There was a moment of silence Carver couldn't interpret. He no longer heard the sounds of the road on the other end. Nothing but a hollow emptiness carried across a thousand miles of static. He feared for a moment Jack had nodded off sitting up, the first great leap into senility.
"Jack?"
"Sorry, Paxton. I must be more tired than I originally thought," Jack said. "What's next for you?"
"We're chasing down a lead in the morning. May be nothing, but we'll see. I'll be on a cross-country flight, so if you call and I don't answer, just leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as it comes through."
"Where you headed?"
"Washington."
"D.C.?" Jack asked, his voice sharper.
"State. Flying into Sea-Tac. You game for another favor?"
"Name it."
"Keep your ear to the ground and let me know if you hear anything interesting about any biotech firms, specifically HydroGen or any subsidiaries of Dreck-Windham."
"Can do. You on a money trail?"
"I wish it were that easy," Carver said. "You get some rest, Jack. Okay?"
"I'm half asleep already. You just be careful, Paxton. I may not have learned a lot, but I have met with a fair amount of resistance."
Paxton said goodbye and turned to watch the world fly past in the darkness. He was lucky to have Jack in his life. Jack may not have been there day in and day out, but he had been there enough to serve as a grounding influence when life became chaos, which was the road they now traveled.
"Who was that?" Wolfe asked, glancing up in the rear view mirror, still wearing the sunglasses.
Carver smiled in response, but in his mind he envisioned a little girl who could see in the dark, a little girl with the eyes of a wolf.
"An old friend," Carver said.
Wolfe returned the smile, though Carver could only tell by the way the man's glasses rose up on his cheeks.
"Next time you talk to Jack, send him my best and let him know we're thinking about him."
"He'd appreciate that, I'm sure."
Jack had said he didn't know Wolfe, but he supposed every agent surely knew the former Deputy Director.
His phone rang, and again he answered it, but not quickly enough. Ellie raised her head and blinked drowsily at him, then turned to look out the side window. Before he could even answer, Marshall was already on a roll.
"You are
not
going to believe this!"
"After the day I've had, there's not a whole lot I wouldn't believe. Try me."
"Okay, okay. First, I talked to Manning. Hell of a woman I might add. Anyway, we compared notes, and yada-yada-yada, she sent me her test results on Candace Thompson."
Carver felt as though his heart stopped in anticipation. "And?"
"I'm getting there. Just hear me out. So I run her DNA through the database, the whole database if you know what I'm saying, and it comes back with a match. You ready for this?
Elaphas maximus
. The freaking Asian elephant, Carver! An elephant of all things."
"It didn't show."
"Ain't that the truth. So I dig into the details regarding the corresponding locus on the X chromosome. That's where a defect can cause a disease called Turner's syndrome, which really messes with things like memory, sense of direction, and dexterity. Now I'm just starting to ponder what that might mean when I start running the program to compare good ol' Candy's DNA against your friend Elliot's--not a sexy name, by the way--which I pilfered from the university's mainframe. And like I said, my friend, you are not going to believe this."
"What?" Carver nearly shouted. He heard Marshall slurp from a mug and wanted to reach through the phone and shake him. Marshall had definitely already consumed an inhuman amount of caffeine. He was talking at a speed to make an auctioneer envious. "Just spit it out."
"All humans share ninety-nine point nine percent of their DNA. That means each of us differ by only point zero one percent, or roughly three million base protein pairs. Candace and Elliot share ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine--you get the drift. That's insane, man. Identical twins share one hundred percent of their DNA, and we're talking about a difference between the two of roughly one three-thousandth of a percent. That's maybe ten thousand base pairs apart."
"You're telling me they have the same DNA?"
"I'm telling you they're freaking twins, Carver. Born from the same mother and father. Delivered on the same day at the same time. If mom ate a pickle, they both tasted it simultaneously."
