He tried to imagine Hawthorne crouched on bloodstained concrete with severed limbs dangling from the ceiling and bones mounded in the corner, gnawing on the meat of a human thigh while flies swarmed his head, and was surprised by how quickly and easily the image came to him.
VIII
Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory
Centennial, Colorado
The sun had risen, though Marshall could only tell by the distant rumble of traffic. He was about to get up to stretch his legs when his phone rang.
"Marshall," he answered through a yawn.
"Don't tell me I woke you." He recognized Manning's voice right away.
"You kidding? I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep for a week. You got something new for me?"
"I was hoping you could help me out."
"Sorry. I must not have heard you right. Inner ear thing. What did you say?"
"I said I need your help."
"That must have hurt."
"You have no idea." He almost thought he detected the trace of a smile in her voice. "I figure you might be able to save me some time here. So far none of my stiffs are matching by their DNA in any of the missing persons databases, and I figure if the facial reconstruction program worked once...."
"No problem."
"So can I send these pictures to the same email address?"
"Yeah," Marshall said. "That will work perfectly. Just give me a little time to play with them, okay?"
"Take whatever time you need. I'll be out here pulling corpses out of the sand until the Second Coming."
"You finding anything interesting?"
"Mummified murder victims aren't interesting enough for you?"
"You know what I'm saying."
"Nothing useful anyway. All we have are authentic five hundred year-old Inca blankets from Peru and obsidian figurines we speculate to be first century Maya, which seems a little odd. Neither society occupied the same space at the same time. All we can say with any certainty is that the bat and the tapir certainly mean something to someone."
"What about the bodies I heard they found in that smokehouse?"
"Not my assignment, but between us, I heard they were able to fingerprint the stiffs, but haven't been able to find any matches."
"Surprise, surprise."
Manning ended the call after he pledged to start the facial reconstructions as soon as he hung up. She was starting to warm to him. Must be his natural charm, he thought. He was debating the logistics of even attempting to propose a long-distance relationship when her email came through. The first set of images was taken at night under bright halogens, creating awkward shadows, but there were enough of them from different angles that he figured he could make it work. This one was clearly male as evidenced by the thick, broad mandible and prominent zygomatic arches. The hair was shorter, but still shaggy. Clumps were missing in obvious sections, but there was no sign of pattern baldness. The pictures gave him the creeps. With the brown skin stretched to the point of tearing, pulling the eyelids away from the empty sockets and the lips from the bared teeth, the man appeared to be growling. More files came in after the first, but he could only do them one at a time, so he opened the program and began with the male subject.
After clipping each section of the face from the best pictures of each, he resized and fit them into his template. The skeletal face was incomplete, but at least he had all of the major landmarks in place. Skin tone, eye color, and the actual non-dyed hair color would have helped tremendously for the final image, yet those were variables that could always be changed regardless. He started the reconstruction and took a short walk to get his blood flowing again.
A couple minutes later, he returned to find the reconstruction complete. He opened the image and drew a sharp breath.
He'd seen that face before. Very recently.
He had to be sure.
An internet search produced what he was looking for right off the bat. The first match was at the
Rocky Mountain News
website. He followed the link, which took him to a page with a color photograph and an article straight out of the paper only two days prior. The caption read:
man suspected in murders of four girls killed by federal agent
.
Beneath, was a picture of Tobin Schwartz.
IX
Redmond, Washington
Carver received Marshall's call shortly after landing at Sea-Tac. He wished the news had surprised him, but after the last couple of days it was going to take a lot more than that. It made sense in retrospect. The overt hostility directed at him regarding Schwartz from both Hawthorne and the strange, changing voice on the phone. The way neither Hawthorne nor Locke appeared remotely interested in watching Schwartz's message in Kajika's trailer. They had already known, as it seemed was the case with just about everything. Schwartz hadn't been infected with the retrovirus at all. The changes had been in his genes all along and he simply hadn't known. Carver wondered if it had been Hawthorne's responsibility to keep tabs on Schwartz, and how the agent was dealing with such a miserable failure.
Worse, Carver was struggling with his own involvement. He had shot and killed a marginally guilty man, who had presumably broken into his townhouse in hopes of soliciting help, and found only death. He couldn't afford to let it consume him now, not while he still had Ellie's life in his hands. There would be plenty of time for that later. Every day for the rest of his life, he suspected.
There had been two unmarked sedans waiting for them on the tarmac, twin black Caprices that now sat invisibly in the packed parking lot of a shopping mall two miles from the off-ramp to State Route 203, which led from suburban Redmond to the HydroGen facilities. The company gave public tours only with advance reservation. Carver didn't press the issue with the woman on the phone for fear of drawing undue attention, though he imagined whoever they were hoping to find already knew they were there. The initial visit was intended to be a scouting mission anyway. With the satellite images of the property and the surrounding acreage and Kajika's somewhat dated memories, they still should be able to get close enough to determine what they truly needed to know: where they would be able to breach the security during the coming night.
For now, the plan was simple. The adjacent land to the southwest was designated park space, bisected by the Skykomish River. Recreational trails wound through fir forests thick with ferns. The hills were steep and appeared to provide reasonable cover to within a quarter mile of the fence enclosing HydroGen's property. Kajika described the barrier as nine-foot chain-link capped with coiled concertine wire and swiveling perimeter security cameras every hundred feet. When asked why such security was necessary for a glorified fish farm, Kajika explained that the business of genetics was cutthroat and significant advances in biotechnology could simultaneously cause one company to prosper and a competitor to crumble. He said they even tried motion sensors, but between the coyotes, bears, and hikers straying from the paths on the refuge, they were being set off so frequently that they were all but useless. Carver knew they couldn't count on finding the same security intact, especially if their suspicions were correct, but at least it was something to go on.
