“Monsters,” she corrected.
“Monsters,” I agreed.
We lay there on the slanting mattress, the sweat of passion cooling on our naked skin, and listened to the sound of our breathing becoming slower and slower. I reached over and pulled the plug on the lamp and we were instantly cocooned in velvety darkness. We lay like that for a long time. I thought Grace had drifted off to sleep when she whispered to me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I turned my head toward her even though she was invisible in the darkness. “Sorry? For what?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, “I love you, Joe.”
Before I could answer her hand found my mouth and she pressed a finger to my lips.
“Please,” she said, “please don’t say anything.”
But I did say something.
I said, “I love you, Grace.”
We said nothing else. The meaning and the price of those words were too apparent, and they filled the darkness around us and the darkness in our hearts. The battlefield is no place to fall in love. It makes you vulnerable; it tilts back your head and bares your throat. It didn’t need to be said.
I just hoped—perhaps prayed—that the monsters didn’t hear our whispered words.
Chapter Ninety-Three
The Dragon Factory
Monday, August 30, 5:02 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 58 minutes E.S.T.
Hecate and Paris lay entwined on the bed they had shared for ten years. The young black woman they had enjoyed lay between them, her chocolate skin in luxuriant contrast to the milky whiteness of theirs. The woman lay with her head on Paris’s arm, but she faced Hecate and her dark hand rested on Hecate’s flawless flat stomach.
Paris and the girl were asleep, but Hecate lay awake long into the night. Her blue eyes were open, fixed on the infinity of stars that she could see through the wide glass dome above their bed. The endless rolling of the waves on the beach outside was like the steady breathing of the slumbering world. In this moment Hecate was at peace. Her needs met, her appetites satiated, her furies calmed.
Except for one thing. Except for a small niggling item that was like a splinter in her mind.
Six hours ago she had finally let Paris talk her into inviting Alpha to the Dragon Factory. The conversation had been brief. He had sounded so happy, so flattered that they were inviting him, and he accepted their conditions without reservations because they were small: the windows of the jet would be blacked out. She teased Alpha, saying that he had taught them to always be careful and she was being careful. Alpha agreed to everything.
Too easily.
“He knows,” Hecate said to Paris after the call was ended.
“He doesn’t know,” insisted Paris. “He can’t know.”
“He knows.”
“No way. If he knew, then he’d never agree to come here, never allow himself to be that much in our power.”
“He knows.”
“No, sweetie. Alpha doesn’t know a damn thing. But he will once he gets here. I can promise you that.”
That had been the end of it. Hecate had to accept that Paris was too much of an idiot to recognize the subtle brilliance that made Alpha who and what he was. Not that she knew exactly who and what Alpha was—but she grasped the essence of their father in a way that her brother seemed incapable of managing.
“He knows,” she murmured to the infinite stars.
Yet he was coming all the same.
Chapter Ninety-Four
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Monday, August 30, 5:03 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 57 minutes
Eighty-two sat in the dark and looked out at the black water of the harbor. He’d never been in Baltimore before. Except for the Deck, he’d never been anywhere in the United States before. He felt strange. Lonely and scared, and alien.
Everyone here had treated him well. His nose was tended to, he was clean and dressed in new clothes: jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt with the logo of a baseball team. They even let him keep his rock. He’d been allowed to eat whatever he wanted. He’d had pizza for the first time in his life, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it. They gave him a bedroom that had a TV with cable. He was allowed to watch whatever he wanted.
But he knew that he was a prisoner. No one had used the word, but what other word was there? Before they let him go to his new room they’d taken his fingerprints and samples of hair and blood and swabs from inside his cheek. They asked him to pee in a cup. It wasn’t all that different from what the scientists at the Hive did, though these people smiled more and said “please” and “thank you.” But they weren’t really asking his permission to do their tests.
The night was long and he didn’t want to sleep. The big man who called himself Cowboy had promised that the New Men were being taken care of, but nobody explained what that meant. All Eighty-two knew was that ships from the British and American navies had converged on the island. Beyond that, he knew nothing and no one would tell him anything about what was being done to the New Men. He never saw the female again, not after Cowboy had rescued him.
Eighty-two felt more alone than he had ever been.
How strange it was, he thought, that he felt more alone, more alien, more apart, here in this place, here among the “good guys,” than he ever had before. He realized bleakly that he no longer had a place. He could not go home again even if he wanted to, which of course he did not, and he certainly didn’t belong here. He belonged nowhere.
He was no one.
The darkness stretched on forever before him.
Chapter Ninety-Five
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Monday, August 30, 5:04 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 56 minutes
Mr. Church sat behind his desk. He hadn’t moved at all in over half an hour. His tea was cold, his plate of cookies untouched.
On his desk were three reports, each laid out neatly side by side.
