Authors: Lance Horton
Shadow Dragon (28 page)
The chuddering roar of the helicopter rolled down the valley like thunder as the large Blackbird, flying at full tilt just above the treetops, raced toward its destination. The chopper, a specially modified MH-60G2 Pave Hawk, was complete with radar-jamming equipment, night-vision capability, and anti-icing systems for the instrumentation, engines, and rotors, making it perfectly suited for this particular mission.
Even though he couldn’t hear the helicopter through the noise-canceling headset built into his helmet, Dr. Myles Bennett felt the vibrations all the way down to his bones. That and the fact that his entire body was trembling in fear caused them to rattle about inside him like a skeletal marionette dancing at Halloween.
Even with the doors closed, it was frigid inside the cabin of the helicopter. But inside his suit, Myles was sweating profusely, which caused the system’s internal cooling system to kick on and only worsened his shivering. Again, fear was to blame for his condition. In spite of that minor malfunction, Myles was suitably impressed—and proud—of the suit’s features. After all, GenTech had played no small part in the development of them. The armor plating woven into the suit and helmet was incredible. Constructed of a special nano-composite—made in part from the silk of spiders genetically engineered in GenTech’s labs—it was waterproof, chemical-proof, and bio-proof, lightweight and flexible yet stronger than Kevlar while leaving no areas of its wearer unprotected. The helmets were sleek models that looked like something out of
Star Wars
, complete with built-in cameras, GPS sensors, and a computerized, heads-up display on the flip-down visors.
The communications system was digitally encrypted and controlled through the use of an eye-tracking system. Across the top were six rectangular blocks displaying the radio frequencies of each of the other men. By simply looking at a particular block and winking, you could select the individual you wanted to speak to, or by selecting the public icon, you could speak to everyone at once. In daylight, the information visor displayed in color, while at night, it offered either infrared or night-vision capability.
The big bird lurched. The bottom fell out from beneath them and dropped twenty or thirty feet in an instant. Myles’s insides lurched as well, and for a moment, he thought he might be sick. He looked around the cabin to check the reactions of the five other men. None of them acted as if they had even noticed it. They were all dressed in identical black suits and helmets with no name or insignia anywhere. Had it not been for the briefing he had given them prior to donning the suits, it would have been virtually impossible to tell any of them apart.
To his right, Mitchell Ainsworth checked his watch. The mission commander reminded him of a drill instructor with a graying, blonde buzz cut and square-jawed face. Next to him, Javier Ramirez was calmly praying the rosary as he had been doing for a good portion of the flight. Across the cabin, Dietrich was asleep. His head lolled to the side in such a way that a portion of a brightly colored tattoo of a serpent-reptile-dragon thing could be seen on his neck. Bill Handley, the big farm boy from Kansas who everyone called “Busey” because of his uncanny resemblance to a young Gary Busey, and the stout black fellow, Johnson, were sitting side-by-side, talking through their helmets and giggling like a couple of school kids on a thrill ride.
The icon indicating Ainsworth’s frequency lit up on Myles’s display. “Peaches, what’s the ETA to the drop point?” Peaches was Patricia Donaldson, a tall, busty blonde from Georgia who, aside from being one hell of a chopper pilot, was self-confident and beautiful, and she didn’t take any crap from the “hard dicks” she worked with. Myles was terrified of her.
“ETA in twenty-five minutes, sugar,” she replied in her syrupy-sweet, Southern drawl.
Along with all the innovations the suit had to offer, Myles suddenly wondered if it had any special features to deal with a soldier soiling himself.
Carrie yelped in surprise.
The fat, bald man on the walkway outside her door was so startled he nearly dropped his Dr. Pepper and bag of Cheetos.
“Sorry,” Carrie called out as she dashed past him toward the Hummer.
The man muttered something under his breath and glared at her indignantly, but by then she was already opening the door. The truck started with a roar that further startled the poor man, who schlepped off toward his room, shaking his head in disgust. Carrie threw the truck in gear and tore out of the lot with an even louder roar.
She tried to remain calm as she raced down the street, weaving in and out of traffic. Overhead, lumpy, blue-black clouds were gathering, forewarning of bad weather and killing off the day more rapidly than normal. The streetlamps lining both sides of the street had come on, but they offered faint illumination against the growing darkness.
*
Kyle peeled the paper farther back, pulled two of the Rolaids from the roll, and popped them into his mouth.
I’ve become a living cliché,
he thought as he chewed up the dry, chalky tablets. Even so, it was better than the agonizing heartburn he had been suffering through.
