Age of Voodoo (29 page)

So saying, the professor strode briskly towards the door, where Pearce stood guard, keeping an eye on the passage outside.

“Hey! Where are you off to?” Buckler demanded.

Seidelmann halted. “Well, I presume you haven’t come here to sit around and chat. Let’s get cracking. Commence extraction, or whatever the phrase is.”

“Hold your horses. This isn’t a rescue mission.”

Seidelmann’s face fell.

“Not wholly,” Buckler amended. “We’re here to find out what’s been going on and put an end to it.”

“You?” The professor looked around at the assembled company.

“Us.”

“It’s just the seven of you?”

Buckler nodded.

Seidelmann barked a laugh. “You have got to be joking.”

“You’ll be getting out of here soon enough, professor. But not until you’ve made yourself useful.”

Seidelmann snorted. “Useful?”

“Yes, useful. If me and my crew are to do any good, what we require from you is information and co-operation.”

“Nothing I can tell you is going to make a jot of difference, Lieutenant Buckler. If this is the full extent of your forces, then our best hope—our only hope—is to leave straight away, while we can. Otherwise we are all going to die—and, if we are very lucky, be allowed to stay dead, permanently.”

“The alternative being that we wind up as zuvembies. Like Colonel Gonzalez.”

“Just so,” said Seidelmann. “Do you relish the prospect of that? Because believe me, I do not.”

Again Seidelmann made for the door, simply assuming that everyone else would take their lead from him and follow. When no one did, he was perplexed.

“Pearce?” said Buckler. “If Poindexter here tries that one more time, put a bullet in him. You choose where.”

“Affirmative.”

“Do you not appreciate the gravity of the situation?” Seidelmann said, rounding on Buckler. “François Deslorges is dug in downstairs, and he’s hatching some scheme, I have no idea what, but knowing him it can’t be anything good. He has amassed a small army of zuvembies, and with them at his beck and call there is no way you can get to him and no way you can hinder him. If you value your safety, lieutenant, and that of your troops, you would be wise to depart
right now
, taking me with you. Go back out the way you came in, and leave Deslorges to his own devices.”

“No can do, prof. I have my orders.”

Seidelmann sighed at his obstinacy. “You would rather die?”

“In an ideal world, no. But this isn’t an ideal world. It’s the world of the US military, where you have two options: do as you’re told, or do as you’re told. I have been told to put a lid on the problem at this installation, so that is my primary objective. And it will be a damn sight easier to achieve if you, sport, pull your head out your fucking ass and supply me with some background detail.”

“In other words, fill you in on Deslorges and his zuvembies, the whole sorry saga?”

“That is exactly it. Maybe if I know more about those things, I’ll have a better chance of ending them.”

Seidelmann’s shoulders slumped. He seemed to realise there was no point in arguing. Buckler had the whip hand. Seidelmann might not like it but there was nothing he could do about it.

“Very well,” he said. “Give me a drink of water, some more food, and I’ll tell you all I can.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T.

“I
T WAS A
good idea,” Professor Seidelmann said. “Correction, a
great
idea. In this era of asymmetrical warfare, when entire battalions can be undermined by the efforts of a handful of determined guerrillas, when terrorists armed with box cutters can cause widespread devastation and the best-funded military and intelligence service in the world are helpless to prevent it, the concept of a standing army is becoming increasingly redundant. The strategy of sending men and women into pitched battle, to overwhelm enemy positions and gain territory, is antiquated. Outmoded. Something for the history books. What’s called for these days is not huge numbers of troops—cannon fodder—but rather, far fewer of them. Soldiers of the highest calibre who can be deployed in small units in hostile zones to secure high-value targets and deliver surgical counterstrikes—”

“Please, professor,” Buckler butted in. “This sounds like the beginning of a lovely long speech, and it’s beautifully put and all, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. Cut to the chase.”

Seidelmann took a swig of water from Buckler’s canteen, a move designed to mask his annoyance at being interrupted mid-flow. “I was merely building up to saying that the way forward, the future for the military, is a harder, more durable, more resilient breed of soldier. One who can take the kind of punishment that would hobble an ordinary man and keep going. One who can last longer behind enemy lines, go without rest longer, fight longer, withstand torture longer, survive longer in harsh, unforgiving conditions...”

“Sounds to me like you just described a SEAL,” said Tartaglione. “Twenty-six weeks of Basic Underwater Demolition at Coronado—you live through that, you’re not a man any more, you’re a goddamn war machine.”

Sampson cheered in agreement, and the two of them bumped knuckles. Pearce, for his part, nodded sagely.

“Acknowledged,” said Seidelmann. “But even a SEAL will succumb to a sniper’s bullet or an improvised explosive device. Even a SEAL is vulnerable to the frailties that flesh is heir to. My goal—my dream—was to discover a method whereby soldiers could be made immune to exhaustion and hardened to injury. My researches in this field led me towards Haiti and the
vodou
tradition, specifically with relation to the zuvembie. I learned that the zuvembie was more than just folklore, that there was actually a sound empirical basis for the myth of the walking dead man, and that it was to be found in the application of certain pharmacological substances.”

“This we already know too,” said Buckler. “Tetrodotoxin, datura, all of that.”

“If you’re so
au fait
with the subject, lieutenant, is there any need for me to carry on?”

Buckler decided to strike a conciliatory note. “There is, and I’d be much obliged if you would.”

