Bloodletting (26 page)

Carver looked at the other men, whose stares played distractedly around the room.

"It was in the middle of the war, during the height of the fighting on the western front and before the Nazi push into Russia, that Mengele began his experimentation on twins. He had studied them years before at the Frankfurt University Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, which set the stage for what was to come. They were an explicable, yet miraculous genetic rarity. Two identical human beings delivered from one womb. Nature's little clones. Their lives decided on the microscopic level of sperm and egg, and by the hereditary factors coursing through thousands of years of their blood. But more importantly, they were duplicate test subjects. A control and a variable upon whom to inflict nightmare tortures. Women were raped or artificially inseminated and the fetuses injected with poisons and viral concoctions of all kinds. Most died, their minuscule remains preserved for display and study. Some lived through birth only to die within days to years. Others were deliberately exposed to foreign pathogens after conception, or their mothers were infected just prior. Diseases brought back by troops from Africa and all around the world, collected from the festering corpses of sick animals. Diseases that killed soldiers in the worst possible ways, and yet were apparently tailor-made for pregnant women and their undeveloped children. Viruses that could be easily manipulated by a demented mind as their life spans were so short, altered using the corpses of wild animals, forcing the viruses to either adapt or die. And adapt they did.

"But Mengele wasn't alone in his endeavors. The twisted and perverse flocked to him, worshipping at his feet, becoming disciples at the altar of a self-anointed god. Men who would be gods themselves, men who believed that human lives were paving stones on the road to knowledge and divinity. These were men with no love for the Wehrmacht or their countries, men of all nationalities, even our own, drawn together by the wretched desire to cause pain, to kill in the most horrible ways, to immortalize themselves by destroying the last remaining temple of their modern God. Men without morality or compassion. But they were just men after all.

"When these men saw the impending fall of Nazi Germany and the prospect of Allied forces swarming the streets, they scattered to the winds. Perhaps some went into hiding or repented their sins, but others set up shop in other parts of the world and resumed their genocidal experiments. Mengele among them, though out of sight around the globe in Argentina."

Carver listened in awe and abject horror, feeling the pain as much as hearing it, envisioning filthy men and women no more substantial than the bodies they had exhumed from the desert affixed to bloodstained work surfaces by wicked iron utensils with sharp points, women with swollen abdomens screaming and listless infants that couldn't.

"When the Allied forces liberated Auschwitz, they found brutalized children shoved into dark, cramped boxes so small they couldn't stand, tangled in straw and their own feces, half-dead from dehydration. They had been abandoned by their captors, and as none of the other prisoners had known of their existence, left for dead. Some did die, bloated babies crawling with maggots, breeding the viruses that had once bred them. The men who discovered them were changed. They had lived through the worst the war could offer, bedding down in trenches under constant fire, marching into a land pleading to be saved from itself, against an army that would sooner destroy its own country than give it up. These were soldiers, kids just barely out of their teens themselves, who stumbled into something that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives and those of generations to come.

"One of those soldiers was my grandfather."

IV

Carver sat silently, waiting for Hawthorne to continue. It was obvious the man was disseminating the information as he went, determining on the fly what to tell and what to hold back.

"My grandfather was Russian, a commissioned officer. Just twenty-five years old. Front line fodder that just happened to be among the first to push through the remaining resistance at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Who knows what might have happened had he been anywhere other than that place at that moment, but he wasn't. He was one of a small group of soldiers who discovered twenty-six children housed in wooden boxes that could just as easily have served as coffins. Twenty-six of a speculated two thousand sets of twins, and these were all that survived. They had been abandoned and left to die in the rush to flee the camp, and in a split-second decision that would change their lives forever, these soldiers decided that that was exactly what had happened.

"You see, these weren't normal children, which was readily apparent from first sight. These babies, the oldest of which was sixteen months, were the product of Mengele's experiments. Some were badly disfigured. Others bore only minor physical anomalies like unnatural eye colors or hair growth patterns, though all were malnourished, dehydrated, and on the verge of death. Those that had survived anyway. After determining that none of them belonged to any of the liberated prisoners, they were whisked away under the cover of night to an infirmary of sorts established in the basement of a safe house. The tide had turned in the war, but still no one knew if the Nazis would rally their numbers and return to attempt to retake their camp, so the children were kept a secret until they were healthy enough to be secreted out of Poland."

"What happened to Mengele?" Carver asked.

"He was smuggled out of Europe by Nazi sympathizers and ended up in Argentina, where he died in 1979. Washed up dead in the ocean. For our purposes though, his involvement ended on January 17th, 1945, when he tucked tail and fled Auschwitz. My only regret is that he and I never had the chance to meet in person. I've heard drowning's the most peaceful way to die. He deserved a different fate many of us would have been happy to personally deliver."

Locke grunted in assent. What Carver saw behind the man's eyes chilled him, bringing to mind the picture of a dead man on the blackened rocks in a rail yard, and presumably the last thing twenty-two indigents ever saw.

"Once strong enough for extended travel, the children were separated and sent to safe homes all around the world, including back to Russia with my grandfather, who returned to Murmansk with a baby girl. My mother. But there were too many questions and the political climate was changing so rapidly that he had no option but to run away through Finland and Norway. He eventually reached England, and from there crossed the Atlantic and settled in Williamsburg, Virginia."

Carver watched Hawthorne like a poker player, scrutinizing every eye movement, every expression, and every muscular contraction for a tell, which would betray a lie. So far there was nothing. The man was well trained and impossible to read. Fortunately, Carver had heard enough to know the man might not have been lying, but he was leaving out large chunks of information. He had seen it on the faces of the other agents, who appeared to be absorbing the story and mentally rehearsing it for when it came up again.

