rib, punching a small hole through him less than an inch in from his side. Not exactly a graze, but not a major organ-buster either. Still, he had a couple of half-inch holes gouged out of him. Holes that needed to be sealed. Which meant stitches. And given that going to a hospital or to a doctor was out of the question, whatever sewing talents Jabba had would need to be summoned.
Jabba was holding up surprisingly well. He’d managed not to throw up when Matt first staggered back into their room, his clothes soaked with blood. He’d made it to the closest drugstore and picked up the items on a shopping list Matt had hastily dictated to him: iodine to clean the wound; any anesthetic cream he could find, to numb the skin; sewing needles, along with a lighter to sterilize them; some nylon thread; painkillers; bandages.
Most impressively, he’d so far managed to complete three sutures on the entry wound without puking, which he’d come close to doing while attempting the first stitch. Three more would do the trick on that front. Then he had the exit hole to take care of.
They were huddled in the far-from-antiseptic bathroom of the motel room. Matt was in his shorts, on the floor with his back against the tiled wall by the bathtub, grinding down his teeth as Jabba pushed the needle through the caldera of skin that rimmed his raw, open wound. The sensation was far worse than the immediate after-effect of getting shot, when the wound was still warm and the pain receptors hadn’t started their furious onslaught up his spine. He felt weak and nauseous and was fighting hard not to pass out. He swam through it by telling himself, over and over, that it would pass. Which it would. He just had to get through this part. He’d had a couple of bad wounds before, and although he’d never been shot, he tried to convince himself that this wasn’t any worse than a nasty cut from a blade. Which was something he’d had. Only then, he’d been sewn shut by a real doctor who’d used a proper anesthetic, not an over-the-counter cream more suited to hemorrhoids and leg waxing.
He blinked away tears of pain as the needle came out the other side.
“This look right to you?” Jabba’s fingers trembled as he pulled the thread through.
Matt didn’t look down. His sweaty face winced under the strain. “You’re the movie buff. You must have seen them do it a few times, right?”
“Yeah, but I usually turn away when they’re doing it,” Jabba grimaced as he pulled the two sides of the wound closer to each other and tied a knot in the thread, adding, pointedly, “which, by the way, they usually do to themselves.”
“Yeah, but then they end up with these Frankenstein-like scars, whereas with Dr. Jabba on the case . . .”
“. . . the Frankenstein look’s guaranteed,” Jabba quipped as he cut the end of the thread off. It wasn’t a particularly elegant piece of stitching, but at least the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore. “See?”
Matt shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. I hear the ladies just love the hard-ass scars,” he cajoled him. “When you’re done with me, maybe you could take a look at mending that hole in my jacket? It’s kind of an old favorite, you know?”
Seven stitches and half an hour later, they were done.
As he cleaned up the bloody mess around them, Jabba filled Matt in on what he’d discovered while he was out, which wasn’t much. He’d given the deadbeat receptionist ten bucks to let him use his computer. He’d logged into his Skype account and made a few calls while burrowing through the Internet, trying to find out more about the team that had died in the helicopter crash.
He’d managed to come up with two other names to add to Danny’s and to Reece’s—a chemical engineer by the name of Oliver Serres, and a biomolecular engineer named Sunil Kumar.
“Both were at the top of their game and highly regarded,” he told Matt. “But it’s weird, dude. I mean, Kumar’s a biologist. So far, we’ve got him, a chemist, Reece—an electrical engineer and computer scientist—and Danny, a programmer. The last three, I get. But Kumar . . . what’s a biomolecular engineer have to do with this?”
The nuance was beyond Matt at the best of times. In his current state, it just streaked past him. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know, man,” Jabba said with visible discomfort. “These biomolecular guys, they’re into rearranging DNA, playing around with the building blocks of life. Pulling apart and rearranging atoms and molecules like they were Lego bricks. And this sign in the sky, the way it looks organic, alive even . . . the gray area between biology and chemistry, between life and non-life, you know? It’s giving me a creepy feeling. Like maybe what they’re doing has more to do with some kind of designed life-form than a projected image.”
Matt frowned, trying to wrap his head around what Jabba was saying. “You’ve spent too much time watching
Jabba shrugged, like it wasn’t a bad thing. “These biotech guys, they’re always getting flak for messing around in God’s closet. God’s closet, man. Who knows what they found in there.”
He let it drift and ran the cold tap. He drank from it, then splattered water across his face before filling up a glass and handing it to Matt. He didn’t have much more to tell him. He hadn’t been able to find any mention of who was backing Reece’s project, let alone what it involved.
Darkness was closing in fast outside their room, which suited Matt just fine. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. He needed to rest. Jabba went back out and picked up some blood-free clothes for Matt and brought back some food and some Coke cans. They wolfed it all down greedily while watching the news. The footage from the cave in Egypt was hogging the airwaves, and the warm pizzas, though welcome, weren’t doing much to quell the cold, dismal feeling inside them.
“This is getting bigger,” Jabba noted glumly. “More elaborate.”
Matt nodded. “They know what they’re doing.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
“These people. They’ve got serious resources at their disposal. Think about what they’re doing. First, they rustle up some major brain power, put them to work somewhere for, what, a couple of years? Then they kill them all off.” He noticed a hint of resistance on Matt’s face and quickly amended his words. “Or, whatever, maybe lock them up somewhere and fake their deaths—even more complicated to pull off. But no one seems to know anything about what this scientific dream team was working on, and there’s no record of who they were all working for. The one thing that’s sure is that there’s some serious moolah involved. Danny, Reece, and the others, they wouldn’t have gotten involved if they didn’t know they had all the backup they needed. And the kind of research they do, it ain’t cheap. Plus the rest of it, all this,” he said as he waved at the screen. “Seriously deep pockets, dude.”
“Okay, so where’d the money come from?”
Jabba thought about it for a second. “Two possibilities. Reece could’ve raised the money privately,” he speculated, “though not from a VC or a public company. There’d be a trace of it, especially after the deaths. No, it would have to be private money. Not easy, given the scale of it. And practically untraceable, given that the entire creative team was supposedly wiped out.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Reece was doing this for a government agency. A highly classified project. Which sounds about right to me.”
Matt’s face darkened with uncertainty. He’d been wondering about the same thing. “Any particular candidates?”
Jabba shrugged. “DARPA. In-Q-Tel.”
Matt looked a question at him.
“DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s part of the DoD. They fund a ton of research. Everything from micro bots to virtual battlefields. Any technology that can help us win these wars and defeat those who hate our freedom,” he added mockingly.
“And the other one?”
“In-Q-Tel. It’s the CIA’s venture capital arm. They’re early stage investors, which is actually very savvy of them when you think about it. Get in on the ground floor. Find out about any useful technology while it’s still being dreamed up. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of tech companies—and that includes a few of the big, household- name Internet sites you and I use on a daily basis.” He gave him a pointed, big-brother-is-watching-you look.
Matt absorbed what Jabba was trying to say. “A government op.”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean, if what we’re saying is true, if they’ve really faked this thing, they’re on
