Immortal (28 page)

Lopez shouted something at him and he glanced to see her untangling the reins with a look of disbelief on her face. He turned to face forward, realizing that the terrified soccer-mom beneath him
was already slowing down. Ethan lunged forward into the wind buffeting his shirt, strode down onto the bonnet of the Taurus and launched himself at a run into the back of a battered old pick-up in
front. The weary suspension on the truck sagged as he landed hard on the metal surface, and he saw the driver look back over his shoulder and shout as Ethan dashed forward and leapt up and over the
cab.

‘What in the name of God d’you think you’re doing?’

Ethan scrambled onto the bonnet of the pick-up and with a single stride launched himself through the air before slamming down onto the rear of the Crown Vic even as the big man was struggling to
get his reloaded rifle out the window again. Ethan jumped forward and landed flat on the roof of the car. He grabbed the rifle’s stock with one hand as it appeared out of the window, twisting
it up toward him and then pulling with all his might to keep the weapon pinned upright, the fingers of his other hand grasping the opposite edge of the roof. He saw the soldier stare at him in
shock, and got his first good look at the face. Broad and craggy, with blue-gray eyes sheened with that curious glaze. He recognized the man instantly, not just from the elevators at Hilary Falls.
The photograph. The big man in the center. The leader.

Ellison Thorne.

Ethan instinctively ducked as an overhead road sign flashed past, emblazoned with directions for the I-25 south for Las Cruces.

Thorne tugged at the rifle and yanked Ethan toward him. Ethan kept his grip, desperately trying to stay on the roof. Thorne was immensely strong, but his awkward angle, half out of his window,
prevented him from pulling on Ethan with all his weight. He stopped trying and instead glared at Ethan, the wind tugging at his thick gray hair and long moustache.

‘You’re walkin’ a road that leads to your doom, boy,’ he rumbled, his voice so deep it sounded as though he were under water.

‘So are you,’ Ethan shouted above the wind. ‘You’re being hunted. You can’t hide forever.’

Ellison Thorne’s moustache curled across his face in the wind as he smiled grimly up at Ethan.

‘Yes, we can.’

Ellison Thorne suddenly ducked out of sight. Ethan was about to try to yank the rifle out of the car when it jinked hard left and before he could respond, he felt something smash the door of the
sedan open. Ethan’s precarious grip on the roof was wrenched painfully free and he flew sideways, one hand still clasping the rifle stock as he was propelled off the roof into mid air. In a
moment which would be seared into his brain for life, Ethan plummeted beside the car and saw Ellison Thorne sitting sideways in the passenger seat, having turned to open the door and then booted it
open with one almighty kick. Then the desert slammed into Ethan’s back with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. As he slid across the loose dust at the side of the road he had a
brief sight of the Crown Vic turning hard right onto the I-25 and accelerating south toward the endless scorched deserts vanishing into a milky blue-white horizon.

And then everything went black.

And then everything went a perfect, flawless blue.

Ethan squinted as the light seared his retina, heard sounds reaching his ears again, voices and the sound of car doors slamming. Then a horse clattering to a halt nearby. The palomino appeared
above him against the hard blue sky and looked down at him with an almost quizzical expression.

‘You just don’t know when to quit, do you?’

Ethan blinked and then saw Lopez peering around the palomino’s head from the saddle. He tried to lift his head, a deep ache throbbing throughout his body. Lopez jumped down and helped him
up into a sitting position and searched with her hands beneath his thick hair.

‘Well, you haven’t damaged your head, leastways not any more than it already was. You were lucky you hit the dust and not the asphalt, and you missed that streetlight by
inches.’

People were gathering around now, staring down at Ethan and the big rifle he still held in his hands, which were now bloodied where his knuckles and knees had scraped across the stony ground. He
tentatively moved his legs and then his arms, wriggling his fingers and toes.

‘Any sign of Zamora?’ he asked Lopez.

‘The police aren’t here yet,’ she replied. ‘They’re probably busy sorting everyone out back in town. Carson got shot, remember, and you just rode a horse straight
through a crowd then down the goddamned highway. First thing they’ll probably do when they get here is arrest us both.’

