by Alex Archer
Annja glanced around, concerned that the sound might have been overheard, but when no one came to investigate she smiled in satisfaction and stepped inside the room, flipping the light switch with one hand while closing the door with the other. When she saw that she was alone in the room, she released her sword, sending it back to the otherwhere to wait until she needed it again.
The office was large, with an oversize desk, a couch with matching leather chairs and a bar. A door to the left of the desk opened onto a private bathroom. The back wall of the room was made of glass, and through it Annja could see the medical ward she’d left behind just moments before.
A switch near the desk controlled the window blinds, and Annja used it to cut off the view from downstairs. Once that was taken care of, she turned her attention to the desk in front of her.
Stacks of file folders and photocopied articles from scientific journals lay in messy piles atop its surface, right next to the computer keyboard and flat-screen monitor. Annja picked up a few of the articles and glanced at the front pages, noting that they had titles like “A Multi-trait Meta-analysis for Detecting Pleiotropic Polymorphism” and “Integrating Multiple Genomic Data Elements to Predict Disease-Causing Nucleotide Variants in Exome Sequencing Trials.”
Nothing like some light reading for the afternoon, she thought sourly.
The articles weren’t going to be any help. They were clearly referencing genetic studies of some kind or another, but they weren’t proof that Stone was kidnapping women and killing them.
She tossed the papers back down on the desk, and in doing so must have accidentally nudged the mouse because the computer screen came out of sleep mode.
Intrigued, Annja pulled out the desk chair and sat down. She dug through the stacks of paper on the desktop until she found the mouse, and then began clicking through the files, looking for anything interesting.
Stone had left several windows open, so Annja started with those. The first few files were spreadsheets showing purchase orders and budget expenditures. She glanced at them but quickly moved on. Next up were half a dozen scientific papers, all focused on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. She stopped there for a moment, trying to make a connection between the missing women and MCD, but eventually moved on because she just wasn’t seeing it.
That was when she found the video.
It had been paused halfway through and showed a weary-looking Stone sitting in front of the camera. Intrigued, Annja clicked Play.
“...morphed into a new formation before failing entirely. I’m directing the staff to focus on the left-hand peptide chain, hoping that running its characteristics to ground can give us some insight on the right-hand chain, which is the important one.”
Annja used the mouse to slide the control back to the starting point.
The video stuttered for a moment and then smoothed out.
“This is update number three hundred and forty-seven,” Stone began. “Thursday evening, just after midnight.”
Day before yesterday, Annja thought. She kept watching.
“Our attempts to artificially replicate and stabilize the prion continue to meet with failure, but I’m determined to push through to the end. Today’s activities centered on getting the left-hand chain of the prion molecule to stabilize...”
Stone went on for several minutes, summarizing the steps her team had taken in the lab that afternoon.
Annja slid the control forward to a spot later in the video and let it play again.
Stone was still speaking but had moved from science to marketing. “Supplies are low—I understand that—but as I’ve told you, I cannot speed up the process any more than I already have. We have a full complement of donors at the moment, so we should be able to continue producing what we need for the next several weeks. In the meantime, we’re searching for additional carriers we can bring into the program.
“We’re close to a breakthrough—I know it. I just need a few more weeks. I will have better news in my next update.”
With that, the video ended.
Annja right-clicked on the file and called up its properties. When she followed the path it had been saved under, she discovered that it was stored in a folder marked...Project Báthory.
Why am I not surprised?
She followed the path to the folder where the video was stored and discovered more than three hundred additional video files.
Each of the files was named with a six-digit number that corresponded with the date on which the video was recorded. A few had an asterisk at the end of the numeric sequences, separating them from the rest. Annja found the first of those, dated over three years ago, and opened it.
Stone’s face filled the screen, and Annja gasped in surprise when she saw it.
In this video Stone looked ten years older than she had in the more recent one. She had deep lines on her face, crow’s-feet around her eyes and her hair looked limp and lifeless—a far cry from the smooth skin and vibrant hair that Stone exhibited now.
It was as if they were two separate people.
“Personal update number one,” Stone said, and Annja thought she could hear a quaver in the woman’s voice.
“It has been twelve hours since I accidentally exposed myself to the Báthory prion taken from the test subjects. I’ve decided to make these personal diary entries to correspond with my official updates in order to document any changes that might occur as a result of the exposure.
“My vital signs are all steady at this time. I’ve ordered a full blood panel to be taken so it can be used as a baseline comparative moving forward. I’ll keep track of any issues I encounter where and when possible.”
Stone looked away from the camera, and a moment later the video ended.
Annja’s thoughts churned as she closed that video and selected another. This one was also marked with an asterisk, but it was dated six weeks after the one she’d just viewed.
