Ancestor (22 page)

No mistaking the electricity in the air, the satisfaction at seeing years of work move steadily closer to the final product.

“Let’s not get excited,” Rhumkorrf said, even though he was the only one talking. He absently swayed a bit from side to side as he waited for the image to process. “When Erika … I mean, when Doctor Hoel and I brought the quagga back from extinction, it took fifty-two
implantation cycles before we corrected the genome enough to produce a live birth.”

Jian felt relieved, invigorated … even
light
. She’d lost some weight in the past few weeks, partly from forgetting to eat, partly from the haunting stress that kept her stomach pinched all the time. Just two days after implantation, a normal mammalian embryo would be nothing but a tiny red dot jutting from the uterine wall. Kind of like a big wet pimple. But according to her calculations, and the astronomical growth rate they’d seen in the in vitro embryos, what lay inside Cow 34’s womb would be much bigger.

Tim’s hand continued to move the transducer across the suspended cow’s belly. He looked sleepy. Maybe a little drunk. Again. He hadn’t smiled since they had landed. Back on Baffin, Tim was
always
smiling.

The progress bar filled up, then a golden-hued image flared to life.

She stared at the screen.

Tim walked out of the stall, saw the screen and stopped cold. “Oh, fuck me running,” he said quietly.

Jian slowly shook her head in disbelief. She’d known they would grow fast, she’d
coded
for it, but this?

“Jian,” Rhumkorrf said. “You are even more talented than I imagined.”

The ultrasound image revealed two fetuses pushed into a tight face-to-face embrace. Rhumkorrf slowly moved his right hand over the trackball, turning the 3-D image to examine the tiny fetal features. Oversized heads had already formed, each bigger than the rest of their respective bodies. Big black spots showed developing eyes. Tiny limb buds sprouted from the bodies. She saw the ghostly shape of forming internal organs.

“Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “How big would you say those embryos are?”

“Umm … at least eight ounces.” Tim’s voice dropped to barely a whisper.
“Maybe even a little more. Normal embryonic growth for a two-hundred-pound mammal should be less than a tenth of an ounce.”

“Eighty times
the normal growth rate,” Rhumkorrf said. “That’s even higher than you projected, Jian. Fantastic!”

Fantastic
. Was that the right word to describe it? No. It was not. From a single cell to half a pound in less than forty-eight hours. She should have felt elated. But instead, she felt afraid.

And she wasn’t quite sure why.

Implantation +2 Days

COLONEL PAUL FISCHER stood on the edge of a Brazilian rain forest, staring up into the dark canopy. Never in all his days had he felt this drained, this utterly exhausted. His feet hurt. His eyes burned. This kind of sleep deprivation and world-hopping schedule would grind a twentysomething into the ground, and Paul was pushing fifty.

Amgen had built its xenotransplantation facility in the middle of the deep jungle. A stunning view surrounded the compound, mostly because there were no roads to tarnish the tree line. Amgen had used helicopters to bring everything in and out. Behind Paul, the special threats CBRN team was moving through the compound, completing their mission of seizing the facility and shutting down Amgen’s research.

A bird sailed from one tree to another. Paul wondered what kind it was. Maybe after all this crap was over he could retire, come back down here and spend months cataloging all the bird species just for the fun of it. Before he could contemplate retirement, however, he had to finish the job.

Approaching footsteps called his attention away. He turned to face the approaching special threats soldier. This one was bigger than most and put off a more frightening vibe than anyone Paul had ever known. He wore a MOPP suit without the hood, exposing his thin blond buzz cut and a mass of scar tissue where his right ear should have been. The man carried an FN P90 in his right hand and a sat-phone in his left.

“Colonel Fischer,
sir.”

Fischer tried in vain to remember the man’s name, then cheated and looked at the name patch on the man’s left breast. “What is it, Sergeant O’Doyle?”

“Mister Longworth would like a status report.” O’Doyle handed over the sat-phone. Paul took it. O’Doyle took a step forward and stared out at the tree line, both hands now on the P90 submachine gun.

Paul lifted the sat-phone. It felt like it weighed eight thousand pounds. “This is Fischer.”

