“Sterling? Has anyone spoken to him about this yet?”
“They can’t find Sterling, either.”
“What? But he should be at Detrick by now.”
“He never showed.”
“And why wasn’t I told?”
No explanation.
“Is everyone around here goddamned incompetent? Why didn’t Sterling show up?”
“No idea, sir.”
DUNNE WAS SHAKEN AS HE STEPPED BACK INSIDE THE INTERROGATION room. He sensed a malevolent pattern, a dark web of danger just outside his reach. Now he wanted answers. “No more stalling, Hitoshi. Why did Orchid kill Connor?”
Kitano raised his right hand, highlighting his missing finger. “She is looking for a small brass cylinder. The length of the medial phalange finger bone. At Unit 731, I had it implanted in my finger. I was extracting it when Connor stopped me. He took it. I had no intention of bleeding to death, not before I released it. I am the seventh Tokko.”
The light went on in Dunne’s head. “Connor kept the cylinder? He was holding on to a specimen of the Uzumaki all these years?”
“Yes.”
He leaned back, stunned. He thought of the reports from Ithaca, Maggie Connor going missing. The pieces snapped together, a cold knot growing in Dunne’s chest.
33
JAKE DROVE THE FEDEX VAN ALONG ROUTE 96A, THE SAME road he’d taken the morning before. FedEx vans were like telephone poles, part of the landscape. The President could put on a FedEx uniform and no one would notice him.
Orchid crouched behind him in the storage area, gun drawn. Dylan and Maggie were tied up in the back, mouths wrapped in packing tape. Orchid was guiding them by Liam’s message, the yellow sheet of paper she had taken from Vlad. Jake didn’t know what the text said, but he had a damned good idea where it was leading them. There wasn’t much else out here but the Seneca Army Depot. They were just a few minutes away now.
In the rearview mirror, Jake caught glimpses of Maggie and Dylan in the shadows. Orchid had secured them to the wall with the same kind of high-tech handcuffs she’d used on him. The cuffs opened and closed electronically, and Orchid controlled them by tapping a sequence on her leg with her right hand. The same kind of tapping also controlled the electric shocks that came from Jake’s belt. There must be some kind of transducer built into Orchid’s gloves. She used them to control everything.
He paid close attention to the patterns of the taps of her fingers.
UP AHEAD THE FENCING STARTED, VISIBLE IN THE VAN’S headlights. On Orchid’s command, Jake parked the van near a locked gate. He turned off the headlights.
“Put these on,” Orchid said, tossing him the cuffs.
Jake obeyed, closing the latch down loosely.
Orchid tapped a pattern on her leg and the cuffs came alive. The shackles tightened, pulling in close, to the edge of real pain.
She tossed him a small army shovel. He caught it with one hand. She tapped another sequence on her leg, and Jake jumped. A bolt of electricity shot through him, emanating from his waist belt, and just as suddenly stopped.
Jake was practically hyperventilating, his heart beating
“Don’t forget,” she said.
THEY WALKED DOWN AN ENDLESS ROW OF BUNKERS, EACH one an ominous, hulking shape in the growing darkness. Jake was in the lead, Orchid forty feet behind, Dylan just ahead of her. Maggie was still in the van, unconscious-Orchid had stuck a needle in her that knocked her out in less than a minute. Orchid had placed a handwritten sign in the window that said, TOW TRUCK ON ITS WAY, and they’d left her behind.
Jake had taken a careful inventory of Orchid’s tools. He had been watching her closely, both in the van and now, catching looks when he could. She had on a small black backpack and carried a Glock in her hand. She’d put on thick, wraparound goggles that Jake was pretty sure were equipped with night vision. And she had her gloves. She could shock him with a few taps of her fingers. She could similarly control their cuffs. Jake was pretty sure that two taps of her index finger, one with her ring finger, followed by three with her thumb caused the cuffs to tighten. The opposite sequence caused them to loosen.
If Jake could get to her, knock her out or kill her, he thought he could release the cuffs. But he had to get past that gun. And he had to do it without getting Dylan killed.
Every few hundred feet was another concrete bunker, all long out of use. They’d passed twelve of them so far. He was alert to everything, every sight and every sound. In the distance he heard squawking. Liam had told him there was a pond on the other side of that tree ridge, a stopover for the geese.
A WHITE DEER CROSSED THE ROAD UP AHEAD, A GHOSTLY apparition seeming to float in the darkness, its body as luminous as the moon. When the fences went up around the periphery in 1941, a decent-sized population of deer were trapped inside, and a few rare white deer were among them. Over the years, the depot guards hunted the brown deer, but they left the white ones to graze among the bunkers. Seneca Army Depot now had the largest white deer population in the world. The simplest rule of evolution, of ecology, of ethics. You reap what you sow.
Liam had brought Jake here ostensibly to show him the white deer. Liam put out salt licks, then collected the DNA that scraped off the deers’ tongues when they licked them. It had always seemed a bit odd to Jake: Liam wasn’t a population biologist. The deer were visually striking but nothing special genetically, simply rich in the genes for white fur.
Now Jake understood: the deer were not what had attracted Liam to Seneca Army Depot. The real reason was its isolation and the bunkers. Miles of nothing. Liam had told him that a single guard was responsible for patrolling the whole damn thing.
If Liam wanted to hide a dangerous pathogen, this would be a great place to do it.
“Stop,” Orchid called from behind. She ordered him to veer right. The visibility was better now, the moonlight bathing the white concrete bunkers in an eerie glow.
Jake glanced over his shoulder, saw Orchid herding Dylan before her, the boy scared half to death. She checked a handheld GPS, triangulating in space and time by four satellites flying over twelve thousand miles overhead. Liam must have left a latitude and longitude reading that told where to find the Uzumaki. Orchid’s footsteps slowed regularly each time she checked the GPS. She was checking it all the time.
“Take a forty-five-degree right turn.”
Jake turned. There was nothing. Only empty grass, waist-high. A few chunks of concrete sticking up through the weeds.
“In there?”
“Twenty meters,” she said.
He counted them off, twenty strides, pushing through the tangle of brush and weeds. He stopped when the count was done.
At first he saw nothing but grass and brush, but then he spied a dinner plate-sized chunk of concrete. In the moonlight, he could just make out a rough design etched in the concrete, three lines spinning outward from the center. A spiral.
“That’s it,” Orchid said, glancing down at the page with Liam’s message. “Move it aside and dig.”
Jake held up his hands, still shackled together.
With the gun, she gestured to Dylan beside her, his hands cuffed before him. “Get cute and I shoot the boy.” She tapped her fingers on her leg and the cuff on Jake’s right wrist popped open.
