Mutant (21 page)

“What specimens do you still have to check?” she’d asked the technician in charge, barely able to conceal her frustration at the slow pace.

“A few large weeds, a corn plant, some individual kernels, and of course there’s the bird droppings. We sent a sample of them over to Julie Carr, for viral cultures as you requested, to see if there were any remnants of the H5N1, or bird flu microorganisms, but those results also came back negative. I guess eighteen months is a long time to have expected the virus to remain intact. But Julie suggested that while we’re checking the droppings for vectors, why not include a primer for traces of H5N1 RNA? A bit might have survived, and would provide just as good evidence of the virus having been present in the bird’s gut as a positive culture. She’s already sent off a request that the CDC in Atlanta forward us the restriction enzymes and primers we’ll need.”

“Sounds good,” Sullivan had replied, trying to sound cheerful while strangling the receiver in the face of even more delays.

A robotic voice from the automated switchboard for the medical school pulled her from her morose thoughts. Navigating the options it offered, she finally punched in the right numbers to get the infuriatingly bossy recording—a male voice this year—to shut up and connect her with Stanton’s extension. To her surprise, she found the man still waiting for her call.

Twenty-four hours later she got Racine’s reply.

My Dear Dr. Sullivan,

What an excellent idea it is that you should inspect their files. Unfortunately, while our initial strike caught the people at Agriterre completely off guard, enabling us to get the samples to you unhindered by any red tape, the company’s lawyers have now marshaled their forces, preventing us further access to the facility. In short, we are engaged in the kind of bureaucratic paper war for which we French are famous. With any luck, however, our courts shall soon order their CEO to release all company documents, at which time I shall forward them to you immediately.

As to our investigation into Gaston’s murder, I’m afraid there, too, we haven’t made much progress. We already knew from our initial inquiry into his disappearance that on the afternoon before he vanished, a woman visited his apartment—a woman who, according to his landlady, “Had been there several times in the preceding six months and was ‘far too beautiful for a toad of a man like him.’ ” We still have not found out this visitor’s identity, let alone where she is or if she had anything to do with his death.

We do know that the night Gaston disappeared, New Year’s Eve, he returned to the Agriterre building, went to his laboratory, and left again. No one knows why, and the CEO, Dr. François Dancereau, remains adamant that nothing is missing from the premises.

In the meantime, I can only say that I share your frustration. May I assure you that your efforts in our behalf are greatly appreciated, and I remain humbly at your service.

Sincerely,

Inspector Georges Racine

He could call himself whatever he wanted, but she knew e-mail from Claude Rains when she saw it. As she read his words on her computer screen she could practically smell his Gauloises and see him gesturing with it, the smoke curling up from its tip. Except unlike his character in
Casablanca
, he hadn’t rounded up “the usual suspects” yet. Disappointed, she started to log off, then wondered again why the name Dr. François Dancereau sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps he’d presented a paper at some conference she’d attended or published an article she’d read. Instead of shutting down, she clicked onto the Medline page—the most complete listing of publications in the health science field—and typed in the man’s name.

No matches found.

Oh, well, worth a try, she thought, and got back to her latest batch of gels.

Monday, June 5, 9:00 P.M.

“Relax! She’s skirting around the truth like a moth around a flame, but so far she doesn’t get it,” he reassured Morgan over the phone. “And according to her latest e-mail from that police inspector in Rodez a few days ago, he’s not making any progress, either.”

“You haven’t had a homicide detective at your door.”

“He wasn’t there for you. Besides, that was well over a week ago, and he hasn’t been back. Obviously he can’t find any link between that idiot guard and Agrenomics beyond what your personnel people told him.”

“When do we take care of Sullivan and Steele?” Morgan persisted, sounding increasingly frustrated. “The cops may not have found a connection, but those two won’t stop until they do—now that we’ve made them both suspicious as hell about the place, thanks to you and your bright ideas about using our own people!”

“Soon,” he told him softly, and hung up, choosing to ignore the criticism. Leaning back in his chair, he stared out his window and savored the view as the setting sun once more ignited the Twin Towers. “Soon,” he repeated, “we will have taken care of everything, including you, my frightened little friend.”

Tuesday, June 6, 5:50 A.M.

She heard his voice far away, yet he seemed to be yelling, speaking in the same harsh language used by the hooded pursuers.

