Chupacabra (6 page)

“I bet Noah Blackwood would run if he saw you from a hundred yards away,” Marty said. “You look like an extraterrestrial that got his head stuck in a wood chipper. You may need stitches.”

“Head wounds look worse than they are.” Luther spotted the platter on the table. “Food!” He started gobbling down stuffed grape leaves and shoveling baba ghanoush into his mouth with flat bread. “Aren’t you guys eating?”

For some reason, Marty and Dylan had lost their appetites.

“Do you have a beanie?” Marty asked Dylan.

“I think so,” Dylan replied.

“I hope so,” Marty said back.

Grace walked into the mansion smelling like dinosaur emissions. She was in for a brutally hot shower, where she would have to scrub herself raw to get rid of the odor. But it was worth it. She loved hanging out with the hatchlings in spite of the resulting stench — and having to be near Yvonne.

As soon as she stepped into her bedroom she knew someone had been going through her things. But she disguised her dismay, breezing in and kicking her tennis shoes off with a bright smile on her face.
Remember the cameras
, she thought. She crossed over to the dresser and opened a drawer as if she were getting fresh clothes. The drawers had clearly been gone through, but she kept her smile, acting as if her biggest concern was what to wear. She had arrived at the Ark with virtually nothing but the clothes on her back. Her grandfather had taken care of that by setting up a generous credit account on the Internet for her. All she had to do was find what she wanted, press the buy button, and the item would arrive the next day. There was a laptop on the desk, which she had only used to order things. She was afraid to set up a private email account or surf the web for fear that her every keystroke would be monitored.

On the bed was a pile of freshly laundered towels. She picked them up and walked into the bathroom. As soon as she had closed the door behind her she let out a sigh of relief. Acting cheerful when you weren’t cheerful was very taxing. She looked around the bathroom again for cameras, but didn’t see any. Next she went over to the toilet, disappointed to note that the water tank did not look disturbed. She removed the lid and set it on the seat. A smile spread across her face, but this time it was a genuine smile. The Ziploc bag was floating zip side down. She had left it floating zip side up. There wasn’t enough room in the tank for it to flip upside down on its own. A fish had nibbled on the bait. But which fish? Had Noah Blackwood searched her room, or was it someone else? There was only one fish she was trying to hook.

Her grandfather’s mansion was nothing like Wolfe’s house — or fort, as Wolfe called it — on Cryptos Island. In fact, the two homes could not be more different. Noah’s mansion was ultramodern, Spartan, antiseptic like a hospital operating room. The only other person she had seen within its stark white walls was her grandfather. Her bedroom, and the entire house, was cleaned within an inch of its life every single day, but she had yet to lay eyes on a maid. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were lonely affairs. By the time she got to the massive dining room, the food was already laid out no matter what time she arrived. No servers or cooks. Noah Blackwood certainly wasn’t preparing the food and setting the table. She had visited the kitchen several times at different times of day. Not once had she found anyone in there. It was like the meals were cooked by ghosts. When she had asked her grandfather about this, he answered, cryptically, that he preferred his help to be neither heard nor
seen. “They are employees. This house is for family,” he had said. As far as she knew, she and her grandfather were the only two people in the Blackwood family. Half the time, her grandfather didn’t show up in the dining room for meals and she ate alone.

Grace missed Wolfe’s cluttered fort, which looked more like a Gothic castle than a home. Jammed into every room was a mishmash of antique and new furniture in total disarray. Meals were communal affairs. The kitchen and dining room were free-for-alls, with everyone participating in the food prep and the eating.

She pulled the Moleskine from the tank and shook off the water in the sink. She had written several pages. It was the most difficult writing she had ever done, because it was filled with lies.

I suppose that’s what bait is
, Grace thought.
A lie dangling on the end of an invisible line.
She opened the Moleskine.
But to hook a fish, the bait has to be believable.

She skimmed the first several pages and got to the section she had penned that morning, hoping it was convincing enough to negate her grandfather’s suspicions.

Grace hoped this wasn’t over the top. She knew that Noah Blackwood, being one of the most accomplished liars of all time, was no doubt equally skilled at spotting liars. When she’d arrived at the Ark, she’d held on to a small hope that Noah Blackwood was not as bad as she’d thought. But after a few days the hope had all but vanished. Beyond his smiling, pleasant exterior there was something fundamentally wrong. It was clear from watching his interactions with his staff that they
were all terrified of him. Even Butch, although he tried to hide it, was afraid of Noah Blackwood.

She looked at her ridiculously expensive Swiss watch. It had cost her grandfather twenty-three thousand dollars. He hadn’t batted an eye. Trinkets like this were
his
bait. The iPad was another one. Shiny, irresistible lures. If she didn’t nibble at the bait, he would think the fish wasn’t biting. Grace had never worn a watch in her life, she couldn’t care less about jewelry, but she had made a huge fuss over the timepiece. The more things, or trinkets, she accepted from her grandfather, the more she had to lose if she ran away. The more she accepted, the more he would trust her. It was an hour before lunch. If her grandfather showed up for the meal, she’d know the bait was working.

She slipped the Moleskine into the Ziploc bags and put it back into the tank, noting the exact position. With the Moleskine back in place, she took off her dinosaur-soiled clothes and dropped them down the laundry chute.

