Silence. Stillness. Barely a breath.
“The rats. The experiments. The vivisections. Everything,” Fell said.
Ishii nodded, his head tremoring. He stubbed out two cigarettes and lit one more. Fell stared long and hard into his Japanese counterpart’s eyes. There was finally real understanding there, something that bridged two worlds an ocean apart, and even years of a war of extermination. Fell nodded.
The four Americans left three hours later. The doctor led the way down the Shibayama street, puffing cigar smoke over the three behind.
“That man is healthy as a horse,” he said, waving his cigar. “I mean, his heart rate was elevated, he was clearly nervous, but the man could probably run a marathon.”
Fell blew across the fresh ink of the signatures on the documents in his hand. He folded them and stowed them inside the pocket of his jacket.
“Of course he’s healthy,” Fell said. “The man is one of the most eminent doctors in this country. He gets the best treatment possible.”
“I still didn’t understand the paranoia he had about the phone calls, and the noises,” the doctor said. “Can’t we protect him?”
Slawson snickered. Stanger just shook his head.
“What’s so funny?” the doctor said, stopping short, turning from one to the other.
The other three continued walking, not even breaking stride. The doctor pulled the cigar out of his mouth and hurried after them. He tapped Fell on the shoulder.
“Yes, Doctor?” Fell said.
“Are the Russians really going to get ahold of that man? It seems like they know where he lives, his phone number, everything. It might be best to get him some protection.”
The three laughed, out loud this time.
“The Russians have their hands full sifting through the rubble in Manchuria,” said Fell.
“The Communists weren’t making the threatening calls,” said Slawson, turning around, walking backward for a few paces. “We made those calls, you dolt.”
Fell backhanded his arm. Slawson cringed and turned around again.
“Wait—you guys were the ones making the threatening calls?” the doctor said. “Why?”
Fell stopped walking, and the entire group stopped around him. He glanced at Slawson and Stanger, then extended a hand toward the doctor.
“Listen, Doctor,” said Fell, shaking the doctor’s hand. “Why don’t you go on ahead? Thanks for coming out on short notice. We needed to make sure that General Ishii was not indeed as ill as he had been claiming. But I must ask you to keep this entire visit confidential. This meeting is of the strictest national security. American MPs are already providing the general security as we speak.”
The doctor nodded, stepped back, and pulled the cigar out of his mouth.
“I understand, Dr. Fell,” he said, tipping the brim of his hat. “If you need me again, you can reach me through the embassy.”
They all shook hands. As the three American operatives lit cigarettes, they watched the doctor amble down the road.
“Is he a loose end?” said Slawson, his voice deadened by an exhale of thick smoke.
“Everyone in MacArthur’s office assured us he was discreet,” said Stanger, tapping the dossier with his fingertips.
“Yes, the doctor is a patriot. We can count on him,” Fell said.
He nodded in the direction of a side street, and they headed in that direction.
“Let’s go clean up the surveillance post, and clear back to Tokyo. By the time the Russians actually do show up around here, we want to be clear of the area. We got everything we need. We can take all of the data back to the Project. The Commies will never catch up.”
The three slapped each other on the back. They walked, ties swinging in the soft breeze, smoke billowing behind.
WORDS IN THE DARK,
TROUBLE ON THE RIVER
U.S.A., 2087
Dim lights overhead. Seated on the waiting room chair, hospital-hard and unforgiving, my legs numb. Listening to voices all around, the people rushing and shuffling by, each at their own speed and volume. Nurses shoving a blood-stained, empty gurney past. A woman somewhere behind me, raspy voice wailing about the blood in her urine, lamenting a three-hour wait. A man to my left moaning from a kidney stone. To my right a child much smaller than myself just sobbing, alone. Doctors rushing by with lab coats billowing. The solemn elderly hobbling unsteadily by on canes.
