But everything at the DORKA lab out in the Virginia countryside was focused on keeping things from getting out. Upton coming in with Rhodes had not been planned for and they’d bungled it because, in reality, they didn’t quite know what they were dealing with.
The scientists hated being told what to do by the government, but that didn’t stop them from cashing their government checks every month and using the top-notch facilities here at the innocently named Department of Research & Kinesthetic Application. He’d sensed some warped humor in the cover name when he was first assigned as the liaison, and he’d learned that they were doing nothing at all about kinesthetics (he’d had to look it up), which is what a cover name was supposed to do: misdirect.
He’d found the scientists to be the greatest bullshitters he’d ever run into, and he had twenty-three years in the army, which meant he’d often been neck-deep in it. When they weren’t flat-out covering their asses, they reverted to science-speak like word camouflage. The bigger and more remote the word (like kinesthetic), the bigger their shit-eating grin as they flashed that superior smile of a PhD in the lab talking to a civilian. Or even better, a dumb soldier.
Johnston was sitting ramrod straight in his chair, as taut as a plebe during meals at West Point, but he became even more rigid as a flash of Robert E. Lee inspiration connected synapses in his brain. It was very simple, the way Lee had split his army at Chancellorsville; Johnston had to split his own force. Turn the truth against the lie.
“How much Cherry Tree do you have left?” he asked Upton.
The scientist pulled the wooden case out of his lab coat pocket. “We’ve got three needles loaded. And there’s a supply in the vault.”
“We’ve got to know the vector,” Johnston said. He could see that two of the scientists working on Rhodes were arguing. The “patient” was babbling something, some childhood trauma he’d never even disclosed to his shrink.
“Shit,” Johnston muttered. He jumped out of his chair and left the office, Upton in tow. They entered the chamber where Rhodes was strapped to a table. The half-dozen geniuses who’d worked on Cherry Tree were clustered around the table.
“You fucked up,” Johnston said without preamble. They all spun about.
“My father cheated on my mother,” Rhodes was saying. “I saw him. In the garage one day, when I came home early. With my best friend’s mom.”
“Shut him up,” Johnston ordered and one of the white coats slapped a piece of tape over Rhodes’s mouth, which was another tick mark confirming what Johnston feared.
“You’re a dick,” the only woman in the room said to him, pulling down her mask, and that checked the last box on the list of his fears.
“You’re infected. You all are.”
They all stared at each other, and then began talking at once.
“Shut up!” Johnston screamed. “Do you have any idea of the clusterfuck you’ve initiated? The question is, how did you get infected? How did Rhodes get infected? And who the fuck else is infected? For once I want to hear the truth,” and even as he said it, he realized he was going to get exactly that, a classic catch-22 if there ever was one.
He held up two fingers. “One. Vector? How did you all get infected? Two. How do we stop it? Is there an antidote?” He extended another finger as a thought occurred to him. “Three. How far can it spread?”
“Ah, the questions three!” one of the scientists said with a giggle, which made them all start laughing. Johnston glanced at Upton, noting that he wasn’t joining in as the six white-coats babbled, in amazing sequence, with Monty Python snippets, several with falsetto voices.
“‘What is your name?’” the first asked, nudging the one next to him.
“‘What is your quest?’” asked the second, who passed it to the third.
“‘What is your favorite color?’”
Johnston was getting ready to pull his 9mm and quiet the room down as the fourth went:
“‘What is the capital of Assyria?’”
“No, no,” the female cried out. “‘What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?’”
At which point someone argued she had jumped over things.
Johnston fired a round into the ceiling, which a part of him knew destroyed the sterile integrity of the room, but he was convinced this wasn’t airborne. That stopped everyone for a moment, allowing Johnston to get a question in.
“How is this vectoring?” he demanded. “How did you people get infected?”
They all stared at the woman, who apparently was the vector person.
“How the hell should I know?” she said.
“Take a guess,” Johnston suggested.
“I ran a simulation while you guys were out showing off. We knew it wasn’t airborne so I wanted to check my parameters and—”
They couldn’t even stop the bullshit when they had to tell the truth, Johnston realized.
“What was different this time?”
The woman frowned. “Well, factoring in the differentials and the parameters from the original experiments to this one, the only difference was we weren’t wearing hazmat.”
Johnston closed his eyes briefly. “Why? Why did you test it again?”
“None of the rats grew another head, did they?” she asked. “According to Deep Six, the first prisoner we tested yesterday has recovered completely. And John,” she nodded at the guy next to her, “agreed to give it a shot, literally, pun intended, so we could get his first-person data.”
“You didn’t have authorization,” Johnston said, and they all giggled.
“We do lots of things here without authorization,” the woman said, “because you don’t have a fucking clue how to run a lab.”
“I liked you all better when you lied,” Johnston said.
“That’s because the truth sucks,” she said.
“How long does it last? Still four hours?”
One of the scientists began waving his hand, like he was in school. “I know. I know.”
“No, me!” Another was waving his hand. And then they all began talking at once and the best Johnston could extract from the babble was four hours still appeared to be the medium.
He fired again, a bit of plaster falling down and hitting him on top of the head.
Through their laughter he got in another question: “How come Rhodes is infected and not Upton or me? We were all in that room.”
“Direct contact,” Upton said. “The prisoner grabbed Rhodes’s arm. We didn’t touch him and he didn’t touch us.”
The woman was nodding. “Yepper. We all touched John.” She giggled. “But not like John wants to be touched, right, bad boy?”
“Do we have an antidote?”
“We barely have Cherry Tree,” Upton said. “And why worry about that when it simply wears off?”
The woman was running her hands over John and one of the other scientists was getting mad. Johnston expected a scientific brawl to break out any moment, which didn’t worry him much because they weren’t much of a physical threat. Maybe they’d take each other out and he’d have some peace.
“That’s why we experimented,” one of the scientists not interested in the woman said. That caused a pause in their focus and everyone started talking about the nature of an experiment and the exact definition.
“You guys make way too much money,” Johnston muttered.
That caught their attention for the moment.
“Sure we do,” the woman said. “We laugh about it all the time. We laugh about it and you and the government and all the waste. A lot.”
Johnston tapped his gun against his thigh. “You know why we pay you so much?”
Surprisingly the woman smiled. “So you don’t have to kill us.”
“Exactly,” Johnston said.