"Are you completely certain? I thought you said that those types shared one hundred percent." Carver was careful to modulate the inflection in his voice and his choice of words. He watched Ellie's profile against the window, limned by the various colors of the passing lights as they entered the Flagstaff city limits. Soon they would be at the motel. Ellie couldn't possibly have known she'd been born a twin or she would have said something when he had shown her the facial reconstruction of the corpse over which she'd been hovering only moments prior. He wondered how she would take the news, how he could possibly explain to her that she had been brushing vile dirt from the mummified remains of her identical twin, who had been interred in a ritualistic manner guaranteed to summon her from the southern hemisphere by a call from an old college professor with whom she hadn't been in contact in close to a decade. He wondered if he could even rationalize it himself.
"Are you even listening to me?" Marshall said. "I swear, it's like talking to my mom or something."
"Just thinking. I asked if you were positive beyond any doubt."
"You tuned me out that long ago?"
"You're chattering like you're on crack, Marshall. Give me a break."
"I'm mainlining the black stuff, man. Pure Columbian. So do you have your ears open now? Here's what I need. I need a sample of your gravedigger friend's blood. Pronto."
"You said you already have--"
"No, no, no. I need the real deal, but I don't have time to wait on shipping. You're going to have to get the sample drawn at a real lab, and the sooner the better."
"Marshall, what--?"
"Don't you see?" Marshall said. Carver imagined Marshall throwing up his arms in exaggerated exasperation. "Her identical biological twin has elephant genes on her X sex chromosome. Get it?"
"I guess not. Why don't you explain it to me, professor?"
"Carver. The X chromosome is inherent, passed directly from the parents to the child in utero. Elliot's twin sister, who shares nearly one hundred percent of her DNA, has animal genes."
"So you think--?"
"I'd wager a vital organ on it."
Carver peered at Ellie from the corner of his eye.
"You'll have what you need first thing in the morning," Carver said, and ended the call.
He reached across the seat and offered his hand to Ellie, who took it and gave him a weak smile in return. He was going to have to tell her everything if he was going to get her to consent to a blood draw on the way to the airport, but first he was going to have to corner Hawthorne.
And now was the perfect opportunity.
III
Flagstaff, Arizona
Kajika had passed out sitting up in the chair, perhaps encouraged by one too many beers. Ellie was asleep on the bed in the adjoining motel room, still fully clothed. She hadn't even taken the time to pull the pillow out from under the scratchy comforter or slip out of her shoes. Right now, Carver envied her and wished he could just curl up beside her, but this was the moment of truth. The men were all in the other room, gathered around the small table with the laptop, each milking a miniature cup of coffee from the vending machine down by the office. Over the course of the last couple of hours, he had begun to make sense of a few details, but the big picture was like a Monet: the closer he came to the truth, the more out of focus everything became. These agents hadn't been surprised by the news of the animal genes because they had known all along. In fact, he was quite confident that both Wolfe and Locke understood on a personal level. He couldn't get a read on Hawthorne though. The older man played everything so close to the vest, betraying nothing in appearance or expression, but he was still in charge, and the time was nigh to call him out.
Carver rose from the edge of the bed and walked across the room to the doors separating the rooms and pulled them just far enough closed to dampen the sound and yet still allow him to see through. When he turned again, the other three agents looked expectantly at him as though anticipating what was coming.
"No more bullshit," Carver said, resuming his seat on the bed. He looked at each of the men in turn. "I have a pretty good idea what's going on here, so it's time to give it to me straight. No more lies. No more avoidance. I want the truth, and I want it now."
"He thinks he knows," Locke said, his lips curling upward into an almost mocking smile.
"Do tell, Special Agent Carver," Hawthorne said, sharing none of his partner's amusement. As always, his face was expressionless. "What do you think you know?"
Wolfe stifled a chuckle when Carver fired him a glance embodying his mounting frustration.
