“Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. Shouldn't be too hard. The program just says something about a new piece of the puzzle of human ancestry. We'll say the skeleton shows aspects of both homo habilis and homo erectus, so we think it's a unique transitional clue.”
Hitchcock said, “In the meantime, we have to figure out what to do about this.”
Balaga's eyes tilted upward in thought. “Hmm, let me ask you this. Are we sure the two are identical species? Absolutely no doubt?”
“Well, your database says they are.”
“Ok, then. We won't get far by looking at Bella. So we have two avenues we can pursue. One, we find out who hacked into my system and who is following you.”
Hitchcock tilted his head in agreement. “Easier said than done. What, may I ask, is our other avenue?”
“We can head down to the Amazon and try to track down the origin of the body. I assume you did some initial searching but haven't had time since the database match for an exhaustive investigation?”
“Yes, that's correct. And you're right, we need to go back.”
Riccio stood up again. “Look, Hitchcock, we appreciate this, we really do. But we're looking at a lot of work before morning. Unless there's something else you need tonight, can we get in touch with you tomorrow?”
“Certainly, certainly. There is only one other item I think you might find of interest. We've come up with a nickname for this new species. An assistant of mine thought of it after finding your data.”
“Ok, I'll admit, I'm curious. What is it?”
“We call them the ‘proto-humans.’”
Hitchcock left them huddled in front of the computer screen, a late night of presentation rewrites ahead of them. As he walked out to his rental car, he pulled his coat tighter around him and hugged his arms to his shoulders. Not yet winter, but the mercury in Boston had dipped below twenty, and the wind spinning off the Atlantic only added to the cold. He couldn't imagine spending a whole winter here.
Which he wouldn't have to. He'd be back in the Amazon soon. Bloody lucky that Riccio and Balaga were willing to help him. He hadn't told them about the other clues he'd come across over the years. The whisperings about a mysterious civilization. Tribe members exploring somewhere new and disappearing forever. After the embarrassments of the 1970's, when the world was suckered into thinking space-men had settled ancient underground cities in the Amazon, he needed hard proof. Now he had it with this body.
He started the engine, turned on the headlights and drove towards his hotel, still pondering his next move. Funding could be a challenge, but he'd been planning for this moment for a long time. Dean Warren owed him several big favors.
It was time to cash in.
A few seconds behind him, a white Ford Explorer stayed close enough to keep him in sight.
Two men occupied the front seats, both with dark hair and eyes as black as a special operations budget. Of slight build, they seemed too small for the full-sized SUV. Their brown skin eliminated the possibility of direct European heritage, but they spoke American English with the accent of West Coast natives.
The driver kept his eyes on the road as he carried on the conversation. “He's heading back to the hotel.”
“I agree. What about the other two?”
“They'll be in the lab for hours. And our orders were to stay with Hitchcock. Something will have to be done about him.”
The passenger nodded. “Yeah, we can't have him poking around. Not now.”
“Okay, get the secure phone. Time to touch base with Montana.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
December 4th, 2012
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Jason Andrews sat in the same uncomfortable chair in Yarrow's office. Another three months of banging his head against an unsolvable serial killer case had not improved his physical health. This time, the pain radiated from his tail-bone all the way up to his neck. On the plus side, at least now he felt easier briefing Linda Yarrow.
“Oh hell, why don't we try the bad news first.”
“Ok. There's been another murder. We watched Schmidt like a hawk for seventy-five days, much longer than we planned. We can tell you how many bowel movements he had during the period. We lost him a couple times, but never for longer than an hour, and no bodies turned up within a hundred miles of where we lost him. There were no more of the serial murders, period.
“Five days ago, after we finally had to pull the plug, another victim. I'm telling you, he knew we were watching him and managed to keep his impulses in check. The shrinks tell me that's very unusual. They're all flustered, trying to redo their profile. But he's gotta be the guy.
“This scene was in Salt Lake City. We checked and didn't see any credit card charges for Schmidt anywhere. We confirmed that he wasn't out of town for work, but there's a lotta flights in and outta Salt Lake, so he could easily have done it.”
“Hey, I don't think you ever told me, what does he do for work?”
“He's a garbage can salesman.”
“Say what?”
“Yeah, strange, huh? He works for a big distributor of metal, plastic and rubber garbage cans. Some dumpsters but not the big ones. He focuses on mostly small and medium-size businesses. He's a manager of regional sales reps, and he does most of his work from home.”
“Do we have his phone records from the time of the murder?”
“Yeah, but they're not much help. The victim died around 11 at night. No calls from Schmidt's phone after 3:30PM, but that's not unusual. He could have still made several flights to Salt Lake that would have put him at the scene.”
Yarrow let out a long breath that ended in a sigh. “Ok, sounds like you still think he's the one. I agree based on what you're telling me. We can't rule out that we're wrong, but we need to maintain some kind of monitoring of Schmidt. What do we do next?”
“Well, I did say there was some good news. We found out something interesting a few days before the latest killing. We were forced to pull the regular surveillance, but we had no more leads to follow. So I decided to tie up some loose ends I figured were just formalities. One of 'em wasn't. Remember the sister who disappeared as a teenager?”