It began the same way, but in this video Stone’s condition had markedly improved. She not only looked better, but her energy levels were practically off the charts.
“I feel fantastic! Better than I have in years, actually.” Stone was sitting at her desk, smiling at the camera. Gone were the lines on her face and the tired, exhausted look in her eyes. She practically sparkled with vitality.
“My most recent blood test shows that the prion is activated and is replicating damaged tissue at a startling rate. I feel as if I’ve lost ten years overnight, as if I could get up and run a marathon right now with no training whatsoever. My thought processes are clearer, with less distractions, too. Better yet, I’ve experienced no ill effects.
“Given these results, I’ve created a temporary delivery vehicle in the form of a body lotion and have decided to continue treating myself moving forward. If we can find a way to bottle this, we’ll be billionaires overnight.”
Stone rambled on for several more minutes, detailing the changes she was seeing in her physical form, but Annja stopped listening, her thoughts lost in the realization of what she’d just heard. Stone’s mention of the prion they were trying to replicate was the key.
A prion was an infectious particle composed of abnormally folded proteins that tended to cause progressive degeneration in the central nervous system. Rather than multiplying in the host organism the way viruses do, prions induced normal, healthy proteins to convert to an abnormal version of the same particle. Prions were the culprits behind diseases like mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
But Stone seemed to be suggesting that they’d discovered a prion that worked in the exact opposite fashion. Instead of converting healthy proteins to unhealthy, abnormal ones, this prion was reviving the proteins that were breaking down due to age, bringing them back to their original healthy state. By altering the proteins within the cells, they were, in effect,
changing the cells themselves, reversing the effects of age and disease from the ground up. If she could find a way to control the process, Stone could quite literally prevent the human body from aging. It was a stunning achievement.
Still, the devil was in the details, and Annja knew that for all the good this project might do in the long run, there was a dark side to it, as well. The very name that had been given to the project—Project Báthory—spoke of the darkness and pain at the center of it all. Clearly Stone had continued with her research and produced a viable product, which she was selling to the highest bidder. But like Báthory before her, Stone was using the blood of innocents for the sake of her own personal agenda, and Annja wasn’t about to let that continue.
She couldn’t let it continue.
The monitor was wireless, but it didn’t take Annja long to find the computer’s tower sitting on a shelf next to the desk. She pulled the tower down, unscrewed the side plate and then tore the hard drive, a rectangular case about the size of a large cell phone, free of its mounting bracket. She left the now-useless tower where it was and slipped the hard drive into her pocket.
She was just coming around the side of the desk when there was a knock at the door.
“Hello?” a male voice called out. “Director Stone? Are you in there?”
Before Annja could say anything, the door began swinging open.
28
When Radecki arrived in the security office, he found two men on duty. As luck would have it, they were the same two men—Gregor and Chovensky—who had tried and failed to scare off Creed the other night in Čachtice.
He smiled when he saw them; they would be perfect for the job.
“Get me the feed from the containment level for the past thirty minutes,” Radecki ordered.
Chovensky jumped to comply. He clicked through several screens and hit a few keys, then spun the time signature dial backward, rewinding the video. “Coming up on the central monitor now,” he said, pointing.
Radecki leaned closer and said, “Back it up to the point where you see me coming out of containment cell six.”
Chovensky fiddled with the controls and finally an image popped up on the monitor in front of them, showing Radecki and his two companions stepping out the door of the containment cell.
“That’s it! Right there.”
“Got it,” Chovensky said.
“Okay, now advance it slowly.”
The camera only had a thirty-degree arc, so Radecki wasn’t surprised to see his digital self, along with his two companions, walk down the hall and disappear while the camera stayed trained on the door to the containment cell.
Chovensky moved to pause the feed but Radecki stopped him. “No,” he said. “Let it run.”
The security guard did so, and the three men watched the empty corridor for a few moments.
“Speed it up a little,” Radecki said.
Chovensky complied. The tape skipped along until a figure entered the screen from the left side and approached the door to containment cell six.
“Slow it down now.”
At regular speed, the figure resolved into that of Nurse Phillips. Radecki watched as she approached the containment room and then used the key card around her neck to open the door. Phillips stepped inside the cell.
“Leave it running,” Radecki ordered.
The rooms had originally been designed as storage spaces, so there weren’t any cameras in the cells themselves. The best he could do was watch the corridor and see what happened from there.
Less than five minutes after Phillips entered cell six, the door opened again, this time from the inside. It wasn’t Phillips who stepped into the hallway, but Creed. She was wearing Phillips’s white lab coat and appeared to have something in her hand.
