Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER EIGHT

Monday, July 14, 2042

“What was the guy’s name?” Wrench twisted at the wheel of the little Ikeda Outdoorsman to avoid a gaggle of children and water buffalo in the rain-soaked road ahead. “The one that came home after twenty years and only his old dog recognized him?”

“Odysseus,” Lessing replied. “How in hell do you know about him? They stopped teaching Greek lit in high school fifty years ago, even in English translation.”

Wrench feigned insult. “Hey, man, I got culture. I read it in a World Classics comic book.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t apply to me. I’ve been gone less than a week.”

“I still feel like a dog. Mulder says: ‘Go get Lessing.’ I go get Lessing, all the way to Lucknow.” Wrench squinted and racked the vehicle down to make a turn. “Woof, woof! Out here I feel like a dog most of the gubbin’ time.”

The monsoons had lowered over the dry north-Indian plain since dawn; now they became a cataract that thundered down with the vengefulness of an angry god. Mrs. Delacroix’s jet had dropped Lessing off at Palam Airport in Delhi, and the local flight to Lucknow was late, as usual. Lessing felt like a discarded mango peel: limp, tepidly wet, sticky, smelly, and gritty all over. He hung on grimly against all that Wrench could do.

Wrench had told him about Indoco: not another breakin, as Lessing had feared, but a mass demonstration outside. There had been perhaps a hundred “students” and another dozen unidentifiable goondas, “ruffians,” the Hindi term for anything from the Prodigal Son to Al Capone, who were undoubtedly paid agitators, though nobody knew whose. The plant chaukidars had taken one look and fled, leaving the mob free run of the plant. Indoco would now have to rebuild three warehouses and replace some machinery, but no one had been seriously injured. Mulder was furious. He was talking of adding a score of foreign meres to his security force, but getting clearance for them from Delhi would not be quick or easy.

Most important of all to Alan Lessing was the fact that Jameela was safe and waiting for him. He felt greater relief than he wanted to admit, even to himself.

There was something new on the fumoff leading from the main highway to the plant: a straw-thatched hut and a cloth-draped pole down across the road. “They put in a police post,” Wrench grumbled. “For our ‘protection’ from more incidents.” He produced papers, shoved them at the dark, dripping face that poked itself into the driver’s window, held out a ten-rupee note, watched it disappear into the night, and drove on.

Jameela, Mulder, Goddard, and three Indians awaited them on the verandah of the main house. Servants with clumsy, black umbrellas splashed out to the Dceda, and Lessing proceeded to flout a thousand years of Indian tradition by marching over and embracing Jameela in public. Her warm, dry, spice-fragrant body felt wonderful.

“You smell bisaind,” she whispered sweetly in his ear. The Urdu word meant “stinking,” like raw meat.

Mulder cleared his throat. “Meet Colonel Srivastava, Indian Army, assigned to protect Indoco until there’s been an investigation. This is Sub-Inspector Mukerjee, Uttar Pradesh Police, and Mr. Subramaniam from the CID. Gentlemen, Mr. Alan Lessing, chief of plant security. He’s been away on a business trip.”

Lessing was tired. He could barely see the figures around him or feel the hands that reached out to shake his. He heard Mrs. Mulder’s tremulous, fairy-godmother soprano chirping at Jameela: “Take him upstairs to the guest bedroom. It’s too late to go back to your own apartment.” Then, somehow, he was there, in a boxy, whitewashed little room with frilly curtains. Jameela shooed servants out and herself struggled with the cantankerous plumbing to produce hot water for a shower. Then he was in bed.

He awoke thinking how he hated to sleep on a hillside, his head higher than his feet. Where in hell was he? Syria? Yes, north of Damascus, with his mere comrades in the gulley below him, and Major Berger’s crack Israeli brigade over the ridge, where they were taking fire from those big, new mortars the Russians had given the Iranians. The shit was heavy over there. Any minute Berger’s air strike would come in and…

Why was he so cold and so damp? In Syria? He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles and was surprised when the scene dissolved and coalesced again into an unfamiliar bedroom It contained one cushioned chair; a huge clothes-cabinet that Jameela called an almari and the British, who could never pronounce anything foreign, an “almirah”; a slow-turning ceiling fan; and electric wires stapled to the wall. A tiny, harmless lizard, which Jameela called a chipkili, walked upside down across the ceiling over his head. The roar of Iranian mortar bursts became the gurgle of the ancient air conditioner that Mulder was always intending to replace. It did keep the room both clammy and damn near freezing. He glanced down and saw why he had dreamed of sleeping on a hillside: Goddard was sitting on the foot of the bed, his ponderous weight enough to scuttle an ocean liner…

