Immortal (36 page)

‘Mister Jarvis?’

A tall, robustly built man extended a hand to Jarvis.

‘Butch Cutler,’ the man said as they shook. ‘Can I ask why I’m here, sir?’

Jarvis gestured to a waiting USAF bus.

‘Best we get ourselves inside first,’ he said cryptically, refusing to be drawn.

Cutler asked no further questions and led Jarvis to the bus that drove them across the vast servicing pan past ranks of razor-sharp F-22 Raptors, the latest air-dominance fighter to join the
United States Air Force. It pulled up alongside a row of administrative offices, where a young subaltern met them and led them to a small room where a table, two chairs and two Styrofoam cups
filled with steaming coffee awaited. Jarvis thanked the subaltern and closed the door behind them, then joined Cutler at the table.

‘You have powerful friends, whoever you are, Mister Jarvis,’ Cutler said. ‘It’s been a long time since someone’s been able to drag me out of my bed at three in the
morning.’

‘Bad habit of mine,’ Jarvis said, feigning humor in order to draw Cutler in. ‘Never was able to sleep more than four hours at a time since leaving the corps.’

Cutler raised an eyebrow. ‘Marines?’

‘Fourth Marines,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘15th Expeditionary.’

‘Not another one,’ Cutler said. ‘Is there a corps retirement home down here or something? I’ve been chasing another ex-Marine all over the state, someone named
Warner.’

‘Ethan,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘He works for me.’

Cutler’s casual manner seized as he looked at Jarvis.

‘Well, your man is a world-class pain in the ass. Wherever he is people die, vehicles crash and things blow up. If he shows up in Santa Fe county again while I’m still there
I’ll have him in irons.’

‘He’s not in Santa Fe,’ Jarvis said. ‘In fact, that’s why I’m here. He’s heading south toward the border with Texas, and he’s acting alone.
Ethan’s got a troubling habit of putting himself in danger to achieve his objectives and he may be biting off more than he can chew.’

‘What the hell’s that got to do with dragging me here?’ Cutler asked.

‘I needed you somewhere we could talk freely,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Put plainly, there’s something going on behind the scenes at USAMRIID and I suspect you could be
compromised.’

‘Like hell,’ Cutler shot back as he slammed his cup down, spilling coffee across the table. ‘My unit’s tight.’

‘I didn’t say your
unit
was compromised,’ Jarvis pointed out.

‘What then?’

‘You called USAMRIID headquarters a few hours ago, trying to reach Colonel Donald Wolfe.’

‘How the hell would you know about—’

‘We work with the National Security Agency,’ Jarvis explained.

‘You’ve been watching me?’ Cutler shouted, standing up.

‘We’ve been watching USAMRIID as a whole,’ Jarvis said, raising a placating hand. ‘We know that you were approached by Jeb Oppenheimer, who has offered a bribe for you to
obtain materials on his behalf.’

Cutler slowly sat down, his gaze fixed on Jarvis’s.

‘He came to my hotel room with four of his heavies,’ Cutler said. ‘I reported it in as soon as they left.’

‘An act I admire immensely,’ Jarvis said. ‘There aren’t many people I know who’d turn down half a million bucks for such a minor indiscretion.’

‘I serve my country,’ Cutler replied with a sigh and a shrug of his heavy shoulders. ‘Doesn’t mean I enjoyed turning down enough money to retire on.’

‘How often do you speak to Colonel Donald Wolfe?’

‘Most days.’ Cutler frowned. ‘He’s my boss. Why?’

‘I need you to tell me how it was that your unit was called down here to New Mexico, specifically to Santa Fe.’

Cutler glanced upward in thought for a moment.

‘The call came in from Donald Wolfe himself, I guess maybe three days ago at USAMRIID. They had some concern that there was a danger of unspecified bacterial agents being released from a
site in or near Santa Fe. We were asked to secure the relevant areas and provide support to the engineering and clean-up teams.’

‘They didn’t tell you what the supposed agents were?’ Jarvis asked.

‘We often don’t know what we’re looking for,’ Cutler explained. ‘Most times we’re searching domestic premises being used by enemies of the United States to
produce toxic chemicals or so-called dirty bombs. Our engineers go in fully protected against any airborne pathogens like anthrax, and then identify the agent at work.’