She flew awake, at first confused as to where she lay. She stared about her, the thin first light of dawn only dimly illuminating the office. In seconds she remembered—her sofa bed, sleeping over at the lab—and settled back on her pillow, her heart still pounding.

She must have had another nightmare, she thought, feeling cold and pulling her blanket around her. The dampness in the place had gotten so bad with all the rain that everyone complained of feeling perpetually chilly, and none of the doors would open or close properly. The fact that they routinely lowered the heat in May whether the weather warranted it or not didn’t help matters.

As she lay there shivering, hoping to warm up enough to get a few more hours of sleep, she didn’t pay it any attention at first, it sounded so faint. Even when she did, her mind initially dismissed it as a distant radio. Until an instant later a sudden increase in its volume made her realize the guttural sounds of her dream were coming from somewhere down the hallway outside her door.

A chill ran through the length of her body that had nothing to do with the temperature. Instantly she sat bolt upright, her heart sprinting to triple digits in a second flat. While she listened the sounds continued in brief spurts, then broke off. Occasionally there were repeated yells followed by silence. As far as she could tell, only a single male voice spoke. A telephone conversation?

Even though she couldn’t make out the words, the rapid staccato cadence and irregular explosive rhythms of the person’s speech definitely mimicked those of the voices that now haunted her dreams. It can’t be one of them, she tried to tell herself, her throat growing tight. She sprang out of bed, tiptoed on bare feet over to her desk, and reached for the phone, intending to call 911. She had her hand on the receiver when she thought, The extension light! If I pick up, it will flash on his end and warn him that I’m here.

She spun around, thinking she could use her cell phone instead, but in the gray light couldn’t spot where she’d left it. Keeping an ear tuned to the distant conversation while figuring he wouldn’t be coming for her as long as he kept talking, she quickly checked beneath the couch where she’d been sleeping.

Nothing.

Riffling through the pile of clothing she’d discarded before going to bed produced the same result. Thrusting her hand into the pockets of her lab coat where it hung in the closet . . . she couldn’t find it anywhere.

I must have left it on the workbench, she thought, her insides lurching into a knot.

She pulled on her dress and slipped into her shoes, planning on being able to run if she had to. Careful not to let the crepe soles squeak on the linoleum floor, she went up to her door. Slowly opening it, she immediately could tell from how much louder the voice got that it came from one of the rooms nearby. The sudden amplification enabled her to better hear the words themselves— foreign and harsh, yet terrifyingly familiar—erasing any doubts she had about the language being the same as the killers’.

Peeking down the hallway, she saw where a thin wedge of light slashed the darkness in front of Azrhan’s office. His door stood partially open, and a shadow from within moved back and forth across the frosted glass. The conversation sounded even angrier now—the person breaking it off in midbreath as if he’d been interrupted, then cutting off the brief silences with a furious tirade that she would have guessed to be profanity in any language.

Is it only Azrhan? she thought, confusion adding to her panic and leaving her barely able to breathe. She’d heard him speak Arabic before, but this sounded altogether different. Could his voice be so distorted by the strange dialect and rage that she could hardly recognize it?

To reach the room where she’d left her cell phone, she had to pass that door. It also stood between her and the exit to the outside corridor where the elevators were. Despite her fear, she stepped into the dark passage and crept forward. But as she got closer to the sliver of light, she began to wonder even more if it wasn’t him. After all, I heard no one breaking in, so whoever it is must have had keys, she reasoned. Shouldn’t I try and take a peek first before calling the police and avoid bringing them for nothing? After all, if it is him, he has a perfect right to use his office any time, day or night, or to speak any language he wants. Yet the prospect of his speaking that particular language, despite her best effort not to think the worst, sent darker implications nibbling like parasites on the edge of her thoughts.

She’d gotten nearly abreast of the door when she heard a particularly vehement string of gibberish and the receiver slam down.

Uh-oh, she thought, frozen in midstep. As she watched, the shadow within grew darker on the glazed window.

He’s coming out! her mind screamed, and she instinctively backed up, ducking into her office again. She swung the door closed behind her, but it jammed before she could shut it enough to snap the lock. Applying more pressure, she pushed so hard it lurched into place with a bang.

Not daring to breathe, she stood there listening. At first she heard nothing. Then tentative footsteps approached along the hallway. “Dr. Sullivan, are you awake?” came Azrhan’s voice.

Friday, June 9, 11:46 A.M.