“Yeah, Schmidt may have killed her too, right?”
“That's the one. We had electronic copies of the birth certificates—everything's online now. But I had a guy go look for the originals. Town of Cool, California.”
“You're kidding, right? There's a town called Cool?”
“That's what I thought, but it's real. Right near Sutter's Mill where the gold rush started. Foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Anyway, my guy found a birth certificate for Amos Schmidt's sibling all right. But it was a boy, not a girl. And catch this—identical twins.”
“Ho-lee Shit.” Yarrow stretched out the syllables. “So that means identical DNA?”
“Yep.”
“So what's all the stuff about the sister disappearing?”
“We're not exactly sure. Someone had to have switched some records around.”
“How the hell did the police miss that? Didn't they interview the neighbors, people that knew it wasn't a girl?”
“The family had moved down to Southern Cal a week earlier. Didn't know a soul. There seemed no reason anyone would lie about the gender of the kid. Plus she disappeared two years earlier. I mean, it's all odd, someone dropped the ball somewhere for sure. But I can see it happening.”
“So what was the kid's name? Is he still alive?”
“Here's where it gets even weirder. The kid's name was Arthur. No record of him in Social Security or any other public database. But we kept digging. An Andrea Schmidt did appear with the same place and date of birth. She has a different social security number and also was in the army for six years. We should have checked it out when we first heard about her, but that task got pushed down the priority list. A few years ago, she mustered out and seems to have disappeared as well. No tax returns, hasn't come through immigration at all.”
“Ok, let me see if I follow this. The girl that disappeared never actually existed, then she joined the army, now she's gone again. And the boy that did exist disappeared or died around the time the girl who never existed appeared.”
“Hell, I think you got it. Any thoughts on where we go from here?”
“I think you're just being nice asking me that. Of course you wanna look for any more signs of Arthur, but the best lead seems pretty obvious. There's some girl out there named Andrea Schmidt that's mixed up in all this. We need to find her.”
“One person out of six billion in the world. Shouldn't be too hard at all.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
December 4th, 2012: Las Vegas, NV
It happened first in Las Vegas, though not by design. Just the luck of the draw. It could have been O'Hare or LAX or Atlanta, or any number of other airports or subway systems in the United States. Within a day, Heathrow in London, Narita in Tokyo, and two dozen others would follow. Places with masses of humanity who dispersed after briefly sharing the same space.
Calvin Logworth would become Patient Zero. But he'd never know of the distinction. All he knew was that if God let him escape from his current bout of intestinal discomfort, he'd never touch Mexican food again. Forget Montezuma's revenge, this was the entire god-damned Aztec tribe stabbing him in the gut. He shouldered his way past two fellow travelers, and made it to a stall just in time.
Normally, an airport bathroom was a haven for Calvin, a calm port in a storm. He spent twenty weeks a year on the road, moving from a crowded bus to a glacial airport security line to the crowds congregated around the gates. All to cram himself into a tiny metal tube with two hundred of his fellow mammals. The stall might be the only time between dawn and dusk when his field of vision wasn't dominated by other people.
Today, it provided little solace. He held his face in his hands, fingers rubbing his temples and forehead. For a moment, he considered that twenty years earlier, his fingers would have been touching hair rather than bare scalp. The pain banished the thought. If he sat still enough and hunched over, maybe he could get some relief.
After five minutes, Logworth felt some of the pain dissipate. But he remained cautious, the physical reminder of his ordeal dripping down his face in the form of perspiration. His mind wandered to his next flight, a short hop to Phoenix. Logworth sold solar electrical systems for a growing distributor based in L.A. He sat eating his burrito and cursed as he remembered seeing President-Elect Reynolds on Fox News. Reynolds had promised to undo the green initiatives started by his predecessors, claiming that cheap oil and the continuing recession made such activities a waste of money. Logworth had met barely twenty percent of his sales targets since Richards lost the election a month ago. Phoenix would prove no different.
He didn't give a shit about their politics. They were all skilled liars, lining up at the troughs owned by the corporate lobbyists. A bunch of rich pigs. But he did care about paying his bills, and with Richards gone, he was likely to be out of a job. At least he'd be home tomorrow. Time to see his wife, Rita, and their teenage son, Brandon. He hoped his stomach would hold out until after he landed. He cringed at the thought of a repeat performance of the last ten minutes, this time inside the tiny bathroom on the plane.
Finally, he reached for the toilet paper roll. Brand new, and surprisingly soft to the touch. He couldn't ever remember that in an airport, and he'd been in a lot of them. Usually just some basic 1-ply sold by the pallet. He took some extra squares and blew his nose for good measure. At least something went right today. Leaving the stall, he washed his hands. No sense picking up even more germs and adding insult to injury. You couldn't be too careful in an airport.
The man with the black eyes watched Logworth head for his gate. Was he the first one? Maybe. Logworth was clearly already sick, so he'd probably progress more quickly than a healthy target. It didn't matter. Dozens if not hundreds would soon follow.
