Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  She stood. Her own hands were shaking. This was it. Success or failure.

  She read the message. By the fourth paragraph, she knew the answer.

  She glanced up. Jake was staring at her, hate in his eyes.

  No matter. He would be dead soon.

  Orchid folded the sheet of paper carefully and tucked it in a pocket. Within hours she would have the Uzumaki. Within days it would be done. Kitano would be dead, the Uzumaki would be free, and she would have all the money. She did something she hadn’t done in a long time.

  Orchid smiled.

  32

  DUNNE STARED ACROSS THE TABLE AT KITANO, AND KITANO stared back. The only other person in the room was an FBI interrogator named Felix Carter. No lawyers were present, no aides, no security personnel. Any information gained would have no criminal relevance, could not be used in a court of law. Kitano had demanded this in writing. He had something to tell them. He would do so only if he was granted blanket immunity.

  Age was destroying Kitano, but he was putting up a hell of a fight. The man was nothing but bone and sinew. His eyes had yellowed, the pupils dark and cold, a contrast to his bright orange prison jumpsuit. Dunne was in a three-thousand-dollar blue pinstriped suit by H. Huntsman, one of four by that Savile Row tailor that hung in his closet. When Dunne had first met Kitano, his most expensive suit had come from Brooks Brothers. Their individual fortunes changed, a role reversal for the billionaire and the up-and-coming wonk, one ascending spectacularly, the other falling dramatically.

  Kitano had three further stipulations. The first was that Dunne be physically present. Dunne knew why. Kitano had leverage on him and was prepared to use it.

  The second one was unusual. Kitano kept a large pigeon rookery at his house in the Maryland countryside, north of Washington, D.C. Even in jail, he’d made sure the pigeons were attended by a full-time caretaker. Hitoshi Kitano demanded full and regular access to his pigeons.

  Requirement number three was perhaps the most visceral, in that it demonstrated the primitive survival instinct. Dunne could tell by the videos of Kitano talking to the FBI. He knew Kitano’s body language like he knew his own father’s. Kitano said the woman was after him. She wanted to kill him, he was certain. Kitano’s whole body had stiffened when he’d said it, his hands held in tight fists. He was scared to death.

  Demand number three: under no circumstances, no matter what happened, no matter what pressure she applied, could they turn him over to her.

  IN THE ADJOINING ROOM WAS A TEAM OF INTERROGATION experts analyzing the spectrum of Kitano’s voice patterns, the fluctuations in his pupil size, the electrical conductivity of his skin. The FBI interrogator would be getting real-time updates on Kitano’s stress levels.

  The interrogator began by reading a summary of events pertaining to the woman. Dunne took no pleasure watching Kitano’s shocked reaction to the details of the victim taken to Bellevue, the “731 Devil” symbols carved into his chest. A similar reaction when Kitano learned of the finger bone in the cylinder with the words KITANO MUST PAY.

  Before today, Kitano couldn’t talk about their cozy and highly improper relationship without getting himself in at least as much trouble as Dunne. But now the duplicitous rat had blanket immunity.

  THE QUESTIONS STARTED EASY, QUERIES ABOUT KITANO’S personal information, his business interests, all for the instrument boys to get baseline readings. From there it moved into more interesting territory, questions about the man dropped off in Times Square. Dunne watched closely, attentive to Kitano’s every gesture. He appeared calm, answering in simple declarative sentences.

  Finally the interrogator nodded to Dunne.

  “All right, Hitoshi,” Dunne said. “Talk. Do you know who the woman is? Or are you just jerking us around?”

  Kitano’s eyes met Dunne’s. “Did you find a tattoo on the victim? An Orchid flower? Anything like that?”

  Dunne said, “Yes.”

  Kitano nodded. “She goes by the name Orchid.”

  “Orchid,” Dunne said. “How do you know?”

  “I saw the photo. I recognized her.”

  Kitano was correct. They’d picked up their first real information on the woman less than an hour ago. The name tattooed on the finger bone had set off alarm bells with the CIA station chief in Beijing.

  “Who is Orchid?” Dunne asked Kitano.

  “She is a kind of specialist. Known in the Chinese right-wing circles. It is rumored she was behind the bombing of Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine. Last year. And the murder of Kabawi.”

