The Dragon Factory Read online

  Sunderland did not speak the string of racial invectives that rose to his lips. He said, “You think too highly of him.”

  “Maybe. If I do it’s because he has Church behind him. Or . . . maybe Church really is controlling him. Either way it brings Church into the picture. We’re directly attacking him and the President.”

  J.P. Sunderland shrugged as if Church and his influence was a non-issue, though in truth he knew Church—and his potential—with greater scope and clarity than the Vice President could ever hope to possess. Sunderland finished his Scotch, hauled himself out of his chair, and waddled to the side table to pour a refill, heavy on the Scotch with a nominal spritz of soda. Then he made a fresh drink for the Vice President. The order in which these things were done was not lost on Collins.

  “God, I just want this over with.” The Vice President jerked the glass out of Sunderland’s hand, sloshing some on his desk blotter. He scowled as he threw half of it back too fast and coughed. Sunderland looked amused as he tottered back to his chair and sank down with a sigh. Collins glared into his drink. “And I want that fucking computer.”

  “We all want something, Bill. You want to get your office back to the level of power it had during Cheney’s time, and I want what I want.”

  And what I want, Sunderland thought, is to take that computer system out of the equation.

  MindReader was the key for both of them. For Collins, acquiring it was less important than silencing it. Sunderland saw it as a short path to a veritable license to print money. His current business partners, the Jakoby Twins—those brilliant albino freaks—could use MindReader to filch even the most heavily encrypted research records from every other genetics lab in the world. The Twins had sidestepped most of the normal limitations most geneticists faced—an insufficient annotation of the genome—by stealing bits and pieces of annotation from different sources. As a result they were already miles beyond anyone else, but they’d hit a wall with what their current computer—Pangaea—could steal. The Jakobys were willing to pay absurd amounts of money to possess MindReader, but as he sipped his Scotch Sunderland toyed with the idea of only leasing it to them. Why give away the cow?

  That way he could also lease use of the system to their father, Cyrus Jakoby. Sunderland greatly admired the elder Jakoby and shared many of Cyrus’s political, ethnic, and societal views. MindReader could push Cyrus’s plans ahead by an order of magnitude. And Cyrus would pay for that advantage, no doubt about it.

  His other concern was his own brother, Harold, who was close with the Jakoby Twins and often went hunting with them or their friends. Harold was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and if MindReader was ever aimed in the direction of the Jakobys then it would find Harold—and that would lead right back to J.P. and the bills he wanted passed. Harold was really the only traceable link, even though he wasn’t really a player himself. But more than one good scheme had been sunk by the presence of an idiot relative.

  He shared none of this with Collins. Sunderland believed in the “need to know” philosophy, and if Collins knew, he’d either chicken out or want a huge cut.

  Sunderland sipped his Scotch and watched the Vice President fret.

  The things in which they both shared interest were the four biotech bills moving through Congress. At the moment there was absolutely nothing that could connect the bills with Collins’s personal interests or Sunderland’s private holdings. MindReader, if aimed in that direction, might change that. Any clear connection that came to light would ruin Collins, trash his political career, and make him a pariah in the business world. It was the lever Sunderland had used to convince Collins to take this action. If the bills were stopped because of some taint of insider knowledge or personal interest, then money would spill all over the place. Without approval of the bills a lot of research would have to go offshore, and that could be costly and time-consuming. Domestic licensing and approval for research led to faster patents, and that got drugs, cell lines, and procedures to market much more quickly.

  Sunderland sipped his drink and hoisted a comforting and comradely smile on his face for the benefit of the Vice President.

  “This had better work,” the Vice President said again.

  Sunderland said nothing.

  They sat in their leather chairs, separated by a big desk and an ocean of personal differences, and they sipped their Scotch, and they waited for the phone to ring.