He followed Logworth to the gate for the Phoenix flight only because his own gate was beyond it. He boarded the flight for Tampa carrying only a gray backpack with a peace symbol stitched onto the back in the seven colors of the rainbow. As he settled into a plush first class seat, he closed his eyes and dreamed of his home in the Amazon.
He recalled his meeting with Gonzales during the latter's visit to the United States a month earlier. Their society had little hierarchy, and whatever excitement he felt about his task was due to its importance rather than the fact that his leader had assigned it to him. Still, the meeting had given him a keen sense of the major part he would play.
He didn't claim to understand the science. The past generation of his people had devoted themselves to the research that made their plan possible. Once they'd obtained a sample of the pathogen, increasing the virulence and perfecting the delivery system required only a methodical approach, not any kind of brilliance.
According to Gonzales, the computer had come up with the idea of using bathroom tissue for delivery. They'd plugged in a large number of variables, and that was the answer. Viruses generally don't adhere well to such non-porous surfaces, but engineering one that could survive as an infectious agent for two days without a fluid environment did not prove a major obstacle. The end result was a hybrid between influenza and EV71, or hand, foot and mouth disease.
The manufacturing of the contaminated rolls took place in a warehouse outside Jacksonville, Florida. No outside personnel ever crossed its threshold. The years of careful preparation made that unnecessary. On December second, the entire run of two-thousand rolls had taken only seventeen minutes to prepare. The man with the black eyes had collected two dozen of them, driven to Atlanta, and hopped a plane to Las Vegas.
This method had two huge advantages. The first was that it essentially eliminated the risk of getting caught. He'd even had his backpack searched at the security checkpoint. Aside from raised eyebrows, the TSA Agent had said nothing.
The second advantage was avoiding security cameras. In the twenty-first century, all mass transit stations have cameras. Especially airports. But these locations remain the most effective places to trigger the spread of a disease. Airports do have cameras in bathrooms, although they don't publicize that fact. You can't have a whole set of rooms with no monitoring and expect to maintain security. But toilet level in a stall is reasonably safe from electronic eyes. Swapping out the rolls took only seconds in most places.
All this ran through his mind as he drifted off to sleep. When he awoke, the plane had begun its descent into Tampa International. He sighed, some of the tension leaving him as he neared completion of his mission. That night, he'd be on a flight from Orlando to Lima, Peru, and from there home. Finally away from this storm of uncontrolled emotions.
Before he boarded the monorail to get from the gates to the terminal, he'd already unloaded two more rolls. Dozens more unsuspecting victims. For a moment, he thought about them. A shame, but his people would not survive without more space. They'd tried mixing with humans before, with disastrous results. He'd heard the stories about the Maya, handed down over the centuries from one generation to the next. And there was only one way to get more space. Get rid of a whole lot of people.
CHAPTER TWENTY
December 7th, 2012: Guatemala
Andrea Schmidt peered through the dense vegetation and shadowy air. Where the hell was she? She'd traveled about three hours from the compound, but now she found herself in the middle of a jungle not featured on any map.
Looking for Yum Cimil.
The ground vibrated under her. Not an earthquake, but the repetitive stomping of thousands of feet. They all stood facing a pyramid, a small one only about fifteen feet high. Which explained why it appeared in no guidebook of the area. One more lost piece of Guatemala's heritage.
Andrea stood near another side of the pyramid, camouflaged by the jungle. She didn't watch the crowd. Her eyes focused on the figure in the huge blue-green headgear, standing at the top.
Cimil.
; She shouldn't have come. Not since the army had she directly disobeyed a regular employer. She told herself that as Cimil's head of security she needed to know, that it was for his own good. The truth was that Cimil's behavior over the past months disturbed her. The unusual delivery two weeks ago solidified her intention to find out exactly what he planned for the future.
She'd known of course that Cimil sought nuclear weapons. Not much of a problem for her, and Cimil had implied that they were for the government of Guatemala. The largest illicit arms dealer in the hemisphere brokering something between a rogue former Soviet republic and his own nation hardly raised eyebrows. Andrea handled the security planning, and it seemed straightforward until the day before delivery.
The first tendrils of doubt crept into her brain when two Uighers showed up with a Georgian. The exchange took place on ships in the middle of the Atlantic, as many of Cimil's larger deals did. In this case, it involved small container ships that carried legal cargo most of the time.
Few would have thought twice about the ethnicity, as their features contain more Slavic traits than anything else. But Andrea had worked on numerous occasions in the former Soviet republics, and she knew all about the Uighers.
Descendants of Genghis Khan, they inhabited the Xingjiang province in Western China. They'd spent their entire modern history rebelling against Chinese rule or defending against the Chinese after winning temporary freedom. Plenty of them had fled to some former Soviet Republics and Turkey. But mostly not Georgia. And that's what concerned Andrea.
Sure, it was possible that a rogue Georgian general brokered a deal for nukes from Uzbekistan and these two came along for the ride. But Georgia didn't maintain a cordial relationship with most of its neighbors. Unlike in the great melting pot of the United States, a Uighur was not likely to both obtain Georgian citizenship and work with nukes.
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