‘Conley met me again a week or two later, and told me he was infected with the bacteria,’ Willis went on. ‘He told me he was a hundred ninety years old.’
‘He was, give or take a few years,’ Lillian confirmed. ‘I’ve run every test on him since Oppenheimer brought me here.’
Willis smiled despite his discomfort.
‘I didn’t believe him at first,’ he said, ‘but pretty soon I realized he was telling the truth, not least because he was dying and was searching for a cure.’
‘The decay?’ Lillian asked. ‘On his arms?’
‘Yeah, it was like he was coming apart at the seams. Some kind of cellular breakdown.’
‘So, you were working with him to try and reverse that?’
Willis sighed again, his eyes closing as Lillian continued replacing the bandages on his stomach.
‘Partly,’ he said. ‘I’d been approached recently by Jeb Oppenheimer, not long after I’d published the papers on Bacillus permians. He wanted to hire me as a specialist, offered to treble my salary. I said no; I knew I was onto something big and wanted to keep it to myself. But when Hiram Conley came on the scene, I decided that if I could figure out what was keeping him from aging, I could sell it to SkinGen for far more than just a fat salary.’
Lillian stopped working, looking down at Willis.
‘You sold out,’ she said finally.
Willis nodded.
‘I’m not proud of it, but I was looking at retiring at thirty-five years of age. Who wouldn’t have taken the chance? Sure, I could have stuck with it and figured it out myself, but I thought: what the hell? Let Oppenheimer sort it out, and I’ll buy myself a condo in the Bahamas and spend the rest of my life sipping cocktails on a yacht somewhere.’
‘What happened?’ she asked him.
‘I offered to take Hiram Conley’s blood to Oppenheimer, who could then use it for tests, but Jeb wanted Hiram Conley to come in himself. I met Conley out in Glorietta Pass, and was trying to convince him it was a good idea when he suddenly pulled his gun and shot me.’
Lillian frowned.
‘So how come Oppenheimer’s got you here now? Surely he could have just left you alone once he’d grabbed Conley’s corpse from my morgue.’
‘Because I didn’t tell him about the cellular degradation,’ Willis said. ‘He only figured that out once he’d taken a look at the corpse and realized that his people at SkinGen didn’t have the skills necessary to manufacture or engineer a genetic copy of the infection. Even the blood samples I’d taken from Conley had degraded. I’d pitched the whole thing to him as good as I could to get the most money, and he was stuck with a corpse that he couldn’t use. I guess Oppenheimer wanted revenge, and for me to figure it out along with you.’
Lillian nodded.
‘And then he kills us both,’ she said. ‘Are there other people chasing this?’
‘Some,’ Willis admitted. ‘Very wealthy people, who had also read my published papers and were interested in investing in my work. I don’t have any names, but I did some research and know that they were part of something called the Bilderberg Group. You ever heard of them?’
Lillian shook her head.
‘Wealthy individuals like Oppenheimer?’ she asked. ‘Pharmaceutical companies?’
‘No,’ Willis shook his head, ‘way bigger than that.’ He looked up at her. ‘And two detectives, government people or so they said. Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. They seemed solid, but I got jumped by Oppenheimer’s goons before I could tell them much.’
‘I think they were the ones looking for us here,’ Lillian confirmed, recalling the earlier altercation outside the laboratory.
‘You figured anything out yet?’ Willis asked her.
Lillian glanced across at Hiram Conley’s remains.
‘Nothing adds up,’ she admitted. ‘What little blood I managed to extract shows signs of anemia, but there was nothing to explain the mummification of the remains, especially not overnight.’
Willis nodded, his voice sounding dreamlike, as though he were struggling to connect his thought processes.
‘The anemia could be due to a mineral deficiency,’ he said. ‘I noticed it in Hiram’s blood pathology before he died. The mummification is almost certainly calcification.’
Lillian blinked in surprise. Calcification was a conservative-transformative phenomenon by which a corpse could appear petrified when the skeleton rapidly absorbed calcium salts in the presence of bacterial decomposition of internal organs.
‘You think that the bacteria inside him affected his calcium levels in some way?’
Willis shrugged lazily, his eyelids half closed.
‘Seems likely to me,’ he murmured. ‘If he was hosting a bacterial infection as I assume he was, then the bacteria must have themselves consumed resources. That’s how they live inside us symbiotically, consuming and replenishing. Maybe Hiram’s death starved them of whatever they needed, and his apparent mummification was the result?’
Lillian nodded, glancing again at the corpse.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she whispered, and then looked down at Willis.
His eyes were closed, and as she watched his breathing slowed gently until his chest stopped moving. Lillian stared at his serene features for a long moment, and then moved away from his body.
The door to the laboratory opened and the guard walked back in carrying a tray of food. Lillian looked across at him and wiped a tear from her eye.
‘You’re too late,’ she said softly. ‘Oppenheimer must have cut him deeper than he realized.’
The guard took one look at Willis’s inert body, dropped the tray and dashed away.
33
‘What the hell’s going on?’
Ethan stood in a hotel room on the city’s south side, looking at the twinkling lights outside his window as he listened to Doug Jarvis on the other end of the line back in Washington DC.
‘Your man Oppenheimer has friends in high places, Ethan. A guy turned up yesterday in the offices here from USAMRIID, some big-shot who’s rated the situation down in Santa Fe as a potential toxic hazard. They’re trying to get jurisdiction of the case and have pushed the DIA and our own medical outfit, NCMI, out of the way.’
‘That’s crap,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If this was a disease it would have spread by now. The apartment block Tyler Willis lived in is home to hundreds of people.’
‘It’s not just that, Ethan,’ Doug said. ‘The high and mighty here at the DIA aren’t best pleased with your investigation down there. They need someone who can work under the radar, not start gunfights and blow up apartment blocks.’
‘We didn’t do the shooting or the blowing up of anything, Doug. Whoever hit that building was either trying to take Willis out, take us out or destroy evidence. Maybe all three. Fact is, they did a damned good job. We’ve got nothing much left to go on without Willis, and Saffron Oppenheimer’s little gang will be almost impossible to find out in the Pecos.’
Ethan waited for a long moment until he heard Doug sigh on the other end of the line.
‘There’s not much that I can do this end except keep my boss out of the loop and hope you two can come up with something before USAMRIID really start putting the heat on. You sure you haven’t got anything else there?’
Ethan looked down at the bed where a photograph lay on the sheet. He picked it up, looking at the faded image of the group of Civil War soldiers.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant Zamora’s off duty and is meeting us here shortly. He’s got some kind of information for us that he couldn’t share while USAMRIID were on site at SkinGen. Listen, Doug, can you have a dig around for me, see why it is they’re coming down hard on us? They have no real connection professionally with SkinGen Corp, except maybe to monitor their work as part of their remit. Jeb Oppenheimer was talking about plans for population control and eugenics. He seems to think that money can buy him anything at all, and why the hell else would USAMRIID personnel be visiting him down here in Santa Fe?’