Xeno Sapiens (19 page)

********************

They had passed the afternoon and
evening quite comfortably, talking about the accident, the progress
of the project, and what lay ahead.

Around six o’clock, Clifton, now fully
awake, began to complain of some pain.

“
Feels like there are two spikes in my
ass.”

“
Bruises,” Ingrid told him. “Mild,
fortunately. With your arm immobilized, we couldn’t rearrange you
as much as we would have liked. We’ll get you out of bed and let
you walk them out.”

“
Will I really be able to get up so
soon?”

“
No reason why not. You’ve dropped
some weight, and your joints will probably feel like they’re
rolling in sandpaper. But unless you’ve got an awfully strong
bladder, you’ll be walking tonight.”

“
How long before I go back to work?”
Clifton sipped some Sprite from a Styrofoam cup. The March
thunderstorm had mostly passed them by, but occasional rain showers
still lingered. Sporadic rumbles of thunder could be heard prowling
the distant valleys.

“
Soon, but I think Jon has something
else on the slate for you.”

“
Like what?”

“
You’re the only patient in history
who has ever undergone successful regeneration of any body
structure,” Merrifield said. “We want to run the inevitable tests.
I’m sure Alan would love to get it written up for publication once
the project is completed.”

“
Betcher ass,” Alan mumbled
quietly.

“
It feels fine,” Clifton said, flexing
his hand. He didn’t sound thrilled about being a case study for a
report. “It doesn’t feel different in any way.”

“
It’s
your
arm,” Ingrid said. “It shouldn’t feel any
different.”

“
I feel like I should be gawking at it
or something, but the honest to God truth is it feels perfectly
natural. Especially since you took that damnable bastard rig off of
it.” Clifton ruefully eyed the empty straps and ligatures that hung
from the side of the bed like limp rags.

Clifton had asked for a TV. No-one paid
it much attention. It was there mainly for the comforting noise it
made when the conversation lapsed awkwardly. When the evening news
came on, conversation stopped for a few minutes while a reporter
did a piece on Josh Hall’s upcoming crusade.

And there he was, as big and criminal as the world. Ingrid
felt Merrifield’s rabid dislike for him. He sneered as Hall began
speaking and he seemed to be thinking:
I’d like to take your piety and run
it up your ass.

Hall was telling the reporter his new
crusade would be something above and beyond the usual. He had
something so telling to say it would shake the houses of the mighty
from stem to stern. When asked if he could give a small hint as to
what his message would be, he smiled slightly, giving the camera
full ogling opportunities at his handsome face. He had revived the
“Big Hair” look popular among ’70’s Country and Western music
stars. He looked ludicrous.

He said he preferred to spread his
gospel as Jesus Christ had; going from town to town and converting
the heathens by the wondrous teachings of Our Lord.

When the interview was over, Merrifield
snapped the TV off savagely.

“
That
man
turns my stomach. If I had my way, he’d be
breaking rocks in the Amen Corner at Devil’s Island.”

Ingrid looked at Clifton, puzzled.
“Wait”
Clifton mouthed.

“
I think we’d best go,” Merrifield
said. “I can’t stand to be in the same room where I’ve heard that
man’s voice. Would you like anything before we go,
Alex?”

“
I’d like Ingrid to stay a while
longer, if she would.”

“
Certainly,” Merrifield said. “I’ve a
notion she would like that very much.” He looked at Ingrid and
smiled. She hadn’t believed it was that obvious.

“
I’ll be back later on tonight, or in
the morning,” Merrifield said. He stared at Clifton, seemingly
amazed. “It
is
good to have you back.”

The three men trooped out and
Merrifield closed the door behind them.

“
What was
that
all about,” Ingrid asked.

“
Jon and Josh go way back,” Clifton
answered. He turned over in his bed and lay on his side. Jeez, but
his ass hurt.

“
How far back?”

“
To basic training, I
think.”

“
Josh Hall was in the army,” Ingrid
asked, amazed.

“
SecureCom,” Clifton said. “A private
security company. Worked mostly, I think, for American companies,
but might have freelanced for shady billionaires, politicians, or
big money interests. He was one of the most lethal operatives this
country has ever produced.”

“
Lethal?”

“
Specialized, very highly skilled.
Thirty confirmed kills in South America, a couple of dozen in the
Middle East. Nobody knows how many unaccounted for on his solo
hunts, but in the hundreds would not be too far fetched. There was
some talk of having him lead an SOG, but he was too far gone by
then.”

“
How so?”

“
This is all hearsay, you realize. No
government oversight. No public files. Some I got from Jon, some
from reports, and some I pieced together myself. I wouldn’t want
any of this to get back to Jon. He’d as soon put Hall on a spit and
roast him over an open flame as to toast his health.”

“
Sounds intriguing.”

“
Intriguing, yes. Nice, no. It’s best
you know about this in case Hall ever tries to stir up any
shit.”

“
He would never know about it,” Ingrid
said assuredly. “What could he do even if he knew?”

“
The same thing he did to you,”
Clifton said.

Ingrid thought about that a long
second.

“
I wish you’d tell me the story,
anyway.”

“
Jon went into the army as an officer
by virtue of his ROTC training back around 1980. He didn’t give a
damn about the service, but they offered him unlimited research
opportunities on a limitless supply of subjects that count the
most: human bodies. If you put a gun in his hands today, he’d
probably shoot himself in the foot. The closest he ever got to
combat was a barroom donnybrook in Atlanta.

