Necessary Evil (5 page)

Kier, now some distance away, still knelt in the tail section with the binders. He showed not the slightest interest in the plane or the bodies.

"Are you finding anything I should know about?" she shouted.

"I'll tell you later."

She made herself continue to the command center of the plane. Beyond a maze of more seats and debris, a partially crushed door had been completely pierced by a heavy object— maybe a person's head. The jagged hole was as big as a basketball. Through that door she would find the flight crew.

She heard a buzzing sound and automatically ducked, squeezing her way between seats and bodies, trying to avoid looking into the sightless eyes of a grotesquely twisted head. Now the buzzing combined with a popping noise.
Of course—electric wires were shorting.
Her gut tightened as her nostrils caught the heavy smell of burned plastic. She saw no visible flame— yet.

"Kier," she yelled. "Kier," she said more loudly. "Get out of here. Take what you can."

She glanced behind her. He was already gone.

Her hands started shaking. An adrenaline intensity overtook her body. There was something . . . a presence. The physical cold mingled with her chilled spirit as the plane made deathly creaks. Outside, the forest was passing into nature's own death: winter.

As Jessie touched the cockpit door, she caught sight of something through the jagged hole: steam—delicate, ghostly puffs of vapor—each wisp so marginally visible she wondered if they really existed. It was someone's breath condensing.

Good men kill when the only alternative is more killing.

—Tilok proverb

F
or a moment he watched Jessie as she knelt over the corpse in the snow outside the fuselage. Then he turned back to the interior of the plane, intensely curious. A feeling crept over Kier unlike any he could recall. It was like being tied to the tracks with train sounds in the midst. There were many large fiberglass pods, tan in color, stored in racks in the aft portion of the cabin. Each pod was about eight feet long, two feet in diameter. Most were broken open, and those that had split had heavy mantles of ice, like refrigerators in need of defrosting. Kier supposed that subzero nitrogen gas or something similar had escaped the pods, leaving behind the icy residue.

Spilling from the broken pods were broken DeWar flasks that looked like metal-clad thermoses. Some had obviously bounced around the cabin and had spilled their contents. Each flask bore an orange-and-black biohazard symbol. Squatting down, he looked inside one of the partially torn open flasks. A vertically suspended carriage with various levels and pie-shaped metal containers hung from the screw-on lid. Inside those metal containers were small, translucent vials, some filled with liquid, some with what looked like a gelatinous material Each vial was a half inch long and coded with a number and initials. Each had a screw cap, the top with male threads, the vial itself with female threads. Some of the vials were crushed

"This is all lab stuff," he said half to himself. Jessie, seemingly intent on the body, made no response.

The tiny placards on the scattered vials read variously: avcd-4, AVCD-4-II, MY-TB, TB-i, TB-2, TB-AV, HP-A, HP-B, HP-C, and a host of other labels. Given the number of pods, if they were all similarly packed, there must have been thousands of vials.

Kier knew that "CD 4" was a name for a protein molecule on the outside of the white blood cells of humans and certain monkeys, but he did not know what "AV" might mean. He knew that '' My TB'' might stand for mycobacterium tuberculosis. HP-A, HP-B, HP-C were perhaps hepatitis A, B, and C. In fact, it seemed that most of the labels bore initials that were shorthand for an infectious disease. He recognized malaria, typhus, scarlet fever, the bubonic plague, leprosy, and many others. Still more vials, with labels like stage 5-mal mel, appeared to be shorthand for various kinds of cancer cells. A planeload of human diseases, a veritable Noah's ark of the plagues of mankind.

His scalp prickled. After glancing again at Jessie, who still knelt by the corpse in the snow, he turned his attention to a large black box that lay open. Its contents were five heavy binders. Possibly laboratory documentation.

No ordinary container, this box had a thick layer of rubberized material on the outside. The inside of the box was metal lined and its walls thick. It was undoubtedly fireproof and shock resistant. Beside the box lay two hefty combination locks that obviously had secured the latches before someone opened them. Carefully he lifted out the binder labeled vol. i, opened it, and saw a table of contents for six volumes inserted loosely, as if the set was regularly updated. Looking down at the box again, Kier saw space for a sixth binder of the same dimensions as the first five. If the sixth volume had ever been there, it was now missing.

