Age of Voodoo

by James Lovegrove

  “Finally, after nearly an hour had passed, I went looking for Deslorges myself.

  “I was about to take the elevator up to Sublevel One when I heard a commotion. I turned to see one of my assistants, the second one I’d sent off, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, man by the name of Vijay Kanetkar, haring along the corridor towards me. From the flop sweat and panic on his face I could tell he was running for his life. Then a shot rang out. Dr Kanetkar fell at my feet, stone dead.

  “I was in complete shock. I could only stare down at poor Kanetkar, uncomprehending. Then I saw Colonel Gonzalez heading my way, arm outstretched, gun in hand.

  “I spluttered, asking him what the matter was, what had Dr Kanetkar done, why had he had to die. Gonzalez didn’t answer. Gonzalez didn’t look like Gonzalez any more. His face was expressionless, blank in a way I had never seen before, as though all the life had departed from it. Which, though I didn’t know it at the time, it had.

  “Gonzalez stopped in front of me and aimed his gun at me. I now know what it means when people say they were paralysed with terror. I was. I couldn’t for the life of me move. I stared down at the barrel of that pistol and heard some small, stupid voice in my mind insisting that it was okay to stand stock still because this wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be, I must be hallucinating or the victim of a practical joke or something, I simply couldn’t be about to die.

  “Then a voice—a real voice—cried out, ‘Stop!’ It was Deslorges. ‘Don’t shoot. I need him.’

  “Gonzalez froze. He didn’t lower the gun. He just became a statue. I think that was the moment when I realised he wasn’t breathing. His immobility was absolute, as though he were cast in bronze.

  “Deslorges strode up. ‘Change of plan, professor,’ he said. ‘Change of boss. I’m in charge now. There’s something that needs to be done, and I’m the man to do it. With some help from you.’

  “I didn’t quibble or cavil. When you have a gun pointing at you and have just witnessed the cold-blooded murder of a colleague, you simply nod and do as asked.”

  “And what did Deslorges ask?” Buckler wanted to know.

  “He demanded my full and unstinting co-operation. He said he had a use for V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T.—a personal project he wished to see through. It was half his formula, he said. He had a right to it. It was as much his property as mine or the US government’s.

  “‘And I’m ahead of you,’ he told me. ‘I’ve already tried it out on a human being, and you know what? It works. Brilliantly. Only difference is, I tried it out not on someone who’s alive but someone who’s already dead.’

  “He could only have been referring to Colonel Gonzalez.

  “‘This here is my zuvembie,’ he said, patting Gonzalez the way you’d pat a sports car or a new set of golf clubs. ‘My servant. Loyal to me like no living person could ever be. I poisoned him last night.

  “It turned out that they had been upstairs, outdoors, sharing a smoke. Gonzalez had a taste for the weed, which I didn’t know. Deslorges said they had been indulging together every now and then. Gonzalez was busy taking a good long drag, distracted, and Deslorges puffed some of his Triple Cross Powder into his face, and he was, in Deslorges’s own words, gone, gone, gone. Dead in seconds. And then Deslorges gave him a shot of V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T., straight in the neck, and a couple of minutes later he was back.

  “‘But... how?’ I asked. Alarmed as I was, I couldn’t contain my curiosity, my ardour for accuracy. ‘How can the formula work after death? There’s no heartbeat to propel it around the bloodstream. It won’t perfuse into the tissues.’

  “Deslorges just smiled. ‘Vodou,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. At the same time, I couldn’t deny the evidence of my own eyes. What else would explain the bizarre, unliving condition Gonzalez was in? Not only that, I wanted to believe it. The scientist in me wanted to believe that I had helped create a biochemical substance so potent, so fit for purpose, it could actually raise the dead.

  “‘And now,’ said Delsorges, ‘you and me, mon ami, we’re going to do the same to many more people. Everyone in this installation, in fact. Starting with those fellows in the lab.’”

  “AND YOU DID?” Buckler prompted.

