Ancestor

  “Well, I guess I’m off to bed,” Colding said. “Holler if you need anything, okay?”

  Jian grunted, but Colding didn’t know if it was a reaction to him or to a piece of data.

  He’d almost made it out of the room when she stopped him.

  “Mister Colding?”

  He turned. Jian pointed to one of the computer screens.

  “I see the date is November seventh,” she said. “I am sorry. I wish I had known her.”

  Tears welled up instantly. He swallowed against the knot in his throat, clenched his teeth against the pain in his chest.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Jian nodded, then turned back to her multimonitor array. Colding left before she could see him cry.

  Three years to the day since Clarissa had died. Sometimes it seemed like a tick of the clock, like he’d kissed her just yesterday. Other times he had trouble remembering what she looked like, as if he’d never really known her at all. At all times, though, every minute of every day, the ache of her absence hung on him like an anchor.

  He pretended to cough, giving him an excuse to wipe at his eyes in case Gunther was watching him on the hall cams. Colding walked toward his room. The research facility still reminded him of a school building: cinder-block walls painted a neutral gray, speckled tile floor, fire extinguishers paired with fire axes in each hall. There were even little handles with the words PULL HERE mounted shoulder high, although those weren’t for the fire alarm—they would close the airlocks tight in case of any viral contamination.

  Colding reached his room and shut himself inside. “All secure, Gun.”

  “I like the part where she said she’s not stupid,” Gunther said. “The understatement of the century.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Get back to bed, boss. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  Colding nodded even though he was alone in his room. No way he’d get back to sleep. Not today. Besides, Jian’s dreams were getting worse. The last two times that had happened, she’d started hallucinating a few weeks later, then finally tried to kill herself. For her most recent attempt, she’d locked herself in a bathroom and filled it with nitrogen gas. Her assistant, Tim Feely, realized what she was doing and called for help. Colding had broken in far ahead of the proverbial “nick of time,” but how close she came to success wasn’t the point—the pattern was the thing. Nightmares, then hallucinations, then a suicide attempt. Doc Rhumkorrf had already adjusted Jian’s meds, but who knew if that would work?

  Colding had to report this. Claus Rhumkorrf was brilliant, Erika Hoel was a legend, but without Liu Jian Dan, the project simply ceased to exist.

  NOVEMBER 7: EVEN FUCKING COLDER

  SHOULDERS SLUMPED, COLDING walked into the secure communications office and sat down at the desk. He’d put on his clothes for the day—jeans and snow pants, snow boots and a big, black down jacket embroidered with the red Genada G above the left breast. Wouldn’t do to talk to his boss while wearing a bathrobe.

  This terminal was the facility’s only way to call in or out. It connected to a single location—Genada’s headquarters outside of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba. A Genada logo screensaver spun on the monitor. Colding hit the space bar. The computer was designed to do only one thing, so the logo vanished and the connection process began. Right now, Danté’s cell phone was ringing a special ring, telling him to get to his own secure terminal.

  Colding waited patiently, wondering how to phrase his message. In just over two minutes, Danté’s smiling face appeared

  “Good morning, P. J. How’s the weather?”

  Colding forced a grin at the hackneyed joke. On Baffin Island, latitude sixty-five degrees, there were only two temperatures—Fucking Cold, and Even Fucking Colder.

  “Not that bad, sir. Mind you, I don’t go outside much, but at least everything is working great in the facility.”

  Danté nodded. Colding had learned long ago that his boss always liked to hear something positive, a process Colding referred to as “giving a little sugar.” He couldn’t blame Danté’s need; if Colding had spent nearly half a billion dollars on a project, he’d want to hear some good news as well.

  Danté’s skin held the rich tan of a man who can afford a private spa even in the deepest, darkest isolation of Manitoba. His thick raven-black hair looked like he’d just stepped out of some Hollywood hairdresser’s chair, and his bright-white grin looked like it had put an orthodontist’s kids through college. The crazy-big jaw featured prominently in caricatures and political cartoons. This was the face of a billion-dollar biotech company, the face that kept investors pumped up and enthused.

