The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(51)
Bob blinked. “I…didn’t intend for them to hurt anyone. That wasn’t the idea at all.”
“Second, instead of taking Lauren out, they pretended they were on her side and spent the next two decades trying to con her into triggering the apocalypse. You said it yourself, Doc: they’re creatures of entropy from a dead world. Did it occur to you, even for a second, that they might not stop at the end of your leash? That they might maybe, just maybe, want to turn this planet into a lump of charcoal so it’d feel more like home?”
He didn’t have to answer. The shame on his face told me everything I needed to know.
“Your old buddies Nedry and Clark hooked up with a senator,” I said. “They’re getting funding from him and Lauren, along with cash laundered from Ausar’s old offshore accounts. I don’t know Senator Roth’s angle, but Lauren was hot to get her hands on Gilles de Rais’s work. She wants to follow in his footsteps. His plan, taking control of the Garden—you think it could have worked?”
Bob shook his head. “No, not at all. For one thing, de Rais was thinking too small. He killed his subjects one at a time, spread out over years. If you need an explosion of life energy to power a ritual, a single mass sacrifice is the only way to go. The ancient Greeks did it with cattle; they called it a hecatomb. De Rais’s approach was like trying to fill a bucket by adding a single droplet of water once every week or two. It evaporates.”
Now I knew what had happened to the missing homeless people, the ones that weren’t being experimented on at the clinic. Lauren must have been warehousing them somewhere, collecting victims for her grand finale. At least that meant they were probably still alive. I just had to find them before the clock ran down.
“Then there’s the attunement issue,” Bob said. “You would need to bring your body and spirit in alignment with the Garden’s…vibrations, for lack of a better word. Simply digesting samples from the tunnels wouldn’t work. You saw what happened to the Viridithol babies, and we’re talking about a much greater amount. It’s a catch-22. In order to survive the ritual, you’d have to take so much of the Garden into your body that you’d inevitably mutate and die before the ritual even began.”
There was an unspoken “but” at the end of his sentence. I stared at him, expectant, until he coughed it up.
“Clark had a theory. A brainstorm based on vaccination therapy. He thought we could give a fatal overdose of Viridithol to a test subject, extract their blood, centrifuge and purify it, and use that as the active base for the final drug. There would still be mutation, that’s unavoidable, but theoretically it could be managed and endured. These were all just ideas on a blackboard, of course. We were hardly going to start murdering people to test a theory.”
“Got news for ya, Doc. That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Bob rose slowly from his chair. He walked over to the other side of the cabin, staring out the darkened porthole window. I could see his face, haunted, reflected in the glass.
“I only ever wanted to help,” he said softly. “All my life, all my research, my work…and this is what they’re doing with it. I knew we were going the wrong way. I pushed back as hard as I could, and they tried to murder me for it.”
He wanted a shoulder to cry on. I was all out of shoulders.
“A lot of people are dead,” I said. “And a lot more are going to die if we don’t do something. What else did you learn from de Rais’s journals?”
He turned back toward me and shook his head. His hand fluttered in the air, playing it off.
“He had one idea, not long before his execution. An obsession, really. He had finally caught on that his sacrifices weren’t working, and he went all out in the other direction. He drew sketches of a great machine. Roped in everything he knew: geomancy, occult architecture, sacrificial currents, you name it. The idea was to create an amplification circuit that would harness a mass death and boost its power even further, sending it surging into his body at the moment he bridged this world and the Garden. He hadn’t even considered the attunement problem, though. Would have killed him twenty times over.”
“So he didn’t actually build the thing,” I said.
Bob wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “No, no, he couldn’t possibly have. According to the sketches, it would have been enormous. Thirty-six stories tall, literally. Even if you had the money, how would you create a monstrosity like that without drawing attention?”
My heart sank as I pulled over his laptop. I opened his web browser, rattled out a quick address, and turned the computer so Bob could see the black monolith on the screen.
“If you’re Lauren Carmichael,” I said, “you disguise it as a luxury resort hotel and build it at the end of the Las Vegas Strip. You build it right in front of the entire world.”
Twenty-Five
Bob turned pale. His hands shook against his knees. The inside of my mouth was bone dry.
“She…she built it?” he whispered. “She actually built it?”
I nodded. “I don’t think it’s finished, but it has to be damn close. I got a look at the blueprints once—the real ones, not the ones they filed with the state. It was all zigzagging hallways and stairways to nowhere, rooms doubling back on other rooms. I didn’t know why, at the time.”