Carver, Hawthorne, and Kajika had been outfitted in hiking gear from the L.L. Bean store in the mall. Baggy khaki shorts with innumerable pockets, flannel shirts, wool socks, and hiking boots that cost more than all the shoes in Carver's closet combined. Carver and Hawthorne had been prepared to roll the clothing in the gutter to create the illusion of frequent wear, but Kajika insisted they would stand out more if they did. Redmond was an upscale suburb of Seattle. People tended to their hiking gear as they would their golf or tennis apparel. So they had merely clipped the tags and changed into their new wardrobe. Carver wore a khaki baseball cap down low across his brow to shield his face if he looked down. Hawthorne had a floppy-brimmed hat that reminded Carver of those he had seen in old pictures on the heads of soldiers in Vietnam, only gray with a white band around the seam rather than camouflaged. Kajika wore a black snow cap under which he could tuck his braid, stating it wasn't an unusual sight around these parts, even in the summer months. They each had a backpack between their feet on the floorboards, stuffed with bottled water, granola they would never eat, and a pair of binoculars.
Locke drove while Wolfe waited with Ellie back at the mall. He would drop them off in the dirt lot at the base of the trailhead and return when he received the call. Their goal was to be back at the car in under two hours. There were still many preparations to be made.
The hike was more strenuous than they had initially anticipated, due in large measure to the fact that none of them had truly slept in days, though no one complained. The forest was thick and lush, a byproduct of the eternal rains, which fortunately had spared them this day. Low-lying clouds turned the world a uniform gray, and a dark mist swarmed them like gnats. They followed the well-manicured path through firs culturing moss, every inch of the ground beneath occupied by ferns, which lent an almost primordial appearance to the trek as though traveling back in time. The climb grew steeper as they approached the Skykomish River. It chuckled down below them as they mounted the bridge crossing fifty feet above, reminding them that one misstep and their bodies would be feeding crabs in the Puget Sound. The path leveled out past the bridge, and had only begun a slow descent into a valley when Kajika led them from the maintained trail onto a thinner branch that followed the topography of the hills down to the right. The wet ferns soaked the bottoms of their shorts and their socks. Carver's toes were pruned inside his boots and his leg hairs stood uncomfortably erect. After half a mile, Kajika slowed their pace and stopped behind a stand of evergreens. He nodded past the screen of vegetation to signify their journey was at an end.
Carver and Hawthorne unpacked their binoculars and crawled into the trees. They flattened to their bellies at the very edge of the cover and studied the area beyond through the lenses. The trees had been cleared to provide a fifty-foot perimeter surrounding the property, leaving shin-high grasses and random clusters of ferns. They could clearly see the tall barrier at the edge of the field. There would be times when they would be completely exposed while crossing. The concertine-topped chain-link fence was still in place as Kajika had described, the cameras mounted where he had said they would be. It didn't look as though the security had been enhanced, but both knew the point of such systems was also to deceive.
Beyond the fence they could see the first two great white domes. They were reminiscent of giant greenhouses large enough to contain an ice skating rink each. The rumble of the machinery within was a sound they felt through the ground as much as heard. To the left of the structures, the back of the main building was obscured by trees landscaped into the compound: pink- and white-flowering dogwoods and crabapples interspersed with sagging willows and prospering pines. To the right was a small brick building about the size of a garage, beyond which were what looked like large swimming pools covered with a slimy green film. Thick pipes bent up and out like so many enormous metal octopi trying to escape the burbling water, the source of the foul, marshy stench. The water reclamation tanks.
Kajika had explained that in 2002 the state of Washington had passed legislation to prevent the insinuation of genetically engineered salmon into the wild populations following the accidental release of thousands by their competitors. The law had effectively destroyed the other aquaculture companies since their holding pens were situated directly in the Sound. HydroGen used a closed-circuit arrangement featuring its own recycling system, completely independent of the Skykomish River. It may have cost substantially more to maintain, but it also allowed them to stay afloat while others were floundering. This meant the water was in a continuous state of motion, flowing through each of the tanks under the six massive white domes and to the reclamation tanks, where it was chemically and biologically filtered and forced back along the line. There were maintenance tunnels beneath each of the buildings stuffed with pipes full of running water and a narrow walkway between, one under each of the buildings with smaller, dead-end branches below each of the sixteen holding tanks, eight to each side of the central aisle. The main tunnels terminated at a perpendicular track with only a single outlet into the main office building itself via a security-controlled entrance into the basement under the lobby, which itself was protected by motion detectors, thermal cameras, and a lone armed guard. They were going to have to bypass four security bottlenecks, the first of which, and apparently the only one giving Hawthorne pause, was the external perimeter.
After five full minutes of watching through the binoculars in silence, Hawthorne finally spoke.
"Son of a bitch," he whispered, and that was all.
They shimmied back out of the detritus and started the long return trip to the rendezvous point. Carver waited until they had again crossed the bridge to finally broach the subject.
"How are we going to get in?"
"We're going right through the fence."
"What if it's electrified?"
"It isn't. Didn't they teach you anything at Quantico? First of all, there weren't any additional wires strung in conjunction with the fence. And there were no thyristors to modulate current or backup power sources mounted to the framework."
"Motion sensors?"
"There were no motion sensors. No thermal sensors. No sensors of any kind. There weren't the telltale marks in the ground to indicate any lines had been buried anytime recently. The grass was solid and healthy within the final ten feet leading up to the fence. Only the cameras and the razor wire."