VIABLE (31 page)

The old man glanced briefly at the gun then returned his gaze to him.

‘You won’t do that.’

The vowels slightly clipped, a guttural edge to the consonants.

‘What makes you so certain.’

‘Because you need to know.’

Cody remained silent, finger curled around the trigger. Whatever game the old man was playing, he didn’t have time for it. He had to get this over with.

‘Know what?’

‘Who you are.
What
you are.’

The old man was bluffing. He might know what Alison had uncovered but how could he possibly know more than that? He didn’t know much more himself. The ploy was obvious. He was stalling, giving his men time to return from the facility. Maybe he even had other teams closer by, already on their way.  He raised the Colt a fraction, flicking the safety with the side of his thumb.

‘Go ahead, Codratus. If you do, you’ll never find out.’

The old man waited, looking up him with his one good eye. After a few moments he smiled, sensing he had won some silent battle of wills, that he was back in control.

‘He told me, before he died, that you might exist, but I never really believed him. Not until we analyzed a sample of your blood, that is. No agglutination. No clumping. Incredible. And to think you were out there all along.’

What was the old man talking about?

‘What do you mean? Who told you I might exist?’

The old man waved the question away.

‘All in good time, Codratus, all in good time. It’s the blood. It’s all in the blood.’

He smiled again, as if at a private joke that only he understood.

‘My blood. That was why you brought me to the facility?’

The old man paused before answering, drawing out the seconds.

‘Yes.’

‘How did you find me? How did you know I possessed the
hh
blood type?’

‘Datacore.’

‘The company that maintains personnel records for the military? How do you have access to their records?’

‘Datacore is mine. I own it. Finding donors with the
hh
blood type had always been the problem. So when I learned that the government was planning to outsource the maintenance of its personnel records it was an opportunity too good to pass up. Datacore was still just a tiny company back then, but it met the tender requirements. It never would have won, of course. But thanks to a senator on the Armed Forces Appropriations Committee who cost me almost as much as I paid for the company itself, Datacore ended up with the contract, and has held it ever since.’

‘So you have access to the blood type of everyone serving in the armed forces.’

The old man shook his head.

‘Not just the military, Codratus. Datacore now manages the records of most of the country’s emergency services and law enforcement agencies as well. It even has a special division to advise the government on what information might usefully be stored about its servicemen and women.’

‘So it was you who initiated testing for the
hh
blood group?’

A nod, yes. Cody thought the old man looked proud.

‘The first of many initiatives. You may have heard of the genetic dog-tagging program? Another of my ideas. I now have access not just to the blood types but also to the genetic records of several million Americans.’

‘So how many have you had abducted?’

‘Over the years the information from Datacore has yielded several dozen candidates. We have to make sure of course that their records are altered before they’re abducted, their blood types changed before the details can appear on the FBI’s NCIC database. Otherwise people like the sheriff in Hawthorne start to notice. That was a lesson we learned after the first abductions.’

‘Shilpa Desai, Cindy Rowe, Robin Taft?’ Alison had told him what Henrikssen had uncovered.

The old man paused for a moment, as if considering. In the end he dismissed the question with a wave of his fingers.

‘Perhaps. So long ago now, though. I forget the details.’

Not a trace of guilt; not a shred of remorse. He hadn’t even remembered their names.

‘But Lars Henrikssen figured out what you had done.’

‘Yes, the sheriff proved unusually efficient in putting the pieces together. But ironically it was because of his meeting with Fitzpatrick that I came to you, Codratus. I could hardly believe it when I accessed the Datacore searches the commander carried out on Christmas Day.’

‘And that was why you had Fitzpatrick killed.’

Cody’s knuckles whitened, his finger involuntarily tightening around the Colt’s trigger. The old man didn’t seem to notice.

‘Yes. You have been lucky to have kept what you are hidden for so long, Codratus. But it was foolish to confide in the Stone woman. Your secret is too valuable to share with anyone, you must realize that. Such potential. Doctor Stone was kind enough to tell us about the adrenaline trigger. I’m sure we would have figured it out sooner or later, but the information was very helpful. I have already had my first transfusion of your blood. This morning, the units my doctors took from you at the facility.’