He rolled the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road under a solitary oak tree. It cast a giant shadow speckled with winks of light from a noonday sun in a high, unbroken blue sky. From Steele to the next hill stretched a mile of asphalt between two fields of young corn, the new sprouts barely two feet high. Approximately half a mile away he could see the Agrenomics facility. The oasis of treed lawns surrounding the long, low building and the deserted railway spur curving away from the rear of the grounds toward the west looked exactly as Kathleen had described it for him. But her brief mention of the massive greenhouses behind hadn’t prepared him for the actual size of the monstrous glass and metal structures. Each of the six could have housed one and a half football fields, and using his rusty memory of the conversion from square yards he figured the area under glass to be about seven acres in all. A tall chain-link fence topped with curls of wire ran around it, the occasional flash from the coiled strands suggesting they were laced with razors.

It’s like a prison, just as Kathleen said, Steele thought.

What intrigued him even more: the entire complex looked practically deserted. The parking lot held fewer than a half dozen cars, and apart from a solitary security guard at the front gate, he saw no one, not on the grounds or around the greenhouses. He paid particular attention to the latter, scanning the place with the binoculars he’d brought along, but couldn’t discern any movement behind its highly reflective panels.

Settling back, he lowered his windows and felt a warm breeze flow over him. Outside the passenger door a bee droned intermittently, making its rounds through the purple lupines and early phlox that grew wild in the ditch. Mingling with the pinging noises of his car as it cooled, the leaves above, dangling from the branches like quivering, silken emeralds, filled the air with a soothing rustle.

He’d driven up that morning hoping some of the staff would be willing to talk with him about the pizza-faced man who’d once worked with them—at least more than they had when, two weeks earlier, McKnight had asked the questions. Timing the visit to arrive at lunch hour, he figured he could follow some of the workers to a local eatery where they’d be off company property and might feel more inclined to speak up, especially if he bought them a few beers. “For openers, I’ll show them my leg wound, and attest that they’d been right all along to feel uneasy about Fred Smith with his beasts,” he’d explained to Sullivan when they first discussed his coming here. “One thing I’ve learned in ER about getting information out of people is that when it comes to casual acquaintances—distant neighbors, people who work together, that kind of thing—nothing gets tongues wagging more than people having their worst suspicions about someone confirmed.”

She’d clucked at his cynical take on human nature, then railed at how he shouldn’t have to be doing the police’s job in any case. “It’s despicable how they refused to press the issue that someone at Agrenomics might have set the pizza-faced man onto you,” she declared, brimming with indignantion. “No?”

“That’s how I read it,” he’d assured her.

“So why don’t the police see things the way we do?”

“Because we haven’t the slightest idea who in the place would go after me, or why. Because nothing links them with Rodez or Hawaii. Because the only evidence you can show that Agrenomics is behaving suspiciously is how they came out pristine clean in your tests. Is it any wonder McKnight won’t act?”

Those eyes of hers had flared so luminously at him that for a second he feared he’d been far too blunt. But the blaze died, and a few seconds later, she mumbled, “I guess you’re right.”

“So it’s time we learned everything we can about the place. While I’m talking to people there about Pizza Face, I’ll try and poke a stick beneath that squeaky clean surface and stir up the bottom a little. There’s got to be somebody who’s willing to tell us what’s going on.”

But no one obliged. Even though Steele had driven by an inviting-looking roadside café and bar not five miles back, an hour passed and not a soul came out of the laboratory premises to go eat. “Must all be a lunch bucket crowd,” he muttered, wondering what he should do next. The idea of sneaking up on the place seemed fruitless, the area being so open. Besides, what good would it do him? As much as he’d like to see inside, scaling the fences around the greenhouses looked impossible, and the solitary guard would certainly spot him if he tried to gain access to the main building. Maybe I can intercept people when they go home? he wondered, glancing at his watch. But that wouldn’t be for another three and a half hours.

He found himself looking at the railway spur again. Retrieving his binoculars he brought it into focus, and followed its roadbed through the fields with his eye. Trees and shrubs lined it most of the way, and it passed close in front of the greenhouses. I might get a glimpse inside them from there, he reasoned, and if I approach using the tracks, I don’t think anyone would spot me.

His left leg hurt as he walked the ties between the rails, yet he made good progress. It had been seventeen days since the attack on him, and a week since he removed his own stitches. His only difficulty occurred when he pushed off with the ball of his foot and worked his calf muscles. Despite the tears and missing strands, the filaments were mending, but the scarring foreshortened their range of movement.