Jessie edged silently past him, headed toward the bodies in the plane.

After the table of contents came a handwritten page scrawled in blue ink. There was a spidery quality to the writing that was the telltale sign of a fountain pen in a hurried hand.

Jack Tillman's going to kill us all, Lord help us. And we have given him the tools.

Although I have not yet made him God, I have put him at God's right hand. These volumes

must be given to the media and to scientists who can sort out how to responsibly use what we

have discovered. If you 're reading this (and whether you work for Tillman or not) you must

kill him before he kills you.

I wanted to help my wife. That's how Tillman talked me into the Wintoon Project with the

Tiloks. I never knew that by trying to save her, I would start this nightmare

The page ended in mid-sentence.

Kier recalled Tillman's arrogant stare. He searched for the remainder of the handwritten diary, flipping quickly through the other volumes, looking for more summary explanations. Nothing.

Jessie, looking at bodies, said something about not touching things. But this was a treasure trove of information and even she didn't sound convinced. Not wanting to start an argument, he said nothing and continued on.

He searched the index for "Wintoon Project," finding only a reference to Volume Six. But Volume Six was nowhere to be found, unless it was in the forward cabin among the debris.

Kier's eye wandered back to the flasks and vials and then to an index page. In a subheading that read "Adult Cloning Methodologies," he found a cross-reference to "Wintoon Project" at page 67 in the missing Volume Six. In fact, the table of contents showed that the entire last half of Volume Six was devoted to "DNA Reconstruction," "Gene Reassortment," "Gene Expression," and "DNA Chip Methodologies."

Looking up, he saw that Jessie was mostly finished with the bodies, staring back at him, wanting to know what he was finding. Where to begin? "I'll tell you later," was all he said, in deference to the smallness of his real answer as contrasted with the potential magnitude of the discovery.

Urgently, he skimmed the dense material for additional references to Wintoon. He again looked for the missing Volume Six, walking up the aisle partway toward Jessie. Nothing.

He had to get these books out of the plane in case it exploded and burned. Kier carried the binders out into the maelstrom and found the mountain still in the midst of its makeover. Snow blew in swirls—it blew up, it blew down, it covered every offered space.

He let his gaze wander over what he could see of the snow-covered trees and the crumpled jet, using what he observed and felt to focus his thinking. The men in this plane had been experimenting with DNA. They had been engaged in genetic tinkering that somehow involved the Tilok. According to the writer, Jack Tillman was a very dangerous man. He apparently owned the contents of the jet. Was all of this related to the Indian girls and their birth-mother jobs? And the disease agents? How?

As he placed the metal box beneath a fir, Kier felt overcome by a sense of disquiet. He shuddered with anticipation as his mind turned to Jessie. When he had last seen her, she had been walking toward the cockpit. He would check on her from outside the pilot's window.

In a few quick strides, he was at the airplane's front windshield, which was badly shattered, but not completely broken through. Even on the lee side of the plane, the same side they had entered at the tail, the snow had drifted halfway to the windows. But it was cottony soft. He sank in to his thighs.

He leaned a large metal bracing structure from the wing against the fuselage and stood on it, still barely able to see inside. It surprised him to find three bodies, one of them facing aft. He pulled himself up another inch. His eyes caught movement—the dull glint of metal. The third body was a live man, gun trained on Jessie through the jagged hole in the cockpit door.

Sliding back down the side of the plane, Kier ran, his great steps eating up the distance. As he passed through the rear entry into the cabin, he choked back the scream that threatened to escape his lips. He became a shadow, sliding up the aisle. He could see Jessie now, her hand reaching for the door, the assailant's bloodied face rising.

Jessie saw the ugly circle formed by the barrel of a large-bore handgun pointing through the hole in the cockpit door.

"Oh no," she breathed like a spent balloon.

Just then Kier's huge hand grabbed her thigh, pulling her body to the side of the cabin. A muted pop followed, and she knew that the silenced shot had narrowly missed her.

As she started to retreat, she brought her gun up and pulled the trigger. It felt like slow motion, but the sound of her shots almost ran together, the roar filling the tight space as the gun jumped in her hand. Kier kept pulling her aft. In a panic, they squeezed through the bodies until they both jumped outside.

Once in the snow, she looked at Kier. Both of them were wet with perspiration despite the cold. "Thanks," she said shakily.

