Ancestor (32 page)

He remembered how he’d left Erika with Magnus.

But Erika had tried to destroy everything, she’d been in collusion with Fischer. Jian hadn’t done anything like that. Unless … unless she’d made good on her desire to contact the outside world.

Colding looked around the room, searching for a phone, a walkie-talkie, even two tin cans connected with strings. But he saw nothing. There was no way to call out, Danté had made sure of that. No way except for the secure connection to Manitoba, and that was locked up tight.

Then his eyes settled on the computer. Somehow, Jian had figured out how to use the computer to call for help. He looked at the blood splatters on the back wall, some droplets still trickling slowly down. He then looked at the hole in the door. Jian had been facing that hole when she died.

She hadn’t killed herself at all.

“Such a tragedy,” Magnus said. “She tried suicide so many times, and finally pulled it off.”

Andy reached down and pulled the pistol from Jian’s hand. “So what do we do now?”

I kill you murdering fuckers, that’s what we do now
. The thought roared in Colding’s head with million-decibel volume. He fought for control. Without a weapon he had no chance against either Magnus or Andy. Despite the rage, the hatred, the undeniable need to do
something
, he had to stay calm. Stay smart. Get Sara, Rhumkorrf and the others off the island. Once Sara was safe, then he could think about justice. He had to play along, buy some time.

“We can’t tell the others she’s dead,” Colding said. “They’ll lose confidence, and it could compromise the project.”

Magnus looked down at him. A small smile toyed at the edge of his mouth. “So what are you saying, Bubbah, that we tell them she’s just taking a nap?”

“Something like that. We tell them she’s had a nervous breakdown. Everyone knows how stress messes with her. We’ll tell them she needs a few days off. By then, hopefully, the ancestors will be delivered and we’ll have our live animals.”

Andy shook his head. “What about the gunshot?”

Colding gestured to the empty room. “You see anyone else coming to see what happened?”

“Colding’s right,” Magnus said. “We’ll board up the door, say we had to break in to reach her when she flipped out. We’ll lock up her room. No one gets in but Colding, because he’s the only one she really trusted. Work for you, Bubbah?”

Colding nodded, feeling the extra burst of guilt brought on by Magnus’s words.

“Good,” Magnus said. “Colding, hurry up and bury her before anyone gets back.”

Colding stood up. “Are you joking?”

“We can’t leave the body here stinking up the place,” Magnus said. “And I’m not putting her in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer where Clayton can stumble into it. If you’d been better at your job, she’d still be alive, so this is
your
mess. Do it. Now.”

Colding thought for a moment, still fighting to control the rage. All that mattered now was getting Sara off the island. He had to do whatever it took to make that happen.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Magnus turned and walked out the door. Andy followed him, leaving Colding alone with the corpse of his friend.

Implantation +21 Days

MAGNUS SAT IN front of the secure terminal, thick fingers drumming a relentless pattern on the desktop—
babababump, babababump, babababump
. He waited for Danté’s face to appear. While he waited, he read the email again.

It was over now. Even Danté had to see that. No place left to run. Taking the C-5 out again was a crapshoot at best, and even if they got it off the island undetected, they didn’t have any more secret facilities. Fischer would have access to satellite coverage. He’d have people watching. He couldn’t see everywhere at once, granted, but the word would be out about the C-5—no more buying off air traffic controllers. If the C-5 passed near an airport radar system, even a small airport, that might be it.

Five days at best,
maybe
six.

Finally, the Genada logo disappeared, replaced by his brother’s panicky face.

“Magnus, what the hell is going on? My computer guys told me our system called USAMRIID?”

“It was Jian,” Magnus said. “She hacked into the secure terminal, used
your end to call Fischer.” He watched Danté’s face, the predictable wave of emotions—disbelief, anger, then anxiety.

“What … what did she tell him?”

