Project Cain (4 page)

•  •  •

Everyone’s played hide-and-seek. (Even me, the weird only-child homeschooled kid. ) And you’ve probably hidden in closets, under beds, etc. Can you remember how loud your breathing was? Even when you tried to be super quiet and slow it down like a jedi or something? Just made it louder, right? Can you remember suddenly
wanting to sneeze or cough? Or getting an itch that wasn’t there at all until you were lying perfectly still in the dark, hoping the person who was “IT” would just stay downstairs? Remember getting a little bored, or even a little afraid, because you hid so well that you were now completely by yourself, and in that unnatural quiet and dark, you started thinking a little about what was in the darkness with you? Maybe even called out, daring the person who was “IT” to come and find you.

But what if the person who was “IT” had a gun?

What if the person who was “IT” wanted to kill you?

This is the game I played for more than six hours. Because of the man downstairs. He’d been there all night. He even found my dad’s secret room.

And the funny thing is, the fear of trying to maybe sneak past this man and maybe being shot by him wasn’t even the real reason I kept hiding. The real reason was worse.

I kept hiding because I still had no idea what else to do.

None.

It was the most horrible feeling in the world.

•  •  •

Eventually, the guy with the gun found me.

I suppose it was only a matter of time. He’d found my dad’s secret room in about three minutes. How tough was it to find a complete douche hiding in his own closet?

The guy was Castillo.

And he was not one of the two DSTI guys from the car.

He was something else.

•  •  •

About Shawn Castillo.

He grew up in New Mexico. His father was from Old Mexico. His mother was from Albuquerque. He wasn’t much in touch with either anymore.

He’d been a linebacker on his high school football team.

He’d joined the Army at eighteen.

There are 500,000 soldiers in the US Army. From those, just 2,000 are selected to join the Rangers. He was a Ranger at twenty.

He was the first in his family to go to college, and he got a degree in international economic history. During this same time, he also learned Desert Warfare Operations and Demolitions. He fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From those 2,000 Rangers, 40 are selected to join Delta Force. He was selected. They taught him counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence techniques. Once, he had to make fire using ice. (Seriously!) When his beard was long, he could pass for a Turk, Afghan, or Egyptian. He’d lived in a Yemen village for four months and everyone had thought his name was Ahmed. Once, during a Delta Force training exercise in Hamburg, he’d pretended to be Italian.

He spoke three languages well. Two others well enough.

With Delta, he captured men named Fazul Abdullah, Binalshibh, and Sheikh Mohammed in places like Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and Pakistan. Sometimes, per his assignment, he just killed these men. He had twenty-three confirmed kills.

His squad nickname was “Sting.”

He’d once been caught and badly tortured.

He’d been awarded three Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars for
valor, two Silver, and a Distinguished Service Cross.

He had horrific nightmares that woke him a couple of times each month.

He preferred brunettes over blondes, but his last girlfriend, the first he’d ever truly loved, was a blonde.

His favorite band was Pearl Jam. He disliked snow. He liked to fish. Talked sometimes about a place called Bluewater Lake, where he liked to camp.

He’d been honorably discharged a year before against his wishes and now worked with the Department of Defense as a consultant of some kind. This was always kept unclear. In the end, the papers all reported he was a security consultant/guard at DSTI. But that was a total lie.

When we first met, he pointed his gun at me and cursed a lot.

•  •  •

I climbed out from the closet, the whole thing more embarrassing than scary. Freeing myself on all fours like that, glasses half off my face, some guy shouting at me. I’m sure I looked astoundingly moronic. At this point, I’ll admit, for a dozen different reasons, I basically just wanted him to shoot me anyway. He didn’t.

Instead he made me sit down on the end of my bed and then started asking questions. Where was my dad? Who else lives here? Last time I saw him? And so on . . .

I mumbled the few truths I knew as best I could.

He’d put his gun away, and now he pulled up the room’s only chair to sit across from me. He asked if my father had any family or friends nearby I knew about. Asked if I knew employees from the school, two nurses named Santos or Kelsoe. Asked if I knew about anything, any
place
, called Shardhara. I gave him mostly shrugs and one word answers.
The one-word was almost always NO. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. They were really all I had to give. Eventually we got around to the heart of the matter.

Something happened at the school, he said. Something bad.

•  •  •

By “the school” he meant the Massey Institute.

Massey was a private school and treatment center maybe a half mile down the road from DSTI. On the same property and everything. The “treatment” part of the equation was for things like mental health, anxiety issues, anger management, eating disorders, suicide, drug and alcohol rehab. That kind of thing. A lot of the “treatments” were built upon advanced pharmaceuticals developed and provided by DSTI, who justified it all as approved “clinical trials” while openly funding and operating Massey.

For years I’d known Massey as a good place. A place where scientists like my father could help fix kids. But now I knew the truth.

Massey is where DSTI kept all their lab rats.

And instead of in cages, their teenage “rats” waited in classrooms and group sessions.

•  •  •

About fifty kids went to Massey.

All boys. Between the ages of ten and eighteen.

