Vitals (34 page)

"I'm still lost, Ben."

"It's Koba, Hal!" Ben cried out, exasperated. "Iosip Dzugashvhili. Say "Hello' to Papa Joe Stalin."

I looked down on the shrunken, pocked, red-beribboned face and could not see a resemblance, but then, I hadn't pored over as many old photos as Ben.

The eyes of the man within the tank opened suddenly and stared up through the glass, then fixed on me. His sclera were tinted pink and reddish spittle bubbled from his mouth. I was sure he could see me. His gaze chilled me: dim, but still electric. Charged with pure hate.

"You're imagining things," I said, with an awful, hollow feeling that he was not, that I was standing only a couple of feet away from the worst mass murderer in human history.

"Gentlemen!" Delbarco called.

"Am I?" Ben shot back, ignoring her. "Look at those peepers. Gorky described him as a flea blown up to human size. Didn't give a damn about the human race, just wanted to suck out all its blood. Looks like a real vampire now, doesn't he?"

"We've got to go immediately." Breaker shouted from the vault door.

The man's purple tongue poked out obscenely and his lips were drawn back, uncovering yellow teeth. He seemed to be trying to speak, or to scream. His head canted over, and waves of red fluid slapped against the sides of the tank. Some flowed into his mouth and he swallowed, gagged, weakly pursed his lips as if to spit, but could not. Then he writhed like an eel in a jar, thumping against the walls of the cylinder.

"It's not possible" I said.

Ben slapped my shoulder and laughed. "Hal, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Fuck, man, look around you."

"There's trouble on one!" Delbarco shouted.

Mercifully, the light in the tank clicked off, but the thumping continued, then a long, thin shriek.

Ben jerked his head to one side, breaking the spell, and shuddered

as he descended the steps. I lingered by the cylinder even as Breaker stalked down the aisle to pull us out of there.

"It's nuts!" I said as I joined Ben. We reclaimed our loads and ran awkwardly to the vault door in our plastic suits, the albums heavy as bricks. Ben managed to hold on to his stack and touch his plastic sheathed cranium with a finger, screwing his hand back and forth. "The whole damned century was nuts, Hal!"

We descended sixteen floors. Delbarco went first, scouting the platform overlooking the loading dock, then waved us through the door. We walked between the shattered aquariums and looked down over a milling crowd of NYPD officers and firemen. Through the doors, I saw fire engines and police cars in broken echelon, lights blinking.

Someone--probably on our side--had called out all the city watchdogs.

"Just play it cool," Delbarco said, as we stripped off our isolation suits. "Let Agent Breaker do the talking."

"Friends, you need to get out of here," Breaker called out over the crowd. "This building is still contaminated." Wearing a plastic isolation suit gave him some authority. A few broke for the door. The firemen donned their oxygen masks.

"Follow me," Delbarco said. "I don't think they'll shoot with the City's Finest watching."

"I wouldn't count on it," Ben muttered.

We walked through the crowd. Halfway out the door, I grabbed a fireman's arm. "There are kids on the eighth floor," I told him. "They're hungry, and they need medical attention. You can go in there--we did. Please go get them."

The fireman stared at my suit. "Easy for you to say. It's contaminated, buddy."

"They're just kids!" I shouted.

He waved me off.

Mingling with the men and women in police uniforms and emergency gear, I spotted a few men in casual clothes, no more than six or

seven. They watched us closely. Some carried pistols, others, small boxes.

Ben froze.

"Come on," I said, and tugged at him, but he was unshakable. I followed his line of sight and saw a trim man in his middle seventies, wearing Dockers, a black windbreaker, and a stoic expression. He folded his arms and stood in the middle of the crowd as if no one else mattered.

"Forget him," Breaker said to Ben in a harsh whisper. "We need to get out of here before they cut through the confusion and bring up reinforcements."

The man in the black windbreaker stared Ben down, then spat on the concrete.

We were hustled with our photographic treasures into the cars waiting in the wide alley. Weaving through the fire trucks and police cruisers, we drove down the alley.

No one followed.

"Was that Stuart Garvey?" I asked Ben, as the flashing and blinking lights grew small behind us.

