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NOVEMBER 9: FLY BY

THE SUN JUST breaking free somewhere behind its tail, the C-5 approached Black Manitou Island; a tiny sliver of white, brown and green in the midst of Lake Superior’s glittering blue splendor. Colding sat in the observer’s seat. Sleep fuzzed his eyes. His axe cut hurt.

“Here you go,” Cappy said, and put a half-full Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand.

“Thanks,” Colding said. “And thanks for the shirt and jacket.”

Cappy ticked off a little two-fingered salute, then walked out of the cockpit. Colding set the coffee down, keeping an eye on it so it wouldn’t spill while he opened the manila folder. The liquid vibrated in time with the C-5’s engine hum.

He took a sip—strong brew—and looked out the front canopy. They were so low the sun sparkled off whitecapped waves, creating a miles wide cone of flashbulbs reflecting the morning light.

“Middle of freakin’ nowhere,” Alonzo said. “And they call these things lakes? I’ve seen smaller oceans.”

“That’s why they call them the Great Lakes, kid,” Sara said. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen them. You gotta get out more.”

“Right,” Alonzo said. “’Cause Michigan is high up on my list of tourist spots. Especially Detroit.”

“Most of the state is just fine,” Sara said. “I grew up near here, town called Cheboygan.”

Alonzo nodded. “You grew up here. Yeah, that explains a lot.”

Sara flicked out her right hand and slapped Alonzo’s shoulder. He laughed, then turned in his seat and called back to Colding. “How ’bout you, bro? Where you from?”

“Georgia. A little town outside of At—”

“Let’s just land the plane, shall we?” Sara said. Colding leaned back. Alonzo let out a long whistle. They were at least five minutes from landing, but no one mentioned that. Seemed Sara wanted to keep the conversation all business, at least where Colding was concerned.

From the observer’s seat, Colding had a stunning view out the front canopy. Black Manitou Island looked mostly white, dotted with patches of brown and green. The island ran almost perfectly southwest to northeast. Colding referred to the map in the manila folder. Ten miles from tip to tip, three miles across at the widest point. Deep bays and fjords made it resemble a tropical archipelago. A wide, sandy beach surrounded the coastline.

Alonzo affected a southern drawl. “How close is the nearest gawd-dayum town? Da-na-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neeerrrr.”

“This is Michigan, you idiot,” Sara said. “Put away the Deliverance banjo.”

Colding checked the map again. “You won’t be doing much partying with the locals. Closest town is Copper Harbor, about three hours away by boat.”

Alonzo groaned. “How far by plane or chopper?”

“Irrelevant,” Colding said. “Once we land, no air traffic off the island.”

“Fuck,” Alonzo said. “Looks like I’ll be dating Rosie Palms and her five friends for a while.”

“Wrong girl,” Sara said. “Around here we call that Dating Miss Michigan.”

Colding kept flipping through the folder. “It’s a bit more accommodating than it looks. Says here the place used to be a four-star resort. Marilyn Monroe supposedly stayed there.”

The island grew in size, now filling the forward horizon.

“No radar,” Alonzo said. “They have an airstrip but no radar?”

“Uhhh…” Colding flipped through more pages. “They only turn it on for landings and takeoffs. Danté doesn’t want anyone wondering why an island in the middle of the lake has functioning radar.”

As if on cue, a small ping sounded through the cockpit.

“Radar, check,” Sara said. “Looks like they’re ready for us.”

Colding leaned forward again. “Fly the length of the island before you land.”

“Please,” Sara said.

Colding looked at her. “Please what?”

“Fly the length of the island, please.” Sara continued to look out the window, never turning to meet Colding’s eyes. “Until we land, I’m in charge, remember?”

Alonzo looked at Sara, a funny expression on his face. He craned his head to look back at Colding as if to say, What’s that all about? Colding just shrugged.

“Eyes on the boat, ’Zo,” Sara said. Alonzo turned back to his normal position.

So this was how it was going to be. Well, once on the island, there was plenty of room to steer clear of this woman.

“Captain Purinam,” Colding said. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you kindly fly the length of the island before landing? Please?”

“Why, it’s no trouble at all,” Sara said. “Standard procedure, really, you didn’t even have to ask.”

Alonzo gave her that funny look again, then shrugged and turned back to his duties.

Sara took the C-5 north, wide of the island, then banked back and closed in on the northeast tip. Colding traced their path on the map as the C-5 flew over. Rapleje Bay split the northeast end of the island into a pair of mile-long, snow-covered tongues. Rocks peeked through the snow in many places, brown and gray, or black with fresh snowmelt. An inch or two of powder covered the ground, clumped on the bare branches of oaks and poplars and weighed down the boughs of thick evergreens.

Just past the bay, they flew over a neat little farmhouse and a good-sized red barn with a black tar-shingle roof. Gray shingles spelled out the word Ballantine in five-foot letters. Colding saw cows milling about a snow-dusted pasture outside the barn, then a running flash of something small and black. Probably a dog.

A road led away from the barn. The C-5 seemed to fly down the road’s slightly curving length. To the left of the road, he saw fields long since grown fallow, spotted here and there with young poplars and pines. To the right, the island’s center ridge angled up a good five hundred feet. In the dead center of the island, a square wooden tower rose up from that ridge like a small cabin on tall stilts. Next to it stood a thin, metal-frame communications tower painted in red and white, two boxy devices mounted high on its sides. At the top, a compact radar array spun in a steady circle.

Alonzo pointed at the wooden tower. “What’s with the Smokey the Bear action?”

Colding flipped through the folder. “It’s an old fire watchtower. Has an air-raid siren and everything. The metal tower has the secure satellite uplink to Genada. And a jammer that blocks all communications in or out.”

“A jammer?” Sara said. “Then how do you talk to someone on the other end of the island?”

“Regular old telephone poles,” Colding said. “Totally self-contained, not connected to any outside system. Look on the right side of the road—landlines running to all the buildings. All the occupied buildings, anyway, which looks like… a total of five, including the hangar.”

“Five houses,” Alonzo said. “Yeah, this place is jumping all right.”

They passed the island’s center, leaving the two towers behind. To the left, Colding saw an idyllic little harbor on the southeastern coast. Blocks of jagged granite surrounded the island, peeking up just past the water’s surface. Only the approach into the harbor looked clear. Massive piles of broken concrete and big rocks made up the harbor wall, turning the endless Lake Superior waves into minor chop. A large white fishing boat, maybe a thirty-footer, sat moored to a long black dock.

Along the road, overgrown trees crowded in among scattered houses. Most of the places looked abandoned. He saw just three buildings that seemed well maintained: a single house, then another barn and house combo. Large swatches of churned-up mud inside fences indicated the barn was a working one.

Not far past that farm, they flew over an open space surrounded by a cluster of small buildings. Colding couldn’t make out much, except for a solid-looking gray stone church with a tall bell tower.

Near the island’s southwestern tip, the forest gave way to a snow-covered lawn edged with orderly rows of landscaping trees. At the back of the lawn perched a three-story brick mansion that overlooked the estate like some lord’s castle from old England. The mansion’s high position gave it a commanding view of Black Manitou’s southern tip: a sandy beach lined with rocks, then nothing but water as far as the horizon.

A half mile due south of the mansion, a wide, flat clearing snaked through the woods like an oversized golf course fairway. Colding had to look at the paper map to see the logic—if you drew a visual line from end to end, the fairway had a mile-long space down the middle. Just wide enough to land a C-5. Danté Paglione had built a landing strip so that it didn’t look like a landing strip, at least to any probing satellite.

And that satellite camouflage philosophy bled over to the hangar. Colding actually didn’t see it at first, and had to spot-check the map before the visual clicked. The hangar was as big as the one back on Baffin Island, but with wire mesh over the roof that sloped down to the closely surrounding trees. A dense pack of fake pine-tree tips stuck up from the mesh. From the ground it probably looked like the worst camouflage one could imagine, but any satellite or even a plane flying at normal altitude would see nothing other than a wooded hill.

“Sightseeing is over,” Sara said. “Let’s get her on the ground.”

Alonzo nodded. “Roger that.”

Sara banked to the left, taking the C-5 back out over the water as she circled around. Surprisingly, the landing was as soft as any commercial flight Colding had ever flown.

The C-5 slowed to a crawl as Sara taxied it into the fake-hilltop hangar.

NOVEMBER 9: HOW’S IT GOIN’, EH?

AS THE C-5’S turbines idled down, the Twins lowered the rear ramp and P. J. Colding walked out of the plane. The place looked and felt oddly familiar: another big-ass hangar, cattle stalls on one end, big-ass open doors looking out into a snowy landscape. And, of course, a fuel truck—he made a mental note to find someplace else to park it.

Just as his feet hit the hangar’s concrete floor, a black Humvee and a beat-up old red Ford F150 pulled into the cavernous opening. A painted logo on the Hummer’s hood read OTTO LODGE. Two men stepped out, both wearing black parkas with the lodge logo embroidered on the left breast. Colding recognized the men from the personnel pictures in the folder Magnus had given him: Clayton Detweiler and his thirtysomething son, Gary. Clayton maintained the mansion and most of the island. Gary was the driver of the boat the C-5 had flown over on the way in, and was also the island’s only regular connection to the mainland.

The Ford truck produced three more people: a taller man almost Clayton’s age, and a man and a woman in their early thirties. Colding recognized them from the personnel pages as well: Sven Ballantine, James Harvey and Stephanie Harvey, respectively.

Clayton walked up and extended his hand. He moved with the hitch of an overweight, older man plagued by a bum hip. His every other step brought the clinking of metal from the plus-sized key ring hanging from his belt. The way he carried himself the sound seemed more like the clinking of a gunfighter’s spurs than the jangle of a janitor’s keys. Colding shook the offered hand, feeling the man’s rough skin and thick calluses.

“Welcome to Black Manitou, eh?” Clayton said. “Clayton Detweiler. You must be Colding.”

Colding couldn’t place the man’s accent. He’d never heard anything quite like it. Clayton wore a scowl so deeply entrenched with permanent wrinkles it might have been the only expression the man had ever shown. A three-day growth of bristly gray beard made the wrinkles look deeper, more defined. His thick gray hair was combed straight back, looked oily-wet, and smelled of Brylcreem. Spots of dirt, grease and what appeared to be several mustard stains dotted his black down jacket.

“Nice to meet you,” Colding said. He turned to the younger Detweiler. “And you must be Gary, our link to the mainland?”

Gary nodded and shook. The guy looked like a living Abercrombie & Fitch ad. His parka was fresh and clean. Oakley sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. A deep tan covered skin that was already turning leathery. He wore a hemp necklace and a small gold loop in his right ear. Gary had a little bit of an odd, rich smell about him, something that Colding knew but couldn’t place.

Colding shook hands with Sven and James. Each managed a fifty-cow backup herd. Sven was a heavyset older man, perhaps sixty, his old-fashioned mustache and sandy blond hair liberally peppered with gray. The mustache mostly hid a rather disturbing crop of nose hairs. Mostly. Sven looked like he should be riding shotgun with Sam Elliott in some old western.

James had the big-necked look of a former football player—a lineman, not a quarterback—and could have been a poster boy for the phrase “cornfed.” Stephanie had a wide-eyed smile and, of all things, curlers in her red hair.

Colding reached out to shake Stephanie’s hand, but couldn’t because she thrust a Saran Wrap–covered plate at him.

Brownies.

“Here ya go,” she said in an accent just like Clayton’s. “My family recipe, eh?”

“Uh, thanks.” Colding took the plate.

James poked his wife in the shoulder. “Since when is our family name Duncan Hines?”

Stephanie put her hands on her hips and gave her husband a dirty look. “I’ll have ya know I put in da walnuts.”

“You’re a walnut,” James said.

“Your face is a walnut,” Stephanie said.

Clayton rolled his eyes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You two put a sock in it.”

“You’re a sock,” Gary said. He didn’t have the strange accent, just a normal midwestern twang.

Clayton shook his head in annoyance. “Sweet Jesus, all of you shut your pieholes. Well, there ya go, Mister Colding. You just met everyone on Black Manitou Island, population five. Time for all of us to get back to work. Just wanted to have you meet everyone so you wouldn’t be asking me stupid fucking questions all goddamn day.”

“Actually, Clayton, there’s a lot I need to know. Looks like you guys take great care of the mansion and the grounds.”

“What, you’re surprised?” Clayton said. “You thought an old hick like me couldn’t take care of business?”

This just wasn’t Colding’s day for making friends and influencing people. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“I been in charge here for thirty years, eh?” Clayton’s eyes narrowed beneath bushy gray eyebrows. “Just ’cause Danté said to take care of you don’t mean I snap to your orders like a trained dog. You got it?”

Gary rolled his eyes, as if he’d heard his father’s shitty attitude a million times before. The others looked around uncomfortably.

“Now hold on just a second,” Colding said. “We need to set a few things straight, right now.”

Before Colding could continue, Clayton looked away, up into the C-5’s rear cargo door. Colding heard light footsteps on the ramp.

“Hey, Peej,” Sara said. “Who’re your friends?”

“We were clearly having a conversation here,” Clayton said. “Who da hell are you, eh?”

“I’m da pilot, eh?” Sara said, her voice a perfect imitation of Clayton’s accent.

Clayton leaned back a bit, the scowl still on his face. “You makin’ fun of da way I talk?”

Sara laughed. “Only a little bit. I grew up in Cheboygan. Used to spend my summers vacationing near Sault Saint Marie.”

“Michigan side or Canadian side?” Clayton asked.

“Da Michigan side, of course. I’m a Troll.”

Clayton’s face lit up in a genuine, friendly smile. It made him look like a completely different person.

Colding stared, dumbfounded, as Clayton extended his callused hand. Sara shook it and introduced herself to the five Black Manitou natives. Where Colding’s intro had been awkward at best, Sara’s felt like old friends reconnecting. Her natural charm relaxed everyone around her.

Sara saw the plate in Colding’s hands. She lifted the Saran Wrap covering and pulled out a brownie as casually as you please. “Oh my, these look delicious. Who made them?”

“I did!” Stephanie said. “You can come over sometime and have some coffee. I made those brownies and they’re my favorite ’cause it’s an old family recipe.”

The woman’s speech reminded Colding of an overly happy machine gun kicking out rapid-fire words.

Sara took a bite, chewed, then laughed. “We must be related. Tastes a lot like my family recipe.”

“Okay,” Colding said. “Enough with the brownies. Captain Purinam, if you could attend to your duties, I want to have a talk with Clayton.”

“Not now,” Clayton said. “Didn’t I tell you I got fuckin’ work to do?”

Colding had been through way too much in the past few hours to put up with this crap. He felt his temper slipping and started to talk, but Gary spoke first.

“Say, Dad,” he said. “You have to run me back to the boat anyway. Mister Colding can ride along, get a feel for the island. Fifteen minutes there and back. He is from Genada, Dad. You know, the guys who pay you?”

Clayton looked away for a second. He seemed annoyed at his son’s logic. “Yah, fine,” he said. “I’ll take you, Colding, but only if Sara comes.”

“I’m in,” Sara said before Colding could manage a word. He felt like his few hours of sleep had slowed his reaction time or something—everyone was beating him to the punch.

“Captain Purinam,” Colding said. “Don’t you have work to do?”

She shrugged. “Nope. The boys have it covered. Let’s road-trip.”

Clayton reached out and grabbed a brownie off Colding’s plate. He bit in, a few crumbs falling and sticking to his stubble. “Good stuff, Stephanie.”

Stephanie beamed. “Thanks!”

“Can you and James hang out here and show people da mansion?”

“Sure!” Stephanie said. “I’d love to. We can walk back ’cause it’s not really that cold out yet and we don’t mind at all, do we, James?”

James didn’t bother saying anything, because Clayton had already walked away. The old man got into the Hummer and slammed the door shut behind him.

Colding looked at Gary. “Is your dad always like this?”

Gary smiled an easy smile. Colding still couldn’t place that smell.

“Unfortunately, he is,” Gary said. “But don’t worry about it, man. He’s the hardest worker you’ll ever meet. And if you need something done, it’s done. Okay?” He asked the last word as if it were a signature on a contract, a contract Colding would just have to accept because that’s the way it was. Gary obviously didn’t want his father catching any shit.

“Okay,” Colding said. “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Gary smiled and nodded slowly, not just with his head, but also with his shoulders. “All right, man. For being so cool about it, I’ll give you shotgun.”

“So kind of you,” Colding said, seeing instantly that Gary had eyes for Sara. Gary turned and climbed into the back of the Humvee.

Colding glared at Sara. “You’re just coming along to piss me off.”

“Yep,” Sara said. “But don’t worry, plenty more where that came from.”

“Fine, whatever. And what was with that whole Troll comment, and that eh thing?”

Sara laughed. “Clayton and the others are Yoopers.”

“What the hell is a yooper?”

“People from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. You know, Upper Peninsula… U. P.… Yooper, get it? Yoopers have a real thick accent all their own. Ya instead of yes, da instead of the, and they end a lot of sentences with eh?, which is basically a rhetorical question. You’ll get used to it. And if a Yooper is from above the bridge, can you guess what they call people who live below it?”

“Ah,” Colding said. “Trolls live beneath the bridge. Wow. What a clever culture you have in these parts.”

A blast of the Hummer’s horn jolted them both. Clayton had one hand on the steering wheel, the other twirling in an annoyed circle that said, Let’s go already.

“I seriously do not like this guy,” Colding said.

Sara walked around to the left rear door. “That’s okay, he clearly doesn’t like you, either. Nobody does, really.”

Colding sighed and got in the Hummer’s passenger seat.

Clayton jammed the vehicle into reverse and squealed out of the hangar. He turned right and stopped fast, throwing everyone around in their seats, then put it in first and shot down the dirt road that ran through the center of the island like a spine.

NOVEMBER 9: BROTHERLY LOVE

DANTÉ’S ELBOWS RESTED on his white marble desk, and his hands held his head. How could this have happened? Every time he turned around, they were stepping deeper and deeper into a head-high pile of dog shit.

He looked up. Magnus sat in front of the desk, relaxing in a chair. He seemed not the least bit bothered by his actions.

“Magnus, how could you have done this?” Danté spoke quietly, firmly. For too long, perhaps, he’d ignored the sad truth: his brother was a bona fide sociopath.

“Relax,” Magnus said. “The problem is solved.”

“Solved? Solved? You killed Erika Hoel!”

“And what would you have done, given her a raise?”

Danté’s face scrunched in frustration. He felt a pain in his chest. He pounded the desk with his fist, just once. The fist stayed there like a dropped gavel.

“Danté, seriously, you need to relax.” Magnus sounded as calm as if this were a budget meeting with the board of directors. That calmness infuriated Danté even more. His own brother, a killer.

“I don’t see the problem,” Magnus said. “Our facility is destroyed, including our equipment, including the cows. I had Farm Girl send an email to the media—the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the blast. Gosh, they didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but as they said in the email, if you commit atrocities on God’s creatures, don’t blame the ALF if there is collateral damage.”

“Fischer knows that’s all total bullshit.”

“Of course he does,” Magnus said. “But the ALF has grown more aggressive in the past few months, so the story fits. The media buys into it. If they do, so does the G8. Everyone wants to see xenotransplantation shut down, and guess what? Now we’re shut down just like everyone else. So what can Fischer do about it?”

“He’ll look for Rhumkorrf’s project, that’s what.”

“And he won’t find it. Fischer has no idea where Bubbah and the staff have gone. As long as no one on Black Manitou gets stupid and tries to contact the outside world, we’re in the clear. It’s what you wanted, Danté—time for Rhumkorrf to finish the project.”

Danté sat quietly. Magnus hadn’t just made a snap reaction, hadn’t flipped out over his service buddy’s death—he’d thought all of this through. In a way, Danté wished it had been a reaction, a crime of passion. That would have been easier to understand than premeditated murder.

“This isn’t Afghanistan, Magnus. This isn’t combat. You killed a woman, for God’s sake.”

His brother smiled. “Are you going to pretend you don’t know what I am? Pretend you weren’t secretly relieved when Galina conveniently disappeared?”

Danté leaned back as if he’d been slapped. He hadn’t wanted Galina to die, not even for a second. “I had nothing to do with her death. You did that, not me.” He felt his heart hammering in his temples. His skin felt hot.

Magnus rubbed his right forearm. “You told me you wished Galina could just go away. What did you think I was going to do when I heard you say that? Did you think I wouldn’t come through for you?”

Danté looked away. Magnus was wrong. It hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t. Danté had just wanted the project to continue, to benefit all of humanity. Of course he’d wished for Galina to go away, but he’d said as much in front of Magnus. Said it… seen the cold look in his brother’s eyes… and said no more.

“Danté, you know I love you, but let’s be honest, you really don’t have a lot going on in the balls department. You have Dad’s skill at running a company, the fund-raising, the public panache, all of that good stuff. When I watch you do your thing at board meetings or the media, it blows me away. I can’t do those things. But when it comes to the other stuff? The off-camera stuff? You just don’t have Dad’s stones. I do. Together, we make a great team, wouldn’t you say?”

Danté felt that pain in his chest again. Sharper this time. His brother’s eyes, so cold, not a shred of emotion.

“Get out, Magnus. Just get out of my sight.”

Magnus stood and walked out, leaving Danté alone with his stress and his shame.

NOVEMBER 9: THE FAIRY

CLAYTON’S HUMVEE FOLLOWED the same road they’d flown over. No surprise, since it was the only road. Arching trees walled up either side. Brown, half-bare branches dripped from their inch-deep coat of melting snow. Many trees had black-flecked white trunks with peeling, paperlike bark. Pine trees stood out the most, thick and full compared with their anemic hardwood cohorts.

Almost no sign of man… It was achingly beautiful. Unkempt dirt roads branched off from time to time, leading to the small, dilapidated houses Colding had seen on the way in.

They passed by what had to be a road to the old town with the big church. Not far after that, the forest thinned a bit. The road quickly crested at a steep dune spotted with tall grasses. The dune’s downslope led to the island’s small harbor.

Beach smells filtered into the open window, complete with a strong odor of dead fish. Up and down the shore, heavy purplish-gray rock outcroppings led right up to the water, some sliding in at an angle, others standing as small cliffs. Patchy, dry orange lichens covered the top of the rocks, adding texture and depth. In the long spots between the rocks, there was nothing but sand, grass and a few scraggly trees reaching out from twenty-foot-high sloping dunes. Thick logs dotted the beach. Some had gnarled roots still attached, white and stripped free of bark. They looked like the bleached bones of desert animals unable to survive an endless sun.

The road ended at the blackened wooden dock, which ran forty feet into the harbor’s calm waters. A small black metal shed sat near the base of the dock. At the end of the dock, Colding saw Gary’s boat. A thirty-six-foot Sharkcat cruiser with a flying bridge. The perfect boat for deepwater fishing or a dockside party with fifteen of your closest friends. Black and gold script spelled the words DAS OTTO II on the boat’s aft.

Gary hopped out of the Hummer, as did Colding. They both walked down the dock to the boat. This close to him and in the sunlight, Colding saw that Gary’s irises looked dilated. Colding finally placed the smell, the sleepy look, the constant half-smile… the guy was baked.

“Gary, have you been smoking marijuana?”

The man giggled a little, a soundless thing that made his shoulders shiver. “Yeah. I’ve been smoking marijuana, Mister Narkie Narkerson. Why, you want some?”

“No,” Colding said. “Just how stoned are you?”

Gary shrugged. “I don’t know, man… how high does the scale go?”

Goddamit. This was their only support on the mainland?

Gary’s smile faded. “Listen, brah, don’t sweat it. Just because I boof a bit doesn’t mean I can’t handle my business.”

“I’m not a fan of drugs,” Colding said. “Or people who do them.”

Gary rolled his eyes. When he did, Colding seemed to hear his own words through Gary’s ears. When the hell had he started talking like a high school guidance counselor? Still, he had to probe a little, see just how much of a liability Gary Detweiler might be.

“Magnus tells me you can take care of yourself.”

Gary shrugged. “I do what Magnus tells me. That’s why I’m always carrying this stupid thing.” He unzipped his coat and opened it a bit, allowing Colding to peek inside at a handgun—Genada’s preferred weapon, a Beretta 96—nestled in a shoulder holster.

Colding nodded. “You ever had to use that on the job?”

Gary laughed. “Do I look like Clint Eastwood? My preferred weapon is a bottle of single malt. I get more done drinking in the bars at Houghton-Hancock than I ever would with this stupid gun. I talk to strangers. I ask questions. I find out why people are in town. I see if people have any interest in Black Manitou, which they shouldn’t, because only locals even know it’s out here. The only shooting this kid does involves tequila and bourbon.”

