Immortal

13

‘She’s gone.’

Lieutenant Enrico Zamora was outside the laboratories as Ethan burst out into the bright sunlight. A small fleet of patrol cars and ambulances, supported by two fire trucks, had arrived to line the edge of the main road, their lights flashing as though a traveling fairground had pulled up in town.

Ethan glanced at the paramedics treating the injured scientists before looking at Zamora.

‘She can’t have gotten far,’ he said. ‘She must be in the woods somewhere.’

‘You got a description of her?’

Ethan described the girl, and was surprised when Zamora unfolded a picture from his jacket pocket and showed it to him.

‘That’s her.’ Ethan nodded. ‘No doubt about it. Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Saffron,’ Zamora replied. ‘One of these here anti-vivisectionists who insist on attacking laboratories having anything to do with animal studies.’

‘She wasn’t alone,’ Ethan said. ‘You get a trace on the van we saw?’

The officer nodded as he slipped the photograph back into his pocket.

‘Found abandoned a few miles from here. Looks like they probably switched vehicles, took those darned apes with them too. We’re guessing they’ll pick up Saffron somewhere on the ways round.’

Ethan shook his head.

‘Doesn’t make any sense. They hit the labs to free the monkeys, that I can deal with. But why all the attention on the computer servers?’

Zamora shrugged.

‘Who knows what these tree-huggers have got inside their heads, aside from dope and dumb dreams. We left the world in their hands, we’d be living in caves and praying to rocks by th’end of the year.’

‘What happened to you guys anyway?’ Ethan asked. ‘It took almost half an hour for the first patrol cars to get here.’

‘False alarm,’ Zamora replied. ‘Looks like it was done on purpose to divert resources away from Los Alamos.’

Ethan glanced across at the administrative building.

‘They knew what they were doing,’ he said.

‘Any luck with Tyler Willis?’ Zamora asked.

‘Some,’ Ethan said, ‘we’ll finish questioning him before we leave, see if he knows anything about the people who hit the building here.’

Zamora was about to reply when Lopez joined them.

‘That could prove tricky,’ she said.

‘How come?’

‘Because he’s taken off,’ Lopez said. ‘I’ve checked both buildings twice and nobody’s seen him since the blasts. His car’s gone too.’

Ethan rubbed his temples before glancing at Zamora.

‘Can you get a trace on his vehicle for us?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied and hurried away.

‘Why would Willis do that?’ Ethan wondered out loud. ‘He could be in danger, he said it himself.’

‘Yeah,’ Lopez muttered. ‘In danger of losing money. We know what he was doing here, researching something that may help people to double their lifespans. He’d already set himself up in business to profit from the technology, even though he hadn’t figured out how it worked yet.’

Ethan rolled the thought around in his mind for a moment.

‘You think somebody else wants his work held up?’

‘All’s fair in love and cut-throat business,’ Lopez said. ‘These scientists work for the laboratories but they often found companies based on their research, patenting their drugs and genes and things. Willis could have rivals, enemies even, people who know what he’s up to and want to get the jump on him. It would explain the need for these activists to hit the computer servers as well as free the animals.’

‘Hired help,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Which means conspiracy, criminal damage, even attempted homicide. We need to find out if Saffron is working for anybody and put the screws into them to see what they sing about.’

‘I got some descriptions from the scientists before the paramedics got to work on them,’ Lopez said. ‘It’s not much, but Zamora reckons he knows at least one of the activists, a Colin Manx. Trouble is they’re hard to pin down. According to local police they live rough out in the badlands, never staying in one place for long.’

Ethan surveyed the scene for a moment, thinking hard. Activists like Saffron and Colin Manx were opportunists, ordinary people who rarely had access to major weapons or possessed tactical skills. The likelihood that they had achieved what amounted to a carefully planned strike on a difficult-to-access laboratory told Ethan that, somewhere along the line, there had to be money involved and, more importantly, motive. Freeing monkeys was one thing, but deliberately destroying scientific evidence and endeavor out of sheer spite was another. Ethan had looked into the eyes of Saffron, and whatever he had seen dwelling there did not match her actions. Aggressive? Yes. Desperate? Certainly. Spiteful? Definitely not. She could have killed someone during her attack but had studiously avoided doing so.

‘What are you thinking?’ Lopez asked curiously.

Ethan turned to her.

‘I’ll look into Hiram Conley at the town hall and see what I can find. Willis mentioned that there were other people suffering from the same infection as Conley, so I might even find evidence of them there along with Conley’s aliases. I want you to start looking for Colin Manx and Tyler Willis. We need to find them before whoever organized this attack gets to them.’