“And now they’re dead,” said Lasser.
“Right. I can’t explain it, Morgan. I mean, someone took them out, that’s obvious, but as to who, your guess would be as good as mine.”
“We don’t have any time for guessing games, goddammit! Blowing the ldeal Maternity connection puts us all in danger. Do you understand that, Garrick?”
“Sure.”
“When I say all of us, that means you, too.”
“I hear you.”
“Relocation may not be enough,” Lasser declared. “Radcliff hasn’t mentioned anything about the breeders yet, but we already know he lost one before he called us in.”
“He can’t blame us for that,” said Tilton.
“Blame’s beside the point, for Christ’s sake! It won’t mean shit who’s guilty if we all go down the tube together.”
“Can we fix it?”
“Maybe. You got rid of the two losers they called orderlies, correct?”
“Deep six,” said Tilton, with a wary smile. “They’re gone for good.”
“All right, then. Say the girl finds someone to believe her story and the cops come looking. There’s an empty building, with no forwarding address. So far, so good.”
“Except for Radcliff.”
“Right. He’s on the paperwork, and people know about him in the town. It won’t take long to trace him back to Brandenburg.”
“The clinic’s covered, right?”
“Should be. I mean, it’s ninety, ninety-five percent legit already, and you’d need a scientist to spot what’s cooking in the lab. No way an Indiana sheriff’s going to see through it. Even if they bring the FBI along, they’ll need a special team and have to know exactly what they’re looking for.”
“We’re covered, then,” Tilton concluded, starting to relax.
“Unless they stumble on the farm.”
“Aw, shit!”
“‘Aw shit’ is right,” said Lasser. “They won’t need a fucking Sherlock Holmes to figure out there’s something wrong about that place.”
“So, are we moving them? The drones, I mean?”
“Not yet. With things stirred up right now, it’s risky, drawing more attention than we have to. Think about it. We don’t know for sure this runaway—what was her name?”
“Joy Patton.”
“Right. We don’t know where she is or who she’s talking to—if anyone. She may be satisfied to get away and let it go at that. File says she was a hooker in L.A. before she came on board the project. That’s a knock against her credibility, right off the top.”
“But, still…”
“We need to take it easy for a while and see if anybody else shows up in Dogpatch.”
“That’s ‘Dogwood.’”
“Whatever. Radcliff still has people on the payroll there, and we can tap into the cop shop if we have to.”
“Jesus, Morgan.”
“Jesus, nothing. This one is. for all the marbles, Garrick. If you haven’t grasped that yet, it’s time to give your brain a wake-up call.”
“I hear you. What’s the plan?”
“We’re staking out the farm ourselves. We leave in twenty minutes.”
Tilton blinked. “You’re going?”
“What did I just say?”
“Well, hey…that’s great.”
Lasser could well imagine what his number two was feeling. Disappointment, even anger, tempered with a measure of relief. It was demeaning to be pushed aside and have the boss take over, like a slap across the face, but Tilton also had to realize that full responsibility for any more snafus would fall on Lasser’s head. That wasn’t quite the safety net that Garrick Tilton would have wished for, but he wasn’t about to find himself a better deal.
“Who are we using?” Tilton asked him.
“Drones. They’ve got eleven trained and ready as it is. The rest of them can treat it as an exercise.”
“That’s pretty smart,” said Tilton, trying on some flattery for size.
“It makes more sense than having independents on the grounds. We’ve had too many problems lately, as it is.”
“I’d better pack.”
“Forget about it They’ve got everything we need, already.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Remember, Garrick, this one is for keeps. Two reasons why we’re doing it ourselves. The first is, Radcliff asked me to come out, but more importantly, when I sign off on something, I expect it to go down as planned. No explanations, no excuses, no mistakes.”
“I hear you, Morgan.”
“Good. Let’s roll.”
Chapter 18
“Cloning?” Harold Smith sounded incredulous. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No way,” said Remo. “It’s the only answer that makes any sense, considering the circumstances.”
“But we are years away from cloning human beings. Maybe decades.”
“I suppose that all depends on who you mean by ‘we,’” said Remo. “I think Radcliff and Eugenix pulled it off.”
“With Thomas Hardy?”
“Right.”
“But that is—”
“Impossible?” asked Remo. “How else do we manage to explain the faces and the fingerprints? These shooters don’t just look like Hardy—they are Hardy.”
Smith considered that for several silent moments. When he spoke again, he sounded weary, like a runner in the last mile of a marathon. “So, you imagine that he has found a way to take…material from Hardy’s corpse and use it somehow to impregnate women? That is the angle on Ideal Maternity?”
“It looks that way to me,” Remo confirmed. “All the talk about adoptive homes and surrogates was bullshit. Radcliff had his so-called unwed mothers giving birth to Hardy time and time again. He gets rid of the women afterward, and starts the whole thing over with another batch.”
“The clones we have seen—if they are clones— were in their twenties, Remo. That would mean—”
“That Radcliff’s been producing little monsters since the early 1970s. That’s right.”
“It will not hold up,” Smith said. “There is nothing in the research to suggest that criminal behavior is genetic. Certain types of mental illness, granted, but there is nothing to support a claim that Hardy was insane. Hit men are not born, they are made.”
“Which brings us to the doctor’s home for boys.”
Smith saw where they were headed, and the view did not improve his mood. “Some kind of school for homicidal maniacs,” he said. “Is that the theory?”
“Not at all. You can’t control a maniac. What Radcliff needs is trained professionals. The kind you get from years of training and emotional conditioning.”
“Like boot camp.”
“Starting from the cradle up,” said Remo.
“The place would need some kind of license,” Smith retorted. “There would be inspections and evaluations, gossip by employees and deliverymen. He could not hide that many clones or pass them off as twins and triplets.”
“First of all, we don’t know how many he has,” said Remo. “Six, for sure, and no one’s saying he produced them all at once. Radcliff had thirteen girls in Dogwood, all at different stages of their pregnancies. Let’s say, at peak production, he can count on six or seven clones a year. They’re no good to him till they’re old enough to pass as adults, and it takes that long to train them, anyway.”
“Still—”
“Let me finish. Formal education doesn’t start until the age of five or six, and I’d be very much surprised if any supervised facility could get away with taking children much below that age.”
“Which means—”
“He’s got another place to stash the infants, right,” said Remo. “Let them cut their teeth on war toys, watching Scarface on the VCR, whatever. I suppose we’ll have to try and squeeze someone to find out where it is.”