Z. Raptor (3 page)

Adam supposed the United Nations headquarters was unusual for Manhattan—it was a huge glass skyscraper standing in its own space, free of rivals. Floodlights emphasized its stark form. A curving stretch of flagpoles stood on the plaza outside. Adam watched the various countries' flags as they gusted in the breeze, bright in the winter darkness.

Chen's bogus cab pulled up into a semicircular drive on First Avenue opposite Forty-sixth Street, while the Lexus continued on its way.

“They're not coming?” Adam asked.

“Doug and the guys have got other stuff to do,” Chen said simply.

Armed police stepped forward to meet the cab. Chen got out and showed his pass, and Adam was relieved when the officers nodded and spoke into their radios. Chen opened the rear door, and Adam held his breath as he climbed out, the sight of so many guns making him uneasy. Then Chen steered him away through a gate in the wall ahead of them that led into a plain lobby. Two police escorts summoned an elevator and showed Adam and Chen inside. The doors slid shut behind them.

“I want to see my dad,” said Adam, his voice sounding thin and quiet.

“We've set up in a conference room in the basement,” Chen told him. “Quiet. Private. Off the record.”

The doors opened to reveal two more impassive guards, who guided them down the corridor to a nondescript door. Chen knocked. Adam felt nerves tearing through his insides as the door slowly opened.

The room was long and painted cream, with a large projection screen on the far wall. A worn wooden table all but filled the space. And sitting on the near side, rumpled as ever, was Bill Adlar—eyes wide through his glasses, his thinning hair mussed and adrift. “Ad, thank God you're all right!”

“I knew you'd find a way to get out of pizza tonight,” Adam joked weakly, grabbing his father in a clumsy hug. “Dad, I was so scared. This friend of his chased me through the city, tried to make out like I'd robbed someone so he could catch me. . . .”

Mr. Adlar frowned at Chen. “He did what?”

“Apologies for the cloak-and-dagger stuff tonight, guys,” Chen said. “But we don't know if people from Geneflow Solutions are watching you already—and if they are, we don't want them knowing we're in contact with you.” He looked at Adam. “That's why we couldn't just wait for you to turn up at your dad's offices and grab you there.”

Adam felt a familiar tingle of nerves. “Then . . . your friends in the Lexus were trailing us to see if anyone else was following?”

“That's right.” Chen looked at Mr. Adlar. “You've got a sharp kid there.”

“I wouldn't be here now without him,” Adam's dad said simply. “But I'd sooner we were both somewhere else. I tried to warn the FBI months ago about Geneflow and their illegal genetic experiments in New Mexico. No one seemed interested then.”

“Yeah, well, things change.” Chen looked troubled. “Let's not forget, Bill, you contacted the FBI anonymously. And you left out some of the more, shall we say,
surprising
aspects of your ordeal.”

“I didn't know who I could trust.” Mr. Adlar didn't break off his stare. “I still don't.”

“None of us knows that, Mr. Adlar,” came a lofty, English voice. The conference room door swung open and a white-haired, owlish man, half buried beneath a long, dark coat and a white, winding scarf bustled inside. He sat down stiffly at the head of the table and shivered as though he still felt the cold. “I am Dr. Jeremy Marrs,” he announced, “chairman of the International Science and Ethics Association.”

Mr. Adlar looked coldly between Marrs and Chen. “Was it ethical to chase my son across Manhattan, scaring him half to death?”

Unruffled, Marrs put on a pair of gold, half-rimmed glasses. “I'm sorry if Mr. Chen's methods lacked a little finesse. But we required the presence of both you and your son at this meeting without delay, and today's youth are resilient, I am informed.” He smiled at Adam. “I'm confident your fine young man will bounce back.”

Patronizing idiot,
thought Adam. But the man's earlier words were playing on his memory. “Science and Ethics Association? I'm sure I've heard that name before—”

“Whenever new breakthroughs in genetic experiments are made, the United Nations consults the association—a loose collection of experts worldwide who consider the ethics of the work and advise on whether it should be allowed to continue.” Marrs turned to Adam's dad. “Until recently, one of our key members in the private sector was a biomedical research executive called Jeff Hayden. I believe you know him?”