  Chapter Five

  Holy Redeemer Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 8:16 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 44 minutes

  The NSA guys had split into four teams, taking the corners of a big box with Helen’s grave as the center point. Not imaginative, but not bad. I made sure they saw me checking them out, which in turn made them front me a bit more. They stood tall and tried to look tough as nails from where they stood. Believe me, I was impressed.

  Even so, I play a pretty good hand of poker, and the game’s as much about what’s on your face as what’s in your hand. I got up and as I walked toward Agent Andrews I let my shoulders sag a bit and deflated my chest so that I looked a good deal smaller than I was. He’d already seen me up close, but there’s a lot to be said for second impressions. Along the way I took a couple of sips from the water bottle.

  “Are you ready to come with us, Captain Ledger?” he asked.

  “Still waiting on a ‘why’ or a warrant.”

  Andrews’s face was harder and I guessed he’d been in contact with his seniors. “Sir, we’re here by Executive Order on a matter of national security. We are not required to explain ourselves at this time.” Andrews’s partner shifted a bit to the right; I guess he wanted to show me how big his chest was.

  I made a show of surprise at this pronouncement, stopping the water bottle halfway to my mouth and looking over the rim at Andrews. “You’re saying that the President himself ordered this pickup?”

  Andrews didn’t blink. “Our orders come directly from the White House.”

  He was being cute, which told me that he knew about the Vice President’s little maneuver. He was being very careful in how he phrased things.

  “Okay,” I said as I took a sip.

  Andrews blinked, surprised.

  I spit a mouthful of water into his eyes, then threw the bottle at the other guy—not that it would hurt him, but it made him flinch and evade. Before they could recover I was on them. I grabbed Andrews by the hair and one lapel and pivoted him around into a foot sweep that caught him on the shin. My foot acted like a fulcrum and with his mass and the force of my spin he came right off the ground like he weighed nothing. I threw him into the second agent’s big flat chest and the two of them went down in a heap. I heard a huge whoof! and a cry of pain as the second guy fell with all of Andrews’s mass atop him. Andrews was no lightweight.

  I wasted no time and sprinted for the parked cars. I had my Rapid Response folding knife in my hip pocket and with a loose wrist flick the blade locked into place. I ran past Andrews’s Crown Vic and did a quick jab job on one tire, and then knifed the tire of a second government sedan. But before I could run back to my Explorer, the Nose and the Surfer cut me off. Nose could run like a son of a bitch and he reached me eight strides before his backup. Dumb ass.

  When he was three steps out I pocketed my knife and jagged out of my line of escape to drive right at him. He had a lot of mass in motion; he was coming in to sack the quarterback and he’d built up such a head of steam that there was no way for him to sidestep. I jerked left and clotheslined him with a stiffened right forearm across the base of the nose. There’s an urban myth that hitting the base of the nose can drive bone fragments up into the brain—even some karate instructors insist it’s true, but it’s not physiologically possible. However, a smashed nose, especially at high speed, can give whiplash, fill the Eustachian tubes with blood, set off fireworks in the eyes, and generally make you feel like your head’s in a drum and a crazy ape’s beating o
n it with a stick.

  The Nose flipped backward like someone pulled the rug out from under him and he was out cold before he hit the deck. He’d need a lot of work on that nose of his, but he should never have put his hand on me. Not ever, and especially not here at Helen’s grave. I take that shit very personally.

  As he fell the Surfer closed in at a dead run and he made a grab for his gun, but I pulled mine and pointed it at him. He skidded to a stop.

  “Pull it with two fingers and throw it away,” I ordered. “Do it now!”

  He did it. Four other agents were closing on us, the closest nearly fifty yards out. I kicked the Surfer in the nuts, then knotted my fingers in his short hair and used him as a shield while I backpedaled to my Explorer.

  I spun Surfer-boy around and gave a palm shot across the chops that would put him in a neck brace for a week, and as he crumpled I popped the lock on the Explorer and dove behind the wheel.

  From the time I dropped my human shield to the moment I roared through the exit of the cemetery they had maybe six separate opportunities to take a good shot at my vehicle or me. They didn’t.

