Androcide (Intel 1 Book 5)

by Erec Stebbins

  And he’d tinkered far beyond an Ebola or Marburg-like man-plague. Those horrible viruses stumbled in the air, spread mostly by direct contact with bodily fluids. But as Gone sifted through the genes engineered into this androcidal bioweapon, she came across genes from other viruses associated with aerosolization and airborne transmission. The madman was building a hemorrhagic flu.

  And this was an early version of the virus.

  Lodmell died years before. This killer was patient. This killer kidnapped, experimented on, and murdered who knows how many men to develop and perfect his microscopic monster. What progress had he made since then?

  But his strength was his undoing. He used the best tools at his disposal—Richards’ viral backbone. The cloning vectors and genes in her freezers. Gone only had to take the sequencing information from the murder victims and compare it to the published research from the Richards lab.

  Perfect matches.

  The probability that the designer of the virus—the killer himself—worked in her laboratory sky-rocketed. Only one member of that lab possessed the size and strength to hoist a dead man over his shoulder and cart him up a flight of steps. Or to place a ring of concrete around a dead priest’s neck.

  Thomas Dyer.

  She opened her eyes, checking the monitor and seeing she’d dozed half an hour. She sat up, grabbed a water bottle, and splashed her face. Time to move. She had the proof. The data was only hours old, but she had her man.

  She emailed her conclusions to Sacker. She texted and called him. But he didn’t pick up.

  Drunk again.

  “Dammit, Tyrell!”

  She couldn’t move this case any further on her own. Dyer was as psychopathic as any serial killer, and far, far more dangerous with the virus he possessed. They couldn’t just collar him with a swat team. They needed a biohazard-suited, combat ready swat team, and she doubted very much those were within easy reach.

  But INTEL 1 had the resources. They could do the impossible. If anyone could get such a team together, they could.

  “Sorry, Tyrell, but we have to move on this. With or without you.”

  She picked up her phone and dialed Rebecca Cohen’s number.

  61

  Election Night

  Sacker threw a beer bottle at the wall-mounted flatscreen. The television shook, teased a moment like it might fall, but held on for dear life. Cheers erupted from the speakers and the bottle shattered on impact with the floor.

  “We return to the headquarters of the Suite campaign here in Florida.” More screams. “As you can see, a lot of jubilant supporters tonight as their candidate seems poised to pull off one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.”

  A man rushed in front of the reporter, brandishing a sign. The cartoon silhouette of a woman in a hijab filled the screen. A red line circled her head with a diagonal through it.

  “Make America Christian again! Take our country back!”

  Burley men moved the celebrant to the side. The reporter continued.

  “As you can see, supporters are not backing away from some of Daniel Suite’s more controversial positions. The question now becomes: just how will he govern? Will the firebrand who rose to national prominence on conspiracy theories and targeting religious and ethnic minorities temper his rhetoric? Will there be the predicted pivot to the middle as the campaign stage ends?”

  People behind the reporter screamed “No!” into the camera.

  “At least for his more ardent fans, they aren’t in the mood for compromise.”

  Sacker hammered the remote with his fist and the screen went dark.

  Fucking klansman’s going to be our next president.

  Staring forward, he reached over to the table beside his recliner. His hand swept the air over an empty six-pack carton.

  “Great.”

  His eyes flicked to the kitchen cabinet. Through the glass in the doors, he could see the caramel color of the bourbon. His last bottle. But it was full.

  Stop it, Tyrell. Not tonight. Don’t let the bastard push you over the edge.

  He pressed his hands to his eyes. It’s just too much. The case snowballing down a wild path. Gone was likely poring over data from research labs. Samples taken from an exhumed corpse, no less! INTEL 1 doing who knew what in the bowels of the earth. Getting hammered wasn’t professional. Not right now. Not with so much on the line.

  He leaned out of the recliner and stood, heading toward the kitchen.

  Just a shot.

  On the way he scooped his cell phone to check messages. Strange—Gone hadn’t written anything all night.