Laundry elves
, she thought. Noah had bought her thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, but she had only worn two outfits so far, simply switching the dirty clothes for the laundered ones. In a couple of hours the clothes she’d dumped would be back in her dresser, cleaned, pressed, and folded.

“Sorry for the stinky clothes!” she yelled down the chute, then listened. She didn’t get a reply, and didn’t expect one, but she felt it was important to try to make friends, even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge her.

The marbled shower was almost as big as her cabin aboard the
Coelacanth
. She turned the water up to a notch below scalding, then stepped under the stream with her eyes closed. As she
reached for the soap dish to her right the marble wall seemed to move. She opened her eyes and stared in disbelief. The wall
had
moved. There was a six-inch gap in the white marble.

 • • • 

Noah was standing in his state-of-the-art DNA laboratory on the third level beneath the Ark. His biochemistry company was called GeneArk. Above ground, the company did very standard biochemistry research. Below ground, under his direction, it had taken biochemistry to unheard-of places. In the Middle Ages, his scientists would have been called witches and warlocks. Their experiments would have been called dark magic.

Noah was talking to his chief genetic scientist, Dr. Strand. The scientist was as pale as an eggshell, as if he hadn’t been out in the sun in a decade. But in truth it had only been six months. He was wearing red surgical scrubs. He had a bandage wrapped around his left hand. Perched on the bridge of his prominent nose were the thickest black-framed glasses Noah had ever seen, making the scientist’s dark eyes pop from his bald skull. The effect, Noah thought, was irritatingly squidlike. He noticed that Strand’s glasses had been damaged, the bridge crudely repaired with silver duct tape.

“What happened?” Noah asked, pointing, and not really caring.

“Nothing,” Strand said. “Dropped them on the cement.”

Noah gave him a nod and got on to more important things. “How are the samples?” he asked.

“Pristine,” Dr. Strand answered excitedly. “There is nothing even remotely like them.”

“Can they be cloned?”

“Absolutely. But of course we will have to transport them south for the real work to begin. When do you think—”

“When I say!” Noah cut him off. Strand had been complaining about being stuck at the Ark for months, and Noah was sick of it.

“Of course … of course … ,” Strand whined, backing away as if Noah was about to take a swing at him.

Noah smiled. He had never hit the scientist, but knowing that Strand thought he might gave him a feeling of great satisfaction.

“Can the samples be mutated and recombined?” Noah asked.

“I’ll need more time to work with the material, but I don’t see why not.”

“And did you take care of the implants?”

“Of course … of course. Subcutaneously, at the base of the tail, just as you requested.”

Noah nodded. Although he already knew the implants had been taken care of. He had watched the minor procedure on one of his secret cameras.

“Where did you find these remarkable creatures?” Strand asked, his excitement overtaking his fear for a minute. “They are absolutely incredible.”

Noah frowned. Questions like this were not allowed at the Ark. Information was strictly segregated. One level had no idea what another level was doing. Most of his staff didn’t even know how many levels there were at the Ark.

“I-I’m sorry,” the scientist stammered, realizing his mistake. “It’s just that the material appears to be millions of years old,
but it’s still viable. If I could learn the country of origin, I could—”

Noah cut him off again with a cold blue-eyed stare. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“Of course … of course,” Dr. Strand sputtered, backing farther away like a frightened crawfish.

“How is CH-9?”

“Yvonne was down here early this morning working with him. She said the training was going well. He has a very strong food drive.”

“What about his implant?”

“Well, his is very different from the implants we placed in the dinosaurs, of course. Yvonne aptly calls it a steering wheel.”

Noah thought about this for a moment. “Is it possible we could use that implant in a human subject?”

“I don’t see why not. It would involve brain surgery, which is always a risk. And we would need a willing subject.”

Noah nearly laughed. Willingness had nothing to do with a subject’s willingness. It had to do with Noah’s will. And he had the perfect subject in mind.

“We managed to come up with a harness for CH-9,” Strand went on enthusiastically. “It doesn’t impede his movements in any way, and with the new camera we can see everything CH-9 sees.”

“We won’t be using the camera in the next field tests,” Noah stated matter-of-factly.

“Of course … of course,” Strand sputtered again. “That’s a given, but as a training tool it’s perfect. CH-9 is fast. He gets ahead of us. Without the camera to see where he’s going, we might lose him. We’ve left the camera harness on him so we
don’t have to tranquilize him every day. He’s a little hard to handle.” Dr. Strand rubbed the bandage wrapped around his hand.

Noah smiled. CH-9 had bitten Strand three times. The last two requiring stitches.

“I’m glad to hear the camera is working well,” Noah said. Ted Bronson’s high-tech camera had been an added bonus to the Mokélé-mbembé raid. Butch had stolen it from the
Coelacanth
. Noah’s technicians had modified it to fit the harness.

“It’s unbelievable! The video is almost as clear at night as it is during the day.”

Noah glanced at his watch. He had just enough time to take a look at the final cut of his syndicated television show before sending it off. It was due to go out early the following morning and air the following evening all over the world. It was a dramatic episode. All he had to do was add an announcement at the end that would shake the scientific community and the general public to their very core. He was looking forward to it.