  I found that very interesting.

  Chapter Six

  The Jakoby Twins—over Arizona airspace

  Saturday, August 28, 8:18 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 42 minutes E.S.T.

  Hecate Jakoby sat naked on the edge of the bed and stared out of the jet’s window at the rolling mountains of clouds below. She loved the contrast of purest white and ten thousand shades of gray. It was a kind of mirror for her.

  Her brother, Paris, stood in black silk boxers that were a much sharper contrast with his snow-white skin. Paris always dressed in dark colors to highlight the albino richness of his lean and muscular body. Hecate preferred softer colors; she was less comfortable with her white skin than he was, though in truth both of them were absurdly beautiful. Even the people who hated them thought so.

  The woman on the bed moaned and turned over in her sleep. The drugs would wear off in an hour or so, but by then the jet would be on the ground in Arizona and the flight crew would take care of the girl. She’d be fed and paid and given all of the proper instructions. If Hecate and Paris liked the report from the staff, maybe they’d treat the girl to another round of play on the flight back. If not, the bitch would be ferried to the closest town and given enough cash for a bus ticket.

  The digital recording of their sexual encounter would be burned to disk and added to the Twins’ library. The library was indexed by gender, hair color, race, and number of partners. There were three—so far—disks in elegant black cases. Those were special—records of encounters in which their lovely playthings had been cremated and their ashes scattered over the ocean. Not for ceremonial purposes; it was simply an efficient disposal method.

  “That was fun,” murmured Paris. “She was spirited. Do you want a martini?”

  “Please,” said Hecate. “A double.”

  Paris glanced at her from the wet bar, saw that she was staring down at the sleeping woman. “What’s with you? You falling in love?”

  “No . . . just admiring the architecture,” said Hecate distractedly. “Two onions in the martini.” The girl was twenty, buxom, tan, with foamy masses of curly red hair. She had freckles and several ornate tattoos—Chinese characters and Celtic knots. She was everything Hecate was not. Although Hecate was beautifully made—tall and slender and ice pale, with snow-colored hair and eyes as dark as ripe blueberries—she wasn’t a California blonde. Her own breasts were small, her nipples the color of dusty roses. The only mark on her otherwise flawless skin was a small scar in the shape of a starburst that was the same dusty rose color as her nipples. That . . . and a small tattoo on her left inner thigh of a caduceus on which two fierce dragons—not ordinary serpents—coiled around the winged herald’s staff. The scales of the dragons and the symmetry of their bodies suggested a double helix.

  Paris had an identical tattoo on his left upper calf and the same starburst scar on his chest. The scar was their personal mark. A bond in the flesh, as their father often called it, a sign of their greatness and a reminder of what Dad called their celestial heritage. They had been marked at birth when the doctors performing the emergency C-section on their mother had discovered twins locked chest-to-chest in an embrace, their blood-smeared cheeks pressed together. At first the doctors had feared that the twins were conjoined in some surgically challenging way, but as they were carefully lifted out of their dying mother’s womb and laid in the incubator the infants rolled apart, an action that tore the fragile skin over their chests. That had been the only conjoined point, and it did them no harm except to leave a star-shaped scar on each child’s chest. The star never faded.

  The delivering doctor, a deeply Catholic obstetrician at the Cancún hospital where their mother had been rushed following a collapse at a Christmas party at one of the bigger resorts, saw the mark at the moment when the delivery nurse announced the official delivery time. Twelve-oh-one on Christmas morning.

  “Milagro!” the doctor had declared, and crossed himself. A miracle.

  The story made the papers worldwide. Twins, albinos with shocking blue eyes, born at the stroke of midnight as Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. The first birth of the holiday, and each child was marked with a star like the Star of Bethlehem. The story, nonsensical as it might be, was picked up by wire services around the world. The death of their mother and the coincidence of her name—Mary—fueled the story into one of beauty from tragedy. Before the Jakoby Twins were a minute old they were already legends.

