Dead and Alive

Chameleon began to move closer — one foot, two feet, three — as Victor pulled open the middle drawer and felt through the contents, his stare focused on the would-be assassin.

Just eight feet away, Chameleon stopped. When it decided to move again, it would surely close the remaining distance and rip into its target’s legs, his torso, clip off his fingers when he struggled to resist, as it climbed frantically toward his face.

Victor glanced down into the drawer. He saw the bottle of pale-green fluid and plucked it out as he returned his attention at once to where Chameleon had been.

No ripple deformed the floor.

Victor extracted the stopper from the bottle.

Chameleon scuttled forward.

Victor splashed half the contents of the bottle on himself as he quickly sidestepped to his right.

Because the fluid contained New Race pheromones kept in the desk in the unlikely event that Chameleon escaped from its sack in the freezer, the lethal mimic halted short of attack. Victor no longer smelled like a target but instead like one of the New Race.

“You live because of me, you live for me, and my happiness is your glory….”

After a long hesitation, Chameleon turned and crawled away into the laboratory, seeking targets.

Victor had not allowed himself anger while the threat remained, but now he felt his face flush with fury. He was eager to know how Chameleon had escaped its cold prison and who should be punished for allowing it to roam free.

At the computer keyboard, he directed the audio-video system to terminate The Creed. The Hands of Mercy fell silent, and the images of the Frankensteinian future vanished from the computer as well as from all other screens in the building.

Instead of displaying the basic menu, however, the computer presented four digits—07:33.

The Dresden clock. Seven and a half minutes, and counting down.

Because he had expected to destroy the Hands of Mercy only in the event of the most extreme and irreversible biological calamity, and because he wanted none of his creations to be able to countermand his decision to destruct once the countdown commenced, the clock could not be stopped. In little more than seven minutes, Mercy would be a seething hell of fire.

His anger gave way to a cool and practical consideration of the circumstances. Having survived two centuries, he could count on a well-exercised survival instinct.

The linked bricks of incendiary material placed throughout the walls and ceilings had been developed by the world’s third-most tyrannical government, refined by the world’s second-most tyrannical government, and brought to exquisite perfection by the world’s most tyrannical government. This was a pyromaniac’s dream fuel.

In the event those governments ever fell and those regimes were in danger of being brought to justice, the press of a button would ensure that their concentration camps, which they denied existed, would burst instantly into flames of such white-hot intensity that even the guards would be unable to escape. The temperatures produced by this incendiary material were not equal to the average surface temperature of the sun; but this stuff would produce the second-hottest fire in the solar system, virtually vaporizing all evidence.

Victor hurried to a cabinet near his workstation and pulled open a door, revealing what appeared to be a large suitcase. Data-transmission cables connected the luggage to outlets in the back of the cabinet. He quickly disconnected all lines.

The Hands of Mercy would be reduced not to rubble and char but instead to ashes as fine as thrice-milled flour floating in a pool of molten bedrock no less hot and fluid than lava from a volcano. Not one splinter of bone or any other source of DNA would survive for forensic pathologists to analyze.

The suitcase contained backup data files of every experiment ever conducted in the Hands of Mercy, including work done within the past hour.

The countdown clock read 06:55.

Carrying the suitcase, Victor hurried across the lab toward the hall door, Chameleon forgotten, the entire staff forgotten.

He had been enamored of the incendiary material now awaiting detonation, and he had been impressed with himself for having the contacts to acquire a large volume of it. In fact, he had kept on his computer an e-mail sent to his supplier, the most tyrannical dictator in the world, expressing his gratitude, saying in part, “… and if it could be revealed that your three nations worked together to perfect this effective and reliable material, the revelation would make fools of cynics who claim your good selves are not capable of international cooperation.”

As Victor knew too well from centuries of disappointments, the worst thing about the sudden relocation of the enterprise following a catastrophic occurrence was the irretrievable loss of correspondence and other mementos that reminded you of the personal side of a great scientific undertaking. His work was not always solitary and somber. He built many friendships over the years, and there were balmy days in places like Cuba and Venezuela and Haiti and the old Soviet, when he had taken the time to share laughter and memories with longtime friends and discuss the important issues of the age with new friends of like mind. In the firestorm to come, so many small but precious things would be destroyed that he risked a disabling seizure of nostalgia if he dwelt too much on the forthcoming loss.

When he stepped out of the main laboratory, something to his right, about sixty feet farther along the hall, drew his attention. It was big, perhaps as large as four men, with six thick insectile legs, like the legs on a Jerusalem cricket much enlarged, and a riot of other anatomical features. Numerous faces appeared to be embedded in the body, some in the oddest places. The face nearest to where a head belonged — and obviously the most dominant of the group — rather resembled Werner.

From this reprehensibly undisciplined creature came a dozen or two dozen voices, eerily childlike, all of them chanting the same grossly offensive word: “Father … Father … Father … Father …”

CHAPTER 48

In the library of the Helios mansion, Erika Five said, “I found it by chance yesterday.”

She slid her hand along the underside of a shelf and flicked the concealed switch.

A section of bookshelves swung open on pivot hinges, and ceiling lights revealed the secret passageway beyond.

Jocko said, “This feels bad to Jocko. You want Jocko’s opinion. Opinion is—not good.”

“It’s not just the passageway. It’s what lies at the other end of it that’s the bigger issue.”

“What lies at the other end?”

Crossing the threshold, she said, “Better you see it than I tell you. I’d color my description, no matter how I tried not to. I need your unbiased opinion.”

Hesitating to follow her, Jocko said, “Is it scary in there? Tell Jocko true.”

“It’s a little scary, but only a little.”

“Is it scarier than a dark, damp storm drain when you don’t have your teddy bear anymore?”

“I’ve never been in a storm drain, but I imagine one would be a lot scarier than this.”

“Is it scarier than Jocko’s teddy bear being full of spiders waiting for bedtime so they can crawl in his ears when he sleeps and spin a web in his brain and turn him into a spider slave?”

Erika shook her head. “No, it isn’t that scary.”

“Okay!” Jocko said brightly, and crossed the threshold.

The floor, walls, and ceiling of the four-foot-wide passageway were solid concrete.

The secret door in the bookshelves closed automatically behind the troll, and he said, “Jocko must really want that funny hat.”

The narrow corridor led to a formidable steel door. It was kept shut by five inch-thick steel bolts: one in the header, one in the threshold, three in the right-hand jamb, opposite the massive hinges.

“What’s locked in there?” Jocko asked. “Something that might get out. Something not supposed to get