Catnip (26 page)

A light then came into his eyes and a smile,
almost grandfatherly in nature, formed on his face. “Ah, now I
understand. You like her.” The professor sighed and relaxed against
the back of the couch. “It is to be expected, I imagine. You are
both young, she is attractive in her own way, and you did not
know.”

The explanation made Harry see blood red. A
mental image of him strangling the scientist entered his head and
it was only with a massive effort that he restrained himself from
leaping forward. “Go on,” he said.

Nurmelev obliged him by filling in more of
the blanks. “I was never given Doug’s family name, either. All the
KGB provided was information on what they had been before we…” he
hesitated only slightly, “
changed
things. Doug was a laborer
who had contracted leukemia. Anastasia had developed AIDS.
Unfortunately in Russia there is poor care, and even if you can
find it, the cost of the medicine is prohibitively expensive.”

He shook his head, seemingly appalled at the
injustice of it all. “My initial experiments were successful, so my
backers moved me from my laboratory in Siberia to one in Moscow.
Doug came from a different research facility, so I cannot tell you
the particulars. After searching for the right candidate all across
the country, I found Anastasia at the age of nineteen in a Kiev
hospital ward, severely undernourished, skinny and dying. She had
come there from Siberia in order to make a future for herself. Her
mother had already died from alcoholism and this girl was also on
her way into death. I promised her a new life.”

Harry felt sick at heart, not for what
Anastasia had done, but what her life had become. He put the drink
down and said, “So you took her, changed her, and set her loose…for
what?”

The scientist finished off his can, burped,
and then tossed the empty container at a garbage can in the far
corner. It clanked in, a perfect three-pointer. “For espionage, of
course,” Nurmelev said. “The mixture of cat and human genes plus an
influx of shark’s cartilaginous DNA cured her AIDS and also
transformed her body. Once the initial transformation had taken
place, we took our operation to the next level.”

He went on to detail how they’d kept
Anastasia under sedation, strapped to a gurney, fed her through a
tube and indoctrinated her in the techniques of how to be a perfect
spy. “It took about six months of intensive training,” Nurmelev
said. “However, we succeeded. She has superior strength and
cognitive skills. She is my greatest triumph.”

Harry wondered aloud how she’d gotten here.
Nurmelev offered a mysterious smile. “We have ways of getting
people in. There are payoffs down by the docks. After the main
experiments had been done, she was given a sedative and transported
via international freighter shipping Russian-made caviar and other
foodstuffs to the United States. Once there, one of our men brought
her here and then her programming took over.”

“Programming…what are you…?”

Nurmelev laughed harshly. “It is all
programming. In addition to the memory implants, she was educated
in all things American. How to speak and how to act, the basic
history—everything was given to her through hypnosis. She speaks
English perfectly and no one is the wiser. She was given the
command back in Russia to return to this place by any means
possible, as was Doug. Unfortunately, his hypnotic programming
broke down sooner than we expected.”

“You don’t know why, do you?”

The bald man slashed the air with his hand,
as if to dismiss the question. “No memory wipe is perfect. The mind
retains certain impressions and feelings, and sooner or later the
true memory surfaces, imperfect though it may be. That is what
happened with Doug and to a lesser extent, with her. She also
escaped, and even if you had not happened along, then she would
have eventually returned here. I did not expect her to be captured,
though. The programming was obviously not complete.”

He paused for a moment to rub his hand over
his lips. “How she managed to get back to New York is a tribute to
her training as well as luck. I sent word to those on the docks to
capture her at all costs. However, she evaded the handlers, and
then the police happened along. I then changed my mind to let
whatever happened, happen, and warned my men off.”

“So what do I have to do with it all?”

Nurmelev leaned forward, his reptilian stare
intense. “You are just an extra in this grand scheme. As I said, we
did not anticipate her getting captured. It was simply a stroke of
good fortune that the FBI contacted you and brought you two
together.”