“Colonel,” Murray Longworth said. “How’s it look?”

“We’ve secured the place. No biohazard warnings, everything looks fine.” Of course everything looked fine. The Novozyme accident had been a fluke. Paul and the special threats team had flown to four continents and shut down five facilities in the last three days, and he’d known there wouldn’t be an issue as long as no one was dumb enough to put up a fight.

“Nice work, Colonel,” Longworth said. “The only one left is Genada, wherever the hell they went.”

“Any progress on that?”

“Nothing,” Longworth said. “Like they vanished. Colding is good.”

Paul nodded to no one. Colding was good. Back when they’d worked together in USAMRIID, Paul had never suspected just how good Colding could be. “Nothing on freezing Genada’s accounts? Can’t we flush them out that way?”

“Switzerland, Cayman Islands and China refuse to cooperate with that. All three countries believe the ecoterrorist attack was real, and that Genada is out of the game. Danté Paglione does a lot of business in those countries, so they won’t freeze his assets unless we have something concrete to show that Genada is still doing xenotransplantation research. Keep digging, Colonel. Find me something tangible to take to those governments. Anything from the Russians on Poriskova?”

“Nothing yet, sir,” Paul said. “But their effort is encouraging.”

For over a year, Paul had been trying to get the Russians’ help in tracking down Galina Poriskova, former Genada employee and whistle-blower. Russian authorities had been mostly unresponsive, but all of that had changed in the last three days. Several Russian agencies had called Paul directly, asking what he needed and how they could help. Near as Paul could estimate, the Russians had at least fifty investigators searching for any sign of Poriskova.

“Well, that’s something,” Longworth said. “How long until they find her?”

“They think maybe four or five days.”

“Good. I’ll keep bird-dogging on my end. I have Interpol and other agencies cooperating. We’ll figure this out, Colonel, just stick with it.”

“Yes sir,” Paul said, then handed the sat-phone to O’Doyle. Paul wondered just how tired he had to sound if Murray Longworth felt the need to bust out a pep talk. But however tired he sounded, it wasn’t half as tired as he felt.

Implantation +2 Days

ANDY CROSTHWAITE SHIFTED his brown grocery bag to his left hand, sighed contentedly, and punched in the code 0-0-0-0 on the security room door. Inside, the familiar rack of weapons was waiting for him.

Real
weapons that could do
real
damage.

Not that the Beretta 96 was a toy. The magazine held eleven .40-caliber rounds, plus one in the chamber (Andy
always
had one in the chamber), for twelve shots of solid stopping power. It wasn’t his favorite, but the 96 was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Still, he far preferred the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Magnus provided the .40-caliber variant, providing for consistent ammo with the Beretta sidearms. The MP5s had thirty-round magazines and fired at eight hundred rounds a minute. Accurate at a hundred meters, the thing turned deer into hamburger-on-the-hoof and killed humans dead.

Andy pulled one of the MP5s out of the rack and carried it over to the security monitor table. He tossed down his tattered brown paper bag. It landed on its side and tipped, spilling copies of
Juggs
and
Gallery
across the desktop.

He sat, hands caressing the weapon’s well-known curves and angles. He’d break it down, clean it and put it back together. At least it was something to do while taking his completely unnecessary shift. What a fucking joke. No one was going to find them here.

He scanned the monitors anyway. The desk setup looked identical to the one on Baffin Island. More of Magnus’s consistency. Why pay money to train people on multiple systems when you can just train them once and install the same system in all locations? Made sense. Everything Magnus did made sense.

Andy checked the infrared feeds of the area surrounding the mansion and the hangar. The infrared worked just fine—and showed nothing. He switched back to the black-and-white pictures of the grounds, the inside
of the mansion. Several of the little five-inch monitors were blacked out—typical Colding, no monitoring private rooms except for that suicidal Chinese bitch.

But what about the mythical
Room 17
? Sara’s room. Yep, the camera was off.

