The Phoenix Variant: The Fifth Column 3 (33 page)

Sophia stepped out of the excavated tunnel. Her friends were waiting in the chamber. The ground was mostly mud, rock and water. Pipes hooked to the ceiling and snaked around her. The tracks hadn’t been laid in these tunnels yet, but the bare bones of the curved surface had been assembled. It felt like it was an animal carcass and she was walking through the ribcage.

Fluorescent lighting spaced at intervals gave the chamber enough light, along with a single red bulb that burned above Nasira.

Czarina stepped out from behind Sophia to help create an informal circle. She was patched up, her arm immobilized in a sling. She would need a more thorough deprogramming, but for now she held.

Nasira and Jay leaned along the chamber’s rocky wall. Aviary stood between Nasira and Damien. Damien had both hands in his pockets as he kicked rocks.

‘I couldn’t have done this without you,’ Sophia said, her gaze falling across all of them and resting finally on Aviary.

‘No shit,’ Jay said.

Nasira elbowed him in the ribs.

‘I mean it,’ Sophia said.

Jay cleared his throat. ‘It’s not your burden,’ he said. ‘Hey, I don’t like nearly being killed on a daily basis but when we help you it’s dangerous—you know, all bets are off.’

Nasira’s eyes rolled. ‘Is there a point there somewhere?’

‘Yeah, not really,’ Jay said. ‘You don’t have to thank us, Soph. I know I complain and I’m not going to lie, working with you is kinda suicidal, but no one else can stop these guys. We’re the last line.’

Damien nodded. ‘It’s what we do now.’

‘OK,’ Sophia said. ‘Well that was easy. See you later.’

She pretended to leave and Jay laughed.

She could see more questions forming on Nasira’s mouth, but Jay beat her to it.

‘What about Denton?’ Jay said. ‘Did he get away?’

‘I negotiated our escape,’ Sophia said. ‘He throws Denton in a cell, we get free passage.’

‘And you believed him?’ Nasira said.

‘I didn’t have to,’ Sophia said. ‘DC, he … made sure of it.’

‘Where is DC?’ Jay said. ‘He was, you know, OK to have around.’

‘That’s his business,’ Sophia said, ‘and I’d rather not make it mine.’

‘So what happens now?’ Damien said.

Sophia surveyed the circle. ‘You do what you need to do.’

‘Well, I have something to do,’ Jay said, ‘that I should’ve done a while ago.’

‘Have a shower,’ Nasira said.

Jay fake-laughed with her, then stopped. Sophia could feel undercurrents from him that suggested this wasn’t another wisecrack.

‘See my family,’ he said. ‘My uncle, cousins. They’re all still in Rio. They think I’m a terrorist who murdered his own parents.’

‘What are you going to tell them?’ Sophia said.

He met her gaze. ‘That I’m a terrorist who murdered his own parents.’

‘I can hack some flights for you,’ Aviary said.

Nasira was shaking her head. ‘Too dangerous right now,’ she said. ‘I can hook you guys up with some drivers. Take longer but it’s low profile.’

‘Actually,’ Jay said to Nasira, ‘I was thinking you could come.’ He turned to Damien. ‘If you’re cool with that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Damien said. ‘Three of us in the same bed might be a bit weird.’

Nasira glowered at Damien. ‘I kill people for less than that.’

Damien chewed his lip. ‘I don’t really have any plans.’

Nasira gave him a wry grin. ‘Aviary could use some protection. And training.’

Aviary glared at her, offended.

‘She’s a quick learner,’ Nasira added. ‘Be an operative in record time.’

Aviary stared at her sneakers. ‘Blushing,’ she said.

‘Aviary, you can’t go back to your apartment,’ Sophia said.

‘I know,’ Aviary said. ‘I have some friends in Austin.’ She looked over Damien. ‘But some training would be cool.’

‘Yeah, that’s kind of on the way to Rio, I guess,’ Damien said. ‘I could meet you guys there later.’

‘Done,’ Jay said.

‘Depends what Sophia has cooked up,’ Nasira said, turning to her with raised eyebrows. ‘What’s the deal?’

Sophia held up her phone. Onscreen, the operatives around the world. 

‘We can’t do this alone,’ she said. ‘Not anymore.’

Sophia
 removed the tangerine vial from her ruck.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Nasira said.

Sophia grasped it. ‘Anti-Chimera vector,’ she said. ‘Cecilia tried to inject me with it in Denver. It would’ve removed my conscience, permanently.’

‘What, turn you into a psychopath like Denton?’ Jay said.

‘Something like that,’ Sophia said.

‘You never said nothing about that,’ Nasira said. ‘Why you still got it?’

‘The mother of all painkillers.’ Sophia gave her a weak smile.

‘You never—’ Nasira said.

