Vitals (33 page)

"Let's go," Ben said, pulling me back.

The children darted into their rooms. I heard giggles and small, frightened voices whispering, whimpering.

We climbed past nine, ten, eleven, stopping briefly to examine each floor. More vats, steel-walled isolation cubicles, huge but stripped labs, their doors welded shut, their shadowy interiors visible only through dusty acrylic windows. Storerooms full of hundreds of filing cabinets toppled over and cleaned out, steel drums filled with old ashes, plastic barrels, empty chemical bottles and glassware stacked high in Dumpsters, martial rows of old black typewriters, an IBM 360 half-covered by a ripped and age-browned plastic tarp, broken crates.

On twelve, a dark storage room had been piled high with empty plastic coffins. An obese male in a black windbreaker lay facedown in the middle of the nested coffins. He had been shot in the back.

Ben walked around the darkening pond of blood--an awful lot of blood--and rolled the body over with one foot. It was wearing green loose-fit Dockers, and under the unzipped jacket, a blue golf shirt.

"Norton Crenshaw," Ben said. "Hello, Melon."

"Satisfied?" Delbarco asked.

"Fuck, no," Ben said. He made a quick reconnaissance of the rest

of the room, pulled over a stack of coffins with hollow, reverberating booms, no joy. We walked quickly back to the stairs.

"Learning anything?" I asked Ben.

"Too damned much," he said.

Forty years ago, the Jenner Building had held one of the biggest CBW operations in the entire United States. Right in the middle of Manhattan.

Creating Manhattan Candidates.

"You're going to have to rewrite all your books," I told Ben as we climbed.

"No joke," he said. "This makes Enigma look like a wet firecracker."

The door to the fifteenth floor had been blasted wide open. Scorch marks and smoke decorated the walls around the door and the ceiling at the top of the stairwell. Beyond the blasted door stood another, smaller door, intact, made of blond fir or spruce and decorated with carved flowers and has-relief saplings. Two spotlights guttered in the cove ceiling over the door. The carvings cast alternating, lopsided shadows.

Ben pushed the wooden door. It creaked open, and we entered a room about forty feet square, filled with toppled chairs, fucked and twisted rugs, off-kilter paintings of landscapes--a beautiful lake (Baikal?), mountains, quaint log cabins in forests. Bookshelves, some upright and some pulled over, books piled between an intervening chair and the inlaid parquet floor. A long oak dining table was covered with thick, leather-bound photo albums, some lying open, others in stacks. One stack had toppled and upset a silver candelabra.

"It's an apartment," Breaker said. "Someone lived here."

A gallery of life-size heroic painted portraits glowered down from the rear wall, draped in velvet curtains and hung with pulls of tasseled gold cord. It could have been the living room of a well-off Russian expatriate, a personal shrine to a glorious past.

Ben flipped through one of the open albums. He spun it around and studied a few pages of mounted photos, then whistled in amazement. "Let's take these," he said. "All of them."

Breaker gave him a quizzical look. "I thought we were here for biological specimens."

"I had a maiden aunt who kept our family's photographs," Ben said. "She pasted them in albums and typed up labels with names and dates and places. Everyone sent her copies. She worked at it until she died. She was our archivist."

Breaker was still not convinced.

"Just take them," Ben insisted. "If we don't, we may never understand what happened."

Breaker looked at me. "Take them," I said.

Three technicians in isolation suits finally arrived, out of breath, lugging aluminum cases. Delbarco spoke with them in low tones in the living room while Ben, Breaker, and I explored further.

Ben found a bathroom. He opened the heavy white-painted door, peered around it, then advanced to a claw-foot tub. The tub was surrounded by a daisy-print shower curtain. He gripped the curtain and gave me a sad, reluctant look through his plastic hood.

"Time's a-wasting," I said.

"Fuck that," he said. "That's what Melon said."

Ben pulled back the curtain with a shing of steel rings. A body lay in the white-en arnel tub, curled in a frail, angular tangle of arms and legs. The wizened face appeared to float, like a lolling puppet's, above one end of an ill-fitting, calf-length black dress. Wide milky eyes stared up at the tiled ceiling with a squirrel-monkey expression of disappointment and surprise.

"Mrs. Golokhova, I presume," Ben said. "Come pay your respects," he insisted. Breaker and I stepped forward. "The wife of our secret master. I guess she didn't want to be kicked out of her home."

