“No,” Yuri replied, sounding sullen at the reminder of his complicity.
“What about the vaccine? Could they have laced it with a microbe and made it infectious?”
“How? They chiefly exported the technology, not the vaccine itself. International pharmaceutical companies on every continent produced the bulk of the world’s supply, and those lots would all have been subjected to standard quality control protocols, including testing for any contaminants.”
Right. So what was he missing? “Back up the images.”
“Ryder, we haven’t time to browse. Look through them once, and let’s get out--”
“Back it up!”
The images appeared in reverse order, the structures reassembling themselves.
“Okay, forward, but fast.”
Yuri sighed, and obeyed.
As the scenes flashed by in a stop action flicker, he noticed what hadn’t been detectable when scrutinizing the images individually. The protein strands expanded, the way particles of rice grow as they suck up water. Some bloated themselves to many times their original size, and the more white cells arrived on site, the bigger these proteins got. Wait a minute, Terry thought, a tingle of excitement creeping over his scalp. White cells are carried in on a flood of increased blood flow to the site of an infection, all part of the normal immune response. Did the rogue proteins fatten up in the presence of human serum, like inert leaches? Their amplified volume certainly explained massive build ups of intracranial pressure and headaches. And superabsorbant compounds definitely existed in nature. Why not ‘boogers’ that seemed to suck up blood? And whatever their molecular structure might be, understanding the phenomenon could reveal a way to remove these intruders, or at least shrink them down, permanently. If not, the Samanthas of the world would wake up screaming once the mannitol ran out.
So what else was going on here? He stepped into the projection to get a better look. The destruction continued all around him as he wandered in its midst and scanned depiction after depiction of freshly minted antibodies locking onto rogue proteins. The more he got into the holograph’s center, the more the images flowed over his flesh and clothing, until the colors and shapes rendered him nearly invisible, tattooing him head to toe in giant renderings of molecules and cells. Beheld from within, the infinity of this new universe extended in all directions, and he felt like a disembodied mind watching it unfold.
“Keep moving. Otherwise I can’t even see you,” Yuri called. “How safe is it being bombarded by all those lasers, anyway?”
“Worried about my health, are you?”
“Just don’t fry your brain before we find Anna. And hurry up.”
“Speed up the changes.”
The destruction accelerated, and everything around him deteriorated into the ruined landscape that had reminded him of Coventry, but by now new cellular structures had arrived. Bulky phagocytes, garbage scows of the immune system, glided along the surface of pulverized tissue, gorging themselves on bits of debris, the ingested pieces visible through translucent walls. A few of the fragments were of the white proteins, but most were remnants of what had once been part of the host’s motor neurons.
Behind him, outside the projected maze, Yuri’s cell phone rang.
Terry’s focus remained on the phagocytes. Something wasn’t right. Image after image of them raced by, recapitulating what they were meant to do--unleash a soup of digestive enzymes on whatever foreign substance the antibodies had locked onto. But the protein intruders weren’t melting on contact the way an organic substance normally would. Instead, seemingly impervious, they continued to absorb serum and expand. The caustic enzymes, however, spilled over to adjacent, already squeezed neurons, and cut them to pieces, completing the destruction of any pathways that might still be functioning.
“It’s like an autoimmune disease,” he said, barely aware of having spoken aloud, full of wonder at the malevolent simplicity of what he was seeing.
“Ryder,” Yuri said, clicking his cell phone closed. “My man spotted two cars pulling up to the front of the building. It looks like part of your reception committee. We gotta run for it.”
A distant sound of breaking glass, followed by the shriek of an alarm underlined the urgency.
“Keep the images coming,” Terry said, raising his voice over the shrill noise. He walked over to a section of the projection where the neurons remained relatively intact.” I need just a few seconds more,” he added, peering into the workings of the host’s brain cells, identifying the same landmarks that he’d seen in the lymphocytes. There was the nucleus, the many mitochondria, the large coils of messenger RNA, the shorter curls of transport RNA, and . . . “My, God!” he gasped, his heart beginning to pound.
