Bloodletting (38 page)

"Don't worry. Your life will not have been in vain."

The voice trailed her into an unconsciousness from which she feared she would never awaken.

V

Redmond, Washington

"Jack--," Carver started, but the older man cut him off.

"There's a time and a place for this conversation, my boy, and this is neither." He turned to Hawthorne. "Dodge?"

Hawthorne nodded once.

"Then the others can't be far from here," Jack said. Carver was amazed how quickly Jack had asserted himself and taken control of the situation. This was a side of Jack he'd never seen before, disimpassioned, hard. Even Hawthorne seemed to have deferred some of his authority to Jack. "We need to figure out where they are, and we need to do so right now."

He held out a sealed manila folder and threw it down on the hood of the Caprice. The name on the folder was Avram Dreck. Jack opened it and pulled out the pages. The top sheet had a photo of Dreck and all sorts of statistical data from height and weight to eye color. He riffled through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Separating those four sheets from the rest, he spread them out on the hood and crammed the rest back into the folder.

"Dreck is listed on the title of four properties. The first is the Dreck-Windham Corporate Headquarters, which we can eliminate right now. The second is his primary residence." He pointed at the full-color picture on the upper half of the page. "Just over ten thousand square feet on twenty-two acres just south of the Washington border. Time-wise, it's a stretch, and considering that his wife and his forty year-old son live there year round, we can cross it off the list as well."

"How do you know we're looking for a property Dreck owns?" Carver asked. "They could be anywhere for all we know. An abandoned house, a warehouse, in the middle of the forest--"

Jack locked eyes with Carver and silenced his protests with a look. This was a different man entirely than he had known growing up.

"Dreck didn't appear on our radar until yesterday, but it looks as though he helped smuggle Heidlmann into the country roughly thirty years ago. Records indicate he passed through customs in Mexico around the same time as Heidlmann. We can only assume he helped hide Heidlmann all this time. If they're kindred spirits as we suspect, they would have remained in close proximity, especially now that their plans are so close to completion."

"Then it would have to be one of the other two properties," Wolfe said. "What else do you have?"

"There's an apartment in a ritzy building in downtown Seattle, but I don't see it as an option. It's too high-profile, too visible. Considering he only purchased it two years ago, my guess would be that Dreck stayed there from time to time when he wanted to follow the progress at HydroGen," Jack said. "That leaves us with a six-thousand square foot vacation home on sixty-five wooded acres about thirty-eight miles northeast of here outside of Verlot."

"It's well within the radius," Hawthorne said.

"I think that's where they are," Jack said.

"If we guess wrong," Carver said, "Ellie and Locke are as good as dead."

"They're as good as dead already," Jack said, his voice lacking any trace of emotion.

* * *

Within minutes they were on the highway again, streaking toward where Carver hoped Ellie and Locke had been taken, unsure of exactly what to expect when they arrived. They had all been gathered by conspiring forces to be eliminated. Carver had never been this scared in his life, but the anger superseded it. There had been so much death, so many innocent lives extinguished in the name of genocide, and he needed someone to hold accountable, someone to pay.

Wolfe had made the call to the police to report Kajika's death and provide the location where they would find his body. Upon doing so, every trace of his usual cockiness and levity vanished. He drove the Caprice with Hawthorne riding shotgun, right on the tail of Jack's Mustang. Jack drove like a man possessed, weaving through traffic, while Carver sat beside him, a million questions trying to force their way out. Thus far he had managed to vocalize none of them. His emotions were in turmoil. He wanted to be as far away from Jack as he could, and yet he wanted to take him by the throat at the same time. So much of this could have been prevented had he known the truth from the start. Kajika's death, Mondragon's murder, and whatever fate may have befallen Ellie and Locke.

Focusing his thoughts, he put voice to three words.

"Who is she?"

"Who?" Jack said, swerving onto the shoulder to pass a tractor-trailer and then jerking the car back onto the asphalt.

"My mother. The woman who raised me."

"This isn't the time."

"This
is
the time, Jack."

Jack glanced at him from the corner of his eye.

"She's your mother, Paxton. Maybe not biologically, but in every other sense of the word. She's the one who tucked you in at night and made sure there was always food on the table. She's the one who read to you and rocked you when you couldn't sleep. She's the one who gave up her life in Arizona to move closer to you, to be with her
son
, in Colorado. She's also the woman who sacrificed a very promising career as a Federal Agent to devote her every waking moment to protecting and caring for you."

Carver was silent.

Jack gunned the engine when the highway opened to a straightaway.

"And my real mother?"

"She was the most amazing person I've ever known. The only woman who could ever understand me. I loved her with all my heart, and they took her from me. Not a day goes by that I don't miss her, that I don't wish she was still here."

An expression crossed Jack's face that reminded Carver of the man he had known all his life, and then it was gone.

"What do you now about my brother?" Carver asked when it was apparent Jack wasn't going to elaborate.

Jack stiffened, the muscles in his jaw clenching.

Carver waited patiently for a reply. He had nearly given up when Jack finally spoke.

"Only that he's my son, and I've been searching for him since before he was even born. Do you have any idea what that's like? To know that your child is out there somewhere and you can't find him despite tapping into every available resource, that the people who took him were doing terrible things to him, things to which no one should be subjected, especially a helpless infant? I would have given my life a million times over to save him. There's nothing I wouldn't do just to see him even once with my own eyes."

"Why didn't you just tell me, Jack?"

"You may not believe me, but it's always been my job to protect you, as a father, whether you were aware of it or not," Jack said. "And nothing I could have said or done would have prepared you for this."

"But I would have had a father, not just fictional memories of a dead man who never even existed."

