Chapter 16
So, there you have it: Dark’s big secret. The reason he’d encrypted his journal. He was complicit in Geneings inception, during a clandestine government project to weaponize the blood of a vampire.
Crazy stuff. Fantastic, even. But the evidence was all there. The very existence of Geneing to begin with. And the lot and batch number of Dark’s experiment encoded in the genetic marker still being used as the litmus test for Gene Genies a century later. That I was even reading Dark’s book at all was proof that what it contained was accurate. Encoding it in the way Dark had done served as its own verification.
This was what Vivian Montavez had died trying to uncover.
Dark’s Journal goes on to detail his attempts to derail Groves through official channels. He even asks for and receives an audience with the Vice President of the United States, only to discover that Barkley is chairing the MJ-12 committee himself.
Of course, Dark is characteristically unable to let the situation lie. More than anything else, Dark is totally convinced of his own moral certitude. He soon takes it upon himself to sabotage the whole of the Cain Project, including the results of batch 300, fearing that the technology in the hands of America’s enemies would be too great a risk for the country to bear.
Dark was humble like that.
He goes full-on commando. Sneaking into the labs at night and destroying all the samples of 300. He then absconds with Cain himself, boxing up the corpse and, with the assistance of the solders assigned to guard the test subject, loads the coffin into a waiting truck and driving off the base.
So little did anyone expect Dark’s betrayal, that he was able to totally blindside them.
But they managed to blindside him, too.
With the blood-drained corpse of its single subject gone, the Cain Project comes to an end. But years later, the continued existence of 300 is proven to Dark’s satisfaction when he notes in newspaper report strikingly familiar symptoms manifesting amongst North Korean rear echelon officers. MJ-12 had finally weaponized 300 and used it on the battlefields of Korea.
Oddly, military or government officials made no move to punish Dark for his disloyalty. Perhaps his rapid success as a science fiction author quickly made he too high a profile a subject to move against. The journal contains nothing about the rest of Dark’s life.
How exactly Dark disposed of Cain’s body or his involvement with the Rosicrucians, is left undetailed in the journal. But he does hint in the last entry of the journal that he did not destroy the vampire. In fact, quite the opposite. Dark begs the reader from the future – so wise and adroit that he was able to decode Dark’s Last Novel – to use all his advanced understanding of genetics to find Cain’s body and discover an antidote to 300.
Somehow, I think Dark expected someone more impressive than Detective Sasha Fonseca to be the first to decode his journal.
But I’d found what I needed to know. Find PFC Michael Elton, and I would find Cain. And finding Cain would mean the end to the Geneing epidemic.
Cain was the source.
Cain was Q.
The blood of Q, the person, unlocked Q, the book, which in turned gave the name of Q, the person.
Dark had a wicked sense of humor like that.
Vivian Montavez had been looking for Q. The search had gotten her killed. I was no closer to finding the identity of Vivian’s killer. But did it matter anymore? With an opportunity before me to end the whole Geneing epidemic, did one single murder still matter?
But it was all so absurd. A vampire, alive in 2050? Dark must have kept Cain in his state of torpidity...a grave, perhaps? Was I looking for the headstone of Michael Elton, PFC?
The second I finished the final page of Dark’s Last Novel, I reached for my phone. Of course, I got nothing but voice mail downtown. If there was anyone left employed in the records department, they’d be out on the streets, throwing rocks at Constantine’s Tac-30.
I put down my phone and drummed my fingers on the carapace of the iBook, trying to remember the URL for the county death records. Then I realized there was no reason to believe that Michael Elton was in the King County area, other than Montavez’s presence here. I’d need to take my query federal...
I was never able to run my search. I slowly became aware of a cool breeze on my face, blowing in from the Vivian’s bedroom. A window was open, but I’d been in the apartment almost the whole evening, reading Dark’s journal, and it was the first time I had noticed the air stirring.
I climbed to my feet and slipped my Rhino out of the holster beside the ereader. I throated the little, plastic gun in my fist as I moved cautiously toward the bedroom door. The window in the bedroom hadn’t been open ten minutes before, I was certain. But we were four stories off the road, with no fire escape.
A shadow moved in the darkened bedroom. I raised my pistol before me.
“Don’t move!” I called out. “Seattle Police!”
“Don’t shoot, copper,” a female voice echoed out of the bedroom. “You got me,” it said as a sultry shadow, hands raised stepped out before the door.
“Move closer – slowly,” I ordered, not lowering my snub-nosed revolver. “Into the light.”
“I’m unarmed,” the woman said, stepping through the bedroom doorway into the dancing light of the single lamp. She was small and beautiful, dark-haired and made up for the evening. Her dress was low cut and long, a tiny handbag swung from her left hand. She looked like she was on her way home from a cocktail party. Perhaps, in 1953.
“What are you doing here?” I barked, lowering my pistol. Whoever she was she was certainly not a threat. “How’d you get in?”
“What am I doing here?” the woman asked, flipping her hair back to fix me with her large, auburn eyes. “What are you doing here? You’re in my apartment.”
