Ravenous Dusk (7 page)

He turned over yet another photograph. A man's body on a steel examination table in a Naval hospital morgue. The body lay skewed at an awkward angle because there was no stretching it out. A tumor the size of a bowling ball warped the arc of the spine just above the hips and several more of greater or lesser size bloomed up and down the torso, great cables of protoplasm stretching from one tumor to the next under the skin. Two of them had been incised and the skin pinned back to expose the contents of the masses. One which had broken through the left temporal wall of the skull was in particularly clear focus. The granular folds of the tumor were studded with spikes of bone and glassy, blue-gray polyps; the tumor was trying to grow teeth and eyes.

"The odds of this kind of cancer forming in even one person are one in several million, and the odds of survival are painfully self-evident. You alone, of all those exposed, showed no sign of cancer immediately after exposure. Your suit was examined, and millions of microscopic pinholes were found burned into the vinyl, so there was no doubt that what hit them, hit you as well. But you survived.

"It was RADIANT, wasn't it? The military built an orbital antipersonnel device which caused cancer, but there was more to it, wasn't there? Radiant Dawn was a form of laboratory, where they were testing the effects of the weapon on those who already had cancer. The effect on them was very different from what happened to previously healthy bodies, wasn't it, Sgt. Storch?"

No response.

"There was a very different kind of Radiant Dawn community on the very same spot in the seventies, did you know that? Records are extremely sparse, and there's not so much as a picture of the leader, a man named Quesada, but there were rumors that it was some sort of a radiation cult. This has been going on for a very long time, hasn't it, Sergeant? This thing that you and your friends were trying to protect the world from, I mean. You might be of the opinion that such an undertaking could never come so far without sponsorship from within the government, and after all I've seen and heard myself, I couldn't say you were wrong. But you know what? Despite all the blood you and our friends spilled, it's still going on."

Storch staring through the pictures. Cundieffe turning over another. A field shot from a helicopter, a tiny toy church with a sheet-metal roof, and an ashtray beside it in the dirt. No, the ashtray was a pit, and the crumpled butts were human bodies. "There've been reports over the last six months of messianic movements in Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya, where cancer incidence is high and treatment nearly non-existent. World Health Organization relief workers reported finding this body pit in Uganda with well over two hundred corpses, completely incinerated with gasoline. They turned out to be victims of AIDS. Their families said they left their homes to go to be healed out in the country. Flyers were found which instructed cancer sufferers to gather at predetermined places in the middle of the countryside to be healed. The AIDS patients just came along hoping for a miracle, and those who already
had cancer
and survived cremated the dead. Well over four hundred cancer patients in those three countries alone have vanished, and we have no idea how many more of these pits there are."

He turned over a satellite image, this one of a city. There were no cars on the roads, no smoke coming from the factories, and the giant broken eggshell in the center told the story. To not recognize it, one would have to have avoided all news coverage throughout the late eighties and early nineties. "There are at least three colonies in the former Soviet Union. The largest is a squatter colony in the quarantined zone surrounding Chernobyl. We still have no idea how large it is, but it's estimated that cancer victims in the Ukraine alone number in the tens of thousands."

He leaned across the table, so close that Storch could have bitten him, if it was worth getting shocked. "If it was your aim to exterminate RADIANT, you failed utterly. The program is still going on, and it's spreading."

Storch might've been an oil painting. Cundieffe sat back, then launched himself out of his chair and walked around behind Storch. Through a gap in the soldiers' cordon, he saw Nye and Hoecker stand up and approach the bars. He signaled them to back off and leaned in behind Storch's head.