  Oh yeah. I turned it off. Why’d I do that?

  He knew why. As he stopped in front of the cabinet, his pretense faltered. He’d been planning to get wasted for hours now, ever since it was clear that pompous bigot was going to be president. The beer had him pretty buzzed. But he aimed higher.

  And I didn’t want Gracie calling. Hearing me like that again.

  He pressed the button, waiting for the phone to power up. The bourbon whispered, right at eye level, the caramel color rich and savory. He could taste the wood and the burn of ethanol in his throat.

  Just one fucking shot!

  The phone danced. Buzz, buzz, buzz as ten messages from Gone burped their way across his screen.

  Damn!

  He unlocked the device and opened the messaging app, scrolling through the texts. His eyebrows rose.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Dyer? That Nordic, uptight giant in a white lab coat? Man-plague? Now there’s a phrase he’d not ever considered becoming part of his lexicon. But Dyer?

  But the more his pickled neurons stumbled through the facts, the more sense it made. Sense? Nothing made sense in this nightmare. But consistent, yes. It fit the facts—the physical size of the killer, association with the Richards lab, the biological engineering.

  Thomas fucking Dyer.

  Well, if that didn’t top it all for the night. A racist billionaire who promised to ethnically cleanse America ascends to the presidency. The Eunuch Maker turns out to be some Aryan whiz-kid in a lab coat with a damn man-plague virus. Captain America was due any minute to tell him it’s all a Nazi plan from 1942.

  Sacker grabbed a pack and flicked up a cigarette, clamping it between his lips. The whiff of kerosene from the lighter mixed deliciously with the burning tobacco. He pulled on the filter, the drag long and deep into his lungs. He took a final look at the bottle. It retreated, hiding inside the cabinet. It knew the winds had changed.

  Not tonight, motherfucker.

  Tonight. Gone had contacted INTEL 1, said she hoped tomorrow they’d organize some kind of response to apprehend Dyer.

  He could be gone tomorrow or kill five more people.

  Sacker liked Cohen. INTEL 1 was swell. But this was his goddamn case. He’d sweated out a half dozen dead bodies, risked his career to bring Gone in. All so the Feds could swoop in tomorrow?

  He burped and tasted beer.

  No way in hell.

  Sacker shuffled to a closet by the front door, yanked the door open and grabbed his jacket, tossing it on a nearby table. He removed a lockbox and keyed in a code, the latch popping on the safe. The dull sheen of a nylon-based polymer welcomed his hand as he removed the firearm.

  You’re drunk, Tyrell. You need to back up. You need to follow the damn protocols.

  He ignored the voice and suited up, strapping in the weapon, donning his jacket. He looked in the mirror by the door. His eyes were bloodshot. His skin flaked, the pores open. He could feel and see the effects of the alcohol.

  Thomas Dyer.

  The son-of-a-bitch had stood right in front of them at NYU, likely laughing behind those cool blue eyes. Drunk or not, the murderer was not going to get one more night to do his dark deeds. And whatever the hell he planned with that virus.

  He opened the door and stepped into the cold morning air. It was dark, the dawn still two hours away. A short walk to his car and he
pressed the key controller, the lights blinking, the door lock popping. He pulled the handle and swung it open, flopping into the seat heavily and slamming it shut. Fog left his lips as he fitted the key to the ignition.

  Thomas Dyer.

  The engine revved and the lights flashed on, revealing a thin dance of snowflakes. He pulled out into the road and gunned the accelerator.

  62

  Dyer Straits

  Thomas Dyer lived on Long Island, taking the train each day into New York City and NYU. Sacker followed a parallel course along the Long Island Expressway toward Old Westbury, exceeding the speed limit and getting away with it in the wee hours. The darkness surrendered to a soft glow on the eastern horizon in front of him. An hour later and he would have been blinded by the sun.