Sophia dropped the vial and crushed it underfoot.

‘Enjoy your vacation,’ Sophia said. ‘While it lasts.’

Everything was soft. Moving like Jell-O. Denton blinked a few times and his vision cleared. Why was he in a hospital bed? What city was he in? There was a window on his left. Outside were a brick building he couldn’t identify and an overcast sky. Not much help. There was a small square table next to him and on it a small vase. Inside the vase, a single chrysanthemum stem. It bloomed blood orange.

‘Hello, Sidney.’

His father entered, removed his suit jacket and half closed the curtain around the bed. He pulled up a chair and sat beside Denton. His body sank low into the cheap vinyl.

‘That’s not my name anymore,’ Denton said. ‘And why didn’t you cuff me?’

His mouth was dry and he was only half comprehensible.

‘We have our own men on this level, you’re not going anywhere.’

Denton blinked. ‘Actually my bladder’s full so I’m going right now.’ He grinned. ‘Just kidding. For now.’

‘I bought you a new shirt,’ his father said, pointing to a white shirt with french cuffs that hung on the curtain rail behind him. ‘It’s not 1944 stitch, but it’ll do.’

‘Where am I exactly?’ Denton asked, grasping his thumb.

‘You’re still in New York.’

His father thought of Roosevelt Hospital, but nothing more. 

Denton pulled his thumb hard. His knuckles cracked, activating the distress signal.

‘How’s traffic out there?’ Denton asked.

‘Enough small talk,’ his father said.

Denton rolled his eyes. But he did catch a brief glimpse of 10
^th
 Avenue through his father’s thoughts. Traffic seemed light, if anything. Denton estimated eight minutes for the reserve operatives to make it from the Astoria Waldorf hotel to here, assuming they took a cab along Broadway. He checked the clock on the wall and made a note of the minute hand. 

‘Thanks for shooting me,’ Denton said.

His father bristled. ‘Likewise. Fortunately you missed my organs and arteries. And I missed your spinal cord.’

‘That’s thoughtful of both of us, isn’t it?’ Denton touched his cheek. ‘Oh, good as new.’

‘Don’t be too proud, that is a skin graft. From your butt.’

Denton glared at him.

‘I always knew,’ his father said. ‘I just didn’t want to believe—’

‘What a monster I’d become?’ Denton said through cracked lips. ‘As though there was some transformation you missed?’

‘I wasn’t there much,’ his father said. ‘I regret that.’

‘Any real transformation I made was long after you bled out on the snow.’

‘You knew I was alive, didn’t you?’ his father said.

Denton cleared his throat and sat upright. Under the bed sheet, half his body was bandaged. ‘I had suspicions,’ he said.

His father was thinking of other things. Of the pre-Chimera vector serum the Nazis gave him. Of the first Phoenix virus they’d tested in Germany.

‘The meteorite from the museum. You had a sample all this time,’ Denton said. ‘Sixty years.’

His father nodded. ‘The Recognizer. Behavioral prediction, tactics. It brought me to where I am today.’

‘A man of sudden talents,’ Denton said. ‘A man of sudden promotion.’

His father’s thoughts shifted to the Benefactors. The men who guided the six-star general of the Fifth Column. Or used to. But the thoughts that fired through his father’s mind suggested the Benefactors still existed.

And they suggested his father was one of them.

That was new.

Or old, to be accurate.

‘So you’ve just been waiting for me to collect the other two Phoenix viruses?’ Denton said.

‘No, we’ve been actively looking ourselves,’ his father said. ‘Our workload has increased somewhat in the last decade, what with the sun’s dark twin blasting through the Oort cloud and turning our solar system into a cosmic pinball machine.’

‘That’s where the Phoenix virus comes from?’ Denton said. ‘The Oort cloud?’

His father shrugged and sat upright. ‘Honestly, absolutely—’

‘No idea,’ Denton said.

‘As long as big rocks fall from the sky with plagues and mutations, I still have a job,’ his father said.

‘Until retirement age,’ Denton said.

He was baiting his father. Which was substantially easier when he only needed to get the fool thinking.

His father thought immediately of the Chimera vector. Something that had been lost after the events at Desecheo Island. But in his father’s mind, it hadn’t been lost for long.

Sophia, Damien, Jay and himself were the only ones with both Chimera vectors woven into their genes. At least that was what Denton had thought. But he should’ve known better.

‘When did you crack the Chimera vector?’ Denton said. ‘Again, I mean.’

‘Quite recently,’ he said. ‘Cecilia helped us.’

His father’s thoughts shifted to Dr Cecilia McLoughlin, and her brief arrangement the year before with the Benefactors.

‘McLoughlin was dangerous,’ his father said. ‘We gave her some authority in exchange for the Chimera vectors. Then she went too far. We needed to remove her.’