  Seidelmann gave a nod that spoke of a despair so abject, it hurt to recall it. “I did. What choice was there? I had a gun to my head, literally. I—I went along with everything Deslorges told me to.”

  “You could have resisted,” said Tartaglione. “Or maybe run away.”

  “And go where?” Seidelmann snapped back. “How far do you think I would have got? I’m a scientist, a civilian. I don’t fight. I don’t resist. I’m as keen to live as the next man. So don’t give me any of your hairy-chested, damn-the-torpedoes bullshit. It won’t wash.”

  “Deslorges killed everyone in the lab?” said Buckler. “Was that how it went down?”

  “Not all of them himself. Gonzalez killed some too, at his master’s behest. The assistants first. It was awful. Them running around, screaming. Gonzalez picking them off, shot after shot, emotionlessly, unerringly. Then Deslorges dealt with the sedated volunteers. That powder of his.”

  “Triple Cross,” said Albertine coldly. “A lethal poudre. Brewed at midnight with the foulest of ingredients, and infused with the power of Baron Samedi.”

  “They choked, writhed, strained at their restraints, perished,” said Seidelmann. “And then Deslorges started resurrecting them, one by one, with shots of V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. Chanting over them as they re-emerged from the sleep of death. Wafting incense sticks up and down their bodies. Telling them he was their master now, his the only voice they could hear, his the will they must obey. He, Papa Couleuvre, was their new father.

  “I was beyond terror by this point. I was in a place inside myself that felt like the eye of a hurricane. What Deslorges was doing was impossible—unnatural in every sense. And somehow I was responsible for it too. My formula. My work. My science. Deslorges had perverted it but had also unlocked its true potential.

  “Only then did something occur to me. I had thought I was the one leading the way, making all the decisions, the senior partner in our working relationship. But what if I’d got that wrong? Perhaps, after all, I hadn’t been exploiting Deslorges for what I could get from him. He had been exploiting me. Science and the occult had met and wrestled, and the occult, through chicanery and sleight of hand, had come out on top.

  “I can’t say this revelation made me feel any better about my plight. But it did at least exonerate me from blame. I had done nothing wrong other than not be quite sufficiently vigilant. Deslorges had tricked me. Blindsided me. Played me for a fool.

  “How he crowed as those zuvembies came to life in the lab. He even had the nerve to congratulate me. ‘Normally a zuvembie takes days to raise,’ he said. ‘Days of work, and concentration, and devotion, and ritual. Now we can do it in minutes, with no effort at all. Monsieur le professeur, you are a genius, and so am I. This is magic and technology blended together in perfect harmony. The next level. Vodou two-point-oh!’

  “He put me to work, under guard by Gonzalez, mixing up a fresh batch of the formula. He warned me to do it properly. The consequences, if I tried to palm him off with a faulty or inactive product, would be dire. Then he sent his zuvembies out into the installation with orders to kill anyone they saw. He stipulated that they should keep the fatal injuries as non-violent as possible. ‘Strangle,’ he said. ‘Suffocate. Try not to break bones or maim.’”

  “He wanted the bodies intact,” said Buckler. “Fully functioning.”

  “What good is a slave whose arm doesn’t work or who’s lame in one leg?” said Seidelmann. “Soon the zuvembies were hauling freshly killed corpses back to the lab, and Deslorges was reanimating them, and I was supplying him with the wherewithal to do so, and the whole thing was like some fever dream, a delirium I couldn’t wake up from, a horror movie I couldn’t walk out of.”


  The professor shivered.

  “I fully anticipated that I would be next, after Deslorges was done with everyone else. I would be the last to be slaughtered and artificially augmented, having served my purpose and become extraneous. But once Deslorges had completed his grisly programme of extermination and revivification—he even checked the register to make sure everyone on site had been accounted for—he seemed to forget about me. He was so thrilled with his new zuvembie army that nothing else mattered. Spying an opportunity, I escaped. I slipped through the throng of ambulatory cadavers and hurried up two floors to here, the communications hub, hoping to get an alert out to our Washington contacts. Alas, Deslorges was one step ahead. The place had been trashed, as you see.”