Goddard was not only big, he was bristly as a boar: his broad skull, the backs of his hands, his shoulders, all were covered with springy, coarse, black hair. The light from the window made a halo around his head, something he would have only if Satan ruled in Heaven! How old was he, anyway? Forty? Goddard was an American from Chicago, a hard-ass, a comer, a would-be exec, smart, and on his way up to the top of Indoco’s dungheap.

Lessing used the opportunity to kick out with both feet as though just waking up.

Goddard let out a satisfying yelp and leaped off the bed. “Christ! You kick your little Indian chicky like that and you’ll break all her bones!”

Lessing yawned in his face. Goddard wasn’t worth hating. “Mulder’s coming. He wants to see you.” “I’m here.” He got up, found his gear had been stored in the almirah, and dug out his shaving things. “Make out with that blonde?”

He let the plumbing answer for him. The faucet belched, hiccoughed, and gushed a stream of brown fluid that slowly changed into steaming-hot water. He shut the door in Goddard’s beefy face so that he could use the facilities.

When he emerged, Herman Mulder was sitting in the one chair. Wrench occupied the foot of the bed, and Goddard now leaned against the wall by the window.

Mulder waited in Buddha-esque silence until Lessing had settled down again at the head of the bed. When he spoke it was just one word:

“Pacov.”

“Sir… I….”

“Please don’t lie.”

Lessing had no intention of lying; he had been about to suggest that a mercenary’s jobs were as privileged as a priest’s confessional or a psychiatrist’s couch. More. A mere could get thumbed for a breach of security. Opfoes and employers alike frowned upon loose lips. He shut his mouth with an audible snap.

Mulder appeared not to notice. “You’re alive because of us, Alan. Very few know who or what we represent, but everybody knows that we protect our people, particularly in the Third World.”

“Sir

“Hear me out Only a very determined foe would attack you while you’re with us. Yet somebody is willing to risk lives to get at you. That foe may believe that we sent you to get… and that we have… Pacov. Which endangers us. Do you see?”

“The raid to get the books doesn’t seem to have been connected with you at all,” Goddard added. “Maybe some other supercorp sniffing around to see what they could find… and almost hitting the jackpot. It’s possible they were Israelis or the Vigilantes for Zion. The Izzies and the Vizzies have come close before.”

“Never this close!” Wrench protested. “How did they know the diaries were here?”

“All under control now.” Mulder wiped his naked, pink forehead with an old-fashioned handkerchief. “The last raid… the local ‘scholars’ and their friends… was not directed at us. They were looking for you again, Alan. It was lucky that Miss Husaini was over at the main office. Two of their non-Indian agitators got into your quarters and made a thorough search. Hitting Indoco was a diversion: nothing seriously damaged, just yelling and burning and prancing around, and a lot of pretending to find ‘dangerous pollutants’ and ‘killer chemicals.’ They didn’t even try to wreck the computer that controls our agro-chemical mixes.”

Lessing said, “Mr. Mulder, I can’t… won’t… tell you more than you know. The name you mentioned is my business, privileged info. It has nothing to do with you or Indoco. I’ll swear to that.”

Wrench struck a heroic pose. “The Code of the West! The Masked Merc rides again!”

Lessing had an insanely funny urge to match nun and cry, Bring on your Gestapo! I’ll never talk!” Mulder, however, had little sense of humor, and Goddard even less.

“Shall I tell you then, Alan?” Mulder held up a thick hand, as pale and hairless as a baby’s. “You went on a mission for one Senhor Gomez, a Goanese ‘mere broker.’ You traveled to the United States, to an installation with the code-name ‘Marvelous Gap,’ located in New Mexico. It was built just after the turn of the century, during the worst period of Born Again paranoia. Then it was officially ‘lost’: closed down, no mention, no records. The place would be an embarrassment to President Rubin’s peace initiative if the Russians found out it still existed. There’d be hell to pay in Geneva, and the United Nations would make a TV sitcom out of it. The present U.S. government thinks it’s better to let Marvelous Gap stay marvelously

