The Dragon Factory Read online

“Doc, you were never cool in school and you’re not cool now. Stop trying.”

  He pretended to adjust the nosepiece of his glasses, but he did it with his middle finger. You could feel the love just rolling back and forth between us.

  “Video,” I prompted. “Do I ever get to see it?”

  Instead of answering me, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious. “What do you know of cryptozoology?”

  “Crypto-what?” I asked.

  “Cryptozoology,” he repeated, saying it slower this time. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor branch of biology or a pseudoscience. In either case, it’s concerned with the search for cryptids—animals that do not belong to any known biological or fossil record.”

  “You lost me.”

  Hu smiled thinly. “It’s simple. Cryptids are animals that are believed by some to exist . . . but which usually don’t.”

  “What? Like the Loch Ness Monster?”

  Hu gave me a “wow, the caveman had a real thought” sort of look but nodded. “And Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, El Chupacabra, and a bunch of others.”

  “Please don’t tell me that I busted my ass to dodge the NSA just to go on a Bigfoot hunt. I’m just starting to not entirely dislike you, Doc; don’t make me have to kill you.”

  His smile would have wrinkled a lemon.

  “No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “we’re not searching for Bigfoot. However, there have been instances of presumed mythological creatures being found. Until a few years ago the giant squid was considered a myth. And two hundred years ago the first people to report an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, a duck’s bill, and a poisonous sting were branded as liars, but we now know the platypus exists.”

  “Platypuses are poisonous?” I asked.

  “Male platypi are,” he said, correcting me with a sneer. “Some of these animals may be UMAs, or Unidentified Mysterious Animals, that, due to lack of physical evidence, spoor or DNA, resist scientific classification in the known biology. Others are relicts—that’s with a t—surviving examples of species believed to be extinct or so close to extinction that living examples are rarely found.”

  “Wow, this is fascinating, Doc,” I said. “By the way, did anyone mention that the Vice President of the United frigging States of America wants us all arrested?”

  Hu peered at me for a moment. “Exciting,” he said. “Another more exotic example is the coelacanth, a large fish believed to have become completely extinct over sixty million years ago, and yet one was netted in December of 1938 by the crew of a South African trawler. Since then living populations of them have been sighted and caught in the waters around Indonesia and South Africa.”

  I grunted. “Sure, I’ve seen them in the Smithsonian.”

  “Generally cryptozoologists search for the more sensational mega-fauna cases—like Bigfoot—rather than new species of beetles or flies. And before you ask, ‘megafauna’ means ‘large animals.’ In biology it’s used to describe any animal weighing more than forty kilograms. And we occasionally find relicts or UMAs that do exist.”

  “Okay, I get that this is like porn for you science geeks, but if there’s some reason I have to sit through it then for Christ’s sake get to it.”

  “I wanted you to have this in mind before I played the video.”

  “Church said he wanted me to watch it without preconceptions so I could form my own opinions.”

  From Hu’s look it was clear that he didn’t think me capable of anything as complex as an “opinion.” He tapped a few keys. “This video was blind e-mailed to us. Someone logged on from an Internet café in São Paolo, created a Yahoo account, sent this, and then abandoned the account. We hacked Yahoo, but all of the info used to create the account was phony. All we have is the file.”

  “Sent to whom?”

  “To an old e-mail account owned by Mr. Church. Don’t ask about the account, because he didn’t tell me. All he said is that it’s one he never uses anymore but which he occasionally checks as a matter of routine.” Hu rubbed his hands together in a way I’d only ever seen mad scientists do in bad movies. “Now . . . watch! I can guarantee you that this is going to blow you away.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia

  Saturday, August 28, 10:48 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 12 minutes

  “We have a virus,” said Judah Levin. He couldn’t help smiling.

  It was an old joke in the CDC’s IT department, and it always got a laugh, or at least a groan.

  His boss, Colleen McVie, looked up from the papers on her desk. She wore her glasses halfway down her nose and measured out half a smile.