On the left was the coroner’s report on Gunnar Haeckel that included DNA, blood type, body measurements, and a fingerprint ten-card. In the middle was a brief report on Hans Brucker that included preliminary information and a fingerprint card. The blood type was a match; the basic body specifications were a match. That was fine. There were a lot of people of that basic size, build, weight, and age with O Positive blood. The troubling thing were the two fingerprint cards. They were identical. Church had ordered the prints scanned and compared again, but the results had not varied. Not even identical twins have matching fingerprints, but these were unquestionably identical.
But it was not the inexplicable match of fingerprints on the two dead men that troubled Mr. Church. For the last half hour he had barely looked at those reports. Instead all of his attention was focused on the brief note he had received from Jerry Spencer, who was now back at the DMS and ensconced in his forensics lab. The note read: “The prints taken from the boy are a perfect match for the unmarked set of prints you forwarded to me. The only difference is size. The unmarked set are larger, consistent with an adult, and there are some minor marks of use such as small scars. However, the arches, loops, and whorls match on all points. Without a doubt these prints come from the same person. There’s no chance of a mistake.”
When Mr. Church first read that note he called Spencer and confirmed it.
“I thought my note was clear enough,” said Spencer. “The prints match, end of story.”
But it was by no means the end of the story. It was another chapter in a very old and very twisted story. It painted the world in ugly shades.
Mr. Church finally moved. He selected a cookie and ate it slowly, thoughtfully, thinking about the boy called Eighty-two. The boy who had reached out to him, who had risked his life to try to save millions of people in Africa and to save the lives of the genetically engineered New Men.
Church picked up the boy’s fin
gerprint card and turned it over to study the photograph clipped to the other side. It had been taken during the physical examination of the boy. Church looked into the child’s eyes for long minutes, searching for the lie, for the deception, for any hint of the evil that he knew must be there.
Chapter Ninety-Six
The Deck
Monday, August 30, 5:05 A.M.
Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 55 minutes E.S.T.
“I think she suspects,” said Cyrus. He sipped his wine and held the Riesling in his mouth to taste its subtleties.
“About?”
“The Wave. Not that she could know anything with specific knowledge, but I think she suspects that we have some sort of global agenda.”
“Of course she suspects,” said Otto. “Wouldn’t you be disappointed in her if she didn’t?”
Cyrus nodded. It was true enough.
“But,” said Otto, “she can only be guessing. She can’t know.”
“No.”
“Not like we know.”
“No.”
“You’ll be able to see for yourself when you visit the Dragon Factory tomorrow.”
They thought about that for a while, and then they both laughed.
“Are you surprised that they invited me?” asked Cyrus.
“A little.”
“Do you think it’s a trap?”
“Of course. Our misdirection with the assassins probably only fooled Paris,” said Otto. He pursed his lips and added, “Though my guess is that this is a fishing expedition more than anything. She wants to look you in the eye when she talks about the attack. She probably believes that you’ll give something away.”
Cyrus laughed again. Otto nodded.
“She’s very smart, that one,” said Cyrus, “but I think we can both agree that she doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does.”
“No.”
“So . . . a fishing expedition with a trapdoor if she doesn’t like what she sees? Is that what you think?”
“More or less. Probably not as rigid as that. Hecate likes wiggle room. If she’s not one hundred percent sure that you sent the assassins, then I expect she’ll give you some heavily edited version of a tour. Letting you see only what she thinks would appeal to you and perhaps flatter you. She’s her father’s daughter in that regard.”
“No, Otto . . . I think she gets that from you.”
Otto shrugged. “I believe that’s her plan.”
“And if she becomes convinced that I am responsible for the assassins? Do you think she’ll try to have me killed?”
“No,” said Otto. “Not a chance. She may torture you a bit; I think she’d be very happy to do that.”
“Let her try.”
“As you say. But ultimately I think Hecate would want you alive. She’s smart enough to know that you’re smarter. She and Paris have stolen more science then they’ve pioneered. You, Mr. Cyrus, are science. Hecate is too much your daughter to throw away such a valuable resource.”
“She’d want you dead, though,” Cyrus said.
“Without a doubt. And I would like to think that she’s too smart to risk torturing me. She learned the art from me, and she knows that turning it around is something I daresay I’ve pioneered. No . . . if Hecate gets the chance she’ll put a bullet in my brain.”
“If we let her,” said Cyrus.
“If we let her,” said Otto.
They smiled and clinked glasses.
They sat in lounge chairs that had been brought outside. All of the Deck’s exterior lights had been turned off, and they were miles from any town. There was nothing to mute the jeweled brilliance of the sky. They could even see the creamy flow of the Milky Way.
“Veder is on his way,” said Otto. “He’ll be here before the Twins’ jet arrives for you. Do you want him to accompany you? We can say that he’s your valet.”
“No. He can go in with the team. But once your Russians have breached the walls I want Veder to find me. I want him protecting me throughout.”
“Easy enough.”
They lapsed into a longer silence.