  “Kabawi?”

  “A conservative member of the Japanese legislature. He led the movement to purify the textbooks of anti-Imperial rhetoric. What your newspapers would call a revisionist. Denying the Rape of Nanking. The Korean comfort women.”

  “Why does Orchid want you?”

  “Many know of my past, what happened at Harbin. Her benefactor wants revenge.”

  “Who does she work for?”

  “There are rumors of a billionaire Chinese backer. Rabidly anti-Japanese.”

  “No names?”

  “Billionaires in China are a cancer. In 2003 there were none—now there are hundreds. It is very dangerous, such sudden power, sudden wealth. It amplifies one’s secret desires, secret prejudices. Such men are very dangerous.”

  You should know, Dunne thought. “Why did Orchid torture Liam Connor?” he asked.

  Kitano’s demeanor changed at this question. Dunne saw it in his face, his body language. A chink in the man’s confident armor. Now they were getting down to it.

  The room was silent. Dunne began to wonder if the old man had suffered a stroke.

  Finally he spoke. “Do you know what happened after they destroyed the USS Vanguard back in 1946? About the confrontation I had with Connor on the USS North Dakota?”

  A knock, and the door to the interrogation room opened. It was Dunne’s attaché. He passed Dunne a note. It said one word: IMPORTANT.

  DUNNE STEPPED OUT INTO THE HALL. HIS DEPUTY WAS WAITING. “What now?”

  “In Ithaca. They found a woman shot dead near Maggie Connor’s workplace. No one can find Ms. Connor. Or her son. The police said there was a fire. And a second fire that was even stranger. Out in the sticks with the rednecks. Firemen found what looks like the remnants of a state-of-the-art biotech lab. The firemen also found two bodies inside, both with gunshot wounds. One of the victims was a Cornell professor, a friend of Jake Sterling’s.”

  “Sterling? Has anyone spoken to him about this yet?”

  “They can’t find Sterling, either.”

  “What? But he should be at Detrick by now.”

  “He never showed.”

  “And why wasn’t I told?”

  No explanation.

  “Is everyone around here goddamned incompetent? Why didn’t Sterling show up?”

  “No idea, sir.”

  DUNNE WAS SHAKEN AS HE STEPPED BACK INSIDE THE INTERROGATION room. He sensed a malevolent pattern, a dark web of danger just outside his reach. Now he wanted answers. “No more stalling, Hitoshi. Why did Orchid kill Connor?”

  Kitano raised his right hand, highlighting his missing finger. “She is looking for a small brass cylinder. The length of the medial phalange finger bone. At Unit 731, I had it implanted in my finger. I was extracting it when Connor stopped me. He took it. I had no intention of bleeding to death, not before I released it. I am the seventh Tokkō.”

  The light went on in Dunne’s head. “Connor kept the cylinder? He was holding on to a specimen of the Uzumaki all these years?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned back, stunned. He thought of the reports from Ithaca, Maggie Connor going missing. The pieces snapped together, a cold knot growing in Dunne’s chest.

  33

  JAKE DROVE THE FEDEX VAN ALONG ROUTE 96A, THE SAME road he’d taken the morning before. FedEx vans were like telephone poles, part of the landscape. The President could put on a FedEx uniform and no one would notice him.
>
  Orchid crouched behind him in the storage area, gun drawn. Dylan and Maggie were tied up in the back, mouths wrapped in packing tape. Orchid was guiding them by Liam’s message, the yellow sheet of paper she had taken from Vlad. Jake didn’t know what the text said, but he had a damned good idea where it was leading them. There wasn’t much else out here but the Seneca Army Depot. They were just a few minutes away now.

  In the rearview mirror, Jake caught glimpses of Maggie and Dylan in the shadows. Orchid had secured them to the wall with the same kind of high-tech handcuffs she’d used on him. The cuffs opened and closed electronically, and Orchid controlled them by tapping a sequence on her leg with her right hand. The same kind of tapping also controlled the electric shocks that came from Jake’s belt. There must be some kind of transducer built into Orchid’s gloves. She used them to control everything.

  He paid close attention to the patterns of the taps of her fingers.

