Rise of the Transgenics (24 page)

It was a fair question. Unsure of how to
answer, Harry mumbled, “Well, we have to scope out the place first
and check the floor plan inside.” He wished he had better
life-planning skills. “Maybe we’ll have to double-check that we can
bypass the security and...”

“That sounds pretty complicated,” Anastasia
cut in, but with a smile on her face. “I think you should stick to
research. Warfare isn’t your field.”

Harry decided she was right and he knew dick.
“Okay, I’m not going to be a field general. So what’s your
brilliant plan?”

“Simple.” She grinned. “I let them see me and
chase me.”

“Really, now?” There was ludicrous, and then
there was suicidal. This plan lay somewhere between both poles. “I
thought the whole objective was not to be seen,” he said, perplexed
by the idea of almost giving up.

Laying her hand on his arm, Anastasia’s voice
sounded confident. “First off, they’ll never catch me,” she said.
“Second, the opposition”—he knew she meant Lyudmila and
Piotr—”won’t be stupid enough to try to follow me to a place with
heavily armed personnel. Third, while the police are chasing me,
that’ll give you the chance to go in and see Farrell.”

It was certainly a risk, but with no other
options, they had to try something. They parked the car a couple of
blocks away from the hospital—the situation seemed dire right away.
Men in black suits patrolled the perimeter, and even in the
darkness, he saw the flash of their pistols. They were taking no
chances.

“So what’s the plan?” he asked.

“Give me ten minutes.”

Anastasia took off like a shot and Harry
waited near the car, crouched down behind the trunk and hoping that
an agent wouldn’t come out and arrest or shoot him. He hoped
Farrell would actually believe their story. There was no reason why
he wouldn’t. He’d seen the monsters. He knew, and...

“Hey.”

The voice, spoken softly, jarred him from his
reverie. Anastasia had returned and crouched down beside him. “I
found out where he is.” She held up her claws. “I always knew these
would be good for something. I climbed the side of the building and
scouted around. Second floor, room two-one-two, so take the
emergency stairs and you might not be caught in the confusion.”

“What confusion?” Harry asked.

“Mine. Watch me,” she said with a tiny grin.
Swiftly, she planted a kiss on his lips and tore off into the night
yelling, “Hey, morons, come and get me!”

Harry watched her go and waited to see what
would happen. Sure enough, the men outside the hospital took off
after her into the brush. Five seconds later, he heard the sound of
cries of pain, a gunshot, and then another yelp of agony. Anastasia
broke cover, ran into the hospital, and came out again with five
more agents and two police officers on her tail. The jangling sound
of an alarm going off filled the air.

“If this is your idea of a diversion, it’s
pretty good,” he muttered and ran toward the door as fast as his
feet could take him. Fortunately, the lobby was empty, and when he
checked the stairs, they were empty as well. He ascended them two
at a time, found Farrell’s room unguarded, and crept in.

Shadows swathed the room, but from what Harry
could make out, it looked like a typical hospital affair consisting
of a bed, a nightstand with a notepad and a pencil on it along with
a single window. It smelled of antiseptic, clean, sterile, and
impersonal. “Agent Farrell,” he whispered and stopped moving as he
felt the muzzle of a pistol tap the side of his head.

“If you’re going to creep into a room,”
Farrell said from his right side, “then you better check the
corners first.”

He flicked on the light and painfully limped
over to the bed. When his eyes adjusted, Harry saw that his contact
had a thick bandage stuck on the right side of his face and his
right arm was in a cast bound up in a sling. “Yeah, that rhino guy
broke my right arm,” Farrell said in a sour voice, wincing with
every word he said. “I’m getting a little tired of being beaten up
all the time.”

“It comes with the territory,” Harry
offered.

“Yeah, that it does. Let me make a call first
and tell my agents to stand down.”

Twenty minutes later, after Farrell had
first called off his men and then drunk a bottle of water, he sat
in bed tiredly rubbing his head and cursing the inefficiency and
stupidity of the police. “When I first got here, they doped me up
right away and stuck me in surgery. I couldn’t tell anyone.