  “And nobody owns a cellphone here?” said Buckler. “A sat-phone, even?”

  “Not allowed. We’ve been operating under conditions of the strictest secrecy, which extends to a complete clampdown on personal communications. Internet access is permitted but no email or social networking sites. Those are all blocked externally by a system of firewalls, with no way round. Given that and the destruction of the satellite uplink, I couldn’t see what else to do but hide in the supply closet and hope—hope that help would arrive, that some sort of automatic response protocol would be triggered.”

  “It did. Marines were airdropped in.”

  “Ah yes. I dimly heard gunfire while I was in my dark little sanctuary. That was how long ago?”

  “Three days.”

  “And now you’ve come. This magnificent seven. To follow in their footsteps and doubtless fail as they did.”

  Buckler batted aside the jibe. “During all this time you’ve been squirreled away, Deslorges—Couleuvre—never came looking for you? He just left you as a loose end? Seems kind of odd.”

  “I’ve wondered about that myself. I can only assume he didn’t care enough to bother. What kind of threat would I be to him, after all? Or perhaps, in some strange way, he feels I’ve earned the right to live. Whatever dark fantasy this is that he’s playing out, I was instrumental in helping him realise it. He’s thanking me by letting me carry on breathing. A professional courtesy, you could call it.”

  Seidelmann lapsed into silence. Talking so much, after nearly a week of enforced muteness, had tired him out. He scratched the scrubby beard covering his chin and contemplated the high-tech rubble all around, as though seeing in it a reflection of the state of his own achievements and aspirations.

  “Well,” said Buckler, “that fills in most of the blanks. What we still don’t know is what the fuck Couleuvre is up to. What’s he want all those zuvembies for?”

  “Company?” Tartaglione offered. “Maybe he hasn’t got enough Twitter followers.”

  “Albertine? You have any suggestions? Better than Tartag’s, please. Not that that would be difficult.”

  “None,” Albertine said. “Bokors tend to seek power—personal advantage. Couleuvre, as far as I can tell, is no exception. But how he can find it stuck here on this tiny island, in this dungeon of a place, beats me.”

  “Professor Seidelmann,” said Lex, “you told us Couleuvre did searches on your computer. About Anger Reef.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea what he found?”

  Seidelmann shook his head. “He didn’t mention anything.”

  “Why don’t we have a look ourselves? It might provide a clue.”

  Buckler shot Lex a sidelong glance. The SEAL commander clearly resented him taking the initiative, the more so because Lex’s proposal was a good one.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said, grudgingly. “Where’s your workstation, prof?”

  “My office. One floor down.”

  “Then let’s ship out. Dove? You’re our go-to guy for babysitting civilians. The prof’s yours. Keep him chipper and don’t let him out of your sight.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FAILSAFE

  SEIDELMANN WAS NOT keen on the idea of going anywhere but up and out of the installation.

  “Isn’t this a rescue?” he bleated to Lex as the group filed towards the staircase. “How can dragging me further into the lion’s den be in any way construed as rescuing?”

  “Take it up with Lieutenant Buckler,” Lex replied. “I’m just the hired help.”

  “I have no intention of dying today—not after all I’ve been through.”

  “Good for you. Neither do I.”

  “This is madness.”

  “And whingeing about it makes it so much more bearable.”

  Seidelmann could see he was going to get no sympathy from the Englishman, so gave up trying.

  Sampson nudged open the door marked STAIRS and peered down. “No bogeys, far as I can tell,” he said, “but visibility’s for shit. Too damn many shadows.”

  “Proceed with caution,” Buckler advised.

  “Yeah. I was going to do that.”

  They descended at a snail’s pace, into gloom. The concrete steps bore dark brown smears and streaks, and Lex pictured Papa Couleuvre’s zuvembie minions heaving bloody, freshly killed corpses down the stairs, leaving gory stains behind. There was no sound except the whisper of their own footfalls and the rustle of clothing.

  Sublevel 2 was much the same as the floor above, although the lighting seemed marginally dimmer, as if to remind them they were that bit deeper down, that bit further from the sun. The air felt chillier, too, and clammier.