  “Unless it’s urgent,” she said, “go practice your standup on someone else. I’m ass deep with the payroll, or don’t you want to get paid?”

  “Being paid is nice, but we actually do have a virus, Colleen. A couple of the secretaries have been complaining about it. It’s a bounce-back program that came at us through—”

  “So . . . deal with it,” she interrupted. “We get fifty viruses a week.”

  “Okay,” he said, and left her office.

  He went back to the main office, where several secretaries were standing around the coffeemaker. Judah had told them to log off and they seemed to take that as a sign to do no work at all. He shrugged—it wasn’t his problem, and Colleen would be buried with her payroll for the rest of the day.

  The virus hadn’t been overtly destructive, but it had been new and oddly configured enough to catch his attention, especially since it arrived as a bounce-back response to the CDC’s daily alert e-mail bulletin.

  Judah sat at one of the workstations, opened his laptop on a wheeled side table, and logged onto both computers. Everything loaded normally all the way to the password screen. He used one of IT’s secure passwords that would open the system but reroute it to his laptop. Again the screens loaded normally. He ran several different spyware scans and came up with nothing.

  He frowned. That was weird, because he had definitely seen the virus warning message pop-up. He tapped a few keys and did a different kind of search.

  Nothing.

  Very weird.

  He logged into the office e-mail account and looked for the e-mail that had likely carried the virus. It was gone.

  Without saying a word he got up and went to the adjoining desk and logged on. Same result—no trace of the e-mail, no trace of a virus. He repeated this four more times, but there was no trace of either the e-mail or the virus anywhere in the system.

  Judah picked up the secretary’s phone and punched the number for Tom Ito, his assistant. When Ito answered, Judah said, “Did you do a system search on an e-mail virus this morning?”

  “No, why—you need me to run one?”

  Judah explained the situation.

  “Got me, Jude. Do we have a problem?”

  Judah thought about it. “Nah. Skip it. If it’s not there, then it’s not there. Nothing to worry about.”

  He hung up and walked over to the secretaries. “Look, the system seems to be clear, but if you get anything else call me right away.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Deck

  Saturday, August 28, 10:49 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 11 minutes

  Cyrus Jakoby received his children in a garden that was so beautifully designed that visitors could easily believe that they were out in the fresh air rather than half a mile under the heat-baked Arizona desert. Cyrus remained seated in a tropical cane rattan chair with a high fan back. He was cool and composed in tropical whites. The Twins bowed to him. They had never hugged their father and only rarely shook hands. Bowing had always been the custom among them. They bowed from the waist in the Chinese fashion, and Cyrus inclined his head like an Emperor and waved them to seats.

  Their chairs were of the same style as his, though not as big,
and from past experience Hecate knew that their chairs were built with slight and carefully planned imperfections. The seats were too deep, so that they had to either perch on the end or sit back and have the sharp edge of the seat cut into the tender flesh above the back of their knees. The legs were ever so slightly uneven, so that they sat off-angled in a way that cramps and aches would gradually form in the lower back and obliques. The chairs were also positioned lower on a slope whose incline was hidden by copious decorative shrubbery and a forced-perspective distraction mosaic made from multicolored tiles. The overall effect was of a lack of comfort and an imbalance that made one feel inferior to the person sitting higher and in obvious comfort in the big chair. And although the design of Cyrus’s chair was island rustic, he rode it like a throne.

  Hecate had long ago found the most comfortable position, half-turned, with her knees together and feet braced to keep her from sliding to the wrong side of the chair. She approved of the chairs and long ago had stopped wondering why she didn’t share her insights with her brother.

  “It’s good to see you, Father,” said Paris, uncomfortably crossing his legs and then uncrossing them.

  Cyrus studied the hummingbirds flitting from one exotic flower to another.

  “It’s good to see you, Alpha,” corrected Hecate.

  Cyrus looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. “And how are my young gods today?”