He nodded, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Delbarco made a call on a satellite phone. She did not sound happy with what she was told. When the call was finished, she, too, closed her eyes and rested her head on the window.

We left the city and transferred to a caravan of Suburbans in New Jersey. Ben switched on his seat light an hour or so later and lifted one of Mrs. Golokhova's albums into his lap. The truck's big tires hummed on the highway. "We should have taken all of them," he said. "It would have been worth the risk. Christ, the history she must have pasted in here." He flipped a few pages, squinting at the snapshots.

I pictured Mrs. Golokhova in her husband's special asylum, living out her madness, with plenty of time on her hands, and these albums as her special task.

A few minutes later, Ben whistled. "Jackpot," he said.

He held the page up for my inspection. A crinkle-cut black-and white photograph--a home snapshot, judging by the trimmed edges and lighting--showed a middle-aged Joe Stalin, easily recognizable, hair graying with dignity. He stood with his arm around the shoulder of a doctor in a white lab coat, wearing pince-nez. Stalin smiled broadly, contemplating a brave future. The date neatly penned below was 4.vi.38.

He did resemble the man in the tank.

"He'd already killed millions," Ben said, voice tinged with that odd wonder that comes over male historians when they contemplate vast atrocities. "He wiped out the Soviet military leadership. He's going to make a pact with Hitler to gain some time, then Hitler will invade Russia. In the next ten years, almost thirty million people will die, some say fifty million, some say more. Do you think he was undergoing Golokhov's treatments by then?"

I had no answer. I just stared at the picture, memorizing the second man's features. Pleasant, mousy even, with soft eyes and a beaky nose.

Two middle-aged guys being chummy.

Most of the trip to Florida is a blur. I don't know what finally happened to the steel Gulag. I'll probably never know whether Ben was simply imagining things.

But the man in the tank, if he had any mind left at all, was suffering. If the stamped tag was any guide, he had been suffering for more than fifty years.

We could see the Lemuria from the balcony of our hotel suite. It was hard to miss, four gleaming high-rise towers arranged from bow to stern on a white cruise ship almost two thousand feet long. In the deep-water port, the ship had come about over the last ten minutes, using bow and stern thrusters, making ready to put out to sea. Through a small pair of stabilized binoculars I could peer a little ways into the shaded entrance to the marina deployed between the ship's massive twin hulls. Yachts drifted in and out of this portal like little butterflies flitting through a house's open back door.

In its presumptive way, the Lemuria was about as ugly as anything I had ever seen go to sea. No doubt the views from the seven hundred condos were spectacular. Rich folks, I thought with a twinge. All with enough money and not enough time to spend it. Lots of potential investors.

Perhaps Golokhov had struck a real gold mine.

Beyond the long entrance to Port Canaveral, I could make out the towers of a launch pad I spun my map around on the table. Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 39. Squeezed into a few square miles around the hotel were some of the greatest technological endeavors in human history. Why didn't I feel a surge of pride?

We were on the fifth floor of the Westin Tropicale, under the guise of attending a Wade Cook investment seminar. There had been some talk of moving us into the Coast Guard station, but that had been nixed just before we arrived, hence our new cover. We had badges and bags full of pamphlets and everything we needed. As the highlight of our seminar, we were scheduled to take a tour of the Lemuria.

Breaker returned to the room accompanied by a man and woman

unknown to me. Ben followed. I stayed by the window, a prepackaged ham sandwich in one hand, binoculars in the other.

Breaker formally waved his arms. "Hal Cousins, I'd like to introduce Nate Carson, from the National Institutes of Health."

"Pleased to meet you," Carson said. He was in his early thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a long, pale, patrician face. He held out his hand, but I shook my head, sorry. He withdrew the hand with a glance at Breaker, then a sheepish grin. "Right," he said.

"And this is Dr. Val Candle. She's from NSA, we dare not speak its name, a specialist in security bioinformatics."