Most of the guys were normal kids.

Some . . . some not.

Some, I knew now from my father, were more like me.

•  •  •

clone (noun)

from the Greek word
klōn
, for “twig”

(1) a group of genetically identical cells
descended from a single common ancestor; (2) an organism descended asexually from a single ancestor such as a plant produces by budding; (3) a replica of a DNA sequence produced by genetic engineering; (4) one that copies or closely resembles another, as in appearance or function; (5) me

•  •  •

It started with peas.

An Austrian monk named Mendel tried some biology experiments in the small garden of the monastery where he lived. It was the 1850s. His specific scientific interest was heredity: how and why children retain certain traits of their parents. No one understood this stuff yet.

To study it, he grew peas. Thirty thousand pea plant “children” carefully bred from specific pea “parents.” He pollinated each plant himself. Wrapped each pod individually. Examined and recorded the most minute detail: blossom color, pod color and shape, and pod position. Thirty thousand times.

It took seven years. He almost went totally blind staring at all those peas. Seriously.

He wrote only one paper about what he’d discovered during all that time and got it published. In the paper, he proved how specific genes in the parent peas controlled the traits of the children peas. Some genes were strong, or
dominant
, and others were weaker, or
recessive
. The strong genes won when the two met in an offspring. He started mapping them all out and eventually could figure out exactly what the next plant would look like.

This guy had invented genetics.

Very few people read his paper, however. He wasn’t a “real” scientist, the real scientists all decided. He was just a monk with a small pea garden. So he was completely ignored.

Mendel next tried bees. He kept five hundred hives with bees collected from all over the world. African, Spanish, Egyptian. He built special chambers for the various queens to mate and bred brand-new hybrid bees that made more honey than any other bee ever before on Earth. Mendel’s bees were also more aggressive than any other bee ever before on Earth. They stung the other monks and soon took their stinging ways to the nearby village. Mendel had to destroy every hive. He killed ten thousand bees.

He went back to plants, which didn’t sting, but tried something other than peas—a plant called hawkweed—and it didn’t work out. Not at all. He couldn’t verify his original findings.

He grew depressed and stopped doing experiments of any kind. Then Mendel died, and the abbot who ran the monastery burned all of Mendel’s old notes and unpublished essays on heredity.

It was another fifty years before other scientists really rediscovered
Mendel’s original paper. This time, however, they liked what they saw. Using Mendel’s original conclusions and evidence on genetics, scientists quickly moved from peas to frogs. From frogs to mammals. They soon figured out how to make detailed maps of DNA. To isolate certain genes and decipher how they worked. How to modify them.

They eventually cloned a whole sheep from a single strand of DNA. Took one single cell from a “parent” sheep and made a perfect copy. Identical. Two of the exact same sheep.

They named the copy Dolly. Dolly became famous. It was 1996.

Now it was game on. The next five years was an explosion of clones.

Japan constructed Noto the Cow. Thousands of Notos. The Italians cooked up Prometea the Horse. Iran made Hanna the Goat. South Korea made Snuppy the Dog and Snuwolf the Wolf. The Scots made pigs; the French, rabbits. Both China and India made water buffalo clones; Spain and Turkey, bulls. Dubai crafted the
exact
same camel a hundred and four times.

America, of course, did it better than all of them combined. More labs, more commercial interest, gobs more money. Cloning and biogenetic research was added to every pharmaceutical company in the nation. Even university kids were making clones. Did you know that there are more colleges in New Jersey alone than in all of Germany? Everything progressed in a hurry.

Cumulina the Mouse. Ralph the Rat.

Mira the Goat. Noah the Ox. Gem the Mule.

Dewey the Deer. Libby the Ferret. Ditteaux the African Wildcat.

CC the Cat. Tetra the Monkey.

Jeff the Serial Killer.

Beans to frogs to rats to primates. Just five years.

Insert chants of “USA, USA . . .” right here.

Cloning humans, by the way, is still completely legal in America.

Everyone just assumes it’s not.

A couple of states have banned it. Most haven’t. And Washington, DC, keeps out of the way. The Human Cloning Prohibition Acts of 2003 and 2007 were both voted down by Congress. The 2009 version of the bill has been buried/forgotten/hidden in various subcommittees for forever.

Our scientists can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they don’t openly use federal dollars. Cloning is currently legal in twenty other countries. See above.

We’re everywhere.

C
astillo showed me a list. A terrible list.

The names of all the students and Massey employees who’d been killed the night before.

Twelve people.

Now just little black lines stacked up on top of one another like dirty dishes.

Twelve
.

Dead. Murdered in cold blood.

Nine were kids. I knew some of them. And I told Castillo so.

My dad’s name was not on this list.

•  •  •

Later, I admit, I would wish it had been.

•  •  •

They didn’t know where my dad was.

Me either, I said.

Castillo told me they did know my dad had been at Massey the night of the murders—from the security system. And that it looked like . . .

That it looked like my father probably, maybe, likely, had something to do with it.

“It” being the murders.

I wish I’d found that possibility more surprising.

•  •  •