Ridley looked down at her clasped hands. Shortly after she’d graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico, she was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, that threatened to destroy her life, her future. It was more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and affected the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. The diagnosis was even more shocking because it was most commonly found in people who were in their forties or older; Ridley was in her early twenties. The thought of what her future held was unbearable, and she had begun contemplating suicide to avoid the hellish life that she saw looming before her.
In a coincidental encounter, she met Dr. Rachel Kempf, who told her that her company was conducting some top secret government-sanctioned genetics research that might be able to stop the progression of the disease, or even cure it altogether. Ridley was certain that even an experimental treatment that could possibly kill her was better than the inevitability of the disease that would slowly destroy her.
Kempf invited her to a small lab in San Diego, California, for treatment. Kempf’s company, a pharmaceutical firm that Ridley had never heard of, would pay all the expenses: Ridley was simply to play tourist and enjoy herself while the experimental miracle cure worked its magic.
And it did. In only a few days, the early onset symptoms of the disease that Ridley had been experiencing – weakness in her hands and a slight but noticeable slur in her speech – disappeared. Kempf showed her the MRI scans from before and after the treatment, where the abnormalities she had identified in Ridley’s brain and spinal cord before the treatment were completely gone. Ridley was cured. Permanently.
It was the most emotional moment of Ridley’s life, and that’s when Kempf chose to reveal what she truly was, taking the form of a humanoid being that was half again as tall as Ridley, with smooth white skin and a bright red feathery crest along her elongated spine. Looking down at Ridley with tremendous almond-shaped eyes, she told Ridley The Secret, that what they had done for her, they hoped to do for all humankind. But a secret it must remain, for there were many who would oppose what Kempf and the others like her sought to bestow upon humanity.
Ridley had no choice but to believe, for she was living proof. She became a convert, a zealot. And every day of her life since then had been devoted to making that dream come true for everyone.
Yet, she couldn’t avoid a gnawing sense of doubt as time went on. As she steadily climbed the ladder in the Bureau, Kempf and a few others of her kind exposed more and more of their plans to her so she could better guide events around them. Most of what she’d come to find out was benign, but there were disturbing discrepancies, such as the unfortunate deaths of several of Kempf’s chief researchers in a car accident a year ago, followed by the disappearance of Dr. Naomi Perrault. Ridley still believed the story that Perrault hadn’t been able to accept The Secret, and had instead believed it to be an insidious plot to destroy humanity. But having worked for over twenty years in the FBI, Ridley couldn’t help but analyze the data she had seen, and doubt had steadily encroached into her vision of a halcyon future.
Looking up at Curtis, she knew that his daughter’s story wasn’t far removed from her own. The girl had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer at the age of ten, when Curtis had been a junior senator. Kempf had paid him a visit and offered an experimental therapy that might cure his daughter. That the girl had cancer wasn’t yet known to the public, and Kempf’s one inviolable condition was that if the treatment was a success, it was to remain a secret.
With no hope forthcoming from the world of conventional medicine, Curtis readily agreed. Like Ridley, his daughter was miraculously cured in a matter of days, and today was enjoying a very healthy and successful time at Harvard University. After Curtis was convinced that his daughter was indeed healthy and cancer-free, Kempf had revealed herself and The Secret to him. He, too, had become a ready and willing convert.
That chapter of the Curtis family’s life had been carefully orchestrated to make sure that the public never knew the true nature of his daughter’s medical condition. The official story had been that she had been diagnosed with a serious but fully treatable liver ailment.
Ridley had only found out that Curtis knew The Secret the day before through Kempf, who had also told Curtis of her story. Keepers of The Secret were rarely introduced to one another, Kempf had explained, but she had felt they both needed to know in order to more effectively run EDS to ground. It had come as a shock to Curtis to learn that Ridley had been in on The Secret for over twenty years, and it had made them both wonder just how long The Others had been on Earth, working on their miracle cure. But Kempf’s only answer to that question had been, “A very long time.”
Curtis sighed, interrupting her reverie. “I think everyone who knows has doubts,” he told her quietly. “But I can’t deny what they’ve done, what they can do. And I can’t deny the joy every parent with a dying child would know if their child could be saved.” He was silent for a moment, before he went on, “When we found out that Kathleen had cancer and the doctors couldn’t do anything, that she didn’t even have a chance...” He shook his head, and she could see tears brimming in his eyes at the memory. “Just the knowledge of it nearly destroyed me. We couldn’t have another child. She was all we had, all we would ever have.” He fixed Ridley with a pitiless gaze that chilled her. “I would have done anything to save my daughter. Anything. And so far, nothing that Kempf and her kind have asked of us has been outrageous.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Ridley said. “They haven’t asked for anything but our silence and to help them make our world a better place. Maybe I’ve just gotten cynical, but can they really be that philanthropic? They’re going to make all our ills go away just because they’re nice, without asking anything in return?”