Harry felt betrayed. Luck or not, he felt as
if he’d been set up every step of the way, led on, and suckered in.
He swore quietly and Nurmelev chuckled. “You think you were—how do
you say it—oh, yes,
duped
into coming here?”

“What do you think?”

Nurmelev shook his head. “No, neither
Anastasia nor Doug tricked you. They were simply following their
implanted orders. However, I am quite pleased she brought you to
this place.”

Harry grimaced, and the bald madman asked him
what was wrong. “What’s
wrong
with this? You experimented on
innocent people. Don’t you have a conscience? You’re just a whack
job in a lab!”

Now Nurmelev got self-righteous and his tone
became downright condescending and arrogant. “You think too much,
young man. We did what we did and I did what I did in the name of
science! Yes, we changed her form. In the process,” he shrugged,
“certain things such as memory and sense of self had to be
jettisoned, but it was an equitable tradeoff, don’t you think?”

“Screw your equitable tradeoff!” Harry
erupted. “You turned her into something different! She’s not human
and she’s not a cat, either. You ruined her friggin’ life! That’s
not my idea of a fair tradeoff! What does she get out of it?”

Nurmelev’s voice grew harsh. “She gets
life
. She would have died without the treatment. You may be
too young to understand this, but the one thing you must learn is
that no matter what the endeavor, there are always tradeoffs.”

Mini-rant over, he relaxed, totally at ease,
and finished the details. “So, once stage one had been
finished—Ivan—I continued on to stage two. Anastasia is a hunter
like Ivan is, but her development isn’t complete or rather, it is
too
complete. Whereas Ivan serves me best in the form he is
in, she will devolve.”

Harry should have been stunned, but his own
research had shown him the answer and the practical side of his
mind took over. “She’ll become a cat, then?”

“Yes, she will become a cat. What else would
she become?” Nurmelev replied. He actually seemed puzzled by the
question. He got up and motioned for Harry to follow him back to
the laboratory, and once there, he went over to his computer. He
punched in a few commands and a matrix for a DNA strand appeared
along with a picture of a long-legged cat with high, pointed ears,
gray fur and black spots on its coat. It had a handsome,
inquisitive face. The line at the top of the screen read
Ussuri
.

“
This
is what I’ve been working for,”
Nurmelev told him. “Anastasia is the perfect spy. Who would suspect
a common animal walking around, say, an industrial plant or a
computer software company or a military installation or even the
White House? No one would. And if the animal is shooed away or even
killed?” He shrugged. “We will simply breed another.”

Harry stood there, his curiosity gone now,
stunned by the man’s coldness. Nurmelev was talking about
transforming people into monsters and their deaths like someone
would talk about stepping on an ant. “How did you manage to get
them to devolve?” If he lived through tonight, he wanted to make
sure he got something out of it, just so Anastasia or anyone else
like her wouldn’t meet the same fate.

Nurmelev glanced at him as if deciding to
reveal the secrets of the universe and then tapped a key on the
computer. Another matrix came up. “Note here,” he said in the voice
of a clinician, and pointed at a segment of the DNA chain. One of
the animal genes seemed to be encroaching upon the human gene. Ten
seconds later, it had enveloped it. “You have probably noticed that
the animal genes eventually overwhelm the human ones. I have
hastened the process.”

In order to keep up the pretense of learning
more and avoiding torture—at least for the moment—Harry nodded and
managed to induce a note of respect in his voice. “This is pretty
amazing. So how did you get around it with Ivan?”

“Here,” Nurmelev shoved his finger at a
different matrix. “I introduced a retrovirus to disrupt the animal
genes and keep them as dormant as possible. However, the delay is,
at best, two months, at least for the smaller animals. Ivan, too,
will eventually devolve, although I have been able to stop his
reversion for the most part. It will shorten his life, but he is
not intelligent enough to understand. As for the others, I have
never tried to reverse the process and I do not know if I
could.”

Harry stared at the equation and sequestered
the chemicals used and the matrix firmly in his mind. The scientist
was pretty sharp, and Harry had to admit—grudgingly so—Nurmelev
knew what he was doing and was a genius in his own right. He might
have been sick and twisted, but he was still a genius.

