Blindspot

by Michael McBride

  “And just how do you propose we do that?”

  “The equipment you had in the field. If I can get it from your pack, can you make it work without drawing any unnecessary attention to what we’re doing?”

  “Yeah, but…what do you have in mind?”

  “Remember that object I took from Moya after he died?”

  Epilogue

  United States Army Bioengineering Research & Development Laboratory

  Ft. Detrick, Maryland

  May 25

  7:55 p.m. EST

  Ramsey had been so focused on achieving success that he never paused to contemplate what came after. It was always a matter of researching and testing and making his project work. He knew he would eventually pull it off, but until he returned to Ft. Detrick, he’d never considered how that triumph would affect his life. He hadn’t expected to be paraded around the base on the shoulders of his envious colleagues any more than he had planned to find the Nobel Prize waiting on his desk for him. He simply hadn’t thought that far ahead at all. If he had, he might not have been in such a rush to get back to his lab. Maybe he would have spent at least a few days touring the islands, perhaps swing up the west coast and check out the Pacific Northwest when he hit the mainland. What had been waiting for him, while entirely logical and should have been expected, was the last thing in the world he was prepared to handle.

  Work.

  More work than he had ever thought possible.

  Once word had gone out that his project was fully functional, the lab had turned into a madhouse. Bodies arrived on planes day and night. And not just bodies. Parts. Heads mostly, but occasionally just eyes. The cooler was so jam-packed with them that the major general himself had been forced to intercede and establish a system of prioritization. And Ramsey had begun to suspect that Staff Sergeant Corvo, who was charged with cadaver duty, was actively plotting against him. He was more miserable than ever, thanks to the repulsive stench that seemed to cling to him wherever he went. Once Corvo heard that the other men were calling him Sergeant Cornhole, if he hadn’t already, Ramsey figured he’d better start sleeping with one eye open. But he knew that the USAMRMC wasn’t about to let anything happen to him. They had big plans for their golden boy. Yes, indeed. They were going to work him like no man had ever been worked before. They were going to work him until he died on his feet, and then they were going to work him some more. At this point, Ramsey was rooting for that to happen sooner than later.

  He rubbed his weary eyes and killed the last of the cold, stale coffee. Was that the third or the fourth pot of the day? What day was it anyway? Maybe he had a few minutes to slip outside to see the sun, if it was still up, get some fresh air—

  The door exploded inward with the sound of a shotgun blast. Ramsey flinched like he always did and Corvo smirked like he always did, as was their routine. Ramsey’s new lab was much bigger than his old one, a real step up in the world. Aldridge had gone out of his way to equip this one with the nicest computers and printers, the fanciest components, and room to add several new Hindsight stations. And, of course, swinging doors like they used in emergency rooms, because taking the time to turn a single goddamn doorknob would simply slow down Ramsey’s pace too much.

  “Break time’s over, Dr. Frankenstein,” Corvo said, shoving the gurney into the room. He made sure to collide with every object he possibly could on his way to Ramsey’s station. “Got some new meat for you. Fresh, never frozen.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Corn—” Ramsey hoped he caught himself in time. “—vo. Corvo.”

  The expression on the staff sergeant’s face as he ducked back out of the lab let him know that he hadn’t.

  Ramsey unzipped the body bag on the cart and recoiled from the scent. Corvo was right. This one couldn’t have been dead for more than a day, at the most. He smelled smoke and burnt hair. Ramsey was already reaching for the eye tongs when he caught a glimpse of the man’s face and froze. He stared at it long and hard, scrutinizing the ridge of the brow, the cut of the jaw, the color of the skin beneath the smudges of ash, the entry wound through his right temple and the massive exit wound above and behind his left ear. There was something familiar about the man, but not something he could readily place…

  God, he was too tired to be doing this. How many had he done so far today? Thirty? Thirty-five? He had to be well over three hundred now in not even two full weeks since his return from South Korea—

  That was it. He recognized this man, all right. No doubt about it. The gunshot wound made sense, but why did the corpse smell like smoke?