Hayden
. Blood-soaked memories tore through Adam's head at the mention of the name.
The psycho maniac who started this whole nightmare.

“I knew Hayden,” said Mr. Adlar coldly. “Past tense. He's dead.”

“According to his board of directors, Hayden's taken a six-month leave of absence from work,” Chen informed him. “Off fossil hunting someplace.”

“And he sent me a video message confirming his resignation from the Science and Ethics Association,” Marrs added, “citing ill health as the reason.”

Adam looked at his dad, baffled. “But we
know
he's dead.”

“The people at Geneflow are incredibly well prepared.” Mr. Adlar leaned forward in his seat. “If you were sent a video, Dr. Marrs, Hayden must've filmed it some time before as a contingency—to stop the authorities from looking too hard if anything happened to him.”

“Possibly,” said Marrs briskly. “In any case, I received an anonymous letter some months ago informing me of Hayden's involvement with a global network of scientific activists, working on this Z. rex project. Am I right in thinking you wrote that letter, Mr. Adlar?”

Mr. Adlar hesitated, then nodded. “I didn't sign it because I didn't want to get Adam caught up in some big covert investigation. He's been through enough. We both have.” He studied them both, anger simmering in his eyes. “And it goes on. You've scared us both witless tonight. Why?”

Chen cleared his throat. “Perhaps you should play the
other
video message you got, huh, Doc?”

Marrs looked at Adam. “I'm not sure it's fit viewing for the boy—even if you do consider him an expert witness.”

Adam frowned, and Mr. Adlar opened his mouth to say something, but Chen was already clicking on a palm-sized remote. “Ten days ago the doc here received an e-mail,” the agent told them as the projector screen on the far wall glowed with bands of color; Adam saw an open laptop connected with an untidy loop of cable. “The video you're about to see was attached.”

Marrs nodded gravely. “Special Agent Chen had already interviewed me regarding the activities of Geneflow and Jeff Hayden. So when I received this video, I brought it to his attention. You'll see why.”

Abruptly, sound and color cut into the projected image. Adam felt his blood run to ice as grainy, unfocused footage of two creatures hazed into view. They seemed part bird and part beast, with dark, scaly bodies sprouting stiff quills around the shoulders. Their S-shaped necks flexed like serpents, and they had long, fearsome jaws. Then the image cut to a blurry image of a man running on a beach, dressed in jeans and a torn shirt, looking over his shoulder. A second later, a giant brown blur of speed and scales raced up behind him. A spray of red erupted from the man's body as he fell. Almost in the same instant, two more of the nightmarish creatures pounded into view, their heads hunched forward on thick, sinuous necks, ready to tear into their share of the kill.

Horrified but unable to look away, Adam saw the image cut to something else—a blur of red scales and bloodied plumage, something standing too close to the camera.

“Tell them.” The voice was unearthly, cold as stone. “Tell them what Geneflow does. The danger.”

And the camera lurched to the left. The image of a woman, blond and haggard, her dirty face streaked with tears, was revealed. Behind her, pixelated palm trees were swaying under a pale sky. She stared into the lens. “This message is for the attention of Dr. Jeremy Marrs, chairman of the International Science and Ethics Association.” She had an American accent, and it sounded as though she were reading the words from a board, off camera. “I'm contacting you because you know Jeff Hayden, and you need to know about his work at Geneflow Solutions.”

“And Josephs,” the voice cut in. “Samantha Josephs.”

Adam had hoped he would never hear Josephs's name again. She was Hayden's right-hand woman, a brilliant but amoral scientist who could justify any action that got a desired result.

The frightened woman on the screen was trying to pick up where she'd left off. Adam was reminded of the horrible videos he'd seen on the news of soldiers captured by the enemy being forced to read their own ransom demands. “Please, please, you
must
help us. There are lots of people trapped here. And creatures . . . It sounds crazy, but they're dinosaurs. Geneflow has bred dinosaurs.
Raptors
. They are smart. Deadly.” The woman shuddered visibly. “One of them is helping us to survive—Loner here.” She sniffed noisily. “We would've died a long time ago if not for him. He's going to try to send this from Geneflow's own computers. They . . . they don't know he can get inside their base.”