She popped the clip out of her pistol, willing herself to gather her thoughts as Kier peered back into the cabin, no doubt trying to catch a glimpse through the hole that had framed the shooter's face. Thirteen shots. Slowly she slid the clip back in place.
Think. Think. I've got a live shooter in the cockpit. Any more shots, the plane could explode. Talk him out. He's bleeding, it's cold. Time is on my side.

"This is the FBI," she called into the fuselage.

Nothing. Not a groan, curse, or plea for help.

"Talk to me," she shouted.

Then she had an idea. When she looked at Kier, he was motioning to the front of the plane, mirroring her thoughts. It would be better to check the cockpit from the outside.

At the cockpit, she had him lift her to the windshield's edge. For an instant, she contemplated the feel of his large hands on her, even as the frigid wind iced her wet body.

Swiping the snow from her eyes, she peeked through the side window. Straining, she saw the gunman's torso. The shooter's gun hand jerked into view. She pulled away from the window, and Kier let her drop as the shooter's bullet split the windshield where her face had been.

"This is the FBI. The plane is surrounded," she called out.

"Oh, thank God," a voice called back above the wind. "I thought you were Tillman's guys."

''Let me get on top of the plane and drop in through the broken windshield," Kier told Jessie quietly. "You go inside and cover him."

"You're a civilian," she snapped. "More important, you'll be a wide-open target."

"Have him put his hands through the hole in the cockpit door. Shoot if he moves. I have a better chance than you would."

She knew he was right. Reluctantly, she nodded and moved along the fuselage.

"First throw out your gun," she called from the rear hatch.

"How do I know you're a Fed?"

"Mister, you're gonna bleed to death if we don't hurry, and I'm not crawling up there to do the I.D. bit. Not as long as you have a gun."

"All right. All right." A second later, a pistol, complete with a long, ugly silencer, flew through the hole in the cockpit door and skittered across the cabin floor. Among the five guys in slick Italian suits, Jessie had only found three guns. The man up front might easily have the fifth.

''Now put your face and hands through the hole in the cockpit door where I can see them."

Silence. She sensed Kier behind her; she could feel his body heat. He had followed her. She whispered to him: "You don't dare climb up on top and start smashing the windshield unless his mug is in a spot where I can shoot it off."

Kier nodded. Then something else flew through the hole in the cockpit door. A hand grenade.

"Tillman sent you!" the man screamed.

Kier saw it coming, and he knew the conventional wisdom: If you saw a grenade coming at you, it was probably too late.

Time didn't slow down for Kier. Nothing did. There was no moment of insight or thought; his life didn't flash before his eyes. There was only time for the instinct to survive. And therein lay the telling act, because he grabbed Jessie before he jumped.

Intense heat engulfed them. Pulling her on top of him, he slid down a brushy, snow-covered hillock.

He became vaguely aware that the foliage had quit slapping their bodies. He felt Jessie slide off and watched her sink a hand into the velvety powder, trying to find purchase.

Kier helped her push up.

Half to herself, she asked, "Why'd he do it?"

"Didn't believe you? Knew he'd die anyway? No telling."

"Didn't believe what?"

"Didn't believe you were the FBI. How would the FBI get here this fast? He said Tillman.' Tillman's in those papers." He nodded back at the plane.

"What do the papers say?"

"Be right back," he said. Kier climbed to the top of the short rise. Returning in about two minutes, he noticed she looked uneasy. He wondered if she'd ever been alone in the deep forest. Around them the oaks shone stark black against the snow that glazed the upper sides of their gnarled branches, witches' fingers pointing everywhere. Behind them the taller evergreens rose like crystalline spires. For him it was a magnificent place temporarily desecrated by mankind.

"You don't like it here."

"It's a dank forest, in winter. Somebody just tried to kill us."

Kier nodded and decided against explaining his thought. Instead, he showed her the elaborate box that contained the five black binders.

"So people are killing each other over a planeful of lab reports?"

"They're into something they shouldn't be. Genetics and more, and involving my tribe. I think that plane was loaded with every infectious disease known to man. Somebody's got to—"

A mountain of air, followed by a thundering blast, knocked them both on their backs. Debris pelted the trees above them. Without the embankment they might have been killed.