Sins of the Father (34 page)

He unfisted his own right hand, and stretched it out toward her.

Just before they touched, he noticed something starting to happen to her hand. At first it was the proportions of her fingers that seemed slightly off. The index finger seemed too long, while the middle finger was too short and thick. The pinkie finger was age-spotted with the swollen knuckles of an older woman. She didn’t seem to be mutating out of control like the virus’s previous victims. She just seemed to be shifting into a strange jigsaw composite of different people.

Patches of her skin were dark while others were light. Some had freckles, or scars, or thick hair. When he looked up at her face, he was amazed and horrified to see a morphing kaleidoscope of varied features, both male and female.

“What?” she asked, her patchwork brows furrowed.

“I think—” he said, gesturing to his own face with a kind of inarticulate flapping. “I mean, something is…”

Before he could find the words to break it to her that she seemed to be transforming into a hundred different people at the same time, something started happening to that unnatural slash in the air behind her. It began clenching, tightening up and narrowing like reluctant lips.

She noticed the direction of his gaze and turned to look.

“No!” she cried.

Before Peter could process this new development, she flung herself through the shimmering rift.

Then she and the rift were gone.

Julia felt an uncanny power fluctuating and flowing through every inch of her body as she spun away from Peter and dove into the gateway. Everything seemed to turn inside out, thrusting her headfirst through a thousand improbable supernovas, all simultaneously.

Then she was suddenly plunged into chilly green water. Before she was able to orient herself and figure up from down in the murky shallows, rough hands gripped her arms and her clothes and hauled her, sputtering, to her feet.

She shook her head to clear it, and looked around at her saviors. They were a dead-eyed pair, pale and utterly expressionless. Both male and both in their mid-thirties, one blond and one dark. Unremarkable, except for their total lack of anything resembling human emotion.

There were two other people there, too. One was female and standing directly in front of Julia, knee deep in water. She was pretty, with wide-set dark eyes and honey-blond hair, but she was just as cold and inhuman as her male compatriots.

The other was a third male, with light hair and blue eyes, standing on the shore. All four were dressed in what looked like black military fatigues or maybe SWAT uniforms.

Are they soldiers of some sort?
she wondered.

The blue-eyed man on the shore was the only one of the four wearing something that resembled a human expression. Unfortunately, it was a hostile smirk that didn’t bode well for Julia.

Although everything looked just as it had before she entered the gateway, she had to assume that she’d made it through to the alternate universe that Doctor Bishop had written about in his journal. Peter was nowhere to be seen, and these grim soldiers were here in his place. But she hadn’t been expecting this sort of welcome committee—or any welcome at all, for that matter—and her mind was racing, desperate to come up with something that would enable her to talk her way out of this situation.

That’s when she noticed the skin of her arms was behaving strangely, flickering like a rapid-paced slideshow of different skin tones and textures. The virus wasn’t supposed to have any mutagenic effects on an epileptic host, but an unexpected physical side effect of some kind was definitely occurring. It seemed odd that she didn’t feel anything unusual, physically speaking, other than a slight adrenaline buzz. Could the fluctuations in her skin be hallucinations brought on by the symbiotic assimilation of the virus inside her brain?

But as fascinating as this effect might be, she had more pressing issues with which to deal.

“Who,” she managed to whisper. “Who are you?”

The woman raised an unfamiliar gun and pointed it at Julia.

“Not in the head,” the smirking man said. “The brain must remain intact.”

The woman nodded, lowered her aim, and shot Julia in the heart.

* * *

Thomas Newton watched the subject sag lifelessly in the arms of the hybrid soldiers, bleeding out into the murky green water. He had a passing surge of discomfort, imagining contamination and rampant plague that might result from the viral load in the subject’s blood.

But Jones had assured him that his newest re-engineered strain of the virus was neither as hearty nor as deadly as the first. It would die off within seconds of being exposed to the hostile environment outside the host organism’s body.

“Get her into the cryo-freezer,” he snapped. “Pronto.”

The hybrid soldiers followed his command, hauling the still-shifting body ashore and carrying it quickly and efficiently to the back of the truck parked up on the bluff. The roll-up was open, the freezer ready and waiting to accept the specimen.

Newton couldn’t imagine how something so obviously wild and unstable could really be the key to creating a new wave of fully organic shifters, soldiers that would outperform their current mechanical hybrids, and tip the balance in the war between the universes. After all, it was clear that the subject had been unable to control her shifting ability—indeed, she barely seemed aware that it was occurring.

His soldiers needed to be finely calibrated and perfectly controlled, able to pass without notice among their unsuspecting human targets. Still, he himself was just a foot soldier in this war, and it wasn’t his place to question the orders of his superiors.