That was when he heard it. The distant thrum of rotors. Still several miles out, but they would be here in minutes. The old man hadn’t noticed yet, but Cody knew he was out of time. He needed to get him to talk. He raised the Colt again, pointing the barrel at the old man’s head.

‘Tell me what you know about me.’

‘Not just yet, Codratus. Not just yet. I’m enjoying our conversation too much. Moments like this are rare. They need to be savored.’

Cody gripped the Colt tighter. He didn’t have time for this. But Henrikssen had been right. In spite of what the old man had done to Fitzpatrick, to Carla, to Alison, now that he was here he found he couldn’t shoot him in cold blood. And the old man knew it.

Then suddenly he remembered. He reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out the syringe he had taken from the facility, from the room where Alison had been tortured. He flicked off the plastic protective cap.

‘What’s that?’

For the first time the old man sounded worried. He tried to sit up, to back away but Cody leaned over the bed, taking hold of one skeletal forearm. The needle slid easily into the cannula already embedded there.

‘It’s what your men at the facility gave to Alison Stone to make her talk. I’m guessing you know what it did to her. One way or another you’re going to tell me what I want to know.’

Cody placed his thumb over the plunger, pausing for a moment. When the old man said nothing he depressed it a fraction of an inch. Suddenly in a fit of rage the old man lunged forward, lips pulled back in a snarl, for an instant revealing a single long yellow curved canine. Their faces were only inches apart and his one good eye glared with such venom that for an instant Cody felt his blood run cold. But he kept his grip on the old man's forearm, his thumb on the syringe. After a moment the old man lay back, his rage spent.

‘Wait. Wait. I’ll tell you.’

The old man looked up at him from the bed with a look of utter malevolence, but Cody ignored it.

Go on.

The old man paused for a moment, wetting his lips.

‘My name is Callum Newman. Heir to Henry Newman. Or Doctor Heinz Albrecht Neumann as he was known before we came to this country.’

Heinz Albrecht Neumann. The name meant nothing to him.

‘Neumann was our father.’

The words hit him like a physical blow. He searched the old man’s face for any evidence that he might be lying, concocting a story in order to buy time.

‘
Our
father?’

He barely managed to stammer out the words.

‘I say father, although I doubt either of us actually contain any of his genetic material. He never told me what he used to create us, even though I begged him, pleaded with him to know, right until the end.
Ein bißchen Bißchen über dieses ein bißchen Bißchen über jene
was all he would say.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that
. How it used to annoy me. From what Doctor Stone was able to tell us it seems that you’ve already guessed at some of your origins. A little more obvious in my case.’ He pulled back his lips, with one long finger tapping the side of the curved, yellow canine he had flashed earlier.

‘You’re mistaken. I know I was born in London.’

‘Yes, the center of the movement at the time. Neumann only returned home to continue his work later, when those ideas fell out of favor.’

‘What ideas? What movement?’

‘Eugenics. From the Greek.
Well-born
. The idea that a race of superhumans could be produced by selective breeding. Balfour, Churchill, Roosevelt: they all supported it. Neumann took it one step further. You were his only success, you know. He spent the rest of his life trying to recreate you. I was as close as he ever got. As you can see, not very close.’ A bitter laugh.

So it was true, then.

Not born.

Created.

‘It was his obsession with recreating you that destroyed him in the end. He became consumed by what he had done for the National Socialists at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, a dozen other camps. All so that they would let him continue with his experiments.’

Cody’s mind was still reeling, considering the possibilities.

‘There...there are others then, like me?’

‘It’s possible, but I doubt it. I was the last of the
Lebensfähig
.’

‘Lebensfähig
?’

‘The Viables. The term our father used to refer to those of his experiments that survived. Most didn’t. And as you can see it wasn’t always a blessing.’

