Jonathan Maberry - The Dragon Factory

“My good friend Jose Cuervo.”

“Ah,” I said. We shook hands. “In the meantime, stay low and stay loose.”

“And you watch your back, Cowboy.”

“Always do.”

Hanler said, “When you fellas are done spooning maybe we can get this bird in the air.”

I shot him the bird and he grinned. Three minutes later we were in the air heading west to Denver.

MacNeil-Gunderson Water-Bottling Plant, Asheville, North Carolina

Two weeks ago

Hester Nichols was a nervous woman. For twenty years she had overseen production of bottled water at the big plant in the mountains near Asheville. She was there when MacNeil bought the plant from the bankrupt soda company that had owned it since the fifties, and she was there when the Gunderson Group bought a half interest in it during the spring-water boom of the nineties. When she was promoted from line supervisor to production manager she had suffered through three FDA inspections, two audits, and a transport union strike. Each of those were stressful, but they were also part of the job, and she weathered the storms one after the other.

Now she was actually scared.

It wasn’t just the unsmiling faces of the quality control advisors from Gunderson who hovered over employees at every step of the bottling process. It wasn’t even the fear that the IRS would somehow discover the new offshore account that Otto Wirths had set up for her.

What worried Hester was that she didn’t know what was in the water.

Otto told her that it was safe. But he had a weird little smile on his scarred face, and that smile haunted Hester, day and night.

She stood on the metal catwalk, fingers curled tightly around the pipe rail, and looked down at the production floor.

MacNeil-Gunderson owned three plants. Two in North Carolina and one in Vermont. This one was the largest-a massive facility that had the second-highest bottled water output in the South-and Hester oversaw the bottling and shipping of twelve hundred bottles per minute. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was just a drop in the bucket of the 170 billion liters of water the industry bottled worldwide, but it was a high-profit business.

Her plant did not bother with spring water but went for the more lucrative purified-water market. Hester had overseen the installation of top-of-the-line reverse osmosis water purification systems and the equipment for enhancing taste and controlling odor through activated carbon. The water was sterilized by ozone and then run through remineralization equipment before flowing like liquid gold into plastic bottles. The plant was fully automated, with only a skeleton crew of mechanics and quality-control technicians on hand. It was much easier to slip things past a small crew, and in the current economy few employees risked making any kind of fuss. Except for shipping, MacNeil-Gunderson was a nonunion shop, and that helped, too.

Before Otto had walked up to her in the parking lot of a Quick Chek four months ago, Hester’s main concern was playing spin doctor for press questions about the source of the water. A Charlotte newspaper had broken the story that purified bottling plants used water from any source, including tap water, seawater, brackish water, river water, polluted well water, and even wastewater streams. The paper emphasized that and glossed over the fact that purification was the key. And the water was actually pure. Or at least as pure as the FDA required.

Until Otto Wirths.

Wirths had offered Hester an absurd amount of money. The kind of money that made her knees weak, that actually took her breath away. More money than Hester could make in twenty years as a manager. Wirths showed her credentials that proved that he was CEO of the Gunderson Group. He could have fired her, but he never even threatened that. Instead he offered her money, and that was enough to buy her cooperation. And maybe her soul. Hester wasn’t sure. He only wanted two things from her: to allow him to provide the quality-control specialists for the plant and to make sure she paid no attention to whatever additives they chose to add to the water.

“It won’t affect the taste or smell,” Wirths had said; then he gave her a sly wink. “But… don’t drink it, my dear.”

When Hester had hesitated, Otto Wirth added another zero to the money he offered. Hester nearly collapsed.

She wrestled with her conscience for nearly a full minute.

That was at the beginning of May and now it was near the end of August. Seven hundred and twenty thousand bottles an hour. One million, seven hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred bottles a day. For four months.

What was in the bottles? The question nagged at her every day, and every day the money in that offshore account seemed smaller; every day she wondered if she had sold her soul for too small an amount.

Her fingers were so tight on the pipe rail that her knuckles were white. She stared down at the production floor as the thunder of the machinery beat at her like fists.

What was in those bottles?

Dear God , she thought, what is in that water?

Near Barawa, Somalia

8 days ago (Friday, August 17)

N’Tabo stopped on the twelfth circuit and lighted a cigarette. He smoked one for every dozen turns around the compound, rewarding himself for four kilometers with an American Marlboro. He liked the menthol ones. The moon was a dagger slash of white against the infinite black of the sky. He could only see a few stars; the lights on the perimeter fence washed the rest away. N’Tabo was okay with that. He wasn’t much of a star gazer.

He took a deep drag on the Marlboro, enjoying the menthol burn in his throat, the icy tingle deep in his lungs. His wife said he smoked too much. He thought her ass was too flat. Everyone had problems.

The rifle on his shoulder was heavy-an ancient AK-47 that his boss had given him ten years ago. It kicked like a cow and the strap had worn a permanent callus over his shoulder from shoulder blade to nipple. No amount of padding or aloe seemed to keep it from rubbing a groove in him. He believed he’d wear that mark until he died. Of course he figured he’d be dead by the time he was thirty anyway. The boss’s crew-the deputy warlords, as they called themselves-would probably shoot him just because they were bored, or because he was pissing against the wrong tree, or because he was just there . They were like that. Three of N’Tabo’s friends had been killed like that in the last six years. For fun or for some infraction of a nonexistent rule. It made N’Tabo wish that the Americans would come back. At least his father and two of his uncles had died in a real battle, back in Mogadishu. Allah rewarded death in battle. How would He reward death by boredom?

The cigarette was almost down to the filter and N’Tabo sighed. Just below the surface of his conscious thought he wished that something- anything -would happen just to relieve the tedium. The thought had almost risen to the point of becoming words on his tongue when he heard the sound.

N’Tabo froze with his hand midway to taking the cigarette from between his lips. Had he heard it or was his mind using the ordinary sounds of the jungle to play tricks on him? It wouldn’t be the first time.

He tried to replay the sound in his mind. It had been a grunt. Low, soft, the kind someone might make if they bumped into something in the dark.

N’Tabo spit out the cigarette and as he turned he swung the gun up, his hands finding the familiar grips without thought, his ears straining into the darkness.

But there was only silence. By reflex he tuned out the ordinary sounds of the dense forest and the desert that surrounded it. The sound had come from the west, toward the arm of the jungle that separated the compound from the town beyond. N’Tabo waited, not daring to call out a challenge. Raising a false alarm would earn him a chain whipping at the very least. Two men had been whipped last week. One had died, and the other’s back was an infected ruin of torn flesh over broken bones.