  Once off 495, he relied on his smartphone GPS. The irritating voice chirped. The AI only botched the job once along some of the more podunk roads leading to the budding mass murderer’s home behind a failing suburb.

  He must rise early.

  The commute to the rail station wasn’t trivial. The train in took an hour, whatever the schedules promised. Home-to-work pushed two, adding to a grand total of four glorious hours simply getting from A to B and back. Sacker was very interested to see just what brewed at Point A.

  If I can make it there.

  Rushing out, he’d forgotten hangover prep. Dehydration threatened to sideline him the most. The headache built as his overworked liver burned through water to detoxify. His eyes squinted and burned. Turns brought nausea. Luckily, the menu was only beer. Things shouldn’t get much worse. But he’d pulled over twice already for the volume ingested.

  I’ll make it there.

  Damn the incessant text messages from Gone and Cohen at INTEL 1. The Feds could use the NSA super-spy-whatever to track his phone. He should’ve mapped the route, written it down, and left the phone at home. But that required far more brain function than he’d possessed in those moments.

  So they knew his destination and they were screaming for him to pull over and wait. At least that’s what they’d been screaming until he blocked their calls and texts.

  He should’ve sobered up by now, recognized he was acting like a rookie. Like a damn idiot. Why indeed try to super-cop this collar? The Black-ops-in-America heroes of INTEL 1 could swoop in with Gone and save the day. Why not wait for backup?

  Because the world is going to shit. Because Dyer could escape before they get here. Because I’ve had a few too many.

  “Because of Gracie.” In the end, pride might come before a fall.

  Sacker shook his head. He pulled to the curb along a beaten-up road beside an abandoned development. Creeping into the woods, trees obscured a house on an overgrown patch of land. Less a lawn than a monument to the resilience of the indigenous grasslands.

  He shut the engine off and exited the car, careful not to slam the door. A pebbled path led to a garage, while a rock and mortar pathway ran to the front door. He decided on the garage.

  No warrant but all kinds of terrorism, national security, probable-cause bullshit.

  He removed his Glock and eased up the moderate incline toward the garage. No sign of lights or movement in the house.

  He can’t have left already.

  His luck couldn’t be that bad. No, smoke rose from one of the chimneys. It would be dangerous to leave a fire burning and commute to work. No professional scientist would ever make such a mistake. Dyer was home.

  As he approached the garage, his metal fillings vibrated to a deep hum. He paused, feeling the buzz extend down to his feet. The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

  Personal generator, Thomas. Big one. Now, what might you be needing that for?

  Breaking in was easier than Sacker expected. The garage had a small window in the back. There was no security system connected to it. He ripped part of a fingernail off trying to pry it open, but the blood and pain were worth the silence.

  He squeezed through the frame and dropped hard to stained concrete pungent with grease. The impact rolled him into a rusted Ford pickup. Sacker stared up at the hulking flatbed. Hardly the wheels of a city-slicker and biomedical whiz-kid. But he was dealing with something very much else here.

  Old days in bad neighborhoods returned to him. He removed a set of small tools, and walked around the truck to the door leading into the house. He picked the lock in seconds, pushing the creaking frame into a cramped kitchen space. Uncleared plates. A breakfast consumed. The smell of brewed coffee lingered. A white shirt hung on a chair. Dyer was home and awake.

  Careful, Tyrell.

  His eyes fell on a wall opposite the kitchen sink. Light from a window fell on a thick steel door, the kind Sacker had seen in industrial freezer rooms. His heart sank when he saw a keypad by the handle, barring the way. But today was his lucky day.

  In a mad rush, huh Dyer?

  The killer hadn’t pulled the heavy door shut. The large latch had not engaged. Dr. Genius left the damn door unlocked.

  Sacker placed his shoulder along the keypad and wall, his weapon raised. With his left hand he pushed the door, darting through the opening with his gun pointed down the stairway.

  Nobody.

  Empty stairs greeted him. Machinery hummed as he made his way down the concrete steps to the cellar. It was unlike any cellar he had ever seen.