Colding could hear the sincerity in Gary’s voice—the man hated carrying the weapon. “So if you don’t like the gun, why work for Genada?”

Gary nodded toward the Humvee. “My dad has lived on this island for fifty years, man. He’s not leaving. This is where I’ll wind up burying him. I need to be here for him, you know? And if I work for Genada, well, then I get paid to be here for him. I make crazy money, and all I do is drive this beautiful boat and bang tourists. Once or twice a year, Magnus and Danté come around. I say yessir and nosir and take them wherever they want to go. Maybe I’m not a gunslinger, but this is more like a permanent vacation than a job.”

“But you’ll use that gun if you have to,” Colding said, his voice low and serious. “If my people are in danger and I call you out here, you’re prepared to do what I tell you?”

“My dad is now one of your people. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him.”

Colding extended his hand. “Gary, I think you and I see eye to eye.”

Gary’s easy smile came back. They shook. “Anything you need from the mainland, just use the supersecret megaspy radio in the security room. Dad will show you how to get hold of me.”

“Thanks. Oh, and Magnus had a message for you. He said to make sure his snowmobile is ready.”

“It is. It’s in that shed with mine.” Gary pointed to the black metal shed at the foot of the dock. “I keep it there so when we’ve got five feet of snow, I can get to the mansion and back to the docks.”

“Five feet of snow,” Colding said, and laughed. “Whatever, dude, I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Gary just smiled his stoner smile and nodded.

Colding stopped laughing. “Wait, you’re serious? Five feet?”

“Sure,” Gary said. “If it’s a mild winter.”

The Humvee’s horn blared.

“Can you two stop grab-assin’?” Clayton shouted from the vehicle. “I’ve got work ta do.”

Gary threw his dad a snappy salute, then untied the boat and hopped in. He climbed up a ladder to the flying bridge. Seconds later the Sharkcat’s engines gurgled to life—they sounded big and powerful. The boat had plenty of room, easily enough to evacuate the entire staff if it came to that.

Gary waved to Colding and shouted to be heard over the engine. “Good luck, chief. I’m just a call away if you need anything.” With that, Gary gunned the engine, trailing a strong wake as he headed out of the harbor.

Colding walked back to the Hummer and hopped in.

Clayton stared after the boat, then shook his head. “Such a show-off, that guy. I love him, but it’s hard when your son is a fairy.”

“A fairy?” Colding said. “You think your son is gay?”

Clayton shrugged. “He’s got an earring, eh? Pillow-biter for sure.”

“My word,” Sara said. “An earring on a man? Well, he’s got to be one of them there homosexuals.”

Colding rubbed his eyes. “Clayton, you are truly a man of culture and learning.”

“Ain’t that da truth,” Clayton said. “Okay, let’s get this shit finished so I can get on with my day. I get paid for maintenance, not for being a fuckin’ taxi driver.”

The term salt of the earth didn’t go far enough to describe Detweiler. More like the rock on which that salt might crystallize. “Clayton, I think you need to relax.”

“Ya? Well, think about this, eh?” Clayton leaned onto his left cheek and ripped off a loud, barking fart. The rotten-egg smell immediately filled the Hummer.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Colding said as he leaned his head out the window. Sara let out a gagging noise, but she was laughing as she rolled down both the backseat windows.

“Oh, Clayton!” she said, breathing through her shirtsleeve. “What crawled up your ass and died?”

Clayton’s shoulders bounced up and down in a chuckle. He breathed in deeply through his nose. “Oh, that was a good one, eh, Colding? Welcome to Black Manitou, city boy.”

“Just take us back to the mansion,” Colding said. “I want to see the security room.”

Clayton backed the Hummer off the foot of the dock, then drove over the sand-covered pavement and crested the dunes. He was still laughing when he drove onto the road leading to the mansion.

NOVEMBER 9: DRINK TILL YA YUKE

INSANITY. TIM FEELY had worked with Jian for two years, so he felt confident knowing insanity when he saw it. And all of this? Yeah, insanity.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Erika Hoel had been licking single-malt scotch out of his belly button. Slowly. That was good. That was hot, and fun, and sexy. Sure, being stuck on a frozen island for months on end was crap on a cracker, but being there with a wild-ass Dutch cougar made it a tad more palatable.

Since then? Explosions. Sabotage. Brady Giovanni burned extra crispy. That same wild-ass Dutch cougar nearly choking out Jian with a fire axe. Colding all bloody. A gigantic plane and a secret frickin’ base filled with “Yoopers.” It was like a James Bond movie featuring inbred hicks.

And, perhaps worst of all, being awarded Erika’s duties.

He needed a drink. Maybe somewhere in this mansion he’d find one, and hopefully before he found a gun—because if he had to listen to this way-too-happy woman with the curlers in her hair for one more minute he was going to shoot himself right in the face.

“This is my favorite view on da whole island,” Stephanie said. “It’s da back porch.”

“Really?” Tim said. “I guess that’s a good name for a porch on the back of a house.”

Stephanie laughed. Her ex-jock husband did not. He shot Tim a glare that clearly said, Watch it, asshole. Guy wasn’t as big as Brady had been, but he was big enough. Tim decided he’d watch it.

Hangover or no hangover, the view from the sprawling veranda simply took Tim’s breath away. The mansion was a jewel atop a crown of snow-spotted golden sand dunes that sloped gently toward the shore.

Flecks of sand and snow blew across cut-stone steps that led almost to the beach. Whitecaps frosted the water all the way to the horizon. Hundreds of frothing spots stood stationary against the roiling waves—ship-killing chunks of granite. Two hundred yards out from shore, a towering rock rose sixty feet out of the water before it seemed to fold over on itself. “What’s that big rock that looks like a horse head?”

“That’s Horse Head Rock,” Stephanie said.

Of course that’s what they called it. Black Manitou Island, a place of poetry.

“Come on,” Stephanie said. “There’s so much more to show you!”

A wide, floor-to-ceiling picture window stood at the back of the veranda. French doors led into an expansive lounge filled with leather furniture and expensive-looking tables. A long mahogany bookshelf packed with old-leather tomes surrounded a large flat-panel TV. A matching mahogany bar with a marble counter and brass trim dominated the room. Behind it oh thank you, Lord, thank you! sat a well-lit, glass liquor cabinet filled with hundreds of bottles.

Tim walked straight to the cabinet. Lonely glasses were lined up on a long white cloth, just waiting for a friendly handshake. He grabbed one and started looking through the bottles.

“A little early for a drink, isn’t it?” James said.

“There’s always room for Jell-O, big fella.”

Tim saw that one brand of liquor dominated, taking up an entire shelf. “You’ve got enough Yukon Jack to last through the second coming. Assuming, of course, that Christ likes to drink till he Yukes.”

“I’d leave those alone,” Stephanie said quietly. “Those belong to Magnus.”

Ah. Magnus. Well, Tim would just go ahead and leave those alone, then.

“Oh my,” Tim said as he pulled out a bottle of Caol Ila scotch. “Come to Poppa.” He poured a glass and drained it in one go. Burned going down. The first glass was just hangover medicine, really. The second glass was for taste.

“Mister Feely,” James said. “Do you mind? We’ve got work to do.”

Tim left the bottle on the counter. He followed James and Stephanie out of the lounge. The rest of the building reeked with turn-of-the-century high class. The twentieth century, mind you, not the twenty-first. Teak paneling, mahogany trim, every room sported a crystal chandelier. Back in the day, this place must have been the hotness.

But all the style and warmth couldn’t quite hide the building’s age. The floor dipped here and there, some teak wall panels didn’t quite line up. Every hall and room held the visible signs of minor repairs—decades of settling had taken their toll.

“Thirty guest rooms,” Stephanie said. “Dining room kitchen all that stuff. Da basement has all da old servants’ quarters, which are pretty much storage now, eh? Also houses da security room but we can’t get in ’cause only Clayton has da door’s secret code. We’ll show you your room, then take off.”

His room. Perfect. Nap time, and not a nap in some godforsaken air force chair designed by the Marquis de Sade. A couple more drinks, then delicious slumber. He drained his glass.

“Mister Feely, I need you!” A gruff German accent—the voice a dagger in Tim’s ear. His heart sank as if his parents had just caught him looking at nudie magazines. He turned to see Claus Rhumkorrf, hands on hips, standing in the hallway.

“Mister Feely! Are you drinking?”

Tim looked at the empty glass in his hand as if he was surprised to see it there. “What, this? Why, I just found this lying about and I’m being a good citizen. Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.”

“We are ready to start implantation,” Rhumkorrf said. “Come with me back to the plane. Now.”

Rhumkorrf turned and stormed down the hall. Stephanie shrugged and held out her hand, palm up. Tim gave her the glass, then followed Rhumkorrf.

NOVEMBER 9: THE SUPERSECRET PASSWORD

COLDING FOLLOWED SARA and Clayton through the mansion’s halls and down a stairwell.

“Jack Kerouac used to vacation here, ya know,” Clayton said. “I used to drink beers with him all da time.”

Colding threw Clayton a doubting glance. “You drank with Kerouac?”

“Ya. Hell of a guy. Farted a lot, though. He could clear out da entire bar when he got going.”

Colding tried to imagine one of America’s greatest literary figures ripping off a loud one in a bar full of Yoopers, but the picture just wouldn’t register.

“What about Marilyn Monroe?” Sara asked. “I heard she stayed here. You drink with her, too?”

“She liked to drink alone mostly, eh? I banged her, though. Nice tits.”

The utilitarian basement showed far less ornamentation than the two upper floors. There wasn’t a speck of dust on anything. Clayton stopped at a door with a small keypad and punched in 0-0-0-0. A heavy deadbolt clicked open inside the door.

“Wow,” Sara said. “Pretty crafty password, Clayton.”

The old man shrugged and walked into a completely modern room, white walls with fluorescent lighting set into a white suspended acoustic-tile ceiling. A row of security monitors sat on one wall, mounted above a white desk that held a familiar-looking computer. The computer screen showed a slowly spinning Genada logo.

But the desk wasn’t what caught Colding’s attention. What held his eyes and made him instantly nervous was the three-shelved weapons rack that took up the center of the room.

“This here is Magnus’s toy chest,” Clayton said.

Colding stared in amazement. He ran his hands along a row of assault rifles: three German Heckler & Koch MP5s, two Beretta AR70s, a British SA80 with a thick nightscope and a triple magazine, four Israeli Uzi nine-millimeters and a pair of Austrian Steyr 69 sniper rifles. Below the rifles hung a rack of Magnus’s favorite handgun, the Beretta 96. Ten of them. Boxes and boxes of magazines and ammo occupied the lower shelves. Two sets of Kevlar bulletproof body armor hung from the end of the rack.

There were some other supplies: first-aid kits, MREs, four propane canisters with blowtorch nozzles, four lighters and fifteen Ka-Bar knives still in their white cardboard boxes.

“What is all this?” Sara said, concern heavy in her voice. “Is Magnus going to war or something?”

Clayton shrugged. “Something ain’t right with that boy.”

Colding noticed three small, wooden ammo crates on a middle shelf. He felt his stomach do a flip as he gently pulled out the box, opened it and saw the contents. “Demex? Fucking plastic explosives?”

“And detonators,” Clayton said. “Doesn’t exactly make me happy to have it in my mansion.”

Colding saw one more thing. On the bottom shelf, a long, black canvas bag. He unzipped it. Inside was a five-foot-long case, painted a drab military green. Four metal latches held the case shut.

“No way,” Sara said quietly. “Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

Colding flipped the latches and lifted the lid to reveal a five-foot-long metal tube, blocky on one end, all of it painted olive green. A handle stuck out from the blocky part. In front of the handle, Colding saw a metal rectangle that folded out into an IFF antenna, an acronym for Identify Friend or Foe. A useful feature, considering this weapon could blow just about anything out of the sky.

“It’s a Stinger missile,” he said.

“I told you not to tell me,” Sara said. Her voice sounded alarmed, not a surprising reaction for a pilot looking at a plane-killing weapon. “Anyone want to tell me why Magnus needs a surface-to-air missile?”

Colding didn’t know the answer. He zipped the bag, slid it back into place, then stood and walked over to the desk and its bank of security monitors. The setup was identical to the one they’d left behind on Baffin Island.

“Clayton, what’s our video coverage like?”

Clayton walked to the counter and started pushing buttons. A series of views flashed across the screens: the outside of the mansion, the harbor, the ballroom, guest rooms, the kitchen. It surprised Colding to see the ease with which Clayton worked the controls—the old man obviously knew his way around the security systems.

“Good coverage,” Clayton said. “We even have that crazy infrared crap. We got regular video all over, including everyone’s rooms.”

“Turn off all room cameras,” Colding said. “Everyone but Jian.”

He watched as Clayton started flipping switches. “Done,” Clayton said. “Why leave Jian’s active? You like them big-girl peep shows?”

“I… no, Clayton, I do not like big-girl peep shows. Jian’s tried to kill herself before. She has to be watched at all times. And as soon as we’re done here, please go in her room and remove all glass, any mirrors. Take down the chandelier and put up a simple fixture, nothing she could hang herself from.”

For once, Clayton didn’t have a smart-ass comment. “I’ll make sure da room is safe,” he said.

“What about the hangar?” Sara said. “That covered, too?”

Clayton pushed more buttons. Multiple views of the hangar, both inside and out. He stopped when the screens showed the mammoth C-5. “There’s connections for cameras inside da big plane. Sara, your boys hook those up yet?”

“If it was on the fly-in checklist, probably.”

Clayton pushed more buttons. Monitors now showed Alonzo in the C-5 cockpit, Claus and Jian in the second-deck lab and Tim Feely in the veterinary station across the aisle from the crash chairs. Clayton changed the view to show Harold and Cappy walking from cow stall to cow stall, opening the clear plexiglass doors. The press of a button lowered the harnesses, putting the animals’ weight back on their hooves. The Twins led the cows out of the C-5 two at a time.

“Yep,” Clayton said. “They got it done. That’s all da coverage we got. No wireless, no cell phones, no Internet. Landlines connect to James’s place, Sven’s, my house, da hangar and every room in da mansion has its own extension. Only way to reach da mainland is da secure terminal.” He pointed to the small computer at the end of the desk. It was a duplicate of the one Colding had used at Baffin Island.

“That calls my son or Manitoba,” Clayton said. “We take care of each other out here, and we’re careful, eh? But anything goes wrong, help is three hours away at best.”

“I want to see the island tomorrow,” Colding said. “All of it. Will your Hummer take us all over?”

Clayton shook his head. “No way. A lot of swamp on Black Manitou. But don’t you worry, eh? Me and Da Nuge will show you everything?”

“The Nuge?”

Clayton nodded. “Ted Nugent. Da Nuge, eh?”

“Well then,” Sara said. “Slap my ass and call me Sally. If Deadly Tedly is involved, I’m in.”

Great. The last thing Colding needed was that woman tagging along again. “Uh, Sara, there’s no need for you to go this time. Just stay here.”

She shrugged. “Gotta go. It’s the Nuge, man.”

“That’s right,” Clayton said, smiling his bristly smile. “But no sleeping in, eh? You both have your asses on da front steps at 8:00 A.M., got it?”

“Got it,” Sara said. “I have to check in with my crew. Drive me back to the hangar, Clayton?”

“I’d be dee-lighted, eh? Colding, your room is number twenty-four. See you tomorrow.”

Colding nodded, barely paying attention to Sara and Clayton as they left him alone in the security room. Whatever a “nuge” was, he’d see soon enough.

He moved to the weapons, checking the action on each and every one. His mind swam with possibilities, mapping out contingencies. Three hours to the mainland by boat, only there was no boat here. Other than Gary Detweiler and the Paglione brothers, no one knew they were on Black Manitou. No one. But, he reminded himself, that was the way it had to be if they wanted to complete the research, bring the ancestor to life and give hope to millions.

NOVEMBER 9: ORANGE SPIDERS

JIAN STUMBLED A little, but Colding’s strong arm held her up. “Mister Colding, I don’t want to go to sleep. We have more work to do.”

“Still not buying it,” Colding said. “Keep walking, kid, you’re turning in.”

He led her down the mansion’s hall. She, Rhumkorrf and Tim had finished implantation. Every cow had a blastocyst in its uterus. Those blastocysts would soon implant into the uterine wall, forming an embryo and a placenta. After that, more of her coding would force the embryos to split and form monochorionic-monoamniotic twins. Mister Feely called it the blue-light special of genetics, two for the price of one. Some might even split a third time, creating triplets. All of this, of course, assumed the immune response continued to accept the embryos as self.

Movement.

Over there, to her left. Jian looked fast. Nothing. Had that been a streak of orange?

“Jian,” Colding said. “Are you okay?”

She stared for a second, but there was nothing there. “Yes. I am fine, Mister Colding.”

They walked on. Colding was really her only friend, the only true friend she’d had since the government decided she was a seven-year-old genius. That’s when they’d removed her from her home in the mountains, taken her away from her family, put her in special schools.

It hadn’t taken her long to show even more promise, outstepping her colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At age eleven, she published her first genetics paper. By age thirteen, she was speaking at conferences, and her face was all over the news as the poster child for China’s scientific ascendance.

Then two things happened. First, she started to see the bad things. Second, she discovered computers.

At first, those bad things were really just strange things. Shadows at the corners of her vision, things that hid when she looked for them. The visions grew worse. Sometimes they looked like little blue spiders. Sometimes they looked like big orange spiders. Sometimes they crawled on her. And sometimes, they bit her.

Even when she showed people the marks on her arms, no one believed her. They gave her the drugs. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t. What almost always did help, though, was the computer. Jian was among the first people in the world to truly exploit computers for digitizing gene sequences, to understand that the world of silicon and electrons could mimic the submicroscopic world of DNA. And when she was lost in the code, she saw nothing but the code. No spiders.

Years had rolled on, some worse than others. Medicines changed. The spiders went away for a while, replaced by green, long-toothed rats, but then the spiders came back and the rats stayed as well. When four-foot purple centipedes joined the spiders and the rats, that was the first time she tried to end it all. People stopped her. Stopped her and put her back to work, but it’s hard to work when the spiders and rats and centipedes are biting you. Eventually, her bosses ceased asking her for work she couldn’t complete. They left her alone to explore her computerized world of four letters: A, C, G and T.

Somewhere along the way, she wasn’t sure when, she started producing papers again. Most focused on a theory of digitizing the entire mammalian genome, creating a virtual world that would show how species interconnect. There was no real commercial or medical benefit, so her bosses just let her write more papers. If nothing else, her genius showed the glory of the People’s Party.

And then one day her bosses told her she was leaving. They’d sent her to Danté Paglione and Genada, to work with Claus Rhumkorrf. Keep playing with the computers, they told her, if this works, they will build statues of you.

She started with the human experiments, putting her computer-created genomes inside the wombs of volunteers who really didn’t know what was going on. Jian had known it was wrong, but when you can’t sleep because there are a dozen hairy spiders crawling on your face, right and wrong don’t matter all that much.

Those experiments had ended badly. Some of the results were even worse than the spiders and rats and centipedes. Jian tried hard to forget those results.

Then Danté hired Tim Feely and P. J. Colding. Colding made Genada stop the human experiments. He made Rhumkorrf prescribe new medicine for Jian.

And the spiders went away.

“This is your room,” Colding said. “Do you like it?”

She touched the maroon wallpaper, feeling the texture of the velvet patterns. A plastic light fixture looked out of place on the high ceiling, as if another fixture had just been removed. A beautiful, wooden, four-post bed awaited her, its thick white comforter calling to her like a lover.

Most important of all, of course, was another seven-monitor computer desk. Just like the one in the C-5, just like the one back on Baffin Island. Danté understood. He always made sure Jian could work no matter where she was.

“This used to be a hangout for the rich and famous,” Colding said. “That’s what you’ll be soon. Rich and famous.”

Jian sighed as she crawled onto the mattress, marveling at the softness of the thick down comforter. She laid her head on the pillow. Colding pulled the comforter up around her shoulders.

She looked up at Colding. “You like Sara, don’t you?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Mister Colding, she is very nice. You should date her.”

“But I can’t date, Jian. I mean, my wife died only…” His voice trailed off.

“Over three years ago,” Jian said, finishing his sentence for him. “That’s a long time, Mister Colding.”

“Three years,” Colding said quietly, as if trying the words on for size.

“You go see Sara right now. You go to her room, talk.”

She waved him away and was already asleep before he made it out the door.

NOVEMBER 9: THIS IS MY WEAPON, THIS IS MY GUN

A KNOCK AT her door. Sara’s pulse quickened. Maybe it was P. J. Peej. Come to give her a proper apology. She wanted to hate him, but riding with him in the Hummer had been a mistake. It made her remember why she’d wanted him in the first place, two years ago.

A glance at the clock showed 11:15 P.M. She quickly checked herself in the room’s full-length mirror. According to Stephanie, Marilyn had been a frequent visitor to Black Manitou, always stayed in Room 17 and had used this very mirror many times. But Marilyn probably hadn’t had bags under her eyes, or worn a rumpled flight suit or been all dirty and sweaty from a long flight.

What did it matter? Sara wasn’t going to sleep with Colding. She could control her hormones. Colding was a user, and that was that. She wasn’t interested in his brown eyes. Or the way he kissed.

Knock it off, idiot. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, go fuck yourself.

She took a deep breath, then walked to the door and opened it… to see the leering face of Andy Crosthwaite.

“Hiya, toots. Still wanna confiscate my gun?”

Sara felt a combination of revulsion and disappointment.

“Andy, it’s time for bed.”

“Exactly,” he said, and started to slide through the half-open door.

Sara Purinam hadn’t risen to the top of a man’s world without learning a thing or three. She blocked the door with her body. The motion brought their two bodies together, so close they could have kissed. Andy’s leering smile widened.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

“Last warning, Andy. You should walk away.”

He laughed in her face.

Sara brought her knee up fast, catching Andy square in the nuts. She could have done it much harder, but she only wanted to stun him a little, not put him in the infirmary. He let out a little whuff and half doubled over. She put a hand on his head and pushed. He stumbled back two steps, enough for her to shut the door and lock it.

She peeked through the peephole. Andy stared at the door. He wasn’t leering anymore. Now he looked like someone who might bomb a government building for shits and giggles. Even through a locked door, Sara felt a small flutter of fear.

Then Andy stood and smiled. He knew she was looking. He turned and walked down the hallway, right hand still on his testicles.

NOVEMBER 9: BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

Implantation +0 Days

AS THE GENADA staff slept, the experimental creatures moved to the next stage. Inside each of the fifty cows, the implanted blastocysts had floated through the void of the uterus until they brushed softly against the uterine wall.

At the contact point, cells rapidly changed into trophoblasts. The specialized trophoblast cells divided, penetrating the uterine wall, almost like anchors diving into the soft seafloor. The process was common to all mammals—except no mammal, not even the smallest mouse, went through the process that fast. Trophoblasts linked up with the cow’s cells to begin creation of the placenta, and also spread around the rest of the blastocyst to create the amniotic sac, a membrane that would surround the embryos and contain a fluid to protect its contents from shocks and bumps.

Less than three hours after that delicate landing, another set of cells distanced itself from the trophoblast. This set of cells, the embryoblast, would become the ancestor itself. When the embryoblast separated, a piece of Jian’s coding caused it to cleave in half. Inside the amniotic sacs, halves quickly started developing into individuals.

Blue-light special, two for the price of one.

And the cows’ immune systems? No response. Nothing at all.

Once upon a time, a man named Roger Bannister shocked the world by running a mile in less than four minutes—a feat that experts had declared “impossible.” Jian’s process was a biological equivalent of that feat, or would have been, if Roger had run his mile in thirty seconds flat.

Less than twenty-four hours after the enucleated egg first fused with the artificially created DNA, gastrulation occurred. In human pregnancies, gastrulation does not occur for two weeks.

Gastrulation is a fancy word that means that cells stop being copies of each other and start taking on the specialized functions of tissues and organs. From a ball of undifferentiated cells, three distinct cell layers form: the ectoderm, the endoderm, and the mesoderm.

The mesoderm becomes the structure of the animal, including the muscles, bones, circulatory system and the reproductive system. The endoderm eventually grows into the digestive and respiratory systems. The ectoderm generates skin and the neural system—that includes the brain.

While all three layers combined to create an ancestor, the ectoderm would turn out to be the real troublemaker.

NOVEMBER 10: ROTTED SQUIRREL

Implantation +1 Day

COLDING STOOD ON the mansion’s front steps, shivering in the early-morning cold despite his thick down parka. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes after eight. Sara stared at him. He tried to ignore her.