^Lessing saw no reason to tell Mulder of Hoeykens’ information and the reason for his precipitous flight from South Africa. Mulder and his SS might decide he was more trouble than he was worth. He said, “I’m a soldier. Politics isn’t my job. I follow orders.” I Mulder sighed. “They didn’t accept that excuse at Nuremberg. He saw that Lessing hadn’t understood. “That was before your time. Never mind. While you were in Pretoria I sent a coded cable to Washington Our people there have been investigating Pacov and other Born Again projects for some time. They punched some buttons, and now I know all there is to know… outside of some top-secret data in the National Security Agency. The movement has friends in Washington, friends with access to the government’s biggest data-banks. The Pacov formulae were all destroyed, as were the administrative records, right down to the mess-hall grocery lists. But they missed one document here, another there. That’s the virtue of computers: once you find a clue, you get the computer itself to hunt for more. It collates everything, patches it together, and hands it to you in a printout.’

Lessing shook his head. “Still nothing to do with me. I’m only the errand boy. I don’t care what’s in the package.”

“Yes. Well. ‘Pacov’ stands for ‘Pandemic Communicable Virus,’ one of the uglier results of military experimentation with recombinant DNA. Do you know what that is?”

“I’ve read. Magazines….”

“Do you want to read what technical details we have? The cable’s on my desk.”

“I’m no scientist.” Actually, he would probably understand most of it. Lessing kept up on military developments as part of his trade.

“Very well, let me tell you in layman’s terms.” Mulder extended a hand to shush Wrench, who had started to speak. “Pacov consists of two separate reworkings of the DNA chains of existing viruses. It’s a piggyback weapon, a two-stage operation. You send in the first stage. The vectors… agents of transmission… for Pacov-1 are extensive: it travels through the air, the water, or directly from person to person and is highly contagious. It spreads for hundreds of miles if conditions are optimal. Pacov-1 causes only a mild, flu-like infection that disappears within a day or two. Public health authorities would overlook it, never consider it a serious epidemic, and even if they did they’d have to look carefully to isolate it. Once a victim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov-1 becomes dormant and almost undetectable. A month or two later you send in the second stage: Pacov-2 is also a virus, just as contagious as the first, and just as harmless by itself. It reacts with Pacov-1, however, to produce a powerful coagulant. A coagulant, Alan, a substance that turns your blood to thick jelly! Your heart isn’t made to pump strawberry jam, and you die within three minutes. No warning, no vaccine, no cure. Those not exposed to both stages remain unharmed. There might be a few immunes, but they didn’t do a lot of testing, as you can imagine. Pacov-2 goes inert like Pacov-1 within a week or two. Then you get your victim’s country, all his property… in undamaged condition… and a lot of corpses to bury.”

Mulder paused. “Does this convince you, Alan?”

It did.

“Pacov terrified the Born Agains. They had opened the gate and come eyeball to eyeball with the worst nightmares of Hell. They ripped out the installation at Marvelous Gap and scattered its personnel around to other projects. Maybe they even killed those most closely involved; they were no more ‘noble’ than any government before or since. It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What would happen if somebody… used… Pacov today?”

Mulder inspected the halfmoons of his tiny, salmon-pink fingernails. “No idea. No data. Perhaps the stuff is too old and has gone inert. Perhaps it never would have worked. All we know is that it was intended as a last resort, the checkmate move, the Doomsday weapon. No, worse. More like the last tantrum of a very bad loser: leap up, shoot your opponent, and kick the chessboard to smithereens! Pacov was meant to destroy nations, Alan… millions… perhaps hundreds of millions of people.”

“Jesus…,” Goddard muttered.

Mulder made a downward, circling motion. “The Last Trump. Not with a bang but with a gurgle. Down the toilet. All mammalian life within the target area.”

“God!” Wrench exclaimed, “What good’s an army? With that stuff…!”

Mulder raised his head to look at the little man. “Quite right, Charles. In the old days an army consisted of human beings with swords and spears, guns and cannon… whatever was state-of-the-art at the moment. You could see the enemy, watch him coming, gird up your loins and fight. Then warfare went out into space: missiles, bombs, satellites, platforms. You… the intelligence agencies… can still see those weapons, but they’re so powerful that neither side dares to start a war. The only atomic devices used in this century were dropped during the China-Viet Nam War.”

“And we’ve learned a lesson from that.” Lessing said.