She had apparently shot herself in the temple with a small, ivory handled revolver, still clutched in one gnarled hand. The hand rested against the side of the tub, pistol hanging from stiff white fingers.

She was supposed to live forever. Perhaps her husband had promised her that much as a reward for being a guinea pig, for years of madness.

Ben backed away. "There's nothing here for me," he told Delbarco on the way out of the bathroom. "But let's get those photos."

"I'd like tissue samples from her," I told Delbarco. She passed the request to the technicians. They went to work quickly, pulling the body from the tub and laying it out on the tile floor.

I left the bathroom before I could see more.

Breaker took two albums. I grabbed three. Ben carried four. That was less than a third of them, but they were thick and heavy, and Delbarco warned us we didn't want to be too burdened in case we had to move fast.

"One more floor," Delbarco said, eyelids heavy, as if she had already seen far too much. "Prepare yourselves, gentlemen. This one takes the cake."

We climbed to sixteen, the topmost floor in Anthrax Central. There, Delbarco applied her shoulder to what looked like a medium security bank-vault door, heaved it wide, and motioned us through. The door made a hydraulic sigh as it tried to close. She jammed a screwdriver in the locking wheel before it could throw its bolts home.

Beyond the vault door, a hundred or more horizontal steel cylinders, about the size of antique iron lungs, stretched in five long rows to the opposite wall, separated only by square support columns and, at the center of the room, two small, glass-walled laboratories or monitoring stations.

The cylinders had been mounted on cement platforms. Two thin copper pipes, no wider than a pinky, and a stiff white electrical cable emerged from the end of each cylinder.

"We're going to need some help understanding this." Delbarco blinked rapidly behind her plastic hood. "Not that I'm keen to know," she added.

I gripped a steel handrail, climbed a set of concrete steps, and

looked over the top of the first tank on my right. A long, narrow glass window provided a clear view of the contents. Inside, bathed in a few inches of reddish fluid more like thin jam or ketchup than blood, lay the naked body of a man. Slight, balding, in late middle age, he seemed to be trapped in light but troubled sleep. His facial muscles and fingers twitched, and his eyes jerked beneath their lids. Thick ripples spread across the red fluid.

Above the man's head, something clicked, and a silvery blue light came on inside the tank. Full spectrum, I thought, and looked up with spots swimming in front of my eyes.

A faint electrical hum filled the chamber. Lights had switched on in all the tanks, throwing ranks of fuzzy blue bars on the ceiling.

Once my eyes adjusted to the new brightness, I could see the man more clearly. Filaments rose from the red liquid and crawled over his fingers, his naked arms, his face, leaving oily trails on the pale, beardless skin.

With a sense of fascinated dread, I examined the back of his hand. Between the tendons, the skin had formed puckered slits.

Throat dry, legs wobbly, I climbed down, braced myself, and moved on to four other tanks. Four more men, all naked, two elderly, two middle-aged or perhaps younger, their faces sallow in the silvery glow, all lay in the same red bath, locked in uneasy sleep.

Ben tapped the end of the fifth tank and pointed to a stamped tin ID plate, the size of a file card, slipped into a holder. Following a twelve digit string of numbers was a hyphen or dash and what might have been a date: 9/3/61.

"Maybe they sealed him up in 1961," Ben suggested. "Like canned tuna."

"Self-contained," I said, and immediately doubted that was possible. With such tiny pipes, there couldn't have been much in the way of fluids going in and waste going out; maybe only a little fresh water. No pumps, no oxygen. Just the lights. Nothing so simple, whatever the

ecological balance, could keep these people alive ... yet they were alive. Twitching. Troubled. "Failed experiments?" I guessed.

"Maybe they went crazy from Golokhov's treatment," Ben said. "Too crazy to take a chance and let them go out into the world."

"Should we breach a tank?" Breaker asked.

"I wouldn't dare," I said. "I wouldn't know what to look for." We were in unknown territory.

"Let's move on," Delbarco insisted. Her voice echoed over the rows of tanks. "There may not be much time."

We ignored her. Ben and I simultaneously turned to look down the long rows of buzzing steel tanks. The horror had gripped us, and we needed to shake loose, to find answers.

With a staccato series of clicks, up and down the rows, the tank lights went out in sequence.