“Added to that, this project is under wraps,
at least as far as you and Anastasia are concerned. The rest of the
FBI agents didn’t know. But I had to speak to the men in my
office—those that survived, that is—and then call the Chief of
Police to tell him to call off the search for you two.”

“He hasn’t so far,” Harry pointed out.

Farrell grunted a sound of frustration. “I’ll
get back on it. In the meantime, I’d still be on the lookout for
mobs.”

Recalling his near escapes, Harry nodded his
head in agreement. “Tell me all about it.” Briefly, he related his
adventures to Farrell.

“Well, that’s human nature for you.” Farrell
leaned back and squirmed around. It was plain to see he was
concerned, though, as worry lines etched in his forehead. When he
spoke, the despair was plain to hear in his voice—that, and anger.
“We lost so many people at headquarters. Merton’s dead, many of the
men and women I knew—dead—and all the information is gone.”

“Gone?”

Farrell suddenly recovered enough to sit up
and his usual hard-ass attitude returned. “Yeah, it’s gone. The
people who survived, they told me that the lab—
your
lab—was
trashed, the Genesis Chamber destroyed, and your computer smashed.
They also said someone had smashed your discs. The file on Merton’s
desk with all your notes is missing. Maybe he hid it, maybe he
burned it or maybe those two killers took it. I don’t know.” With a
sudden groan, he sank back into the sheets once again.

Harry also experienced a sinking feeling. If
the mayhem duo got their hands on his notes, then this Grushenko
character could build his own version of the Genesis Chamber. If he
did that, then who knew what horrors would be created?

Then again, considering how perfect Lyudmila
was in her own warped way, maybe Grushenko had already done so.
There were so many unanswered questions, enough to make any
person’s head spin.

Chiefly, though, Harry wondered why they
hadn’t taken the computer and the discs. Everything he’d done, from
cell analysis to chemical re-compositing to detailed matrixes
showing the finished product and result of fusing animal and human
DNA, it had all been there. It didn’t make sense.

A knock at the door signaled a visitor.
Anastasia strolled in, her body unscathed by the recent
hide-and-go-seek escapade. “You’re alive,” she greeted the agent
coolly.

“I got lucky,” Farrell answered. “It’s nice
to see you, too.”

It seemed that being mauled by an enhanced
monster hadn’t dimmed the agent’s sense of sarcasm, at least where
Anastasia was concerned. He leveraged his body to the side of the
bed and sat up. “We have to talk.”

Quickly, they hashed out a plan. “I can get
you a plane over to Russia, but I have to clear it with the State
Department first,” Farrell told them. “That’ll take an hour at
least, and they’ll have to get authorization from the President,
not to mention the Russians. That might take longer.”

“Can you do that?” Anastasia asked.

The agent frowned. “On my end, yes, setting
up a plane is pretty easy. We have some private jets stationed at
JFK Airport, just in case. We can get clearance from the flight
planners.”

“Fine, that’s step one taken care of,” Harry
said. “Problem of transportation, solved.”

“That isn’t what we have to worry about,
though.”

“What is?” Harry pressed, although thinking
about it he shouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first
place.

The key difficulty lay with the nature of the
Russian government. Russians tended to be very xenophobic. Even
with one of their own going rogue and creating unspeakable horrors
in some hidden lab, they didn’t want to face public
embarrassment.

Farrell explained all this very quickly and
simply. “And it
is
embarrassing for them. All this time
they’ve put on a show of not knowing jack about what was going
down, but once it’s made public, it’ll go right to the Kremlin. Not
even the state-controlled press can keep it a secret forever. Many
people are involved. Heads are going to roll.”

“It’s already public,” Harry pointed out.

“And it’s here,” Anastasia said, adding to
his statement. She got up to pace the room, her body taut and her
voice sharp. “I remember now how secretive Nurmelev was when he
made me the first time. He didn’t have anyone else in his lab. It
was just us, always us.”

Anger bristled in her voice as she spoke, and
the hair on her shoulders stood straight up. “Personally, I think
you should hold a press conference to show to everyone what I am so
they can see what they did to me. My own people—they did this to
me!”

“Yeah, and what happens if another mob comes
after us?” Harry countered. “What do we do then?”

