Guillermo Del Toro - The Complete Strain Trilogy - The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal

With his fire gloves on, he pushed in the twin red flaps and pulled the door handle out from its recess. He rotated it in the direction of the arrows, nearly 180 degrees, and tugged. The door should have popped outward then, but it would not open. He pulled again, but knew immediately that his effort was useless—no give whatsoever. There was no way it could have been stuck from the inside. The handle must have jammed. Or else something was holding it from the inside.

He went back down wing to the ladder top. He saw an orange utility light spinning, an airport cart on its way out from the international terminal. Closer, he saw it was driven by blue-jacketed agents of the Transportation Security Administration.

“Here we go,” muttered Captain Navarro, starting down the ladder.

There were five of them, each one introducing himself in turn, but Captain Navarro didn’t waste any effort trying to remember names. He had come to the plane with fire engines and foaming equipment; they came with laptops and mobile handhelds. For a while he just stood and listened while they talked into their devices and over each other:

“We need to think long and hard before we push the Homeland Security button here. Nobody wants a shit storm for nothing.”

“We don’t even know what we have. You ring that bell and scramble fighters up here from Otis Air Force Base, you’re talking about panicking the entire eastern seaboard.”

“If it is a bomb, they waited until the last possible moment.”

“Explode it on U.S. soil, maybe.”

“Maybe they’re playing dead for a while. Staying radio dark. Luring us closer. Waiting for the media.”

One guy was reading from his phone. “I have the flight originating from Tegel, in Berlin.”

Another spoke into his. “I want someone on the ground in Germany who sprechen ze English. We need to know if they’ve seen any suspicious activity there, any breaches. Also, we need a primer on their baggage-handling procedures.”

Another ordered: “Check the flight plan and reclear the passenger manifest. Yes—every name, run them again. This time accounting for spelling variations.”

“Okay,” said another, reading from his handheld. “Full specs. Plane reg is N323RG. Boeing 777–200LR. Most recent transit check was four days ago, at Atlanta Hartsfield. Replaced a worn duct slider on the left engine’s thrust reverser, and a worn mount bushing on the right. Deferred repair of a dent in the left-aft inboard flap assembly due to flight schedule. Bottom line—she got a clean bill of health.”

“Triple sevens are new orders, aren’t they? A year or two out?”

“Three hundred and one max capacity. This flight boarded two ten. A hundred and ninety-nine passengers, two pilots, nine cabin crew.”

“Any unticketed?” That meant infants.

“I’m showing no.”

“Classic tactic,” said the one focused on terror. “Create a disturbance, draw first responders, gain an audience—then detonate for max impact.”

“If so, then we’re already dead.”

They looked at each other uncomfortably.

“We need to pull these rescue vehicles back. Who was that fool up there stomping on the wing?”

Captain Navarro edged forward, surprising them with a response. “That was me.”

“Ah. Well.” The guy coughed once into his fist. “That’s maintenance personnel only up there, Captain. FAA regs.”

“I know it.”

“Well? What’d you see? Anything?”

Navarro said, “Nothing. Saw nothing, heard nothing. All the window shades are drawn down.”

“Drawn down, you say? All of them?”

“All of them.”

“Did you try the over-wing exit?”

“I did indeed.”

“And?”

“It was stuck.”

“Stuck? That’s impossible.”

“It’s stuck,” said Captain Navarro, showing more patience with these five than he did with his own kids.

The senior man stepped away to make a call. Captain Navarro looked at the others. “So what are we going to do here, then?”

“That’s what we’re waiting to find out.”

“Waiting to find out? You have how many passengers on this plane? How many 911 calls have they made?”

One man shook his head. “No mobile 911 calls from the plane yet.”

“Yet?” said Captain Navarro.

The guy next to him said, “Zero for one-ninety-nine. Not good.”

“Not good at all.”

Captain Navarro looked at them in amazement. “We have to do something, and now. I don’t need permission to grab a fire ax and start smashing in windows when people are dead or dying in there. There is no air inside that plane.”

The senior man came back from his phone call. “They’re bringing out the torch now. We’re cutting her open.”

CHESAPEAKE BAY, black and churning at that late hour.

Inside the glassed-in patio of the main house, on a scenic bluff overlooking the bay, a man reclined in a specially made medical chair. The lights were dimmed for his comfort as well as for modesty. The industrial thermostats, of which there were three for this room alone, maintained a temperature of sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Stravinsky played quietly, The Rite of Spring, piped in through discreet speakers to obscure the relentless shushing pump of the dialysis machine.

A faint plume of breath emerged from his mouth. An onlooker might have believed the man near death. Might have thought they were witnessing the last days or weeks of what was, judging by the sprawling seventeen-acre estate, a dramatically successful life. Might even have remarked on the irony of a man of such obvious wealth and position meeting the same end as a pauper.

Only, Eldritch Palmer was not at the end. He was in his seventy-sixth year, and he had no intention of giving up on anything. Nothing at all.

The esteemed investor, businessman, theologian, and high-powered confidant had been undergoing the same procedure for three to four hours every evening for the past seven years of his life. His health was frail and yet manageable, overseen by round-the-clock physicians and aided by hospital-grade medical equipment purchased for his private, in-home use.

Wealthy people can afford excellent health care, and they can also afford to be eccentric. Eldritch Palmer kept his peculiarities hidden from public view, even from his inner circle. The man had never married. He had never sired an heir. And so a major topic of speculation about Palmer was what plans he might have for his vast fortune after his death. He had no second-in-command at his primary investment entity, the Stoneheart Group. He had no public affiliation with any foundations or charities, unlike the two men jockeying for number one with him on the annual Forbes list of the world’s richest Americans, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway investor Warren Buffett. (If certain gold reserves in South America and other holdings by shadow corporations in Africa were factored into Forbes’s accounting, Palmer alone would hold the top spot on the list.) Palmer had never even drafted a will, an estate-planning lapse unthinkable for a man with even one one-thousandth of his wealth and treasure.

But Eldritch Palmer was, quite simply, not planning to die.

Hemodialysis is a procedure in which blood is removed from the body through a system of tubing, ultrafiltered through a dialyzer, or artificial kidney, and then returned to the body cleansed of waste products and impurities. Ingoing and outgoing needles are inserted into a synthetic arteriovenous graft semipermanently installed in the forearm. The machine for this procedure was a state-of-the-art Fresenius model, continuously monitoring Palmer’s critical parameters and alerting Mr. Fitzwilliam, never more than two rooms away, of any readings outside the normal range.