‘I’m already on it,’ Jarvis replied. ‘SkinGen doesn’t do work into infectious diseases, especially not for the military. According to SkinGen’s spokesperson, Donald Wolfe stayed overnight on Jeb Oppenheimer’s yacht before flying direct to DC this morning on a SkinGen jet and then on to Manhattan afterward, or so he told Director Mitchell.’
‘So?’ Ethan asked.
‘So I started wondering why someone at USAMRIID would be hanging around Jeb Oppenheimer, flying aboard his jets and such like instead of taking a military transport. I sneaked a peak at the flight plans filed by the pilots of the SkinGen jet. Turns out that it took off fifteen hours earlier than he’s saying. Wherever the hell he went it wasn’t direct to DC. Seems like Wolfe’s used his authority to conceal the aircraft’s true flight path. Whatever the hell this guy’s up to, he’s hiding it from both the DIA and USAMRIID. I might be able to twist a few arms at the National Security Agency and get some surveillance, see where he’s really been.’
‘At least it’ll be something we can work with,’ Ethan said. ‘Let me know.’
He hung up, looked at the photograph again and then out the window across the city to where the Sangre de Cristo mountains loomed in the lonely darkness beyond.
New Mexico was a huge state largely filled with desert and nothing much else. To survive out in the wilderness men would need specific skills to be able to live off the land with minimal support. He thought back to his days in the Marine Corps with the 15th Expeditionary Unit, and the skills they’d employed.
On November 25, 2001, the 15th MEU Special Operations Command launched an amphibious assault over four hundred miles into Afghanistan, with Ethan’s own platoon attached to a Marine Recon patrol. Landing at an airbase southwest of Kandahar, they had established Camp Rhino, America’s first forward operating base and conventional ground presence in Afghanistan. Deploying again in 2003, Ethan’s platoon, again supporting Marine Recons, crossed the border into southern Iraq and secured the ports of Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr in order to destroy Iraqi resistance and enable follow-on humanitarian assistance to begin.
Ethan had, with his men, learned several important lessons during the initial infiltration into Afghanistan that had helped them upon arrival in Iraq. Chiefly, that the desert might be extremely hot during the day but it becomes extremely cold during the night. Water, though scarce on the surface, was available at depth beneath the dunes and wadis, if you knew where to look for the telltale signs of old river courses betraying the presence of rare downpours and the subterranean aquifers they fed. The ports secured in Iraq had revealed another useful quirk of desert life: the presence of coastal water produces morning mist as the sun rises, which can be captured in suspended plastic bags as moisture, providing limited additional water to troops in time of dire need. But the most important lesson of all, above anything else, was local knowledge. Befriending native Bedouin tribes, trackers and guides had taught Ethan more about desert survival in three months than he’d learned with the Corps in three years.
He looked out into the darkness. A small group of seven men could conceivably live indefinitely off the land without betraying even the slightest hint of their presence. They would only be forced into urban areas to buy medicines. Obtaining food, water and shelter would not require assistance, especially if they did not age.
But an old man, one like Hiram Conley, might tire of such a lifestyle. Ethan remembered what Tyler Willis had said: whatever had kept them alive for so long had not made them younger, it had only halted cellular senescence. They had become frozen at whatever age they were when they encountered whatever it was that had given them the gift of immortality. That meant that Hiram Conley had been around sixty years old ever since the Civil War, which for his era was virtually geriatric. He may have been suffering from various age-related ailments already, and thus cursed with having to endure them forever. Ethan figured that a century and a half of chronic arthritis would be enough to make anyone throw in the towel, immortal or not.
A knock at the door broke his reverie, and he opened it to see Lopez standing with Zamora in the corridor outside.
‘Thanks for coming over,’ Ethan said to Zamora as he bid them inside, noticing that the officer had removed the sling from his arm.
‘No problem,’ Zamora replied, ‘although I can only speak to you now in an unofficial capacity. Something’s going on at town hall and it stinks.’
‘They’ve shut you down?’ Ethan asked, closing the door.
‘USAMRIID’s taken over,’ Lopez said as she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Butch Cutler’s got a small army of guys crawling over what’s left of Tyler Willis’s apartment, searching for traces of chemicals.’
Ethan frowned.
‘It doesn’t make any sense. If we’re assuming that for some reason Jeb Oppenheimer or someone within SkinGen decided to blow up the apartment, then why would USAMRIID be in there looking for chemicals? Forensics would be able to detect any kind of explosives or accelerants used in the attack.’
‘Maybe SkinGen didn’t make the hit,’ Lopez suggested.
‘What do you mean?’
Zamora took out a photograph, a black-and-white mugshot. A strikingly handsome man stared at the camera, a height chart on the wall behind him.
‘You’re looking at a man named Lee Carson,’ Zamora said, ‘arrested for drunk and disorderly outside a bootlegger’s called Old Wayne’s in Albuquerque. Yesterday, a call came in from Jay’s Bar and Grill in La Cienega, south of Santa Fe. A girl who works there reported a man who came in by the name of Lee Carson, whose hand appeared to be suffering from some kind of wasting disease. I recognized it as the same affliction being suffered by Hiram Conley when I encountered him out Glorietta way.’
Ethan felt a pulse of excitement.
‘He’s one of the others that Willis mentioned? Can we be sure?’
‘The girl described Lee Carson as about twenty-five years of age,’ Zamora said, and then gestured to the mugshot. ‘That was taken in 1929. Old Wayne’s was shut down during the great Depression, long before World War Two.’
Ethan stared at the photograph again.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said finally.
Turning, he picked up the old photograph of the seven soldiers standing beside the cart in 1862, and scanned their faces. Within seconds he saw what he was looking for, and handed the photograph to Lopez.
‘Second from right, the one with the hat on,’ he said.
Lopez stared at the picture, and Ethan saw her jaw drop.
‘He’s there,’ she said in a whisper. ‘This photograph is over a hundred fifty years old.’
Ethan looked at Zamora.
‘These people, survivors, whatever they are, must be in contact with each other. They must be experiencing some kind of reaction. Tyler Willis said they were suffering from a bacterial infection. If we assume that they were all infected at the same time, then they’ll all be showing these kinds of afflictions. Maybe that’s why Hiram Conley came out of hiding: he knew he was dying and needed help. It’s the only reason these people would reveal their secret.’
Zamora caught on to where Ethan was going.
‘They’ll rally together and try to find a solution,’ he said. ‘They’ll seek out medication, a cure.’
‘The question is where?’ Ethan pondered out loud.
Zamora was about to answer when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, answered, and his face fell as he listened. Slowly, he lowered the phone to his side and looked at Ethan.