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“I’m not sure we have a choice when it comes to timing.”
Truer words had never been spoken. “Okay, what is it?”
Daniel took a deep breath and then started talking. Standing next to the man, C.P. watched his mouth move, and his hands lift up and shift back and forth in front of him, and his Adam’s apple ride up and down in the front of his throat.
And then he stopped.
Oh, so he must be done. And as his words sank in, she had to say, she was not surprised. This was the way the night seemed to be going, and if there was one thing she had learned over the last decade, it was that choice had less of a role in destiny than she would have wanted.
“Come with me,” she said with exhaustion.
Then again, anything was better than this empty office.
THIRTY-ONE
WELL, WHAT DOyou know, Daniel thought.
As C.P. led the way into a windowless, secured vault, lights came on across the ceiling, and he had to blink the glare away. After his retinas adjusted, he was able to focus on what was lying, in pieces, on the examination table in the center of the space. The android was so human-like, it was something out of the mind of James Cameron, the skin some kind of polyurethane that retained its peachy color, the face structure molded to perfection, the body dimensions exactly correct. And underneath the surface? So many stainless-steel parts, all connected and state of the art, a full set of artificial limbs that were coordinated by some kind of motherboard.
A warrior who needed no food, no water, no sleep, and no recovery or healing from injuries.
“Is this what you’re talking about?” she asked him as she went right up to the body.
“Yup.” He joined her at the table and focused onthe eye sockets, which were empty. “And it looks exactly like the ones I killed. I always took the eyes.”
Leaning over, he took the head and angled it to him. The skull had been disconnected from the spinal cord, just like the arms and legs had been unplugged from the torso. As its vacant sockets seemed to seek his own stare, he thought, not for the first time, that this shit was straight-up Terminator, a biomechanical unit created to function among people while being controlled by directives that were programmed into its CPU.
“How long have you had these remains?” he asked.
“Since the spring. We found it out in the woods. Someone had hid it—”
“Yeah, this was my kill.” He pointed to damage on the skull. “These bullet wounds are mine. This unit came after Lydia and me.”
“We didn’t know what it was. But we were tracking the pair of you. I was aware things at the Wolf Study Project were unraveling and that the setup I had there for testing compounds had gotten out of hand. When my guards found the android body, it was quickly apparent there was someone else in Walters.”
He tapped the eye sockets. “I always took the peepers because these machines can be regenerated. Reused? Is that the word? And I wanted to slow down their return into service.”
“So whose are they?”
“We were trying to find out because they were getting inconvenient. More and more were interfering with our work—and I’ll be honest. When one of them turned up here? Tracking Lydia and me? I thought maybe they were a creation of yours.”
“No, I’m strictly research. Not… whatever this is. We took the thing apart because we wanted to understand it—but there are no clues as to who made it. The skin—is extraordinary. It’s bio-identical nearly. The circulatory system? The brain? It’s like no computerized anything—or mechanical, for that matter—that any of my men had ever seen. I keep it here because this is a lead-lined containment room. I figured that whatever tracker was on it would be neutralized, if not because it was functionally compromised then because of the insulation.”
“Smart.”
Daniel went down the table, inspecting the body. The skin had degraded a little, but nothing like a real human’s would have once its oxygen source was cut. The muscles were the same, peeling back from the stainless-steel joints, yet still rosy in appearance.
“So I’m about halfway through the F.B.G.’s database of reports,” he said. “And the thing that stands out is that there’s nothing current filed after this past spring. I don’t know where the staff went—or whether they switched their IT shit to adifferent platform. But something has changed in a big way.”
C.P. made a noise that could have meant anything, and given the way she was staring into the middle distance in front of her face, he knew he’d lost her attention.
“If this is not yours,” he said, “then I think there’s someone else out there looking for immortality.”
This got her to focus and her eyes shifted to his. “What do you mean?”
Daniel put his hand on the biomechanical soldier’s shoulder. “Whoever is making these has serious resources, and they’re not using them for medical research. This is about war—someone has developed and is testing a better-mousetrap soldier. So I’m curious, has Vita-12b or any of your compounds—do any of them have chemical weapon applications?”
C.P. recoiled. “No. I mean, we work with the immune system. Ten years ago, the original compound I was trying to develop was about reversing the aging process—or at least slowing it down. Through our results, we sidestepped into immunotherapy for cancer. That was when I hired Gus. I’ve been parallel processing the two strains of research ever since, but Vita was what took off. Mother Nature is stingy with her life cycle secrets, as it turns out. It’s not just about the length of the telomere.”