He picked his head up and found Nurmelev
staring at him, a half-smile on his face. “My formula is workable,
is it not?” the scientist asked.

Harry forced himself to nod and leaned back
to think about the scientist’s plan. It was so simple and so
frightening, it would work. Not only that, it would work very well.
“So Anastasia would go into, say, a military installation and…”

“And be able to detail everything she has
seen,” the scientist finished for him smoothly. He leaned back in
his chair, totally at ease and totally in control. “Unlike Ivan,
she has retained her full mental capabilities. Granted, it is a
stretch for any brain to be able to fit into a small cranium such
as a cat’s, so our plan is for her to first reconnoiter a facility
that we wish to obtain secrets from, and after, while still in
semi-human form, she will be debriefed.

“Once she devolves, however, she will in all
likelihood lose the power of speech, but not the intelligence. It
took many trials to find out how to shrink a brain the size of a
human’s to the size of an animal’s, many trials and failures, but
we finally succeeded. Anastasia is our success. The plan is that
she will enter the facility, obtain the secrets, and return to
base. There, she will simply point to words in a technical
reference manual or scientific journal in order to communicate.
That
is the genius of this plan.”

He went on to further detail the scenarios,
and painted an image of an army of trained cats and dogs which
could go anywhere, observe everything, and then leave. No secret
would be safe from the prying eyes of these Russians, and no one
would ever know…except the people who’d been experimented on.

And what if other countries decided to get in
on the act? Voicing his thoughts, the Russian’s face lit up in a
smile of delight. “We will sell the formula to the highest bidder.
Whether it is the Chinese, the North Koreans, or even the Italians,
it will not matter. They will pay and we will become wealthy.”

His eyes shone with the surety of his cause,
and Harry felt simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the
concept. Above all, he felt a massive wave of pity for his
girlfriend. To end her days as a pet…while she’d live a normal
life, it wasn’t the way he wanted her to go out and he knew
Anastasia felt the same way. She’d had all choice taken away from
her.

Nurmelev turned his attention away from the
computer for a moment and walked to a far corner where another
thick door lay. He opened it and beckoned Harry over. “Look in
here,” he said.

Harry took a peek inside and immediately
recoiled. The image of a number of grossly distorted aberrations of
humanity inside instantly repelled him. None of them moved. They’d
all been piled carelessly on top of each other and from the stench,
it was clear they’d been there for quite a long time.

The scientist shut the door, but the images
Harry saw, images of defilement and death remained branded on his
brain forever. “You’re just sick,” he whispered. “Those were people
once.”

Nurmelev nodded. “Yes, they were. Please note
the tense you used. They
were
people once. After my success
with Anastasia, I thought about using other kinds of wildlife such
as raccoons, bobcats and deer, but none of them ever worked out.
These were other test subjects, also brought over from Russia.
They,” he pointed to the mountain of bodies, “they were the
failures.”

He spoke without a trace of emotion in his
voice. “When they transformed, they came out of the process insane
and often deformed. We kept them in this room. It is specially
reinforced to withstand a bomb blast and they could not escape. I
must admit that a lot of luck played a part in Anastasia’s
transformation. Outside of Ivan and Doug, she has been the only
other success story. However, I anticipate greater success in the
future.”

The gorge rose in Harry’s throat and with a
great effort he kept it down. “How did you get the process?” He had
to know and didn’t want to believe his father had somehow been part
of this.

Nurmelev went back and sat down at his
computer. “Our experts hacked into the mainframe of your father’s
computer at his company a number of years ago.” The Russian’s face
wore a look of triumph. “We also had experts on the inside,
industrial spies. Of course, your father didn’t know. My own
research had hit a wall, as your people say, and could go no
further. The security on your father’s computer was formidable.
Once we received the information, one of our expert hackers managed
to decrypt your father’s files. He was a most brilliant man—and you
are just like him,” the small man said.