We were like kids in a carnival, determined to see the next freak. Delbarco sensed our giddiness. "Shape up, gentlemen," she warned. Then, with a pale, tightly controlled expression, she added, "The last thing I want is to know what's actually going on here. I like to sleep nights."

"Too late," Breaker said.

Ben raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Within his plastic glove, the sound was not much louder than the plop of a raindrop. "I've just had a horrible idea," he said. "The gallery in her office. There were about a hundred people in the pictures. Count the tanks."

"About a hundred," I said. "If they're all occupied."

Ben stooped and laid his albums on the floor. I stacked mine beside them.

Breaker took a call on a small walkie-talkie as Ben stalked purposefully between two rows, peering in the murky light at the stamped tin labels. "Maybe we can find a catalog," he said, "Some ID for these bastards."

I followed Ben, wondering what he was up to. "What's your idea?" I asked.

29 I

"It's too weird," he murmured.

The doors to the monitoring stations in the center of the room were open, but the glassed-in rooms were completely bare. Dust lay in a thin gray film on the floor. Ben left tracks.

The lights switched on again. The tanks buzzed like electric hives. Instant sunlight every few minutes, regular as clockwork.

"Think Russian," Ben called over his shoulder. "Golokhov was playing every side, pitting them against each other, supposedly doing services for everybody, with secret shenanigans as insurance. Who was taking advantage of whom? I can't believe these are failed experiments. It doesn't make sense they would keep them lying around, sucking up resources. They would just dispose of them. And I don't think they were friends. Who would treat their friends this way? Wouldn't you put them out of their misery?"

He looped back and marched up another aisle, pausing to read the tags one by one. "I think we're in a Gulag. A steel Gulag."

He stopped and held his finger on a tag, jiggling it experimentally. He had found what he was looking for. "This could be it. Dear, sweet Jesus." He adjusted the plastic leggings on his suit with muttered curses and clomped up the concrete steps.

The date on the tag, following the long serial number, was 3/7/53. That would have been a year before the Jenner Building had been handed over to Silk.

Ben waved for me to climb up beside him. Together, we leaned over the rectangular window in the cylinder.

The man stretched out in the bath of red fluid had bushy eyebrows, a distinctive thick nose, and a long, back-slung shock of what had probably once been white hair, slicked now and stained pink. Spatters and purposeful ribbons of red gelatin clung to his lined cheeks and his ragged mustache, worked along parted lips.

I wondered if the red fluid dissolved the lengthening hair, took care of the waste products, kept the confined individuals fed and alive. Self-contained. I still wasn't convinced, but the dust between the rows

of tanks, marred only by our footprints, showed that few if any people had been there for years, perhaps decades.

"Doesn't look happy, does he?" Ben asked. "Maybe he's having bad dreams."

"So?"

"Granted, he isn't in the best shape. After all, he's over a hundred and, what, twenty-five, twenty-six years old?" Ben seemed in awe. "Christ. Who had a stroke in the Kuntsevo dacha? Who was leeched but denied access to doctors? Who pointed up at the print on the wall of a boy and a girl bottle-feeding a lamb? Who died on the bed while Svetlana was watching? It was all a sham. Did Beria know?" Ben looked at me almost cross-eyed with a weird excitement.

"Know what?"

"Don't you recognize them? Didn't they teach you history in school?" Ben paused, then asked plaintively, "Or am I just going crazy?"

"Could be," I said.

Ben shook his head as if to scare away flies, but he could not stop staring at the old man in the cylinder.

"Hell, I'm sure of it! He's a wreck, but I've studied pictures of him since I was a kid. This is hint. Banning was right. Golokhov treated him, kept him going way past a normal lifetime. But not the way he would have wanted." Ben let out a barking laugh that echoed from the far walls of the chamber. "Golokhov was in exile, but he must have helped the Politburo bring him down. Fake an illness. Incapacitate him. Maybe they slipped in a double. Or maybe Svetlana and the others were tagged or brainwashed." Ben was working up enthusiasm for this unlikely tale. "It has to be! They shipped him out of Russia when Silk set up shop in New York. Installed him here in the new building, along with his fellow monsters, architects of the old regime. Then they hung their pictures on the wall downstairs." Ben squinted at the rows of cylinders. "Jesus, do you think Beria is in here, too? Packed away for old times' sake?"