“The usual chitchat. What she had for lunch, ancestor research, that kind of thing. The only piece of luck was she didn’t get a chance to give our location.”

“You broke the connection in time?”

“You could put it that way, sure.”

“You … you didn’t,” Danté said. “Magnus,
please
tell me you didn’t.”

Magnus said nothing.

“But she’s the whole project. You idiot! What the fuck are we going to do without her?”

Magnus was the boots on the ground, making real-time decisions, saving Genada’s ass, and Danté was calling
him
an idiot?

“So what now?” Danté screamed, shaking his fist at a camera hundreds of miles away. “That’s just a brilliant business decision on your part, you fucking
psycho
. What the hell do we do now?”

“We cut our losses,” Magnus said. “We cover our trail, move on to the next opportunity.”

“What do you mean,
cut our losses?”

“Big brother, you’d better pull your head out of your ass and do it quick. Don’t you get it?
Jian called Fischer
. He wants Colding and Rhumkorrf. He thinks he’ll get them to roll over so he can nail us on other charges. But when we give Colding and Rhumkorrf to Fischer, we make sure they won’t talk. Ever. He set up the game this way, not us. He gets what he asked for, and the G8 know without a doubt that Genada is out of the transgenic game. That’s all the governments really want. Our lawyers unfreeze the accounts. Presto chango, we move on.”

Danté leaned in toward the camera until his face filled up the screen. “We can’t do that! Those are our people, and we’re
so close!
Once the ancestors are born, the public and press won’t let anyone get in our way. We’ve
won
, we just need a few more days!”

Magnus kept his face expressionless, but inside he felt a rare spurt of sadness. Poor Danté. Never able to make the decisions that had to be made.

Danté’s face lit up, like the answer to the world’s problems had just flashed in his head. It made him look like a special-ed kid who just caught a bug after hours of failed attempts. “Manitoba! Listen, let’s move the C-5 to Manitoba. I’ll have crews start building facilities that can hold something the size of a tiger.”

Magnus nodded. Sure. Why not? “Okay, brother. How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s think it out. There’s a major blizzard coming across Lake Superior tonight. The fringes of it are probably already hitting Black Manitou. Our weather report says that’s going to last the better part of two days, and there’s another storm right behind it. I assume you talked to Farm Girl?”

“Got an email from her,” Magnus said. “According to her, we have five days.”

“Perfect,” Danté said. “I’ll have to do some travel jumping to lose Fischer’s men first. I’ll be at Black Manitou in four days, as soon as the second storm fades a bit, with flight plan and strategy in hand. Okay?”

“How big are these storms?”

Danté reached for his keyboard. The picture changed to a weather map of Michigan. The land was brown, the water was blue, and the two-fisted storm was an angry green mass hung like a massive shroud over the northern shore of Lake Superior.

“Well well well,” Magnus said. “That
is
a big storm.”

The picture switched back to Danté’s face. “Almost hurricane-class winds. Nobody will fly in that, and any boat will be a death trap. Just give me four days, Magnus. I’ll be there on December fourth. We’ll find a way to get the C-5 out of there, in secret, and to Manitoba. We
have
to find a way.”

Magnus nodded. “Four days? I think I can handle that.”

“Wonderful,” Danté said. “You’ll see, little brother, we’ll pull through this,
together.”

Magnus smiled, then disconnected. Family was such a funny thing. You can pick who you fuck, who you kill, but you can’t pick your own brother.

Fly to Genada headquarters? In a massive plane that Fischer was looking for? Danté had lost it.

Magnus called up the computer’s password program, locking out all access except for his own. When he finished, he left the security office and headed for the hangar.

COLDING WIPED THE back of his hand across his forehead. It just smeared dirt on his skin more than it wiped away the sweat. How had it come to this? How?

He bent to scoop up a last shovelful of dirt, dumped it, and patted it down. For all of her genius, for an intellect that should have been celebrated all across the world and in the history books forever and ever, Liu Jian Dan ended up in a shallow, frozen, unmarked grave.

