and better things.” Vinny looked smug.

  “Ah. That’s not good.” If I had to kill someone, why couldn’t it have been someone without a rich and powerful family?

  Vinny shrugged, looked down for a moment. In fact, unless I missed my guess,
he was holding something out on us, savoring the drama and triumph.

  I looked at Spooky, raised an eyebrow.

  He got it, shifted his stance that conveyed impatience to his nephew.

  “Okay, here’s the kicker,” Vinh continued hurriedly. “The other two employees are scientists as well. So we got a microbiologist – Elise – a virologist, and an epidemiologist.”

  “Only three. Ah’m only a po country doctah,” I put on my best hick accent, “but that sounds like they were working on the XH. And that narrows it down to some kind of germ. A virus, or other disease pathogen. And I’d have a tough time believing that a team of just three people could come up with something like this, though stranger things have happened.”

  Tran spoke up. “Then they did not make it. They study it. Experiment. Decode. Perhaps replicate. Try to fix it, to get rid of the problems.”

  I nodded.

  “Where are they located?” asked Zeke.

  “They have a Norfolk, Virginia office address.”

  I felt a surge of relief, and I could see that Zeke had gotten it too. “That means we’re not going up against a well-funded, well-supported Agency effort. It’s something off to the side, something maybe they don’t even know about. Just a couple people probably, maybe only one, and like all bureaucracies, they have been slow to realize what they got. And maybe INS, Inc. hasn’t seen fit to tell them. Maybe their top guy – who’s the CEO?”

  “Raphael Keith Durgan. Medical doctor, biologist. Formerly of the USDA, at Plum Island Animal Disease Center.”

  “And the Department of Homeland Security took over the island in 2003, with the USDA becoming a tenant,” Zeke chimed in.

  “How’d you know that?” I asked, surprised.

  He grinned. “You get all over in spec ops.”

  I shrugged. “So he’s working on disease, maybe some black projects there, because you know the USDA ain’t the only people doing biological work on the island. Not with Homeland Security running the show. He gets recruited because he has the clearances and has worked on stuff, maybe anthrax or weaponized smallpox or something we’ve never heard of. He gets put in charge of the research effort in this little company because somebody doesn’t want it in the regular system. The heavies are there to keep control of things. Must be the same thugs I saw at the Iron Saddle.”