The president interrupted her. “I, Allison. My order, and no one else’s.”
“Yes, sir. If you were to use nuclear weapons now, and it later turned out from our analysis that the things only had a forty-eight-hour lifespan, well… You get my drift, sir.”
“You’re saying we need to know more before we take drastic actions. Permanent actions.”
“Exactly. Sir.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We allow the evacuations to continue and provide any and all support we can to make them as smooth as possible, with the understanding that more people are going to die. We have to accept that.
“Second, we wait for the analysis results to come in. Like you’ve said before, we need to know what makes these things tick. We need to know how to kill them. In the meantime, we pound the hell out of them with the conventional capabilities we have if they resume their movement.”
The president thought for a moment, resting his chin on his palm. “And if we can’t stop them?”
“Then, sir, we cross that bridge when we come to it. There’s too much we don’t know right now, which makes it impossible for me to provide you with any viable courses of action.”
“I know you’re right, Allison. But I viscerally dislike not having options.”
“As do I, Mr. President. As do I.”
The president leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms. It seemed like his whole body ached from lack of sleep. Getting older, he thought, was a definite pain in the ass. “You disagreed with Jessie Hruska pretty strongly.”
“It’s not that I simply disagreed with her, Mr. President. I’m concerned that Ms. Hruska isn’t providing you with the correct option at the correct time. Her advocacy for the use of nuclear weapons — on American soil — was very premature in my view. Like I said, it’s not—”
“—the correct course of action based on the information we have to date.” The president finished her statement for her. “You don’t have to sell me any further, Allison. I agree with you.”
He could see Allison pause, considering what she was about to say next. It didn’t take her long.
“There’s something else, sir.”
“What is it?”
“I spoke to General Smythe immediately following the meeting. He told me the information regarding the discovery of the level 5 contaminant was, in fact, up-channeled.”
“The first time I heard about it was when Ray Smythe told me himself. Who did he—”
“Sir, Ms. Hruska has taken it upon herself to channel all communications — minus mine, obviously — through herself first. She’s controlling access to you, sir.”
The president was dumbfounded. That was definitely not how the communication flow was designed to work. “Are you sure of this?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the president said. But he figured it was explainable. She’d let him sleep, waiting to wake him until it was absolutely necessary when there was new information streaming in. It was obvious she was trying to protect him, keep him from being overburdened. The president decided he’d speak to her about it when they were alone the next time. “Is there anything else, Allison?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you for your input. I value it more than you can imagine.”
“Thank you, sir. Just doing my job.”
“And I’ve got to get back to doing mine.”
An instant before the president terminated his communication with the vice president, the secretary of defense — with Jessie Hruska — burst into the situation room.
Tank’s eyes were wide with fear. “Mr. President, they’re emerging. It’s starting again.”
CHAPTER 34
“Carolyn, you mentioned twins earlier. What did you mean?” Garrett asked.
She was standing over the charred and torn body of the humanoid thing sprawled on a stainless steel examining table in front of her. She could see Garrett’s reflection beside hers as she stared through the thick Plexiglas. “It was what the Gemini agent was designed to do: genetically produce an army of superhuman night fighters. Two at a time.”
“Two at a time?” He was listening, trying to concentrate on what she was saying, but Garrett couldn’t help but stare at the thing on the table. In the artificial light of the lab, every single detail jumped out at him — every little crevice and fold in the fiendish face, every misshapen lump of restructured bone stretching against the skin, every single coarse hair covering its body — revealed in full Technicolor detail. He’d seen the things in the dark, in the shadows, lit only by frantic muzzle flashes. They’d been almost dreamlike in a way, blurred figures in the night moving so incredibly fast, with only pairs of intense yellow eyes slicing through the blackness to mark their passage. But in this brightly lit laboratory, the thing took on a new reality. It was no longer a nightmare creature from a bad dream. It was real.
He was repulsed by what he was seeing, but still, it fascinated him. He could see that it had been a person once; tattered clothes hung from its misshapen body, pieces of a leather belt clung to its waist, and what appeared to be a high school class ring was buried into the mutated flesh of the thing’s right ring finger. For all he knew, he may have passed this person on the street or driven past him in his car just a few days ago, but now, the it that person had become was just a dead, rotting monster.
“Garrett? Are you listening?” Carolyn asked.
“Sorry. Seeing this thing up close is really—”
“Yeah, I know. He’s quite a looker, huh?”
“Not your type, I hope.”
“No, not quite. I prefer a man who won’t eat me on the first date.” Carolyn unlatched the outer covers from two of the gloves attached to the case. “Josef Mengele was fixated on twins. He’d run endless experiments on them.”
“I know. My grandmother was at Auschwitz. When she arrived, she had a twin sister.”
When she arrived. The meaning was obvious. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. My grandmother survived the camp. She didn’t talk about it much, but when I was older I started to research it on my own. I found a lot of material describing Mengele’s experiments with twins. I could never find anything that explained what he was trying to prove, though. Lots of theories, but nothing concrete.”
“The real reason died with him,” Carolyn said. “The bastard suffered a stroke while swimming in 1979. Brazil. Nazi hunters didn’t find the body until 1985. I personally think he was just a sick Nazi bastard who was trying to perfect Hitler’s ‘master race’ by trying to understand and exploit the genetic triggers that produce twins. That’s my theory.” Carolyn reached inside the Plexiglas box and carefully pulled a strip of burned fabric away from the thing’s charred flesh. “Josef Mengele sent most of his experimental data to Berlin for safekeeping when things started going badly for the Nazis. The Russians stumbled across it when they entered the city. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that they started trying to expand on the good doctor’s work.” Carolyn tossed the piece of fabric aside. “Gemini was designed to transform a person into a completely different being, a different species. A species designed to see in the dark.” Carolyn pulled more fabric from the thing’s body. “Back then, fighting at night was much more difficult than it is today. No night vision systems. Having an army of killers that could own the night would’ve given the Soviets an incredible advantage.” She tossed the fabric aside and started on another strip. “Part of the genetic code would trigger a reproduction sequence at a certain time. The things were supposed to double their numbers at timed intervals.”