VIABLE (17 page)

Lars said nothing for a long moment.

‘Perhaps you’re right, Special Agent DeWitty, perhaps you’re right. When you put it like that it does sound like I’ve been on a bit of a wild goose chase. Maybe I should just let you fellas take it from here.’

‘I’m sure that’d be for the best, Sheriff. Why don’t you just send me over the details of that old lady who claims she saw the Rowe woman being abducted and we’ll handle it? Nothing more for you to worry about. Now what’d you say her name was again?’

Lars hesitated for a second.

‘Radcliffe. Ethel Radcliffe.’

‘And you say she lives opposite where the Rowe woman used to live?’

‘No, no. Used to live there. Moved years ago. She’s in an old folks’ home up by Spanish Fork these days. I don’t have the address to hand right now.’

‘But you’ll send it on to me?’

‘Sure.’

Lars pretended to take DeWitty’s e-mail address, then he put down the phone. He didn’t know why he hadn’t mentioned Emily Mortimer’s name to the FBI agent when he had first told him what he had discovered, but now he was glad he hadn’t.

An organ-collecting serial killer.

He’d only come up with that possibility two days ago.

And he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

19

CAPTAIN
JOHN
JAMES Fitzpatrick sat behind his desk, his face impassive. He had listened without interruption as the sheriff had summarized the events of the last few days, beginning with the van that had crashed into Mount Grant and Gant’s admission to and subsequent escape from the hospital, ending with his visit to the Utah State Penitentiary and the telephone call he had had with the FBI agent the day before.

On the drive up from Carson City that morning Lars had filled Alison in on the other persons with the
hh
blood type who had gone missing. Alison wasn’t sure how this new piece of information fit with her theory about Gant. The last recorded disappearance of a person with the
hh
blood group had been almost thirty years before. It was possible that it was just a coincidence, although knowing what she did about how rare the blood group was it was hard to ignore four such individuals having gone missing, even over such a long period. She would need to think about it more. Was it possible that Gant had been targeted just because of his blood group, that his abductors knew nothing of the other extraordinary abilities she believed he possessed? 

She had paid particular attention to the base commander as Henrikssen had described her theory about Gant’s connection with Codratus Doyle, Jason Mitchell and Luke Jackson. They were likely to need Fitzpatrick’s assistance if they wanted to locate Gant and it was imperative that he understand how important Gant was. But the man had been impossible to read. She hadn’t realized that the sheriff would forward her email and now she wished she had taken the time to compose a more compelling argument for the connection between the men. Otherwise though she had to admit that the sheriff had provided an accurate synopsis of what she had uncovered, showing neither support for her conclusions nor the skepticism she knew he felt.  She forced herself to remain silent while he finished speaking.

Fitzpatrick looked at both of them for some time. When he finally spoke it was Alison he addressed.

‘So, Doctor Stone, your father was in the Air Force?’

‘Yes. He served a single tour in Vietnam in 1971.’

Fitzpatrick was quiet again for a moment.

‘I’ve served with the Navy for almost thirty years, most of my career as a naval aviator like your father. Last operational experience was flying Combat Search and Rescue in the early days of the first Iraq war. After that they promoted me and gave me a desk job with the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Spent nine months there – more than long enough to realize that I had no interest in being a career naval officer if that was what it meant. When I threatened to resign they sent me here.’

He paused before continuing.

‘I hated every minute of my time in Washington, but if there was one good thing to come out of it, it was that it made me extraordinarily good at identifying when someone was bullshitting me. So, Doctor Stone, I guess you realize how incredible this theory of yours sounds?’

Alison started to say something to try and convince him, but he held his hand up to stop her.

