The X-Files: Antibodies (9 page)

Scully crossed her arms over her chest. “So what happened to this man?”

“We couldn’t even find him again—he must have turned chicken after all. So I sent the letter myself.

Somebody had to. The world has to know.”

Outside the post office, Gurik looked desperately toward an old woody station wagon with peeling paint, touched up with spots of primer coat.

Boxes of leaflets, maps, newspaper clippings, and other literature crammed the worn seats of the station wagon. Bumper stickers and decals cluttered the car body and rear. One of the car’s windshield wipers had broken off, Mulder saw, but at least it was on the passenger side.

“I didn’t
burn
anything, though,” Gurik insisted fervently. “I didn’t even throw rocks. We just shouted and held our signs. I don’t know who threw the firebombs. It wasn’t me.”

“Why don’t you explain to us about Liberation Now?” Mulder asked, falling into the routine. “How do they fit into this?”

“It’s just an organization I made up. Really! It’s not an official group—there aren’t even any members but me. I can make any group I want. I’ve done it before.

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Lots of activists were there that night, other groups, people I’d never seen before.”

“So who set up the protest at DyMar?” Scully said.

“I don’t know.” Still pressed against the side of his car, Gurik twisted his head over his other shoulder to look at her. “We have connections, you know. All of us activist groups. We talk. We don’t always agree, but when we can join forces it’s stronger.

“I think the DyMar protest was pulled together by leaders of a few smaller groups that included animal rights activists, genetic engineering protesters, industrial labor organizations, and even some fundamentalist religious groups. Of course, with all my work in the past they wouldn’t dare leave me out.”

“No, of course not,” Mulder said. He had hoped Gurik would be able to lead them toward other members of Liberation Now, but it appeared that he was the sole member of his own little splinter group.

The violent protesters had materialized promptly, with no known leaders and no prior history, conveniently turned into a mob that burned the facility down and destroyed all records and research . . . then evaporated without a trace. Whoever had engineered the bloody protest had so smoothly pulled together the various groups that even their respective members didn’t know they were being herded to the same place at the same time.

Mulder thought it was very clear that the entire incident had been staged.

“What were you fighting against at DyMar?”

Scully said.

Gurik raised his eyebrows, indignant. “What do you mean, what were we fighting against? The horrible animal research, of course! It’s a
medical facility
.

You’ve got to know what scientists do in places like that.”

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“No,” Scully said, “I don’t know. What I do know is that they were trying to find medical breakthroughs that would help people. People dying of cancer.”

Gurik snorted and turned his head. “Yeah, as if animals have any less right to a peaceful existence than humans do! By what standard do we torture animals so that humans can live longer?”

Scully blinked at Mulder in disbelief. How could you argue with someone like this?

“Actually,” Mulder said, “our investigation hasn’t turned up evidence of any animal experimentation beyond the lab rat stage.”

“What?” Gurik said. “You’re lying.”

Mulder turned to Scully, cutting the protester off.

“I think he’s been set up, Scully. This guy doesn’t know anything. Someone wanted to destroy DyMar and David Kennessy, while transferring the blame elsewhere.”

Scully raised her eyebrows. “Who would want to do that, and why?”

Mulder looked hard at her. “I think Patrice Kennessy knows the answer to that question, and that’s why she’s in trouble.”

Scully looked pained at the mention of the missing woman. “We’ve got to find Patrice and Jody,” she said. “I suggest we question the missing brother, Darin, as well. The boy himself can’t be too hard to find. If he’s weak from his cancer treatments, he’ll need medical attention soon. We’ve got to get to him.”

“Cancer treatments!” Gurik exploded. “Do you know how they develop those things? Do you know what they do?” He growled in his throat as if he wanted to spit. “You should see the surgeries, the drugs, the apparatuses they hook to those poor little animals. Dogs and cats, anything that got lost and picked up on the streets.”

“I’m aware of how . . . difficult cancer treatments antibodies

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can be,” Scully said coldly, thinking of what she herself had endured, how the treatment had been nearly as lethal as the cancer itself.

