Immortal

23

‘Fire in the hole!’

Ethan Warner sprinted frantically out of the Hilary Falls apartment block to a row of squad cars and a pair of fire trucks, their beacons flashing as a police helicopter thundered overhead. The exchange of gunfire in the center of Santa Fe had attracted every squad car for miles. He just had time to see Lopez and Zamora diving for cover behind the vehicles as the sky seemed to split over his head. Ethan threw himself down and rolled across the asphalt as the third-story apartment exploded, an expanding fireball of oily black smoke and tongues of flame blasting shattered glass to fall like a hailstorm across the lot. He shielded his head with his arms as the shockwave plowed into him, a blast of hot air followed by metallic thumps as chunks of masonry and brickwork slammed into the nearby squad cars.

The blast subsided as flaming fragments of furniture, paper and window frames fluttered down around Ethan. Ethan got to his feet, his ears ringing from the explosion as fire crews dashed past him with hoses, aiming them up at the burning apartment and spraying thick streams of white water into the crackling flames.

‘You okay?’

Lopez appeared behind him, her face a mask of concern as she began tapping him down, searching for breaks or abrasions.

‘I’m good, just about.’

Zamora walked up to him, holding his injured shoulder.

‘Jesus Christ, it’s like a war zone down here. You did good, Ethan. What the hell had they done in there? I could smell fuel.’

‘Yeah,’ Ethan said. ‘They probably frayed the gas line behind the stove to start the leak.’

‘Where was the accelerant?’

‘Cat-litter tray,’ Ethan said.

‘How do you know?’ Lopez asked.

‘No cat, and no cat-flap either,’ Ethan explained. ‘It’s an old Boy Scout trick. Litter burns well when it’s doused in fuel and doesn’t leave much of a trace of anything. Investigators would have assumed that the gas leak caused the blast on its own, not arsonists.’

Lopez looked up at the apartment and the thick smoke billowing from the windows.

‘Neat trick,’ she said. ‘Nasty too.’

‘Those guys were heavily armed and they knew how to shoot straight,’ Ethan said to her. ‘Probably ex-soldiers. Somebody really doesn’t want Tyler Willis’s little secret getting out. I saw a car pull away with two men in it who seemed very interested in what we were doing. They were the same guys we saw come out of the elevator, the ones with the weird eyes.’

‘I remember them,’ Lopez said, turning to Zamora. ‘Can we find their vehicle?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Zamora said. ‘But if they’re as professional as we think they are, it’s doubtful we’ll catch up to them now.’

Ethan nodded.

‘They’ll have swapped vehicles, probably be on their way out of the county and there’s too much border to track their movements.’

‘We need another line of inquiry here,’ Lopez said, looking at the smoldering apartment. ‘Wherever Willis is, somebody’s trying to prevent us from finding him. Why don’t we try another tack?’

‘Jeb Oppenheimer,’ Ethan said.

‘Saffron led us here, remember?’ Lopez pointed out. ‘We’ve only got her word about her grandfather, and to tell you the truth I don’t like her much.’

‘No shit?’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘Saffron is an eco-warrior who’s already tried to kill you once. She then tips us off about this apartment so she can make a break for it. When we get here we damn near get blown to pieces. You see a picture developing?’

Ethan sighed, looking up at the apartment.

‘I just don’t see Saffron as a killer,’ he said. ‘There’s more to her than that.’

‘Yeah,’ Lopez snorted, ‘and I’m sure Adolf Hitler’s ma reckoned he was just misunderstood.’

Zamora spoke up from beside them.

‘There’s a lot more to Saffron Oppenheimer than we thought,’ he said, gesturing with a jab of his thumb behind them. ‘I did a search for her in our database, new gear we’ve got that’s linked to the FBI’s records. Turns out that Saffron was up for culpable homicide five years ago during an attack on a laboratory in Utah.’

Ethan winced as Lopez turned to the officer.

‘Go on,’ she said, folding her arms and raising an eyebrow in Ethan’s direction.

‘Saffron was part of an activist movement that tried to blow up a vivisection laboratory. The attack went wrong, one of the activists died and all the accomplices were arrested. Turns out the attack destroyed the closed-circuit cameras monitoring the labs, so all the evidence was circumstantial. All the activists blamed each other, the police couldn’t bring them to trial and lawyers argued that the dead activist had only himself to blame. As he had been estranged from his family for over a decade, no charges were brought and the case collapsed.’

Ethan shook his head.

‘So what’s the deal?’