  Ramsey hit the button on the intercom and removed the cadaver’s right eye while he waited for a response. The lateral orbital rim was fractured, which made the extraction difficult, but he always used the right eye for consistency’s sake, a routine that had started with a young girl on a blood-drenched field a world away.

  “What do you want now?” Corvo replied from the speaker mount.

  “Did this one arrive with any paperwork?”

  “They all arrive with paperwork. Since when do you care?”

  “Would you mind bringing it to me?”

  “Seriously? I just sat down for like the first time all fuc—”

  Ramsey terminated the conversation with his elbow.

  He’d performed this procedure so many times now that he could do it in his sleep. He had the entire system set up and functioning in a matter of minutes. The image was already running the gamut of filters when Corvo burst through the doors with a printout in his hand. He tossed it onto the dead man’s chest and blew back out through the doors without a word, which was totally unlike Corvo.

  Ramsey definitely needed to watch his back now.

  The computer beeped to signal the completion of the process. Ramsey sent the finished image to the printer with the tap of a key. He was too busy reading through the printout to look at the computer monitor.

  There was no information whatsoever. No name. No date of birth. Nothing. All the form contained was the various tracking numbers and the signatures of those along the chain of custody for the remains. And still this corpse had been bumped to the front of the line. Whoever this man was, someone out there wanted answers about his death in a hurry and had the political capital to make it happen. The body was still so fresh that were it not for the gunshot wound that had taken off the better part of his cranium, the man looked as though he could have crawled right off the table and walked away, unlike the majority of the “blue men” who Corvo ferried back and forth from the cooler.

  Ramsey cast the useless printout onto the work station beside him, where someone had apparently dropped off a letter for him while he was otherwise occupied or, more likely, on one of his countless trips down the hall to the restroom, thanks to the diuretic effects of the coffee. Who dropped it off? When had they done so? It was almost as though someone had deliberately placed it where only he would see it, but when no one else was around to bear witness.

  There was no return address on the small envelope. No postage. Just one handwritten word.

  Ramsey.

  He picked it up and turned it over and over in his hands, his brow furrowed, then looked from the letter to the corpse and back again. He opened it with a wry smile on his face.

  Inside was a small newspaper clipping, little more than a passing mention, roughly the size of the Post-it note stuck to it. The note read simply:

  It’s over now.

  The whirring sound of the photo printer ceased. Ramsey skimmed the article as he crossed the room to where the image from the dead man’s eye waited. There had been a fire at a warehouse near Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. shortly before midnight. While there was no immediate confirmation of human casualties, authorities reported that the remains of several rare and unusual primates had been found amid the blackened debris. An investigation would be launched posthaste into what officials believed to be a smuggling operation involving endangered species, which fetched huge dolla
rs on the black market.

  Ramsey set the article aside, removed the photograph from the printer, and walked back to his personal desk in the rear corner of the lab. He plopped down in his chair, set the image on his keyboard, and opened the top drawer. There was a nondescript manila envelope shuffled into the mess of papers and folders inside. He withdrew it, set it on his lap, and stared at it for a long moment before he finally opened it and extricated the lone piece of paper inside. He positioned it on his desk directly to the left of the image he had just produced. The paper was crumpled, the quality of the image pathetic by comparison to the new one beside it, but it was still clear enough to show Ramsey what he needed to see.

  The blindspot was a black hole in the bottom left portion of the picture. The remainder was pixelated and hazy due to decomposition. The image was dark, yet he could still discern the forest, the broad leaves of the maples and the brushy branches of the pines. And the tiny gray ring hidden in their midst, from which a curl of gray smoke rose. It was the barrel of a rifle, nearly invisible, like the man who braced it against his shoulder, only the whites of his eyes clearly evident. But the shape of his features…the sharp crest of his brow, the outline of his bulging jaw…highlighted ever so subtly by the flash of the muzzle flare…were identical to those of the corpse across the room from him now.