But she had no patience for this now. “Some research is necessary to help people in the future. I don’t condone excessive pain or malicious treatment of animals, but the research helps humans, helps find other methods of curing terminal diseases. I’m sorry, but I cannot sympathize with your attitude or your priorities.”

Gurik twisted around enough so that he could look directly at her. “Yeah, and you don’t think they’re experimenting on humans, too?” His eyes were not panicky now, but burning with rage. He nodded knowingly at her. The skin on his shaven head wrinkled like leather.

“They’re sadistic bastards,” he said. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how some of the research was conducted!” He drew a deep breath. “You haven’t seen the things I have.”

THIRTEEN

Federal Office Building

Crystal City, Virginia

Wednesday, 11:30 A.M.

In a nondescript office with few furnish-X ings, Adam Lentz sat at his government-issue desk and pondered the videotape in front of him. The tape still smelled of smoke from the DyMar fire, and he was anxious to play it.

Lentz’s name wasn’t stenciled on the office door, nor did he have a plaque on the new desk, none of the trappings of importance or power. Useless trappings.

Adam Lentz had many titles, many positions, which he could adopt and use at his convenience. He simply had to select whichever role would allow him best to complete his real job.

The office had plain white walls, an interior room with no windows, no blinds—no means for anyone else to spy on him. The federal building itself sported completely unremarkable architecture, just another generic government building full of beehive offices for the unfathomable business of a sprawling bureaucracy.

Each evening, after working hours, Crystal City became a ghost town as federal employees—clerks and antibodies

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paper pushers and filing assistants—rushed home to Gaithersburg, Georgetown, Annapolis, Silver Spring . . .

leaving much of the area uninhabited. Lentz often stayed late just to witness the patterns of human tribal behavior.

Part of his role in the unnamed government office had been to oversee David and Darin Kennessy’s research at DyMar Laboratory. Other groups at the California Institute of Technology, NASA Ames, the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing—even Mitsu-bishi’s Advanced Technology Research and Develop-ment Center in Japan—had forged ahead with their attempts. But the Kennessys had experienced a few crucial lucky breaks—or made shrewd decisions—and Lentz knew DyMar was the most likely site for a breakthrough.

He had followed the work, seen the brothers’

remarkable progress, egged them on, and held them back. Some of the earlier experiments on rats and small lab animals had been amazing—and some had been horrific. Those initial samples and prototypes had all been confiscated and, he hoped, destroyed. But David Kennessy, who had kept working even after his brother left, had proved too successful for his own good. Things had gotten out of control, and Kennessy hadn’t even seen it coming.

Lentz hoped the confiscated tape had not been damaged in the cleansing fire that had obliterated DyMar. His clean-up teams had scoured the wreckage for any evidence, any intact samples or notes, and they had found the hidden fire safe, removed its contents, and brought the tape to him.

He swiveled a small portable TV/VCR that he had set on his desk and plugged into a floor socket. He closed and locked his office door, but left the lights on, harsh and flickering fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. He sat back in his standard-issue desk chair—he wasn’t one for 76

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extravagant amenities—and popped the tape into the player. He had heard about an extraordinary tape, but he had never personally seen it. After adjusting the tracking and the volume, Lentz sat back to watch.

In the clean and brightly lit lab, the dog paced inside his cage, an enclosure designed for larger animals. He whined twice with an uncertain twitch of his tail, as if hoping for a quick end to his confinement.

“Good boy, Vader,” David Kennessy said, moving across the camera’s field of view. “Just sit.”

Kennessy paced the room, running a hand through his dark hair, brushing aside a film of perspi-ration on his forehead. Oh, he was nervous, all right—

acting cocky, doing his best to look confident. Darin Kennessy—perhaps the smarter brother—had abandoned the research and gone to ground half a year before. But David hadn’t been so wise. He had continued to push.

People were very interested in what this team had accomplished, and he obviously felt he had to prove it with a videotape. Kennessy didn’t know, though, that the success would be his own downfall. He had proven too much, and he had frightened the people who had never really believed he could do it.