  Hecate touched her scar with one hand and with the fingers of the other traced the smooth and unmarked valley between the sleeping girl’s breasts. What would it be like to be ordinary? Hecate mused. Not for the first time.

  Even deep in her sleep the girl felt the touch and moaned again. Hecate bent and kissed the smooth place between the girl’s breasts, paused, and then licked the skin, tasting the olio of sweat, perfume, and natural musk. Hecate wondered what her flesh would truly taste like if she could ever work up the nerve to bite. She wondered how blood would change the taste.

  “Good God,” said Paris as he came over with the drinks, “are you never satisfied?”

  Hecate raised her head and smiled. Her brother never quite understood her, and that was okay. There were plenty of things about her she didn’t want understood. She accepted the martini and sipped it.

  “Mmm, perfect.”

  Paris sipped his drink, set the glass down on the deck beside the bed, and began pulling on his clothes. He put on black slacks, a charcoal shirt, and loafers without socks, his clothing choice conservative to suit the occasion. This was the second of their twice-monthly visits to their father’s laboratory in Arizona. It was really a prison, but they’d sold their father a line of propaganda stating that he needed a safe haven to protect him from the mud people and the government—or at least those parts of the government that weren’t sucking on the Jakoby tit. Cyrus appeared to be convinced of the necessity for a hidden base and they’d coddled him by allowing him to design it according to his “vision.” The base he created was in the shape of a dodecahedron—which Cyrus said was a crucial form in sacred geometry—and became familiarly known as the Deck. The Twins had built hundreds of security and surveillance devices into it, some of which they let Cyrus know about—they were sure he didn’t know about the others.

  “I wish to hell we’d built his lab somewhere closer,” Paris complained. “Fucking Arizona? In August? Besides, it lacks style.”

  “Style?”

  “C’mon,” he said, “it’s a secret lab with an actual mad scientist. We missed an opportunity to be cool.”

  “Secret lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes are so five minutes ago.” Hecate sniffed. “Besides, Dad’s hardly Dr. No.”

  “He’s smarter. And eviler. Is that a word?”

  “No. But it’s true, Daddy certainly puts the ‘mad’ back in ‘mad scien
tist.’ ” She and Paris laughed and clinked glasses.

  “What have you heard from him lately?” asked Hecate, sipping her martini and continuing to stare at the woman she had shared with her brother for the last three hours. She could still smell the woman, still taste her, despite the vodka. The girl had tasted like summer and freedom.

  “His man Otto’s called me a dozen times in the last week. Hmm . . . I wonder if Otto qualifies as an evil assistant or henchman?”

  “Evil assistant, definitely,” decided Hecate.

  “I suppose. Anyway, he said that Dad wants the new generation gene sequencer, the Swedish one that was on the cover of Biotech Times.”

  “So? Let him have it,” said Hecate.

  “He wants two of them, and I think he wants them just because they were on the cover.”

  “Who cares? Buy him a roomful.”

  “He already has a roomful of Four Fifty-four Life Sciences sequencers,” complained Paris. “He says they’re garbage and his attendants had to restrain him from having a go at them with a fire axe.”

  Hecate shrugged. “Why are you making an issue of this? If Alpha wants twenty new computers then let him have them. We can debit his allowance for it. God knows he’s been enough of a cash cow lately to allow him some toys. What’s it to you?”

  Paris sneered at his sister’s use of “Alpha.” Dad had started calling himself that a month ago and insisted that his children only address him by that name. Their father’s staff had to address him as Lord Alpha the Most High. For two years before that he’d only answered when addressed as the Orange, which was a vague reference to some alien race whose origins and nature seem to be in some dispute among UFOlogists. Paris was grudgingly indulgent; he had a vein in his forehead that started pulsing every time he had to shape his lips around one of those names. The only one of his father’s names Paris had ever liked was Merlin, which Cyrus had used for most of their teenage years.