Jarvis took a sip of his coffee and eyed Cutler with interest.

‘So you’re brought down here, and you head for where?’

‘An apartment block, downtown Santa Fe. The only lead we had was that of a man named Tyler Willis, some kind of big-shot brain out of Los Alamos.’

‘Why was he mentioned as a target?’ Jarvis asked.

‘It was pretty vague,’ Cutler admitted. ‘Something to do with experiments outside his remit or something, general suspicion but no probable cause. We’d been told it would
be a discreet operation, but your man Warner rolled up and then the apartment was blown sky-high just before we got there.’

‘And what was it that you were looking for, specifi-cally?’ Jarvis asked. ‘They must have had some idea in order to send you in there in the first place. Was it a vial of
something, or maybe vats of chemicals?

Cutler shook his head.

‘No, mostly just a directive to be prepared to encounter toxic substances. Wolfe did mention that I should keep an eye open for any blood I might find.’

Jarvis raised an eyebrow.

‘Blood?’

‘Yeah,’ Cutler said. ‘He briefed me verbally that Willis might have been tinkering around with a pathogen that infected people through the mixing of bodily fluids, specifically
blood. He said that if I was to find any, I should have it sealed and sent directly to his office in Maryland.’

Jarvis leaned back in his chair and looked out the window between the gaps in the blinds at the rows of aircraft parked beneath the twinkling lights.

‘And did you find any?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Cutler said. ‘Anything left in that apartment was completely incinerated. If there was blood there its presence might be traceable but that’s all. There won’t
be any means of identifying who it belonged to.’

Jarvis drained his coffee and crushed the cup in his hand before looking at Cutler.

‘Tyler Willis was working on a project regarding a particular type of bacteria that can infect and live in the human body. The blood he took was from a man named Hiram Conley, who was
subsequently killed in a fracas with state troopers outside Santa Fe. My problem is that Tyler Willis told only two people about the blood he took: Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. So, how could
Donald Wolfe have known about that blood and sent your team down here, if he hadn’t himself been told by someone else where that blood was?’

Butch Cutler opened his mouth to reply, then hesitated.

‘He must have been tipped off,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe by a concerned citizen?’

‘Not likely,’ Jarvis said. ‘Tyler Willis was conducting his work under the utmost secrecy – he hadn’t even told his own secretary what he was doing. Ethan Warner
talks to him, the labs come under attack and then Tyler Willis goes missing. Warner searches for Willis and the chase leads to SkinGen, where’s he’s convinced Tyler is being held
against his will. You guys then get another mysterious “tip-off from Donald Wolfe and Willis later turns up dead.’

Cutler frowned as he thought.

‘Oppenheimer?’

‘The only way Donald Wolfe could have known about that blood is if either Tyler Willis or his abductor told him about it. Colonel Wolfe is involved in the homicide of Tyler Willis, either
willfully or inadvertently.’

Cutler slowly raised his hands to his face and drew them down his cheeks as Jarvis watched a terrible realization set in.

‘I called the bribe in to Wolfe,’ he said, and then a new horror blanched his face. ‘And I pulled Warner out of SkinGen. Tyler Willis might have been just a few yards
away.’

‘You weren’t to know,’ Jarvis said, convinced that whatever Donald Wolfe was up to, Cutler almost certainly had nothing to do with it. ‘We need to get Wolfe in custody
and out of the loop before he can cause any more damage.’

‘What do you mean? What’s he been doing?’

Jarvis tossed the photographs of the SkinGen jet at Bethal airfield in Alaska, and explained the colonel’s missing flight hours.

‘He visited a place called Brevig Mission, right out on Alaska’s west coast, before flying from there direct to New York City. You got any idea why he might do that?’

Cutler shook his head.

‘None whatsoever,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing up there that I’m aware of that would hold any interest for USAMRIID. Nothing that’s not already frozen under the
permafrost anyway.’

‘So there may be something?’ Jarvis pressed.

Cutler rolled his big shoulders in a shrug.

‘Most departments have at one time or another traveled to habitats bordering the Arctic Circle, mainly to study the victims of novel diseases. Their bodies are preserved by the cold when
they’re interred, sealing in whatever killed them for future study.’

Jarvis felt something cold slither through his veins as he considered what Cutler had said.