  UP AHEAD THE FENCING STARTED, VISIBLE IN THE VAN’S headlights. On Orchid’s command, Jake parked the van near a locked gate. He turned off the headlights.

  “Put these on,” Orchid said, tossing him the cuffs.

  Jake obeyed, closing the latch down loosely.

  Orchid tapped a pattern on her leg and the cuffs came alive. The shackles tightened, pulling in close, to the edge of real pain.

  She tossed him a small army shovel. He caught it with one hand. She tapped another sequence on her leg, and Jake jumped. A bolt of electricity shot through him, emanating from his waist belt, and just as suddenly stopped.

  Jake was practically hyperventilating, his heart beating rat-a-tat-tat.

  “Don’t forget,” she said.

  THEY WALKED DOWN AN ENDLESS ROW OF BUNKERS, EACH one an ominous, hulking shape in the growing darkness. Jake was in the lead, Orchid forty feet behind, Dylan just ahead of her. Maggie was still in the van, unconscious—Orchid had stuck a needle in her that knocked her out in less than a minute. Orchid had placed a handwritten sign in the window that said, TOW TRUCK ON ITS WAY, and they’d left her behind.

  Jake had taken a careful inventory of Orchid’s tools. He had been watching her closely, both in the van and now, catching looks when he could. She had on a small black backpack and carried a Glock in her hand. She’d put on thick, wraparound goggles that Jake was pretty sure were equipped with night vision. And she had her gloves. She could shock him with a few taps of her fingers. She could similarly control their cuffs. Jake was pretty sure that two taps of her index finger, one with her ring finger, followed by three with her thumb caused the cuffs to tighten. The opposite sequence caused them to loosen.

  If Jake could get to her, knock her out or kill her, he thought he could release the cuffs. But he had to get past that gun. And he had to do it without getting Dylan killed.

  Every few hundred feet was another concrete bunker, all long out of use. They’d passed twelve of them so far. He was alert to everything, every sight and every sound. In the distance he heard squawking. Liam had told him there was a pond on the other side of that tree ridge, a stopover for the geese.

  A WHITE DEER CROSSED THE ROAD UP AHEAD, A GHOSTLY apparition seeming to float in the darkness, its body as luminous as the moon. When the fences went up around the periphery in 1941, a decent-sized population of deer were trapped inside, and a few rare white deer were among them. Over the years, the depot guards hunted the brown deer, but they left the white ones to graze among the bunkers. Seneca Army Depot now had the largest white deer population in the world. The simplest rule of evolution, of ecology, of ethics. You reap what you sow.

  Liam had brought Jake here ostensibly to show him the white deer. Liam put out salt licks, then collected the DNA that scraped off the deers’ tongues when they licked them. It had always seemed a bit odd to Jake: Liam wasn’t a population biologist. The deer were visually striking but nothing special genetically, simply rich in the genes for white fur.

  Now Jake understood: the deer were not what had attracted Liam to Seneca Army Depot. The real reason was its isolation and the bunkers. Miles of nothing. Liam had told him that a single guard was responsible for patrolling the whole damn thing.

  If Liam wanted to hide a dangerous pathogen, this would be a great place to do it.

  “Stop,” Orchid called from behind. She ordered him to veer right. The visibility was better now, the moonlight bathing the white concrete bunkers in an eerie glow.

  Jake glanced over his shoulder, saw Orchid herding Dylan before her, the boy scared half to death. She checked a handheld GPS, triangulating in space and time by four satellites flying over twelve thousand miles overhead. Liam must have left a latitude and longitude reading that told where to find the Uzumaki. Orchid’s footsteps slowed regularly each time she checked the GPS. She was checking it all the time.

  “Take a forty-five-degree right turn.”

  Jake turned. There was nothing. Only empty grass, waist-high. A few chunks of concrete sticking up through the weeds.

  “In there?”

  “Twenty meters,” she said.

  He counted them off, twenty strides, pushing through the tangle of brush and weeds. He stopped when the count was done.

  At first he saw nothing but grass and brush, but then he spied a dinner plate–sized chunk of concrete. In the moonlight, he could just make out a rough design etched in the concrete, three lines spinning outward from the center. A spiral.