“What?”
“Hold at this one, and come take a look!”
Inside the neuron were tiny coils of messenger RNA unlike any he’d ever seen in humans before. Stubby little spirals resembling pigs’ tails, showers of them, streamed toward the mitochondrial factories. And coming out of the mitochondria were tiny white threads--claspers, tentacles, and globular shapes trailing off behind them.
“Okay, Ryder, show me what you’ve got,” Yuri said, suddenly appearing at his side, barely visible under the camouflaging wash of psychedelic colors. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Terry pointed upward, and began to explain what the two types of messenger RNA might mean.
“I get it,” Yuri cut in. “One group of those RNA coily things is not like the others. Now can we go?”
The man’s glib indifference pissed Terry off. “Do you ever actually say stuff that isn’t lifted from Phillip Marlowe or Big Bird?”
Yuri gaped at him as if he were crazy. “Can we please focus on our current predicament--”
“You still don’t give a shit, do you?” Terry said, his anger at Yuri spiraling out of control. He suddenly felt strangely heady, as if flush with drink. “Open your eyes to the fruits of playing Robin Hood, Yuri! Look closely at what the mitochondria are putting out, probably thanks to those funny bits of messenger RNA that ‘aren’t like the others.’”
“Not now, Ryder--”
“Yes, now! We don’t fucking budge until you see your crime!” Despite the shriek of the alarms and the imminent arrival of God knew who, nothing seemed more important.
“You’re nuts--”
“I said, look at what you’ve done!”
Yuri squinted upward again, at least Terry thought he did. Any movement made it hard to read an expression of any kind under the swirl of shapes that skittered over his face.
“See?” Terry persisted. “Those tiny white strands, with claspers, tentacles, and globby pieces hanging off them--they’re coming out of the mitochondria. The host is making them. That means it’s the host’s own brain tissue that’s been programmed to produce the very proteins that are destroying it. Something’s fucked with its DNA--”
“Son of a bitch!” Yuri said, his tone suddenly bleak. Gone was the bravado. Instead, a hard, cold anger resonated through a voice so fierce that Terry, in one of his instant flashes of insight, glimpsed the authentic Yuri behind all the charades. The man’s outrage at what he’d seen in those cells matched Terry’s own, but, Terry suspected, only so far as the wrong of it might bring harm to his private world. And should those nearest and dearest to him be threatened, Terry sensed, Yuri’s code of right and wrong would be determined solely by what it took to protect them. The outlaw solipsist--women loved these guys for how they lived in the moment, in real life, or as the doomed bad-boys of gangster films. As for Anna, Terry at last understood her forgiving Yuri his adultery. She did it in exchange for a far more absolute fidelity--that he’d be faithful to the death in keeping her and Kyra safe.
Noises out in the lobby snapped Terry back to their immediate peril. What the hell had he been thinking, trying to force a mea-culpa from Yuri when they had to scram?
“Understand now what you made possible, asshole?” he whispere
d as they started toward the foyer. “Think Anna would be proud? She’d be the first to say that what you stole gave the Chinese a green light to launch their attack--”
“Give it a rest, Ryder!”
Doors slammed outside the theater’s entrance.
No escape that way.
Retreating back into the thick of the hologram, Terry spotted the nearest EXIT sign on the far side of the theater. He’d barely time to think that they’d never make it when the massive sliding door at the entrance rumbled open.
Yuri grabbed his forearm with a grip that felt like a talon. “Just freeze,” he hissed. “Don’t even breathe.”
The two men became statues.
Terry looked toward the sound of running feet. He made out a half dozen figures silhouetted against the white lights in the lobby. They moved the way shadow puppets do, in jerky spurts, holding their guns with both hands, pointing them here and there in the darkness. The weapons appeared so oversized they might have been props cut from construction paper, and the tips of the muzzles, capped with stumpy, large cylinders, were almost a parody of their silent, yet deadly purpose.