With an effort, Ethan struggled to his feet. Lopez slipped the heavy uniform jacket from his shoulders and turned it in her hands. The thick fabric was torn where Ethan had landed on his back,
but it had protected him from injury. She showed it to him.

‘You realize that luck does run out, eventually,’ she said.

Ethan nodded, looking up as a squad car pulled up nearby with lights ablaze and sirens wailing. Ethan limped toward them with the rifle in his hands, relieved to see Zamora climbing out of the
car.

‘They went south in a silver Crown Vic,’ Ethan called out, and gave Zamora the registration number before handing him the rifle.

‘This the murder weapon?’ Zamora asked.

‘Yeah.’

Zamora turned and tossed the rifle into the back of the squad car.

‘Hey, that’s evidence,’ Ethan protested, pointing at the rifle and then wincing as pain bolted up his arm.

‘Yes it is,’ Zamora agreed. ‘It has fingerprints on it and we’ll have them analyzed, but as evidence for homicide it’s useless. You’re thinking about
ballistics, aren’t you?’

‘The barrel’s rifled,’ Ethan said. ‘It may have a distinctive effect on the ball, if you’ve recovered it from Carson’s body.’

‘USAMRIID has Carson’s body,’ Zamora said. ‘They’re on the scene already, arrived within a few minutes of the shooting. What you’re forgetting is that these
weapons all have rifling, and that means it’s not enough to prove that this weapon fired the ball that killed Carson. More than that, the ball isn’t fired like a modern weapon –
it doesn’t have an imprint like a modern bullet so it can’t be connected to any one rifle.’

‘I know,’ Ethan said. ‘But having the weapon is better than not having it. The fingerprints are evidence enough.’

Zamora sighed, rubbing his temples with one hand before gesturing them to join him in his squad car. Ethan sat in aching silence and watched as Zamora recovered the palomino and had it
transported back to Sedillo Park before he drove back in silence. They arrived to see ranks of re-enactors filing en masse from the field which, in its center, now had a police cordon.

Butch Cutler was there already, directing his staff with bellowed commands. He turned as Ethan limped across to the cordon, Zamora and Lopez either side of him. Cutler looked at Ethan’s
bedraggled, bruised and bloodied form, and smiled.

‘You look like shit, Warner, but I’m pleased to say it’s the last time I’ll have to see you at all because if I do, I’ll arrest you on sight.’

‘We’re leaving,’ Ethan said without emotion. ‘We captured the murder weapon, it’s in Officer Zamora’s patrol car.’

Cutler raised an eyebrow in surprise.

‘What of the perpetrators?’

‘Escaped,’ Zamora replied. ‘We’ve got their license plate out, one of the patrols will find them soon enough.’

‘Not if they go into the deserts,’ Ethan said.

‘Either way,’ Cutler growled, ‘it’s none of your business now, Warner. Once again you’ve brought chaos to New Mexico and now you’ve outstayed your welcome.
Get off this field, get cleaned up and then get the hell out of here or I’ll have you in a cell by sundown.’

Ethan said nothing as he turned his back and walked away, trying not to limp.

‘How the hell did they get here so damned fast?’ he asked out loud.

Lopez walked alongside him. ‘They’re up to something. Question is, what are we going to do about it?’

‘We’ll do what Cutler wants, and stay out of Santa Fe,’ Ethan replied. ‘Tell Zamora to let us know when his men find that car. We’ll go pick up some equipment, and
start taking the fight to the enemy.’

2.53 p.m.

‘What news, Donald?’

Jeb Oppenheimer sat behind his desk, the windows around his office opaque once again and his monitor showing an image of Donald Wolfe at the USAMRIID headquarters at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

‘We’ve got a USAMRIID team working in Santa Fe and Socorro counties, trying to keep up with everything that’s going on down there. So far we haven’t recovered any useful
material from the apartments or from any of the crime scenes.’

Oppenheimer leaned forward on the table keenly.

‘What about the body, the one found at Sedillo Park?’

Wolfe smiled.

‘Perfectly preserved – we had the corpse on ice within an hour of death. So far the level of decay is minimal. However, the acceleration is irreversible once death has occurred.
Sooner or later the remains will also be useless to us.’