"I wasn't really able to put it all together until I learned about Candace Thompson. Turns out she has the genes of an elephant in her X chromosome. I didn't understand the significance at first, but then it hit me. Marshall said the only way a sex chromosome could be altered was through the DNA of her parents. Granted, she was infected with the retrovirus, but that wasn't what caused this particular mutation. To find the source, we have to go back an entire generation. Maybe even further. In addition, we have at least two serial killers you guys have personally, I'll say brought to justice for lack of a better term, who I suspect were similarly afflicted. Just as Ellie and the body in the desert are identical twins, I suspect that you, Locke, and Charles Grady were as well. What I don't have a handle on, is how Ellie was unaware of her twin's existence and how Locke and Grady ended up living distinctly separate lives with different last names."
Hawthorne rose from his chair and removed his cell phone from his jacket, the exact same model through which Carver had spoken with the modulated voice of his enigmatic superior in the field behind the ramshackle farmhouse. He pressed a series of numbers, then brought the phone to his ear, but said nothing. Carver could hear a muffled electronic voice through the earpiece. Hawthorne nodded once, then again.
"Yes, sir," he said after a moment, then disconnected and shoved the phone back into his jacket. He stared at Carver for what seemed an eternity, his eyes piercing.
"So we're doing this now?" Wolfe said, taking off his glasses for only the third time since Carver had known him. He shielded those startlingly blue eyes from even the weak light cast by the bedside lamp.
"He's not completely ready," Hawthorne said, "but we've run out of time."
"I still don't think he's up for this yet," Locke said. His face was dark with what could have been a week's growth of beard. "I'm not convinced he ever will be."
"It doesn't matter what any of us think," Hawthorne said. "The order's come down."
Carver sat silently, waiting. While he thought he was prepared, he was about to learn he had only scratched the surface of something far bigger than he could ever have conceived.
Hawthorne sat in the chair across from him, his eyes never leaving Carver's for longer than it took to blink.
"Are you familiar with the name Josef Mengele?" he finally asked.
"He performed invasive experiments on prisoners in concentration camps for the Nazis," Carver said, and suddenly the repercussions hit him like a fist.
"Mengele was worse than that. He was an evil man the likes of which the world has never known. The Angel of Death, they called him. This was a man who would stick needles into the eyes of children and inject dyes into their irises to change the color, a man who would autopsy prisoners while they were still alive. There was no anesthesia, not even aspirin. These men, women, and children were strapped to tables and subjected to violations of the mind, body, and soul with implements this monster designed himself and smelted in the fires of hell. You may think you've heard about his atrocities, about lethal gas pumping through showerheads, mass cremations and burials, but the acts perpetrated behind closed doors, away even from the watchful eye of the Third Reich, gave new meaning to the word evil."
Carver watched Hawthorne's face flush with emotion, sorrow, rage, and something indefinable. His hands curled into fists so tight the skin on his knuckles threatened to split.
"This was a man intent on creating a master race not for the Führer, but for himself. His instructions were to facilitate the advancement of an Aryan nation, a way to make everyone over into blonde-haired, blue-eyed perfection. But where was the challenge in that? Where was the fun for a beast that reveled in the infliction of pain and torture as much as the science? Traits like hair and eye color could be selectively bred, but here he had a limitless supply of subjects upon whom he could conduct any experiment his black heart desired. By 1943 there were literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners in concentration camps, and whatever hand had once kept him in line was now occupied thousands of miles away waging war on fronts across Europe, Russia, and Africa. The soldiers who stayed behind to work in the camps were the most repulsive, despicable creatures the human race has produced. Men who thrilled in beating, maiming, murdering, and raping men, women, and children--it didn't matter. They had free reign to do whatever they wanted to people they saw as animals, fodder half-dead from starvation that welcomed death as a release from living in refuse and shoveling corpses into pyres that burned day and night, fueled by their loved ones, whose ashes fell upon the waking terror that was their lives like greasy gray snow."
Hawthorne paused to steady his voice. His mask of composure had been stripped away and he positively trembled with anger. The scars across his face were no longer intimidating, but somehow humanizing. He drew in a long breath and released it slowly before speaking again.