Once the body of the subject was interred in the cryo-freezer for transport to the lab, Newton closed the roll-up door on the back of the truck and rapped on it to signal the driver.

He watched without comment as the driver put the vehicle in gear and drove away.

* * *

Jones watched one of a bank of monitors on the desk. The image was of Reiden Lake through cameras he had installed to watch for Julia. He would be collecting them soon, since they were no longer needed, though it didn’t much matter if he did. No one would find them, just as no one had found them in Bangkok, Hartford, the Ambassador Hotel, or in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel beneath New York.

Of course, that last one hadn’t needed to be collected. It was incinerated when the thermite destroyed everything in the tunnel. Just as he’d planned it.

Jones switched off the last of the monitors. As secret lairs went, this one wasn’t so bad. He had everything he needed, and things were going according to plan. Oh, there were some adjustments he would need to make, but not many. With Doctor Lachaux’s mutated brain in his possession, he had exactly what he needed to take his work further than anyone had dreamed.

A noise behind him caught his attention. He spun slowly in the office chair.

An electronic typewriter—a Selectric 251—hummed to life. The hammers began striking the crisp, white paper in the machine, yet there was no one at the keys. Well, no one on his side of the fence, at least. In the small mirror set up next to the typewriter, Jones could see the keys move. It was a fascinating process to observe.

Hit a key over there, make a letter over here. He watched the message take shape on the crisp, white paper in the machine. A message between worlds. He read the news, the import of it sinking in.

He smiled.

Another airport—the first place Peter went when he wasn’t sure what to do next.

This particular one was New York’s familiar JFK airport, and he sat slumped in a long row of uncomfortable seats facing the window, with a laptop balanced on his knees. He had been cleaning out the accumulated junk from one of his many email accounts, but found himself just staring at the screen, brain idling in a kind of dull, blurry neutral.

He was exhausted, wrung out like a washrag and weighed down with thorny, unanswered questions. The most pressing of which remained what the hell he was going to do about Big Eddie.

And he was all out of answers.

A new message appeared in his inbox, attracting his eye. It was from his old Iraqi friend and fixer Tarik. The subject was BIG FISH.

Hello my friend,

Please join me for another fishing trip. The big ones are jumping. Don’t let them get away this time.

Meet up at the usual place for details.

—T.

A little fishing trip was just what he needed to put all this madness behind him, and if he was lucky, he’d score enough of a catch to get Big Eddie off his back for good.

Peter looked at his watch, then called up the schedule for Qatar Airways. He still had plenty of time to make the 4:30 flight to Baghdad. Shuffling through his various passports, he looked for the one that seemed the least dodgy out of the stack. He found one that didn’t look too bad, and booked himself a seat in first class as Jack Johnson.

He closed the laptop and stood, stuffing it into his messenger bag. He turned toward the large screen that displayed the upcoming international departures, and spotted a man standing nearby, looking right at him.

The man was unremarkable, on the youngish side of middle-aged but dressed older in a high-end navy-blue suit and a subtle, pricy tie. His shoes were spotless and his eyes were small and shrewd behind wire-rimmed glasses. He could have been any ordinary businessman waiting for a flight back to the head office, but his interest in Peter was unmistakable.

He didn’t smell like either a thug or a fed. Too well dressed and paunchy, with soft clean hands.

Peter couldn’t decide if it would be wiser to shake this guy, or call him out, but in the end he didn’t have to choose because the man came over to him.

“Peter Bishop?”

Peter narrowed his eyes but didn’t respond.

“I have a business proposition for you,” the man said.

He reached into an inner pocket and Peter flinched a little, even though he knew it was highly unlikely that the man had managed to bring a gun through airport security. Instead of a weapon, the man pulled out a thick envelope and handed it over. The envelope was unmarked except for an unfamiliar three-dimensional “M” logo in the upper-left corner.

Judging from the weight and shape of the envelope, it contained cash.

Lots of it.

The man had his interest now, that was for sure.

“My employer has authorized me to issue this advance, just for considering his offer. If you aren’t interested, you can put that in your pocket and walk away right now, no explanation required. If you are interested, well, there’s more where that came from. Plenty more.”

“I’m listening,” Peter said, slipping the envelope into his messenger bag. “But I have to catch a flight in two hours.”

“We’ll give you a ride in the company plane,” the man said. “You can meet with my employer on the way to your destination.”

“I’m not headed to Cleveland, you know,” Peter said. “I’m flying international.”

“We know where you’re going, Mr. Bishop,” the man said. “It’s not a problem.” He gestured to his left. “This way, please.”

Peter frowned, still not entirely sure how to feel about this unexpected development. But he knew exactly how he felt about that envelope full of cash. And how Big Eddie would feel about it, too.