“Wouldn’t we, if we could?” Curtis asked. Ridley only offered him a doubtful expression. “It’s true, Monica,” he told her emphatically. “Listen, the United States spends almost thirty billion dollars a year on foreign aid. Sure, a huge chunk of that’s for weapons, but a lot isn’t. A lot of it’s medical aid. Every time there’s a disaster somewhere in the world, even in countries that hate our guts, we send them tons of money and aid supplies. And now, with the subsidies Congress is going to approve, we can help poor countries afford the New Horizons seed. And we’ve already paid for development of the seed itself. If what Kempf and her kind are offering was something that we could send out overtly without people going berserk over some sort of idiotic alien conspiracy theory, I’d gladly put my signature on a bill that would send it to the entire world and happily pay every penny of the cost. And nobody’s ever accused me of being a liberal-hearted sap.”
Ridley had to smile at Curtis’s last remark. While it was a Republican administration, the former President had been able to work well across the aisle with the Democrats in Congress, and Curtis had been able to cater equally well to the more conservative members of the party. It had been a winning combination at the polls, and the unlikely team had been very effective in office. But Curtis was universally known as a hard-ass, and beyond a very small circle of close friends, no one would ever have expected to see tears in his eyes over anything.
“So, no, I don’t think their philanthropic claims are ridiculous,” he told her. “But Kempf and the others are right,” he conceded. “People wouldn’t understand if they knew what was happening, just like these fools in the EDS don’t. Unless you’ve experienced the miracle, you can’t believe in it. We’d be burned at the stake as heretics, even though we’re offering people salvation. That’s why we have to help the world without people knowing it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jack, Naomi, three other heavily armed men and one woman stood tensely in front of the blast door to the lab dome, weapons at the ready. It had been a long, tiring flight back to California after their meeting with Richards in Maryland, capped by the dangerous procedure of gett
ing the captive harvester from the airport to the base, and then into one of the cells in the antenna silo complex.
While everyone would have liked to take a rest, Jack and Naomi insisted on finding out what had happened in the lab dome, and to Vlad.
“We don’t need any mysteries like that,” Jack had told Renee after she finished relating the story of what had happened when she had gone into the dome those long hours before.
“Open it,” Naomi ordered.
“I’ll go first, if you don’t mind,” Hathcock said easily. Jack nodded: even though the man was only carrying a G36C assault rifle instead of the massive Barrett sniper rifle, he was by far the best shot and had more combat experience than anyone else in the base, including himself.
As the massive door thrummed open, Hathcock quickly scanned the expanse of the room over his gun sights before stepping inside. Jack and Naomi followed right behind him, covering to the left and right, scanning high and low between the mezzanine level and the ground floor.
“No contacts,” Hathcock called clearly as he moved deeper into the maze of lab equipment and work benches. “I’ll take the upper level.”
“Roger,” Jack said from behind him, motioning for two men to follow Hathcock up the steps to the mezzanine. He, Naomi, and the last of the search party, Carla Torres, a woman who’d also served in Afghanistan as an intelligence specialist, moved carefully along the ground floor.
Jack had them sweep wide to the right, checking the far side of the dome from where the animal storage cage was, to make sure nothing had crept over there. It was clear.
Spreading out, they then moved back to the other side of the dome, finally coming to stand in front of the animal area where Alexander had been trapped.
“It’s clear down here,” he called up to Hathcock. Yeah, it’s clear all right, he thought. Too damn clear. “Jesus,” he said aloud. “What the hell happened here?”
Naomi moved forward far enough to reach out and open the latch on the doorway to the enclosure.
“Keep your eyes on the mezzanine,” Jack told Torres, who nodded uneasily. “Renee said that she thought she saw something moving up there.”
Torres stepped back a few paces so she could get a better view of the support structure for the upper level and scanned the length above where Jack and Naomi were standing. Then Jack stepped into the animal enclosure to look around, but there wasn’t much to look at.
“Nothing,” he said into the quiet that surrounded them.
“That’s what’s so odd,” Naomi muttered as she joined him, leaning over to inspect the monkey cage more closely. She ran her hands across the metal inside the cage, the bottom and the mesh sides. “We keep the animal cages clean, Jack, but there’s not a trace of anything but metal here, not even a tiny scrap of food caught in the mesh. And the metal’s shiny, like it’s been polished.” She looked around at the other enclosures. “It’s like the entire room’s been given an acid bath that scoured everything away.”
“What could have done that?” he asked, a shiver running up his spine as he looked at the floor for any trace of liquid. “Wait a minute. What’s that?”
Naomi turned around to look where Jack was pointing. Under the table that had once been home to a dozen lab rats was a large pool of...something. “Don’t touch it,” she warned.
“No worries,” Jack told her, edging back to give her more room as she knelt next to the puddle.
“Torres,” she said, “grab a handful of specimen vials and some swabs from that table there, please.”
Torres grabbed several vials and some swabs, quickly handing them to Naomi. Then she backed up to where she could watch the mezzanine.
Naomi carefully dipped a swab in the liquid and dropped it into the vial before sealing the lid. Then she slipped the vial into an empty pocket. Standing up, she called out, “Hathcock!”
“Here!” he answered instantly.