“Hey, Colding,” she said. “Unless that watch is some kind of Star Wars teleporter, it’s not going to make Clayton get here any sooner.”

“Star Trek had teleporters, not Star Wars.”

“Oh, snap. Thank you for the nerd correction, fan boy.”

“Give it a rest. Clayton’s late, okay?”

She put both hands on her cheeks and affected an expression of shock. She looked out at the mansion’s snow-covered front lawn and the long curving driveway—both of which, of course, were completely empty. “Looks like we’re going to get all caught up in the morning-commute traffic jam. We’ll be late for the Trekkies convention!”

That biting, sarcastic tone. It was really starting to get on his nerves. “Don’t you have other shit to do, Purinam? Or do I get another full day of your attitude.”

“I cleared my calendar just for you, Peej.”

The nickname again. It made him remember her naked, remember the cool smoothness of her freckled skin.

Over three years ago, Jian had said. That’s a long time, Mister Colding.

No. This wasn’t going to happen. Sara clearly despised him, and with good reason. Sometimes Colding wondered if he’d cornered the market on finding things to feel guilty about, but this was right up there with the best of them.

“Look, Sara. I… I’m not normally… well, I don’t normally act like that. With women. The way I did with you, I mean.”

“You don’t normally hump-and-dump?”

“Uh… no.”

“Oh, I see. Just with me, then. How nice it must be for all the other women you treat with respect and dignity.”

Colding started to say there aren’t any other women, but he stopped. He was just sounding more and more like an idiot.

The gurgle of a diesel engine saved him from further embarrassment. Sounded like a big truck. The trees past the curving driveway hid it from view for a few seconds. The sound grew a bit louder as the source cleared the trees and turned down the snow-covered drive.

Sara laughed and clapped.

Colding looked at the strange vehicle, then at Sara. “What the fuck is that?”

“That has be the Nuge. How awesome.”

Colding stared at the thing rolling toward them. A lumbering, two-part vehicle painted white—white, with black zebra stripes. The front half looked like a four-door metal box set on top of short tank treads, with room inside for front and back bench seats. A stubby down-slanting hood ended flat with heavy headlights and a metal-grate bumper. The roof had a hatch above the front passenger side, and a second above the entire rear seat.

The rear section looked like a modified flatbed riding on its own set of squat tank treads. In that flatbed was a small aerial lift with a man-sized white plastic bucket (also painted with zebra stripes), like the kind on telephone repair or utility trucks. When extended, the arm might lift the bucket as high as twenty feet. An articulated joint connected the front and back halves of the vehicle.

Clayton drove down the curved driveway and stopped in front of the wide stone steps. He leaned out the open driver’s-side window and smiled at Sara. “Hiya, doll.” He looked at Colding and the smile faded. “Let’s go, eh? I ain’t got all day.”

“Clayton,” Colding said, “what the hell is this thing?”

“It’s a Bv206. Magnus bought it surplus off da Swede military. I use it to mow da landing strip, groom da snowmobile trails and fix da phone lines when storms knock ’em down. Lot of ground to cover, eh? And most of that ground is either swampy, muddy or covered in six feet of snow.”

“And you call it Ted Nugent, why?”

Sara raised her hand like a kid in school. She jumped up and down and waved her arm. “Oh! Oh! Teacher, pick on me, pick on me!”

“Miss Purinam,” Clayton said. “Please answer for da class.”

“It’s called Ted Nugent because it can go down in the swamp. Just like Fred Bear.”

Colding looked back and forth between them. “Who is Fred Bear? What the hell are you people talking about?”

“It’s a song,” Sara said. “It’s a Michigan thing, you wouldn’t understand. Just get in.”

Sara hopped into the back. Colding walked to the passenger-side seat and opened the door, pausing for a moment to run his hand over the black-striped surface. The armor looked thick enough to stop small-caliber fire. So Magnus had a Stinger, a platoon’s worth of weapons and a troop transport. Wonderful.

Colding hopped in and shut the door. “You’re late, Clayton.”

“I slept in. Da benefits of youth.” He put the vehicle in gear and pulled away from the mansion.

“You know, Clayton,” Colding said. “You can call me doll, too. I might blush, though.”

“Aw, fuck ya. Listen, I’ll take you up da northwest coast, show you da snowmobile trails. They’re mostly mud and swamp until everything freezes solid. Then I’ll swing you around to North Pointe and, if ya don’t mind, Sven would like a word.”

Colding shrugged. Why not? He had to see the whole island anyway, even if it was freezing out. Colding started to roll up his window.

“Oh, yah,” Clayton said. “Mind leaving that down? I ran over a squirrel a couple of days ago. Didn’t quite get all da guts out. It’ll stink in here something fierce if you close it.”

How about that? Clayton actually asked nicely for something. No pissy tone this time. Maybe the old man was loosening up. Colding shrugged and rolled the window back down.

They headed northwest. Much of the trail looked like an ancient road, now overgrown and pitted, some spots thick with two feet of black, stagnant water. The Bv rolled through all of it. One swamp looked a good twenty feet deep in the middle, but the Nuge proved to be fully amphibious—it rolled into the water and floated, moving across the surface until the tank treads dug into the mud on the far side. One hell of a machine, really.

Through the thick trees, Colding saw the occasional collapsed house. Snow clumped on moss-covered roofs, and a few even had saplings growing up through the angled remnants.

Sara leaned forward, preferring to look out the front window rather than the sides. “Looks like a lot of people used to live here.”

“Yah,” Clayton said. “Some forty years back we had about three hundred year-round residents. Mostly copper mining, but also summer people, tourists.”

“So what happened?”

“We had… an incident. At da copper mine. Twenty-two people died. This trail goes right by it, I’ll show ya.”

He cranked the Nuge forward at a punishing twenty miles an hour. Branches scraped the vehicle’s sides and roof, but Clayton effortlessly avoided the tree trunks.

They popped out at a clearing near the island’s high rocky spine. Colding saw a small shed made of bone-dry wood, bleached almost white from decades of sun. Like a set from an old silent movie, a barely discernible sign had the word DANGER written on it in faded, paintbrush-scrawled letters.

“That’s da old mine,” Clayton said. “Used to be tons of copper across da whole U.P. Boomtowns rivaled anything from da gold rush days out West.”

“Spooky,” Sara said. “Is that where the people died?”

“Most of ’em,” Clayton said. “Those men are still in there, at least their bones. At night, when it’s quiet, you can hear them calling for help.”

Colding would have mocked a woo-woo superstition like that, but Clayton’s memories clearly ran deep to a place of pain, maybe also of fear.

“The cave-in kind of broke da town’s heart,” Clayton said. “People moved away over da years. There was only about fifty of us left when Danté came in and bought everyone out. He kept me and Sven. James and Stephanie are new, brought in to manage a backup herd. Enough of this shit. I don’t like this spot much.”

Clayton put the Bv206 in gear and they drove back into the woods, the rough road jostling everyone inside. His mood seemed to lighten the farther they got from the mine. “I think I smell squirrel guts,” he said. “Your window down all da way, Colding?”

“Yeah, you can see it is.”

Clayton looked and nodded. “Okay, eh? Well, keep it down. I’m a little cold so I’m rolling mine up. You know us old guys can get chilly.” He cranked the handle to raise his window just as they broke out of the trees at the edge of a small farm. Colding recognized the barn with the roof shingles that spelled out Ballantine. This was where the island’s only working road started. Or ended, depending on how you looked at it.

Clayton stopped in Sven’s driveway. He got out, then, inexplicably, stepped on the metal-grate bumper and hauled himself on top of the vehicle. Colding looked up at the roof for a moment, then leaned out the passenger window to ask Clayton just what the hell he was doing.

As he leaned out, he caught a blur of movement coming from the right. He turned in time to see a wide-eyed black shape flying through the air, teeth flashing inside a gaping mouth. The assaulting animal sailed cleanly through the open passenger window and hit Colding full speed, knocking him flat on the seat.

A dog. A wet dog. Colding’s adrenaline burst of panic dissipated as a tongue furiously licked at his face. He tried to push the dog away, but it dove at him as if its life depended on it. Despite the animal’s loud whines of joy, Colding heard Clayton’s loud, sandpaper laugh.

“Oh my God,” Sara said from the backseat, “he’s adorable!”

“She’s adorable,” another man called out. “Mookie! You get off that man and out of that car, eh?”

The wide-eyed, black-furred cattle dog managed one last sloppy lick, then turned and dove back out the window as gracefully as a leaping gazelle.

“What a little sweetheart,” Sara said.

Colding sat up, using his jacket sleeve to wipe dog spit from his face. “Oh, for crying out loud. I’ve been slimed.”

Sven Ballantine walked up and stopped about five feet from the Bv206. Mookie sat next to him, head forward and big eyes open wide, as motionless as a statue except for the long-haired tail that swish-swished quietly in the snow.

Clayton was still standing on the hood, and still laughing.

And then, Colding smelled it.

“Oh God,” Sara said from the backseat. Her laugh gave her words a staccato sound. “What… stinks?”

The horrible odor, it seemed, was coming from Colding’s hands and clothes. His nose wrinkled involuntarily.

“You’ll want to clean up,” Sven said. “Mookie found something dead this morning. She likes to roll in stuff like that. Sorry.”

Clayton’s laugh came even louder.

“It’s okay,” Colding said. “Jesus, this stinks, what the hell is this?”

“Dead… squir… rel!” Clayton called out from the roof. His laugh had turned into a hysterical, wheezing cough. “Gonna… piss myself… that’s why I was late. Found… dead… squirrel, knew that damn dog would roll in it… jump on you… so funny!”

“Sorry,” Sven said. “Really sorry you stink so bad and all. Mookie has a knack for getting into trouble. She’s a real pain in da ass.”

Colding noticed that despite Sven’s words, his big hand was absently scratching the black dog’s stinky head. Either Sven loved the dog unconditionally, or the old man couldn’t smell a thing. Mookie looked up at Sven with blissful reverence.

Colding banged on the inside of the Bv’s roof. “Let’s go!” He managed a smile at Sven. Sven just nodded. Mookie’s mouth opened and her tongue hung out the side, the big smile of a happy dog.

Clayton climbed down. No sooner had his feet hit the ground than Mookie took off like a shot. Damn, that dog could move. Clayton slid through the driver’s door with surprising agility, shutting the door just before the smelly dog could follow him in. Mookie jumped at the high window, showing amazing air-time. Her slobber streaked the glass. She barked and whined, desperate to say hello.

“Not today, you stinky girl,” Clayton said, still chuckling lightly. “I’ll come see ya after your daddy gives you a bath, eh?”

“Back to the mansion,” Colding said.

Clayton laughed some more, a sound that would have been infectious if Colding weren’t the butt of the joke.

“What’s da matter, doll?” Clayton said. “I thought you wanted to see da old town.”

“Tomorrow,” Colding said. “You got me good, now get me back to the friggin’ mansion so I can shower and burn these clothes.”

Clayton put the Nuge in gear, then headed back down the road. When Colding stepped out of the vehicle and walked up the mansion’s front steps, the old man was still laughing.

NOVEMBER 11: TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

Implantation +2 Days

INSIDE THE C-5’S lower deck, Jian watched Tim move the handheld transducer across Cow 34’s belly. An overhead harness looped under the cow’s legs, hips and chest, holding her off the ground and supporting all of her weight.

The transducer fed data into the portable ultrasound workstation positioned just outside Cow 34’s stall. Doctor Rhumkorrf sat in front of the workstation, his small behind parked on a wooden stool, his hands toying with buttons and absently caressing a black trackball.

Above those controls sat a video monitor that showed nothing but a blue progress bar, just over half full, with words above it that read 52 PERCENT.

In her career, Jian had seen ultrasound evolve from grainy, two-dimensional, black-and-white images to three-dimensional representations showing depth from a top-down perspective, then to what they had now: full, rotatable 3-D models with animated images showing the natural movements of an in utero animal.

75 PERCENT

No mistaking the electricity in the air, the satisfaction at seeing years of work move steadily closer to the final product.

82 PERCENT

“Let’s not get excited,” Rhumkorrf said, even though he was the only one talking. He absently swayed a bit from side to side as he waited for the image to process. “When Erika… I mean, when Doctor Hoel and I brought the quagga back from extinction, it took fifty-two implantation cycles before we corrected the genome enough to produce a live birth.”

88 PERCENT

Jian felt relieved, invigorated… even light. She’d lost some weight in the past few weeks, partly from forgetting to eat, partly from the haunting stress that kept her stomach pinched all the time. Just two days after implantation, a normal mammalian embryo would be nothing but a tiny red dot jutting from the uterine wall. Kind of like a big wet pimple. But according to her calculations, and the astronomical growth rate they’d seen in the in vitro embryos, what lay inside Cow 34’s womb would be much bigger.

94 PERCENT

Tim’s hand continued to move the transducer across the suspended cow’s belly. He looked sleepy. Maybe a little drunk. Again. He hadn’t smiled since they had landed. Back on Baffin, Tim was always smiling.

100 PERCENT… PROCESSING…

The progress bar filled up, then a golden-hued image flared to life.

She stared at the screen.

Tim walked out of the stall, saw the screen and stopped cold. “Oh, fuck me running,” he said quietly.

Jian slowly shook her head in disbelief. She’d known they would grow fast, she’d coded for it, but this?

“Jian,” Rhumkorrf said. “You are even more talented than I imagined.”

The ultrasound image revealed two fetuses pushed into a tight face-to-face embrace. Rhumkorrf slowly moved his right hand over the trackball, turning the 3-D image to examine the tiny fetal features. Oversized heads had already formed, each bigger than the rest of their respective bodies. Big black spots showed developing eyes. Tiny limb buds sprouted from the bodies. She saw the ghostly shape of forming internal organs.

“Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “How big would you say those embryos are?”

“Umm… at least eight ounces.” Tim’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Maybe even a little more. Normal embryonic growth for a two-hundred-pound mammal should be less than a tenth of an ounce.”

“Eighty times the normal growth rate,” Rhumkorrf said. “That’s even higher than you projected, Jian. Fantastic!”

Fantastic. Was that the right word to describe it? No. It was not. From a single cell to half a pound in less than forty-eight hours. She should have felt elated. But instead, she felt afraid.

And she wasn’t quite sure why.

NOVEMBER 11: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

Implantation +2 Days

COLONEL PAUL FISCHER stood on the edge of a Brazilian rain forest, staring up into the dark canopy. Never in all his days had he felt this drained, this utterly exhausted. His feet hurt. His eyes burned. This kind of sleep deprivation and world-hopping schedule would grind a twentysomething into the ground, and Paul was pushing fifty.

Amgen had built its xenotransplantation facility in the middle of the deep jungle. A stunning view surrounded the compound, mostly because there were no roads to tarnish the tree line. Amgen had used helicopters to bring everything in and out. Behind Paul, the special threats CBRN team was moving through the compound, completing their mission of seizing the facility and shutting down Amgen’s research.

A bird sailed from one tree to another. Paul wondered what kind it was. Maybe after all this crap was over he could retire, come back down here and spend months cataloging all the bird species just for the fun of it. Before he could contemplate retirement, however, he had to finish the job.

Approaching footsteps called his attention away. He turned to face the approaching special threats soldier. This one was bigger than most and put off a more frightening vibe than anyone Paul had ever known. He wore a MOPP suit without the hood, exposing his thin blond buzz cut and a mass of scar tissue where his right ear should have been. The man carried an FN P90 in his right hand and a sat-phone in his left.

“Colonel Fischer, sir.”

Fischer tried in vain to remember the man’s name, then cheated and looked at the name patch on the man’s left breast. “What is it, Sergeant O’Doyle?”

“Mister Longworth would like a status report.” O’Doyle handed over the sat-phone. Paul took it. O’Doyle took a step forward and stared out at the tree line, both hands now on the P90 submachine gun.

Paul lifted the sat-phone. It felt like it weighed eight thousand pounds. “This is Fischer.”

“Colonel,” Murray Longworth said. “How’s it look?”

“We’ve secured the place. No biohazard warnings, everything looks fine.” Of course everything looked fine. The Novozyme accident had been a fluke. Paul and the special threats team had flown to four continents and shut down five facilities in the last three days, and he’d known there wouldn’t be an issue as long as no one was dumb enough to put up a fight.

“Nice work, Colonel,” Longworth said. “The only one left is Genada, wherever the hell they went.”

“Any progress on that?”

“Nothing,” Longworth said. “Like they vanished. Colding is good.”

Paul nodded to no one. Colding was good. Back when they’d worked together in USAMRIID, Paul had never suspected just how good Colding could be. “Nothing on freezing Genada’s accounts? Can’t we flush them out that way?”

“Switzerland, Cayman Islands and China refuse to cooperate with that. All three countries believe the ecoterrorist attack was real, and that Genada is out of the game. Danté Paglione does a lot of business in those countries, so they won’t freeze his assets unless we have something concrete to show that Genada is still doing xenotransplantation research. Keep digging, Colonel. Find me something tangible to take to those governments. Anything from the Russians on Poriskova?”

“Nothing yet, sir,” Paul said. “But their effort is encouraging.”

For over a year, Paul had been trying to get the Russians’ help in tracking down Galina Poriskova, former Genada employee and whistle-blower. Russian authorities had been mostly unresponsive, but all of that had changed in the last three days. Several Russian agencies had called Paul directly, asking what he needed and how they could help. Near as Paul could estimate, the Russians had at least fifty investigators searching for any sign of Poriskova.

“Well, that’s something,” Longworth said. “How long until they find her?”

“They think maybe four or five days.”

“Good. I’ll keep bird-dogging on my end. I have Interpol and other agencies cooperating. We’ll figure this out, Colonel, just stick with it.”

“Yes sir,” Paul said, then handed the sat-phone to O’Doyle. Paul wondered just how tired he had to sound if Murray Longworth felt the need to bust out a pep talk. But however tired he sounded, it wasn’t half as tired as he felt.

NOVEMBER 11: GALLERY AND/OR JUGGS

Implantation +2 Days

ANDY CROSTHWAITE SHIFTED his brown grocery bag to his left hand, sighed contentedly, and punched in the code 0-0-0-0 on the security room door. Inside, the familiar rack of weapons was waiting for him.

Real weapons that could do real damage.

Not that the Beretta 96 was a toy. The magazine held eleven .40-caliber rounds, plus one in the chamber (Andy always had one in the chamber), for twelve shots of solid stopping power. It wasn’t his favorite, but the 96 was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Still, he far preferred the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Magnus provided the .40-caliber variant, providing for consistent ammo with the Beretta sidearms. The MP5s had thirty-round magazines and fired at eight hundred rounds a minute. Accurate at a hundred meters, the thing turned deer into hamburger-on-the-hoof and killed humans dead.

Andy pulled one of the MP5s out of the rack and carried it over to the security monitor table. He tossed down his tattered brown paper bag. It landed on its side and tipped, spilling copies of Juggs and Gallery across the desktop.

He sat, hands caressing the weapon’s well-known curves and angles. He’d break it down, clean it and put it back together. At least it was something to do while taking his completely unnecessary shift. What a fucking joke. No one was going to find them here.

He scanned the monitors anyway. The desk setup looked identical to the one on Baffin Island. More of Magnus’s consistency. Why pay money to train people on multiple systems when you can just train them once and install the same system in all locations? Made sense. Everything Magnus did made sense.

Andy checked the infrared feeds of the area surrounding the mansion and the hangar. The infrared worked just fine—and showed nothing. He switched back to the black-and-white pictures of the grounds, the inside of the mansion. Several of the little five-inch monitors were blacked out—typical Colding, no monitoring private rooms except for that suicidal Chinese bitch.

But what about the mythical Room 17? Sara’s room. Yep, the camera was off.

He set the MP5 on the desktop, then flipped a switch. Sure enough, the screen lit up, showing the inside of Sara Purinam’s room. There she was, on her bed. Too dark, though. He scanned the controls… ah yes, night vision. He pushed a button and saw Sara Purinam’s naked upper body gleam in green-tinged glory. Just a B-cup, but he’d still do her.

She, however, would not do him. The dyke.

“Paybacks are a bitch, you tall twat.”

He watched her sleep. He would keep an eye on her, wait for her to slip up. One way or another, figuratively or literally, Sara Purinam was going to get fucked.

NOVEMBER 12: THE THING IN THE CAR

Implantation +3 Days

THE NEXT MORNING, Colding, Clayton and Sara rode along in Clayton’s Humvee. No Nuge that morning, but regardless, Colding kept his window rolled up tight.

They reached the fork that led to the harbor. This time Clayton took the road on the left. More trees, more snow, more collapsed houses. Five minutes later the trees ended, giving way to the old town. Clayton pulled into the town center, a stone-paved circle about fifty yards in diameter. Some of the snow-dusted stones were broken or just plain missing. A few small trees grew up through some of the gaps.

An old well made up of the same broken stones sat smack in the circle’s center. Some of the stones had crumbled away and lay on the ground like rotted-out teeth. The well looked like some B-movie version of a trapdoor to hell.

Clayton stopped the Hummer. The three of them got out and started walking.

“Welcome to downtown Black Manitou,” Clayton said. “I’m sure a city boy like you will feel right at home, eh?”

“Sure,” Colding said. “I’ll bet the opera house is right over the next hill.” The town’s structures were in marginally better shape than the dilapidated houses out in the woods. Buildings lined the paved area like numbers on a clock. With due north at noon, ten o’clock was the gothic, black-stone church. The thick building dominated the town circle, squatting down like a granite bulldog. It seemed to have so much weight the rest of the town might rise up at any moment, the light end of a lopsided teeter-totter. The few windows looked original, their glass visibly warped, giving the solid structure an almost fluid appearance. A bell tower (noticeably absent a bell) rose like a pinnacle from the steep slate roof.

Clayton pointed to a green building about twenty feet from the church at the eight o’clock position. The window was still decorated with a faded yellow banner cut in the shape of a star that said GROUND CHUCK ON SALE! Inside, Colding saw empty racks and shelves.

“That used to be Betty’s,” Clayton said. “Combination grocery and hardware store. She was still here when Danté bought everyone out.”

At seven o’clock, the road out of town ran between Betty’s and a red building with a moth-eaten moose head hung over the door. One glass eye was long since missing. Shreds of moose fur hung down like demonic streamers.

“That was Sven Ballantine’s hunter’s shop,” Clayton said. “He ran it during deer season. Magnus and that surly little prick Andy Crosthwaite came up about five years ago and went wild, killed every last deer. Cut their heads off, took a picture right by that well.”

“Jesus,” Colding said. “I didn’t know Magnus was such a conservationist.”

“Pissed me off to no end, eh? Deer been here since 1948, when an ice bridge connected da island and da mainland. Deer just walked over.”

Colding gave Clayton an untrusting look. “An ice bridge?”

“Yep.”

“From the mainland,” Sara said. “Three hours away.”

“Yep.”

Sara shook her head. “Clayton, you are so full of shit you’d float. It can’t get cold enough to make ice cover that much open water.”

Clayton hawked a loogie and spat it on one of the mottled paving stones. “You’ll see ice everywhere in another week. In a normal winter, Rapleje Bay will have ice two feet thick by da end of November. This winter? Gonna be cold. Maybe coldest ever.”

He gestured at a rustic building made of hewn logs and rough wooden beams sitting at about four o’clock, directly across from the church. Other than the church, it was the town’s only two-story building. “Da mansion you’re staying at was for da rich folk, but plenty of regular people came to Black Manitou Lodge here to hunt and relax.”

A few more wooden buildings dotted the town circle. All had peeling paint. Some sagged under rotted, moss-covered roofs. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“Clayton,” Sara said. “I think you forgot that thing in the car.”

The old man looked at her, then nodded. “By gosh, I think you’re right, eh? Be back in a jiffy.”

Clayton turned and walked quickly to the Hummer.

Colding looked at Sara. “The thing?”

“The thing,” she said. “In the car.”

Clayton reached the Hummer, got in, started it up, then drove down the road right out of town.

Colding watched the black vehicle vanish into the woods, heading for the mansion. “You told Clayton to strand us?”

Sara nodded. “That’s right.”

“Huh. Wouldn’t the joke be better if you were in the vehicle with him?”

“No joke this time. I wanted your undivided attention.”

He looked at her, looked close. The pissyness was gone. She seemed all-business.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Almost right. I’m the one who’s going to listen. You’re going to tell me some things. How you came to work for Genada, how you found me and my crew and why you had that one amazing night with me then vanished.”

“Sara, we—”

“Now, P. J. You will tell me now. We had a connection. I thought I was being a girly-girl about that, deluding myself, but in the past couple of days I’m pretty sure my initial instinct with you was right. We did connect, didn’t we?”