  Sampson and Tartaglione peeled off left and right to check the junctions at either end of the passage. They pronounced the coast clear in both directions.

  “You do the honours, prof,” Buckler said, and Seidelmann, with a show of great reluctance, led the way to his office.

  It was a small room furnished with a simple metal desk and an uncomfortable-looking typist’s chair on castors. Seidelmann had personalised it by hanging up the framed diplomas Lex had seen on the video clip, along with the photo of him shaking hands with the former president. These decorations were incongruous in such a sparse, modest space, like a duchess’s jewels loaned to a pauper. They added nothing but the impression that Seidelmann was an insecure man who needed constant validation of his own status.

  Seidelmann booted up the desktop PC, typed in his password, and called up the internet browser history. He scrolled through, looking for sites Papa Couleuvre had visited. Everyone clustered round him, Buckler and Lex at either shoulder.

  “Here we are,” Seidelmann said. “Searches on early Cold War history, US military construction projects around that time, the Cuban situation, geography of the Caribbean, Anger Reef itself... The dates of the searches tally with when Deslorges started getting curious about this place. I had no idea how extensively he pursued the topic. There are reams and reams of pages listed. It would take hours to go through them all.”

  “Narrow it down to sites he visited more than once,” Lex said. “If he hit on something particularly juicy, chances are he’d have gone back for a second look.”

  Seidelmann squinted at the screen. “That’s logical. It’d likely be towards the end of his online sessions as well. If he was after a specific item of information, once he’d found it there’d be no need to go on.”

  After a few more mouse clicks, he said, “Here’s a potential candidate. Visited three times in two days, less than a fortnight ago. I’ll just pull it up.” He examined the result. “Oh dear. Doesn’t look very authoritative, does it?”

  The screen showed an amateurishly designed website. The layout was clumsy. Yellow text blared against a black background, the font too large as though someone was shouting rather than talking.

  “Some kind of conspiracy theory forum, it looks like,” said Seidelmann. “See the list of subject headings? CIA Mind Control Projects. Reverse-Engineered Alien Spacecraft Technology. Sedatives In The Water Supply. The Illuminati Killed JFK. God knows what Deslorges dug up from here, but doubtless it wasn’t good. Or accurate.”

  “Do a keyword search for Anger Reef,” said Buckler.
r />   Seidelmann tried. “Nothing.”

  “Worth a shot. How about listening post? Radar monitoring? Underground installation?”

  “Nothing, nothing and nothing. Just by speed-reading, I can tell this is a site run by oddballs for oddballs. It’s all outlandish claims backed up by not a scintilla of credible evidence. And the grammar and spelling are atrocious. Here’s someone who’s managed to get Hitler’s name wrong. Two ‘t’s. And the abortion he’s made of ‘Führer’... That’s the level of intellect on display. The internet, one of the greatest cultural and scientific achievements of all time, and it’s become the haunt of illiterates and hopelessly gullible—A-ha.”

  “What?” said Buckler.

  “Well, that’s why we didn’t find it using keywords. Installation has more than one ‘l’, you idiot.” He was talking to the screen. “This is a comment posted on a thread about military bases, secret ones and not so secret ones. Someone’s saying that all major underground US military installations carry a failsafe in case they’re overrun by enemy forces. The person claims he used to work in the command centre at NORAD, monitoring the attack detection systems for incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles and, in the wake of nine-eleven, for rogue commercial aircraft as well. He says, and I quote, ‘If the Russkies or whoever stormed Cheyenne Mountain, no way were they gonna be allowed to keep it to themselves.’” Seidelmann’s lip curled over the word gonna. “‘There’s a purge protocol in place that’d leave them with nothing but a smoking ruin and a handful of ashes, if activated.’ Someone else then asks him to elaborate. ‘You mean like a ton of napalm or something?’ And our friend replies, ‘Like that only bigger and a lot more radioactive.’”

  “The next poster calls bullshit on that,” Buckler said. “Whole thing degenerates into a slanging match.”