Paul McEuen - Spiral

“Why?”

“He said he couldn’t say. That it was classified.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That the investigation was ongoing. And the MicroCrawlers are still missing.” The pencil was tapping faster now. “Professor Sterling, I gave Connor’s grants a closer look. One jumps out at me. The principal investigator is listed as Vladimir Glazman. Connor is listed as co-PI. It’s got your name on it, too. DARPA project 54756/A00.”

Jake recited the title from memory: “Crawlers in a Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Bioterrorism.”

“Care to explain?”

“That’s going to take some time.”

“Well, let me ask you this: the fungi in Professor Connor’s lab? Could they be dangerous?”

“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “His lab wasn’t rated for anything dangerous—it was BSL-1. Biosafety Level 1. It means that nothing in there was a significant health risk.”

“That’s odd.”

“Why?”

No more pencil tapping. “Elber, this fellow from Detrick? He told me to seal off Connor’s lab. No one gets in or out. He said they would have a team here in the morning. Does that sound like BSL-1?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jake said.

“Well, then, we need to talk.”

ORCHID HELD THE STEERING WHEEL AT TEN O’CLOCK AND two o’clock, her hands wrapped in skintight black Forzieri gloves. She stared at her hands. The hands that had failed her. She still had a hard time accepting her failure. She’d known all his pressure points. She had researched his habits, his family, everything. But Liam Connor had tricked her.

When he had finally confessed, he was barely alive. The Uzumaki, he’d said, was hidden in a stretch of forest at the edge of the Cornell campus. She had taken him there, followed him across the bridge.

And then Liam Connor had jumped.

She took a hand from the steering wheel, began to strum her fingers on her thigh. No nervous habit this; she was typing. Her gloves had a piezoelectric material woven inside that generated a tiny electrical signal with the movement of each finger. The words appeared as ghostly green letters along the top of her glasses: EN ROUTE TO MESSENGER.

She needed time. The Messenger would give it to her.

She touched index finger to thumb, and the tiny camera in her glasses took a picture of the road ahead. As stipulated, Orchid provided complete documentation: detailed notes combined with time-stamped photographs, from the beginning to the end. No detail escaped documentation. The client had demanded it.

The old Camry plowed on. A few puddles of weak light thrown down by street lamps lining the road were all that interrupted the inky blackness. The I-Deal self-storage facility came into view. She turned off Route 79, the gravel crunching under her tires, and pulled the car to a stop two rows away from the unit she had rented two days previously and outfitted for her needs.

She gave herself two minutes. She closed her eyes, folded her hands together, thumbs touching lips. She started the process, the calming, the stabilization that placed her where she needed to be.

Two minutes later, she was ice. She reached over the seat and grabbed her backpack. She unzipped the top and checked the contents:

1. D-321G infrared goggles.

2. Pen-style X-Acto knife.

3. A pair of eight-inch pruning shears.

4. Blazer butane microtorch.

5. 100cc syringe loaded with LSA-25.

6. Johnson & Johnson rolled medical gauze, stored in a Ziploc sandwich bag.

7. Ziploc freezer bag filled with ice.

She stepped out of the car, smooth and calm, backpack draped over her shoulder. The night was cold, the asphalt mottled with patches of light snow. She walked through the silence, mind empty, letting doubt remain in the car, fingers typing on thigh: APPROACHING MESSENGER.

She stopped before I-Deal unit #209. A few careful twists of the dial and the combination lock clicked open. She rolled the sliding door up two feet, bent down, and stepped under. She slid the door closed behind her, disappearing into the pitch-black darkness. Inside, she paused, taking in the smell. Wood and metal and a vague chemical odor. That would be the plastic. She had lined the walls, floor, and roof with plastic sheeting because of the inevitable spray.

And another odor, stronger than the rest. A scent that was her stock in trade.

Terror.

Working by feel, she removed the Night Optics D-321G night-vision goggles from her pack and pulled them down over her eyes. The darkness was no longer darkness. The goggles were Gen 3, equipped with an infrared flashlight invisible to human eyes but not the gallium arsenide photocathode and microchannel plate detectors in the 321. The room was empty, save for a small satchel in the corner and a single nylon rope dangling from the ceiling, taut from the weight it held.

At the end of the rope, hanging in a prone position in the center of the empty space, was the Messenger. He was a human cocoon, wrapped in cloth so only his face and chest were exposed, and supported knees to shoulder by nylon webbing. She had hunted him hours before, taking him in a stairwell in the Bronx. She used the Paxarms Mark 24B pistol projector with a dart equipped with fentanyl, to be followed by the M-5050 antidote. Fentanyl had the bonus that, should the target get away before the antidote was administered, the target would die.

The Messenger twisted slowly in the darkness, fear in his eyes, mouth stuffed with cotton matte and taped shut, dramatically dulling his ability to make any kind of sound. It had been a simple hunt, too simple to be truly enjoyable, even if he was Japanese. He was completely unsuspecting. If asked, he would say he had done nothing to make one of the highest-paid killers in Asia hunt him. It was true. The Messenger’s only crime was his name.

He couldn’t see her but sensed her coming closer. She could tell by the heightened wriggling.

She gave him the injection first, then went to work on his chest with the X-Acto knife, cutting the Chinese characters with quick, sharp strokes. He was Japanese, so there was little hair to contend with. And he was young and fit, so the skin was smooth and taut. Blood popped up like fallen raindrops.

She finished the lettering, snapped a photo of her work, then mopped up the excess blood with a bit of gauze. She replaced the X-Acto knife and took out the clippers. When she had bound the Messenger, she had taped down all the fingers on his right hand save the middle one, as if he was giving her the finger. She placed the blades of the shears at the juncture of the knuckle.

She squeezed hard.

Snap!

He fluttered, grunting and moaning, dangling at the end of his rope. The blood spurted down on the plastic sheet below, the flow making a central puddle surrounded by little circular swirls, the sound like rain.

She took out the torch, fired up the flame, and cauterized the wound. The smell of burned blood and flesh was sharp in her nostrils.

She picked up the severed finger and wrapped it in gauze, then put it in the Ziploc freezer bag filled with ice and stored it in her pack. She waited for three minutes, then checked again that the bleeding was stanched.

She put away her tools, then typed on her leg: MESSENGER READY.

He wriggled in his cocoon, rotating slowly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, stopping his motion with a hand on the side of his head. “Tomorrow is your big day.”