Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(136)

Can’t breathe. God help me. Can’t breathe.

Glancing to his left, Garfield could see Pam, her head now encased in another plastic bag, her wide eyes staring into his. Fear leached into his soul.

“What was in the packet?”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Kromly panted, struggling to rise despite the agony in his arms. What the f*ck was Eduardo Montenegro?

Back to dreamland. Again and again. Each time the hallucinations grew worse, his fear amplified until finally he found himself unable to stop shaking. The visions had morphed into an unearthly mixture of nightmare and reality. Pam was here in the cabin, lying on the cot across from the spot where he sat tied to the chair.

And, amid the rising liquid terror that threatened to drown him, Eduardo was there, asking his questions.

When Garfield Kromly finally began to talk, he told everything he knew about the disk. Where it came from. The strange code embedded into the GPS satellite signal. How he had arranged to pass the disk on the Washington Mall. Everything.

Pam disappeared and Garfield found he could breathe again, although tears had cut streaks down his cheeks and left his shirt collar damp.

Eduardo leaned in close. “One more question, then I’ll release you from all the nightmares.”

Kromly was numb. “Ask.”

“You know the Ripper. Where is he going?”

If he could have managed it, Kromly would have smiled. If Eduardo wanted to meet the Reaper, then Garfield was happy to send him. Hell. He just wished he could be there to watch.

“He’ll go to the place where the GPS signal is uplinked. The GPS master control station at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.”

Eduardo nodded, then rose and walked out of Kromly’s field of view.

Behind him, Garfield heard a familiar sound, Saran Wrap being pulled from a roll. Then as Eduardo began methodically wrapping the clear plastic wrap around and around the CIA trainer’s head, a new set of horrifying images writhed into Kromly’s mind.

Only this time, his beloved Pamela was not there to slowly suffocate with him.





142


Phil Rabin opened his front door, then paused, staring down at the DHL package propped against his step. He’d heard the doorbell, but he hadn’t seen the truck. Funny. He normally noticed everything. He didn’t even know they delivered on Thanksgiving Day.

Walking into his study, he turned the express-delivery package in his hand. About the size of an encyclopedia. But it didn’t weigh enough to be a book. The ink of the handwritten return address had been smudged into illegibility. Oh well. If he wanted to find out who it was from, he was going to have to open the damn thing.

Tearing open the box’s pull strip, Phil dumped the contents onto his desk, a sealed manila envelope and a Polaroid photo. Did they still make those cameras?

Picking up the photograph, Phil sat down. As editor of the New York Post, he didn’t associate with anyone from the Times. But that didn’t mean he didn’t recognize their Pulitzer Prize winners, even a dead one. Freddy Hagerman.

Holding the photo up to the light, Phil examined it more closely.

It was Freddy Hagerman all right, sitting up in bed, clad only in a nightgown, the bed sheets thrown back to reveal his bare legs. The left one ended in a bandaged stump, just above where the knee should have been.

Across the back of the photo, a simple message had been scrawled in black marker.

“I can’t trust my editor. Thought you might be interested in a story that cost me a leg. F. H.”

The brown envelope drew his attention. Slitting the top with a letter opener, he removed an unlabeled compact disk. There was nothing else.

Sliding the disk into his computer, Phil scanned the contents. A text document labeled “Story,” a sound file, and an images folder.

Curiosity thoroughly aroused, Phil played the sound file first. At first he thought he must have gotten a bad recording, with just some poor-quality background noise. Then the screaming began, first from a single voice, quickly joined by others. The horrible chorus grew in volume, barely recognizable as human, then wavered and died out. Perhaps a minute passed in relative silence before a new round of terrible howls filled the tape.

Even with no narrative on the tape to explain it, by the time he finished listening, every hair on Phil’s body was standing at full attention, held in the grasp of tight little goose bumps that would not fade.

Opening the “Story” file, Phil began reading.

It was a full-blown report, complete with Freddy Hagerman’s byline, already formatted for print. Before he had finished the first five paragraphs, Phil found himself flipping back and forth between the words and the photographs in the images directory.

Somehow, Freddy Hagerman had stumbled on a gallery of horrors worthy of Hitler’s Germany. But this one was financed and operated by the United States government, a deep black program performing nanite experimentation on human subjects. And although Phil believed strongly in protecting legitimately classified information, his principal belief was in the importance of the first amendment to the constitution. It was no accident that the founders had placed it first in the Bill of Rights.

The experimentation in this report could not be explained as a noble attempt to cure children of terminal diseases, as Freddy’s first Pulitzer-winning story had been undercut.

In the tunnels below Henderson House, subjects had been collected from society’s castaways. From the severely retarded and unwanted. From the homeless. From society’s dregs, the disappearance of which would go as unnoticed as their existence. The only other requirement for admittance to the program was that the person be horribly disfigured or missing limbs, things that went beyond the capabilities of current nanite treatments to repair.