“W
e had monitored his every move,” Thurman continued, wanting Blaine to know, proud of it.”Studied all his research. It was our scientists who realized how easy it would be to turn CLAIR into a killing machine. Just a slight modification in the formula, I’m told. Barely even noticeable.”
“You and the fat man really do belong at the same table.”
“Look, we didn’t know the kid was going to test it in that mall.”
The flames continued to encircle them, moving ever closer, shrinking the central patch. If either noticed, he didn’t show it.
“But you didn’t stop him, either,” Blaine said accusingly.
“Our people lost him inside. They were still inside when …”
“So there was no one to follow him when he ran, but you needed him back to reproduce the formula for you.”
“And who better to find him for us than Blaine McCracken?”
“Through Harry Lime. I’d never suspect anything that way, even though I should have.” Blaine paused, everything falling together. “I guess you can count yourself fortunate Joshua Wolfe escaped in the first place. Otherwise Marokov’s kill order would have stood. You’d outlived your usefulness to the fat man, until the kid disappeared and he turned to you again.”
“The bastard told me about you and Marokov. He had me set the whole thing up.”
“He played you for the fool you’ve always been, that’s all.”
Thurman bared his teeth in a grimace of pain. “I think I’ll surprise him.”
“You’re not up to it, Thurman. He’d eat you for lunch—literally maybe. Leave him to me.”
F
riday night had run into Saturday morning by the time Erich Haslanger had finished running computer diagnostic tests on the compound Joshua Wolfe had created in the Group Six labs. He confirmed early in his work that the compound in and of itself was as innocuous as it was generally unidentifiable. That indicated it was some sort of activator the boy planned to mix with his original CLAIR formula. If not toward repairing it, though, then what?
Even for supercomputers capable of performing a million commands a second, the diagnostics took time. After all, there was no hard data for them to work from, no actual analytical samples. There were only two formulas, neither of which was totally complete. Haslanger tried to be patient. He knew what it was like to wait for the night to end just so morning would come and keep him from a slumber he knew he would never awake from.
Because the ghosts would come for him.
It had been worse in the dreams than it had been in reality, for in the dreams his discarded subjects were shown all grown up. Not just heaps of freshly delivered, misshapen, stillborn flesh or shapeless things that had somehow managed to survive long enough for him to mercifully end their brief lives. In the dreams he saw them matured: the extra or missing limbs, the disfigurements and mutations, the scale of development all horribly wrong.
Reaching for him, trying to hold him in their dark dream world. The ghosts had come close the last few times he had chanced sleep years before. The next time he would remain their prisoner. Waking would never come.
Last night he had come dangerously close to nodding off. Feeling himself start to drift, the glow of the computer monitor the room’s only light, the pills not working. Once he jolted himself awake from a slide into darkness, convinced scratch marks would be left on his body where the ghosts had tried to drag him down with them. Terrified, he had barely been able to catch his breath or still the hammering of his heart.
Now, late on Saturday morning, Haslanger heard a series of beeps as the computer signaled completion of its program. His eyes locked on the monitor and read the final results. A pang of fear, even worse than the one his near-sleep had wrought, slid through him. He backtracked through the program, hoping for an error.
There was none. Haslanger double-checked, and checked again.
He rose so quickly from his chair that it toppled over backward. He burst out of his office. The hallway beyond burned with light, hurting his eyes. He looked at his watch, realizing he’d gotten through another night, seeing that it was nearly noon. But the emptiness of the first hallway made him fear he was actually sleeping and this was his eternal prison, the ghosts sure to step out from the doorways at any instant.
Just around the corner, though, he heard voices and footsteps. A few workers greeted him, but Haslanger hurried past them, picking up speed, out of breath by the time he reached Colonel Fuchs’s office.
“T
he spirits smiled upon us, Blainey,” Wareagle said, as they made their way through the Valley of the Dead under the careful watch and cover of the remaining Sioux warriors.
“Your people lost some good men today, Indian,” he told Johnny by way of apology.
“The chief saw this in his vision, Blainey. He will be saddened as we are, but not surprised.”
Entering the village, they expected to see Silver Cloud waiting, the knowing half-smile etched over his lips. The old chief was there, all right, but he wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t alone.
Sal Belamo was standing next to him, the dust-coated rental car parked nearby off the road.
“We got problems, boss.”
“A
n hour down the road,” Belamo was explaining, his eyes glassy and distant,”we stop at a diner and I go in to get some food. Kept my eye on the car the whole time. Kid was inside that car right until the time I turned to the counter to pick up my order. I get back to the car, open the door, and next thing I know I’m waking up almost two hours later.”
“GL-12.”
“Huh?”
“A sleeping gas developed by Group Six. The kid must have smuggled some of it out. That’s what he used on you, Sal. Released it into the car and made his getaway just before you returned.”
“Shit. But what the fuck for, boss? I mean, we’re on his side, right? What the fuck is he doing?”
“I don’t know, Sal.”
“I do,” said Dr. Susan Lyle as she gingerly emerged from the car.
“W
hat are you saying?” Fuchs demanded.
Haslanger was pacing rapidly up and down the office, his face beet red. “Heat. It all comes down to heat.”
“What does?”