  This was the last thing that United Nations Peacekeeper Eduard Moya had seen before he died.

  Ramsey shifted his gaze to the right and looked at the new image for the first time. The ink was still damp and glistened under the bright lights. Flames filled the right half of the image, rising from crates and boxes, and from a furry lump on what looked like a stainless steel table. The killer had stood in precisely such a way that the black circle of the blindspot hid his face, chest, and the majority of his right arm, all except for the nine-millimeter pistol directed straight at Ramsey through the picture. And the left arm, which offered a discreet thumbs-up gesture where only the dead man, or someone looking through his right eye, would see it.

  “Right back at you, Rockwell,” Ramsey said through a crooked grin.

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  One

  Pueblo Bonito

  Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

  June 17th

  7:36 p.m. MDT

  Twelve Years Ago

  Dr. Graham Bradley waited for the rooster tail of dust that had followed them for the last twenty miles to pass over the forest-green Cherokee before he finally opened the door and stepped down onto the sun-baked earth. His chief of security, Roland Pike, remained rigid behind the wheel, staring fixedly through the dirty windshield. The setting sun bled the sandstone escarpments crimson and cast long shadows from the sparse pockets of sage and creosote that spotted the sandy valley. A faint breeze ruffled Bradley’s ebon hair and returned the dust, forcing him to shield his azure eyes. His custom-tailored Caraceni slacks and calfskin shoes were already gray with accumulation. At least he’d had enough foresight to shed his jacket in the car, just not enough to have packed a change of clothes in his hurry to reach the site. When the call came from Dr. Brendan Reaves eight hours ago, Bradley had been in the middle of a board meeting. The anthropologist had refused to divulge the nature of his discovery over the phone and had insisted that Bradley needed to see what he had found in person. Considering the scope of Reaves’s research, Bradley couldn’t imagine why he would be summoned in such a fashion, which only served to heighten his curiosity. The corporate jet had been fueled and waiting at Sea-Tac when he arrived. Four hours in the air and three more wending through the New Mexico desert in the rental Jeep, and here he was, parched and irritated, and tingling with anticipation.

  “This had better be good,” he said, and struck off toward the cluster of khaki tents at the edge of the Pueblo Bonito ruins.

  The rubble formed a D-shape, straight in front and rounded where it abutted the sheer cliff. Walls composed of stacked layers of flat rocks climbed three stories up the sandstone face to where petroglyphs had been carved by long-dead hands nearly a thousand years prior. Where once more than six hundred rooms and thirty-nine ceremonial kivas had surrounded a broad central courtyard, now only the framework remained. Some walls still stood thirty feet high, while others had crumbled to the ground. A large portion was buried under tons of sandstone where “Threatening Rock” had broken away from the embankment.

  For nearly two hundred years, this had been the capital of the thriving Anasazi culture and could have housed as many as five thousand people. Until, abruptly, they abandoned the entire canyon and embarked upon a northwestward migration that would prove to be the end of this once flourishing society.

  And no one knew why.

  A ring of halogen lights blossomed to life just beyond the tents, turning half a dozen men and women to silhouettes. One of them raised an arm to hail him and broke away from the group. Dr. Brendan Reaves, Regent’s Professor of Cultural and Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University, strode directly toward him. He wore a dusty ball cap over his unkempt, sun-bleached hair. The bill hid his face in shadows. He extended a dirty hand, then thought better of it and swiped it on his filthy shorts. Instead, he tipped up his chin and offered a beaming smile, which made his sharp hazel eyes positively sparkle. He barely looked out of his teens.

  “Thank you for getting down here so quickly,” Reaves said. “I honestly didn’t think you’d be willing to make the trip in person.”