I don’t know how they do it,
he thought as Lewis came walking back in, accompanied by the lingering scent of cigarette smoke. He had a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. He had refilled it at least four or five times today, twice before the trip out to the Morris place and at least twice, if not three times since.
“Marasco still hasn’t shown up?” Lewis asked.
“No,” said the sheriff.
Just as well
, Kyle thought. He wasn’t in the mood for any smart-assed comments right now.
The phone beeped, and Lydia’s voice came over the intercom to tell them that Al Crowe was on the line. They had been waiting on the coroner’s report on the blood samples from behind Morris’s place.
“Put him through,” said the sheriff.
The phone rang once as the call was transferred.
“Hello, can you hear me?”
“We hear you, Al,” said the sheriff. “What have you got for us?”
“Don’t know if I’ve got good news or bad. I guess it all depends on how you look at it, eh? Anyway, I ran the hemoglobin test on all the samples first, and they all came up negative, so we know it’s not human blood. The three I’ve tested so far have all turned out to be dog blood. I’m testing the last two right now.”
“How long before you get those back?” the sheriff asked.
“About another half hour, assuming it’s also from the dog or it matches one of the antiserums we’ve got on file. If not, it may be days before we can identify it. Either way, I’ll call you as soon as we know.”
“Thanks, Al,” the sheriff replied and then punched off the speakerphone.
“Shit,” Lewis growled.
“You really think he shot his own dog?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah, I do,” Lewis said. “We know he was drinking last night. The son of a bitch probably got crocked, and when his dog started barking, he got pissed off and blasted it from his back porch.”
“But what about the cuts on the trees?” Kyle asked. He wasn’t ready to write off the possible connection as fast as Lewis seemed to be.
“We won’t have anything back from the lab for days, if not weeks, but I’m not holding my breath. Those could have been from anything. Besides, even if they do match, they don’t give us—”
Lewis stopped as the conference room door opened. It was Clayton.
“Uh, ’scuse me, sheriff, but Miss Daniels is here again. Says she needs to talk to Agent Andrews immediately. Says she’s got something important to show him.”
Lewis looked across the table to Kyle. “Don’t ask me,” Kyle said with a shrug. He had no idea what she was doing here.
“Send her in,” Lewis said.
Carrie came rushing in with a handful of papers clutched in her hand, shaking them in their faces like a teacher scolding her students for their bad test scores. Kyle just sat there, his mouth agape. But it wasn’t her behavior that caught him off guard. It was her appearance. For the first time since they had met, her hair was down, and she was wearing makeup. In spite of appearing windblown and dismayed, she looked absolutely stunning.
“You’ve got to do something fast,” she said. “I’ve got information that proves that GenTech is to blame for all the murders—only now they know about it, and if you don’t do something fast, they’ll get away with it, and I—”
“Wait a minute,” Lewis said. “Slow down. What the hell are you talking about?”
“GenTech,” she said, throwing the papers onto the table in front of them. “This proves that they’re running a genetic research project, and I think that whatever was on that plane is what’s been killing all those people.”
Lewis picked them up and began looking at them. “What do you mean this proves that?” he asked. “Where did you get this?”
“From Charlie. He downloaded it from one of the servers on their network.”
Kyle looked up at Carrie. He didn’t like what he was hearing.
“Who’s Charlie?” Lewis asked.
“Charlie Wiesman, the IT guy at the paper. He hacked into GenTech’s network and—”
“He what?” Lewis barked.
Carrie stopped, her eyes widening. “He … he downloaded a ton of stuff like this from one of their servers,” she continued hesitantly.
“Goddammit.” Lewis looked at Kyle. “I thought you told her to stop sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.”
“I did,” Kyle said. He looked at Carrie. “I told you we were handling this. You told me you would stay out of it.”
“I … what does it matter?” Carrie said. “At least I got it.”
“Yes, it does matter,” Lewis said. “This doesn’t do us a
damn
bit of good!” he said as he slapped the papers onto the table.
“How can you say that?” Carrie replied. “You haven’t even looked at it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lewis shot back. “It was obtained illegally. It can’t be used as evidence. We have to get a search warrant before we go in there for any of this to stand up in court. Now all they’ll say is it was planted.”
Looking at Carrie, Kyle noticed the tears beginning to shimmer in her eyes.
“I know how the system works,” she said, her voice trembling. “Believe me. I’ve seen it in action enough to know. You guys’ll screw around waiting for some judge to tell you it’s okay to go look for something, and by the time you get there, it’ll be too late.”