But I was removed from it all. Nothing escaped me, but I was no part of it—I was a black hole in the midst of the shimmering, bright panic all around. Sucking it all in, emitting nothing. The other room—where it was happening, where the horror was unfolding—none of it crossed my mind, none of it broke the plane of my perfect focus. It couldn’t. I just absorbed it all around me, down to tiniest details—the smoker’s rasp in the woman’s throat, the tortured twist of the man’s face, the musky smell of the boy.
But the veneer broke when something dropped in my lap. A hand squeezed my shoulder. I remained still, not looking to see what I had been given. Instinct told me the person was friendly, the hand’s grip somehow comforting, a protective gesture. But I didn’t look to see who it was. I wanted only to be that black hole, that untouchable, empty thing, crushing within me whatever came close. The hand left, the person walked away, trailing a doctor’s lab coat behind. It was only then that I glanced at my lap. A miniscule test tube, twinkling in the light, lay there. Turning it over, I watched the sparkle of a liquid, a tinge of green. I looked off in the direction where the giver had gone—and only saw the terrified scurrying of people back and forth, hurry and not-hurry, arrival and departure. The friendly presence had vanished.
Then—splashdown and submergence in the black river. The drowning, the darkness coming at me, this time noticing that it was a cavernous mouth—a fish mouth—swallowing me whole. Cold terror clamped down, I screamed without sound.
Drenched in slimy sweat, I awoke to a ringing sound. My eyes opened, I angled out of bed and reached around in the dark for the lamp switch.
The ringing again—the digital call unfamiliar, resounding in the dark.
My hand found the switch and flicked it. Light filled the bedroom. Mary did not stir, her Dormus gusted slow and rhythmic. I slipped on my Kevlar moccasins, swung on my robe, and shuffled out into the hallway.
The noise had stopped. I waited, listening to the pipes and the settling of the house. The windows were lit by moonlight. Empty silence.
It struck again, a ding-dong of something up above. I looked up and saw the shadow of a dusty speaker in the overhead corner. The doorbell, I realized with relief. The unfamiliar sound I’d only ever heard a handful of times, and then only when the damned Unified Three missionaries came calling. Then it rang again—insistent this time.
I scratched at the thin beard along my jaw. Who would ever come to my door during the day, let alone in the middle of the night? I crept down the stairs and grabbed the loose rung of the railing, trying not to make too much noise. I went straight into the dining room, trying to get an angled look through the windows at whoever was on the porch. But I couldn’t see—the dark figure was too close to the door. All I could make out was the person’s back. The doorbell rang again. I heard a muffled voice from upstairs—Mary was talking in her sleep again, through the oxygen mask.
Cursing softly, I went to the front door. I waited. Just as the person reached again for the doorbell, I edged the door open a crack. I angled my eye at the opening to get a look.
The shape was backlit from the moonlight. I couldn’t see the face, but the silhouette was stooped, not tall, hands hovering at the beltline, like a gunslinger. The person stood rigid. The picture was ripped from a nightmare. My heart hammered. I pulled my face back and shut the door.
A tiny knock, a little rap of knuckles.
“Joe. It’s Neal. Open the door.”
I reached forward, twisted the knob, and cracked it open a few inches.
“Neal?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “Nice dark yard you have here. Let me in, damnit,” the Old Man croaked.
I opened the door and the shape shuffled in, and I saw from a weak ray of moonlight that it was indeed Old Man Wetherspoon, wearing a ballcap and a sweatsuit. I stifled a laugh but ushered him in and closed the door. I led him into the kitchen, flicking the light switches on along the way. Wetherspoon turned each one off as he followed.
“Let’s just stay in the dark,” the Old Man said. “Mary has to be asleep.”
“We have to have a little light in the kitchen, at least,” I said, tapping the little light over the stove. “Want a glass of water?”
“God, no,” Wetherspoon said. “Never drink from the tap, Joe. Trust me—you’ll live longer. But if you offered me a whiskey, I’d have a whiskey.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Wetherspoon looked all around, as if he expected an ambush from the dark. The Old Man seemed unhinged—he would have to be handled carefully. I smiled at him.