He set the MP5 on the desktop, then flipped a switch. Sure enough, the screen lit up, showing the inside of Sara Purinam’s room. There she was, on her bed. Too dark, though. He scanned the controls … ah yes, night vision. He pushed a button and saw Sara Purinam’s naked upper body gleam in green-tinged glory. Just a B-cup, but he’d still do her.

She, however, would not do him. The dyke.

“Paybacks are a bitch, you tall twat.”

He watched her sleep. He would keep an eye on her, wait for her to slip up. One way or another, figuratively or literally, Sara Purinam was going to get fucked.

Implantation +3 Days

THE NEXT MORNING, Colding, Clayton and Sara rode along in Clayton’s Humvee. No Nuge that morning, but regardless, Colding kept his window rolled up tight.

They reached the fork that led to the harbor. This time Clayton took the road on the left. More trees, more snow, more collapsed houses. Five minutes later the trees ended, giving way to the old town. Clayton pulled into the town center, a stone-paved circle about fifty yards in diameter. Some of the snow-dusted stones were broken or just plain missing. A few small trees grew up through some of the gaps.

An old well made up of the same broken stones sat smack in the circle’s center. Some of the stones had crumbled away and lay on the ground like rotted-out teeth. The well looked like some B-movie version of a trapdoor to hell.

Clayton stopped the Hummer. The three of them got out and started walking.

“Welcome to downtown Black Manitou,” Clayton said. “I’m sure a city boy like you will feel right at home, eh?”

“Sure,” Colding said. “I’ll bet the opera house is right over the next hill.” The town’s structures were in marginally better shape than the dilapidated houses out in the woods. Buildings lined the paved area like numbers on a clock. With due north at noon, ten o’clock was the gothic, black-stone church. The thick building dominated the town circle, squatting down like a granite bulldog. It seemed to have so much weight the rest of the town might rise up at any moment, the light end of a lopsided teeter-totter. The few windows looked original, their glass visibly warped, giving the solid structure an almost fluid appearance. A bell tower (noticeably absent a bell) rose like a pinnacle from the steep slate roof.

Clayton pointed to a green building about twenty feet from the church at the eight o’clock position. The window was still decorated with a faded
yellow banner cut in the shape of a star that said
GROUND CHUCK ON SALE!
Inside, Colding saw empty racks and shelves.

“That used to be Betty’s,” Clayton said. “Combination grocery and hardware store. She was still here when Danté bought everyone out.”

At seven o’clock, the road out of town ran between Betty’s and a red building with a moth-eaten moose head hung over the door. One glass eye was long since missing. Shreds of moose fur hung down like demonic streamers.

“That was Sven Ballantine’s hunter’s shop,” Clayton said. “He ran it during deer season. Magnus and that surly little prick Andy Crosthwaite came up about five years ago and went wild, killed every last deer. Cut their heads off, took a picture right by that well.”

“Jesus,” Colding said. “I didn’t know Magnus was such a conservationist.”

“Pissed me off to no end, eh? Deer been here since 1948, when an ice bridge connected da island and da mainland. Deer just walked over.”

Colding gave Clayton an untrusting look. “An ice bridge?”

“Yep.”

“From the mainland,” Sara said. “Three
hours
away.”

“Yep.”

Sara shook her head. “Clayton, you are so full of shit you’d float. It can’t get cold enough to make ice cover that much open water.”

Clayton hawked a loogie and spat it on one of the mottled paving stones. “You’ll see ice everywhere in another week. In a normal winter, Rapleje Bay will have ice two feet thick by da end of November. This winter? Gonna be cold. Maybe coldest ever.”

He gestured at a rustic building made of hewn logs and rough wooden beams sitting at about four o’clock, directly across from the church. Other than the church, it was the town’s only two-story building. “Da mansion you’re staying at was for da rich folk, but plenty of regular people came to Black Manitou Lodge here to hunt and relax.”

A few more wooden buildings dotted the town circle. All had peeling paint. Some sagged under rotted, moss-covered roofs. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“Clayton,” Sara said. “I think you forgot that thing in the car.”

The old man looked at her, then nodded. “By
gosh
, I think you’re right, eh? Be back in a jiffy.”

Clayton turned and walked quickly to the Hummer.

Colding looked at Sara. “The thing?”