“Joshua Wolfe’s original formula for CLAIR. He programmed it to be heat sensitive, so it wouldn’t be able to survive above a certain relatively low temperature.”
“You said that already.”
Haslanger stopped in his tracks. “He can take it out.”
“Take
what
out?”
“Heat sensitivity, the defense mechanism. That’s what the compound he created in our labs does. We thought he was solving the problems surrounding the organism’s recognition of oxygen-nitrogen proximity, becoming more specific with its programming so it would attack only the molecules present in air pollution and bypass those forming human blood.”
“But he wasn’t.”
“No. According to its programming, CLAIR should have died when it entered the human body. The boy theorized that exposure to certain amino acids present in the outer layers of the skin neutralized the temperature-sensitive defense mechanism he’d given his compound, and he was right. The substance he created in our labs is meant to
synthesize
those amino acids on an extremely concentrated level. Once mixed with the original CLAIR formula, it will permanently remove the defense mechanism that prevented the organism from spreading beyond the Cambridgeside Galleria.”
“Are you saying that—”
“If he combines the new compound with CLAIR and releases the resulting product, there will be nothing to impede CLAIR’s spread, nothing to stop it.”
Fuchs stood up very slowly. “In which case …”
“Joshua Wolfe could destroy the world,” Haslanger completed.
“
A
ll
human and animal life?” McCracken asked, not believing what Susan Lyle had just explained.
She nodded. “He told me as much last night but I didn’t realize he’d actually do it, actually release them.”
“Release what?”
“The Fires of Midnight,’ the title of the first poem Josh ever wrote. It describes his frustrations over being so different, over not fitting in. He had tremendous rage even then, and now it’s boiling over. He’s fed up. He wants a way to make sure everyone will just leave him alone.”
“By threatening to destroy the world if they don’t …”
“He believes that’s the only way to keep the Group Sixes of the world off his back. He can live with anything, I guess, except being forced to perpetrate more Cambridgeside Gallerias.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“
What
?”
“A CIA splinter group that’s been monitoring him all along tampered with his formula. They’re the real murderers.”
“But he doesn’t know that.”
“Not until we tell him. If what you say is true he’s got to have a sample of the original CLAIR formula stashed somewhere, right?”
Susan nodded slowly.
“D
isney World, Doctor.”
“What?” Haslanger had trouble rising out of the torpor he had sunk into upon returning to his darkened office. He had left the lights off, almost daring sleep to take him, preferring that to facing what Joshua Wolfe was prepared to unleash upon the world. He felt beaten, duped. All the time he and Fuchs had been trying to fool the boy, he had been fooling them. And Haslanger had fallen for it, blinded by the pride he felt for what he had created. He knew he was finished here, just as he knew there was nowhere else for him to go.
“The people Sinclair dispatched to Orlando have confirmed that Joshua Wolfe was inside Disney World’s Magic Kingdom shortly before he broke into our network from the hotel,” Fuchs elaborated.
“His second portion of CLAIR …”
“Interesting hiding place, don’t you think? Provides hope for us in spite of everything.”
“Hope?”
“Your revelation about what the boy has the potential to do changes nothing so far as the preservation of Group Six is concerned. Our survival still depends on locating the remainder of CLAIR. I’ll alert General Starr toward that end. I’m sure he’ll give us however many men we require to accomplish the task.”
“You’ll never find it,” Haslanger insisted.
Fuchs glared at him quizzically through the dark. “I wasn’t talking about finding it. I was talking about finding
the boy
and letting him lead us to it. I mean, thanks to you, Doctor, we now know exactly where he must be headed. All we must do is wait.”
“McCracken will be accompanying him, or following close behind.”
“Then we have to make sure to take enough men to deal with him once and for all as well, don’t we?”
“W
hy didn’t you tell me all this before?” Blaine demanded.
“Because I was afraid it would confirm everything you feared about Josh already, everything your Indian friend already believed.”
“He didn’t do anything. We know that now.”
“You didn’t then. If I’d told you he had another vial of CLAIR hidden, if I’d told you what he was planning to do with it …”
“What?”
“I was afraid you’d kill him.”
“What kind of man do you think I am?”
“Someone who does what he thinks is the right thing.”
“Killing innocent people is never the right thing.”
“Until this morning you didn’t know Joshua Wolfe was innocent. But everyone’s been after him because of the terrible things they thought he could be capable of: you from one side, Group Six from the other. But what about the miraculous things he’s capable of ?”
“In your hands, instead of Group Six’s?”
“Among others.”
“And after you get what you want, somebody else gets their turn, right? Point is, sooner or later we’re right back where we started—with Group Six or somebody else just as bad ending up using Joshua Wolfe.”
“We all want something,” she managed. “Even you.”
“All I want right now is to keep this kid from mixing his two test tubes together. Let him know that he didn’t kill anybody, after all.”
“And just how do you plan to go about that?”
McCracken shrugged. “For starters, Dr. Lyle, it looks like I’m going to Disney World.”
“R
egrettable, Mr. Thurman, most regrettable,” Livingstone Crum lamented when Thurman reached him by cellular phone from the Valley of the Dead.
“Pack it in. This one’s finished.”
“Thanks in no small part to you.”