  “I was just about to call you,” Danté said. “We acquired some additional mammalian genomes. Valentine is flying them out as we speak. He should be landing at your facility in about thirty minutes. Make sure you’re ready for him, I need him back right away.”

  “Consider it done,” Colding said.

  Danté leaned toward the camera, only slightly, an expectant look on his face. “So since you called me, I’m assuming you have good news about the latest immune response test?”

  “They’re starting it now,” Colding said. “We won’t know for a few hours.”

  “It has to work this time. Has to. If not, I think it’s time to bring in more people, top-level people.”

  Colding shook his head. “I still strongly recommend against that. We’re secure right now. You bring in more people, you open the door to a CIA plant.”

  “But we have background checks—”

  “Let it go, Danté,” Colding interrupted, not wanting to have this conversation yet again. “You hired me for this reason. We’re a lean operation. Four scientists, four security people and that’s all we need.”

  “Clearly that’s not all we need!” Danté said, his face morphing into a narrow-eyed snarl.

  “I know this team. I saved this project once, remember?”

  Danté sat back, took in a big breath, then let it out. “Yes, P. J. You did save the project. Fine. So if you’re not calling me with good news, you must be calling me with bad.”

  “It’s Jian. She’s … she’s having nightmares again. I wanted to let you know.”

  “As bad as before?”

  Colding shook his head. “No. At least, not yet.”

  “What’s Rhumkorrf say?”

  “He’s adjusting her meds. Doesn’t think it’s a major problem, and he’s sure we can control it.”

  Danté nodded, the muscles of his big jaw twitching a little. “That old woman drives me crazy. No wonder the Chinese dished her off like that.”

  What a prick. Dished her off? Danté had all but begged the Chinese for permission to add Jian to the Genada staff. “Come on, Danté, you know we got the better of that deal.”

  “It’s only a good deal if she makes it happen and we turn a profit. And if she doesn’t, a lot of people are going to die miserable deaths.”

  “I’m more than familiar with the consequences of failure, Danté.”

  Danté’s scowl softened a little. “Of course, P. J. My apologies. But we can’t keep funding this bottomless pit forever. Our investor demands results. Call me if anything else comes up.”

  “Yes sir,” Colding said, then broke the connection. The spinning Genada logo returned. Genada had many investors, but only one that actually worried Danté—the Chinese government. For Danté to snap like that, the Chinese had to be pushing for a return on their significant, if covert, investment.

  And that meant time was running out.

  NOVEMBER 7: TASMANIAN WOLVES

  COLDING WALKED OUT of the main building’s airlock and into the morning cold. Even after many months, he couldn’t get used to these temperatures. He ran the awkward run of someone trying to stay tucked inside his coat, quickly covering the fifty yards to the hangar.

  The hangar looked completely out of place on the snowy, barren landscape. Seven stories high at the peak, 150 yards long, 100 yards wide. Two huge s
liding front doors allowed for a plane that would never really come, which was why the hangar doubled as the barn for the cows, and tripled as the garage for the facility’s two vehicles. At the base of the left-hand sliding door was a normal, man-sized entrance. Colding waddle-ran to it and slipped inside.

  Inside, heat. Thank the powers that be. He walked to one of the heaters and pressed the higher button again and again, cranking it up to full. He heard natural gas hissing through the PVC pipe as he stripped off his gloves and held his hands in front of the grate. The security-room computer controlled this heater and the fifty or sixty just like it that were spaced along the ground and up on the ceiling, but the temporary override was like heaven.

  “Oh, come on,” a high-pitched voice called out. “You’re turning up the heat? It’s frickin’ toasty in here.”

  “That’s because you’re a mutant from Canada,” Colding called over his shoulder. “You were probably born in an igloo.” He jerked his hands back as the heat nearly burned him. There, that was better.