He could lie. Just say no, walk back to the mansion and be done with it. Instead, he nodded.

She smiled a little. Some of the tension seemed to drain out of her. “Good. That’s good. So make like a stoolie and spill.”

He looked around the town. They really were in the middle of nowhere. At least a thirty-minute walk back to the mansion.

Fuck it. Why not?

“I was in the army. Used to work for USAMRIID, the army’s division to protect servicepeople from biological threats. I met my wife there. Clarissa. She was a virologist. We were married for two years, then there was… an accident. Have you heard of H5N1?”

Sara shook her head.

“Bird flu. Terrorist cell was trying to bring it into America the old-fashioned way—by infecting their own people and shipping them over. CIA caught them. USAMRIID was called in to see if we could help the carriers. Long story short, proper restraint precautions were not followed. The guy in charge, Colonel Paul Fischer, he decided to treat the carriers like human beings instead of the terrorist animals they were. One of them… one of them got loose, tore off my wife’s mask and… coughed and spit in her face.”

Sara’s eyes widened with fear. She was probably imagining herself in Clarissa’s shoes. Trying to, anyway—who could really know what it felt like to have someone breathe death in your face?

Colding continued. He couldn’t stop himself now. “They brought Clarissa to an ICU. She caught pneumonia, got through that, but the bird flu gave her viral myocarditis.”

“Which is?”

“Viral infection of the heart. Came on particularly fast for her. Damaged the muscle tissue, made her heart weak, made it swell. Basically destroyed it.”

Sara’s hand went to her mouth. She was such a tomboy, but that gesture of empathy for a dead woman she’d never met ached with femininity. “Couldn’t they give her a transplant?”

“She still had the virus in her system. There was no way to be sure it wouldn’t just infect the new heart. They… they can’t afford to waste replacement organs on someone who’s a risk.”

“Because of the shortage of organs,” Sara said, nodding a little. Sadness filled her eyes.

“They put her on a ventilator. After a couple of days they… well, they told me there was no hope for recovery. She was in so much pain, so weak. She slipped under before we could make a decision. So I had to make it for her. I knew she wouldn’t have wanted to suffer, and it was only a matter of time.”

He had to stop for a second. He hadn’t talked about it, to anyone, not since it happened. Doing so dredged up vivid memories, like it was happening all over again. Clarissa’s hands, so weak they couldn’t hold his, so he held hers. Before they put her on the ventilator, he’d told her it would be okay. She’d answered in her weak voice that he was being stupid—she knew what was happening inside her body. Better than anyone, probably, because she was dying from something she’d studied for a decade.

Sara reached out and touched his upper arm. “You ended it for her? You took away her pain?”

He nodded. The tears were coming now. He couldn’t stop them anymore. Her eyes still closed, eyes that would never open again. The nurse pulling the IVs, removing the breathing tube. Her breaths coming in tiny, shallow gasps. The nurse walking out, shutting the door, leaving the two of them together to ride it out to the end. Till death do them part.

Sara’s hand on his arm, gently sliding up and down. “What did you do then?”

More memories, just as vivid. The rage he’d felt. All his sorrow and hurt channeled into pure aggression.

“I got in my car and went to see Fischer.”

“To talk to him?”

“No,” Colding said. “To kill him. I tackled him as soon as I saw him, really fucked up his knee. His face was a sheet of blood by the time they pulled me off. Army was going to court-martial me, but Fischer pulled strings. Got me a dishonorable discharge, and I was out.”

“What did you do then?”

“Nothing,” Colding said. “Sat on my ass for six months. Got fat. Felt sorry for myself. Collected unemployment. Missed my wife. Then Danté Paglione called me. Genada was trying to solve the organ-shortage problem. They had multiple lines of experimentation, but one involved getting women to carry transgenic animal pregnancies.”

“Carry… are you kidding me? Is that even legal?”

“No. A Genada scientist named Galina Poriskova ratted out the experiment to Fischer. Danté had a second line of research that would solve the organ-shortage problem forever, but if Fischer busted them for the human experiments, that second line would never be completed. I offered to come aboard, but only if Danté scrapped the human experimentation for good. Wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but Danté needed me. I knew how Fischer worked, how USAMRIID operated. Danté shut down the experiments. By the time Fischer got to Genada, there was no evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Danté is smart,” Sara said. “Ruthless, but smart. Hire the guy who would do anything to stop people from dying the way his wife died, right?”

“Transparent as hell, but also dead-on.”

“And Tim? How did he come into the picture?”

“He did some contracting for USAMRIID,” Colding said. “Research stuff. That’s where I met him. He was a double PhD candidate in genetics and bioinformatics. I know some of the science, but needed my own guy to make sure Genada was staying honest. I hired him to come along for the cleanup. Once Galina left, Danté threw money at him to make him stay and replace her.”

“But how did Danté find you? How did he know about you, and Fischer, about your wife?”

“Same way he found you when I had the idea for the C-5. Magnus and Danté have a high-level contact. From the NSA, I think. The contact can get at all kinds of service records, and more. We found you, found out you were behind on payments for your 747. Then I came to talk to you and what happened… happened.”

“Yeah,” Sara said. “I remember. Which brings us full circle. Why didn’t you at least call me, or say good-bye?”

“You gotta understand… my wife had been dead all of seven months when I met you. You talked about a connection? Well, I felt it, too, but I couldn’t feel that way when her grave was barely cold. I couldn’t betray her memory like that.”

Sara stepped forward until their chests touched. She reached up and caressed his cheek, her fingertips somehow warm despite the frigid temperature. “No wonder you’re so gung ho for this project, Peej. I thought you were a rotten douchebag, but now I know I was wrong—you’re not all that rotten.”

Colding laughed. “Wow, am I glad I bared my soul to you.”

Her smile faded, and she touched his cheek again. “Any woman would just melt inside if she knew how you felt, Peej. You did what you thought was right, to honor your wife’s memory. But now she’s been gone a lot longer than seven months. It’s okay to move on with your life.”

Colding leaned toward Sara and kissed her. Her lips were soft and warm, and he forgot all about the cold.

NOVEMBER 13: I HATE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BIG POPPA

Implantation +4 Days

ONE OF HIS cell phones buzzed. Lower-left inside jacket pocket. Only one person had that number. Magnus quickly walked to his office and shut the door behind him. He didn’t need to share these calls with Danté. Not just yet, anyway.

Danté’s will seemed to be faltering. They’d reached that point before. With Galina. Magnus, of course, had fixed that, just like he would fix things now.

He answered the phone. “Go ahead.”

“Well helllooooo, Big Poppa.”

The incoming area code said 702—Las Vegas. All he knew about Farm Girl was that she had once worked for the NSA. Maybe she still did. Judging from the crap sound of the call, she had already bounced the signal through a dozen relay points and was nowhere near Vegas.

“You sure know how to throw a party,” she said. “Dad is looking for you and your friends in the dairy industry.”

Magnus nodded. Dad was Fischer. She wouldn’t have called for just that. Didn’t take a rocket scientist to know CIA assistant director Murray Longworth would still be driving Fischer to track down Rhumkorrf and Jian. Longworth did not like loose ends. “So why doesn’t Dad come ask me himself? He knows where I live.”

“He is,” she said. “He’s coming to see your brother.”

Magnus felt his eyes narrow and his lip curl. He forced himself to relax. If Fischer tried to screw with Danté, the man had another thing coming.

“How close is Dad to finding my friends?”

“Doesn’t have a clue where to start. Heck, Big Poppa, even I don’t know where they are.”

That was as close as you could get to a compliment from this woman—if Farm Girl couldn’t find you, you couldn’t be found. Colding and Danté had really pulled it off, hiding the project right under the Americans’ noses.

“Dad’s frustrated,” Farm Girl said. “If your friends stay quiet, I don’t think he’ll find them at all.”

“Glad to hear it. Anything else?”

“I need to expand my wardrobe a bit. Things get more costly every day.”

Farm Girl wanted more money. Well, fuck it, she could have more money. Thanks to her intel, Genada was the only horse left in the xenotransplantation race.

“That’s fine,” Magnus said. “Maybe Santa will be nice to you this year.”

“I like Santa. I love to sit on his lap.”

Magnus sighed and hung up. Once she started with the sexual innuendo, she didn’t stop. She sounded sexy as hell, true, but he’d heard enough about her in certain circles to know that getting horizontal with Farm Girl could be a very bad experience. The woman was nine shades of psycho.

Fischer and Longworth were clueless. The rest of the G8 nations had no idea Genada was still in the hunt. The Chinese knew, but they weren’t about to talk and give up a chance to save millions of their own people.

Genada now had the most valuable resource it could hope for—time. The Rhumkorrf project, it seemed, might just pan out after all.

NOVEMBER 14: HOT MIDNIGHT

Implantation +5 Days

COLDING TYPED IN the supersecret password of 0-0-0-0 and entered the security room. Gunther sat at the terminal, his eyes wide and his fingertips flying across the keyboard.

“One sec,” he said without looking away from the screen. His fingers never paused. Colding shut the door behind himself and stood there, waiting. Once Gunther got into a writing groove, you had to just let the man do his thing.

“She screamed… and grabbed… the broken pool cue,” Gunther muttered, leaning so close to the monitor that he had to turn his head a little to read from left to right. “Never again, Sansome said… never again… will you harm my love. He jabbed the cue down… like an axe… and the point punched through Count Darkon’s… unprotected… chest. As the body… vanished… no, wait, as the body… disintegrated… yeah, that’s the shit right there… he knew that it was over. Forever.”

Gunther leaned way back in the chair until it almost tipped over, pumping his raised fists in victory. “The end, bitches!”

“You’re done?”

“Hell fuckin’ yeah. I just finished Hot Midnight. The trilogy is complete.”

“Nice work.” Colding checked his watch. “Not to muck up your afterglow or anything, but I need to report to Danté.”

“Oh, right.” Gunther stood, then leaned forward to tap in a few more keys. “Just saving this slice of brilliance.”

“Congrats, man. When do you send it to publishers? How does that even work?”

“Screw the publishers,” Gunther said. “I’m going to give this baby away.”

“Give it away?”

“Yeah, online,” Gunther said. “You’ll see. I’ll rack up so many fans that the publishers have to give me a big fat deal.”

Gunther walked past, his eyes once again dopey-looking and half-lidded. He held up his hand for a high five, which Colding met, and then Gunther walked out and closed the door behind him.

Give the book away, for free? That was the dumbest thing Colding had ever heard of.

He moved the mouse and clicked the icon labeled MANITOBA, then waited patiently as the encrypted line connected with the home office. Less than a minute later, Danté’s smiling face appeared.

“Good morning, P. J. How is the weather out there?”

“Getting colder, sir. Word is we’re due for a big dose of the white stuff.”

“When it comes, you have to get on those snowmobiles. Fabulous times. What’s up?”

“They did it.”

Colding watched Danté’s reaction. The man looked half hopeful, half skeptical. “They’ve done what, exactly?”

“Implantation.”

“Finally,” Danté said, more of a breath than a word. “And it’s successful thus far?”

Colding nodded. “Forty-seven cows are pregnant. Two failed to implant, one fetus aborted on day two. What’s more, all of the pregnancies are either twins or triplets.”

Danté smiled a wide smile, a genuine smile. Colding realized that he had never actually seen a real, heartfelt smile from Danté. It made the man look a bit maniacal.

“How long?” Danté said. “How long until we have an actual birth?”

“Well, we don’t know,” Colding said. “Getting to this point was a major accomplishment, but Doc Rhumkorrf said there’s bound to be complications. The fetuses are growing very fast, which makes it hard to react to problems. It’s been five days and they’re already around fifteen pounds each.”

“If they survive, how long until a live animal, P. J.?”

Colding shrugged. “Too early to tell, really, but it could be anywhere from a month to three months.”

Danté grimaced. “Just do what you can to get me at least one live animal.”

“Will do. Danté, as long as I’ve got you here, I was wondering if you had an update on Doctor Hoel? Any word on her?”

Danté sat back. His demeanor seemed to change instantly. “She’s fine. Don’t worry about her and do your job.”

That subject was clearly off-limits. And Colding could do nothing about it from Black Manitou. “How about Colonel Fischer? Does he have any idea where we are?”

Danté shook his head. “No. But he’s looking. Hard. We must have live animals if we’re going to get the media and the public on our side.”

“The fetuses will grow at their own rate, Danté. It’s up to nature now.”

Danté didn’t like that answer, but had to accept it. He knew enough about biology to understand things had to run their course.

“Very well, P. J. Keep me updated.”

Danté broke the connection. Colding looked at his watch. He could go check up on Jian, or he could see if Sara was around. Jian was with Rhumkorrf and Tim… she’d be fine.

He’d go find Sara. Colding walked out of the security room, amazed at once again feeling excited and nervous about talking to a woman.

NOVEMBER 14: TASTE

Implantation +5 Days

THE TWO FORMING creatures floated inside the amniotic sac, pressed face-to-face like sleepy lovers. The liquid environment supported their growing weight. Millions of chemical compounds drifted freely within that liquid. Some of those compounds were strong enough to register as scents.

And others, strong enough to register as tastes.

Inside two tiny mouths, those taste compounds landed on tiny tongues. Newly formed dendrites fired off chemical messages, chemical messages that traversed a tiny gap, known as the synapse, to land on the axons of the next nerve cell. This process repeated up the chain, traveling from the tiny tongues to the tiny brains in a fraction of a second.

Those taste signals activated a very primitive area in the newly formed brains. In effect, taste turned the brains on for the first time.

There were no thoughts, no decisions, although those things would come soon enough. There was only a short, intense race against time.

For the taste activated an instinct that would drive the creatures’ every waking moment.

Hunger.

NOVEMBER 15: COW SIXTEEN, MINUS ONE

Implantation +6 Days

HANDS SHOOK HIS shoulder.

Claus Rhumkorrf tried to open his eyes, but they seemed glued shut. Lights blared right through his eyelids.

“Doc, wake up.” Tim’s voice? Tim, who had replaced Erika. A stab of emptiness. Claus had told himself he didn’t feel a thing for that woman anymore. That had been easy to believe when she was around every day, but now that she was gone he felt her absence.

“Wake up, dammit.” Tim’s voice, ringing with stress. His breath, reeking of scotch. And the man’s palpable body odor—how long since Tim had bathed?

“Come on, bro,” Tim said. “There’s a problem with Cow Sixteen.”

Claus moaned. His back was so stiff. Where was he sleeping? On a cot. In a plane. He wasn’t even bothering to go back to the mansion anymore. Instead, he just slept in the C-5’s bunk room. And the body odor? That wasn’t Tim. Maybe a shower was in order. Claus opened his eyes to see Tim’s blurry, anxious face.

“Cow Sixteen?” Claus said as he reached for his glasses. “That one has twins or triplets?”

“It was twins,” Tim said. “But now the ultrasound shows only one fetus.”

Claus slid his glasses in place. Tim’s words hit home. He stood and walked out of the bunk room, Tim following close behind.

NOVEMBER 15: THAT’S NOT NORMAL

Implantation +6 Days

COLDING COULDN’T HELP but wince a little. Sure, it was science, but that didn’t change the fact that he was watching Tim Feely slide a tube into a cow’s vagina. A harness suspended the cow, keeping her hooves just a few inches off the ground. Tim wore long gloves that were smeared with a clumpy, whitish substance that Colding could only think of as cow smegma.

“A little deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. His voice had a flat tone but dripped with anger and tension. He sat at a portable fiber-optic workstation, staring intently at a screen showing a fleshy, pinkish tunnel—the view from deep within the cow’s womb.

The 3-D ultrasound workstation sat close by, pressed up against the door of the stall opposite Cow 16’s. Jian half hid behind the machine, trying to stay out of the way. Rhumkorrf had shoved the workstation there in disgust when the high-tech, gold-tinted image showed only one ancestor fetus where yesterday there had been two. Then he’d started screaming, apparently, which was when Jian sneaked away and asked Colding to come to the C-5.

“Deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. “Get it in there.”

“Love it when you talk dirty, Doc,” Colding said.

Rhumkorrf sighed and shook his head. “This is not the time for your stupid fucking jokes.”

“Yikes,” Colding said. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

Trying, and failing. Rhumkorrf was mad because the cow had reabsorbed one of its twin fetuses. Reabsorption was when the mother’s body made some primitive yet calculated decision to not only abandon the small fetus but also break it down and reuse the raw materials. The problem was, reabsorption only happened when fetuses were a few ounces—it did not happen when they were roughly twenty pounds.

“Deeper, goddamit!” Rhumkorrf shouted. “I don’t have all day!” His comb-over was starting to fray.

In the cow’s stall, Tim started to sweat.

“Doc, come on,” Colding said. “Just take it easy.”

“I don’t need your input, Colding. Shut up or I will kick you out of here. Mister Feely, you insufferable idiot, can you do your damn job?”

That would be just about enough of that. Colding put a hand on Rhumkorrf’s shoulder, letting his thumb slide behind the trapezium muscle just to the left of the neck, pointer finger in front, just above the collarbone. He pinched the fingers together.

Rhumkorrf stiffened in his chair and hissed in a short breath.

“We’re all under a lot of stress here, Doc. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Of course.”

“Good. And you know shouting and stress affect Jian, so let’s just calm everything down. Tim is doing fine, don’t you think?”

Colding relaxed the pinch a little, but kept the muscle firmly between his thumb and forefinger.

“Of course,” Rhumkorrf said. “Uh… Timothy. My apologies.”

In the stall, Tim nodded absently. His attention remained focused on the fiber-optic tube.

Colding released the pressure and gave Rhumkorrf’s shoulders a quick, friendly rub. “There you go, Doc. All better.”

Rhumkorrf leaned forward, probably already forgetting Colding’s rebuke. On the monitor, a crystal clear image flared to life. Colding sensed Jian walk up on his right, Tim walk up on his left, all three of them looking over Rhumkorrf’s scattered comb-over at the image.

Rhumkorrf reached out, fingertips touching the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s bigger,” Tim said quietly. “It shouldn’t be that big… can’t be.”

A placental sac filled the screen, translucent pinkish-white lined with thin red and blue veins. Inside the sac, the fetal ancestor in profile. Its head looked twice as large as the rest of the body. Tiny paws folded up under a long snout, which was dominated by the huge, bluish, closed eye. Colding could even see a tiny, fluttering thing… the ancestor’s beating heart.

“Fetuses average twenty pounds,” Jian said quietly. “They grow twenty pounds in six days.”

Rhumkorrf’s fingertips traced the closed eye. He turned and stared at Colding with wild eyes, his anger gone.

“You see? We’ve done the impossible!”

Colding couldn’t find words. Until now, this had been something on paper, a process he administered just as someone might administer an assembly line or a manufacturing plant. Even the gold-tinted image from the 3-D ultrasound had seemed somehow… Hollywood. The live image from the fiber-optic camera finally brought it all home in full, wet color—this was a living creature. A man-made organism that had germinated somewhere in Jian and Rhumkorrf’s genius, then clawed its way into existence.

Colding tore his eyes away from the image to look at the little man who made it all happen. “Pretty frigging impressive, Doc.”

Rhumkorrf turned, smiled and started to reply, but a strangled scream from Jian cut him off. Terror wrinkled her face into a disquieting caricature, locked her attention on the workstation’s screen. As one, Colding and Rhumkorrf looked back to the monitor.

The fetal ancestor, eyes open, stared right back at them.

Rhumkorrf jerked his fingers away from the screen and almost fell backward into Colding.

An inexplicable wave of fear tingled up Colding’s spine before he remembered it was only a computer monitor and this was a picture of a small fetus, not some six-foot-long creature looking at him with a malevolent gaze.

Jian’s hands flew to her head and grabbed huge fistfuls of hair. “Tian a! It is coming for us!”

“Jian, calm down!” Colding snapped. “Claus, is that supposed to happen?”

“No,” Tim said. “Fuck no that’s not supposed to happen.”

Rhumkorrf’s skin looked even paler than normal, the hue of the walking dead. “I must say it’s a bit unusual, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

“What?” Tim said. “A bit unusual? Dude, you are so full of shit! Just look at the goddamn thing!”

“Mister Feely! I’m not going to—”

Once again Rhumkorrf found himself interrupted, this time by blurry motion on the monitor that drew everyone’s attention. The fetal ancestor turned its wedge-shaped head. Now two black eyes stared out from the screen, right through the translucent placental sack. Colding knew the fetus was actually looking at the fiber-optic camera inside the womb, but the tiny eyes seemed to be looking right at him.

“Odd,” Rhumkorrf said. “Most animals don’t open their eyes until after birth.”

The fetus opened its mouth and lurched forward, hitting the inside of the placental tissue and stretching it outward like a wet pink balloon. They all flinched. Jian screamed louder. The tiny head reared back, the sac’s stretched and torn whitish membrane sagged. Another violent thrust. The oversized head ripped through the sac in a cloud of swirling fluid. A gaping maw, pointy teeth. Jaws snapped shut and the image blinked into static.

They heard a splashing from the stall. Colding looked back to see fluid spurting out of the cow’s vagina, a three-second downpour cascading off the floor. The cow’s water had just broke.

Jian shouted something in Chinese, her voice an uneven tremor that rang with easily understood fear. She tangled both hands in her hair and yanked. Clenched fingers came away thick with long black strands.

Colding grabbed her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Jian, stop it!”

She stared at him, eyes wide with primal fear. She seemed terrified of him, as if she thought he was someone else. Or something else. She pulled another double handful of hair from her head, then shoved Colding hard in the chest. The move caught him by surprise. He tried to regain his balance, but his foot caught on Rhumkorrf’s stool, knocking it over and sending both men to the rubberized deck. Jian ran, disappearing down the open rear ramp, heavy feet pounding out a reverberating rhythm.

Rhumkorrf was up first, surprisingly nimble. He helped Colding to his feet. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Doc, do not try and tell me what I just saw was normal.”

“It was probably just a reflexive acti—”

“Oh fuck you!” Tim said. “Try studying your biology 101, Doctor Rhumkorrf.”

Colding left them both behind, sprinting past docile cows sitting quietly in their plexiglass stalls. He ran down the rear exit ramp.

“Jian, wait!”

She kept moving, kept heading for the hangar door, fat shaking in time with her panicked waddle. Colding caught her just before she grabbed the door handle. She turned and tried to push him again, but he caught her wrists. She struggled for a moment, but he held her tightly. Her wide eyes stared at him without recognition.

“Take it easy,” Colding said. “Jian, just take it easy.”

She blinked rapidly, then clarity seemed to return to her vision. She fell forward into his arms. The sudden move and her weight knocked him back a step, but he held her up. She wrapped her arms around him, head buried in his chest, her body shivering.

NOVEMBER 16: AUTOPSY

Implantation +7 Days

RHUMKORRF SIGHED AS he looked down at the fetal ancestor curled up on the dissection tray. The fetus had torn the amniotic sac in order to get at the tiny camera, spilling the life-supporting fluid contained inside. It had died shortly afterward.

They would avoid fiber-optic work now, stick to the 3-D ultrasound for fear of a repeat performance. Additional ultrasounds on the herd had shown that each cow had only one fetus. All second and third fetuses were gone.

Looking at the cat-sized corpse on the autopsy tray in front of him, he had trouble grasping that it wasn’t even a week old. Mammalian development didn’t happen like that. The word impossible flashed through his mind every few seconds, yet the facts lay on the tray before him.

His gloved hands set the little corpse on a scale. Twenty-one pounds. In just six days. But why should he be surprised? From the earliest planning stages they’d sought rapid growth. That was how he’d found Jian in the first place.

He’d read her published research and realized she could theoretically create an artificial genome, then experiment digitally until they could alter normal growth rates. It was on reading Jian’s second or third paper, he wasn’t sure which, that the whole ancestor project came to him in a flash of brilliance. His work on the quagga cloning project, breakthroughs in computing power, advances in oligo machines—the parts clicked, and he knew his destiny. The pieces existed, the required technology just a bit beyond what was already available off the shelf. All it really took, of course, was enough money.

Venter had funded the quagga cloning, but the man wouldn’t touch the ancestor project. He had even called the idea ludicrous. So Claus had secured a meeting with Danté Paglione, CEO of Genada, Inc.

Danté jumped on the project. He saw the real possibility of Claus’s vision. Danté obtained Jian, and the project was born. Erika Hoel’s leading-edge expertise in large-mammal cloning was the perfect parallel to Jian’s theoretical work, so Danté hired her as well. And now, after several abandoned lines of experimentation, after five long years, Claus’s vision was a reality.

Tim Feely came up the ladder to the second deck. He looked sweaty, harried. His nose looked a little red. “What did you find, bro?”