“Okay, whiskey it is,” I said, nodding. I walked into the dining room, opened the cabinet, poured two fingers’ worth into two heavy glasses. My foggy mind wondered why the hell the Old Man had appeared at my home in the middle of the night. But I would have to play it cool, keep him talking. I returned to my spot at the counter and handed one to the Old Man. Wetherspoon took a sip, smacking his lips. A strange smile I had never seen before on his face crossed his lips—like that of a tired man who had finally reached his bed at the end of a long arduous journey.
“God, it’s been so long,” he said.
“Neal, you’ve been gone for weeks. Where were you?” I said. “And wait a second—I thought you didn’t drink?”
Wetherspoon swished the tumbler in his cupped hand, watching the amber liquor lap up near the rim, leaving a film sliding slowly down the side. That narcotized smile was still spreading across his face.
“I was somewhere safe,” the Old Man said, ignoring the second question. “You know, nothing’s safe unless it’s secret. And a secret is only a secret if it’s absolute. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t tell you, Young Joe.”
“Fair. But why are you knocking at my door in the middle of the night? And how did you get my address?”
Wetherspoon grinned.
“Even if you’re unlisted, the hospital records have it all. They have to,” he said. “At least the good, classified ones have to.”
“You still have access to the hospital’s database.”
“Of course I do,” Wetherspoon said. “I was there before there was a database, so I made sure to carve out my own little electronic niche in the whole thing, right from the start. In case of catastrophe.”
Taking a slow quaff of the whiskey, I pointed at him with my upturned pinky, the cheap liquor wrinkling my face, burning deep in my chest.
“You’re saying this is a catastrophe,” I grunted.
“An unmitigated disaster,” the Old Man said, nodding. “And we’re smack-dab in the center of it.”
“Does this have anything to do with the documents in your office?”
“Ah, the documents you stole, then fenced to our wayward journalist friend,” the Old Man said, shaking his head. “The documents that got you fired. Quite a beard you’re growing there, by the way.”
“Fired?” I said, the panic rising in my chest against the whiskey burn. “The Kraken told me I was just suspended.”
“No, you’re done at the hospital. Sorry to tell you this way, Joe,” said Wetherspoon. “The reason I’m here is because we’re both outsiders, and outsiders have to stick together to survive. And those documents are the key to everything at Saint Almachius.”
The Old Man tipped back the glass and drained it. He plunked it down on the marble countertop with finality. His face was taut in a grimace. Breathing hard, trying to keep myself calm, I went in the other room and returned with the whiskey bottle. I poured Wetherspoon another glass and topping off my own. I set the bottle down and watched as the Old Man began in on the other glass, savoring every drop. I swished my own on the countertop without drinking it. It was too late, or too early, to drink. Normally I’d be pulling off my Dormus, readying myself for work. But the machine was still broken—and I had no job to go back to anymore. Nightmares and hellish daydreams were all I had remaining to me. And the Old Man had reappeared standing there in my kitchen in the middle of the night. That seemed like a strange dream itself. I took a hesitant sip and recoiled again at the sting in my throat. I pointed at my guest.
“Goddamnit, Neal,” I said. “What’s the catastrophe? What’s in the documents?”
“You already know, to some extent,” Wetherspoon said. “You know people have dropped dead inexplicably in that hospital. You know there are some new staff members suddenly appearing out of nowhere. And you know some strange new initiatives are starting.”
“And it’s all connected,” I said.
“Yes. But you don’t know exactly how connected they are, or how far back these things go. If we hadn’t had the Big Blackout—quite an appropriate term, take it from this old drunk—then we’d all have a better handle on how deep these roots really run.”
“Stop with the cryptic bullshit, Neal,” I said.