But Lentz knew the researcher’s own son was dying, which might have tempted him into taking unacceptable risks. That was dangerous.

Kennessy adjusted the camera himself, shoving his hand in the field of view, jittering the image.

Beside him, near the dog’s cage, the big-shouldered technical assistant, Jeremy Dorman, stood like Igor next to his beloved Frankenstein.

“All right,” Kennessy said into the camcorder’s microphone. A lot of white noise buzzed in the background, diagnostic equipment, air filters, the rattle of small lab rodents in their own cages. “Tonight, you’re in for a
rilly big shew
!”

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As if anybody remembered Ed Sullivan,
Lentz thought.

Kennessy postured in front of the camera. “I’ve already filed my data, sent my detailed documenta-tion. My initial rodent tests showed the amazing potential. But those progress reports either went unread, or at least were not understood. I’m tired of having my memos disappear in your piles of paper.

Considering that this breakthrough will change the universe as we know it, I’d think somebody might want to give up a coffee break to have a look.”

Oh no, Dr. Kennessy,
Lentz thought as he watched,
your reports didn’t disappear. We paid a great deal of attention.

“They’re management boobs, David,” Dorman muttered. “You can’t expect them to understand what they’re funding.” Then he covered his mouth, as if appalled that he had made such a comment within range of the camcorder’s microphone.

Kennessy glanced at his watch, then over at Dorman. “Are you prepared, Herr Dorman?”

The big lab assistant fidgeted, rested his hand on the wire cage. The black Lab poked his muzzle against Dorman’s palm, snuffling. Dorman practically leaped out of his skin.

“Are you sure we should do this?” he asked.

Kennessy looked at his assistant with an expression of pure scorn. “No, Jeremy. I want to just give up, shelve the work, and let Jody die. Maybe I should retire and become a CPA.”

Dorman raised both hands in embarrassed surrender. “All right, all right—just checking.”

In the background, on one of the poured-concrete basement walls, a poster showed Albert Einstein handing a candle to someone few people would recognize by sight—K. Eric Drexler; Drexler, in turn, was extending a candle toward the viewer.
Come on, take it!

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Drexler had been one of the first major visionaries behind genetic engineering some years before.

Too bad we couldn’t have gotten to him soon enough,
Lentz thought.

Vader looked expectantly at his master, then sat down in the middle of his cage. His tail thumped on the floor. “Good boy,” Kennessy muttered.

Jeremy Dorman went out of range, then returned a few moments later holding a handgun, a clunky but powerful Smith & Wesson. According to records Lentz had easily obtained, Dorman himself had gone into a Portland gun shop and purchased the weapon with cash. At least the handgun hadn’t come out of their funding request.

Kennessy spoke again to the camera as his assistant sweated. Dorman looked down at the handgun, then over at the caged dog.

“What I am about to show you will be shocking in the extreme. I shouldn’t need to add the disclaimer that this is real, with no special effects, no artificial preparations.” He crossed his arms and stared firmly into the camera eye. “My intention is to jar you so thoroughly that you are ready to question all your pre-conceptions.”

He turned to Dorman. “Gridley, you may fire when ready.”

Dorman looked confused, as if wondering who Kennessy meant, then he raised the Smith & Wesson.

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, exhibiting his nervousness. He pointed the gun at the dog.

Vader sensed something was wrong. He backed up as far as he could in the cage, then growled loud and low. His dark eyes met Dorman’s, and he bared his fangs.

Dorman’s hand began to shake.

Kennessy’s eyes flared. “Come on, Jeremy, dammit!

Don’t make this any worse than it is.”

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Dorman fired twice. The gunshots sounded thin and tinny on the videotape. Both bullets hit the big black dog, and the impact smashed him into the mesh of the cage. One shot struck Vader’s rib cage; another shattered his spine. Blood flew out from the bullet holes, drenching his fur.

Vader yelped and then sat down from the impact.

He panted.

Dorman looked stupidly down at the handgun.