Such a loser. Oh, how Claus longed to have Erika back. Just to see her face again…

“I’m still working on it, Mister Feely. And stop calling me bro.”

Tim poked the dead fetus, then quickly pulled his finger back. “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here.”

“You have such an eloquent way with words.”

“Funny,” Tim said, “your mom told me the same thing.”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t reference my mother.”

“And I prefer box seats at a Pistons game followed by a Texas reach-around, but I’m not going to get either.”

Claus paused, thought of asking what a Texas reach-around was, then shook his head and let it go.

“Goddamn spooky,” Tim said. “The physiology looks so familiar, almost first-trimester human if you factor in the large size.”

Tim was right. It did look a little like a human fetus. Claus cut out the heart. It was already well developed and looked very human. So much, in fact, the two might be indistinguishable. Transplanting it into a human would prove exceedingly easy.

The ancestor’s limbs were already forming into their final shape. Somewhat disturbing were the tiny, needlelike claws at the end of each finger. Claws, like a cat’s, not hooves, like a cow’s. Had Jian coded for that? Maybe it was part of her broad integument swap. As long as the organs were right, the feet didn’t really matter.

The size of the head and braincase also surprised Claus. Obviously, Jian had used a great deal of genetic information from higher mammals. But it was far too early to tell if the current body proportions would remain through birth and into adulthood.

“Hey, bro,” Tim said. “You wanna hear something really scary?”

Claus sighed. “Just say it, Doctor Feely.”

“I did some calculations. I’m estimating the fetuses have a fifty percent food conversion rate.”

Claus stopped and looked at the younger man. “Fifty percent?”

Tim nodded. “Based on the amount of food the mothers have ingested, minus their baseline metabolic rate and factoring in the fetal weight.”

Claus looked at his subject in a new light. Fifty percent of everything the ancestor took in was converted to muscle or bone or other tissues. Vastly higher than any other mammal.

“That’s significant, but not the scary part,” Tim said. “What makes my nut sack shrivel up and head for higher ground is Jian’s weight projections. According to her tables, a six-day-old fetus should weigh five pounds, not twenty.”

Claus looked up. He’d known the numbers but hadn’t stopped to realize that the fetus on the table was more than four times the size Jian had coded for. Shorting her meds had produced the needed breakthrough, but Claus found himself wondering what details she might have missed in her creative state. What things might she have failed to document?

Or, possibly, were there things she didn’t even know she’d done?

But none of that mattered. The bottom line was they had living animals gestating inside the surrogate hosts. From here on out, all they had to do was study the growth patterns and adjust the genome accordingly. Success was a given; the only variable was time.

Claus continued the autopsy, slicing open the stomach. The contents spilled onto the dissection tray.

Neither man said a word.

The mystery of the missing embryos lay on the wax tray in front of them. Rhumkorrf stared at the tiny, half-digested bones. He could clearly make out bits of a skull.

The ancestors were eating each other inside the womb.

NOVEMBER 16: THE RUSSIAN REPORT

Implantation +7 Days

PAUL FISCHER STARED at the sealed envelope on his desk. He was almost afraid to open it. If it didn’t contain information that would help him, he had few options left.

Other than the contents of the envelope, his only real lead had been uncovered by Interpol. The agency had discovered a shoestring connection between Genada and a U.K. company called F. N. Wallace, Inc., that had purchased parts from a scrapped C-5 Galaxy. That discovery made the pieces fall into place for Paul; a plane that large could move the entire Rhumkorrf experiment anywhere in the world. But knowing Genada had a C-5 only helped if the plane was out in the open, or if it flew again. Paul knew Colding would make sure neither of those things happened.

No, Paul’s best chance now was to find Galina Poriskova.

And that was why he was scared to open the report that sat in front of him. It could be the key to Poriskova’s whereabouts. An actual Russian lieutenant, escorted by two MPs, had hand-delivered it just minutes earlier. The Russian had actually asked for Paul’s ID and carefully examined it before asking Paul to sign for the report. Galina’s involvement could be enough to convince Switzerland, the Caymans and China to freeze Genada’s assets. If Paul couldn’t make that happen, there was no way to flush out Colding.

Paul couldn’t put it off any longer. He opened the sealed envelope, finding two manila folders inside: one thick, one thin. The thick one was on top, so he started with that. It contained page after page of financial records, records that seemed to confirm Galina had been living a lavish lifestyle all across Russia and Eastern Europe. After the financial records, though, came something far more interesting. It seemed that when Russian investigators followed up on the plane tickets and hotel stays purchased in Galina’s name, they discovered that more often than not, no one showed up. At times, a tall blonde did purchase big-ticket items like art and jewelry—but Galina was a five-foot-four brunette. Bottom line? Galina hadn’t been seen in Russia or anywhere else since shortly after her meeting with Paul two years ago.

Which meant the second report could contain only one thing.

Paul opened it. If the words on the four pages chilled him, the photos damn near froze him cold.

He picked up his phone and hit the extension for his assistant.

“Yes sir?”

“Get me Longworth, please. Immediately.”

“Yes sir.”

Paul hung up and waited for the callback. The second report changed everything. As gruesome as it was, it provided the leverage he desperately needed. If the C-5 lead panned out, he could combine it with this and make his case for freezing Genada’s accounts worldwide. But that would take time. And with Genada’s mole inside the U.S. governmental system, Danté might still stay one step ahead.

Unless Paul found a way to make sure the mole couldn’t find anything at all.

He looked at the Russian report. Not at the contents, but at the report itself, at the folder. Paper. A courier. That’s what he needed, not emails, databases and phone calls… nothing electronic.

The phone rang.

“This is Colonel Fischer.”

“What do you have for me, Paul,” Longworth said. “You find them yet?”

“I have an interesting lead. If you approve, I’d like to try something different. We have to catch them off guard if we’re going to gain the momentum, go on the attack.”

“I like the sound of that,” Longworth said. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’d rather not say at the moment, sir. I’ll have a courier deliver you a memo.”

“A courier? Just email me.”

“No,” Paul said. “I can’t.”

Longworth paused for a second. “I see. Good, Colonel. Send your memo. And while you’re at it, send memos to anyone else you need help from. I’ll make a call and ensure you have as many couriers as you need.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Paul hung up and did some mental math. To do this right would take three days, maybe four. If it went well, he’d soon be making another visit to a Genada facility.

And this time, he’d find much more than an empty building.

NOVEMBER 17: A WALK ON THE BEACH

Implantation +8 Days

COLDING AND SARA walked along Rapleje Bay. Snow, stones and sand crunched under their feet. The bay’s two tongues of land on either side made for a mile-long, water-filled U that pointed northeast toward the unending expanse of Lake Superior. Stars sparkled like diamond chips on a blanket of black velvet.

He had to get some personal time, even if it was only an hour or so. Jian had recovered from her panic attack. Not all the way, but some—she was still twitchy, eyes always darting to corners. She was hallucinating again, even though she denied it. Colding had told Rhumkorrf to up her meds a little bit more.

Rapleje Bay was ten miles away from the mansion, from the hangar… from the lab. Sara had borrowed Clayton’s crazy Bv206, the Nuge, so they could get away from everyone for a little bit. It was all getting to be too much: the fetus biting the camera, Jian going off the deep end, Danté’s evasiveness, Fischer out there hunting for them. But it was all worth it… wasn’t it? Saving millions of lives, sparing people the pain his wife had gone through—didn’t that end justify the means? A week ago, he would have said yes. He wasn’t so sure anymore.

A stiff wind blew from the northeast, rippling the nylon of his black Otto Lodge parka. He was ice-cold. Sara seemed perfectly comfortable in only jeans, a sweatshirt and a windbreaker.

“You must be part penguin,” Colding said. “I know you were born around these parts and all, but it’s freezing out here.”

“Technically, thirty-two degrees is freezing. It’s at least forty-five out here. Like spring, really.”

Colding smiled and shook his head, wondering how she might handle a sweltering summer day in Atlanta.

“Besides,” Sara said, “you better soak up this heat wave while you can. On an island like this you can bet it’s below freezing every day from December to February.”

Colding shuddered at the thought. “That’s horrifying. I had enough of that at Baffin Island.”

“Oh come on, Peej. This place is beautiful. This is where the jet set from the fifties came to relax, and you’re being paid to be here. Do you know what a resort like this would cost you a night?”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t pay a dime.”

Sara rolled her eyes. “That’s you, Peej, last of the tightwad romantics.”

Colding stopped and looked at Sara. Her short blond hair flopped in the stiff breeze. She had a beauty he’d never seen in another woman, including, he realized, in Clarissa. Even when Sara squinted her eyelids against the stiff wind, he found himself admiring her laugh lines.

She turned and met his eyes, then smiled. “I’ve decided to forgive you for being a rotten douchebag.”

“Good news for me.”

“Uh-huh. But you still owe me.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. Big time.”

“I see. And how can I ever make this up to you?”

She grinned. “There’s a heater in the Nuge. Wouldn’t it be fun to know you put Clayton’s pet vehicle to… other uses?”

He felt a tingly rush in his chest, a vibration that reached into his fingers and toes. In the Nuge?

“Uh…” he said.

She took his hand and led him back to the zebra-striped vehicle.

NOVEMBER 18: RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Implantation +9 Days

P. J. COLDING KNEW HE had said something very, very wrong. He just didn’t know what it was.

Danté stared out from the secure terminal screen, his eyes narrow slits of barely controlled fury. “I can’t believe you could be this stupid.”

“But I don’t understand.” All he’d done was give Rhumkorrf’s latest update. “Things are going better than we ever expected. The autopsies show incredible, healthy growth.”

Danté shook his head the way you might when you hear someone say something so incredibly stupid it barely merits a response. “You’re a smart man. Or at least I thought you were. See if you can guess which word in your sentence pissed me off.”

Colding’s mind raced for an answer. “I… I still don’t understand.”

“Autopsies!” Danté shouted. He banged his fist on the desk to punctuate each syllable. “Aw… fuck… king… top… sies!”

“But, sir, after the first fetus attacked the fiber-optic camera, the mother—”

“Spontaneously aborted, I know. Of course you do an autopsy on that fetus, you idiot, but how many more did you murder?”

Murder. Used in association with a lab animal.

“Two,” Colding said. “They’re growing so fast, Claus wants to properly document their development.”

“I don’t need documentation!” A thin line of spit dangled from Danté’s lower lip. “I need living animals! What is there about the phrase we’re running out of time that you don’t understand?”

“Danté, autopsies are vital to the long-term success of the project. The purpose of these animals is to collect human-compatible organs. If the animals are born and the organs have some congenital defect, Jian will need all the data she can get to figure out where that defect occurred in the growth phase. What if there are problems later on?”

“What if there is no later on?” Danté stood up and leaned forward. His face filled the screen. Colding couldn’t help but think of the fetal ancestor snapping at the fiber-optic camera.

“We can’t risk any of them,” Danté said. “We need at least one live animal to gain the support of the world and to get Fischer to back the fuck off.” Danté blinked a few times, then again sat in his chair. The back of his right hand wiped across his mouth, clearing away the string of spittle.

So much for Fischer supposedly not having a clue. Either Danté hadn’t been honest before, or something had changed. “Danté, let me talk to Fischer. I know him. I can tell him how close we are, get him to ease up.”

“Absolutely not. I’m not taking any chance he can find the project.”

“But sir, we—”

“No! He cannot find Black Manitou. Fischer knows about Hoel. Just take care of the project and let me handle the rest of it. Let me make this perfectly clear.” Danté leaned into the screen, violet eyes crazy-wide. “No… more… autopsies. You do not kill a single fetus, for any reason. Do you understand?”

Colding nodded.

Danté broke the connection without another word. The Genada logo spun slowly on the screen.

Colding thought about Danté’s reaction. The man was normally so composed, but he’d lost it. Lost it bad, and maybe said some things he hadn’t wanted to say. Fischer knows about Hoel. Of course Fischer knew about Hoel; she had been his operative. Unless…

Unless Fischer knew Hoel… was dead. And if she was, there was only one person who had the opportunity to kill her before Fischer could have taken her to safety.

Magnus Paglione.

But that was just a theory, and a far-fetched one at that. Thank God Magnus was far away at the Manitoba headquarters.

As long as Magnus stayed there, everything would work out just fine.

NOVEMBER 19: MOLLY MCBUTTER

Implantation +10 Days

IN THE C-5’S cockpit, Sara Purinam whistled the tune to “Cat Scratch Fever” as she walked through the maintenance checklist on her clipboard. She and Alonzo were doing the weekly walk-through of all cockpit systems. A couple of things needed work, but Big Fred was in solid shape. Even on a military base with full crews, C-5s were maintenance nightmares. Out here? Making sure she was ready to go on a moment’s notice was a full-time job.

“’Zo, you go through the comms check yet?”

Alonzo nodded. “Yes, genius. It was fine. Just like I told you when you asked me five minutes ago.”

Ah. That was right, she had asked him.

Alonzo set his clipboard in his lap and looked at her. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear someone fucked you stupid.”

She whipped out her clipboard and bopped him on top of the head. He flinched and laughed, rubbing the spot she’d hit.

“Ouch! I notice you didn’t deny it.”

She shrugged. He’d already figured it out, no point in lying to him.

“Sara, what happened to no way I’m hitting that again?”

“So I was wrong. So sue me.”

He fiddled with his clipboard. “Just… well, no one cares if you’re getting some nookie, but we all saw how messed up you were last time you and Colding danced.”

“Well, it’s different now.” It was different. But Alonzo’s concern made her see it through his eyes. She had hated Colding. Now? She wondered if the opposite was happening, and after only a few days.

“Just use your head,” Alonzo said. “I mean, you know, use it for thinking.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ho-kay, I think I’m done with your verbal diarrhea. I’m going to check the systems in the barn. You stay here and think about the things you’ve said, young man, and you feel shame.”

She stood and turned. He held up his hand and smiled. She gave him the high five he wanted. Alonzo supported her, but his concern made sense. Made sense to her brain, sure, but not to her heart.

You are in so much trouble, girl. You’re falling hard and you know it.

She couldn’t help it. To think the reason he never contacted her was that he still grieved for his dead wife. Heart-wrenching, and just so tragically romantic she could barely stand it.

Sara wandered down to the first deck, where Jian, Rhumkorrf and Tim were working on the cows.

“Good morning,” Jian said with a welcome smile. She was standing inside stall twenty-five, working on cow, well, Cow 25. The woman’s silky black hair looked patchy, rumpled. Colding had talked about the fetus incident, the hair pulling… Jian’s breakdown.

“Morning, Jian. How are you?”

Jian waved a hand dismissively. I’m fine, the gesture said, then she returned to her work.

Sara moved across the aisle to scratch the nose of a cow with an ear tag that read A-34. It was a big cow. Hell, they all were big. Sara stood five-foot-ten, and if the cows had their heads up they could look her right in the eye. Thirty-four had an all-white head save for a black eyepatch on the right side. She reminded Sara of that dog “Petey” from the old Little Rascals movies. She scratched the big, bony part of its nose. The cow’s eyes narrowed in pleasure. It pushed into her hand, its neck so strong and head so big it made Sara stumble backward.

“Hey, take it easy, old girl,” Sara said with a laugh. “Don’t go getting greedy on me now.”

Tim looked up from his current patient. “Do you fucking mind? We’re trying to work here.”

Sara felt like she’d been slapped. She just wanted to say hello. Before she could respond, Jian shuffled out of stall twenty-five and scowled at Tim.

“Sara can go anywhere she wants,” Jian said in a cold tone. “You just keep your mouth shut or I will shut it for you.”

Tim blinked slowly. If Sara hadn’t known better, she would have sworn Feely was drunk.

“Well,” Tim said. “Look who had her Cocoa Puffs this morning.”

Jian’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

“Means you’re koo-koo,” Tim said. “I’ll translate into English for you. You’re fucking crazy.”

“Feely!” Rhumkorrf snapped. “That will be quite enough of that.”

“Back off,” Tim said. “I’ve had about enough of your little Nazi mouth.”

Rhumkorrf paused, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again. “Are you threatening me with physical violence?”

Tim shook his head. “No, I said I’ve had about enough of your Nazi mouth. That’s a statement of preference. But I also want to put my foot so far up your ass you can smell my toes. That, to be clear, is a threat of physical violence.”

Rhumkorrf blinked. Tim stared. Jian and Sara looked back and forth between them. Sara had to do something to get rid of this tension.

“Jian, give me some paper,” Sara said. Jian paused for a second, then did as she was asked. Sara grabbed a black permanent marker and wrote something down on the paper.

Jian read it, then covered her mouth with her hand to try and hide a giggle. She grabbed a roll of Scotch tape, pulled out a strip, and taped the paper to the stall. Written on it in neat, black block letters were the words MOLLY MCBUTTER.

“They need names,” Sara said. “What kind of a name is thirty-four? From now on this one is Molly McButter.”

Rhumkorrf started to protest, but Jian grabbed the marker and another sheet of paper. With almost childlike glee, she wrote down a name and taped it to cage forty-three. That cage held a cow with an all-white head, the only all-white head in the herd, who was now apparently named BETTY.

Rhumkorrf sighed, then shrugged. “All right. I suppose this is harmless.”

“It’s retarded,” Tim said. “That’s what it is.”

Sara gave him a pleading look. He stared back, then rolled his eyes a little. “Retarded, that is, unless you name one Sir Moos-a-Lot. Then we’re all good in the hood.”

Jian grabbed another piece of paper. “How you spell moozalot?”

Sara smiled and winked at Tim. He smiled back, then told Jian how to spell it.

NOVEMBER 20: BLOWTORCH

Implantation +11 Days

“WHAT DO YOU mean, he’s here?”

His secretary repeated her message. Danté Paglione’s stomach dropped again, even further than it had the first time. “Send Magnus to my office, now.”

Danté leaned back in his chair. His palms slid in circles on the cool marble desktop. This was bad.

Magnus’s office was next door. He arrived first, his solid form sliding through the door without a sound. “You beckoned, O master?”

“It’s Fischer,” Danté said. “He’s here.”

Magnus stopped and stared. He seemed to process the information for a second, then shrugged. “He could have called first, but then I’m guessing you wouldn’t have been in a hurry to set up a meeting. Relax, brother, we can deal with this.”

Magnus sat in one of the two chairs opposite the desk. How could he be so damn calm?

“Did Farm Girl call you?” Danté said. “Why wouldn’t she warn us Fischer was coming?”

“She would have, if she’d known,” Magnus said. “Fischer must have stopped telling people where he’s going. He knows someone is picking off his signals, so he’s stopped sending signals.”

“What else could he have done we don’t know about?”

Magnus shrugged. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

Seconds later, Colonel Paul Fischer walked through the door. He wasn’t alone. Two men in Canadian Army uniforms accompanied him, as did three other men wearing civilian suits. Fischer’s hat was under one arm. His other hand carried a leather satchel with an open top.

“Colonel Fischer, this is unacceptable,” Danté said. “If you’re here to continue your witch hunt against Genada, I assure you our lawyers will have a field day.”

“I won’t be long,” Fischer said. “In fact, let’s get right down to business. Where are Claus Rhumkorrf, Liu Jian Dan, Tim Feely and Patrick James Colding?”

“In hiding,” Magnus said. “Seems some ecoterrorists want to kill them. We’ve got to protect our people.”

Fischer stared down at Magnus. “Protect them? Like you protected Erika Hoel?”

“Sad, that,” Magnus said. “We saved four out of five. Wouldn’t you Americans describe that as batting eight hundred?”

“Magnus,” Danté said. “Let me handle this.”

Magnus nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on Fischer. Fischer turned back to face the older Paglione brother.

“Colonel,” Danté said, “please leave.”

“Let me spell this out first,” Fischer said. “The Canadian government, the United States government and several other governments are cooperating to freeze Genada’s assets.”

Danté’s stomach flip-flopped, and he felt that now all-too-familiar pinching in his chest. He’d known this day might come. “You don’t have that kind of international pull, Fischer. You can’t freeze our assets.”

“Not all of them,” Fischer said. “Switzerland and the Cayman Islands are still in process, but that will be taken care of by the end of the day. And you’re wrong. After the Novozyme incident, I do have that much international pull. Even with the Chinese.”

Fischer let that last word hang in the air. Danté’s mouth felt dry.

“I’m not much of a talker, Danté, so I’ll make it simple. We know you’re continuing research that potentially threatens all of humanity. You thought you could keep it going while the G8 demands you shut it down. You’re known for your smart business decisions, but that one is just stupid.”

Magnus leaned forward. “Are you calling my brother stupid?”

“How perceptive of you,” Fischer said. “The Canadian government is investigating the murder of Erika Hoel. Officially, Rhumkorrf, Feely, Colding and Liu Jian Dan are the primary suspects. They are all wanted for multiple murders.”

Danté looked at Magnus, then back to Fischer. “Multiple? What the hell are you talking about?”

Fischer reached into his leather satchel and pulled out a manila folder, which he placed on Danté’s desk. “Russian authorities identified the body of a Jane Doe with DNA matching that of a missing woman. That missing woman was Galina Poriskova, former employee of Genada. Although her remains were heavily decomposed, the Russians said she had been burned badly by an intense flame. A blowtorch, probably. They know this because the bones were burned in some places. Also, her right pinkie had been cut off. Galina Poriskova was going to shut Genada down, Danté, but she was tortured to death. Now, you and I both know who did that, but Jian, Rhumkorrf and Colding are the official suspects. Genada’s assets are frozen because, as your brother just admitted, you are now harboring those suspects.”

Magnus smiled. Danté recognized a rare expression on his brother’s face—respect.

“Colonel Fischer,” Danté said. “I assure you that—”

“Save it,” Fischer said. “As of right now, Genada is shut down.”

He pulled another folder out of the satchel and tossed it on top of the Galina murder report.

“That’s what we know about your C-5. Brilliant work, I admit. We want your flying lab, we want all of your research, and we want your staff. While I want to see you and your psycho brother in jail, my mission is to find Rhumkorrf and the others. Should we find them, that means Genada is no longer harboring fugitives. Your accounts would be opened up.” He put a business card on the desk. “If you need to reach me, that’s my number. Otherwise, good luck dealing with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

Fischer turned and walked out of the room, limping just a bit. The other men followed.

Magnus sat quietly. Danté pushed the C-5 folder aside and opened up Galina’s murder report. There were pictures. The pain in his chest grew stronger, more piercing.

“Magnus… how could you do this?”

“She was a threat.”

A threat. She was also a human being. Burns down to the bone? What kind of an animal had Magnus become?

“It will be okay,” Magnus said. “Danté, I’m here to protect you.”

“We don’t need that kind of protection. We need to get our lawyers going on this right now.”

“Come on, Danté,” Magnus said. “Lawyers? What do you think they can do against the bureaucracies of the entire free world?”

“We have to do something.”

“Do we? Wouldn’t it be easier if Fischer just… went away?”

Danté stared at his brother’s cold eyes. Magnus couldn’t consider something that drastic. That wasn’t even sane.

Then he looked down at the photos again and wondered whether Magnus had ever been sane.

“You don’t do a thing,” Danté said. “You hear me? Not a damned thing. I can fix this. All we need is a live animal. Once we have that, we go public. Everyone will back off. They can’t drop the hammer on a company that will save millions of lives. In fact, Magnus, I need you at Black Manitou. You have to make sure there are no problems.”

Magnus stared, said nothing for a few seconds. “You want me out of the way?”

“That’s not it,” Danté said, but they both knew that was it. “The project is our only hope. If this round of fetuses doesn’t turn out, we don’t have the money to fund another. I told Colding not to kill any additional fetuses, for any reason—you make sure he obeys that order. You also have to make sure that island is locked down tight. If someone gets off and Fischer finds them, he’ll find Black Manitou, and then it’s all over. Can you do that, Magnus? Can you do that for me?”

Magnus blinked, and his eyes softened a little. “Damn, you’re good at this stuff, brother. My brain knows exactly what you’re doing, but the way you sling words, it makes my heart want to obey.”

“Will you go?”

He nodded. “Yes. I’ll call Bobby and leave right now. I’ll be on Black Manitou by tomorrow morning. Do me a favor, call Colding and let him know he’s taking over Andy’s security shifts for a few days.”

Magnus turned and walked out.

Danté breathed in and out, long and slow, until the pain in his chest started to fade. Colding wouldn’t be happy about Magnus coming to Black Manitou, but that was just too bad.

NOVEMBER 22: HOT EVENING

Implantation +13 Days

SARA LOOKED BEHIND her as she quietly walked down the basement stairs. No one there. She walked to the security room door, punched in the supersecret code and slipped inside. Colding sat behind the monitors, feet up on the desk, a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. His eyes lit up when he saw her. Such a smile. That boy was nothing but trouble.