Candle appeared to be in her late thirties. She had strong Middle Eastern features--long, thick black hair curled into a loose bun, elegant sad eyebrows, large black eyes faintly underscored by marks of shadow, prominent but classic nose. Depending on my mood, I could have found her homely or strikingly beautiful, but it was clear she didn't much care what anyone thought. She was professional and clipped in her speech, with a deep voice and a defiant Brooklyn accent. "You don't look so good, Dr. Cousins," Candle said.

"I don't feel so good," I said. "What was in that elixir besides Ex Lax and ipecac?"

"Desperation and hope," Candle said. "We're learning a lot. I wish they'd put us on the case years earlier."

"Let's go over this thing now," Breaker said. "You've been briefed about Washington. The President may be in remission, but he still refuses to sign the necessary papers. That limits us. The Vice President is in Israel, the Speaker is God knows where, so the Secretary of Defense is in charge of our operation for the time being. Everyone else in the White House is sicker than dogs. The director of the FBI committed suicide this afternoon at 3:00 P.M. The new director of the CIA has sanctioned our operation, but substantial portions of the Agency are still resistant and may be considered either turncoat or thoroughly tagged. Emergency review is under way at the Pentagon, but we're going to take some initiative and make our move on Lemuria before it's

finished." Breaker turned to me. "Here's the serving suggestion. You'll go with them into the Lemuria to provide expertise. Mr. Bridger will accompany you. You've both had lots of experience with Silk operations. Someone will be assigned to protect you."

"How do you know whether or not they'll be tagged?" I asked.

Ben clutched the single album from Mrs. Golokhova's collection and approached the broad window.

"I appreciate your concern, Dr. Cousins," Breaker said. "I am going to spend the next few hours smoothing the way with the reluctant folks in Washington. A few old-guard agents and politicos, not tagged or run by Silk, still hate to think we're going to dredge up all this carefully buried toxic waste. I've argued that you should be part of the cleanup, because you know what to look for."

"We hope he does," Candle said.

"There'll be two marine architects with ship plans here before midnight. That's all we're going to tell you about the operation until you're under way," Breaker said. "But be assured, there is more."

"We could take her in port, now," Ben said, looking wistfully through the plate glass.

"We'll follow procedures," Breaker said.

"Just like in Nam," Ben said. "Your procedures could cost a lot of lives."

"I couldn't agree more," Breaker said. "But that's the way it's going to be. You can opt out now if you want." He left the room. Ben went to the refrigerator to drag out a six-pack of Cokes, pulled one from its plastic circle, and fell back into a chair. He tapped the album with a row of fingers and lifted an eyebrow my way. Something to show me.

Candle and Carson folded their arms and stood staring at me as if I were some curious bug. "Why immortality?" Carson asked critically.

"We'll discuss that later," Candle said. "We need to know all the receptors you've blocked. We've searched your papers, but you never published all the details."

We sat around a glass-top table in the middle of the suite's living room. They opened their valises and pulled out stacks of paper, all stamped TOP SECRET HIGHEST, all edged with finger-zip incendiary strips.

"You're going to learn some things here that go beyond top secret," Candle said. "I'll personally track you and claim your testicles if you ever reveal this, ever, to anyone, in any way."

I held back a wisecrack. She was in no mood for flippancy, and I was tired. "All right," I said.

She delivered her speech crisply, with no discernible emotion. "NSA has been studying the potential for biological encryption. Our division is tasked to learn whether genomically coded messages can be or are being sent into our country in birds, insects, plants, or bacteria. We analyzed bacterial genomes in samples sent from major metropolitan centers and detected non-aleatory genomic alteration, which we prefer not to call mutations, in three hundred different varieties of common gut bacteria. We determined these alterations involved intelligent intervention. In twenty-five of thirty alterations, an internal self-modification scheme was mathematically demonstrated. We eliminated outside intelligence as the cause and invoked the possibility of interior genomic intelligence."

"You can do that, I mean, confirm that?" I asked.

"I can't, personally," she said with regret.

"But you know what it means?"

"It implies that bacteria can modify themselves worldwide in less than ten years. Call it evidence of coordinated genomic shift, call it microbial 'thought," call it whatever you want, but people I trust, brilliant people, tell me it's real."

The Little Mothers of the World, I thought.