“At any rate, I visited Port-au-Prince, and after enquiring around was put in touch with François Deslorges, also known as Papa Couleuvre, a bokor who claimed to be able to create zuvembies. We struck up a working partnership—I shan’t bore you with the details, you’d no doubt consider them extraneous—and with his aid I came to an understanding of what a zuvembie is and by what means it is possible to induce a person to become one. Thereafter it was a case of working out how to apply the process practically and in such a way that it could be of use to my employers at the Pentagon—how to take an ordinary general infantryman and turn him into a fearless, inexhaustible, unstoppable killer commando. Deslorges agreed to continue to assist me here, at Anger Reef, in return for a handsome retainer. He seemed, at the time, to be motivated solely by profit, for which reason I felt I could trust him. There’s nothing purer or more reliable than sheer greed, is there? I knew he was an unsavoury character with a very shady reputation but I believed he would be biddable as long as he was getting paid. His love of money would keep him honest.”

“A
vodouisant
should not love money,” said Albertine. “The loa do not approve of acquisitiveness, especially when it’s someone exploiting
vodou
for their own gain.”

“Yes, thank you, my dear,” said Seidelmann. “I take it you’re a practitioner of the art yourself? Then you would know as well as I do that there are two sides to
vodou
. Like any other belief system, it attracts its fair share of charlatans and conmen, fakers and frauds, people who are in it only for what they can get out of it. I was under no illusion about Deslorges. From the start I knew he would require careful handling, a certain amount of finessing. Yet, despite his
outré
physical appearance and his quite prodigious intake of marijuana, I felt he was sincere, in his way, and committed to his calling. He seemed—
is
—highly accomplished when it comes to
vodou
, an advanced
kanzo
initiate. Take, for instance, his prowess as a thaumaturge. In Port-au-Prince, as a guest at his peristyle, I watched him perform acts of healing that were quite remarkable, one might even say miraculous. He removed a disfiguring birthmark from a baby’s face. He shrank a benign growth on an old woman’s neck until it disappeared altogether. In a country like Haiti, with its already negligible health care system made worse by the recent earthquake, a man like Deslorges is a powerful force for good, or perhaps a necessary evil. A witch doctor who’s as much doctor as witch. He also could be very charming—charismatic—when he wished to be. I decided that, on balance, it would be safe to extend my association with him.”

“But you were wrong.”

“Indeed, dear, I was wrong. Very wrong.” Seidelmann looked rueful, the snake wrangler who had been bitten by one of his pets. “For our first few weeks at Anger Reef we collaborated peaceably and proficiently enough, Deslorges and I. He assisted me with gauging dosages and adjusting formulae. We were seeking to develop the perfect mixture of herbs and toxins to achieve the zuvembie effect while still allowing the element of self-determination in the subject. We wanted to be able to bring someone to the point where fatigue and discomfort are minimal, almost immaterial, while not being zombie-like in the conventional sense—retaining their sentience and independence of thought. A tricky balance, but the results, in rhesus monkeys, were encouraging. We had animals that could go for days on end without food or water and show no ill effects. Animals that could undergo vivisection procedures happily without anaesthetic, all the while carrying out simple puzzle-solving problems. Animals that could cling to heating filaments with no evident distress even as their paws were slowly scorched...”

“Nice,” said Morgenstern.

“Don’t think I don’t have a conscience about these things, young lady. I’m no unfeeling monster. But if science is to advance, some unpleasant steps must be taken. And unless you’ve never worn any cosmetics or shampooed your hair with any products that haven’t been safety-tested on God’s lesser creatures first, don’t be so quick to judge.” Another swig of water. “Eventually we reached the stage where we were ready to graduate to the next level—humans. Through rigorous experimentation on monkeys we had a product we felt was suitable for use on people with few if any side effects. We elected to call it V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. I say ‘we’, but it was Deslorges who came up with the name and then expected me to construct an acronym to suit.”

“Which you did.”

Seidelmann allowed himself a small smile of pride. “I did. Venously Injected Vitality Elixir Magnifying Ordinary Resilience Twentyfold. The name V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T., and the fact that Deslorges refused to consider any of the alternatives I suggested, ought to have tipped me off to his ulterior motives. Perhaps if I’d been less bound up in my work, less thrilled by the advances I was making... I was, after all, on the brink of that long-sought-after, much-desired breakthrough: the creation of super-soldiers.”

“And then, at some point, Deslorges turned you over and butt-fucked you,” said Buckler. “Without lubricant.”

Seidelmann winced. “With hindsight I should have noticed sooner that he had begun to behave erratically, and should have nipped it in the bud. His timekeeping lapsed. He wasn’t down at the labs punctually every morning, as he had been. He seemed to be losing interest in what we were doing, his enthusiasm waning. Sometimes I had to roust him out of his room or the refectory to come and help me. On occasion I would have to go topside to find him, and there he’d be, on the beach, gazing out to sea or else dancing and chanting, communing with the loa. He complained that being underground all the time was making him claustrophobic. His marijuana usage went up. He seemed to have brought along an endless supply of the stuff, and I tolerated the habit in him as I would have in no other work colleague since it relaxed him and made him more amenable. Plus, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it?” He addressed this remark to Albertine. “Part and parcel of the West Indian lifestyle, and the
vodou
tradition too. Isn’t that right, dear?”

Albertine didn’t answer. Her only response was to mutter darkly under her breath, a string of words of which Lex caught just one: “patronising”.