The Carbon Trail (30 page)

He shot Richie a pleading look. “Can you help me? Can you help me find out?”

Richie’s heart sank, knowing that he had no answers to give. Chapman was missing in action and they had no leads. Nothing except the fact that he’d been in Scrabo Tower the day he’d disappeared.

Something occurred to him - they could go in and search the Tower now that Neil Scrabo was secure. Richie made a mental note to clear it with Magee then he looked at Jeff Mitchell again. The look of sadness on his face was almost pitiful. He couldn’t tell Mitchell about his plan to search Scrabo Tower for Chapman; it might push him over the edge. Instead he took the line that he and Magee had agreed.

“Yes, I’ll help you. We have men out looking for Chapman already, in all his usual haunts.” It was the truth. “We’ll add St Augustine to the list. Now that the operation’s over we’ll have more resources to put on the search.”

Jeff Mitchell’s look of relief was worth the half-lie. Richie watched as he relaxed back against his seat, then he turned the key gently in the ignition and drove them both home.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Souths Bar, Tribeca. 1 a.m.

“How would you like to come back to work, Tom?”

“No thanks, I just want my pardon and my share of the money that’s frozen in Scrabo’s account.”

Magee stared at his old student across the table and saw the beginning of a smile in the bar’s dim light. He could feel a punch-line coming.

“Besides, you could never cope with me becoming your boss.”

Magee laughed until he wheezed and Evans reached over and slapped him on the back, still talking.

“I’m still the same whistle-blowing malcontent that I was eight years ago, Joe. Do you really think any White House administration would let that pass?”

When Magee stopped coughing his reply took Tom Evans by surprise.

“Actually yes, this one would. You were right about the government back then; it was just your public exposé of it that was wrong. This is a very different administration.”

Evans snorted. Magee stared hard at him and Evans knew that he was being serious.

“I’ve been authorised at the highest level, Tom, not only to give you a full pardon but to offer you your old job back, with a promotion. I’ll even throw in five minutes alone with Al Schofield.”

Evans fell into stunned silence as Magee continued.

“Look, Tom. We need men like you. I’ve never doubted it but your quick thinking on that roof-top confirmed it again. At most I have five years left and then you’d end up running the show.” He smiled. “Besides, we need to keep you off the streets.”

“What about Cartagena? He’s a good agent, despite the attitude. Surely the job is his?”

Magee smiled. “Let me handle Richie. He’s good and he’ll get better, but you were the best I’d ever trained. Look, you’ve heard the offer, so just think about it. That’s all I have to say, except…” He held up his glass. “It’s your round.”

***

Mitchell couldn’t sleep no matter what he tried. His head was buzzing with questions, so at five a.m. he entered his study and opened the lock-box, removing the flash-drive and papers inside and slipping them into his briefcase. He shrugged on his jacket and headed for the front door, only to see Richie leaning, arms folded, against the leaded glass. He looked as rough as Mitchell felt.

“Going somewhere?”

“Work. I need to tidy things up if we’re leaving.”

“At dawn?” Richie’s look was as sceptical as his voice.

“Let me go, Richie. You know where I’ll be and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Richie glanced towards the stairs. His message was clear, but Mitchell couldn’t worry about Karen’s feelings right now. He was thinking of her long-term happiness, not just today’s. Mitchell shook his head and moved towards the front door, then something occurred to him and he stopped, giving Richie a small smile.

“I’m trusting you to take care of them.”

Mitchell was out the door and in the Lexus before Richie realised exactly what he’d meant.

***

When Mitchell reached Scrabo Tower dawn was breaking. He watched it through his office window, wondering how many more of them he would see. He breathed in its beauty as if it was his last and then turned towards his work, making fast progress in the early morning peace. By seven a.m. there were three neat piles on his desk. One for the research team, one for Devon with a note, and the last one for shredding. In two hours’ time the outer office would be full of people and his day would be filled with queries to answer and papers to sign. If he was ever going to act it had to be now.

Mitchell lifted his briefcase and pulled out the flash-drive, slipping it into his computer. Thirty minutes later he’d read the Archaeus PDF twice, feeling again the shock he’d felt in his study that first night. It confirmed all his fears. He’d taken carbon engineering far beyond the animal research on the disc he’d given the agency. That had only outlined the physical changes that the new form of carbon could create, it was nothing compared to this. What was in the Archaeus
file was far too dangerous to fall into anyone’s hands.