The would be shooters quickly became transfixed by the massive tower of light and color in front of them. They approached it slowly, sighting down their gun barrels. Terry felt certain that they were all drawing a bead on his head.
The size of the image gradually drew their gaze upward. As near as he could make out, their features were Asian.
A seventh figure wearing a long coat that flowed like a cape entered the auditorium. The face remained a dark oval until the person walked past the armed men and came close enough to the perimeter of the hologram to be bathed in the colorful haze.
He abruptly clenched his jaw to keep from gasping out loud.
There in front of him, her wide, creamy features captured in a pink-on-blue neon mist, Wey Chen scowled at him with a black, molten stare.
Chapter 27
Time slowed.
Terry didn’t so much as blink.
She sees us, he kept thinking.
Yet she said nothing.
What was she waiting for?
He slowly let out his breath. To him it sounded like an express train.
It made no impression on Wey Chen’s hard-eyed gaze.
Was she saying nothing to prolong the agony, or could light and magic really be all that stood between them and a bullet?
Get it over with, you bitch, he wanted to scream.
Still, he held his ground, and silence.
So did Yuri, his fingers still dug into Terry’s forearm.
The gunmen continued to be mesmerized by the upper regions of the hologram, their collective gaze fixed on the depiction of molecules and cells extending to infinity.
The instant they returned their attention to floor level, and saw their quarry, would they open fire?
Or wait for Wey Chen’s command?
Or what was it Yuri had predicted? They would set Holomolecular Designs alight for sure if we’re inside.
A gas explosion wouldn’t be hard to rig.
They could just let him and Yuri be found in the rubble.
He felt rage, not fear.
After finally getting a lead on this thing, catching a glimpse into its inner molecular workings, his every instinct told him that he could reason through what he’d observed and, given time, penetrate its secrets. But to be stopped by goons with guns--not on my watch!
His brain seethed into overdrive.
He’d jump Wey Chen.
Or better still, rush one of the gunmen, grab his pistol, and bang away with it, doing as much damage as he could.
He tensed, ready to spring.
Yuri’s fingers dug deeper into his arm.
Fuck him.
He took a deep breath, knowing it would be his last.
I love you, Carla.
Wey Chen’s severe expression turned more stern than ever. She was about to set her men on him, he was sure of it. He’d waited too long.
But nothing happened.
Instead, she gave her head a tiny shake. It was such a miniature imperative, the movement nearly imperceptible, he couldn’t even be sure it had occurred, but the surprise of it threw him so off guard that he aborted his leap.
She instantly wheeled about and headed back toward the main door, snapping out a stream of orders in Cantonese.
Her henchmen turned heel and followed without a word.
All except one. He unleashed his own rapid-fire stream of Cantonese.
She spun around to face him, and spewed out an equally venomous-sounding reply.
Their subsequent exchange grew ever more heated.
Whatever the argument was about, the men with guns kept their eyes on her.
Finally, Wey Chen’s normally cool voice rose to a screech. Reaching into her pocket and pulling out a satellite phone, she punched in some numbers, then held it out to her adversary, as if challenging him to take the call.
Terry held his breath. The seconds crawled by. Tiny details about the man leapt out a him--the swath of pock marks that cratered his cheeks, the thick black hair that kissed the top of his ears, a gold tooth that winked from inside his pursed mouth.
The other gunmen began to talk amongst themselves, their eyes now locked on the dissenter.
The man’s jaw bulged so hard Terry expected to hear a crack and see nuggets of his filling fly across the room. But the pumped-up muscles along his mandible deflated, and he stormed off toward the lobby.
Way Chen pocketed her phone, then gave a single syllable command as she strode after him. The rest of the men followed, treading carefully in the wake of her flowing coat.
“What the hell?” Terry whispered to Yuri when they were gone.
The man simply pointed toward the smaller exit door and tugged Terry toward it. “Follow me. I know all the underground passages out of here.”