  “That’s it,” Orchid said, glancing down at the page with Liam’s message. “Move it aside and dig.”

  Jake held up his hands, still shackled together.

  With the gun, she gestured to Dylan beside her, his hands cuffed before him. “Get cute and I shoot the boy.” She tapped her fingers on her leg and the cuff on Jake’s right wrist popped open.

  Jake was careful to note the sequence of taps she used.

  Jake took the spade and went to work.

  After ten minutes, at a depth of maybe three feet, his spade struck concrete. He brushed away the dirt.

  “Dig it out,” Orchid said.

  Five minutes later, he had it free of the earth. It was a cylindrical plug of concrete, maybe a foot in diameter and two feet long. It weighed about fifty pounds. A piece of rebar stuck out of the top, like a handle.

  Orchid said, “I was sure it was in one of the bunkers. I checked nearly every damned one.”

  Jake understood. The bunkers drew your attention, but they were decoys. Liam had hidden the Uzumaki in a nondescript patch of weeds. Orchid couldn’t have found this spot in a hundred years. This is what Liam had been hiding, and what he had died trying to protect.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUNKER WAS SEALED BY A MASSIVE iron door, ten feet tall and thick as a safe’s door. A larger metal bar sealed it closed, locked by a simple combination padlock. Orchid read him the combination from the sheet of yellow paper. Jake opened the lock and lifted the handle. To his surprise, the door swung open easily, the hinges barely squeaking. The interior of the bunker was dark, but Jake detected a kind of odd glow inside, brightening and fading with the rhythm of a heartbeat.

  “Inside,” Orchid ordered.

  As Jake entered, the source of the glow became clear. Bioluminescent patches of red, green, and yellow all along the walls, pulsing slowly on and off. The glowing fungi that Liam had left in the letterbox—there were rows and rows of it here.

  “Go to the back,” Orchid said.

  Orchid flipped a switch, and an overhead light turned on.

  The bunker was a half-cylinder, twenty feet high in the center and maybe a hundred feet long, like a submarine cut in half. The floor was swept bare concrete. But it wasn’t empty, like the one that Jake had visited when he came here with Liam. Rows of lab benches lined the walls, some covered with beakers, pipettes, and a few larger pieces of equipment, others with trays of glowing fungi, pulsing red, yellow, and green. It was a smaller, stripped-down version of Liam’s lab back at Cornell. He must have brought it
in bit by bit over months. Maybe years. Assembling it on his trips to supposedly observe the white deer.

  Orchid directed Jake to set the concrete plug down. Orchid held Dylan close, the gun to his head.

  Dylan was wide-eyed, staring at a strange chair in the center of the space. It was made of black reinforced carbon struts, almost like a high-tech electric chair. There were straps on the arms and legs, and there was a terrifying head assembly of bolts and clamps.

  Next to the setup was a small metal table. On it, Jake saw a MicroCrawler.

  It took him a moment to realize.

  This is where she had tortured Liam.

  Dylan was transfixed by the chair. He looked scared to death. He seemed to grasp what it was for. He was shaking, in full-blown panic.

  He broke for the door.

  Orchid caught him with one arm and tossed him back, smashing him into one of the cases holding the glowing fungi. The boy fell to the ground, pulling trays of fungi down on top of him.

  Jake took a step toward her. “If you hurt him, I’ll—”

  Orchid tapped on her leg and a lightning bolt ran up Jake’s spine. He fell to the ground, quivering, seeing white.

  Finally it stopped. After a few seconds he managed to sit up.

  Dylan had backed against a wall, patches of glowing fungus clinging to him. His face was empty, hollow, as if the boy Jake knew and loved had disappeared.

  “Stay still,” she said to Dylan, “or I’ll shoot you.”

  Orchid pointed to the chunk of concrete. “Break it open,” she said to Jake.

  Jake slowly stood. He lifted the plug of concrete and threw it down hard on the concrete floor. A corner broke off, but nothing more. The second time was no better. The third time it hit at an angle and split open cleanly, revealing a hollow, spherical cavity inside. Inside the cavity was a large child’s red balloon.

  An old builder’s trick. You want to leave a cavity inside concrete, help keep the weight down, you embed an inflated balloon when you pour it.