“Hey,” he said. “Anyone see you come in?”

She shook her head. “I think I lost the tail, Mister Bond.”

“Oh, knock it off. I just don’t want Magnus finding out about us. Technically, I am your boss, you know.”

“You can boss me around anytime.” She walked to the desk, pressed against him and stroked his hair. “I’m down for some covert lovin’, but what are you doing here? Isn’t this Andy and Gunther’s gig?”

Colding shook his head. “Not since Bobby dropped off Magnus yesterday. Seems Mags prefers the company of Andy, so the two of them are either snowmobiling or in the lounge getting ripped.”

“Bit of a sudden shift in the totem pole order? Andy must love that.”

“Yeah. He’s walking around like the cat that tortured and killed the canary. But it’s not so bad. I can’t keep as close an eye on Jian as I’d like to, but I’m watching her on the lab cameras. Other than that, just catching up on my reading.”

His pile of papers looked like a manuscript. The header at the top read HOT EVENING—BY GUNTHER JONES.

“Oh, snap! Is that Gunther’s trashy vampire romance novel?”

He nodded. “Yeah, only it’s not all that trashy. The writing isn’t that great, but I have to admit I can’t put it down. I already read the first one, Hot Dusk.”

He set his stack of pages down carefully, then reached back on the counter and found another thick sheaf. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Hot Dusk, the first in the series.”

“You’re serious. You’re actually telling me this is good?”

“Good enough to keep me hooked. I’m a little surprised myself, but I’ve got to find out how Margarite handles Count Darkon.” He stopped talking and just stared at her, as if he were weighing his options about something.

“What,” Sara said. “Do I have a booger or something?”

Colding smiled and shook his head. “No, no boogers. I just… well, I think you should know what’s happening with the fetuses. I don’t think it’s anything to really worry about, but you should know—as long as you promise not to tell your crew.”

“Why wouldn’t I tell them?”

“Because you’re not supposed to know,” Colding said. “I like those guys, don’t get me wrong, but if Miller and Cappy start blabbing and Magnus finds out they know, it’s my ass, and…”

“And?”

“Well, nothing. I just don’t think you need that kind of pressure.”

She never hid anything from her crew, but she trusted Peej. “Okay. I promise.”

She waited. Eventually, he talked and told her what was happening inside her plane, what was growing inside the cows.

She did freak out, but only a little.

NOVEMBER 24: NICE FUCK-FACE

Implantation +15 Days

COLDING WALKED INTO the lounge knowing he’d see the same thing he’d seen for the past three days—Magnus and Andy getting trashed. Sure enough, there they were.

Magnus was relaxing in one of the brown leather chairs. His left hand held a tumbler with amber liquid and ice. A half-empty bottle of Yukon Jack sat on the mahogany table in front of him. Next to the bottle lay the remote control for the lounge’s flat-panel TV.

On the chair to Magnus’s right sat one Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite: shoes off, white-socked feet resting on a coffee table, Rolling Rock beer in his hand, a shit-eating grin twisting his mouth.

“Colding,” Magnus said. “Ready to give your report?”

Colding felt his face get a little hot. Every day, he had to stand in front of Magnus and report. Colding had a feeling the daily charade was Andy’s idea, some kind of partial revenge for drawing down on him.

“No issues on my security shift,” Colding said. “Anything else?”

Magnus took a slow, deliberate sip. “Yes, two more things. How is the progress in the lab?”

“Couldn’t be better. Tim estimates the fetuses are all over a hundred pounds. I checked in with Rhumkorrf a few minutes ago—he said he may attempt a cesarean in about a week.”

Magnus raised his eyebrows. He looked at Andy, who shrugged and took a pull on his beer. Magnus looked back at Colding. “Let me make sure I understand this. A cesarean, meaning, you cut them out, and the ancestors walk on their own?”

“Hopefully, yes.”

“So this isn’t hypothetical anymore. You’re telling me that we’ve actually done it?”

“If the fetuses survive the coming week, then yes, we’ve done it. If not, then Jian and Rhumkorrf revise the genome. But we’ve come so far this time we know it’s not a question of if, but when.”

Magnus took another sip, then smiled. “My brother did it.” He drained his drink in one pull, then lifted the bottle and refilled the glass.

“You said you had two more things,” Colding said. “What’s the other?”

“How’s Jian, Colding? How’s she doing?”

Colding felt a small wash of fear creep across his back. “She’s fine.”

Andy’s smile widened.

“That’s not what Andy tells me,” Magnus said. “He said she is… what’s that delightful colloquialism you used, Andy?”

“Crazier than bugshit on burnt toast.”

Magnus pointed at Andy, a little gun-finger trigger pull. “That’s it. Crazier than bugshit on burnt toast. Funny how I’ve been here almost four days, Colding, and you haven’t told me about that. I gave you plenty of time. I even scheduled daily reports for you to give you the opportunity to be up front, but it seems you don’t want to be forthcoming to your boss. Why is that, Bubbah?”

Colding shrugged and looked out the big window at the sprawling expanse of Lake Superior. How much more did Andy know? Did he know Jian might be hallucinating again? “Jian has some issues, but that’s the price you pay for dealing with genius.”

Magnus nodded. “Right. Genius. And she’s reliable? Won’t have a sudden bout of homesickness, try and get back to the mainland?”

Now he understood Magnus’s concern. A crazy Jian was unpredictable, could do anything, including trying to contact the outside world.

“She’s good,” Colding said. “Trust me.”

Magnus stared at him, said nothing. It took everything Colding had to not turn away, to stay locked on those cold, violet eyes.

“Okay, Bubbah, I’ll take your word for it.” Magnus turned to look out the picture window once again. Colding gathered that he had been dismissed. He started to walk out of the lounge when Magnus stopped him.

“Oh, Bubbah, just one more thing.”

Colding stopped and turned. “Yes?”

“As a supervisor at Genada, do you think it’s wise to be fucking the help?”

Magnus knew. Colding looked at Andy, who just kept on smiling.

“I figured Sara for a lezbo,” Andy said. “But man, that bitch loves the cock, eh, Colding?”

Magnus picked up the remote control. The TV’s dark screen flared to life with a green-tinged night-vision image. Colding on his back, in Sara’s bed, Sara sitting up, on top of him, riding him.

Colding felt his hands ball up into fists.

Magnus raised his glass, saluting the screen. “Impressive. Why, then, can one desire too much of a good thing?”

Colding ground his teeth. “I ordered cameras off in the rooms.”

“Oh, that,” Andy said. “I guess I didn’t get the memo. Man, love the titties on that bitch.”

Colding’s rage welled up, threatening to blow wide open. Only once before in his life had he wanted to kill another man—that was the day he’d attacked Paul Fischer. He had to think clearly, stay calm. The whole Erika/Claus/Galina triangle had almost destroyed the project. Magnus might not take kindly to a love affair between Colding and Sara. If Magnus had murdered Erika Hoel, the man would have no compunction about killing Sara Purinam.

Magnus hit the pause button, freezing Sara as she leaned far back, her hands behind her on the bed, her breasts standing out. Past her shoulder, Colding could see his own eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy, his mouth a combination of a smile and a snarl.

“Hey, Colding,” Andy said. “Man, you’ve got a great fuck-face. Nice.”

Magnus shook his head. “And here I thought you were such a straight shooter, Bubbah. Fraternization with a subordinate is prohibited.”

“Uh-oh, am I going to get written up? Will this go on my permanent record?” Colding looked at the wall, trying to appear bored with the whole thing. “What do you want, Magnus?”

“I want to know if Sara Purinam is your girlfriend.”

“I’m fucking her. So what?” The words sounded sick to his own ears.

“That’s all, Bubbah? Just fucking her?”

Colding shrugged. “Is that against company rules?”

Magnus laughed. “Not against the letter of the law, but you are her boss.”

Colding had to be the stereotypical man-pig, convince Magnus he didn’t care about Sara. “Are you ordering me to stop fucking her?”

“Take it easy, Bubbah. I just want to make sure you aren’t falling for her, something that might compromise your judgment.”

“No worries there,” Colding said.

“So,” Magnus said, “Sara’s just a whore to you?”

“She sure fucks like a whore,” Andy said. “Where do you think she learned to fuck like that?”

“Where indeed,” Magnus said. “She give up that pussy to anyone?”

Andy laughed. “Not everyone. She won’t give it up to me.”

“No surprise there,” Colding said. “Your infinitesimal cock wouldn’t be enough for her, little man.”

Andy’s laugh died in his throat.

Magnus chuckled. “Infinitesimal cock. In case that’s outside of your vocabulary, Andy, it’s an insult. You going to just take that?”

Andy stood and tossed his beer aside. It fell to the ground, spilling on Clayton’s immaculate carpets. “Fuck a duck, Colding. I’m going to kick your ass right now.”

“Sit down, Andy.”

Andy looked at Magnus, then back to Colding. “But you said—”

“Sit!” Magnus shouted the word, so loud even Colding flinched. Andy sat.

Magnus raised his glass to Colding in a mock salute. “Fuck who you want, Bubbah, just keep doing your job. But remember, some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”

The way Magnus said that made Colding’s blood run cold.

“Cupid? Magnus, with all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about?”

That half-smile again. “Didn’t they teach you Shakespeare in America?”

“Not really. I wasn’t much for the literature classes.”

Magnus nodded a little, as if that statement had answered some longstanding question. “Go ahead and take off. I’m sure you’ve got something, or someone, to do.”

Colding walked out of the lounge. Not only were his personal problems magnified, but he’d been slacking on his main job—Jian. Magnus was watching her. Colding had to make sure the woman got the help she needed.

Rhumkorrf had to fix Jian’s meds, and fix them now.

NOVEMBER 24: YOU UNDERSTAND

Implantation +15 Days

THE SNOW HAD not come with a big, gale-force storm, but it most certainly had come. An inch here, another two overnight there, usually light but fairly steady over the past weeks. Only now did Colding really notice the accumulation of a half foot of snow that covered everything.

And still the flakes came.

He stood at the water’s edge, watching Claus Rhumkorrf try to skip stones. Above and behind them stretched the mansion’s sprawling back porch. In front of them: water, whitecaps, and Horse Head Rock.

Rhumkorrf picked up a flat stone from the water’s edge. It slipped out of his mitten-covered hand twice before he held it firmly enough to throw. The rock skipped once before plunging into a three-foot wave.

“Need flatter water for that,” Colding said.

“Now you’re a physicist?”

“Come on, Doc. Talk to me. We need to help Jian.”

Rhumkorrf shrugged. “Pressure and stress exacerbate her symptoms, and we’re under the gun, as they say. There is only so much we can do for her.”

“That’s a cop-out answer and you know it.”

Rhumkorrf kept staring out at the water, seeming to focus on Horse Head Rock some two hundred yards from shore.

“She was fine for months,” Colding said. “Now she’s struggling. Hallucinating. We have to stop it before she tries to kill herself again.”

“I increased her dosage.”

Rhumkorrf tried to pick up another rock, but it kept falling out of his oversized black knit mittens. He gave up after the third try, stood straight, and stared out at the choppy water.

Something was wrong here. Rhumkorrf was the visionary, the planner, but nothing in this project happened without Jian’s genius. And yet Doc didn’t seem remotely concerned that her biochemistry had changed, that he might have to scramble to find a new medicine that worked.

“I’ll bring in someone else if I have to,” Colding said. “Another physician who can help her.”

Rhumkorrf suddenly shifted into a visible state of anxiety just a few degrees below panic. “If you bring another doctor out here, or take her to the mainland, the Americans might find us and shut us down.”

Colding held up both gloved hands, palms up. “If you can’t help her, what do you want me to do?”

“Do your job,” Rhumkorrf shouted. “Keep us safe, keep us secret until I finish my work. Jian’s job is to help me create the ancestor, something that she’s doing exceedingly well right now, so maybe we just need to take the good with the bad.”

The prick didn’t give a rat’s ass about Jian. All he cared about was the experiment.

“You’re a medical doctor,” Colding said. “You’re supposed to help people.”

“That is exactly what I’m doing. Helping millions of them. Haven’t you noticed, P. J., that when she gets like this she is at her most brilliant? It’s for the greater good. You of all people should understand that.”

Colding stared down at the little man, the cold forgotten for the moment. Realization set in. Rhumkorrf wasn’t concerned about finding a new medicine, because he knew the current medicine would work just fine… if she got the proper dose.

“You motherfucker,” Colding said. “You shorted her meds.”

Rhumkorrf shrugged and again looked out at Horse Head Rock.

Suddenly it was hard to think. Colding wanted to kick Rhumkorrf right in the teeth. “How long has this been going on?”

“Five weeks. Had to be done, and it worked. You understand.”

Colding snapped out his left hand and grabbed the back of Rhumkorrf’s neck, squeezed it tight as he pulled the smaller man close.

“Don’t you touch—”

Rhumkorrf couldn’t finish his sentence, because Colding’s right hand locked on Rhumkorrf’s throat, pressing down on the Adam’s apple. Rhumkorrf’s gloved fingers tried to pry the hands away but couldn’t find purchase. Another memory flashed in Colding’s mind, this time of Magnus back on Baffin Island, squeezing just a little bit harder to get Andy to stop struggling. Colding’s hands tightened. He also gave one short shake, bobbling Rhumkorrf’s head.

Eyes wide with terror, looking up through glasses knocked askew, Rhumkorrf stopped moving.

“Fix it,” Colding said. “Or I’ll fix you.”

He pushed Rhumkorrf away, a little too hard. The man stumbled and fell, skidding across the snow-covered sand. Hand on the ground behind him, he looked up at Colding. Colding suddenly saw the scene through Rhumkorrf’s eyes—a bigger man, a stronger man, towering over him, ready to hurt.

Sanity snapped back into place, and with it, deep embarrassment.

“Claus… I…”

“Stay away,” Rhumkorrf said. “I’ll correct her medication, just stay away from me.” He scrambled to his feet and ran for the steps to the mansion, giving Colding a wide berth as he passed.

Colding didn’t know what bothered him more, that he’d flipped out and put his hands on Rhumkorrf, or that for a brief instant he’d used Magnus Paglione as a template for proper behavior.

“Fuck,” he said.

He waited a few seconds to give Rhumkorrf plenty of room, then walked toward the steps that would take him up to the mansion.

He’d check in on Jian, and then go find Sara.

NOVEMBER 25: STUPID COW

Implantation +16 Days

AT THREE IN the morning, Jian found herself alone in the C-5’s upper-deck lab. She blinked and looked at the work log she’d called up on her computer. It couldn’t be. But there it was, the keystroke log didn’t lie.

She’d just done a protein analysis. The results had looked familiar. Now she knew why—she had done the same analysis yesterday, and the day before. But she didn’t remember doing either of them.

She called up more logs, looking at her work. Some things she remembered doing, some she did not. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. She couldn’t even manage twenty minutes of sleep before the mishmash animal of her dreams came for her.

Doctor Rhumkorrf had brought her meds today, not Mister Feely. Rhumkorrf said he had made an adjustment. It would take a little while for her body to acclimate. Three days, maybe four, to get back to normal, he had said. She’d start feeling a little better as early as tomorrow. And when she did feel better, could she please please please make sure she told Mister Colding?

She knew she wouldn’t feel better. Doctor Rhumkorrf was lying. Everyone lied to her.

But the numbers didn’t lie.

Maybe her failure caused the dreams, the spiders. The rats. The mishmash. The numbers.

Movement on her left. She turned and took a step back all at the same time, then felt a dribble of pee trickle hot down her leg.

An orange spider.

Big as her whole head, staring at her. Jian’s hand shot to the desktop, where she’d left her Dr Pepper. She grabbed and threw all in one motion, the open bottle trailing brown and white froth as it shot toward the corner.

The spider scrambled out of the way as the plastic bottle hit the floor and spun, spraying the area.

“Zou kai!” Jian screamed. “Zou kai!”

The spider was gone. Must have slipped into a crack or something, even though she couldn’t see a crack. Damn spiders.

The numbers. She had to fix the numbers, fix the numbers so the ancestors would come out right.

But… ancestors… for people parts?

That was it! How could they expect to produce an animal with transplantable organs? Out of a cow? She could fix it, she could fix it all, make the whole project work. They just needed a different kind of host.

She put on gloves, then opened the liquid nitrogen container. She carefully pulled out sample trays and set them aside until she found the one she wanted. The one nobody else knew about. She put the other trays back inside, then carried her special sample to the elevator and descended to the empty lower deck.

Some of the cows were asleep. The ones that were awake watched her. Sir Moos-A-Lot had an orange rat on his head. It didn’t seem to notice that the rat was gnawing on a black-and-white ear, red blood spilling down the cow’s big flat cheek. The cow just stared at her, oblivious.

Stupid cow.

Jian quietly walked down the center aisle, trying to ignore several sets of cow eyes that followed her motion. She opened the storage cabinets in Mister Feely’s area. There, a sterile envelope that had what she needed: a catheter that looked like a thin turkey baster.

Jian grabbed the catheter package. She placed it and the sample tray on the lab table.

Embryo transfer in most in vitro procedures was done by a doctor, and guided by ultrasound. Ultrasound would take an extra set of hands. Jian did not have an extra set of hands. Too bad the orange spiders couldn’t help. They had lots of hands.

She’d be on her back, but doing it herself would only take about five minutes.

And besides… they were her eggs. She could do whatever she wanted with them.

NOVEMBER 25: A VALID CONCERN

Implantation +16 Days

CLAUS RHUMKORRF SAT at the ultrasound station, waiting for Tim to finish running the transducer across Molly McButter’s belly. Claus had taken a liking to Molly, but that was simply because the cow showed above-average intelligence. And he liked the way she nuzzled against his chest when he scratched her ear (but only, of course, when no one else in the lab was looking).

Jian, thank God, was looking better already. She’d even combed her hair. Two more days, three at the most, she’d be back to her normal, far-less-creative self. That was okay, though, because they were in the homestretch. No question anymore—the ancestors would live to term, and all data indicated they would walk on their own.

That asshole Colding, manhandling him like that. How dare he. And yet Colding had been right. At least somewhat. If Jian killed herself, that didn’t help the project. With the most significant problem behind them, Claus could afford to be gracious and correct her meds. She still threw darting glances into the corners, but he estimated that behavior would vanish by the end of the day.

The progress bar filled up. A gold-hued picture flared to life. “Heilige scheisse,” he said, the words out of his mouth before he knew it.

Baby McButter had come a long way from its start as a microscopic ball of undifferentiated cells. If Claus hadn’t known better, he would have estimated the creature up on the screen to be four or five months along, not two weeks.

Jian stared at the picture. She shook her head as if to clear it, then stared at it again. “There has to be a mistake,” she said. “That fetus is at least a hundred pounds.”

“More,” Tim said as he came out of Molly McButter’s stall. “Try one-thirty.”

“No,” Jian said. “Program say ancestors should be no more than forty pounds right now.”

“Your program versus a scale?” Tim said. “I think the scale wins, Froot Loops.”

“Stop with the names,” Claus said, feeling odd about his instant defense of Jian.

“I don’t care about Jian’s bullshit program,” Tim said. “Look at the damn readouts. Well over a hundred pounds in two weeks? Nothing grows that fast. Not an elephant, not nothing.”

Claus marveled at the life he’d created. The back legs looked much thicker than he’d theorized. The front legs looked strong as well, but were skinnier and longer than the back. That would suggest a creature that moved at somewhat of an angle, like a gorilla on all fours, as opposed to horizontally, like a running dog or a tiger.

The skeletal structure also showed remarkable growth. The ribs looked very thick and extended from the head all the way down to the hips, growing against one another almost like a kind of internal armor.

“Doc,” Tim said. “What are we going to do?”

“We observe and document,” Claus said. “We prepare for a C-section in a week. Maybe less.”

“That’s not what I mean, dude. Based on the growth patterns thus far, in another week these bitches could hit three hundred pounds.”

Rhumkorrf nodded. “True, and adult weight could reach four hundred, maybe five hundred pounds. You’re right, the organs might be too large. We’ll adjust the genome for the second generation, but right away we can use livers, maybe even kidneys.”

Tim’s face wrinkled up as if he were looking at a very, very stupid person.

“What?” Claus said. “Now what is your problem?”

“I’m not talking about transplants and organs, you fucking nerd.” Tim looked at Jian. “You know what I’m talking about, Fruity Pebbles?”

“Mister Feely,” Claus said, “I’m not going to tell you ag—”

“Predators,” Jian said. “Teeth. Claws. Maybe three hundred pounds at birth, possibly twice that size within days. Where will we put them? What will we feed them?”

Claus looked at her blankly, then turned to stare at the workstation’s gold-tinted screen. He used the trackball to turn the fetal image, looking at it from every possible angle. Teeth. Claws. Muscle. Aggression. Attacking the camera, killing while still inside the womb.

“Perhaps,” he said quietly, “that is a valid concern.”

NOVEMBER 26: CHECKMATE

Implantation +17 Days

COLDING STARED AT the chessboard and contemplated his next move. He couldn’t screw it up, because he was winning—he was actually beating Jian. No one in the project had ever beaten her. Okay, maybe her brain was still a bit addled from the med shorting, but Colding would take a victory over her any way he could get it.

He had avoided Sara as much as possible in the last two days. After, of course, he’d gone to her room and broken the cameras there. He didn’t quite know how to tell her that Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite had a video of her, naked, making love.

He explained his distance by telling Sara that he had to focus on Jian, that he’d been slacking off more than a little on that part of his job. Sara understood. And he wasn’t lying, because he did focus on Jian, monitoring her progress, making sure Rhumkorrf gave the proper dosage. That and playing a lot of chess.

Colding moved his queen’s knight and smiled. “Check.”

Jian stared blankly out the lounge’s picture window. She seemed to have forgotten Colding was even there at all. She looked much better, though—clearly, the proper dosage was working.

“Jian?”

She just sat there, her hands turning a bottle of Dr Pepper over and over until the color was a light brown—the normal dark caramel shade mixed with the white of bubbles seeking escape against the bottle’s pressure. When she finally opened it, Colding thought, the thing would explode.

“Hey, kiddo, pay attention—you’re in check.”

She glanced at the board, then went back to turning the Dr Pepper bottle.

“Jian, talk to me. What’s eating at you?”

She looked at him, her eyes once again focused. “It is too big.”

“I know, it’s okay. Gary Detweiler is getting material for heavy cages. We’ll have them up in a few days. Doc tells me that will keep the animals under control.”

She laughed. “Doctor Rhumkorrf wants to see his name on the cover of Time magazine. He would risk all of us.”

Colding thought of the shorted meds. Jian was more right than she knew. He also thought of the cages, and of a tiny, camera-biting fetus enlarged to two hundred pounds. Or even bigger. Rhumkorrf had assured him everything would be fine, but the man’s statements were questionable at best. If Jian was worried, then Colding was worried. “Why are the fetuses so much bigger than you thought they would be?”

She looked down. The bottle turned faster. “I… I made projections, but… maybe I was not thinking clearly.”

Not thinking clearly. He thought about the timeline. She’d had her breakthrough, created the successful batch right when they left Baffin three weeks ago… two weeks after Rhumkorrf started shorting her meds.

“Jian, I need you to think. You said you coded for a herd animal. Docile, about two hundred pounds adult weight. But it’s not just the size of the ancestors, it’s the aggressive behavior, those… teeth.”

She raised her head, looked him in the eyes. He couldn’t quite read her expression. On her face he saw doubt, confusion. “I thought I program for herbivore. But… it is predator.”

No shit, Sherlock. Herbivores didn’t eat each other in the womb. If Genada had more time, more resources, Colding could just scrap this round of fetuses and have Jian start over. Magnus, however, wasn’t going to let that happen.

“I want to leave,” she said suddenly. “I want to leave this place. Something bad is going to happen, unless we stop it. We need to call someone.”

Colding’s breath caught in his throat. He automatically looked at the camera in the upper corner. Gunther was in the security room. Did he see Colding and Jian in here? There was no sound… but Colding had also thought there was no video capture in Sara’s room. Who knew what else he was wrong about? If Magnus found out Jian was talking about leaving, what would he do?

“Jian, don’t say that again. Don’t you even think about saying anything like that, to anyone. Do you understand?”

“But Mister Colding, I am afraid that I… I…” Her voice trailed off.

“These half-sentences of yours are really annoying, Jian. Just tell me.”

She looked at the chess piece in her hand and said nothing.

“Jian, just tell me. What are you afraid of?”

Her eyes narrowed. Something was going on in that brilliant head of hers, but what?

“I did things I do not remember doing,” she said. “I think that… I will look at code again, see what I can find.”