“That’s not true,” Kyle said, even though a part of him knew she was right.
“Yes, it is,” Carrie said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. They already know they’ve been hacked. Charlie sent me two e-mails with files attached. The first one had this information and a lot more, which I started to print out. I assumed there was so much information he had to send two files. But when I opened up the second file, it crashed my computer. I think it was trying to wipe out my hard drive. I couldn’t get it to shut off, so I unplugged it and pulled the battery.”
The room was silent. It was as if all the air in the building had suddenly been sucked out, leaving them in a giant vacuum.
Kyle found it hard to breathe, as if the air had been sucked out of him as well. She had lied to him. He had trusted her, and she had betrayed him. Just like always, he had been too trusting, too naïve. Now it was all falling apart. Carrie looked at him, trying to gain his support with the same beseeching look he had seen in her eyes before, but he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He turned away and looked to Lewis.
“Gotdamned reporters,” Lewis growled, his jaw clenching in anger as he shook his head. “Fuck!” he shouted, slamming his fist to the table.
Carrie turned and ran from the room.
Lewis was on the phone immediately.
Focus
, Kyle thought.
Stay focused
. He picked up the printouts from the table and looked at them. There was the e-mail from Charlie and two complete photos and a part of another. The print quality wasn’t great, but it was still good enough to make out what looked like photographs taken during the early stages of development of a strange, monstrous-looking beast with leathery wings, sharp, talonlike claws, and a long, toothy snout. A yardstick had been placed beside the creature to show that it was a little more than two feet long. It was impossible to tell how far along in its development the thing was or how large it might become. The second page was what appeared to be a computerized design sketch of the creature, complete with measurements and notes with arrows pointing to different areas of interest. According to this, the thing was over seven feet tall. Structurally, it was much larger than the one in the photograph, and it had large, batlike wings extending from its torso. The main trunk of the thing was reminiscent of a crocodile, as was its long, toothy snout, but it stood upright on thick, powerful-looking hind legs. Behind it trailed a long, whiplike tail. As Kyle looked at the thing, it reminded him of something out of a science-fiction or horror movie like
Predator
or
Alien
, and it occurred to him just how useless this information was without actual proof of the existence of such a creature. Who would believe that such a monster could be created in a laboratory, especially when it looked more like something created in a special-effects studio in Hollywood?
He understood why Lewis was so upset. Even with him on the phone to Seattle now, it would take time for SAC Geddes to get in contact with Washington and then even more time for them to show sufficient evidence to a judge to get a search warrant. And search warrants were required to be very specific about what was being looking for and where. There was no way for them to pin that down yet, and even if they could, now that the intrusion had been uncovered, it was certain that the people involved at GenTech were already hard at work removing or destroying any evidence that might remain.
Lewis was right. They were fucked.
“I know. I know,” Lewis’s voice rose as the conversation became more heated. “It’s not his fault. He told her. Some hacker at her office did it. Yeah, the guy’s name is Charlie Wiesman. We don’t have an address. He’s the IT guy who works at the paper with her. Yeah, get a team over there ASAP.”
Realizing his job was on the line in spite of Lewis’s defense, Kyle’s attention remained locked on the phone conversation.
“No,” Lewis replied. “There are some notes and a couple of photographs she printed out. But then she opened the virus, and it wiped out her hard drive.”
But that wasn’t exactly right.
“Wait a minute,” Kyle said. “Carrie said that when her computer locked up, she unplugged it and disconnected the battery.”
“Yeah, so?” Lewis said, not understanding the significance of that statement.
“So maybe the program didn’t finish running. There might still be some data on her computer that can be retrieved, but we’ve got to get it from her before she tries to do anything with it.”
“Did you hear that?” Lewis said into the phone. “Yeah, okay, we’re on it. I’ll call you as soon as we have it.” He hung up and turned to the sheriff. “Do you have the address of the motel she’s staying at?”
“It’s in her file,” he said, already rising to get it.
To Kyle, Lewis said, “You still have her cell number?”
“Yeah.” Kyle pulled out his phone and dialed the number. Her voice mail picked up. “Carrie, it’s Kyle Andrews. Don’t do anything with your computer. Don’t try to boot it up again or anything. There still might be something on it that we can retrieve. We’re on our way to your motel to pick it up, so if you get this, just wait for us there. If you have any questions, call me at this number.”
“I hope you’re right about this,” Lewis said as they hurried out. “Or both of us might be looking for a job.”