"What aren't you telling me?" Carver asked. "If you want to distract me with a history lesson, you're wasting all of our time. We have a plane to catch, and I expect you to reach your point long before we reach our destination. We'll come back to your story. For now, tell me what happened to the other children."

"My grandfather and the other soldiers realized that if they handed the children over to the government--any government--they would be no better off than giving them back to the Nazis. They were physically different. Regardless of where they went, they would be studied, locked in sterile rooms and prodded with an endless series of needles. Together, their abnormalities were impossible to ignore, but separately, they could be hidden. At least to some degree. Of the twenty-six children rescued from Auschwitz, nineteen survived and were distributed to trustworthy families hand-selected by my grandfather and the five other men in his confidence, other soldiers who had seen the horrors of the war and would sooner die than allow anything further to happen to its most innocent victims. The children ended up throughout Europe and North America in cities large enough that they could blend in, but not so large they would become lost.

"The six former soldiers were spread out across the continents where they could discreetly watch the children, ensure their welfare, and monitor changes in their health and appearance. Where they could protect them."

"That's too many people trying to keep a secret. It would never work. And besides, wouldn't these men have been deserters? There would have been people looking for them, and they would have led them right to the children."

"No one ever came after them. After all, they were dead."

"Clever, but even if they switched dog tags with dead soldiers, someone would have been keeping an eye out for
them
."

"Who said they switched identities with other soldiers? How do you think they were able to get out of the camp initially with so many children?"

Carver finally understood. "They switched lives with dead prisoners."

"There are things I haven't told you. You need to understand that these men became criminals to protect the children. Looking back, I don't think I would have been strong enough to make that decision, a decision made in the span of a heartbeat while exhuming lifeless infants from wooden crates hardly bigger than shoeboxes. In that moment, they sacrificed themselves for us," Hawthorne said. Wolfe and Locke nodded, faces somber. "And they did other things that weren't legal. Not by any stretch. They assumed the wealth of dead prisoners, looted Nazi treasure, and assimilated a substantial fortune by deceptive means. With this money they established a foundation in 1948, the Society for the Preservation of Ethnic and Cultural Integrity, through which they solicited millions of dollars in donations. I don't know anything about the financial details, nor do I care. All I know is that it was this foundation that kept the children alive and safe, and laid the groundwork for what was to come.

"As the years passed and technology advanced, the foundation used its substantial influence to convince the Reagan-era American government to create the Division of Genetic Stabilization, a joint venture between the Department of Health and the Department of Justice. Its public face is responsible for advancing the rights of those afflicted with hereditary and gene-altering disorders, organizing research, evaluating the scores of genetic mutations that arise on nearly a daily basis, and establishing the threat level to the human gene pool. Behind the scenes, we're plugged into the FBI, CIA, and just about every other acronym, all while operating as an independent entity. We exist, and yet we don't. Take Wolfe. He's a full-fledged Special Agent in the FBI out of the Phoenix branch. Locke here is actually CIA."

"So no one knows about this Division of yours," Carver said.

"Only a few people anyway, and given a couple more changes in administration, it will just be another annual appropriation no one will notice until it's in the hands of some oversight committee way down the road. We all do our normal jobs until something, shall we say...unique comes along, and then our services are requisitioned where they're needed. And then we return to our everyday lives until the occasion arises again."

Carver's head was pounding.

"What does that have to do with anything going on here?" he asked.

"That should be obvious by now."

"Some of Mengele's experiments involved animal genes, correct?" Carver waited for Hawthorne to nod. "So he's been dead for thirty years. He can't possibly have anything to do with what's going on now, and you already said his participation ended in 1945. You even said you knew who was doing this yesterday. Let's get everything out in the open now. Full disclosure."

"I have a feeling you'll see for yourself soon enough. Like I said, Mengele had many disciples."

"You're talking in circles now, and I for one, don't have the time or patience."

"This job requires time and patience, if nothing else. We've been tracking these people since before I was ever brought into the fold."

"Then you guys must not be very good," Carver said. He watched Hawthorne's face flare red, but didn't look away, not even when he heard Locke emit what sounded like a growl.

"This coming from the man who shot Tobin Schwartz. Tell me, how are you feeling about that decision by now?"

Carver lunged across the gap between them and grabbed Hawthorne by the jacket. The older agent swatted his arms away, and before Carver knew what had happened, Hawthorne had a grip on his tie and was pulling it tight like a noose, their faces now only inches apart. Hawthorne's eyes were wild, bestial, the pupils dilated so wide they nearly eclipsed the yellowish-brown irises.

"You want to come at me, you'd better bring more than that," Hawthorne snarled. He jerked on the tie for good measure and shoved Carver back onto the bed.

"If you two are through," Wolfe said, "I'd like to try to get what little sleep I can before we head out."

"The lady needs her beauty sleep," Locke said.

"Not yet," Carver said, wrenching the tie loose enough to allow the blood to drain from his head. "Not until you tell me how this involves Ellie."

V

Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory

Centennial, Colorado

Marshall choked down the last of the coffee, which hit his gut in a fiery stream of acid, and clutched his belly. If he wasn't careful, he was going to end up having to make a run for some Pepto, or maybe something stronger if he could find a twenty-four hour pharmacy.

He thought of the after-hours clinic where the four girls had been seen as infants when they had been sick. The drug with which they'd been treated hadn't been listed in their charts, but was it possible he was looking in the wrong place? What if they hadn't been injected with some suspicious-sounding drug, but had rather been subjected to one that had been tainted? Maybe something ordinarily innocuous that a nurse might not have given a second thought to using on a baby, one the parents would notice and to which they wouldn't object?