Bloodletting (28 page)

"He was continuing Mengele's research," Paxton said.

"He was improving upon it," Wolfe said. "Taking it a step further. It was an extension of the original experimentation, but this psycho got it in his head during his thirty-some years in hiding that he could do a better job of playing God."

"What happened to the children they found?" Paxton asked.

"The Foundation used its substantial resources to find surrogate parents, though in most cases, it was only able to secure a mother. Generous souls sympathetic to their plight. The children's names were changed, their birth certificates falsified, and they were moved to two locations in the Southwest where they could be more closely monitored: Santa Fe, New Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona. All but the oldest child were too young to understand what had happened to them and their biological parents, and would never remember. It was never our intention for them to find out. They were better off oblivious. For all intents and purposes, they were dead to the world. Only now it appears that someone knows their secret. We're confident it's Heidlmann."

"You never found him?"

"Not for lack of trying."

"What about the children he took with him?"

"We've found a couple," Locke said. "As you already guessed."

"Grady and Ross," Paxton said.

"They were bred and raised to be monsters," Hawthorne said. "They had no history, no life before the murders we could trace. They simply emerged from wherever they'd been hiding and announced their arrival with bloodshed."

"The experiment failed then," Paxton said.

"Did it?"

The room fell silent. Ellie held her breath so they wouldn't hear. None of what they had said could possibly be true. Her cheeks were damp with tears and she shook with conflicting emotions. She wanted to storm in there and shout at them, to crawl back into bed and sob into the pillow. This couldn't be right. If it was, her entire life had been a lie.

"And Ellie was one of those children," Paxton finally said.

"The twin left behind," Hawthorne said.

"Then that was her twin buried in the desert." Paxton paused. "But she never did anything like Grady or Ross."

"That we know of. Murders go unsolved every day. Or maybe
she
wasn't like the others. Maybe she was the failed experiment and that's why she ended up in a mass grave."

"If there were only six sets of twins, who are all the rest of them?"

"Further experiments, I assume. Like the girls in Colorado, only an earlier version."

"So this elaborate burial site was all a ruse set up years ago to draw Ellie out?"

"Among others," Hawthorne said.

Ellie saw Paxton look from Wolfe to Locke. It struck her what Hawthorne was suggesting. There were now three of them in the same place at the same time.

"How would anyone possibly know that setting this all up in such a manner would bring everyone here at once so long ago?"

"Who's to say external forces haven't been shaping the course of the future all along to ensure it?"

Paxton ran his fingers through his hair and sighed, a gesture of frustration that hadn't changed in their time apart. He turned away from the other man, started to get up...and looked right at her through the inch-wide gap.

She ducked back against the wall, but knew she was too late.

"Can't sleep?" he asked, now standing over where she crouched on the floor. He smiled down at her and she realized how silly she must have looked. "Maybe it's time we talked."

VII

Sky Harbor International Airport

Phoenix, Arizona

Sleep had been a lost cause for the remainder of the night, so they had packed and adjourned to an empty all-night diner named Gibby's, where they had eaten greasy eggs and hash browns in relative silence before heading to the Phoenix office of the FBI. Ellie had deposited a sample of blood and they had made it to the airport with time to spare. The plane had been waiting on the tarmac as planned and it had only been a matter of minutes before they were in the air and streaking across the sky toward the Pacific Northwest. Carver had checked in with Special Agent Manning just after takeoff, but she had nothing new to report beyond what she had discussed with Marshall the night before. She renewed her promise to call him first should there be any new developments. He also placed calls to Jack and Marshall. He reached Jack's answering machine and assumed he was still asleep after the late night, so he left a message saying that they needed to talk. If he hoped to make sense of what Hawthorne had told him, he was going to need an unbiased, rational sounding board accustomed to exotic conspiracies and questionable insanity. As the former Deputy Director of the FBI, Jack was perfect. Carver crossed his fingers that the return call would come while he was in a position to slip away from Hawthorne. Maybe Jack would even have something new to report regarding the agent.

Marshall had been a little more helpful, sharing what he'd learned about the potential points of access to the retrovirus at the after-hours children's clinic. There was nothing concrete to go on, but another connection to Dreck-Windham solidified his suspicions and reassured him that heading to HydroGen and Seattle was the right course of action.

The plane was the same model as before, only the pilots were different and it was far more crowded this time. Hawthorne sat across one of the small tables from Locke, leaning over his laptop and scrolling through every iota of information they could find on Dreck-Windham while his partner dozed, mouth open, snoring to shame the engines. Wolfe and Kajika sat behind them, both worshipping steaming paper cups of coffee, from which thin flumes of steam rose through the holes in the plastic lids. Wolfe wore his sunglasses and Kajika looked as though he could use a pair. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids swollen and red. Carver and Ellie sat across the aisle from them, facing each other across the fold-out table.

Wispy white clouds filled the windows, through which the ground was only sporadically visible.

"So how much did you hear last night?" Carver asked. He tried to keep his voice low enough to intimate privacy, though he knew all of the others would be listening discreetly.

"Enough to know someone's made a big mistake. My mother wasn't born until well after World War II. But I don't suppose that changes the current situation at all, does it?"

"Ellie...I believe what Hawthorne said. It sounds way out there for sure, but there are things...things you don't know."

"I don't want you to tell me anything else. I just want to go back to the way things were."

Carver felt his phone vibrate under his jacket and pulled it out. On the screen was the text message he'd been expecting from Marshall.

positive. exactly the same elaphas maximus at loci p11 to 22 on the x
.

He nodded and replaced the phone in his interior pocket.

"That girl in the first bundle..." Carver said, trying to capture Ellie's stare to keep her from looking out the window. "You share the same DNA. Even at the point where her chromosomes have been replaced by those of an Asian elephant,
Elaphas maximus
."