‘Imagine that,’ Denton said. ‘Looks like I did you a favor.’

‘We cut off her reinforcements at the eleventh hour,’ his father said. ‘Looks like I did
you
a favor.’

Denton laughed. ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘We’re both missing the same Phoenix virus. And it was sitting in a museum all along.’

‘And now it’s dust in some burned out subway tunnel,’ his father said.

Denton tuned to his father’s thoughts. His father had intercepted the Peru meteorite in mid-transit, somwhere in Brooklyn. It had never even made it to New York where Denton was waiting.

His father stood, brushed his suit. ‘You need your rest.’ He cast a disappointed glance over Denton’s bandaged body. ‘Clearly your Chimera vector isn’t quite the wonder you’d hoped.’

Denton checked the clock. Barely four minutes.

‘Tell me about the Benefactors,’ Denton said.

‘I’m not here to indulge your cloak and dagger fantasies,’ his father said.

No, Denton thought, but your brain is.

He focused hard. Saw a smear of faces. They were vague, distant. But he recognized one face. It was unmistakable.

Colonel Wolfram Sievers.

The Director of the Ahnenerbe.

‘What happened to Sievers?’ Denton said.

‘Who?’

‘The Standartenführer,’ Denton said. ‘1944.’

His father adjusted his tie. ‘Long dead. He was hanged in ’74.’

Denton raised an eyebrow. ‘Just like Saddam Hussein, right?’

‘We’re not amateurs,’ his father said. ‘Sievers’s stunt double actually looked like Sievers.’

Denton saw Sievers’s face again, this time in detail. The beard. The waxed mustache. Greyed but still thick. The bastard was alive.

Denton reached out, pulled his father by the tie. The old man’s chin pressed hard into Denton’s chest. Denton removed the catheter from his wrist and wrapped the tubing around his father’s neck, drew it tight. He sank the needle into Denton Senior’s neck. Not to inject it, just a bit of pain to distract him. Denton held the tubing in place as his father clawed for him.

Denton got to his feet. His father was making a bit of noise, which wasn’t great, so he pulled the bed sheet off the mattress and wrapped it over his head. He twisted the end over a few times, made it taut, and used his spare hand to reach over the table. He took the vase by the lip and lightly smashed its base on the table’s edge, careful not to make any noise that might attract someone posted outside the ward.

The base shattered, leaving him with helpfully jagged edges. He carefully grasped one piece and aimed with precision at his sheet-entwined father, where he approximated the neck to be. Around the tear, the sheet stained dark crimson. The crimson blotted outward.

Denton discarded the piece and reached for the oxygen tube on the wall behind him. It was attached to an oxygen line. He opened the valve and shoved the end of the tube into his father’s neck, probed his way to the carotid artery. Blood shot up the tube, the suction working at high pressure. Denton held his father down, soothed him with a soft shush.

His father’s body jittered, gargled, then slumped over the mattress. Denton held him there for a while, watching the blood shoot up the suction tube. He would be drained in no time. Denton pushed the tube in a fraction more and found it remained in place.

‘Relatively painless,’ he said. ‘For me, anyway.’

He set about the task of undressing his father. The pants, shoes and socks were salvageable. The tie and shirt were not and bloodstains on a suit tended to attract attention too. He didn’t want that.

He paired his new shirt with his father’s incomplete suit and, with six minutes elapsed, set foot into the private bathroom. He would have to do without a tie for now. The man who stared back at him looked ghostly, damaged. But as he peeled off each bandage the regeneration was obvious. Pink, freshly formed skin replaced recent lacerations and grazes. He might’ve been covered in swelling and bruises when he was admitted here, but he saw none in the mirror now.

The pockets of his father’s pants yielded only a set of keys, a wallet with an NCS badge and a comb. Denton discarded the comb and took the rest.

He practiced a smile in the mirror. ‘Born again.’

Bright new teeth were visible at the back of his mouth. His cheek looked just like it always had. He was impressed with himself, which occurred often.

When he finished in the bathroom, he peeked around the curtain for a quick check. His father lay slumped over the bed, knees on the floor. Denton checked his pulse. It was weak, almost gone. The suction tube still sucked blood enthusiastically to the wall. He’d probably lost almost half by now. There wasn’t much that rudimentary Nazi serum would do to help. Even if Denton closed the valve, his father would most certainly die.

He checked the clock. Eight minutes.

‘I think it’s about time to discharge,’ he said to himself.

Somewhere in the distance, as if on cue, a small explosion detonated. The sound rippled off the many walls, reaching Denton as he straightened his tie. He stepped out of the ward in time to see suited men and armed soldiers rush for the explosion and doctors and nurses scatter. Only two remained calm and standing: his operatives.

‘I always wanted an explosive discharge,’ Denton said.