‘Like infectious diseases,’ he suggested. ‘The plague, for instance.’

‘Sure,’ Cutler nodded, ‘a whole bunch of viruses and bacterial infections.’

Jarvis’s mind began racing as he plotted Colonel Wolfe’s movements in his mind.

‘Why is Donald Wolfe in New York City?’ he asked.

‘He’s there to present a key-note speech on population before the United Nation’s General Assembly. What he says will probably shape global pandemic policy for decades to
come.’

A vision of the United Nations building, set in the heart of one of the most populous cities on earth, flashed dark and foreboding through Jarvis’s mind.

‘How many nations will be attending?’ he asked.

Again, Cutler shrugged. ‘All of ’em, I think. A hundred ninety-two.’

Jarvis nodded slowly. It was a little-known fact that although Western nations generally guided UN policy, the United Nations was mostly representative of developing nations who outnumbered
their developed brethren by two to one. Gripped by a sense of impending disaster, Jarvis leaned forward on the table.

‘Whatever Wolfe is planning, it’s not pretty,’ he said finally. ‘I’m going to need your help to stop him.’

Cutler gathered himself together and looked at Jarvis with a steady eye.

‘What do you need me to do?’

17 May

A brutally cold wind swept in off the peninsula, chased by the feeble light of the midnight sun just below the horizon as FBI Special Agent Pete Devereux led three men
across the tundra. The small town of Brevig Mission with its spindly church shrank behind them in the strange blue shadows cast across the snow fields. Devereux was following an Inuit guide who was
almost entirely concealed by thick coats and a fur-lined hood.

Devereux’s voice seemed weak as it was snapped away by the wind.

‘You sure they were out here?’ he asked, shouting to be heard.

The Inuit nodded, gesturing ahead of them.

‘They were here. Two men. They did not ask the elders to dig here, and refused to talk to us.’

Devereux looked out across the frozen wastes to where magnificent mountains crouched against the cold vista. He was about to say there was nothing to see when he spotted a series of geometric
shapes huddled in a small knot amidst rippling clumps of hardy grass. A different kind of chill enveloped him as he realized what they were.

Gravestones.

The Inuit led the FBI team to the edge of the stones, and pointed to a spot on the ground some ten feet away.

‘This is where the man was working. He had tents and a vehicle. He stayed for a few days, and then he must have died here because another man came and took the tents away.’

Devereux looked at the ground. Half hidden by snow and ice he could just see where tent posts had been driven into the permafrost. Trampled, muddled snow and ice betrayed the presence of men in
the last few days. His eye traced the ghostly outline of the tent, and he realized it had surrounded a single grave. Treading carefully, Devereux stepped across the snow and looked down at the
grave. He lifted one foot and placed it on the earth in front of the gravestone, and instantly felt it give slightly beneath him.

Devereux turned to his companions.

‘Unpack the shovels.’

The Inuit tracker looked at him, his tiny eyes squinting against the bitter wind and little specks of ice encrusting his eyelashes.

‘This is not proper,’ he said. ‘You disrespect our people by digging here.’

Devereux shook his head as one of the agents began handing out shovels.

‘It’s not our choice,’ he said. ‘Your people have already been disrespected, we’re just trying to put it right. We’ve been ordered to do this for public
safety. Whatever the people here were doing, it may not have been safe.’

The Inuit frowned.

‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

Devereux stared at the Inuit as the agents behind him began driving their shovels into the icy earth. He was about to join them when, over the shoulder of the Inuit, he saw the town of Brevig
Mission in the distance. The church spire of the Lutheran Memorial Church caught his attention. With a sudden jolt of memory, he recalled seeing an entire graveyard behind the church as
they’d passed by.

Devereux whirled around to look at the gravestones behind him. His eyes flicked across them one by one, and the dates leapt out at him. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. They stretched away until
they were too far to be read.

Beside him, another FBI agent drove his shovel into the snow. Devereux grabbed his arm and held it fast. The agent looked at him quizzically.

‘C’mon, Pete, let’s get this over with. It’s goddamn freezing out here.’

Devereux turned to the Inuit guide.

‘These people, they all died at the same time?’

The Inuit nodded. ‘They all got sick.’

‘How many?’ Devereux asked.