  Walls of clear plastic subdivided the basement. Throbbing motors from hulking air filtration units decorated several points in the plastic maze. Their deep beats sent his developing headache into the red. Sacker squinted and moved toward an opening. A thick zipper split the plastic apart to allow entry.

  Tyrell, what the fuck are you doing?

  He stopped. He’d stumbled into a scene from Outbreak or some zombie apocalyptic television show. Alone in the home of a monstrous serial killer who mutilated his victims, posing them for public viewing in New York City. He stood in this maniac’s underground hot zone laboratory. Behind the plastic wall lurked a deadly virus that made blood pour out of the eyes of men.

  Sacker grabbed a biohazard mask on a nearby cart. He fitted it over his head, trying to make the thing snug around his neck. Maybe good enough. It would have to be enough, whatever the consequences.

  Dyer was here. He knew it. The Eunuch Maker wasn’t going to get away.

  Sacker ducked under the zippered doorway and moved through a narrow plastic-walled corridor. The fogging mask reflected his ragged breathing back to him. The corridor opened to an inner room. His gun hand dropped to his side.

  A reek unlike anything he’d known assaulted him. He gagged. The poisonous odor infiltrated and clogged his lungs, his stomach lurching.

  Sweet Jesus God in heaven have mercy.

  Blood-soaked bodies faced him in a semi-circle. Dyer had lashed the devastated forms to gurneys. Machines monitored them. Several had flatlined, the equipment beside others screaming about the dire state of the proto-corpses underneath. His stomach heaved again.

  Dire. Dyer. Die or...what?

  His head spun. The stink, the blood, the antiseptic walls.

  Hangover. Dehydration. Water. I need water.

  Neurobiology took over. Primitive tissues in his brain overruled higher cortical function. Sacker panicked.

  Get out. Get water. Get help.

  The doorway was behind him. Get out. Run. He spun, holding back the contents of his stomach, turning away from the hellscape he had stumbled into.

  Thomas Dyer towered in the doorway with a two-by-four. He whipped the wood against the side of Sacker’s head.

  White lab coat. Brown wood. White light.

  Black enveloped him as he hit the floor.

  63

  Fresh from the Juicer

  “A poor decision, Detective Sacker. Now that you’ve seen this, I can’t let you live. Of course, you’d be dead soon anyway.”

  Squinting, Sacker woke to an agony of light. His head was a pincushion with ten thousand knives inserted. His left eye stuck shut and his mouth tasted copper.


  Blood. Where did I see...

  He yanked against the restraints.

  “You can’t escape. Stop trying. I should stitch your head. The plank gave you a good cut. But you won’t bleed out. And it won’t matter much now anyway.”

  He was still in the inner room. The nightmare forms were beside him, the stench overpowering. A man in a yellow spacesuit hovered above.

  Stall. Feign confusion and ignorance. Hope Gone and the others would arrive soon.

  “Dyer,” he croaked. “What is this? It’s beyond murder.”

  “Please don’t insult my intelligence. You’re here. You must be pretty close to the truth.” He paused and looked off into the distance. “You’re working alone on this, aren’t you? NYPD protocol is strict. You shouldn’t have come here by yourself.” Dyer laughed. “You’re smarter than I thought. And more foolish. But I’m impressed detective. You figured this much out on your own. But they didn’t believe you, did they? And so you decided to play hero.”

  Not exactly far from the truth, but the relief! Dyer didn’t know about INTEL 1. He didn’t suspect how much had been deduced. He wasn’t rabbiting. They still had a chance!

  Stall! Make him think you’re defeated.

  It wasn’t a hard act.

  “Go to hell,” Sacker mumbled.

  “Still, I’ve pushed my luck,” said the space suit, hands clanking items on a metal tray out of sight. “It wasn’t you or NYPD at the bank. That had Feds written all over it. Idiots shut down my account. Tipped me off.” He sighed. “Yes, sooner or later all my breadcrumbs were going to lead someone here.”