“Quickly,” urged the eerie voice from off camera, distorting the microphone. “Brutes are coming.”

The woman's face twisted in fear as she spoke faster, gabbling in breathless sentences. “We're on a tiny island in the central Pacific, maybe six hundred kilometers south of Hawaii. There's a big concrete bunker here, used in World War II. That's where the base is. There is also a place to land a boat that's marked with a stone pillar in the water. And a tower too . . .” She wiped her eyes and crouched down, barely in the shot, as if afraid to be seen even by the camera. “Please, please come.”

“Josephs and her kind are evil,” came the cold hiss of a voice. Adam felt a prickling through every hair in his body as the mass of red scales pushed back into sight and the focus blurred on a powerful, human-sized figure, half lost in shadow.

Then the figure stepped back. Adam flinched, and his father gripped the arms of his chair.

Confronting the camera, half in shot, was a reptilian nightmare. Though the picture lacked definition, those details he could see hit Adam like a stone. The beast's scaly skin was complicated about the shoulders by a sharp tangle of quills. Stubby feathers with a steely sheen coated the powerful arms. The neck was an obscenely thick gnarl of flesh, and the crimson-striped face a mash-up of vulture and crocodile with long, toothy jaws. On its hind feet, Adam could see a huge, sickleshaped claw. The creature peered out from the screen with unblinking orange eyes. They were an animal's eyes, and yet the woman's grief seemed mirrored there.

The jaws creaked open. “You must be here before the experiment ends.” The cold scrape of its voice filled and chilled the conference room. “Before the feast.”

Then the screen switched to blank blue and a box that read NO SIGNAL. The creature's last word hung in heavy silence. The message had ended.

F
or Adam, it seemed as though the night's chill had blown inside the conference room.
So it's starting again,
he thought bleakly.
The monsters. The fear.

Mr. Adlar asked for the message to be played through again. Chen worked the remote, but this time Adam looked away. He pictured Sam Josephs—black and bright, plain and petite. Nothing like the image of your typical evil mastermind. She looked so ordinary, yet was an exceptional thinker; she'd worked her way into countless high-tech firms, stolen their secrets and fed them to Geneflow to speed its work along.

As the second viewing reached its chilling conclusion, Adam saw Chen's eyes flick between him and his father. “Well, well,” the agent murmured. “From the looks on your faces, anyone would think you really believe that crazy story the woman and her pet dinosaur are selling.”

“And so do you.” Mr. Adlar took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Or else you'd hardly have bothered to abduct us in order to get a second opinion. That is why we're here, right?”

“Very astute, Mr. Adlar.”

“Bill.”

“In your statement, Bill, you claim experience of ‘hyperevolved reptile mutations,'” said Marrs, quoting from a printout on the table in front of him. “Agent Chen first contacted me a month ago, asking me if I could help with some inquiries he was making into the Geneflow organization. Naturally I remembered your anonymous statement—”

“And the details tallied with intelligence I'd gathered myself,” said Chen.

“What's wrong with you?” Adam demanded, fear and dismay giving way to anger. “We just saw people dying, and that poor woman and a . . . a Z. raptor or something, and you're just sitting there waving bits of paper like nothing's happened.”

“Easy, Adam.” Mr. Adlar reached out a hand to place on Adam's shoulder.

“Easy?” Adam shrugged the fingers away. “Geneflow have . . . I mean, they've . . .” He felt himself turning red as his voice began to choke on tears. “Dad, they've started everything all over again.”

“We're not in this alone anymore. Right?” Mr. Adlar licked his lips. “It's okay.”

Adam took some deep breaths, glaring at Marrs and Chen. “Is it?”

“I assure you, we're taking this matter extremely seriously.” Marrs was as smooth and soothing as a practiced politician. “Agent Chen has been checking all leads—including your good selves. When he informed me he was ready to collect you both, I flew here from London on the next flight to discuss the matter further.” He paused, loosened his scarf a little as he turned to Mr. Adlar. “I was aware Hayden's research company was dabbling in cell-regeneration techniques, but is it truly possible for them to have created some sort of mutated reptile with the power of speech?”