“It’s like they say in car racing. Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go? By the way. Where do I send my bill? Directly to you?”
“Sure, Marty. That’d be fine.”
“Okay. So then I hired WVU’s top sprinter to run the course. I gave him as many practice runs as he wanted, then had his best effort recorded.”
“And?”
A grid of green lines overlaid the video, and it restarted, the sprinter being represented by a stick figure. He was slightly faster than Praman but noticeably slower than the woman.
“Can’t be right, Marty.”
“I agree. It can’t be. But it is. That rather corpulent woman, running on uneven ground, seems to have just set the fifty-meter world record.”
Smith chewed his thumbnail for a moment. This wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear. “What about the blood?”
“It’s not painted on, if that’s what you mean.” The screen faded to black for a moment and an image of a shirtless African man running directly at the camera came on.
“Look how the blood is laid out on this guy — starting at the head, flowing uniformly down the torso, and collecting around the waistband of his pants. I turned up the heat in my living room and ran a humidifier, mimicking the reported conditions for that day in what I’m fairly certain is Uganda, then covered myself with blood and ran around.”
Smith’s brow furrowed as he pictured a half-naked Marty Zellerbach wringing a prime rib over his head and then prancing around with his inhaler. It was a surprisingly disturbing image.
“You know, this physical experimentation thing is really exhilarating, Jon. I thought you microbiologists eschewed computer models because, as a group, you’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. But now I’m starting to see the appeal.”
“I’m so happy to hear it. What did you learn?”
“That when you start to sweat, the blood just thins out and then it’s gone. I’m certain now that they’re bleeding from their hair.”
“Maybe cuts on their heads? Some kind of ceremony?”
“Sorry, Jon — no way to know. I cleaned up the video as much as I could, but we’re at nowhere near the resolution we’d need to see little self-inflicted wounds. Call me before you do something like this again and I’ll build you some decent cameras.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Just one more thing,” Zellerbach said as another video started running in slow motion on the screen. “Look in the back — the tall guy with the sunglasses falling on his face.”
Smith watched the man drop to the ground and skid to a stop, lying motionless in the dirt.
“Was he shot?”
“Nope — no impact. Now look at these stills and the time codes.” A collage of the man lying on the ground came up, spanning almost the entire time of the attack.
“I compared all these down to the millimeter, and that guy doesn’t budge. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. And what’s interesting is that this is just the best video we have of this phenomenon. I counted three separate occurrences.”
“If not a bullet, then what?”
“Nothing, as near as I can tell. That’s what’s so weird. They just dropped dead.”
Smith drummed his fingers quietly on the table. The mind automatically inhibited extraordinary physical feats to prevent catastrophic injury and exhaustion. That safety valve could be bypassed, but it was rare — women pulling cars off their children, people under the influence of certain narcotics, extreme fear.
“Okay, thanks, Marty.”
“No problem at all. If you ever get anything like this again, send it to me right away. I’ll drop everything. Unbelievable. Crazy—”
“I will. Now I want you to delete the video and your analysis.”
“No problem.”
“I don’t just mean delete it; I mean write zeros to it. I want it completely unrecoverable from your system.”
Zellerbach sounded a little put out. “Fine.”
The screen went blank and Smith powered the laptop down.
“What do you—,” Klein started but then paused when Smith made a cutting motion across his throat.
“The computer’s turned off, Jon.”
Smith picked it up and slammed it repeatedly into the edge of the desk, leaving the floor strewn with parts. “Never underestimate Marty Zellerbach.”
18
So you’ve got nothing, Barry?”
Jon Smith cradled the phone against his shoulder and looked around the office Klein had set him up in. Beyond a chair, a desk, and a pad of paper, it was completely empty — reflecting the utilitarian nature of the man who ran Covert-One.
“I dunno, Jon. Bleeding from hair follicles is pretty unusual. Scurvy is the only thing that comes to mind, but it wouldn’t create the kind of flow you’re talking about. Are there any related symptoms?”
“Not that I know of,” Smith said, irritated that he had to lie. Science was about the free exchange of ideas, and keeping the big picture from one of Harvard Medical School’s top people wasn’t the way to get answers.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Thanks anyway. If anything comes to mind, you know my number.”
He hung up and marked the man off the long list of scribbled-through names representing luminaries in every field from toxicology to infectious disease to psychology. And what did he have to show for it? A bunch of guesses. Incredibly educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless.
There was a quiet knock on his doorjamb and he glanced up from the pad. “Tell me you’re here with good news, Star.”
Her training was as a librarian but her look leaned more toward outlaw biker. It drove Klein crazy, but there was nothing he could do — she was to paper what Marty Zellerbach was to the cloud.
“I think I may have found
“Thank God. I knew you’d come through.”
“Yeah…The problem is that when I say ‘everything,’ I mean this.” She held up what looked depressingly like two sheets of paper.
“That’s it?”
“Sorry, Jon.” She slid one of the pages onto the desk. “Did Mr. Klein tell you about the German doctor who mentioned attacks like this sixty years ago?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t give me any details.”
She tapped the document in front of him. “This is a note from a Stanford professor who spent a few months working with the late Dr. Duernberg on a project in Uganda. Skip to the highlighted part — the rest is just a bunch of yada yada yada.”
The passage was only a few lines long and discussed a possible parasitic infection that caused insanity in humans. It went on to say that the transplanted Jewish doctor was looking into the phenomenon. And that was it.
“If Duernberg’s dead, what about the good professor?”