She set down her rook in a new space that blocked his check. Colding smiled and started to move his knight into attack position, when he saw that by moving her rook, she had put his king in check with her bishop.

“Checkmate in two moves,” Jian said absently.

“Fuck,” Colding said.

The bottle spun even faster. Without another word, she stood and walked out of the office.

NOVEMBER 27: KILL ’EM ALL

Implantation +18 Days

JIAN HELD HER breath and waited while Claus Rhumkorrf read her report on his computer. They were alone in the upper-deck lab. She was feeling better, but not when she was around him. Stress was bad for her. Made her twitchy. Made the shadows move.

He turned from the screen to stare at her. “But you don’t remember doing this?”

She shook her head. “I do not, but look at it. That is the real code I used for the genome. That is why my growth projections are so off.”

His eyes widened. She’d never seen that look before. A look of doubt, of fear. He turned back to the screen.

“I see,” he said. “And now that you know this, you have new projections?” His tone of voice, almost like he didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Yes, Doctor Rhumkorrf.” She again looked at the printout in her hands, even though she already knew the answer. “Birth weight, approximately two hundred fifty pounds.”

He swallowed. She actually heard him swallow. Trembling hands reached up to readjust his black glasses. “And your best guess at… at the recalibrated adult weight?”

“Over five hundred pounds.”

Of all the odd things, he picked his nose for a second. He wiped his finger on his pants leg. “That would be more in line with the growth we’ve seen in the fetuses. Still, we need to see the adults. We won’t know organ functions or dimensions for sure until we have an adult. Then we can make adjustments and try again.”

Jian couldn’t believe her ears. See an adult? Was he crazy? “Doctor Rhumkorrf, we need to kill them.”

His head snapped around, anger smoldering in his eyes. “Kill them? But we’re succeeding!”

Jian shook her head. “We are creating something bad. Something evil.”

“We’ll have the cages soon. We’re not going to kill anything.”

Jian started to speak, but was interrupted when Mister Feely’s head popped up the aft ladder.

“Bro-ski! Froot Loops! Get down here, pronto!” He disappeared back down the ladder. Rhumkorrf and Jian followed him to the first deck.

Mister Feely stood next to Molly McButter. Molly’s head hung almost to the ground. Thin trails of blood ran from her mouth.

Rhumkorrf knelt to look into the cow’s mucus-coated eyes. “What’s wrong with her?”

Tim shook his head. “I’m not sure. I just got here ten minutes ago and found her like this.”

“Ten minutes? You should have been here hours ago, Mister Feely. Were you drinking again, or just sleeping off last night’s hangover?”

“Fuck you, shit-breath,” Tim said as he ran down the aisle to his lab area across from the crash chairs and the elevator. He tore through the cabinets and came back with a fluid-filled IV bag and a needle envelope.

“So?” Rhumkorrf said. “What’s wrong with her? Doctor Hoel isn’t here to wet-nurse you anymore, you drunken idiot.”

“Know what, chief?” Tim hung the bag from a hook above Molly McButter’s stall, then knelt to work the needle into her neck. “You’re about one ounce of lip shy of me pimp-slapping you like a bitch.”

“Just tell me what’s wrong with the cow!”

“She’s sick, it’s like her body is feeding on itself. I’d say it’s a sudden onset of malnutrition.”

Jian had looked over the cows just last night, and they seemed fine. Malnutrition? How could that be? Too much stress. She felt all itchy. She wanted to get out of there, get away from Rhumkorrf, Feely and the cows.

“Ridiculous,” Rhumkorrf said. “It can’t be malnutrition. Molly’s feed bin is full; she hasn’t touched it. We’ve increased their food intake to compensate for the advanced fetal growth. She didn’t look like this yesterday… did she?”

“Not even close,” Tim said. “Whatever made her sick, it made her so sick she stopped eating. She’s the only one showing these symptoms, so I’ll see if something is wrong with the IV setup. Maybe the pump broke or the needle jammed.”

Jian looked at the other cows. They all looked fine. Then she saw something move in stall forty-one. Coldness blossomed in her chest. A tiny plastic baby-doll hand reached over the stall divider. A black-and-orange tiger paw appeared a few inches to its left.

“No,” Jian said in an inaudible whisper.

The mismatched arms shivered. A black head slowly appeared from behind the wall. Jian shut her eyes tight and jabbed her thumbs into her stomach, sending a wave of dull pain up her body. She gave her head one shake, then opened her eyes.

The thing was gone.

“Jian,” Rhumkorrf said sharply. She jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to face him.

“Jian, did you hear me?” He looked annoyed. Mister Feely looked disgusted.

“No, Doctor Rhumkorrf. What did you say?”

“I asked what you thought of this.”

Jian quickly looked at the sick cow, then back at Rhumkorrf. “Mister Feely is right, the rapid fetus growth is making the cow sick.”

Tim inserted a new IV needle into Molly’s neck. “I’m going to crank up her intravenous feeding,” he said. “Hopefully that will normalize her metabolism enough for her to start eating again. I’ll increase all the cows’ food another twenty-five percent. I think that sometime during the night Molly became sick enough to stop eating, and her body started breaking down muscle in order to sustain the fetus. From there, the situation cascaded.”

“We need to set up checks every two hours,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’ll have to create a rotation with the nonimportant staff.”

Tim shook his head. “I can do you one better, bro-hem. I’ll program their monitors to watch for altered vitals, tie that into the security room computer. Something goes wrong, the security dude on staff gets beeped, zooms in with a camera, then gives us a holler. Easy.”

Jian shook her head. “No. Just let them die.”

Rhumkorrf glared at her.

Tim nodded slowly. “Fuckin’ A right,” he said.

“Wrong,” Rhumkorrf hissed, the word long and drawn out. Jian took a half step back.

“These animals will not die,” Rhumkorrf said. “And if they do, I swear to God that I will destroy both of your careers. Timothy, the only way you will get near a lab is if you’re pushing a mop. And Jian, I promise you that when they take you back to China, you will spend the rest of your life rotting away in an insane asylum.”

Rhumkorrf’s eyes were wide and angry. A sneer bent his upper lip. Hateful. She had to look away. And when she did, Rhumkorrf turned his gaze on Tim. Tim looked down—all of his bluster, all of his threats of violence, gone.

Rhumkorrf walked back to the aft ladder and climbed to the second deck. Jian said nothing. She had to do something to stop all of this, but what? Mister Colding wanted her to shut up. Doctor Rhumkorrf just didn’t want to listen. Mister Feely was all talk. Sara? She wasn’t one of the decision makers.

Jian couldn’t rely on anyone. She knew what she had to do. The only question was, did she have the courage to do it?

NOVEMBER 27: NICE ENDO

Implantation +18 Days

COLDING WAS GETTING the hang of snowmobiling, and, he had to admit, he liked it. A swarm of sleds shot down the snowpacked road toward the docks—Magnus and Andy out in front, Alonzo and the Twins next, then Colding, with Sara bringing up the rear.

She hung back a little in case Colding had problems. Wasn’t exactly rocket science to drive one, but like anything else a sled took some getting used to. The brakes on a car or motorcycle usually weren’t applied while driving thirty miles an hour across snow or ice, for example.

Up ahead, the road crested the snow-covered dune that marked the harbor. Colding’s eyes widened as he saw Magnus and Andy accelerate up the dune and fly off it, trailing comet-tails of powder through open air before they vanished behind the dune’s far side. ’Zo and the Twins took the crest more conservatively, keeping their sleds on the ground as they went over. Colding slowed and stopped a good fifty yards shy of the dune.

Sara slid to a stop next to him. “You like what you see there?” Her smile blazed in the afternoon sun. Even with goggles covering her eyes and a helmet hiding her hair and ears, she looked stunning. The helmet didn’t hide those freckles.

He looked back to the dune. That much air under Magnus’s sled seemed terrifying, but it also seemed like a crapload of fun. “How do you land without killing yourself?”

“You push off when you hit the crest. Keep your feet flat on the runners, but keep your knees bent. Push down with your legs when you land, it absorbs the shock.”

“Sounds like jumping a dirt bike.”

She nodded. “If you’ve jumped a bike, you know how it works. I’ll go side by side with you, just match my speed.”

Colding shook his head. “What if I wreck the sled?”

“I’m pretty sure Genada can afford a new one. Don’t be a pussy.” Sara gunned her snowmobile and shot away, engine whining. Colding squeezed his throttle tight. The sled rocketed forward so fast he almost fell off. These things were flat-out built for speed. He caught up to Sara at the base of the dune. The upward slope pushed him down into his seat. Still accelerating, he hit the crest and pushed off.

Weightless. Exhilarating. The harbor spread out before him, white and blue, the Otto II bobbing slowly in the light chop. The sled dropped down. He bent his knees, then pushed.

Jarring impact, body stunned, limp and flopping. More weightlessness, not the good kind, then a smack that rattled his head inside the helmet. Sliding facedown. Something cold in his neck and left shoulder.

No more motion.

“Fuck,” Colding said.

“Hey!” Sara’s voice. “Are you okay?”

He pushed himself to a sitting position. As he did, he felt packed snow fall from his snowsuit neck down his shirt and over his stomach. Sara crouched in front of him, helmet now off, eyes filled with concern.

“I think I’m okay,” he said. He pulled off his gloves, unzipped the suit and started fishing inside his shirt for the ice-cold snow. “Nothing hurt but my pride.”

“You looked sexy,” Sara said. “You know, right up until that whole landing thing.”

Colding laughed and stood. His snowmobile had wound up on its side, clear plastic windscreen cracked from the crash. He put it back on its treads. Other than the windscreen, it looked no worse for wear. Sara’s sled, of course, had no damage. “I see you landed like a pro.”

“I’ve been riding since high school,” Sara said. “An old boyfriend from Gaylord taught me.”

“You dated a gay lord?”

“It’s a town, dumb-ass. Just south of Cheboygan. Big rivals in high school football. I was a sophomore dating a senior from a rival school… so scandalous. He used to take me snowmobiling all the time.”

“What was his name?”

Sara started to speak, then stopped. “Crap, I had it. Man, that was what, almost twenty years ago? Ah! Don Jewell. See? Sharp as a tack despite my advanced years.”

“You still in touch with him?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t talked to him since high school. No idea what happened to him.”

The sound of the Nuge’s diesel engines drew their attention. Clayton’s snowproof vehicle crested the dune at a modest speed, then continued toward the dock. Out at the dock, Colding saw the others already at work unloading the Otto II. Magnus, Andy, Sara’s crew, Sven, James and Stephanie Harvey. They hauled metal poles, rolls of heavy chain-link fence and bags of concrete from the ship to the base of the dock. Mookie the dog ran around, barking, kicking up chest-high waves of snow before stopping every twenty or thirty feet, standing tall, snow-covered black ears up high and black eyes searching the tree line for some imagined threat to her master.

“Let’s get to work,” Colding said. “Last thing I need is Magnus thinking I’m a slacker. And remember, no public displays of affection out here.”

“Spoilsport,” Sara said.

They walked quickly to the dock, the Nuge close behind. At the base of the dock, Gary Detweiler and Sven Ballantine stacked their loads of cement bags—Gary carried a single forty-pound bag, Sven carried three.

“What’s up, Mister Colding?” Gary said. “Helluva endo you had there.”

“Endo?”

“He means your landing, eh?” Sven said. “And I use that word loosely.”

Colding laughed and shrugged. No way a wipeout like that wasn’t going to bring him some ribbing.

Gary patted the pile of concrete bags, already stacked five high and six across. “This is some pretty serious gear for a cow pen.”

Sven rolled out his neck. The cracks sounded like breaking ice. “Babies are on the way, Gary. Expensive babies. Best to keep them protected.”

Colding nodded. Sara looked away. She knew the real reason they needed heavy-duty enclosures. Clayton, Gary, Sven and the Harveys did not. That had been Magnus’s orders—outside of Colding and the scientific staff, no one needed to know.

Sven turned and walked back down the dock to fetch another load.

“I saw a weather report,” Gary said. “You better get these cages built fast. Forecast is for a major storm in three days. No way you can do any construction once it comes in. For sure you’ll get that five feet of snow I told you about.”

“Wonderful,” Colding said. “Like Christmas come early.”

Gary leaned in. Colding could smell the pot rolling off him. “All this heavy fence, Mister Colding, for cows? Come on, what’s really going on? I just want to know if my dad is safe.”

“Piss off, eh?” Clayton walked up, moving with that old-man hitch-stride of his. “I don’t need you babysitting me, boy.”

“But Dad, all this stuff.”

“Yeah, all this stuff.” Clayton bent at the knees, grabbed a forty-pound bag of concrete under each arm, then stood. “We need to load all this stuff onto da Nuge. Let’s get crackin’, eh?” He carried the bags to the Bv’s rear section and started stacking them in.

Gary pursed his lips and shook his head. Apparently, concern for his father could cut through a marijuana high.

Colding picked up two bags and immediately dropped one. Holy crap, eighty pounds of concrete wasn’t exactly a loaf of bread. Clayton had picked up two like they were nothing, and Sven walked around with three. Good, clean country living had its benefits, apparently.

“Stop dickin’ around already, eh?” Clayton shouted. “Can you two pillow-biters have your gay moment off da clock, for fuck’s sake?”

Gary laughed, then picked up a bag and carried it to the zebra-striped vehicle. Colding adjusted and picked up his two—almost threw his back out, but he’d be damned if Clayton lifted more than he did.

NOVEMBER 28: FISCHER WAITS…

Implantation +19 Days

PAUL FISCHER READ through the printed reports, all of which boiled down to the same one-word summary.

Nothing.

That’s what they had: nothing. Multiple law-enforcement, military and intelligence agencies had gone over every last shred of Genada’s financial information, corporate history, employee profiles and anything else that might produce information on the whereabouts of Claus Rhumkorrf, Liu Jian Dan, Tim Feely or Patrick James Colding. The agencies were even looking for more people now—Magnus Paglione, who had slipped his tail shortly after Paul’s visit to Manitoba, and the suspected crew of Genada’s C-5: Sara Purinam, Alonzo Barella, Harold Miller and Matt “Cappy” Capistrano.

A search for all of them, and still… nothing.

Fischer pushed the papers away and leaned back in his chair. He had to finally admit defeat. Colding had beaten him.

All Fischer could do now was wait and hope that someone in Genada made a mistake.

NOVEMBER 29: FREAKIN’ ORCS AND ELVES

Implantation +20 Days

A FANTASY NOVEL. Yeah. That was where the money was. Freakin’ orcs and elves and shit? Some wizard kids? How hard could that be?

Gunther knew the vampire romance novel was a guaranteed home run. Why not whip out some bullshit fantasy novel under a pen name? Jeez, eighteen-year-olds were doing it, making millions by rehashing Tolkien. Nerds would buy anything with a dragon on the cover, and Gunther could rehash with the best of them.

Had to start with a quest. That’s how they all started, really, some dopey farmer kid getting sent on some quest, during which he’d have adventures and trudge through a magic swamp or something, then…

A beep from the console broke his concentration. That new alarm Tim had set up for alerts about the cows’ vital signs. Elevated heart rate from Miss Milkshake. Gunther tapped the controls, switching the monitors to an interior view of the C-5’s lower deck.

He started moving the camera remotely when the alarm changed from a beep to a steady drone. Flatline.

“Uh-oh.”

He moved the camera until it pointed at Miss Milkshake’s stall. On the black-and-white screen, a dark puddle spread out from under the clear plastic door.

NOVEMBER 29: 210 POUNDS, 6 OUNCES

Implantation +20 Days

THE 3-D ULTRASOUND was a marvelous invention, but Claus had always thought it looked a little… fake. Maybe it was the gold tint, or the way the little computer model rotated with the trackball movements. He knew the images were real, but on the flat-panel screen they still looked like exactly what they were—computer graphics. And computer graphics, no matter how detailed, couldn’t touch the real thing.

The real thing, which now sat on the lab table. It wasn’t in a dissection tray, because there weren’t any dissection trays that big. It didn’t even fit on the damn table. He, Tim and Jian stood there, looking at the corpse they’d taken out of Miss Milkshake’s belly.

“Oh fuck me running,” Tim said. “Look at those claws.”

Claus was looking at the claws. And the teeth. And the front and back legs that hung partially off the edges of the black table. He looked at his computer for the tenth time, still amazed at the weight. An actual weight, not one of Tim’s calculations.

Two hundred ten pounds, six ounces.

Five feet long from the tip of the nose to the end of its tailless posterior. The beginnings of fur were pushing out from the pink skin. The animal had put on fifty-five pounds in the last three days.

What in God’s name had Jian created?

“Look at the teeth,” she said.

“I am,” Rhumkorrf said. “Can’t you see that I am?”

Long and pointy, the ancestor’s teeth were definitely designed for killing. For ripping off large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole. A mouth full of canines, without an incisor or molar to be found.

Tim reached out, gingerly, and traced his fingers along the animal’s thick head. “This lower dentiary, it’s massive.”

The heavy jawbone was at least two feet wide at the base, giving the head a wide, triangular shape tapering off at the nose. The jaw bulged with attached muscles.

Claus hadn’t been ready for this. They hadn’t seen a fetus outside of the womb for thirteen days, ever since Danté forbade further autopsies. Thirteen days ago, 115 pounds ago.

“Timothy,” Claus said. “Start on the autopsy for Miss Milkshake immediately. We have to know why she died. Go.”

Tim ran to the ladder and descended.

Claus carefully examined the skull. Two feet wide, two feet long, the last fourteen inches of length were nothing but jaws and teeth. The creature still possessed a proportionately large braincase. The brain-to-body weight ratio ranked alongside that of wolves.

The skull wasn’t the only shocking feature. The front legs had retained their relative length advantage over the hind limbs. The creature would move half upright. All claws ended in thick, muscular digits, each tipped with a six-inch-long claw. Sharp, pointy claws, like those of a big cat.

“Now you see,” Jian said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, please.”

“You shut your mouth,” he said quietly. There would be no more insubordination from Jian and Timothy, a fact he would have to remind them of from time to time. “It will probably go through more physiological changes before it’s ready for birth. What I can’t figure out is this protrusion coming out of the back of its head.” A two-foot-long strand of cartilage, thin but sturdy, stretched from the back of the fetus’s head. He gently lifted the cartilage; still-forming skin ran from it down to the creature’s back.

“It almost looks like a variation on the dimetrodon’s spinal sail,” Claus said. “I don’t know what you were coding for with this, Jian. Come now, you’ve got to remember something this unusual. What is it?”

Jian looked at the growth, then up at Claus. Tears filled her eyes. “I do not remember what that is for,” she said. “But it does not matter. Please, Doctor Rhumkorrf, we are on an island where no one can reach us. We have to stop this, you can ask—”

“Do you remember what your insane asylum looked like, Jian?”

She leaned away like he’d actually hit her. That reaction, the way she caught her breath. He knew she’d spent a few years in one, before her countrymen got her back to some semblance of sanity. It was the perfect threat to keep her in line.

“Get back to work,” he said. “You made this animal. You go through your code, figure out what we have to prepare for. Do you understand me?”

She shrank back, nodding, then turned and waddled to the ladder. He stared at her all the way, in case she looked back with that pathetic, fat face. She did once, saw him watching her, then scurried the rest of the way to the lower deck.

Left alone, Claus stared at the huge corpse. Claws. Teeth. That wide jaw. That spine.

The cages would be enough.

They had to be.

NOVEMBER 30: THE PIMP SLAP

Implantation +21 Days

TIM SHIVERED AS he stared up at the bulkhead monitor. He needed a snort something fierce, but he couldn’t risk pulling his flask out of his back pocket. Not with Rhumkorrf watching. And maybe this really wasn’t the best time to be schnockered.

Jian stood next to the screen, also looking up at it, mumbling in Mandarin over and over again, switching her weight from the left foot to the right foot and back. She didn’t look like a scientist anymore—she looked like a lunatic.

Rhumkorrf sat on a stool, alternately looking at the IV needle in his hand and the pictures up on the bulkhead monitor. “So the IV needle came out of the vein,” he said, his voice a monotone of detached scientific analysis. “When would you estimate this happened, Mister Feely?”

“About 11:00 P.M.,” Tim said. “I checked the logs of the IV pump. It registered a pressure change, but not enough to trigger an alarm, because it was still pumping. Miss Milkshake had a slight hematoma at the insertion point. I estimate the fetus started eating the amniotic sac at around 12:05 A.M., causing the mother internal bleeding. Dude, the fetus actually ate the placenta, by the way, as well as a chunk of the uterine wall. Miss Milkshake flatlined at 12:37 A.M., according to the heart rate recorded by the stall’s computer. The fetus drowned in her blood at approximately 12:56 A.M.”

Rhumkorrf’s head snapped around. He had that furious look in his eyes again. “Mister Feely, are you sure about those numbers? As soon as Miss Milkshake died, the fetus would have asphyxiated within minutes—no oxygen from her blood.”

And now for the really, really fucked-up part. “The… uh… during the fetus’s struggles, its claws punched a few holes in the cow’s abdomen. There was a little… uh… air coming in, which it tried to breathe, I think, but it was also aspirating the mother’s blood.”

Rhumkorrf looked shocked. “So the fetus outlived the mother?”

“By around nineteen minutes,” Tim said. “When the needle came loose, I think that Baby Milkshake got… ah… it got hungry and tried to eat the first thing it could find.”

“This is not good,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re going to have to increase the nutrient intake and set up shifts to check each IV on the hour.”

“Doctor Rhumkorrf,” Jian said, “this has gone far enough. We have to kill the cows, today. Right now!”

“That’s enough.” Rhumkorrf’s voice boomed through the confined upper-deck lab. “Jian, you’ve never been stable to begin with, and now? Well, your meds are clearly not working. I’ve had it with your paranoid rants!”

“Oh, blow it out your ass,” Tim said. Was this guy for real? The evidence of pending disaster sat on the table right in front of him. “Don’t be a fuck-tard, bro. Open your damn eyes! We need to kill these mutant freaks, and right now.”

Rhumkorrf’s small face wrinkled with fury. “I will not stand by while you two… pussies ruin this. We’ve been working for this for years! And we’re almost there.”

“Please,” Jian said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, you must listen. We have to—”

Rhumkorrf stamped his foot on the rubberized floor, cutting off her words. “Jian, get out! I won’t hear any more of this! Get out of my lab! Get out of this plane entirely! You’re fired! Get out, get out getout!”

Tim and Jian looked at each other, then back at Rhumkorrf.

“Get out, I say! Get out now!” He pointed his finger to the ladder, anger radiating from his body.

Jian descended.

Well, maybe it wasn’t a good time to get schnockered, but that’s exactly what Tim was going to do. He pulled the flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the top and took a long drink. Ah, the power of scotch.

A hand hit his and the flask flew across the lab, trailing scotch as it went. A blur of motion, then a stinging sensation on his right cheek.

Rhumkorrf had slapped him. He stood nose to nose with Tim, his comb-over sticking up in a hundred different directions, eyes wide and unblinking behind the heavy black glasses.

“Feely, did you forget what I said about your career?”

“Screw my career,” Tim said. “I just want to get off this island alive.”

“I can’t believe you’re buying into Jian’s paranoid delusions.”

At that moment, Tim Feely lost it. He pushed Rhumkorrf hard in his chest. The smaller man stumbled back and fell, turning as he did to land on his hands and knees. He started scrambling to his feet, but Tim jumped on his back. They struggled, then Tim got his hands on Rhumkorrf’s head, turned it so it faced the big screen.

“Look at it, bro, look at it! It tried to eat its way out of the womb. The only one here with delusions is you! What’s going to happen when they’re born? What are we going to feed them?”

Tim never saw the elbow. He rolled back, jaw radiating pain, split lower lip spilling blood down his chin.

Panting and shaking, Rhumkorrf stood and looked down. “We can feed them the cattle from the other farms. And we’ll have Danté bring out more food. This is science, Feely, and we have to make it work. I wish I had Erika, but I don’t. I have you. Now, you get your ass downstairs and start doubling the nutrient supplement. I will not lose another fetus, not when we’re so close.”

Tim stared for a second before he realized something disturbing. He was afraid of Claus Rhumkorrf. The wee German was right—Tim was a pussy.

Tim stood, face burning with embarrassment, then cautiously slipped past Rhumkorrf and scurried down the aft ladder.

Rhumkorrf had always been obsessed, but this? This was a different level altogether. Anyone could see the danger. Rhumkorrf had to see it as well, had to, but still thought he could put those creatures in the new cages. The goddamn things were going to be bigger than lions.

Tim walked down the center aisle toward his lab. As he did, he passed each and every cow, staring at each and every massively swollen belly.

