The Genesis Plague

14

Stokes punched his security code into the keypad and the mechanical jamb bolts disengaged. He cranked down on the handle, gave a push, and the door whispered open. The fowl stench of excrement drifted out at him. ‘Good lord,’ he gasped, holding back his gag reflex. He set the air filtration system to the max. Then taking the handkerchief from his blazer’s breast pocket, he covered his mouth and tentatively proceeded into the vault.

At the room’s centre, Roselli was sprawled face up on the carpet in a spread eagle, blue complexion, murky eyes opened wide and frozen to the blank ceiling. Whatever he’d had for dinner and breakfast, both liquid and solid, had found its way into his trousers. Post-mortem bowel release; Stokes had seen it many times in the killing fields.

‘Oh, Frank. Why couldn’t you just keep your cool, like the old days?’ he said, crouching down and rummaging through the corpse’s pockets until he found a key ring and Roselli’s PDA. ‘All right fellas,’ he called back to the door. ‘Get in here.’

A broad-shouldered man came in wearing a sour expression. Behind him a second man, shorter by at least five inches, came in pushing a heavy duty Rubbermaid tilt truck. Both men were wearing periwinkle baseball caps and coveralls embroidered with a crisp logo for a fictitious company whose speciality was document shredding. The truck parked near the service entrance bore the same insignia, along with a slogan: ‘YOUR SECURITY IS OUR SPECIALTY’.

Stokes stood and stepped aside. ‘It’s not pretty. I’ll throw in extra for your trouble.’

‘How do want to do this?’ the taller one asked, all business.

‘Let’s go with heart attack at the wheel.’ Stokes tossed the keys over.

‘Like a telephone pole … something like that?’

‘Sure. Just nothing too dramatic,’ Stokes reminded. On a previous assignment to eliminate a pesky senator who’d been poking around into the project’s financing, this same duo had roughed up the body enough to raise a coroner’s suspicion. An investigation ensued, which luckily led only to dead ends.

‘And no witnesses, you hear me?’ Stokes warned. He slipped Roselli’s PDA into his inside breast pocket.

‘No witnesses,’ the taller man replied.

‘All right. Get him out of here.’

The shorter man wheeled the tilt truck closer.

The two men each claimed a spot on opposite sides of the corpse, hooked an armpit and a knee, hoisted the body up on a three-count, then dropped it into the tilt truck with a thud. The taller man folded down the stiff legs while his partner got back behind the handles.

Stokes stared down at the wide brown stain left behind on the rug. A call to housekeeping would raise too many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.

As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli’s PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: ‘2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.’

Liberated from the vault’s thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.

‘Great,’ Stokes huffed.

Navigating the BlackBerry’s menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli’s first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, ‘undeliverable’ error messages started bouncing back from the intended recipients’ e-mail accounts. Stokes was relieved to see that the addressees were the scientists who’d partaken in the 2003 cave excavation. The message began with a warning about Stokes’s malicious intentions. Next came a rally call for each recipient to contact authorities with all information pertaining to his or her time spent in Iraq. Also included in the e-mail were hyperlinks to classified material and documents that detailed the project’s true mission. What Roselli hadn’t anticipated was that Stokes’s NSA contact had already deactivated and thoroughly emptied said e-mail accounts — stage one of the clean-sweep that would be complete only when each name in this e-mail wound up being the subject for an obituary. That task was well under way.

‘Nice try, Frank. Always a step ahead of you.’

The PDA’s grimy keyboard was making his fingers sticky; some tacky white powder that could only have come from the doughnuts that had led to Roselli’s equally doughy belly. Disgusted, Stokes paused to wipe his hands with his handkerchief before hunting for the second stealth e-mail.

But sifting through the SENT and DELETED items, he could not find a second draft. If Roselli set the message to automatically delete upon transmission, there’d likely be no way of retrieving it or determining the recipient.

After two more minutes, however, Stokes did manage to determine the e-mail address to which the second message had been sent. The domain was registered to Our Savior in Christ Cathedral — Stokes’s personal e-mail account. Rushing over to his computer, Stokes went into his e-mail client. Some spam about cheap health insurance and solar heating systems managed to sneak through, but nothing from Roselli.

What tricks did Roselli have up his sleeve? he wondered.

Cursing, Stokes tossed the PDA in his desk drawer.

From a utility closet adjacent to the elevator, he collected some cleaning supplies and made his way back into the vault. He began by thoroughly spritzing the air with odour neutralizer. Then off came his blazer and he got down on his knees to squirt the soiled mess with commercial-duty rug cleaner. He used a scrub brush to attack the stain, blotted up the resultant frothy goo with paper towels, and repeated the process. The heinous act reminded him of shitter detail back in the Corps. Though nothing could match that raunchy mix of kerosene and flaming excrement — truly the stuff of nightmares.

Satisfied, Stokes rounded up the supplies and filled a trash bag with the waste.