‘That’s thoughtful of both of us, isn’t it?’ Denton touched his cheek. ‘Oh, good as new.’
‘Don’t be too proud, that is a skin graft. From your butt.’
Denton glared at him.
‘I always knew,’ his father said. ‘I just didn’t want to believe—’
‘What a monster I’d become?’ Denton said through cracked lips. ‘As though there was some transformation you missed?’
‘I wasn’t there much,’ his father said. ‘I regret that.’
‘Any real transformation I made was long after you bled out on the snow.’
‘You knew I was alive, didn’t you?’ his father said.
Denton cleared his throat and sat upright. Under the bed sheet, half his body was bandaged. ‘I had suspicions,’ he said.
His father was thinking of other things. Of the pre-Chimera vector serum the Nazis gave him. Of the first Phoenix virus they’d tested in Germany.
‘The meteorite from the museum. You had a sample all this time,’ Denton said. ‘Sixty years.’
His father nodded. ‘The Recognizer. Behavioral prediction, tactics. It brought me to where I am today.’
‘A man of sudden talents,’ Denton said. ‘A man of sudden promotion.’
His father’s thoughts shifted to the Benefactors. The men who guided the six-star general of the Fifth Column. Or used to. But the thoughts that fired through his father’s mind suggested the Benefactors still existed.
And they suggested his father was one of them.
That was new.
Or old, to be accurate.
‘So you’ve just been waiting for me to collect the other two Phoenix viruses?’ Denton said.
‘No, we’ve been actively looking ourselves,’ his father said. ‘Our workload has increased somewhat in the last decade, what with the sun’s dark twin blasting through the Oort cloud and turning our solar system into a cosmic pinball machine.’
‘That’s where the Phoenix virus comes from?’ Denton said. ‘The Oort cloud?’
His father shrugged and sat upright. ‘Honestly, absolutely—’
‘No idea,’ Denton said.
‘As long as big rocks fall from the sky with plagues and mutations, I still have a job,’ his father said.
‘Until retirement age,’ Denton said.
He was baiting his father. Which was substantially easier when he only needed to get the fool thinking.
His father thought immediately of the Chimera vector. Something that had been lost after the events at Desecheo Island. But in his father’s mind, it hadn’t been lost for long.
Sophia, Damien, Jay and himself were the only ones with both Chimera vectors woven into their genes. At least that was what Denton had thought. But he should’ve known better.
‘When did you crack the Chimera vector?’ Denton said. ‘Again, I mean.’
‘Quite recently,’ he said. ‘Cecilia helped us.’
His father’s thoughts shifted to Dr Cecilia McLoughlin, and her brief arrangement the year before with the Benefactors.
‘McLoughlin was dangerous,’ his father said. ‘We gave her some authority in exchange for the Chimera vectors. Then she went too far. We needed to remove her.’
‘Imagine that,’ Denton said. ‘Looks like I did you a favor.’
‘We cut off her reinforcements at the eleventh hour,’ his father said. ‘Looks like I did you a favor.’
Denton laughed. ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘We’re both missing the same Phoenix virus. And it was sitting in a museum all along.’
‘And now it’s dust in some burned out subway tunnel,’ his father said.
Denton tuned to his father’s thoughts. His father had intercepted the Peru meteorite in mid-transit, somwhere in Brooklyn. It had never even made it to New York where Denton was waiting.
His father stood, brushed his suit. ‘You need your rest.’ He cast a disappointed glance over Denton’s bandaged body. ‘Clearly your Chimera vector isn’t quite the wonder you’d hoped.’
Denton checked the clock. Barely four minutes.
‘Tell me about the Benefactors,’ Denton said.
‘I’m not here to indulge your cloak and dagger fantasies,’ his father said.
No, Denton thought, but your brain is.
He focused hard. Saw a smear of faces. They were vague, distant. But he recognized one face. It was unmistakable.
Colonel Wolfram Sievers.
The Director of the Ahnenerbe.
‘What happened to Sievers?’ Denton said.
‘Who?’
‘The Standartenführer,’ Denton said. ‘1944.’
His father adjusted his tie. ‘Long dead. He was hanged in ’74.’
Denton raised an eyebrow. ‘Just like Saddam Hussein, right?’
‘We’re not amateurs,’ his father said. ‘Sievers’s stunt double actually looked like Sievers.’
Denton saw Sievers’s face again, this time in detail. The beard. The waxed mustache. Greyed but still thick. The bastard was alive.
Denton reached out, pulled his father by the tie. The old man’s chin pressed hard into Denton’s chest. Denton removed the catheter from his wrist and wrapped the tubing around his father’s neck, drew it tight. He sank the needle into Denton Senior’s neck. Not to inject it, just a bit of pain to distract him. Denton held the tubing in place as his father clawed for him.
Denton got to his feet. His father was making a bit of noise, which wasn’t great, so he pulled the bed sheet off the mattress and wrapped it over his head. He twisted the end over a few times, made it taut, and used his spare hand to reach over the table. He took the vase by the lip and lightly smashed its base on the table’s edge, careful not to make any noise that might attract someone posted outside the ward.
The base shattered, leaving him with helpfully jagged edges. He carefully grasped one piece and aimed with precision at his sheet-entwined father, where he approximated the neck to be. Around the tear, the sheet stained dark crimson. The crimson blotted outward.
Denton discarded the piece and reached for the oxygen tube on the wall behind him. It was attached to an oxygen line. He opened the valve and shoved the end of the tube into his father’s neck, probed his way to the carotid artery. Blood shot up the tube, the suction working at high pressure. Denton held his father down, soothed him with a soft shush.
His father’s body jittered, gargled, then slumped over the mattress. Denton held him there for a while, watching the blood shoot up the suction tube. He would be drained in no time. Denton pushed the tube in a fraction more and found it remained in place.
‘Relatively painless,’ he said. ‘For me, anyway.’
He set about the task of undressing his father. The pants, shoes and socks were salvageable. The tie and shirt were not and bloodstains on a suit tended to attract attention too. He didn’t want that.
He paired his new shirt with his father’s incomplete suit and, with six minutes elapsed, set foot into the private bathroom. He would have to do without a tie for now. The man who stared back at him looked ghostly, damaged. But as he peeled off each bandage the regeneration was obvious. Pink, freshly formed skin replaced recent lacerations and grazes. He might’ve been covered in swelling and bruises when he was admitted here, but he saw none in the mirror now.
The pockets of his father’s pants yielded only a set of keys, a wallet with an NCS badge and a comb. Denton discarded the comb and took the rest.
He practiced a smile in the mirror. ‘Born again.’
Bright new teeth were visible at the back of his mouth. His cheek looked just like it always had. He was impressed with himself, which occurred often.
When he finished in the bathroom, he peeked around the curtain for a quick check. His father lay slumped over the bed, knees on the floor. Denton checked his pulse. It was weak, almost gone. The suction tube still sucked blood enthusiastically to the wall. He’d probably lost almost half by now. There wasn’t much that rudimentary Nazi serum would do to help. Even if Denton closed the valve, his father would most certainly die.