  Colding put his gloves back on, trapping the heat radiating off his warm skin. He turned, saw the thick-bodied Brady Giovanni start up the diesel engine of the small tanker truck they used to refuel Bobby Valentine’s helicopter.

  The hangar wasn’t exactly toasty, as Brady had said, but it was well above freezing. The seventy-thousand-square-foot building held fifty Holstein cows at the far end. They were over sixty yards away, a testament to the building’s size. The big black-and-white animals chewed on feed. Occasionally one of them let out a moo that echoed off the hangar’s sheet-metal roof some seven stories above.

  On this end of the hangar sat the fuel truck and a Humvee. The Hummer saw very little use other than weekly eyeball checks of the off-site data backup, which sat at the end of the facility’s one-mile-long landing strip, and for taking Erika Hoel to weekly checkups of Baffin Island’s two backup herd facilities. Each facility was a miserable thirty miles away—a sixty-mile round-trip with Hoel was about as much fun as a barbed-wire enema.

  Brady eased out of the fuel truck, leaving the engine to idle. “All set for Bobby,” he said. “I’ll start refueling his chopper as soon as he lands.”

  “It’s cold as hell outside this morning,” Colding said. “After you open the doors, make sure you adjust the heat so the cows don’t get chilled.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll crank the heat for them. You might say it will be a hot time in the old town … this morning.”

  Brady laughed at his own joke, as usual, leaving Colding to smile and nod vaguely as he politely tried to grasp the humor. Brady’s laugh sounded much like his voice: high-pitched, more at home in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl than a six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound man. As a security guard, Brady cut an imposing figure. No one understood his jokes, not even Gunther or Andy Crosthwaite, who had both served with the man in the Canadian Special Forces.

  Speaking of Andy … Colding checked his watch. A little past 10:30 A.M. Imagine that, Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite was late.

  “Brady, you heard from Andy?”

  Brady shook his head.

  “Shit. Well, he’ll be out here soon to help you with the refueling. I’m gonna step outside for a second. Hold down the fort.”

  Brady laughed his high-pitched laugh. “Hold down the fort. That’s good!”

  Colding smiled, nodded. Hard enough not getting Brady’s jokes—now he apparently didn’t get his own.

  He walked out of the hangar’s small personnel door and back into the subzero morning’s blazing white. His feet scrunched the facility’s packed snow as he walked away from the hangar, until they sank calf-deep into undisturbed drifts. He stood alone, staring out at the white expanse of Baffin Island. With his back to the lab, there wasn’t a building in sight.

  Three years. Fuck sleeping, he should be drunk. Maybe he’d hang with Tim Feely after the morning’s experiment. Tim was always down for a drink and always seemed to have a bottle close at hand.

  Three years.

  “I just wish I had you back,” Colding muttered. But Clarissa couldn’t come back, no matter how bad he wished for it. He couldn’t blunt the pain permanently lodged in his chest. What he could do, though, was make this goddamn project work … and by doing so, spare hundreds of thousands of people from experiencing pain just like his.

  He turned back to look at the compound, his home for almost two years. About fifty yards southwest of the hangar stood the compound’s other building. The square, cinder-block building only looked simple. Its two entry points were facility airlocks that maintained a slight negative pressure. It was a sobering thought—Colding’s home was a place designed to keep death in.

  The building contained state-of-the-art labs for genetics, computers and veterinary medicine as well as a small cafeteria, rec room and nine 600-square-foot apartments. It was a good-sized facility, but after twenty isolated months even the Trump Tower would seem claustrophobic.

  Between the hangar and the main facility stood a metal platform that supported a ten-foot satellite dish. The platform, the hangar and the facility were the sum total of civilization at Genada’s Baffin Island base.

  A distant, rapid growl of rotor blades echoed off the landscape. Colding turned to see a dark speck on the horizon. The speck quickly grew into the familiar image of a Sikorski S-76C helicopter. Colding loved the sight of that machine. If you took a typical TV news chopper, removed all the logos and painted it flat black, you’d have a twin to Bobby’s Sikorski. With twelve seats and a range of over four hundred nautical miles, the Sikorski could get the entire staff to safety in case of an emergency.

