The rest of my team — all of the two-legged variety — were scattered around the country looking at potential recruits. We’d lost some players recently and we had the budget and the presidential authority to hire, coax, or shanghai the top shooters from law enforcement, FBI hostage rescue, and all branches of Special Ops. For guys like us it was like being turned loose in a candy store with a credit card.
We flew through sunlight beneath a flawless blue sky.
When the Koenig Group had gone private a few years ago, they moved out of a lab building on the grounds of the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, an air force base sixteen miles south-east of Trenton, and purchased several connected buildings once occupied by a marine conservation group that had lost its funding. I pulled up the schematics of the place on my tactical computer. The place looked like it had been designed by whoever built the Addams Family mansion and the Bates Motel. The centerpiece was a faux Victorian pile that was all peaked roofs, balconies, widows’ walks, gray shingles and turrets. Almost attractive, but overall too austere and grim-looking. To make it worse, the conversion people had added wings and side buildings to the main structure, all connected by covered walkways that gave the whole place a haphazard, sprawling appearance. Unlovely, unkempt and supposedly unoccupied. Seen from above via satellite, it looked like several octopi collided and somehow melded together and were then covered with shingles and paint. Charming in about the same way as a canker sore is appealing.
The files on the research being conducted at the Koenig Group were sketchy. On the books, the teams there were collating and evaluating data from several thousand smaller biological and genetic projects from around the world. Dead-end projects that had either been canceled because they were too expensive when measured against predicted benefits, or because they’d hit dead ends. The Koenig teams had scored some hits by combining data from multiple stalled projects in order to create a new and more workable protocol, largely influenced by recent advances in science. A transgenics experiment that was infeasible twenty-five years ago might now be doable. The original hypotheses were often well in advance of the scientific capabilities of the day. The Koenig people sometimes had to sort through mountains of old floppy disks — back when they were actually floppy — or crates filled with digital cassette tapes, and even tons of paper to put a lot of this together. It was painstaking work that was often frustrating and futile… but which now and then yielded fruit.
Shame that those bozos didn’t share all of that fruit with the US of A.
Dickheads.
The frustrating thing for us, though, was that we really didn’t know all of what they’d discovered. When the task force kicked the door in, they found a lot of melted junk and very little else. And the management team at Koenig apparently kept their employees compartmentalized so that few of them knew anything of substance. Probably because most of them would have made a call to Uncle Sam if they were in on it. Or they’d want the Koenig people to pad their paychecks. Either way, from what I read in the file, there were only three genuine villains and they were under indictment and under surveillance.
So who was messing around inside the building? And what were they looking for?
Church didn’t think this was anything more than a look-see by someone who used to be a detective. He didn’t offer back-up except for a Barrier agent who would ‘liaise’ with me. Whatever that meant, given the circumstances. Maybe whenever she landed Stateside we’d compare notes over diner coffee and that would be that.
But as I looked at the satellite photo of the sprawling, ugly building I began to get a small itch between my shoulder blades. Not quite a premonition, but in that neck of the woods. What my grandmother used to call a ‘sumthin’’, as in ‘sumthin’ doesn’t feel right’. My gran was a spooky old broad. In my family no one laughed off or ignored her sumthins.
I gave myself a quick pat-down to make sure I’d brought the right toys to this playground. My Beretta 92F was snugged into its nylon shoulder rig; the rapid-release folding knife was clipped in place inside my right front pants pocket. There was a steel garrotte threaded through my belt and I had two extra magazines for the Beretta.
The sad part of it was this was how I dressed all the time. I had this stuff on me when I went to Starbucks to read the Sunday papers. I would have had it on me at the ballpark watching the Orioles spoil the day for the Phillies. I would like to be normal; I’d like to have a normal life. But when I joined the DMS, I left normal somewhere behind in the dust.
The Black Hawk flew on through an untroubled sky.
-4-
While I flew I read some reports from Dr Hu. Even though he hadn’t yet gotten concrete information on the Changeling Project, MindReader had compiled bits of information that added up to a pretty disturbing picture of what they might be doing at Koenig.
Transformational genetics is a branch of science that scares the bejesus out of me. It has some benign and even beneficial uses, but the DMS doesn’t go after doctors trying to cure a genetic defect. No, the kind of scientist we tend to encounter is often best visited with a crowd of torch-and pitchfork-bearing villagers.
Here’s an example, and this is why my palms were sweating as I read those reports. Hu found clear evidence of several covertly-funded studies to create an ‘elastic and malleable genetic code’. One that was able to ‘withstand specific and repeatable mutagenic changes within desired target ranges consistent with military applications’. These programs have an end goal of ‘at-will theriomorphy’.
Yeah.
Short bus version of that — included courtesy of Dr Hu, who has little faith in my ability to grasp basic concepts — is that the North Koreans and Chinese have been funneling money into research for practical science that would allow a soldier to change his physical structure at will and at need. To transform from a human into something else.
Hu could only speculate on what that other shape might be. His speculations included an insectoid carapace, gills, resistance to radiation and pollutants, retractable feline claws, enhanced muscle and bone density, night vision. Stuff like that.
True super soldiers. But not entirely human super soldiers.
You see why I occasionally have to shoot people?
Before I joined the DMS this was science fiction stuff, comic book stuff. No, it was nightmare stuff because the science was out there. All it required was enough funding, little or no oversight from either congress or human rights organisations, and a flexible set of morals. Sad to say, all of that is possible.
We are living in a science fiction age. Or, maybe it’s a horror story.
Mad scientists like Frankenstein? That’s almost a joke. Frankenstein, at least, was trying to do some good for humanity. He was trying to conquer sickness and death.
Guys like the Koenig Group…well, what the hell do you even call men like that?
-5-
I had the pilot do a slow circle of the Koenig place and then set me down in the parking lot. The building extended out onto a wharf in the bay, and there were slips for six small boats and one large one, but nothing was currently tied up. No cars in the parking lot, either. The left-hand neighbor was an industrial marina for craft that serviced the big dredging platform six miles off the coast, which kept pumping sand back to shore to replace what Mother Nature and global warming were taking away. The right-hand side was protected marshland. A billboard proclaimed that an exotic animal park would be opening soon, but the paint was peeling and faded, and the board looked twenty years old. The only exotic animal I could see among the marsh grass was a Philadelphia pigeon looking confused and out of place.