Her body began to quiver. “Harry, you’re
still human. The worst they can do to you is put you in jail, but
I’m already there.”

Immediately, her claws sprang out and she
took a swipe at the wall, leaving deep gashes in it. “My own
people...I wasn’t anything else except some kind of plaything. I
had a life...and they took it from me. It wasn’t much of a life,
but it was mine, and then suddenly...it wasn’t.”

Her eyes watered and Harry immediately went
to her side, awkwardly placing his arms around her. She clung to
him for a second, her body quivering with full-out ire, then pushed
him away. “Wait, just wait a minute. You need to hear this, and you
need to hear this too, Agent Farrell.”

Leaning against the wall, she wiped her eyes,
and her voice shook as she related her ordeal. “I don’t remember
all the details, but what Nurmelev did,” her eyes got a haunted
look in them, “that, I can’t forget. He strapped me down,
twenty-three hours a day. I was fed through an IV drip. No bathroom
privileges. I lay in my own waste. They drugged me half the time,
but I could smell my own body odor, and I hated it.

“And then there were the injections, the
combinations of drugs, and even though I was doped up a lot, the
pain still came through. Do you know what it was like?”

The expression on her face turned fierce. “It
was like knives being inserted slowly into every muscle and tendon
and cell of my body. I screamed. I vomited on myself. I cried and
begged and pleaded, and what happened? He laughed. He laughed and
kept the experiment going...”

As she spoke, Harry’s sense of outrage grew,
but he knew whatever he said wouldn’t assuage her grief in any way.
This was something he could never truly understand. Her eyes blazed
with total fury as she ranted on...and her rant was thoroughly
justified.

She finished by saying, “So don’t you or
anyone else come to me with keeping this private. I’m living proof
of what people will do just to see what will happen. And if I
wasn’t scared of getting shot or thrown into jail for being what I
am, I’d go on every damn television station in the world and show
what
my people
did to me.”

She sagged down to the ground, one hand
covering her face but not attempting to wipe away the rivulets that
flowed from her eyes and ran like mini-rivers down her cheeks.

Pitiful didn’t even begin to cover how
horrible her story was, Harry thought, and he started to go over to
her. Farrell, though, beat him to it. He awkwardly got up from his
bed and limped over to her. Kneeling slowly and stiffly, he placed
a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get them, Anastasia,” he said in a
soft voice. “And you’re part of our world now, if that means
anything.”

Looking up at him with a tear-stained face,
she sobbed out, “I haven’t been very nice to you.”

“You don’t have to be,” he answered. “My job
does not compel me to be nice, either. To be honest, that’s why my
wife left me and why my daughter—she’s about your age now—doesn’t
want to see me. That’s what kind of person I am.”

He stood up slowly, wincing at every sudden
change in body angle. “However, I can promise you this much. Once
this is over, we will make this as public as we can. People will
still stop and stare. There’s nothing I can do about that. But
you’ll always have a place with us.”

Listening in, Harry tried to suppress a
smile, but couldn’t. It seemed that the agent was doing his best to
wipe away his image as a robotic hardass keeper of the realm.
Anastasia got to her feet and tentatively put out an arm to help
him to stand erect. “Thanks,” she whispered.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving off her offer
of assistance. Groaning, he got into bed. “Okay, so getting to the
airport is one thing, and once you’re inside Russia, that’s
another. Assuming our Russian allies aren’t so cooperative, you’ll
need a location.”

“We know they’re in Chernobyl,” Harry
said.

Farrell nodded. “Chernobyl is actually in the
Ukraine, and it’s an awfully big factory.”

He pulled out his smartphone and typed in
some information. A second later, a picture of an abandoned factory
complex sprang up on the small screen. “That’s Chernobyl. There’s
wreckage everywhere, and God knows how much radiation is still
present. It’s been sealed off by the Russian government since
nineteen eighty-six.”

“Good news,” Harry muttered.

A frustrated grunt came from the agent’s
mouth. “Here’s some more good news. There might be dozens of labs
or hidden research areas. We have to know exactly where to go. The
problem is that we don’t know much if anything about where a lab
might be.”