“Can you zoom in on that?” Radecki asked.
Chovensky worked the controls, zooming in and enhancing the image at the same time. When he was finished, Radecki could easily see what it was that Creed was carrying.
Phillips’s key card.
Not good.
“Start it up again,” Radecki said. “Let’s see where she goes.”
This time, both men got in on the act. Chovensky worked the first camera, running the feed until Annja stepped past the lens and was therefore out of sight. At that point, Gregor took over. Since the cameras were time synced, he could switch to the next one in line, moving down the hall without dropping Creed from sight. In that fashion they followed her down to the end of the hall and then watched as she used the key card to call the elevator.
The elevators didn’t have cameras in them either, but Chovensky and Gregor were already calling up the feeds from the cameras outside the elevators on the other levels as Radecki said, “Find her. I want to know where she went and where she is now.”
There were a tense couple of minutes as the two men negotiated the various possibilities, but it wasn’t long before Gregor said, “Got her! Conference Level B.”
He put the feed up on the master monitor so they could all see it.
Annja emerged from the elevator and began making her way down the hall. As before, the men followed her with the cameras, watching as she wandered down several hallways, apparently searching for a way out.
Radecki found himself hoping she’d discovered the exit. It would be so much easier arranging a fatal accident if she was outside in the real world rather than locked down here with them.
But it wasn’t to be.
About five minutes after getting off the elevator, Creed looked back with some anxiety on her face and then swiftly moved to the closest door.
She swiped the key card and, when the lock flashed open, slipped inside the room, easing the door shut in her wake.
Gregor spoke up before Radecki could voice the question.
“Conference room, second floor. The one that overlooks the medical ward.”
They watched as three employees walked past in the hall outside the room and then waited several more minutes for Creed to emerge, to no avail.
Perhaps she was still in there.
He was thinking of heading in that direction when the screen in front of him fluttered several times and then went dark.
“What happened to the feed?” Radecki demanded as he felt his pulse begin to race. If he lost her now...
Gregor grimaced. “That camera’s been on the blink for the past week or so.”
“Why wasn’t it fixed?”
“Authorization hasn’t been approved. It was submitted earlier this week but the director hasn’t signed off.”
Another sign that she’s slipping, Radecki thought. “Find her!” he said. “I want to know where she is in this facility at this very moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
Radecki pulled out a chair and sat down while his men began scouring security tapes, trying to locate their missing prisoner.
29
With nowhere else to go, Annja did the only thing she could think of. She quickly stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.
She was just in time.
She could hear the newcomer’s voice growing louder as he came into the room.
“Director Stone? Are you all right? I saw the door was damaged and...Director Stone?”
There was silence for a moment, followed by approaching footsteps and then a knock at the bathroom door.
“Director Stone? Are you all right?”
Annja reached into the otherwhere and drew forth her sword, even as she rapidly weighed her options. She didn’t particularly like any of them, truth be told, but she had a hunch that whoever was out there wasn’t going to go away until he made sure Stone was okay.
Covering her mouth with her hand to muffle her voice, Annja called out, “I’m fine.”
“Okay,
no problem, then. I’ll just wait here.”
Come on!
Annja had been hoping her visitor would leave once he discovered that “Director Stone” was in the restroom, but no such luck. She would have to go out there and deal with him.
She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.
Her visitor had opened the blinds and was standing near the window, looking down into the medical ward. He was curly haired and wore a white lab coat over dark slacks.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, keeping his eyes on the patients below. “I brought the latest pathogen reports and thought we might go over...”
He turned and saw Annja standing there, sword in hand.
She nearly smiled, the expression on his face was so comical. She didn’t blame him for his shock, though. A woman wielding a sword and standing between him and the safety of the hallway was probably the very last thing he’d expected to see when he’d got up this morning.
Or any morning, for that matter.
“Close your mouth before you swallow a fly,” she told him wryly.
His jaw snapped shut with a loud clack.
Annja had planned on tying him up and leaving him locked in the bathroom, but now she had other ideas. He’d mentioned pathogen reports, which meant he probably knew exactly what was going on around here. He could fill in the blanks in the narrative she’d constructed.
“Sit down in that chair and don’t move,” she told him, pointing to the leather desk chair she’d just been sitting in. “You and I are going to have a little chat.”
He glanced at the chair and drew in a deep breath.
“Who are you? What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be in the director’s office. I’m going to call security and see to it...”
He’d started toward the door, thinking perhaps that the weapon was just for show and that Annja wouldn’t have the courage to use it.
She quickly disabused him of that notion, flicking her wrist and sending the very tip of the blade lashing toward his face, cutting a two-inch furrow across his cheek.