"He is also known as Mad Jack. He is well named. He's got a taste for methamphetamines, to give an edge to himself and his men. He has also, let us be candid, a taste for atrocity. To such an extent he was fired as a private contractor by U.S. occupation forces in Iraq for mysterious incidents late in 2003. Rumor has it he ambushed a patrol of SAS men dressed as Arabs near Ramadi and killed two of them. The U.S. command, which as you know seldom admits culpability for any misdeed or accident, would take no official corrective action. But the SAS swore vengeance. He was removed for his own safety."
"Lovely," Annja said.
"Some people believe times of great peril call for such men. Myself – having known many such – I feel the peril they themselves pose outweighs any benefit they incidentally confer on mankind. But leave that.
"The point is, if he is employed by this facility, it is doing something big. And whoever is in charge will go to literally any lengths to keep it secret."
"You mean to the extent of breaking the law," Annja said.
His only answer was a laugh.
"And you think this mysterious research may have something to do with these monster sightings?"
He turned his head toward her far enough to show her a raised eyebrow. "Sightings?"
"All right. These monsters?"
"Yes."
She shook her head. "Sounds like your typical antigovernment conspiracy theory."
"True enough," he acknowledged. "You yourself have clearly been targeted by a particularly pernicious conspiracy these past few weeks."
"What on earth do you mean?" she asked. Although she knew too well already.
"You have suffered some highly coincidental attacks recently. And I don't mean just the remarkably determined onslaught by street gangsters near that most delightful art gallery. Indeed, you seem to have appeared on the periphery of a pair of very violent, if not intrinsically common, incidents at what we might call the far ends of the Earth. Or, indeed, the former Spanish empire."
She blinked at him. She felt as if her flesh had grown chill beneath her skin. "How do you know about that?"
"I am here with the knowledge of your Department of Homeland Security. They tend to take an interest when American citizens are involved in possible terrorist incidents abroad, even peripherally. Fortunately they seemed willing to accept that you were merely an extraordinarily unlucky young woman, to turn up twice in the wrong place at such wrong times, in Mexico City and Cebu. Or perhaps they have knowledge they didn't care to share. Who can know?"
She uttered a shaky sigh. "Those aren't the only attacks," she said in a small voice. As concisely – and steadily – as she could she described the near kidnapping on the UNM campus.
"Aha," he said. "That is the most revealing incident of all."
"What do you mean?"
"That syringe likely contained a substance known as succinylcholine," he said, "or something most closely analogous. Its object is to stop your heart of an apparent heart attack. It is quite undetectable unless looked for by a forensic procedure done only in Sweden."
He glanced at her again. "A highly professional hit. And one favored by certain...official agencies engaged in unofficial activities."
She shook her head. "I can't believe my government would do such things."
"If it is any consolation, they may not be members of your government," he said. "Not directly, although acting on what they believe is its behalf. But do not deceive yourself."
He nodded his chin in a direction she thought was west. She had a reasonably good sense of direction, but the seemingly random twists and turns among the nighttime hills, and the eerie dissociative effects of coming off a colossal adrenaline jag – not to mention the totally unreal nature of the night's events – had totally scrambled it.
"Not so many miles away across these mountains they design and build devices to take the lives of millions – to extinguish, quite possibly, all life on Earth. Do you think such men would hesitate to snuff your life, if they believed – or could convince themselves – some national interest lay at stake?"
"You speak as a man with lots of experience at rationalizing acts of violence," Annja said.
His smile was sad. "Because I am, dear lady," he said. "Because I am."
"What do you mean it wasn't a demon?" Annja almost screamed.
"What I said, as is my custom," Godin said, "is it wasn't even evil. Hold still, please."
"But I felt it," she said, gritting her teeth briefly at the stinging as he poured the hydrogen peroxide they'd bought at a Walgreen's along the gouges torn in the back of Annja's thigh. She lay on her belly on the bed of a no-name motel room dressed in a long T-shirt to allow the Jesuit to minister to her wounds. "I feltits evil. It was almost tangible."
"It felt likeevil," he said. "I felt it, too. That was mostly its wrongness. But it was no demon. Believe me. It was just a frightened animal. Vicious but not evil. But it did not belong here."
"You sound like you're defending it."
"No. It attacked people. It had to die. But what we experienced was its own fear and anger at finding itself surrounded by creatures strange and doubtless horrific to it. It was clearly a predator. We may have resembled prey. And it certainly felt as horrible a sense of wrongness from us as we did from it. That, I think, is what you perceived as evil. First, empathetically, the terrible intensity of its emotion. Second, your sense of things being horribly wrong, resonating with its own."
"What do you mean, wrong? Ow."
He had given the peroxide time to work. Now he dabbed the pink-tinged white froth up with cotton balls.
"It wasn't from around here. That was surely obvious, yes?"
"But not demonic?"
"Not in the customary understanding of demonic. Although there are entities that might properly be so characterized who likewise sometimes penetrate our dimensions from their own."
"What do you mean?"
"Look at it this way. This at least is less unsettling to your faith in skepticism. What we fought tonight was not what you would call a supernatural entity. Although I would argue there is no such thing as supernatural, since all that exists in this world must surely be natural. However unanticipated it may be. But this creature's presence in our world was thoroughly unnatural.This will sting."
He poured alcohol on the tooth marks. She winced and clutched the bedspread.
"I hope that stuff kills any extradimensional microbes that thing may've left behind," Annja said.
"I suspect you have little to fear from such things," he said, daubing up the alcohol with more cotton balls. "They would be as likely to die from biting you as to do you harm, non?It is more terrestrial pathogens which concern me. Especially since you were not the first person the creature bit."
"True enough." She knew the diseases she most had to fear were those that might be transmitted from her fellow humans.
He put his hands on her thigh, manipulated the wound. She bit her lip. It hurt.
She was also aware that his hands were very strong. And very high up on her thigh. She felt extremely awkward and a little too vulnerable at that moment.