Mitchell knew now why he’d named the file ‘Archaeus’. It was apt. Archaeus; alchemy’s creation of the vital spark. This research wasn’t about mere flesh and blood; the physical changes that he’d made to t animals. This work was about the very essence of living things; the thing that made him Jeff Mitchell, and Richie Cartagena himself.

Scientists and philosophers had spent centuries trying to describe it, as far back as the ancient Greeks. Even the churches had weighed in, calling it the ‘soul’. What was it really? Identity? Personality? Conscious and unconscious thought? Maybe even some sort of Quantum energy, if recent publications were correct. Whatever you called it, it was what turned a human body into a human being, and made each one of them unique.

Mitchell stared at the equations in front of him, stunned by their impeccable logic. Had he really discovered this? A way to capture people’s very essence? He read it again, still disbelieving, but there was no doubt. Just as carbon was the building block of physical life, his research had shown, through work on the neurotransmitters in the brain, that carbon held the basis of human consciousness itself. It was brilliant work but Mitchell knew that he couldn’t trust it to anyone. It had to die with him.

He sat for a moment considering what the work might mean to the future of the human race. Telepathy? Maybe, but the world had been looking at that for generations; it was nothing new. Collective consciousness? Remote viewing? Spying on enemies from your office chair using only the power of thought? Perhaps. There’d been work on that before; the Stargate project in the seventies, twenty million dollars spent before it was called a dud. Perhaps this was the leap forward that it would take to make it work. Mitchell ran through the possibilities, not knowing that the truth he was about to discover would make all his speculations seem like children’s games.

Mitchell left the office, locking the door behind him, and took the elevator down to the basement lab. The last time that he’d been there was with Devon, the previous time the night before his blood-filled shower; the night that Greg Chapman had disappeared and the CCTV had lost time. The cleaners had found Chapman’s cell-phone there and Mitchell was sure that he’d carried out the Archaeus trials there as well. It was the logical place. But wherever he’d done the trials he needed to make sense of it all before he died.

As he pulled open the basement door the lights flickered on and Mitchell gazed around the laboratory where he’d spent the last five years of his life. A place that he would have to say goodbye to soon. Jeff Mitchell had no idea that what he was about to find there would give him his future back.

***

Karen walked into the kitchen and pressed the kettle on to boil. She took her tea out to the deck to drink, admiring the peace of the autumn morning. Richie watched her from the doorway, smiling at how tiny she was in her bare feet. With her soft blond hair and make-up free face she could pass for a student instead of a thirty-something Mom. He felt protective of her, and of Emmie. They hadn’t asked for any of this.

Karen knew that Richie was watching her and she didn’t mind. He was a kind man, gentle and strong, and he made her laugh. She couldn’t remember the last time that she’d laughed. In a different life they might have had something together.

A sob caught her unexpectedly and Karen covered her face with her hands. She cried softly until it was wet, and she could barely breathe. She thought sadly of her handsome husband. She loved Jeff so much and he would be dead soon, no matter what anyone did. Suddenly all her worry about being safe paled against the reality of a future spent alone. Her shoulders dropped and her sobs grew so harsh that they racked her slim frame.

Richie let her cry alone for a minute, knowing that she needed the release, then he walked over and took her in his arms. Karen gazed up at him, surprised for a moment, then she slowly relaxed, feeling safe in his arms for that instant, no matter what the future would bring.

***

The outer lab was empty apart from a haze of dust that drifted past Mitchell in the flickering lights. It was an icy, grey-white space; almost colourless, but not in a drab way; it was just the colour of science. Mitchell thought of the bright kindergarten corridor that he’d stood in two weeks before, smiling at his daughter’s pretty world and its contrast to his own. There were no bright collages hanging on his walls, just square blocks of concrete and upper-case words screaming ‘CAUTION. HIGH VOLTAGE’ above every door

Mitchell walked through the huge lab slowly, his footsteps dulled by the polymer underfoot. He scanned the long room as he went. Right and left were exactly the same. Row upon row of work-benches and computers, with no personal touches to break the sombre mood.

