Lillian raised her hands helplessly.
‘Results of what?’ she demanded. ‘Even if I took tissue samples they’d crumble before I could do anything with them. This decay is not the action of bacteria eating the flesh, or even of biodegradation. This is a human body decaying at a cellular leveclass="underline" complete and utter disintegration. Even the bones are starting to crumble.’
Lillian turned, and with a blunt instrument tapped Lee Carson’s forearm sharply. The pallid flesh sagged beneath the blow and the bone within splintered with a dull crack.
‘What do you need?’ Oppenheimer asked.
Lillian put the instrument down and folded her arms. She knew there was only one way in which she could identify what had happened to Hiram Conley and Lee Carson. If she could understand that, then she had a possible ticket out of Jeb Oppenheimer’s hands.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do, to me or to anyone else,’ she replied. ‘What you need is a live specimen, nothing less. You won’t need to carve them up or torture them. You’ll just need to sit them down, run some blood through a bypass machine so that it doesn’t decay when it’s outside their body, and study it. Whatever is inside these men, it is as reliant upon them as they are upon it. Apart, they are nothing.’
Oppenheimer glared at Lillian angrily for a long moment, and then turned.
‘Keep working while there’s still something left,’ he ordered, and left the theater, slamming the door after him.
Lillian waited for a moment until she was sure that he had gone, and then turned her attention back to Lee Carson’s remains. She stretched over his chest and peered down into the depths of his ribcage, deliberately keeping her own body between Carson and the cameras she knew were watching her from the corner of the room. She pushed aside the brittle tissue of Carson’s lungs with her gloved hands until she saw what she’d been looking at for the past half-hour, before Oppenheimer had stalked into the theater.
Buried deep within Lee Carson’s heart, at the end of a ragged passage where it had torn through the tissue, was a single musket ball, the dull metal gleaming at her from within the left clavicle of the heart. Lillian felt her own heart skip a beat. The ball was gleaming because the tissue around it was still moist, as live and fresh and healthy as it had been for over a hundred fifty years. Whatever had kept Lee Carson young for over a century and a half had relied upon the one thing that his body could supply, and when death had finally come, whatever wonders it had achieved were lost with it. Only the musket ball, buried within his heart, had provided it with the fuel it required to stay alive in that tiny vicinity. Tyler Willis had been right.
Iron.
Oppenheimer took the elevator from the operating theater to the first floor of the SkinGen building, then turned right and walked through a warehouse packed with boxes of pharmaceutical tools and chemicals. His cane clicked through the open spaces until he reached a loading bay where ten men were waiting for him. All were dressed in black jump-suits, their bodies festooned with weaponry. He knew that they represented the command element of a combined force of some one hundred men, who were already waiting at a prearranged location out in the deserts of New Mexico.
Be ever prepared, his father had once told him, and be not beleaguered by the unexpected.
Oppenheimer disliked mercenaries. Hired guns were unpredictable and liable to self-preservation rather than loyalty, and the fact that Wolfe had sent them instead of trained troops bothered him immensely. Sure, their presence and service would be entirely deniable to either USAMRIID or SkinGen, but mercenaries could just as easily abandon the chase or even turn against him — or indeed Donald Wolfe if the going got too tough. He knew well enough the art of betrayal. A line from recent memory infiltrated his thoughts: ‘In the end, only one remained, the strongest of them all. But as that individual was now entirely alone they were worth nothing, and collapsed and died, having eradicated themselves from existence.’
He extinguished Saffron’s words from his mind as the leader of the hired men, a man named Red Hoffman, stepped forward. He was tall and bulky, with a flat-topped buzz cut of ginger hair and a pallid face pock-marked with what had likely been childhood acne.
‘We’re ready to go, sir,’ he said. ‘What’s our target?’
‘How many of your men have served in the military?’ Oppenheimer asked, gesturing to the men behind Hoffman.
‘All of them, sir,’ Hoffman replied, raising his chin. ‘Every single man I’ve hired has served at least one tour of duty in—’
Oppenheimer walked past Hoffman. The man disgusted him already, acting as though he were commanding a Delta Force legion when his pasty skin and sagging guts suggested otherwise. Oppenheimer selected a scrawny-looking man with receding hair and bloodshot eyes, whose face bore crooked scars that ran from the corners of his mouth up his cheeks in a permanent macabre grin.
‘You. When and where did you serve?’
‘The ’80s, sir, US Army, First Infantry Division.’
Oppenheimer took in the man’s slumped shoulders and skinny hands. ‘Where were your headquarters?’
‘Fort Hood, Texas, sir,’ the man replied with a slight quiver.
Oppenheimer turned to look at Hoffman.
‘The First Infantry are based at Fort Riley, Kansas,’ he said quietly. ‘First Cavalry are at Fort Hood.’
Hoffman’s proud demeanor slumped.
‘A genuine mistake, sir,’ he muttered. ‘Been a while since our service years for most of us.’
Oppenheimer stepped up to glare into Hoffman’s eyes and spoke loudly enough for the men behind them to hear.
‘I dislike liars,’ he rattled. ‘You’re being paid good money to go out there and track down several men, but judging by your fat gut and your double chin the closest you’ve gotten to the army is playing with toy soldiers in your grandma’s fucking garden.’
Hoffman’s pocked skin flushed pink as he stared over Oppenheimer’s head into the distance. Oppenheimer turned and paced up and down as he addressed the men as one.
‘The man you are looking for is Ethan Warner. He is a former United States Marine with combat experience who is likely more capable than every man standing here combined. I suggest that you lose your fantasies of being elite soldiers and concentrate on your strengths.’ He looked at each and every one of them with revulsion. ‘Your only strength being numbers.’ He turned to Hoffman. ‘Get these assholes off my property and out into the desert. Ethan Warner is searching for a small group of men who must not be harmed. As for Warner, the first person to shoot him dead and bring his head back here will receive enough money to buy a small island in the Bahamas, is that clear?’
The men bellowed a cry of ‘hoo-rarr’ and began jogging out of the warehouse and down to the loading area outside, where two coaches were waiting for them. Oppenheimer reached into his pocket and retrieved his small GPS locator, checking its screen. There, in the middle of a map of the New Mexico desert, a signal beeped and flashed once every second.
Oppenheimer smiled.
‘There you are, Ms Lopez,’ he said. ‘Everybody can be bought.’
He turned to Hoffman, who was shouting orders as his men loaded heavy cases into the coaches.
‘Hoffman! Get Lillian Cruz up here! We’ll need her on the scene if we capture our targets.’
Hoffman selected two of his men and stormed off toward the theater. Oppenheimer watched them go and then checked his GPS tracker one last time before walking toward the coaches, determined that he would witness his finest hour with his own eyes.
50
‘What is it?’
Ethan hurried down into the flickering light of the camp fires to see Lopez gesturing for him to follow her, pointing toward a young girl who sat quietly amongst a small knot of Saffron’s followers.