“The Bureau of Wellness has been performing medical experiments on the general population and has been doing it for more than a hundred years.”
Wetherspoon drained the rest of his glass, then slid it across the countertop. I caught it, somehow. In a daze, I splashed liquor in it, and slid it back.
“Joe, we are witnessing the largest human-experimentation program since World War II. There’s an open-air lab all around us. And every one of us is a guinea pig.”
“Bullshit,” I said, shaking my head.
Wetherspoon sneered.
“Joe,” he said. “Do you really think the bubonic plague just appeared out of nowhere? And how about that mass die-off at the hospital that you oversaw? And the convenient death of the suspect implicated in both? Does this all sound like a coincidence?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to believe me. Everything was in the documents you stole.”
“I couldn’t read them. They were on smudged old paper, in the old alphanumerics. No one could read them.”
“You kids nowadays—those goddamned Gliffs on those glowing screens have made you illiterate,” the Old Man said, shaking his head. “You need to know this: a vast program of experimentation has been right under our noses for years. It’s been going for decades. And no one’s ever been able to stop it.”
“Neal, this sounds insane,” I said.
“How else do you explain Lamalade’s actions—the bubonic plague, the die-off?”
“A lone psychopath, gunning for glory and infamy,” I said.
The Old Man shook his head.
“This janitor was just a tool intended to serve his purpose. He was like a Bunsen burner or a scalpel, used for a while and then thrown away. How far this extends, where it goes from here, no one has any idea. And Lamalade dropped dead just as he was pulling back a corner of the curtain for you. You heard it yourself. And then they fired you, to get you out of the way.”
The Old Man coughed, tipped some whiskey down his throat. I pointed at him again.
“I’m assuming you know about Lamalade because of your all-knowing hook-up to the hospital records,” I said.
“I have my sources,” the Old Man said. “Over the years, I knew there were studies going on. But most were benign.”
“What else do you know?”
“I know the documents. A list of studies too long to remember.”
I snapped my fingers. It suddenly occurred to me—the physical thread linking all of this.
“What about the labels?” I blurted.
The Old Man’s white eyebrows arched high.
“You found labels,” Wetherspoon said. “Did they have the Bureau seal?”
“Yes.”
“And a long serial number?”
&nbs
p; The Old Man seemed to know everything. Down to the last detail. I watched him for any sign that he was lying to me. But I saw nothing.
“Yes,” I said.
“They mark the experiments. They catalog the patients, and disease.”
I walked over, picked up my Atman and gave a voice command to call the hospital. The Old Man rushed over, joints creaking, and yanked the device out of my hands.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Wetherspoon said.
“I was going to call McDermott over at the hospital. Maybe he can help.”
Wetherspoon’s veiny, gnarled hand placed the Atman on the counter. He shook his head.
“No. He might be part of the whole thing. Anybody could. Everybody could. Don’t you realize that?”
“Then I can call Zo Lanza. He’ll know what to do.”
Wetherspoon returned to his spot at the other side of the kitchen island, except this time he pulled out a stool, sat, and pounded his fist on the granite countertop. I recoiled from him.
“That would be even worse,” the Old Man barked. “You can’t trust any of them. All this goes way above us—way above anyone at Saint Almachius. What’s one cop going to do about that? Write them a summons?”
Shaking my head, I sat on the stool across from my mentor.
“Can I at least call Betty Bathory and warn her?” I said.
Wetherspoon shook his head.
“Betty is a wonderful woman,” he said. “But you can’t tell her anything, either. Everyone at the hospital knows she’s close to you. If she knew anything, there would be all the more reason to target her. Better for her to know nothing.”
“You think something big is coming,” I said.
The Old Man stopped pounding the countertop. He deliberated, chewing his lip, rocking his head back and forth as if physically weighing the options. He had never seemed jittery like this before. He was like a man possessed, a soul consumed.
“I do,” the Old Man said. “Besides that, I don’t know much. This Lamalade character…”
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