‘Just let me finish, Doctor. I must admit I was more than a little skeptical at first, like I see the sheriff here still is. But your email prompted me to do a little checking myself. Anyway, before I tell you what I’ve learned I’m going to ask both of you to promise me you’ll exercise some discretion in dealing with Cody if you find him. Now, Sheriff you needn’t look so worried. I’m aware people have been killed and I’m not asking you to compromise any part of your investigation in so far as it relates to any of that. If Cody’s guilty of something in this whole sorry mess then so be it, you do what you need to to bring him to justice. I’d be prepared to bet dollars to donuts that he just got dragged into what happened at Mount Grant and I suspect that’s the conclusion you’re coming to as well, if you’re not there already. But now he’s in trouble, and it looks like you people are ahead of the game in trying to sort this out, so I’ll help you if I can. All I’m asking is that if you do find him you listen to why he’s decided he doesn’t want to be found, and if he decides he wants it to remain that way, well then you respect that. Do we have an agreement?’

They both nodded.

‘Good.’

Fitzpatrick opened a drawer and took out a thin file, sliding it across the desk. As Alison leaned forward to examine the file’s contents he continued.

‘Since the early ’nineties the military has contracted out the maintenance of its personnel records to the private sector, to a corporation called DataCore. The DataCore system holds complete records for all currently serving members of the armed forces, as well as archive files for most retired servicemen back to the First World War. That file you have in front of you contains the Army records for Jason Mitchell. There’s a photo of him on the second page.’

Alison had already flipped to the photo of Mitchell. She looked puzzled.

‘But that’s not Doyle. Are you sure this is the same Jason Mitchell? It must be a fairly common name. There had to have been more than one serving at the time.’

‘Yes, there were several. I checked them all. None looked anything like Cody. Now bear with me Doctor, this
is
the man we’re looking for. Born Grinnell, Iowa 1925, youngest of three brothers. Parents died while the boys were still in school. Raised by the local orphanage. All three brothers enlisted the week after Pearl Harbor and all three were shipped to England to prepare for the Normandy landings. Jason Mitchell took part in the amphibious assault on D-Day; he would have been among the first men on the beach that morning. Neither of his brothers even made it as far as the shore. The landing craft Jason Mitchell was in was also hit and most of the men drowned. I checked the records for the others in his platoon. Of the few that managed to get ashore only Mitchell survived; the rest were cut down by machine gun fire before they’d even got out of the water. Mitchell made it onto the beach only to step on a land mine. He was evacuated to a hospital ship. I pulled his medical records. There’s not a lot of detail; I guess the surgeons had better things to do that day than to write up case notes. But his file shows that Mitchell was unconscious when he was brought in and had to be ID’d from dog tags they found laced into his boots. His injuries were such that he wasn’t expected to survive.’

Alison was busy flicking through the information she had printed out in the internet cafe in Manchester. When she found what she had been looking for she stopped, looking up at Fitzpatrick.

‘Doyle was on that beach that morning. According to the citation for his Victoria Cross it was where he was killed.’

‘Yes he was. At first I thought that was probably just a coincidence. Tens of thousands of troops were landed on only a handful of beaches that day. But then I read a little more of Mitchell’s file. Turns out he recovered fully from his injuries. He was shipped back to the States and stayed with the Army until he was demobilized in 1946. Then in 1950 war broke out in Korea and he re-enlisted, this time as a candidate aviator. A copy of his air force records are in the file. The service numbers show it’s the same Jason Mitchell from Iowa that landed in Normandy in 1944 but take a look at the photograph.’

‘It’s Doyle.’

‘Yes. My guess is that Doyle came across Mitchell on Omaha that morning and for some reason assumed his identity.’

Alison felt an idea beginning to form. The British Army had thought Doyle had died in 1944, but they had been mistaken. And neither Mitchell nor Luke Jackson had ever been confirmed killed.

The dates.

Gant had come to her about regenerative capacity.

But if she was right it would mean…

It was preposterous, wasn’t it?