"I don't presume to know everything about you, Sgt. Storch. I'm not even cleared to know what happened to you in the Gulf War. But I think I know a lot more about you than the people who are going to execute you today, because I'm the only one who's been looking in the right direction. I've read medical reports, for instance. VA hospital records that were sealed and buried. They knew there was something wrong with you, Sergeant. You and the other survivors of the Tiamat engagement. They found elevated white blood cell counts, but they didn't match the other blood in your system. They did DNA tests, and they couldn't accept what they saw, so they did them again, and then they forgot about you. Because they couldn't explain what the DNA of another organism was doing in your body, in rogue cells that were stimulating your autoimmune responses. They couldn't explain how the cells continued to split off in culture, and became independent single-cell organisms, with no genetic similarity to you or the parent cells. You didn't die in Baker because you already had cancer, but they couldn't understand it, so they never told you. You see what they do with unacceptable truths.

"I already have all the answers they want, but they don't really want to hear them, so your silence is the greatest service you could possibly render them. I don't need to know anything else from you, except this: when did your thumb grow back?"

Storch leapt away the table and sprang at Cundieffe. The agent's feet slipped out from under him on the plastic sheeting. The flagstone floor banged his knee silly and it gave way under him. He whirled around and went for his gun, but Nye had it. He froze then, when he saw Storch's eyes. For a second, he could have sworn they were the same steely gray as the blisters on the tumor in the picture.

Storch jolted straight up and his legs kicked out spastically in mid-air. Then he collapsed and beat the floor like an epileptic. Cundieffe smelled ozone and burning hair. Storch's eyes were green wheels with gold spokes flashing rage and terror, but his voice was steady and low as he said, "I will talk to you…outside."

Col. Nye fought with Cundieffe for five minutes, but after a replay of the argument with someone on a secure telephone line, he relented, and they brought Storch to the surface.

He walked in the center of the eight-man escort, with Cundieffe and Nye just behind them. Nye explained the conditions of the field trip in an almost hysterical rasp, relaying instructions from someone at the other end of his phone. Storch was not to be unshackled. He was not to move more than fifty feet in any direction, because the shock-collar around his neck contained two grams of C4. If he wandered out of range of the microtransmitter Col. Nye carried, it would detonate.

"Do you really think that's necessary?" Cundieffe asked.

"Not even sure it'd slow him down, but if he runs, he's your problem."

The eleven of them crammed into the elevator and two guards reached to press the button. One looked at the other one second longer than he should've, both their hands off their weapons, and Cundieffe looked at Storch, whose head was inclined on the pair. Cundieffe looked down at Storch's feet, shifting weight and turning as if to spring into a pivot motion that would allow him to grab one of the weapons behind his back. Nye leaned on the shock button, and Storch trembled while Nye chewed them out. One of them finally pressed the button, and the doors slid closed.

As they rose, Col. Nye shouldered his way through the cordon and stood nosehole to chin with Storch. "Bet you love all this attention, don't you, asshole?" he growled. "All this commotion over Baby's first fucking words, you think we're gonna blink and away you'll go with a song in your motherfucking heart."

Storch looked back blandly at Nye's Halloween-mask face, but made no move. In the close quarters of the elevator, Cundieffe could make out the distinctive tang of each man's perspiration. All but Storch's. He smelled like lightning.

The car rose six stories before humming to a stop and disgorging the passengers into a service corridor. Col. Nye seemed to see something in Storch's eyes that made him bite back the main course of his ration of wrath, and led the way out. Soldiers stood at attention every ten feet and doubled up outside each door. Somewhere in the building, very faint, Cundieffe could hear sirens.

Col. Nye went to a double door at the blind end of the corridor and threw them wide open. The pallid, weak winter sun was a revelation to Cundieffe, who threw his arm up across his face as he stepped out into it. They were in the open central courtyard of an office building, seven stories high. All the curtains were drawn, and there were another dozen soldiers spread around the perimeter and before the three glass doors leading back into the building. Some quick-thinking superior of Col. Nye's had pulled the fire alarm to clear the building.