“
He was put in charge of a section of
the CBW department. That’s where he met Alan. Jon’s problem was to
mutate a plague organism into a highly infectious form. Army
business, you know. He turned the whole thing over to Alan. Alan
worked on it for a while and came up with an Anthrax strain that
will kill you deader than shit in about four hours.”

“
Alan did that?” Ingrid couldn’t see
it, not from the man who had orchestrated almost the entire
procedure that had brought Clifton’s arm back. It smacked of evil
and illegitimacy.

What the hell do you think you’re doing,
a small voice
inside of her whispered.

I’m taking the good with
the bad. The regeneration procedures and cancer treatments are the
sweetener to the sour medicine that you’re practicing here. All of
those kidney patients on dialysis and heart patients waiting for a
ticker can now have their own, home grown, so to speak. Isn’t a
little dirt, a little blood on your hands, worth that?

“
If it will make you feel any better,”
Clifton said, “it’s never been used.” This was a large lie, but
Clifton felt justified in making it.

“
The bad goes along with the good. I
can accept that,” Ingrid said. “How does Josh Hall fit into all
this?”

“
The Powers that Be sent Josh Hall to
the CBW facility as an observer, or some such silly thing. God only
knows what idiot approved that fuckup. He was already wilting in
the heat by that time. Maybe SecureCom thought he should be
familiar with the kind of stuff he might have to work with. It
would take somebody of Hall’s capabilities to put it in the water,
or fertilizer, or whatever they do to spread that stuff.

“
Like I said, by the time he got to
Atlanta in 1986, he was already more than a little buggy. He was
still in his early twenties and all he had ever known was what
SecureCom had taught him: how to kill. Everybody at the CBW site
was scared to death of him.”

“
I was born in 1980,” Ingrid said.
“That would make Hall, what, forty, forty-five or so?”

“
Somewhere around there. But a fit and
vigorous forty or forty-five. He keeps in shape, you can tell just
by looking at him. He started with SecureCom when he was seventeen.
No family that I know of. He was so good at his job that SecureCom
used him on almost all of its covert missions. Call Josh Hall, send
him out of town, and
bang
! In the next few days, you would hear of some government
official or radical being shot, stabbed, or blown up in their
car.”

“
Jesus,” Ingrid said.

“
I told you it wasn’t pretty. Nothing
much about the real power behind the throne is.”

“
I was thinking of something else,”
Ingrid said. His hands had been on her head. How much blood had
been on those hands?

“
It’s not that bad, Ingrid. Most mercs
are okay when they get out.”

“
But he’s an
evangelist
,” Ingrid protested.

“
So would be Charles Manson,” Clifton
said sourly, “if they ever let him out of prison. What could be
better cover? The killer turned pious. Some people, you can’t
credit them with what they say they are.”

“
And you think Josh Hall is like
that?”

“
I think he’s got a lot of people
blinded. He’s much too dangerous to have so many people slavishly
hanging on his every word.”

“
But he’s been preaching for fifteen
years.”

“
He started that as soon as he was
fired from SecureCom, shortly after Jon’s project was completed,”
Clifton affirmed. “Claimed he had seen the light of the Lord and he
was stepping out of the killing arena to serve a higher calling.
The truth was that SecureCom wanted to get rid of him.”

“
Why do you say that?”

“
Because he was let go after trying to
murder Jon.”

Ingrid was speechless. Bad enough to
find out that Hall was a killer, doubly bad to discover that he was
pathological as well. She had never cared for Hall, but at times
she had closely examined her motives because of what he said. Now
she was angry that she had ever put any credence in any of
it.

“
What happened?”

“
As I understand it, Hall had been
making quite a pain of himself. He never wore a mask and it was
practically impossible to get him to change into sterile garb in
the clean areas. He always carried a bayonet in his boot in a
specially made sleeve. He would stomp into the clean areas with his
mask off and rough up the help, quoting passages from the bible and
generally scaring the shit out of everybody.

“
You know Jon. He doesn’t take shit
unlimited from anybody. It eventually got so bad that Jon called
the IG himself and demanded that somebody come down and haul the
maniac away. Probably two or three somebodies is what Jon had in
mind. Jon has his flaws, but judgment of character is not one of
them.”

Ingrid thought of the day Merrifield
had told her he believed she would work for them. He had known it
even before Ingrid had decided. Clifton continued with his
tale.

“
Hall got wise to it. Probably shook
down some of the help or threatened to cut their throats. Jon
wasn’t the only one who had complained, so Hall knew they were
keeping an eye on him.

“
We all knew he was shaky even at the
beginning of Jon’s project. Who knows what had gotten into his head
while he watched a killer bacteria being constructed? Jon’s
constant bitching didn’t help matters. He knew what was coming and
he was on the phone everyday, ranting and raving with a fair amount
of flair and color to have something done about Hall. And what Jon
wanted was more than just removal from the facility.”

“
Christ, Alex,” Ingrid said with
unaffected loathing. “That’s terrible.”

“
Which part?”

“
All of it.”

“
It’s true, though,” Clifton sighed.
“There’s so much you don’t know -that most people don’t know- about
who actually wields the levers of power; who pulls the strings on
the press marionettes, who manages the news and controls
politicians and elections. Most people think they have a pretty
good line on things before they go back to watching the boob tube,
but they know, precisely,
nada
. Some stuff, Ingrid, once you know about it, you’ll wish
you had never found out.”