"The moment anyone learned you were my son, you would have been in danger. They would have stolen you from me again and done who knows what to you. And don't think for a second that I enjoyed watching the son I loved more than anything else in the world growing up from afar. I was there for you every chance I got, not too much so as to draw undue attention, but enough that I never missed a significant moment in your life. I was there even when you didn't know it. So you go ahead and be as angry at me as you want, but don't you ever--ever!--blame the woman who raised you. She was everything to you that I couldn't be, and for that I will forever be in her debt. If you need to blame someone, you blame me, but I don't intend to lose another son, so you'd better believe you're stuck with me whether you like it or not."

Carver didn't know what to say. He felt betrayed, but if he put himself in Jack's place, could he honestly say he would have done anything differently?

The highway wound up into hills so thick with evergreens that he could see nothing beyond. Way off in the distance, the snowcapped cone of Mount Olympus towered over the treetops, and for just a second he smelled apples.

Jack gnashed his teeth with a screech.

"So you were born in Auschwitz," Carver said.

"This conversation is over."

"You have a twin."

"Yeah. He's buried in a little wooden crate the size of a shoebox in Poland. An emaciated baby who never had the opportunity to live."

"And you have animal genes in your DNA."

"Focus on the task at hand, Paxton."

"I am, Jack."

"You're wasting time."

Jack veered from Highway 92 North onto the Mountain Loop Highway, heading east-southeast. It wouldn't be much longer now.

"They turned the other twins into monsters," Carver said. "Ross, Grady, Covington. Mine is responsible for bleeding fifteen people to death. Chopping up innocent little girls, Jack. Mummifying eleven others in a smokehouse over the course of a decade. There were even two more still hanging from the rafters in there. And there were the policemen who were literally torn apart. Mondragon. Kajika. I need to know everything you know. I need to understand what we're up against, and that starts with what's inside of you."

Jack took a sharp left way too fast, and the car hurtled from the asphalt onto a gravel road. The rear end bucked to the side before regaining traction on the grass on the slanted shoulder, the barbed-wire fence bordering it gouging lines through the Mustang's paint. Another quarter-mile and Jack slammed on the brakes. He guided the car off the road and over a fallen section of the fence into a small meadow. They parked beside a cluster of firs that screened the vehicles from the road.

Wolfe pulled in beside them.

"Haven't you figured it out yet?" Jack asked. He opened his door, but didn't climb out. His eyes stared through the windshield, unfocused. "They were
trying
to make monsters. The greatest weapon in any war is fear. If you take away the will to fight, your enemy will crumble. That was the whole point, to create soldiers who would inspire so much terror in their opposition that they would cower in their homes or run from battle, soldiers who weren't bound by the rules of engagement, who would come under the dark of night and tear people apart with their hands and teeth. This was a time when the Germans were preparing to seize the entirety of Eastern Europe and they weren't thinking short term. They were planning complete world domination, and what scared Eastern Europeans, Paxton? What element of their heritage would have terrified them to the point of never even considering rising in revolt?"

Carver closed his eyes. He felt the weight of Jack's stare upon him in the moment of revelation.

Carver thought of his brother. He had wanted Carver to know who he was up against every step of the way. He had shown him the face of the killer in the mirrors, shown him the truth of his lineage through the DNA on the scalpel, and he had shown him from the start what was inside of him.

The exsanguinated bodies.

The desiccated corpses.

The answer had been hidden in them all along.

The obsidian figurines.

The bat.

"Christ," Carver whispered. "They were trying to make a vampire."

VI

Denver, Colorado

The seizures had begun within ninety minutes of Marshall's call to the CDC. At first, they had been unwilling to believe him, and had even hung up on him once, but the evidence he had provided had been incontrovertible. Every federal officer and local law enforcer had been mobilized and assigned to the various hospitals and clinics that had received shipment of the flu vaccine. They were to confiscate every single unit, minus those that had already been distributed to the staff. Fortunately, all facilities were required to keep comprehensive lists of every person treated with the vaccine. Marshall imagined he'd be spending the rest of his professional career tracking the hundreds to thousands who had received the vaccine early throughout Colorado and Wyoming, as his counterparts in other states undoubtedly would as well. It didn't matter though, not in the grand scheme of things anyway. They had prevented tens of millions of children from becoming like the four little girls, who had been robbed of their lives as though they meant nothing, but whose deaths now had meaning.

Unfortunately, no one would ever know.

Marshall sat on the hood of his silver Audi in the parking lot at Denver General, watching as the agents in their blue windbreakers with FBI in gold on the back carried case after case of the vaccine out through the emergency room doors and loaded them into the matching black trucks illegally parked in the ambulance bay. They'd already been doing so for nearly twenty minutes, and there seemed to be no end in sight. The story all of the agents had been given, and in turn purveyed to the hospitals and its employees, was that several samples of the vaccine had been found to have dysfunctional nasal applicators, causing increased inhalant pressure that could prove hazardous to the sensitive nasal membranes and sinuses. That was all anyone would ever know about why nearly fifty million flu vaccines had been recalled at the last minute. And few people would give it a second thought outside of the inconvenience. After all, rumor had it that forty million units were recalled in 2003 following a string of allergic reactions.

Marshall wondered what had
really
happened then.

There would be plenty of angry people in the morning, people who had planned their entire weekend around waiting in line for a flu shot, but they'd get over it. People always needed to have something to complain about anyway.

He watched the agents stack the last crates of the vaccine into the trucks and pull down the doors of the cargo holds, locking them with two loud
thunks
that made him smile. The engines rumbled to life and the trucks pulled back out onto the street as the air filled with the sound of ambulance sirens. Life resumed again, none the worse for wear, unaltered.