“I’ve been here all evening. You’ve been hiding in there all night?”
The girl smirked. “No, sweetie. Can I put my hands down now?” She was still standing with her long, thin arms up beside her dark hair. I nodded and picked up the Rhino’s holster off the table.
Then her comment hit me, “What did you say? This is your apartment?”
“That right,” she said, moving slowly forward on high heels. She pointed at my pack of Kools on the coffee table. “Mind if I bum one?” She didn’t wait for a reply, taking a cigarette out of the pack.
“You lived here with Vivian Montavez?” I asked. There’d never been mention of a roommate. There was only one bed.
“Something like that,” she said, putting the cigarette to her lips. “Got a light?”
I fished out my Zippo, flicking it open. As I watched the beautiful girl light the tip of her smoke, the resemblance dawned on me. The self-portrait by the front door...
“Ugh,” she spat in distaste. “Menthol.”
“But you’re...” I said, still holding the burning lighter out before me.
“As I said, copper, you’re the one in my apartment.”
“But, but,” I stammered, realizing the Zippo was still lit and flipping it closed. “You’re dead. Dead, and no fooling.”
“Looks good on me, huh?” Vivian smiled.
“No, I mean, I pulled you out of a dumpster. You were dead. You are dead.”
“Don’t burst a nut worrying about it, honey. There isn’t time.” Vivian reached down and picked the e-reader up off the coffee table. She tapped the previous button a few times and fixed me with a smoldering stare. “You decoded it. Q. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I acknowledged. “Well, my friend with the computers. I followed the trail you left. Found the decryption key in your DNA.”
Her smoldering stare wavered for a millisecond. A look of confusion momentarily crossed her big, beautiful eyes, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She returned the e-reader to the table. “It’s already all over the Internet. It’s a firestorm. There isn’t much time.”
“You never decoded it, did you?” I gues
s I’d already figured that out. All this time, I’d assumed I was playing catch up with Vivian. But perhaps I’d done her one better. “What is this? Some kind of ruse? Whose body was that in the dumpster? Did you switch the DNA samples or something?”
“No honey,” Vivian said, taking a draw of her cigarette. “It’s no trick. That was me in the dumpster. If you’ve read this…” She pointed at the e-reader. “…I’m sure you’re close to piecing together what happened. You look like a smart fella.”
She had been truly dead. I was sure of that. But now, here she stood. Then that would mean...
I reached for my Rhino. Her hand moved faster that I could see. She caught my wrist before I could grab hold of my gun. We arm-wrestled like that for a second, but she was inhumanly strong.
She squeezed. My wrist began to crack.
“Let go!” I screamed. “Fuck!”
She forced me down to my knees. With one hand she had me bested. Beaten.
“You know that Nietzsche thing?” she asked, looking down on me with menace. She could snapped my arm with the slightest flick of her wrist and she was savoring the power. “About what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Well, he had that all turned around...”
She twisted my arm a last few degrees, and I howled in pain. Then she let me go, pushing me to the ground.
Fuck. It felt like she’d broken my arm. But she’d made her point.
“You can’t be alive,” I panted. “It’s just not possible.”
“I’ve got no time to explain,” she said, finishing the last of her cigarette and snuffing it out in the ashtray. “They’ll be here any second.”
“Who?” I pulled myself painfully back up onto the futon, holding my arm. “Who will be here any second?”
“Your FBI buddies,” Vivian said, smiling a vindictive smile. “They already have your friend. O’Day? Now they’re coming for you. Despite the unrest downtown, I guess they could spare their SWAT team to deal with you. You’ve made a whole lot of big, powerful enemies today, honey. Decoding that book and then just releasing it on the Internet like that.”
“I didn’t release anything,” I said.
“No, but your friend did. And he ratted you out. They’re outside, right now. The whole fucking FBI. Any second now they’re going to burst in here and throw a bag over your head. I can’t even imagine what sort of hole-in-the-ground they have in Guantanamo for an enemy of the state like you, but you can tell me one last thing before you vanish: Where’s Q?”
“Who?” I feigned stupidity.
“Don’t get smart,” she said, stepping toward me. “Or I’ll break the other arm.”
I flinched in terror. “Read the book!” I hollered.
“If I could wait that long, I wouldn’t be asking!” she screamed at me. “Tell me, Fonseca, where is Cain?”
“Go to hell!” I screamed back.
She didn’t get a chance to respond. On cue, the door to Vivian’s apartment blew in. Constantine’s Tac-30 unit came storming in, centimeter guns raised. One second, Vivian was standing over me, the next she had vanished. Back out through the window in the bedroom, I could only assume. Four stories off the ground.
I didn’t resist. The tactical guys rolled me over and quickly slipped my wrists into a zip tie. My arm throbbed, but it would do no good complaining. A second later, the lights went out, as a black bag came down over my head.
After that it was just bumping and jostling. Radios crackling and feet stomping. There was a car, or maybe a van, then the cold of a steel floor through the fabric of the hood.
Then just the sound of road noise.