"An elephant?" Ellie laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That's why you needed the sample of my blood? So you could determine if I have elephant genes? I think you guys need to recalibrate your equipment."

"I know how that must sound--"

"You have no idea how crazy that sounds. Let's look at this objectively. Do I have a trunk? How about tusks? I know I don't have the figure I had in high school, but do I look like I weigh two tons? Don't answer that. Do I have gray, leathery skin?"

"The mutation is on your X chromosome at a specific point where problems lead to deficiencies in sense of direction, dexterity, and non-verbal memory. I've given this a lot of thought since learning about Candace Thompson, your twin. I may be completely off base, but bear with me. What do we know about elephants? They're supposed to have amazing memories."

"But I don't--"

"Just follow me through this, okay? So what's the life cycle of an elephant. They live and graze in herds. They eventually understand it's time to die on an innate level when their teeth wear down to the point they can no longer chew the roughage needed to survive. And what happens then? They migrate away from the herd to their pre-designated spot to die, an elephant graveyard where they can lie down amidst the bones of their ancestors. It's one of the great natural phenomena. How do you think they know how to find this place? It's in their collective memory, passed down through generations in their genes." He was silent for a moment, watching her features for any sign she had taken the next logical leap. "And what do you do for a living, Ellie? What's your specialty?"

She smiled faintly, her eyes far away. "I find ancient burial sites."

"How do you know where to look? Where to start digging?"

"I just...feel it," she said, meeting his gaze. "I stand there and imagine myself hundreds of years in the past, a part of a living society now long gone, and somehow I know where to find them."

"Like yesterday," Carver said, remembering her crouched over what looked like the crown of a skull. There had been few false starts. Just the hole in the sand she had made with her hands. It seemed like months ago now.

She nodded and turned to the window again, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes before they could run down her cheeks.

"It's going to be all right," he said. "We'll get you through this."

She just shook her head and stared out into the vast emptiness. He was trying to formulate something more reassuring to say when a ringing sound beneath his jacket startled him. The unfamiliar tone belonged to what he had come to think of as his company phone. The other agents all turned to him at the sound, waiting expectantly for him to answer.

"Carver," he said into the phone.

The voice on the other end was that of a little boy, right down to the slight lisp. "Now that you've been briefed, what do you think? Do you believe?"

"Yeah. I believe, but I still have questions."

"I don't provide the answers," a teenage girl with a Valley lilt said. "I give the orders. The rest is up to you."

"Who are you?"

"In due time."

"You're the Colonel, aren't you? The one Hawthorne told me about."

The haughty, deep laugh of an obese man was the response. "There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The man to whom you refer died a long time ago with his wife, but we're wasting time on small talk."

"So why did you call?"

"To make sure you were one hundred percent on board," an elderly woman said. "There's no turning back now."

"I'm prepared to do what needs to be done."

"Are you prepared to kill, Special Agent Carver?"

"If I must, but only after exhausting all other options."

"You're a mouse scurrying down a snake hole. There are no other options. The people waiting for you will not hesitate. They will show no mercy."

"I think they'll find I'm willing to do the same."

"Now that you know Schwartz wasn't quite the monster you believed him to be and you killed him anyway, you'll hesitate," a man with a Brooklyn accent said. "And then they'll have you."

"If this is a pep talk, you really need to work on your motivational skills."

"You won't find any of this amusing when you're strapped to a table being bled dry."

"I don't find this remotely amusing now," Carver said. "In fact, I think you're deliberately misleading me, or at least withholding crucial information. Still."

"You know what you need to know. Anything more would be a hindrance."

"Why did you really call?"

"So suspicious, my boy. You have an incoming file. Open it when you hang up."

Carver brought the phone away from his ear and noticed a new icon representing the file.

"One more thing, Special Agent Carver," a young girl said. He pictured the words coming from Jasmine Rivers's dead mouth. "Look across from you and answer me one question." Carver stared at Ellie. "Does the fisherman spare a thought for the worm while prying the hook from the mouth of a trophy bass?"

The call was terminated with a click, and Carver realized he was holding his breath. When Ellie turned to face him, he hurriedly composed himself and hoped she hadn't seen the flash of surprise in his eyes. He should have known all along. That's why they had brought him in from the start. He was the hook and she was the bait. They were going to flush out Heidlmann even if it meant her life. And his.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing." He tried to force a smile. "You should try to get a little more sleep. You look exhausted."

"That bad, huh?"

"I didn't mean--"

She smiled and he couldn't help but relax a little. In that moment they were both teenagers again and he felt that awkward stammering coming on, his heart beating against his ribcage.

"I was just giving you a hard time, Paxton." She turned away again with a coy grin and closed her eyes.

The phone grew heavy in his hand, forcing him to study the screen. The new file icon was right in the center. After a brief pause, he tapped the display with his fingertip. A picture immediately opened and filled the small rectangle. He turned the phone sideways to accommodate the orientation. The subject was the recently deceased corpse of Edgar Ross. It was a similar photo to the ones he had already seen: massive unkempt beard; long, scraggily hair; blood smeared across his face; dirt beneath his head. Carver tapped the arrow underneath the image and a second picture replaced the first. Still Edgar Ross, but from a different angle, this one from the side as though the cameraman had been lying on the ground beside the body. It showed Ross's face in profile, allowing him to see what had been obscured by the sheer amounts of blood and hair. He looked across the aisle toward the front of the plane. Hawthorne was silhouetted against the clouds beyond the window. His hair was far shorter and he lacked the rugged beard, but the lines were right. Carver wouldn't have been able to tell from any other angle. The man on the phone had known as much.