“Quite so. Hopefully, at least. But you see where I’m going: a conventional army costs money, but every state can afford something, and it’s visible to its foes. Space weapons are prohibitively expensive… billions, trillions… more than even the United States or the Soviets can tolerate, decade after decade, generation after generation. They’re too powerful to employ without the risk of a retaliation that will turn your own country into a radioactive wasteland, and they’re still relatively easy to keep track of; both you and your opponents know what’s there.” He tapped the chair arm for emphasis. “Think, though: all you need for Pacov… or for the toxin counterpart the Russians call ‘Starak’… is a handful of scientists, a wet lab, and a delivery system. Cheap, cost-effective, and easily concealed. Any petty terrorist organization can afford it, any banana republic, any fanatic religious sect.” He got up and came to stand over Lessing. “Just how big were those Pacov cannisters?”

It didn’t matter now. He might as well tell it. “A little globe, like a Christmas-tree ornament. And a cylinder, about this size.” He indicated four inches between thumb and finger.

His own stash of Pacov came to mind. Maybe Mulder’s movement, the descendants of the Nazi SS, were indeed reformed, just another bunch of nice guys making a living through hard work and honest capitalism. He didn’t trust them. Not them, not anyone. He was willing to tell Mulder some of what he knew, but he’d be damned if he’d hand over his samples to these people, or to anybody except maybe God Himself. And only then if the Big Guy asked politely.

Mulder wiped pearls of sweat from his forehead. “A family enters a country as tourists. Pacov-1 goes along in a box with their children’s toys—”

Wrench uttered a nervous giggle. “With a clown face painted on it!”

Mulder scowled in irritation. ‘Tes. A month or two later a man arrives with Pacov-2 disguised as a deodorant stick or a tube of insect repellent. He goes to his hotel room, cracks the container in the sink, and leaves again. He’s safe because he wasn’t exposed to Pacov-1, which is now quiescent.”

“And everybody in the target area dies,” Goddard breathed.

“True,” Mulder said, “but messy! There are no neat limits to a biological weapon, no idea how long it will really last! Viruses are unpredictable, and they can mutate. Did you know that there’s an island near Scotland that is still uninhabitable because of British experiments after World War II? Almost a century later! Biological weapons are cheap and effective, but they’re two-edged swords.”

“As blackmail…!” Goddard held up his cupped hand and made a throttling gesture.

“What if your target calls your bluff? Don’t be stupid. Bill! They might decide to sterilize your side of the planet with atomic bombs! Or use Starak or another BW agent of their own! And if Pacov got out of hand, you could end with a cemetery instead of a world!”

No one spoke for a time. The sun had grown insistent, and waves of heat beat against the rippled, bubbly glass of the windowpane. The old air-conditioner chugged and sputtered, just managing to keep the inferno outside at bay. Mulder wiped his face. Wrench fidgeted, and Goddard sat like a carved behemoth. Lessing pulled the pillow around, both for comfort and also to watch the other three. Silent watching often got better results than speech.

“They blame us… my ancestors… for genocide,” Mulder mused. “Is Pacov our doing? Those missiles in the sky? Yes, we fought a war, and yes, we bombed and shot and slew. So did the Allies. Match Auschwitz against the firebombing of Dresden or the horror of Hiroshima. All horrible, all stupid. We’ve learned, Alan, learned a lot in a hundred years.”

Lessing blurted out, “And the ‘Holocaust’?”

“Didn’t Wrench tell you that there never really was one… at least, not the way the Jews tell it. Forced labor and camps and disease and maltreatment, yes; it was war time, and my ancestors did what they believed they had to do. And there were some shootings in the eastern territories, mass executions of Jews and communist guerrillas. But no gas chambers, or any of the other fanciful inventions claimed by the Jews. But it’s always the victors who write the histories.”

“And hold the war-crimes trials,” Wrench whispered.

“Anyhow, whether there was a ‘Holocaust’ or not is irrelevant to this age. No one wants a war that will end life on earth. Nor can one people rule a world of slaves. The Israelis have expanded into a slave-empire, and they are just beginning to reap the whirlwind. No, we’ll win our way, Alan. We are the people who invented the technology and organization that makes this modem world possible. We’re fitted to win. We want a healthy people, a healthy environment, a healthy world. A radioactive desert or a rotten orange crawling with germs… neither is of use to us… or to the Jews or anyone else.”

