He wished Zero were alone, but Zero might wind up telling Romy and Patrick anyway, so it was better they all heard it firsthand.
“I’ve lied to you, Zero. Lied to you from the day you were old enough to understand. You’re not a mutant sim. You’re the very first viable sim. We designated you ‘Sim Zero.’ Your cells provided the source material that was modified and remodified into the creatures we now call sims. All sims are your descendants, Zero. You are the sim Adam.”
Ellis heard Romy gasp, heard Patrick mutter, “Oh, man!” But he was watching Zero.
Zero looked up, fixed him a moment with his yellow irises, then looked away again. “And who ismy Adam?”
“That’s a longer, more complicated story. ButI was lied to long before you were, Zero. To see the whole picture, we have to go back to the early days when my brother and I were plowing all our capital and everything we could borrow into germline engineering a commercially useful chimp-human hybrid. We weren’t looking to create a labor force then. We had other uses in mind—antibodies and xenografts were high on our list. We could see success down the road but we needed more funding. To get it, we made a deal with the Devil.
“Mercer approached the Pentagon with a plan to co-develop an aggressive warrior-type simian-human hybrid along with the more docile strain we wanted to market for commercial use. The World Trade Towers were still standing then, but everyone in the military accepted that sooner or later we’d be at war again in the Middle East. So the generals jumped at the plan. But they realized the outrage that would arise when the public learned that the army was creating gonzo animal warriors and training them to kill humans—what if they got loose?—so they cloaked their involvement under layers of security and bureaucracy.
“A wing of Army Intelligence was created to develop and train these hybrids as warriors; it was given the innocuous name of Social Impact Studies Group. SIRG in turn created Manassas Ventures as a conduit for the funds funneled to our new company, SimGen. To make this look like a real venture capital deal, the head of SIRG, a colonel named Conrad Landon, demanded that Manassas get a piece of SimGen in return for the investment. We agreed, not knowing at the time that we’d be mortgaging our souls.
“But even with all these millions in funding, the transgenic road to a sim-human hybrid was fraught with obstacles, and at times seemed impassable. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, embryo splitting, and germline modifications are routine procedures now, but not then. We found we were able to increase the intelligence of apes, mandrills, and baboons by only small degrees, which did not make the Pentagon happy. And we were also running into walls trying to ‘upgrade’ the chimp genome closer to human. We were swapping genes from our own cells into chimp germlines and making a hideous mess of it. With a string of failures and the Pentagon breathing down our necks, I was cracking under the pressure.”
Ellis sighed, remembering and regretting his decision to take a sabbatical at that time. Merce had been enraged, screaming that he was jeopardizing both their futures, but Ellis had made up his mind. He’d recently wed Judy and already their marriage was in trouble because he was never home. So for his own sanity and the sake of his marriage, he’d left his brother to work alone while they flew to France and rented a little house in Provence. It had temporarily saved his marriage, but it ruined the rest of his life.
“So I took a breather to rest and recoup. I intended to stay a month but that stretched into two, then three, then longer. I shouldn’t have gone at all. I’ve done many foolish things in my life, but the most foolish was trusting my brother to work alone.”
32
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
Darryl Lister had been waiting twenty minutes in Portero’s undersized backwoods shack. How did he stand this crummy, uncomfortable furniture? The guy lived like a refugee.
But not for too much longer.
He heard a car pull up outside and gestured to Venisi, one of the two men he’d brought with him, to check the window. He looked out and nodded.
Okay. Portero was here. Darryl took a deep breath. He’d been steeling himself for this moment since the word had come down a few hours ago. Now that it was here he wanted to get it over with. They’d been through a lot, Portero and he, but the time had come to put the past aside and deal with the present.
Darryl pointed to either side of the front door; Venisi and Markham nodded, drew their pistols, and moved into position.
He’s seen my car, he thought. He’ll be expecting me, but not them.
A few seconds later Portero stepped through, dressed in black BDU shirt and pants, his face tight, obviously ready for a confrontation. He immediately spotted his two extra guests and his hand darted toward his sidearm, but stopped halfway.
“Let’s not do anything precipitous, Portero,” Darryl said.
Portero glanced around the room. “Maria?”
“She’s in the bedroom. She didn’t feel a thing.”
Portero squeezed his eyes shut. “You didn’t have to—”
“Yes, I did.” Markham had held her down while Venisi put a bullet through her brain. She’d looked very peaceful when Darryl had looked in on her. “And it’s your fault. If you’d dumped her when I told you, she’d still be alive now, but you’re bigger than the rules, aren’t you, Portero. Now hold still while these two gentlemen search you.”
Darryl had warned his two men about Portero. He’d seen the guy in action—tough, fast, vicious—and didn’t want any slipups. Venisi covered him while Markham removed Portero’s pistol from his holster and did the pat down.
“What’s this all about?”
“Clean-up time. The time when you tie up the loose ends, mop up the floor, close the door, and walk away.”
When Markham was done, he nodded.
“You’re telling me I’m a loose end?”
“Eminently so.”
Portero looked at the ceiling. “I see.”
Darryl had to admire his composure. No breakdown, no begging. But he’d expected no less. If he kept this up, the next five minutes would be bearable.
“The Old Man found out about Snyder and Grimes,” Darryl told him. “I had to say you hid their deaths from me as well.”
That had been one hairy meeting. The Old Man had just received word that the DoD had reversed its approval for Operation Guillotine—soon as the Pentagon heard about the sim’s baby, it decided it wanted nothing to do with monkey commandos—and he was in a frothing rage. For a few bladder-clenching moments there Darryl had thought he might be scheduled for a one-way ride into the woods, but he’d managed to shift all the blame to Portero.
“Snyder and Grimes brought your loss total to six men—five KIA and one Section Eight. But that’s only part of the reason I’m here.” He gestured toward the door. “Let’s step outside.”
Portero led the way, followed by Venisi and Markham. Darryl brought up the rear.
“It’s all falling apart,” he said as he ejected the clip from the pistol that had been used on Maria. “The sweetest arrangement ever—ever—is tumbling down around us. All because you didn’t do your job. So now we have to fall back. Covering our tracks isn’t going to be enough. We have to erase them.”
One by one he began removing the .45 caliber rounds from the clip.
“For instance, as we speak, there’s an inferno raging in the middle of an Idaho nowhere, roasting a lot of monkey meat. When the arson squad, or whoever eventually gets the job, starts to sift through the ashes, they’re going to have a lot of questions, but no answers.”
When he got down to the last round, he left it in the clip and pocketed the others.