  “Well, Alpha,” said Hecate. “And you’re looking especially fit.”

  Paris hid a sneer behind a cough and Cyrus affected not to notice.

  Cyrus said, “I’m self-renewing, as you know.”

  “Of course,” Hecate said, though she had no idea what that meant. She made herself look pleased and knowing.

  “Before we discuss whatever it is that’s putting such troubled looks on your faces,” Cyrus said smoothly, “please let me have an update on the shipping.”

  Hecate shrugged. “The entire distribution network is in place. We have three cargo ships of bottled water and bottled sparkling water en route to Africa and six shiploads already in the warehouse in Accra in Ghana, four in Calabar in Nigeria, and two each in Libreville, Gabon; Lomé, Togo; and Tangier. Two of our Brazilian ships will make stops in Callao, Peru, and Guayaquil, Ecuador. The shipments to Chile and Panama will go out next. And we can handle the domestic shipments to New York, Louisiana, and Mississippi by water or rail.”

  For a moment Cyrus’s eyes seemed to lose focus and his skin flushed as if the news touched him on an almost erotic level. It was a reaction Hecate had noted before, but she let no expression show on her face.

  Paris laughed and it broke the spell. “It’s kind of ironic that one of the world’s great criminal enterprises is largely financed by the sale of purified water.”

  “Yes,” Cyrus said with a wolf’s smile. “Life is full of delightful ironies. But don’t forget that illegitimate business cannot succeed without legitimate business. Even those greaseballs in the Mafia understand that.”

  They all chuckled over that, but Hecate’s laugh was as false and measured as her father’s and she knew it. She just did not know why Cyrus thought it was funny. She’d had toxicology screens done on random samples of every shipment of water, and as far as she could tell there was nothing in there but purified water and enough trace minerals to make the health club set think they were actually getting something for the money they spent on glorified tap water. Maybe it was time to run an entirely different set of tests on the water.

  “Father,” began Paris, and then corrected himself with an irritable grunt, “ ‘Alpha’ . . . we’re moving into Phase Three of the South African account. We’ve run the Berserkers through three field tests with variable results, the most recent of which was last night in Somalia. What we’d like is—”

  “ ‘Variable’?” Cyrus interrupted.

  “That’s really why we’re here, Alpha,” explained Hecate. “Our clients have some concerns about certain behavioral anomalies. Concerns that, unfortunately, are borne out by the test results.”

  “What kind of anomalies?”

  Hecate looked at Paris, who gave her a “well, you started this” wave of his hand. She took a breath and plunged ahead. “In the second and third field tests we’ve documented aggression increases in levels beyond what the computer models predicted. In short, the test subjects have become too violent.”

  “Of course they’re violent,” snapped Cyrus. “They’re killers. They’re supposed to be violent. What kind of idiocy is this?”

  At the sound of his raised voice two animals stalked quietly out of foliage behind his chair. Hecate and Paris did almost comic double takes on them because at first glance they appeared to be large dogs, Danes or American mastiffs, but immediately that idea was torn to shreds as the animals stepped from shadows into sunlight. The animal to Cyrus’s left was the bigger of the two, a female with heavy shoulders between which a hideous head lolled. He stared at Hecate with the hateful slitted yellow eyes of a hunting lion. He hissed silently at the Twins and pawed at the ground with retractable claws that left furrows in the tile. The second animal, smaller but thicker in the shoulders, circled the entire clearing at a slow and silent pace.

  Hecate and Paris were frozen to their chairs. Paris’s eyes tried to follow the stalking creature; Hecate couldn’t take her eyes off of the big animal. There was a gas dart pistol in her pocket, but she knew she had no chance at all of drawing it if that thing moved. He crouched there, his tension etching the taut lines of each muscle.

  Paris was always the better actor and he reassembled his composure first. He recrossed his legs and cocked one eyebrow as if appraising a pet poodle.

  “Cute,” he drawled. “What do you call them?”

  “Otto calls them tiger-hounds.”