‘The laboratory they’d attacked,’ Zamora replied, ‘belonged to SkinGen Corp, owned and operated by Jeb Oppenheimer.’

Lopez turned to face Ethan, her arms still folded and her eyebrow still raised.

‘Shall we?’

Ethan was about to answer her when several white vans with tinted windows pulled up behind the squad cars, their lights adding to the blizzard of beacons. He watched with Lopez and Zamora as a thick-set man clambered out of the lead van, wearing a gray suit that matched his buzz-cut. He had a squat neck that, with his severely cropped hair, made his head look almost square. He slammed the van door shut and strode across to them, the identity tag on his jacket flapping in the hot breeze.

‘Butch Cutler,’ he announced himself. ‘USAMRIID. We’re here to take jurisdiction of the site.’

‘You are?’ Zamora asked. ‘We weren’t informed of any risk of hazardous material breaches or such like.’

‘Nothing’s certain yet,’ Cutler said, glancing curiously at Ethan and Lopez. ‘You must be Ethan Warner.’

‘And Nicola Lopez,’ Ethan gestured to his partner. ‘How did you know?’

‘My boss,’ Cutler said. ‘He’s been talking to yours. They’ve decided it’s best you hand over to us until we can figure out what’s going on here.’

Ethan said nothing for a moment as Cutler removed his jacket and folded it over his arm. His sleeves were rolled up and Ethan caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his right forearm, the banner of the US Army Rangers and a winged parachute.

‘That the real deal there?’ Ethan asked, gesturing to the tattoo. ‘Or are you just a fantasist?’

Cutler squinted at Ethan without apparent emotion for several seconds.

‘75^th Rangers, Long Range Surveillance,’ he said. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘15^th Marines, Recon,’ Ethan replied.

In all of Ethan’s years, whenever former soldiers met, especially those who had served alongside each other in grueling conflicts, there was an instant camaraderie, a realization that you were near another man who could be relied upon to get the job done, to find solutions and to survive. Ethan looked into Cutler’s eyes and saw there a sudden unease. The tattoo was almost certainly genuine enough, as was Cutler’s service — he looked all over like a born and bred ranger, but he was watching Ethan now with a wary expression as though he was being faced with a sudden and unexpected threat.

‘Why have your guys been sent down here, exactly?’ Ethan asked.

Cutler tossed his jacket into the van and walked past Ethan, who turned to give him room. He felt as though they were two predators circling each other before a fight.

‘The apartment, so I’ve been told,’ Cutler replied, ‘was the current residence of Tyler Willis, a micro-biologist. His work at both Los Alamos and here in Santa Fe brought him into contact with a number of exotic bacteria, any one of which he could have had on his person when this attack occurred.’

Lopez frowned at Cutler.

‘He wasn’t in the apartment when it went up,’ she pointed out.

‘But whatever he had on his person may have remained inside,’ Cutler replied.

‘The apartment’s been incinerated,’ Ethan said. ‘There’s not enough left in there to be an infectious hazard. Nothing could survive that.’

Cutler turned to face him.

‘Chemolithotrophic bacteria can live fifteen hundred meters underground in solid basalt rock, survive and reproduce on the edge of space and at the North Pole or beside deep-sea ocean vents where the temperature is well over a hundred degrees and the pressure four hundred atmospheres. That a chance you want to take in the middle of a residential area? Unless you’ve got probable cause for remaining here on site, I suggest you let us take over before anything else blows up in your face.’

Ethan, standing four-square in front of Cutler, knew that the man was trying to intimidate him. Cutler stood at least two inches taller than Ethan and was maybe thirty pounds heavier.

‘It’s all yours,’ Ethan said. ‘Although if there’s such a worry about hazardous materials shouldn’t you all have arrived here with protective gear on, seeing as we’re standing about thirty yards downwind from the burning apartment you’re so worried about?’

Cutler’s right eyelid twitched convulsively for a moment and then he smiled without warmth.

‘It’s unlikely we’ll find airborne pathogens. Tyler Willis was a research scientist, not Saddam Hussein. Now, if you’ll excuse us?’

Ethan stepped aside as Cutler led his team past them toward the smoldering apartment block.

‘Interesting,’ Lopez said. ‘They got here real quick.’

‘Too quick,’ Ethan said, turning to Zamora. ‘You got a Center for Disease Control unit down here anywhere?’

‘Not that I know of,’ he admitted. ‘And we didn’t call one in.’

Ethan watched Cutler for a few moments, and then turned to Lopez.

‘Let’s go and meet Jeb Oppenheimer, and see what he has to say for himself.’