  Bradley gave his best boardroom smile to hide his annoyance. GeNext Biosystems was his baby and he was intimately involved on every level from research and development through marketing and distribution. He wasn’t the kind of COO who pandered to shareholders or spent his days swilling martinis on tropical shores. His vision was of a forward-thinking, revolutionary company that remained on the cutting edge of biotechnology through a non-traditional approach to research all over the globe, which meant that even he needed to roll up his sleeves from time to time.

  “So, Dr. Reaves. Right to business. What could possibly be important enough to drag me across the country on a moment’s notice?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Reaves turned and guided Bradley toward an old pickup painted tan by the desert. “Like I said, you have to see it with your own eyes.”

  Pike eased out of the Cherokee and stood at attention, but Bradley dismissed him with a subtle wave. He climbed up into the passenger seat of the professor’s truck and kicked aside a pile of garbage to make room for his feet. The truck reeked of body odor and dust, and shook when Reaves started the engine.

  “Where are we going?” Bradley asked.

  He watched the ill-defined dirt road in the bouncing headlights.

  “Not far. Just across the wash to Casa Rinconada. It’s the largest, and only freestanding kiva in the Pueblo Bonito complex.”

  “You found more remains?”

  “You could say that.”

  Reaves glanced over and gave a cryptic smile.

  Bradley was in no mood for games. He was tired and famished, and had reached the end of his patience. Reaves must have recognized as much from his expression and started talking to fill the tense silence.

  “Okay. Let me set the stage. In case you don’t remember, I’m an evolutionary anthropologist. I study the changes—both cultural and physiological—in a society over time. My primary focus is the tribes of the American Southwest, specifically the Anasazi, who inhabited this amazing primitive mecca here in Chaco Canyon from about 800 to 1150 C.E.. We’re talking about more than four hundred separate villages clustered around a dozen or so major pueblos like Bonito back there, all within a twenty-five thousand square-mile territory, the majority between these very canyon walls. They mastered agriculture, even in this hostile terrain, and set up a system of commerce that was beyond ad
vanced for the time. And then, one day, they just up and abandon this community that took hundreds of years to build, by hand, stone by stone.”

  The tires grumbled over a bridge that shuddered under the truck’s weight. The creek bed below them didn’t appear as though it had ever held water. Ahead, a low mesa crowned by a tall stone ring resolved from the cliffs behind it.

  “Next thing we know,” Reaves said, “the Anasazi reappear in the Four Corners area, only their entire architectural style has changed. Instead of building at the bottom of valleys like this one, they’re erecting fortresses hundreds of feet up on the cliffs. We’re talking about the kinds of places that someone can only enter if a ladder is lowered down from the village or if they can scale the sandstone like Spider-Man. Places like Mesa Verde in Colorado and the White House in Arizona. We speculated that the mass exodus was caused by a prolonged period of drought in the middle of the twelfth century, which killed all of their crops and drove the wild game from the area, but that didn’t explain the necessity for the fortified villages carved into niches that only birds could reach. It was almost as though they feared something, as though they were preparing to defend themselves against some kind of invading force.”

  “I know all of this, Dr. Reaves. I’m the one underwriting your research. Tell me how all of this pertains to the project I’m funding.”

  The plateau rose above them to their right as the road wound around it. From their vantage point, the circular walls of the kiva appeared remarkably well preserved.

  “Right. We know that the Anasazi had an absurdly high incidence of anemia. Nearly forty percent of the remains exhumed here in Chaco exhibit porotic hyperostosis, which is a destructive pathological condition caused by iron-deficiency anemia that erodes the bones of the skull and orbits, and the ends of long bones. We assume that this was caused by a shift in diet over time as the Anasazi came to rely almost exclusively on plants and grains rather than the increasingly rare native game animals. They essentially cut out the iron that the human body needs to function, which it extracts from meat. That’s why it made reasonable sense when we found evidence of cannibalism. The body always knows what it needs to survive, and instinctively determines how to get it. It’s the same reason that pregnant women have cravings. Their bodies are telling them exactly what they need, both for themselves and their unborn fetuses, from fundamental nutrition to vitamins and trace minerals.”