The soldiers ran out into the courtyard and spread out to the far corners, turned and faced Storch, but in that instant, they were blinded, and probably would have been shot to pieces by the courtyard guards, had Storch tried anything. He walked out into the center of the courtyard, stopped and fell to his knees. His eyes closed, his mouth open, he simply basked as soldiers paced around him with weapons drawn, as if he were not already chained and beaten within an inch of his life. What had he done down in Florida, what had he shown them, that had them so frightened? He doubted anyone else even noticed that Storch now had a thumb he had lost in the Gulf War, so what had they seen? His medical records probably held the answer, but there was so much more he could learn from Storch himself, if he only had the time to reach him…

Col. Nye screamed. Storch was turning purple. His face and neck seemed to swell as his skin changed. It looked as if he was holding his breath, but the entire courtyard reverberated with the echoes of his cavernous lungs, as if he was trying to suck all the air out of the world. Nye shocked him, but Storch didn't seem to notice. He raced across the courtyard and hoisted one bandy leg to kick Storch squarely in the chest, but Cundieffe caught the leg under the knee and easily tipped the Colonel back on his ass. His hand went for—oh, nuts, Col. Nye still had his gun.

"Stay the—hell—away from this man, Colonel! Get your men back! He's having an allergic reaction to the sunlight! Help me get him into the shade—"

Cundieffe bent to lift Storch up by the arms, but the sergeant shook him off and stood on his own. "Get your hands off my fucking body," Storch said. He was not shaking or hyperventilating, anymore, but his skin was still a livid violet. He looked long and hard at Cundieffe, as if he'd just awakened from a dream to find the FBI agent lurking at his bedside. "They haven't fed me in a week," he said.

"Your cancer isn't killing you, is it?"

Storch, still looking up at the silvery blue square of sky, shook his head. "When I—when it needs to adapt, then He goes away," he mumbled. "For a while. Talk fast."

"Who controls RADIANT?"

Storch trembled. "Ask another question."

"Where is the Mission?"

"I really don't know."

"Why did you do it?"

"To stop Him…" Storch spat out the big H the same way rape victims speak of their attackers, the way pathologically God-fearing people talk about their deity, the One who gives them orders when they forget to take their meds.

"Stop whom? Stop him from doing what?"

"Stop Him from changing us. Being us…"

"Why weren't you killed by RADIANT?"

"It kills you, but—it speaks to cancer, and the cancer grows and it— becomes you."

He was raving so Cundieffe switched topics, firing his questions double-time. "Who controls the Mission? How many cells are there?"

"Probably Wittrock, now. Everyone else I know is dead." He seemed to strain for a moment—to remember, or simply to talk? "Wittrock said there were other units, but I don't know where they are."

"Whoever controls RADIANT turned it on the Mission in retribution for the attack, correct?"

"Well, shit, I guess you got all your answers."

"Does Keogh control RADIANT?"

Storch only looked at him for a second, then looked back up at the sky. The tendons stood out in his neck, muscles bunched up in his jaw. "His name's not Keogh. Not Keitel or Quesada, either."

"Then what is his name?"

Storch looked away from the sky as if it had suddenly become filled with something he couldn't bear to see. When he turned to look at Cundieffe, his whole body trembled with effort, yet remained totally contained. He stared very hard at Cundieffe, who began to believe that the prisoner was suffering a stroke. "He…has no name. He steals names, faces…H—he—his name was K-k-k…" A capillary in his right eye burst. "Tell my daddy to stop writing that book…"

"What else does Keogh control, Sergeant?"

"Agent Cundieffe, we'll have no more questions." Storch thawed and became molten, flowed up into Cundieffe's space so fast he was sure trigger-happy Col. Nye would fry him, but if he did, it had no effect anymore. Which shouldn't surprise, he thought.

When it needs to adapt—

Cundieffe felt himself suddenly dealt deeply into a game he did not know how to play. Either Storch was a masterful con man, or a certifiable split personality, or something else that no one in the world could understand. In any case, he would be dead in a matter of hours, so Cundieffe decided to play along.

"To whom am I speaking, please?"

"We are all one flesh, touching, loving, hating, killing itself, Agent. We are all one flesh, becoming one mind…"

"What is the purpose of Radiant Dawn?"

"We are teaching the world to adapt, Agent. In what they see as death, there lies eternal life. What they really fear is transformation, not death."