  “That’s boring.”

  “It won’t be the catalog name,” snapped Cyrus, and just as quickly his voice softened. “We’re working on something catchier. The big one is Isis; her mate is Osiris.”

  Moving very casually, Paris reached under his shirt and withdrew his dart gun. It was made from a high-density polymer blend and had a gas-injection clip that could fire .32 pumpkin balls filled with glass flachettes. He laid it on his thigh, his finger straight along the outside of the trigger guard. He said nothing.

  Cyrus smiled and then made a clicking noise with his tongue. Osiris stopped prowling and came over to sit on Cyrus’s right. Isis stopped hissing, but her eyes never left Hecate’s. The animals sat straight, their bodies as motionless as stone statues carved into the legs of a throne. Every once in a while one of them would blink very slowly, the action serving to remind the Twins of their reality and potential.

  “Hmmm, trainable,” murmured Paris, nodding approval. “Will they bond with multiple handlers?”

  “Within limits,” said Cyrus, “but push comes to shove they’ll protect whoever feeds them first. They bond very quickly with the initial human handler but can be taught to tolerate others.” He reached down and stroked the head of the bigger of the two animals. “I make it a point to be the first person with whom each of my animals bonds.”

  “They’re . . . beautiful.” She could feel the gaze of the animals like a physical touch.

  “They’re ugly as ghouls,” Cyrus snorted. “However, I didn’t design them for their beauty. Pretty can be frightening,” he observed, “but not in a guard dog.”

  “Are they dogs?” Paris asked.

  Cyrus shrugged. “Technically they’re about sixty percent canine. The rest is a mix of useful genetic lines. They’re very much made to order as the perfect free-roaming guard animals. Nothing comes close.”

  Hecate stared, lips parted, at Isis, and the big creature stared back at her and into her with an intensity that was palpable and a personality that was familiar. Hecate said nothing, but when she blinked the animal blinked.

  Paris wasn’t paying attention to his sister. He was hiding a smile provoked by Cyrus’s claims that these creature
s were perfect. Paris personally disagreed with that assessment, but that wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss with his father. Back home, at the lab Paris and Hecate called the Dragon Factory, he had his own guard dogs, and he thought how interesting it would be to pit his Stingers against these tiger-hounds. The Stingers were a breakthrough in deliberate chimeric genetics. The Twins had managed to create animals with mammal and insect genes, a feat of morphogenetics that had kicked open a lot of doors for them. It was one of the benefits of being able to combine research from so many different sources, thanks to Pangaea. A pit fight between his Stingers and the tiger-hounds would be a huge moneymaker. He’d already made some side money with steroid and gene therapy on standard fighting dogs. This would be a more select market, but the more exclusive the commodity the higher the price.

  “We could move twenty mated pairs of these things by close of business,” he said. “One photo and some bare-bones specs in an e-mail and you could name your price.”

  Cyrus shook his head. “I’ll sell pair-bonded brothers, but you can’t have any of the bitches.”

  “That’ll drop the price.”

  “It sustains the market,” Hecate corrected him, earning a nod from their father. “We want to sell fish, not teach our customers how to catch fish.”

  Paris shrugged. This was one of the areas on which his father and sister always agreed. For his part, Paris preferred constantly bringing a series of new products to market rather than establishing ongoing markets. “Well, at least let me take orders on the males.”

  “Talk to Otto,” Cyrus said, and dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “Now, what about the Berserkers?”

  Hecate smoothed her skirt. “For reasons we can’t quite chart, the transgenic process has had several unexpected side effects. On the plus side, physical strength is about ten percent above expectations, but intelligence seems to be diminishing. They’re not idiots, but they seem to rely too much on instinct and too little on higher reasoning. But it’s their aggression level that has our clients concerned. If their aggression continues to escalate with each mission, then there is a very real concern that their behavior will deteriorate beyond a point of practical command control. That will shorten their duration of usefulness in the field.”