Several times Otto looked at Cyrus and opened his mouth to speak, but each time he left his thoughts unsaid. Finally Cyrus smiled and said, “Speak your mind before you drive me crazy. You want to know about the Hive. About how I feel?”
“Yes. We lost so much. . . .”
“We lost nothing that matters, Otto.”
“The New Men. The breeding stock . . .”
“The Twins will have them somewhere. They’re smart enough to recognize what the New Men are. They would want to experiment with them. Once we take the Dragon Factory we’ll get them back. Or we’ll get enough of them back so that we can start again.”
“And Eighty-two?”
“I don’t think the Twins will have killed him. I think he’s alive. I feel it. If he’s at the Dragon Factory and unharmed, I might even show the Twins a degree of mercy.”
Otto did not need to ask what Cyrus would do—or to what extremes he would go—if Eighty-two was dead. No amount of pills would be able to control Cyrus if that happened.
But then Cyrus surprised him by saying, “But in the end it doesn’t matter.”
Otto gave him a sharp look.
“Somehow I feel like we’ve moved past that,” said Cyrus. “As we get closer to the Extinction Wave, so many of the other things are becoming less important.”
“The New Men fill a necessary role. A master race needs a slave race.”
“Maybe.”
“Those are your own words, Mr. Cyrus.”
“I know, and I believed them when I said them. But they don’t feel as valid now. We’re doing a great thing, Otto. We’re doing something that has never been done before. Within a year a billion mud people will have died. Within five years—once the second and third Waves have had a chance to reach even the remotest parts of Asia—there will only be a billion people on the planet. When we created the New Men we conceived them as a servant race during an orderly transfer of power. But . . . do you really think things will be orderly?”
Otto said nothing.
“I think we have lit a fuse to chaos itself. As the mud people die, the white races will not unify as a single people. You know that as well as I do. That was Hitler’s folly, because he believed that whites would naturally form alliances as the dirt races were extinguished. You and I, Otto . . . we’re guilty of being caught up in fervor.”
“Why this change of heart? Are you doubting our purpose?”
Cyrus laughed. “Good God, no. If anything, I have never felt my resolve and my focus—my mental focus, Otto—to be stronger. With the betrayal of the Twins I feel like blinders have been removed and a bigger, grander picture is spread out before me.”
“Are we having an incident, Mr. Cyrus? Should I get your pills?”
“No . . . no, nothing like that. I’m in earnest when I say that I have never been more focused.”
“Then what are you saying? I’m old, it’s late, and I’m tired, so please tell me in less grandiose terms.”
Cyrus nodded. “Fair enough.” He sipped his wine and set the glass on the cooling desert sand. “I have been reimagining the world as it will be after the Extinction Wave—Waves—have passed. There will be no reemergence of old powers. The Aryan nations will not rise. That was a propaganda that we both believed, and we’ve believed it for so long that we forgot to think it through; we forgot to allow the ancient dream to evolve even while we evolved our plans as we acquired new science. The deaths of five billion people will not bring a paradise on earth. It will not create an Aryan utopia.”
“Then what will it bring?”
“I told you. Chaos. Mass deaths will bring fear. Fear will inspire suspicion, and suspicion will become war. Our Extinction Wave is going to plunge our world into an age of total global warfare. Nations will fall; empires will collide; the entire planet will be awash in blood.”
Otto was staring at him now.
Cyrus looked up at the endless stars.
“We were born in conflict, Otto. Our species. Darwin was right about survival of the fittest. That’s what this will become. Evolution through attrition. We will light a furnace in which anything that is weak will be burned to ashes. True to our deepest dreams, Otto . . . only the strong shall survive. It is up to us to ensure that strength is measured by how skillfully the sword of technology is used. But make no mistake, we are about to destroy the world as we know it.” He closed his eyes. “And it will be glorious.”
Chapter Ninety-Seven
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Monday, August 30, 9:14 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 50 hours, 46 minutes
When I woke, Grace was gone. She left like a phantom early in the morning. I looked for her, but every time I found her she was busy. Too busy to talk, too busy to make eye contact that lasted longer than a microsecond. It hurt, but I understood it. Those three little words we had whispered to each other in the dark had been like fragmentation grenades tossed into our professional relationship. This morning was like the deck of the Titanic twenty minutes after the iceberg.
A pretty hefty dose of depression was settling over me as I made my way to the conference room for my seven o’clock meeting with Church and Dr. Hu.
They were both there. Church studied me for a long moment before greeting me with a wordless nod; Hu didn’t bother even looking up from his laptop. I poured a cup of coffee from a pot that smelled like it had been brewing since last month.
“Please tell me we’re ready to roll,” I said. “I feel a strong need for some recreational violence.”
“Switch to decaf,” Hu murmured distractedly.
“Have we checked out those New Men? I mean . . . does the Kid’s story hold water about them being Neanderthals?”