When she had met him she had thought Gant was one of her students, a freshman, nineteen, maybe twenty years old at most. How old was he actually? She realized she didn’t know. The answer would be in his Navy medical records. She could just ask Fitzpatrick but for now the idea was still too absurd to voice aloud. Instead she pulled the copy of the file Henrikssen had given her from her bag and began flicking through it. There it was, at the top of the second page:

Carl Austin Gant – D.O.B. 8/7/1978

That made him thirty-six. She hadn’t focused on that until now, she had been pre-occupied with his recuperative abilities. She supposed it was possible he just looked very young for his age. There were thirty-year-olds who could pass for twenty, certainly, at least from a distance, or in a photograph. But she had met Gant, had seen him close up. He wouldn’t just
pass
for someone who was twenty. He looked like he couldn’t have been much older. Except…except hadn’t she thought that there was something about him that
had
seemed older?

Was it possible no-one had noticed? Gant had been stationed at Fallon for almost a decade. People often didn’t notice small changes in others, the almost imperceptible signs of ageing, when they saw them day after day. Would they be any more likely to notice the absence of those signs? Probably not after only a few years. Given long enough, certainly. No forty-year old could pass for someone twenty years younger close up, regardless of the care they had taken of themselves or how lucky they had been with their genetic make-up. If a person really wasn’t ageing and they didn’t want others to know about it, sooner or later they’d need to move on, to start afresh somewhere new.

Was
that
why Gant hadn’t returned to the base as soon as he had escaped from the hospital?

Jesus
. Could it really be that Doyle, Mitchell, Jackson and Gant were the same person? Doyle had assumed Mitchell’s identity in 1944 and had maintained in until 1953. Had the same man resurfaced as Luke Jackson in Vietnam twelve years later, and as Carl Gant twenty-six years after that?

If it was true it was incredible. Gant would be almost a hundred years old. What could it be about his genetic makeup that prevented him from ageing, at least not in the conventional sense? He must have been younger at some point. Either he was continually ageing, just very slowly, or he had stopped getting older when he had reached his current age.

She was quiet for a while. If she was correct there might be some record of what he had been doing in the twenty-three years between stepping off that helicopter in Laos and when his records with the Navy as Carl Gant had begun again in 1997. Something that might help prove her theory.

‘Did you search for other examples of men like Gant?’

‘I did consider that. Given the number of personnel who have served in the armed forces over that period there was just no way to check their photos. I thought his blood type might be connected to it somehow. I went back to ‘95, when tests for
hh
first began, but there was no-one that resembled Cody.’

Alison paused, considering how to frame her next question.

‘Captain, do you remember anything unusual about Cody during his time at Fallon? Anything that at the time seemed out of place, hard to explain?’

The commander stared hard at her for a long moment.

‘Just where are you going with this Doctor Stone?’

She hesitated, afraid that if she simply blurted out her idea it would seem ridiculous. In the end it was Lars who answered for her.

‘Doctor Stone here thinks Gant
is
Doyle, Mitchell and Jackson, don’t you Doctor?’

Alison looked over at the sheriff, surprised that he had reached the same conclusion as her so quickly.

‘Well if you buy into all this other stuff about Gant it’s not as crazy as it first seems. If we’re prepared to accept that he has all these super cells that allow him to heal like he seems able to, is it that much more of a stretch to suppose that he might also not age like the rest of us?’

Alison was unsure what else to say. She couldn’t have thought of a better way to express it than the sheriff just had. Fitzpatrick looked from her to Lars and back again, as if they had both taken leave of their senses. When neither showed any signs of recanting he finally returned to the question.

‘Well, there is one thing that’s always bothered me. Cody’s an instructor with the Combat Search and Rescue program the SEALs run here. Because of his experience he’s often operational. A few years back he was part of a unit that was sent in to rescue a recon team that’d found itself in trouble. Anyway, things didn’t go well and by the time Cody’s team gets to the extraction point the place is crawling with hostiles. The helicopter that’s supposed to be dropping the SEALs gets shot up pretty bad and both pilots were hit, one of them killed. Anyway the SEALs manage to get most of the recon boys on board in one piece and then Cody flies the helicopter back. He told me afterwards that the other pilot, the one who hadn’t been killed, had just told him what to do. But I knew that wasn’t the case. The pilot was unconscious when they brought him in.’