“Watch for any puddles of liquid up there,” she told him, “and keep well clear of them. The cages down here look like they’ve been bathed with some sort of acid, and I don’t want you stepping in any of it.” Naomi didn’t think the liquid here was acid, as it hadn’t reacted to the materials in the swab, but there was no sense in taking any chances.
“Understood,” he called back. “We’re moving into the biohazard room now...”
“There’s nothing else I can see here,” Naomi conceded.
Nodding, Jack turned away and led her and Torres back toward the steps leading up to the mezzanine.
They found Hathcock emerging from the biohazard room, a perplexed look on his face.
“Bugger if I know what happened in there,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder, “and there’s no sign of our Russian friend. But look at this.” He pointed to the edge of the door to the room. “There should be a heavy rubber seal here, and a matching gasket on the wall. They’re gone. And all the rest of the seals are the same way. And look at this.” He pointed to what had once been a computer, but was now an eerie-looking pile of shiny metal and silicon bits. “Every bit of rubber and plastic in the room is gone. Just disappeared.”
“What about the monkey?” Naomi asked, moving past Hathcock to look inside the room.
“What monkey?” Hathcock said, following her to the first biohazard containment chamber. “There’s nothing in any of these. They’re all empty. And the lower parts of them have just fallen apart.”
Naomi peered into the first chamber where the rhesus monkey had been. Just like the animal housing area, it had been scoured clean. The metal door to the lower part of the chamber that contained all the mechanisms was on the floor.
“Shit,” Hathcock swore. “Plastic hinges. They’re gone.”
“Along with everything else in the unit that wasn’t metal,” Naomi said, peering into the guts of the cabinet with the aid of the flashlight on the end of Jack’s rifle. “And guess what? There’s another puddle in here.” Using a vial and swab, she took a sample, marking the top with her pen so she’d know where the sample had been taken from.
“So what happened?” Jack asked. If anything, he was more spooked now than he had been down below.
“Whatever happened,” Hathcock told him, “it was behind a locked door.” He poked the door to the room with the muzzle of his weapon. “This was secured when we got here. I had to pry it open.” Nodding to the keypad inside the door, or what was left of it, all the plastic and rubber components having mysteriously vanished, he said, “Now I know why.”
“Naomi,” Torres called from around the corner in a tense voice. “You should see this.”
Followed closely by Jack and Hathcock, Naomi joined Torres and the others on the walkway that led past the biohazard room to the storage area.
“What is it?” she asked as she scanned the next segment of the mezzanine that led from the air intakes for the diesel generators around to the exhaust tunnel on the opposite side.
“The supplies,” Torres said. “The stacks of boxes. Half of them are gone.”
“Bloody Christ,” Hathcock muttered as he moved forward into what had been the storage area, “she’s right. But look at this.” He probed the toe of his boot through a scattering of detritus, all of it metal, foil, or ceramic, on the metal grating. “This is stuff from some of the spare parts boxes,” he said. “But some of it,” he reached down and picked up a ceramic cylinder, “isn’t something you could even take apart: this is part of a water filter with a cast plastic housing. You couldn’t even cut it off without damaging the ceramic filter. Yet here it is.”
“And where’s the rest of the stuff that should be here?” Jack mused. “There must have been at least a dozen good-sized boxes.”
“Look at this one,” Naomi pointed to a box that was stacked atop several others along the dome wall. “It’s been half...melted.”
As they stood there uncertainly, Jack’s mind began to weave together the bits of the puzzle that he and the others had seen. The conclusion he was coming to was
too terrible and bizarre to contemplate, but it seemed to fit all the facts they had at this point.
“I don’t think it was melted,” he said quietly, “at least as we’re thinking of it. I think everything that’s missing was eaten.” The others looked at him in shock. “Don’t ask me by what, but look where we’re standing.” He gestured to the grated metal flooring on which they stood. “Right above the animal area.” He turned toward the biohazard room. “I think this started with the monkey. Remember the weird lesion or whatever it was that we saw on it before we left for Spitsbergen? I think that was the first visible sign that the retrovirus was transforming it into...something. And that something started eating all the plastic and other stuff, even the animals that are missing.”
“Carbon and other organic compounds,” Naomi murmured, her terrified mind flying along the trajectory of Jack’s reasoning. She suddenly gasped. “Oh, my God! Vlad!”
Nodding grimly, Jack said, “He must’ve come up here to check on the monkey, and it was already out of the chamber.”
“Then the fucker got him,” Hathcock continued. “But how did it get out of the biohazard chamber?”
“The harvesters are shape-changers,” Naomi said. “Maybe...maybe this is some sort of a larval form that’s made up mostly or entirely of the malleable tissue. Perhaps it didn’t have any skeleton developed yet.”
“What,” Hathcock said, “so it just oozed its way out through the gaps that were left after it ate the rubber seals?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said, “but it got out of there somehow. It got Vlad, then it must have come over here...”
“...and when it was done snacking on the supplies, it dropped down onto the animals.” Jack shuddered. Had it dropped a few more feet to the right, Jack thought, sickened, poor Alexander would’ve been finished.
“After that,” Jack said, “Renee said that both Alexander and Koshka were staring at something up here, and she thought she saw something go into the air intake tunnel.”
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