The sound of the approaching helicopter was louder now. He needed to get out of here, before they arrived. His mind raced. He still had so many questions he wanted to ask.

‘What about my mother?’

The old man waved his hand, dismissing the question.

‘Before he had access to the camps our father used the homeless, the indigent, for his experiments. She was probably a prostitute, a young woman desperate for money. Who knows? Who cares? She was only an incubator.’

Suddenly the old man turned his head, straining to hear. A smile slowly crept across his face. He had finally heard the helicopter.

‘Do you hear that Codratus? Within moments my men will be here. Even if you manage to get out of this building you won't escape me. It doesn’t matter where you go, I will track you down. But this doesn’t have to be unpleasant. All I need is access to your blood. I am a very wealthy man. I’ll give you anything you want.’

‘And all those people you killed?’

‘Only because I needed to stay alive. You would have done the same if you were me. But if I have you, if I have your blood, the killing will stop. I won’t need anyone else.’

Cody was out of time. He placed the comms unit he had been holding in his hand back in his ear.

‘Did you get all that?’

‘Yep, Connie’s recorded it all. Feds are on their way, less than a minute out. You’d best get out of there. They’ve already secured the men at the facility.’

The old man stared up at him in disbelief.

‘Who is that? Who are you talking to?’

‘That was the sheriff in Hawthorne you tried to have killed this morning. He’s recorded our conversation.’

The old man stared up at him, his face contorted in a mask of rage.

‘You fool. Do you think the sheriff can protect you? He’ll be dead before the day is through. And you, all I need is your blood. I can keep you in a box if I choose.’

‘That helicopter you hear isn’t your men returning. It’s the FBI. You’ll spend whatever time you have left in a cell.’

Cody pointed down at the syringe he had inserted in the cannula in the old man’s arm.

‘I’m going to leave you with that.’

He looked down at the old man for a moment longer. Then he turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Moments later from the roof the sound of the helicopter’s Rolls-Royce engines preparing for takeoff, and then it was gone, replaced by the sound of another helicopter, closer now, coming in to land.

The old man stared at the syringe for a long moment. He heard the door from the roof open, the sounds of boots in the corridor outside. Then he was pressing the plunger, pushing the pale yellow liquid into his veins.

As the door to his room burst open the old man thought he detected the first faint odor of garlic.

Epilogue

ALISON
WALKED
BACK from the lecture theatre to her lab. The fog that had settled in from the bay to the east that morning, blanketing the campus, was slowly burning off. It had been a long, grey winter. She was ready for spring to begin.

It had been her first lecture since Christmas, and she had been a little nervous, but she thought it had gone well. Physically she had recovered quickly, but it had taken a long time for her memory to return. The first few weeks after she had regained consciousness had been the worst. She hadn’t even been able to remember her name. But it had come back, slowly, frustratingly slowly at first, and then faster. As far as she could tell she was now largely back to normal, although she still had no recollection of anything that had happened in the fortnight prior to her admission to UMC. The neurologists there had told her that she might get fragments back as time went on, but it was also possible that she would simply never remember what had happened to her. Those few weeks might remain a mystery forever.

She had learned from the hospital that she had arrived by helicopter, but they had been able to tell her little else. The sheriff from Hawthorne, Henrikssen, had visited her in hospital, and again a few weeks after she had been discharged, at her lab. She had no memory of ever having met him. He had explained that he had come to see her just before Christmas and asked her to look at blood samples related to a crime that had occurred in his town. That visit had led to her having been targeted by Callum Newman, a reclusive billionaire, one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history, who had somehow managed to evade detection for almost half a century. Even now, three months later, the story was still all over the news. Alison had no idea whether she had ever even met the man, or what he might have done to her to cause the neurological trauma she had suffered. She would probably never find out - Newman had taken the information with him to the grave. When the FBI had finally tracked him down they had found him in a coma. He had died shortly after they had taken him into custody and his body had immediately been cremated. She didn’t even know what he looked like. Not a single picture had ever been released of the man responsible for at least two dozen deaths over a period of over fifty years.