The sun blasted the stone ballast with the full heat of the afternoon, and the dark treated wood beneath his feet released such a pungent perfume of creosote that it radiated all the way to the back of his nose to tickle his throat. His exertion left him breathing with his mouth open, and he unbuttoned his shirt, letting it trail out behind him while the breeze evaporated his sweat and cooled his torso. He took some pride in having lost the paunch he’d been developing over the winter; cutting back on drinking and keeping busy had started to take effect for the better. Around him the cicadas buzzed, their sound mingling with the continuous whisper of the bushes and young trees lining the tracks. The noise, he hoped, would cover the occasional crunch of his footsteps.

He’d driven a little under a mile past the front entrance of Agrenomics before he parked once more on the side of the road. Slipping his binoculars around his neck, Steele walked several hundred yards through a field to reach the spur. From that point, atop a little hillock, he could see where the line joined the main track about another mile farther west. Several miles beyond that, there seemed to be a railyard where strings of freight cars sat on dozens of sidings. Using his binoculars, he made out a small diesel engine poking its way through the various switches and tracks, coupling onto a string of boxcars, then shunting them farther down the line. He could also make out a man wearing jeans and a hard hat who dangled off a ladder at the end of the rear car, waving instructions to whoever sat at the throttle in the engine’s cab. Around them stretched endless green fields of month-old spring crops made lush by all the rain they’d had. A sleepier scene he couldn’t imagine.

Maybe I should visit those men when I’m through here, he thought, continuing to trudge along toward Agrenomics and eyeing the shiny tracks that indicated regular use. Perhaps I’ll learn what they haul out of the place and where it goes.

The greenhouses loomed ahead on his left. As he drew closer, he kept an eye on the back end of the lab building through the foliage on his right. To his relief he saw that it had no windows.

Staying low, he veered toward the near corner of the razor wire fence and ducked behind a complex of massive pipes and flexible hoses. Satisfying himself that he remained out of sight, he took a closer look at what he’d hidden in. It seemed to be a device for pumping something into railway cars, and he could make out a similar structure located on the main grounds near the wall where the spur ended. His curiosity about what they shipped grew.

He proceeded to stride briskly along the length of fence leading farther into the fields. It stretched about three hundred yards, and he kept a sharp eye out for security cameras, planning to mimic somebody out bird-watching if he saw a sign of surveillance. Even when he failed to spot any peering lenses, he put on a show of periodically gazing into the sky through his binoculars, just in case.

Finally he reached the far end of the barricade, where he stepped around the corner while still keeping an eye out for overhead video equipment. He knelt to massage his calf, the uneven ground and his fast pace having aggravated it, then surreptitiously tried scraping away enough dirt to slip under the bottom strands of the chain links. His fingers hit a strip of concrete buried in the soil. “Christ!” he muttered, realizing that the only way through would be with a pair of wire cutters. He next attempted to see into the nearest greenhouse, but while its peaked roof had clear glass, the panes on the sides had enough of a reflective surface that they prevented the identification of much of what was inside. All he could make out were tables of endless troughs containing scattered stalks of something that looked about six feet high, but the rest seemed to have been already harvested.

Disappointed, he turned and started back the way he’d come. He got halfway along the fence toward the tracks when all at once he thought he heard voices.

“Shit!” he said, glancing around him ready to do some fast talking.

But he saw no one.

Yet the voices continued, muffled so he couldn’t make out the words, the way a conversation sounds when the people speaking are in the next room. It must be coming from inside one of the greenhouses, he thought, straining to see any sign of movement behind the glass nearest him. But all he saw were silhouettes similar to those same scraggy stalks that he’d seen minutes earlier.

The voices continued. Somebody even laughed. “What the hell?” he muttered, looking around and feeling the bewilderment of a rational man who’s suddenly beginning to consider he may actually be encountering a ghost. Either that, or he got more sun than he realized, he thought, determined to figure it out.

The voices still continued. Not so much behind, beside, or in front of him, as from below.

He studied the ground beneath his feet. It seemed like ordinary dirt. He scuffed it with the toe of his shoe. More ordinary dirt. He then swept his eyes to right and left, and spotted a rectangular metal cover coated with dust just inside the fence by where he stood. Kneeling down, he heard the voices grow louder. They were definitely coming from wherever that cover led.