Now she would be nothing more than carbon.

It had to be a shallow grave. Hard as hell to dig through that dirt. He’d pickaxed and shoveled through about eighteen inches of frozen soil. Below that, the ground temperature must have been above freezing, because he saw no more ice crystals. His arms started to give out at four feet deep, so he’d stopped and placed her inside. She wasn’t going to be here for long. He’d make sure of that. Soon, snow would cover the broken dirt, and the grave would vanish. But he could find her again. He’d buried her in a small clearing near a single birch sapling that hadn’t quite reached ten feet tall.

He lifted the pickax, looked at it, wondered what it would be like to swing the point into Magnus Paglione’s head.
Soon enough
. He set it down and pulled on his parka. From the pocket, he pulled out a can of Dr Pepper.

“I’m sorry, Jian. I failed you.”

That was all the eulogy he could muster.

Colding gently set the can of Dr Pepper on the pile of loose dirt, shouldered the pickax and shovel, then started the walk back to the mansion.

SARA SAT IN the lounge, curled up on a leather chair with a blanket over her legs. She was halfway through the now beat-up printout of
Hot Dusk
. Without Colding to hang out with for the past few days, she’d spent her free time reading Gunther’s novel. Not really her thing, but it was fun to read a book by someone she knew. Clearly, though, written by a guy—ruby penises? Seriously?

She liked the book, but her eyes merely grazed over the words, marking the brief intervals between long looks out the window toward the angry water and the ice-covered rocks. The hazy afternoon sun hid behind clouds that blended from gray to a road-mud black at the horizon.

Colding walked into the lounge. Her face lit up, but she saw no return smile. He looked dirty, rumpled and chilled to the bone. His pants were soaked around the legs and streaked with dark, crumbly dirt. He walked straight toward her and stood, looking down. She’d never seen such an expression on his face: a look of anger and concentration and fear all mashed up into one.

“What are you reading?”

He knew exactly what she was reading. He had given it to her. “Um … Gunther’s book.”

“Yeah? Is it good?” He held out his hand. So odd. She handed him the manuscript. He took the pages, then they slipped out of his hands. He bent to pick them up, pushing the loose pages together again.

“Sorry,” he said. He handed her the manuscript. “Actually, I’ll have to check it out another time. I have some more work to do. Later.”

He turned and walked away without another word. She set the book in her lap, and her finger brushed a small piece of paper barely sticking out of the top of the stack. A piece of paper that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Sara casually flipped to that page and read the small note he’d slipped into the manuscript.

Her eyes seemed to fall out of focus. She blinked, then read it again.

Jian …
dead?

And Erika Hoel, murdered?

Peej wouldn’t joke about something like this. Not about murder. Holy
shit
.

As casually as she could, Sara crumpled the note. It was hard not to look up at the cameras, one mounted in each corner of the room. She brought her hand to her mouth and coughed. Mouth filled with the taste of paper, she coughed a few more times, the hand in front of her mouth hiding her furious chewing. She swallowed.

Sara felt a sudden urge to gather up her crew. Run a full check on the C-5 and make sure everything was shipshape. If she had to move quickly, she didn’t want any unexpected trouble from the plane. She put the book down and calmly started toward Alonzo’s room.

SARA, ALONZO, CAPPY and Miller trudged through the snow, walking the half mile from the mansion to the hangar. The heavy black clouds had closed the distance, pushing the gray aside like a broom slowly sweeping dust. The first flakes of snow swirled around in crazy spirals. More would be coming, and soon.

“You gonna tell us what’s up?” Alonzo said, his shoulders in their usual cold-weather position high up at his ears. “Do you really expect us to believe you want a
surprise inspection?”

“Quit your bitching, ’Zo,” Sara said. “Just get it done.”

“You’re full of shit, boss,” Miller said.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “Full of shit.”