* * * *
A north wind had whipped the crystal clear night into blinding squalls. One minute they hurtled along under an open sky teeming with stars, the next a confusion of white flakes that had no up or down swallowed them up. Yet Yuri never slowed their skidoo. Considering what was behind them, Terry didn’t want him to. The rotten-egg stench of leaking gas had already choked the basement corridors as they’d made their escape.
Suddenly the darkness behind him was suffused with an orange glow. It illuminated the curtains of blowing snow in a false dawn, turning them into crimson mists. Terry clung to Yuri’s back, awaiting the shock wave. There’d been no option but to ride with him. The driver of the second snowmobile, their loyal lookout, had taken off after warning them of Wey Chen’s arrival.
Terry ticked off the passing seconds in his head, hoping to reach six before the shock wave hit. That would mean they were a mile from the epicenter and probably safe enough.
It struck when he reached three.
WHAM!
Even through he insulation of his helmet, the noise deafened him.
The back end of the skidoo lifted, and he felt more than heard the motor rev dangerously fast as the treads accelerated in mid air.
He’d no idea how far forward they flew, their front hood tilted slightly down. He braced for the crash.
Yuri throttled back just a little, and leaned to the rear, forcing Terry to do the same. The shift in weight brought the nose up, and for an instant Terry thought they’d flip over backwards with the machine on top of them. But Yuri gunned it as they landed in an explosion of snow, lurching them forward, and on they went.
They drove with the lights off, the fire giving enough illumination to see the trail they’d left going in. But twenty minutes later Yuri slowed, the track marks drifted over and no longer visible.
He came to a stop, turned off the motor, and they stood watching the distant inferno. It had become a pillar of fire, shooting hundreds of feet high and bathing the frozen landscape red for tens of miles.
Terry raised his faceplate and listened, anticipating that t
heir would-be assassins might also have acquired skidoos.
Except for the howling wind and distant sirens, there were no other sounds. Soon even their fresh tracks would be blown over. For the moment they were safe.
But he wanted answers. “She’s your spy? You and Wey Chen are in cahoots?” he said, turning on Yuri.
“I wouldn’t say ‘cahoots’ exactly,” the Russian began, once more affecting that damned everything’s-fine-I’ve-got-it-all-under-control tone.
Big mistake.
Terry grabbed him by the shoulders and wrenched him onto the ground, pinning both arms with his knees. Pulling up the man’s faceplate, he enjoyed the black fear in those normally playful eyes. “No more of your crap, Yuri!”
“I’m telling you the truth. She’s working with me--”
“That woman’s a spy for her side. Might even be up to her eyeballs in the making of SHAKES. Did she promise you a deal to set me up?”
“No! It’s not what you think--”
Terry’s hands went for the throat.
Yuri instinctively tucked his chin and protected the vulnerable structures of his larynx.
Terry’s thumbs forced their way past the muscular resistance, and, with surgical precision, found Yuri’s hyoid bone and thyroid, cricoid cartilages--the structures of the Adam’s apple. He pressed, powered by a fury that verged on ecstasy. The purpling face and bulging eyes drove him to squeeze all the harder. “The woman let us go, Yuri. It was plain as day. What’s her game?”
“Yes, she let us go,” his victim gurgled. “I knew she would. Because I have something she needs. And she has what we need--”
“We? Don’t include me in your fucked-up tricks--”
“I swear, the woman’s going to help us. She didn’t trust her own contact, some big shot in government . . .”
Yuri’s attempts at an explanation trailed off to a croak, and in the distant, orange glow, his face took on the hue of a fresh bruise. The sight sent Terry’s savage euphoria to new heights. All the bullshit that had brought the world to the brink--all the conning and lies and games and agendas of everyone from presidents to generals to self-indulgent gangsters and traitorous doctors--embodied itself in Yuri. He’d done this--done it to Carla!
The Darkness Drops Page 36