Lessing said slowly, “I don’t know whether I believe you or not. I don’t know that I care whether I believe you. It all happened a hundred years ago. Your Hitler is as dead as last week’s curry.” Goddard stiffened, but the others ignored him. “What do you intend to do, Mr. Mulder? What do you want me to do?”

Mulder heaved himself to his feet, Goddard leaning forward solicitously to lend a hand “We want you to find Pacov. Who paid you? Who’s got it now?”

“Ask Gomez.”

Goddard snorted. “Gomez is dead, Lessing. His heart stopped It had a bullet in it.”

Lessing stared. “Who? When?”

“You thumbed him. That’s the rumor. We know you didn’t, because you were in Pretoria. But the meres don’t know that. In some circles you’re dead meat.”

“But you know other meres,” Wrench prompted. “People above

Gomez’s level?”

“You can go and inquire,” Mulder interrupted smoothly. Or you can go your way and face those waiting for you outside Indoco’s fences. The Izzies are looking for you, and the Americans want you. Somebody knows about Pacov and Marvelous Gap, somebody who either wants to interrogate you or see you unzipped. We can protect you. You can stay here for a while, and if things blow over, fine. Otherwise we can hire you as chief of security at Club Lingahnie, our new spa on the island of Ponape. The south Pacific is lonely, but it’s safe.”

“He’d have to leave his Indian popsy here,” Goddard sneered.

Surprisingly, Mulder turned on the man. “That’s enough, Bill! Do you know where the word ‘Aryan’ comes from? Sanskrit, Bill, the ancestor of Hindi and other North Indian languages. It originally meant ‘noble.’ India was invaded about 1,500 B.C. by the Aryans, relatives of our own ancestors.”

The wings of Goddard’s fleshy nose flared. “Mr. Mulder, are you saying that these… these… Pakis are White!”

Wrench tittered, but Mulder did not flinch. “Many in the upper castes are. At least so Alfred Rosenberg, one of the leading theoreticians of the Third Reich, said, though he did add that they had become ‘mixed.’ In any case, the First Führer treated them as Aryans. There was a Waffen-SS division, the Frei Hind, made up of anti-British Indians. It spent the war near the Bay of Biscay, I think. It saw no combat, but it was racially acceptable to Reichsführer Himmler.”

Spots of angry red burned in Goddard’s cheeks. “I suppose Blacks are Aryans, too!”

“Not black Africans, certainly, but there were Muslims in the Waffen-SS.”

Wrench appeared to be enjoying the turn the conversation had taken, and he cut in: “The Handschar Division. Right, Mr. Mulder? Didn’t the First Führer once line ’em up and hand out little Qur’ans to wear around their necks? Qur’ans with swastikas on ’em?”

“I think so.” Mulder wiped his forehead again. “There were men of many nationalities… Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Dutch, Flemish, French, Romanians, Hungarians, even some Britons… in the SS. More than just blonde, Germanic ‘supermen’: many different White sub-groups. Not everybody was as pure-minded as Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, who complained that even many Volksdeutschen, Germans who lived outside Germany, were too weak and undisciplined to serve as replacements in his Totenkopf Division.”

“But…”

“And what if the Reich had won? All those different peoples, all those languages and cultures and traditions? I know what your faction wants. Bill, but it won’t work. Even if you cleansed the earth of every Black and every Jew and every non-German… including yourself, being of French and English descent, I recall… you’d still have to build a world. Hatred is a useful motive in combat, but it makes for very poor economic or administrative policies. You have to look beyond your immediate horizons, Bill.” He made soothing motions with his handkerchief. Clearly he did not want a quarrel.

Goddard struggled with himself, managed a smirk, and grated, “Excuse me, sir.” He went out.

“A good man,” Mulder looked after him ruefully. “Enlightened racism, the service of our Western ethnos, is the theoretical basis of our movement. But Bill takes it too far… and then doesn’t take it far enough beyond that.”

Lessing had decided. “I want to go to see a man in Paris,” he said. “I’ll try to find out about Pacov: who got it, who wants it… who wants me. I don’t promise to give it to you….”

“Nor do we want it. It should be destroyed safely!”

“But I have to know… for my own good.”

“Fair enough. Miss Hilary, down at the plant, will get you tickets and reservations. Leave any time.”

“After I’ve seen Jameela.”