  The heli closed in, then swooped down to the mile-long landing strip like a noisy shadow, kicking up clouds of powdery snow. The landing gear extended. Bobby Valentine set her down gently.

  After a short pause, a metallic rattling sound echoed across the snowy landscape. The hangar’s massive doors—240 feet wide and 70 feet high—split in the middle and slowly opened just enough for the fuel truck. Brady drove it out and stopped close to the Sikorski. Colding walked toward the helicopter, watching the hangar doors to see if they would close.

  They stayed open. Which meant, obviously, that Andy Crosthwaite was not in the hangar to shut them.

  The main building’s front airlock opened. Colding expected to see Andy, but instead Gunther Jones trotted out into the cold. At six-foot-two, Gunther stood eye to eye with Colding but was much skinnier, his black Genada jacket always drooping from his rail-thin frame like a loose shirt on a wire hanger.

  “Gun, where the hell is The Asshole?”

  “Asleep. I didn’t want to leave you guys shorthanded.” He handed Colding a walkie-talkie. “That’s punched in to Andy’s room vid-phone.”

  Colding sighed and pressed the transmit button. “Andy, pick up.”

  No answer.

  “Andy, come in. I’ll keep squawking until you answer.”

  The handset crackled back. “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Get your ass out here, Andy. Gunther’s supposed to be off-duty.”

  “Is Gun there?”

  “Yes, he came out to cover for your lazy ass.”

  “Then it’s a reach-around happy ending for all. Leave me alone, Colding.”

  “Dammit, Andy, come out here and do your job.”

  “I’ll pass. My GAF level is pretty low right now.”

  GAF? Colding looked at Gunther.

  “His give a fuck level,” Gunther said.

  Colding considered Andy only slightly more useful than a day-old dog turd. He’d served with Magnus, which was the only reason the dangerous little bastard had a job at all.

  “Andy, I’m—”

  “Uh-oh,” Andy said. “I think this thing is broken.”

  A click, and with it, the conversation was over. Colding didn’t bother hitting the transmit button.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Gunther said. “I don’t mind. Let me say hi to Bobby and I’ll close
up the hangar, crank the heat. Cool?”

  Colding nodded. The two men reached the Sikorski as the rotor blades started their slow spin-down and Bobby Valentine hopped out.

  Bobby was the Pagliones’ private pilot and all-around errand boy. He pushed his heavy brownish-blond hair away from his eyes and flashed the smile that seemed to get him laid everywhere he went. He carried a lunchbox-sized metal case in his left hand. His right he offered to Colding, who shook it firmly.

  “P. J., how are you?”

  “I’m just fine, Bobby-V,” Colding said. “Okay flight?”

  Bobby nodded. “It was fine, as the return trip will be if I get out of here before that low-pressure system comes in.” Bobby reached out to shake Gunther’s hand. “Gun, my man, how’s the writing coming?”

  “Good, real good! I’m almost finished with the third book. Stephenie Meyer won’t know what hit her.”

  “Go get ’em, tiger,” Bobby said.

  Gunther nodded, then jogged to the hangar. He ran by Brady, who was dragging a fuel hose to the Sikorski.

  Bobby gently lifted the metal case like it was a fragile heirloom and handed it to Colding. “Right there is a regular who’s who of extinction,” Bobby said. “Caribbean monk seal, Stellar’s sea cow, pig-footed bandicoot and a Tasmanian wolf.”

  “A Tasmanian wolf? Those have been gone since the thirties.”

  Bobby nodded. “We found a stuffed one in Auckland. Got some DNA out of the fur or something. Okay, package delivered, so let’s get me turned around and outta here.”

  “That soon? Doc Rhumkorrf is dying to go flying with you.”

  Bobby checked his watch. “Can Herr Dok-tor do it right now?”

  “He’s in the middle of an embryonic immune reaction experiment.”