NOVEMBER 30: THE CALL

Implantation +21 Days

JIAN SHUFFLED DOWN the hall, small steps making for a slow pace, her hands furiously spinning a Dr Pepper bottle top-over-bottom-overtop. She entered her room, shut the door behind her and locked it. She then moved to the dresser. She didn’t slide it, but instead picked the whole thing up. Grunting slightly from the effort, she set the dresser against the door. She looked at the big four-poster bed. She slid behind it and shoved. Wooden feet squealed against the polished stone floor. The bed wedged nicely against the dresser.

Jian sat at her computer desk and called up the program she’d written two days earlier. There was nothing else she could do. Rhumkorrf wouldn’t listen. Not to her, not to Tim. Colding wouldn’t do anything. There was no longer any choice.

She entered some commands. The program flashed up a window with the words READY TO INITIATE CONTACT SEQUENCE.

She hit enter.

IN THE SECURITY control room, Andy Crosthwaite was sitting hunched down behind the security monitor. His big bag o’ porn sat close by, the brown paper worn down to an almost tissue-paper thickness from its many travels. But Andy wasn’t looking at the latest Juggs or Gallery. He was halfway through Hot Midnight. No one was more shocked than he that old Gun could write a hellacious fucking book, and that Andy might actually dig some cheesy vampire romance crap. But it wasn’t just mushy romance; Gun had thrown in more fuck scenes than a Skinimax after-hours flick.

Andy didn’t want anyone to see him reading the book, especially Magnus, who always had his nose in Shakespeare this or Shakespeare that. Andy hadn’t read much Shakespeare, but he knew damn well the old English dude didn’t write about killer vampire stableboys with glittering ruby schlongs. That bit was just genius, Gunther old boy… gen-ee-us.

A long beep brought his attention to the main monitor. A command-line window popped up. The window listed two lines.

“What the fuck?”

He shuffled together the pages of Gunther’s novel, set them on top of the big bag o’ porn, then scooted up to the keyboard. He called up the main security menu and clicked the jammer icon, launching the control window. Sure enough, the jammer’s status said disabled. He hit the enable button.

Andy felt a sinking feeling in his chest.

The log monitor scrolled again, this time with the messages:

Andy turned to the camera monitor and started flashing through the channels. C-5 cockpit: empty. C-5 lab: Rhumkorrf working at a lab table, but not near a computer. C-5’s veterinary bay: Tim in stall four, attending to a cow, also nowhere near a computer. Magnus’s room: empty. Colding’s room: he was asleep in his bed. Jian’s room…

What was with all the furniture pushed up against the door? And she… she was sitting at her wacky computer desk.

“Oh, fuck a duck.”

The log line scrolled again.

“Oh, motherfucker!” Andy grabbed the phone and dialed the extension for Magnus’s room. As it rang, he punched a button on the console, activating the secure satellite uplink monitor.

He clicked yes to listen in. He called up the transmitter control window and clicked disconnect, knowing what he’d see.

Magnus still didn’t answer.

“Oh, unholy duck fuckers.” Andy turned up the sound on the monitors.

A CHEERFUL VOICE answered on the seventh ring. “USAMRIID, how can I help you?” The voice sounded tinny coming from the computer’s small speakers.

“I want Paul Fischer.”

“Pardon me, ma’am?”

“I need Paul Fischer. Zhe shi hen jin ji.”

“Ma’am, I—”

“Fischer! I must talk to Fischer about problems with our transgenic experiment. If you take the time to screen this call, I will be dead before someone can answer.”

There was a brief pause. “Hold on one moment, ma’am.”

Jian stared at the computer screen but wasn’t really looking at it. All her eyes could see was a ghostly vision of the needle-toothed fetus snapping at the fiber-optic camera.

MAGNUS BUTTONED HIS pants, zipped his fly, then walked out of his bathroom to the desk phone that had rung nonstop for over a minute.

“This is Magnus.”

“Where the hell have you been?” Andy screamed so loud Magnus flinched and held the receiver away from his ear.

“Stop yelling,” Magnus said. “I was taking a shit.”

“So is Jian, all over us. I think she connected to Manitoba, and from there she’s calling Fischer!”

Magnus reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a Beretta 96. “Can you shut down our transmitter?”

“I can’t! She locked me out somehow, turned off the jammer, too. I can’t bring it back online.”

Magnus pinched the phone between his shoulder and ear, checked the eleven-round magazine—full. “Is she talking to him now?”

“I think she’s on hold.”

“Where is everyone? Where is Colding?”

A brief pause: “He’s sleeping. Rhumkorrf and Tim are in the C-5. Sara and her crew are doing maintenance there. I think Gunther’s out for a snowmobile ride. Don’t know where Clayton is, maybe he’s with Gunther.”

Magnus thought for a second, then reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a second Beretta. “Listen to me, Andy. Take a ninety-six out of the security room rack. Get rid of it, make sure it won’t be found, and make sure there’s a blank space in the rack.”

“Got it.”

Magnus slid the extra Beretta in the back of his pants, then walked into the hall.

“ARE YOU STILL there, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll connect you now, please hold.”

The phone sound changed a little, carried a touch of static, then a man’s voice answered.

“This is Colonel Paul Fischer.”

“This is Doctor Liu Jian Dan. Listen carefully.”

She heard a hiss of excitement just before he spoke. “Jian Dan… listen, we’ve been look—”

“Shut up!” Her patience was gone. Time was almost up. Too much stress. They would be there soon, the rats, the spiders, the mishmash monsters with the teeth and claws. “You shut up and you listen! They are too big.”

“What’s too big?”

“It is! The code is wrong, I don’t know why I made what I did, but it will kill us all.”

“Doctor, please calm down—”

Her door shook in its frame, five big slams. So loud! Jian screamed and stepped away from the computer. Her hands grabbed big tufts of her uneven black hair. The door rattled again, vibrating with each repetitive, powerful blow.

“Ma’am? Doctor?” Fischer’s voice came from the speakers, small and faraway, drowned out by the pounding and by Jian’s screams.

MAGNUS GAVE UP knocking and just punched the door, a straight right with all his weight behind it. The wood cracked with the sound of a gunshot. A white, jagged split appeared in the thick brown door. He reared back and hit it again, even harder, and his fist went through. Blood smears streaked the splintery hole. He took a quick look at his fist—the skin had split over his knuckles. A two-inch splinter jutted from between his index and middle finger. Blood ran down his hand.

Magnus pulled out the splinter, tossed it aside, then reached into the hole and tore free a thick, head-sized piece of door.

He stepped forward and looked into Jian’s room.

IT HAD BEEN too much for her strained mind. The violent pounding on the door eroded her sanity to the last pebble of rational thought. When Magnus looked in, Jian didn’t see a human face at all—she saw a wide black head with smiling, evil eyes and long teeth dripping with saliva.

The mishmash face of her dreams.

Doctor Liu Jian Dan screamed for the last time.

Magnus calmly aimed his Beretta through the hole and fired. The bullet smashed into Jian’s temple, just above the left eye. It punched through bone and tumbled through her brain, ripping out the back of her skull in a cloud of pink and red. Gelatinous globs splattered against the wall.

The shot knocked her back a step, froze that last scream in her throat. Chunks of bone and brain hanging from the back of her ravaged head, Liu Jian Dan managed to take one small step forward, regained her balance for just a second, then fell face-first onto the floor.

NOVEMBER 30: FAILURE

Implantation +21 Days

COLDING SAT UP in his bed, blinking away the sleep. Had he heard a gunshot, or dreamed it? An instinctive alarm rang somewhere in his subconscious.

“Jian.”

He threw the covers aside and sprinted into the hall, headed for her room.

COLDING FOUND HER door half open. He tried to push it open farther, but something blocked it. A dresser, he saw as he slid into the room… slid in, and saw the body.

He brushed past Magnus and Andy. Jian lay on the floor in a still-widening pool of blood. Her left hand was clenched into a fist, strands of her black hair still sticking out from between her fingers. Her right hand held a Beretta 96. He didn’t need to check for a pulse—the fist-sized hole in the back of her head said it all.

“She must have snuck into the security area,” Andy said. “Stupid Clayton and that code.”

“She was a smart woman,” Magnus said. “Even if we had a real code, she probably would have figured it out.”

Colding knelt next to the body of his friend. The woman he was supposed to protect. Not just because it was his job, but because Jian had needed someone to protect her, to help her cope with life.

And he’d failed her.

Just like he’d failed Clarissa.

He should have gotten Jian off the island days ago. She needed help, real help, she needed to be away from the stress that messed her up so bad even if the meds were perfect. But no, he’d ignored her needs, because of the fucking project. Because of hope for millions.

Colding looked up at Andy. “What happened?”

“I saw her on a routine video sweep,” Andy said. “She had the Beretta, she was babbling something in that ching-chang-chong talk.”

Magnus made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound, almost a bad impression of someone expressing sympathy. It made Colding want to rip out the man’s tongue.

“Andy called me and I rushed here, but the door was blocked,” Magnus said. “I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t speak English. I couldn’t get inside in time to stop her.” He held up a still-bleeding hand, as if his blood was inarguable evidence of his efforts to save Jian.

And yet even with the brains of his company’s prized genius dripping down the walls, Magnus Paglione didn’t show a shred of emotion. Colding remembered his suspicions about Erika Hoel, how Danté wouldn’t say anything about her.

He remembered how he’d left Erika with Magnus.

But Erika had tried to destroy everything, she’d been in collusion with Fischer. Jian hadn’t done anything like that. Unless… unless she’d made good on her desire to contact the outside world.

Colding looked around the room, searching for a phone, a walkie-talkie, even two tin cans connected with strings. But he saw nothing. There was no way to call out, Danté had made sure of that. No way except for the secure connection to Manitoba, and that was locked up tight.

Then his eyes settled on the computer. Somehow, Jian had figured out how to use the computer to call for help. He looked at the blood splatters on the back wall, some droplets still trickling slowly down. He then looked at the hole in the door. Jian had been facing that hole when she died.

She hadn’t killed herself at all.

“Such a tragedy,” Magnus said. “She tried suicide so many times, and finally pulled it off.”

Andy reached down and pulled the pistol from Jian’s hand. “So what do we do now?”

I kill you murdering fuckers, that’s what we do now. The thought roared in Colding’s head with million-decibel volume. He fought for control. Without a weapon he had no chance against either Magnus or Andy. Despite the rage, the hatred, the undeniable need to do something, he had to stay calm. Stay smart. Get Sara, Rhumkorrf and the others off the island. Once Sara was safe, then he could think about justice. He had to play along, buy some time.

“We can’t tell the others she’s dead,” Colding said. “They’ll lose confidence, and it could compromise the project.”

Magnus looked down at him. A small smile toyed at the edge of his mouth. “So what are you saying, Bubbah, that we tell them she’s just taking a nap?”

“Something like that. We tell them she’s had a nervous breakdown. Everyone knows how stress messes with her. We’ll tell them she needs a few days off. By then, hopefully, the ancestors will be delivered and we’ll have our live animals.”

Andy shook his head. “What about the gunshot?”

Colding gestured to the empty room. “You see anyone else coming to see what happened?”

“Colding’s right,” Magnus said. “We’ll board up the door, say we had to break in to reach her when she flipped out. We’ll lock up her room. No one gets in but Colding, because he’s the only one she really trusted. Work for you, Bubbah?”

Colding nodded, feeling the extra burst of guilt brought on by Magnus’s words.

“Good,” Magnus said. “Colding, hurry up and bury her before anyone gets back.”

Colding stood up. “Are you joking?”

“We can’t leave the body here stinking up the place,” Magnus said. “And I’m not putting her in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer where Clayton can stumble into it. If you’d been better at your job, she’d still be alive, so this is your mess. Do it. Now.”

Colding thought for a moment, still fighting to control the rage. All that mattered now was getting Sara off the island. He had to do whatever it took to make that happen.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Magnus turned and walked out the door. Andy followed him, leaving Colding alone with the corpse of his friend.

NOVEMBER 30: ENDGAME

Implantation +21 Days

MAGNUS SAT IN front of the secure terminal, thick fingers drumming a relentless pattern on the desktop—babababump, babababump, babababump. He waited for Danté’s face to appear. While he waited, he read the email again.

It was over now. Even Danté had to see that. No place left to run. Taking the C-5 out again was a crapshoot at best, and even if they got it off the island undetected, they didn’t have any more secret facilities. Fischer would have access to satellite coverage. He’d have people watching. He couldn’t see everywhere at once, granted, but the word would be out about the C-5—no more buying off air traffic controllers. If the C-5 passed near an airport radar system, even a small airport, that might be it.

Five days at best, maybe six.

Finally, the Genada logo disappeared, replaced by his brother’s panicky face.

“Magnus, what the hell is going on? My computer guys told me our system called USAMRIID?”

“It was Jian,” Magnus said. “She hacked into the secure terminal, used your end to call Fischer.” He watched Danté’s face, the predictable wave of emotions—disbelief, anger, then anxiety.

“What… what did she tell him?”

“The usual chitchat. What she had for lunch, ancestor research, that kind of thing. The only piece of luck was she didn’t get a chance to give our location.”

“You broke the connection in time?”

“You could put it that way, sure.”

“You… you didn’t,” Danté said. “Magnus, please tell me you didn’t.”

Magnus said nothing.

“But she’s the whole project. You idiot! What the fuck are we going to do without her?”

Magnus was the boots on the ground, making real-time decisions, saving Genada’s ass, and Danté was calling him an idiot?

“So what now?” Danté screamed, shaking his fist at a camera hundreds of miles away. “That’s just a brilliant business decision on your part, you fucking psycho. What the hell do we do now?”

“We cut our losses,” Magnus said. “We cover our trail, move on to the next opportunity.”

“What do you mean, cut our losses?”

“Big brother, you’d better pull your head out of your ass and do it quick. Don’t you get it? Jian called Fischer. He wants Colding and Rhumkorrf. He thinks he’ll get them to roll over so he can nail us on other charges. But when we give Colding and Rhumkorrf to Fischer, we make sure they won’t talk. Ever. He set up the game this way, not us. He gets what he asked for, and the G8 know without a doubt that Genada is out of the transgenic game. That’s all the governments really want. Our lawyers unfreeze the accounts. Presto chango, we move on.”

Danté leaned in toward the camera until his face filled up the screen. “We can’t do that! Those are our people, and we’re so close! Once the ancestors are born, the public and press won’t let anyone get in our way. We’ve won, we just need a few more days!”

Magnus kept his face expressionless, but inside he felt a rare spurt of sadness. Poor Danté. Never able to make the decisions that had to be made.

Danté’s face lit up, like the answer to the world’s problems had just flashed in his head. It made him look like a special-ed kid who just caught a bug after hours of failed attempts. “Manitoba! Listen, let’s move the C-5 to Manitoba. I’ll have crews start building facilities that can hold something the size of a tiger.”

Magnus nodded. Sure. Why not? “Okay, brother. How do you want to do this?”

“Let’s think it out. There’s a major blizzard coming across Lake Superior tonight. The fringes of it are probably already hitting Black Manitou. Our weather report says that’s going to last the better part of two days, and there’s another storm right behind it. I assume you talked to Farm Girl?”

“Got an email from her,” Magnus said. “According to her, we have five days.”

“Perfect,” Danté said. “I’ll have to do some travel jumping to lose Fischer’s men first. I’ll be at Black Manitou in four days, as soon as the second storm fades a bit, with flight plan and strategy in hand. Okay?”

“How big are these storms?”

Danté reached for his keyboard. The picture changed to a weather map of Michigan. The land was brown, the water was blue, and the two-fisted storm was an angry green mass hung like a massive shroud over the northern shore of Lake Superior.

“Well well well,” Magnus said. “That is a big storm.”

The picture switched back to Danté’s face. “Almost hurricane-class winds. Nobody will fly in that, and any boat will be a death trap. Just give me four days, Magnus. I’ll be there on December fourth. We’ll find a way to get the C-5 out of there, in secret, and to Manitoba. We have to find a way.”

Magnus nodded. “Four days? I think I can handle that.”

“Wonderful,” Danté said. “You’ll see, little brother, we’ll pull through this, together.”

Magnus smiled, then disconnected. Family was such a funny thing. You can pick who you fuck, who you kill, but you can’t pick your own brother.

Fly to Genada headquarters? In a massive plane that Fischer was looking for? Danté had lost it.

Magnus called up the computer’s password program, locking out all access except for his own. When he finished, he left the security office and headed for the hangar.

NOVEMBER 30: COLDING SAYS GOOD-BYE

COLDING WIPED THE back of his hand across his forehead. It just smeared dirt on his skin more than it wiped away the sweat. How had it come to this? How?

He bent to scoop up a last shovelful of dirt, dumped it, and patted it down. For all of her genius, for an intellect that should have been celebrated all across the world and in the history books forever and ever, Liu Jian Dan ended up in a shallow, frozen, unmarked grave.

Now she would be nothing more than carbon.

It had to be a shallow grave. Hard as hell to dig through that dirt. He’d pickaxed and shoveled through about eighteen inches of frozen soil. Below that, the ground temperature must have been above freezing, because he saw no more ice crystals. His arms started to give out at four feet deep, so he’d stopped and placed her inside. She wasn’t going to be here for long. He’d make sure of that. Soon, snow would cover the broken dirt, and the grave would vanish. But he could find her again. He’d buried her in a small clearing near a single birch sapling that hadn’t quite reached ten feet tall.

He lifted the pickax, looked at it, wondered what it would be like to swing the point into Magnus Paglione’s head. Soon enough. He set it down and pulled on his parka. From the pocket, he pulled out a can of Dr Pepper.

“I’m sorry, Jian. I failed you.”

That was all the eulogy he could muster.

Colding gently set the can of Dr Pepper on the pile of loose dirt, shouldered the pickax and shovel, then started the walk back to the mansion.

NOVEMBER 30: A HOTSHOT LIKE YOU

SARA SAT IN the lounge, curled up on a leather chair with a blanket over her legs. She was halfway through the now beat-up printout of Hot Dusk. Without Colding to hang out with for the past few days, she’d spent her free time reading Gunther’s novel. Not really her thing, but it was fun to read a book by someone she knew. Clearly, though, written by a guy—ruby penises? Seriously?

She liked the book, but her eyes merely grazed over the words, marking the brief intervals between long looks out the window toward the angry water and the ice-covered rocks. The hazy afternoon sun hid behind clouds that blended from gray to a road-mud black at the horizon.

Colding walked into the lounge. Her face lit up, but she saw no return smile. He looked dirty, rumpled and chilled to the bone. His pants were soaked around the legs and streaked with dark, crumbly dirt. He walked straight toward her and stood, looking down. She’d never seen such an expression on his face: a look of anger and concentration and fear all mashed up into one.

“What are you reading?”

He knew exactly what she was reading. He had given it to her. “Um… Gunther’s book.”

“Yeah? Is it good?” He held out his hand. So odd. She handed him the manuscript. He took the pages, then they slipped out of his hands. He bent to pick them up, pushing the loose pages together again.

“Sorry,” he said. He handed her the manuscript. “Actually, I’ll have to check it out another time. I have some more work to do. Later.”

He turned and walked away without another word. She set the book in her lap, and her finger brushed a small piece of paper barely sticking out of the top of the stack. A piece of paper that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Sara casually flipped to that page and read the small note he’d slipped into the manuscript.

Her eyes seemed to fall out of focus. She blinked, then read it again.

Jian… dead?

And Erika Hoel, murdered?

Peej wouldn’t joke about something like this. Not about murder. Holy shit.

As casually as she could, Sara crumpled the note. It was hard not to look up at the cameras, one mounted in each corner of the room. She brought her hand to her mouth and coughed. Mouth filled with the taste of paper, she coughed a few more times, the hand in front of her mouth hiding her furious chewing. She swallowed.

Sara felt a sudden urge to gather up her crew. Run a full check on the C-5 and make sure everything was shipshape. If she had to move quickly, she didn’t want any unexpected trouble from the plane. She put the book down and calmly started toward Alonzo’s room.

SARA, ALONZO, CAPPY and Miller trudged through the snow, walking the half mile from the mansion to the hangar. The heavy black clouds had closed the distance, pushing the gray aside like a broom slowly sweeping dust. The first flakes of snow swirled around in crazy spirals. More would be coming, and soon.

“You gonna tell us what’s up?” Alonzo said, his shoulders in their usual cold-weather position high up at his ears. “Do you really expect us to believe you want a surprise inspection?”

“Quit your bitching, ’Zo,” Sara said. “Just get it done.”

“You’re full of shit, boss,” Miller said.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “Full of shit.”

She stopped. So did they. The snow swirled around them. She looked each of them in the eye. Her friends. Her family. “Do you guys trust me?”

All three nodded.

“Then do the inspection, and don’t ask any more questions.” She turned and walked toward the hangar. Her friends followed. The less the boys knew, the less chance of someone slipping up, tipping their hand to Magnus. If he had killed Jian, he wouldn’t think twice about whacking the C-5 crew.

They entered the plane, leaving the growing wind to howl outside. Once inside, Sara stopped to give everyone instructions.

“Miller, Cappy, do a status check on the flight harnesses for each cow.”

The Twins exchanged a glance.

“Just in case, right?” Miller said.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “In case we had to hypothetically fly in bad weather?”

Sara nodded. The Twins nodded back, then quickly and quietly went about their duties. Sara walked down the aisle between the cows, Alonzo at her side.

“Know what?” he said. “I have this crazy urge to do the preflight checklist.”

“I’d start in the lab,” Sara said. “You know, make sure all the equipment is locked down. Just in case.”

“Just in case, right. Because far be it from me to tell you that storm coming in is going to be a high-toned son of a bitch.”

“No way we’d fly out in that,” Sara said. “But after the storm passes… anyway, doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“Say no more, mon capitaine.” Alonzo walked to Tim’s lab area and got started.

Sara moved through the barn toward the fore ladder, walking past the cows, suddenly very annoyed with the ever-present smell of cattle and the stink of cow shit. Alonzo was right. That storm was a high-toned son of a bitch, and by the time they prepped the C-5 for flight it would be right on top of them. They couldn’t safely bust out until tomorrow, when the weather broke. That gave her one night to talk Colding into leaving.

She climbed the front ladder, reached the top and walked into the cockpit—

—to find Magnus Paglione sitting in the comm chair. He smiled at her. The cockpit lights played off his freshly shaved head. Sara’s heart beat double time. Adrenaline shivered through her body.

“Sara, are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“You scared the piss out of me, Mister Paglione. What the hell are you doing in here?”

Magnus shrugged. “Just checking out the plane, making sure everything was in good shape. You don’t mind if your boss checks up on you, do you, Sara?”

She forced a smile. “Of course not.”

“Is it still getting nasty outside?”

Sara felt sweat trickling down her armpits. Maybe he’d decided she knew too much. Maybe he was here to kill her, too. “Yes sir, still nasty. Wind is already picking up. That storm will be on top of us real fast.”

“I’ll bet it would be difficult to fly this big bird in weather like that.”

Sara nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, grateful to have an actual subject to discuss. “Oh hell yes. Taking the C-5 up now would be downright stupid.”

“But you could do it,” Magnus said. He stood up and walked closer, breaking the three-foot cushion. The killer stared down at her. This close to him, all alone, she felt like a child, home from school after another disciplinary incident, waiting for her father to make her go fetch the belt.

No, not a child… she felt like an insect.

Magnus reached up slowly and brushed a flake of snow off her shoulder. “I bet a hotshot like you could fly this beast into that storm.”

Her voice came out small and thin. “I… yeah… we could do it. You know, in an emergency, I suppose.”

Magnus smiled. “Well, consider this an emergency. Danté has intel that Colonel Fischer could be here as early as tomorrow morning. You’re bugging out tonight.”

Sara stared up at him, fear vanishing in the face of swelling anger. “You can’t be serious, Magnus. I wasn’t yanking your chain about that storm.”

“I’m serious, too,” Magnus said. He leaned down. Sara couldn’t help but flinch a little as his scarred face, with its odd violet eyes, stopped only inches from hers. She smelled Yukon Jack on his breath.

“I want you flying off this island by twenty-thirty hours,” he said. “Not a second later, you got that?”

His voice was no longer the smooth, calm monotone she’d heard all this time. Now it crackled with authority, a voice that had undoubtedly ordered men to attack, to shoot, to kill.

“Yes sir.” The words came out of her mouth of their own volition.

Magnus stepped back, then nodded once with the flair of a Prussian officer snapping his boot heels together. He slipped past her and out of the cockpit.

Sara shivered. Maybe the storm wouldn’t be as bad as she thought. And even if it were, it had to be better than being stuck here with Magnus Paglione.