Oppenheimer leaned back in his chair and sighed with relief, still unable to believe that he had finally obtained what he had searched for for so many decades.

‘How could they have known about this man before us?’ he demanded. ‘Lee Carson? I’ve been searching for these people, chasing legends and stories for thirty years or
more, then Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez stroll down here and identify one of them within two days.’

Wolfe shook his head, his hands raised in a gesture of helplessness.

‘I don’t know, but it must have had something to do with Tyler Willis. We know that Hiram Conley was talking to him. He could have identified the survivors to Willis, who then told
Warner and Lopez.’

Oppenheimer shook his head slowly.

‘No, Willis was too afraid of what I would do to him to have held anything back. They must be coming out of hiding for some reason. Willis didn’t know where Conley and Carson had
gained their longevity, but he did say it must have been bacterial.’

‘If you hadn’t damned well killed Willis we could have asked,’ Wolfe murmured.

‘It was an accident,’ Oppenheimer replied. ‘I had no intention of killing him. Tyler Willis was one of the finest researchers into the field of senescence, far too valuable to
simply eradicate.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Wolfe asked.

‘I need to have a chat with Warner and Lopez, how shall I say, more
discreetly
this time.’

‘That could be a problem. According to reports, Warner and Lopez have gone off the radar.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’ve left Santa Fe and Socorro county. My men on the ground don’t know where they are right now.’

Oppenheimer struggled to comprehend what Wolfe was saying.

‘Then goddamned find them again!’

‘It’s not that easy,’ Wolfe countered. ‘New Mexico is huge. If they’ve gone out into the wilderness it could take an entire army to locate them. Warner is a former
Marine. If he wanted to, he could hide out there for years and we wouldn’t find him.’

Oppenheimer closed his eyes, sitting back in his chair and forcing himself to think clearly. It had for years been a major problem in his quest that the individuals he sought were almost
certainly spending large amounts of time living out in the Pecos wilderness, or under pseudonyms in small towns scattered all over the state. Tracking them down was almost impossible as they moved
regularly to avoid detection, and they seemed to always have some kind of support from within the towns – people who supplied them with medicines or money or clothes. Oppenheimer had never
identified these mysterious benefactors any more than he had the extremely aged men he sought.

‘We’ll have to go after them,’ he said finally. ‘If they make contact then this whole thing will be for nothing.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Wolfe said, ‘depending on how we play it.’

‘How so?’

Wolfe’s expression hardened as he spoke.

‘It would appear that whatever afflicts these men, it isn’t permanent.’

Oppenheimer’s heart seemed to skip a beat in his chest.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lee Carson’s hands and lower forearms were decaying
before
he was shot,’ Wolfe replied. ‘It may be that this condition of theirs was starting to recede and that
they were looking for help. It would explain why Hiram Conley came out of hiding and approached Tyler Willis in the first place.’ Wolfe took a breath. ‘They may be dying.’

Oppenheimer shook his head vigorously.

‘No, that’s not possible. You know for yourself now, it’s true. These men are some two hundred years old and haven’t aged since they encountered whatever it was that
caused this.’

Wolfe leaned back in his chair, seemingly unperturbed by the revelations.

‘I doubt, Jeb, that your clientele would appreciate discovering that their elixir of youth would only extend their lives by a few decades.’

Oppenheimer cracked his cane down on his desk, pointing a finger at Wolfe’s image on the screen.

‘It makes no difference. What nature provides we can improve. Once we know how the bacteria work we can make the necessary genetic alterations to enhance performance. By the time my
clients realize that they’re vulnerable we’ll have had another fifty, sixty or seventy years to research improvements.’

Wolfe grinned coldly.

‘But the price, Jeb,’ he said. ‘It will suffer.’

Oppenheimer felt his throat constrict. His voice gurgled as he struggled to control himself.

‘You worry about ensuring that what happens in New Mexico stays in New Mexico. Let me worry about who’s paying for what. Right now we’re selling a concept that alongside global
population control will enhance the quality of the human race a hundredfold in just a few decades, and the glory of it all is that we’ll still be around to see it.’

Wolfe examined his fingertips as he spoke.

‘And if any one of those clients were to see the state of Lee Carson’s arms in the meantime?’ he suggested offhandedly.