In a moment he reached the back wall; cool, pale stone, broken only by the smooth steel door to the research suite that said private without a single word. Mitchell ran his hand slowly down its patina and stood for a moment, considering flight. Whatever had caused the gap on the CCTV tape, the reason lay behind here. Did he really need to know? Did he want to? Mitchell shook his head and turned, striding towards the lab’s exit as if he was being chased. Then he stopped.

Jeff Mitchell stood still, listening to the silence around him and then to the voice inside his aching head. He couldn’t run any more. If there were answers to his questions then he had to find them before he died. He reached the steel door again in two steps, punching in the entry-code before he changed his mind. The door swung open and Mitchell stepped inside, pulling it behind him to avoid prying eyes. They weren’t likely while Devon was away, but you never knew.

The internal light flickered on, revealing that he stood in a short hallway with a room on either side. ‘The Research Suite’, accessible only to him. The left hand door led to a refrigeration facility, the one on the right to the small office that he and Devon had seen on the CCTV. The office door lay open. Mitchell frowned. The tape said that the last person in there had been him; he must have left it unlocked. But he was normally fastidious about security.

Mitchell recalled his blood-stained shower two weeks before. He’d been here the night before it, the video-tape proved that. Had he been attacked by someone, was that where the blood had come from? Mitchell shook his head, knowing that the answer was no. The blood hadn’t come from injuries on his body.

What then? Had he been the attacker? It was unlikely, but if he had been then the question was why? The answer came quickly. There was only one reason that he would have attacked someone in his research suite. If they were an intruder.

Mitchell walked forward cautiously and pushed at the open door with one hand; the other one curled, ready to fight. One half of the office held a desk and work-bench, the other was made of glass with a self-hinged door. The glass room that he’d seen on the CCTV. Two empty cages sat on the floor beside the desk.

Mitchell scanned the room for signs of an injured intruder but there were none. He exhaled noisily, relieved; they must have got away. He thanked his lucky stars and turned to leave, then stopped as a dark-red patch in one corner caught his eye. Blood.

Small drops of dried blood covered the room’s black polymer floor. There’d been a fight here, but not a fatal one; it didn’t explain the amount of blood on him in the shower. Whose blood was it? Mitchell searched the room frantically for clues, knowing that whoever it was might still be there. The key-codes showed that no-one had entered or left the suite since that night.

As Mitchell rifled through the desk drawers for information something nagged at him. If no-one had been on the CCTV that night but him then how had his attacker entered? And why hadn’t the guards in reception noticed a stranger? More importantly, when had they fought? It must all have been during the gap on the video-tape; had they knocked it off during the fight or had he wiped it? Mitchell’s head hurt with questions that he couldn’t answer and he slumped heavily onto the desk chair.

The Archaeus work had been trialled here, he was certain of it. It would have been easy to hide. Only he and Devon ever visited this floor and Devon wasn’t allowed in the research suite. Mitchell glanced at the cages and then through the open door at the refrigeration room, built in perfect proximity for scientific trials. He walked into the hallway and examined the floor. There was a trail of blood leading towards the fridge. More blood, but still not enough to explain his shower.

Snatches of memory filled Mitchell’s mind. A man fighting with him in the hallway. Fists flying, him evenly matched with his foe. The man had followed Mitchell into the office and they’d fought again. And then what? A searing pain ripped through Mitchell’s head and he staggered back against the wall. A series of images flashed through the pain. The small, glass room, flooded with light. Animals changing, but not physically this time.

Mitchell huddled on the floor, banging his head against the wall for relief. But there was none. Not from the pain and not from the images in his head. They filled his mind, showing him the horrors that his Archaeus work had achieved. This was no sci-fi movie, it was real life.

He didn’t know the date or time of the experiment but he could picture the result. A rabbit; timid, docile, nibbling on some leaves. An angry dog, a pit-bull; snarling and snapping at the air, searching for something to bite. Mitchell watched, filled with dread, as they sat in cages inside the glass room and were flooded with light. No, not light, radiation of some sort. He kept on watching until it cleared.

The dog was lying quietly now, cleaning its paws, the rabbit snarling and biting its own fur, blood smearing its whiskers. Mitchell retched at the memory. The changes in the animals hadn’t been physical this time; they’d swopped consciousness. The dog’s mind and personality were in the rabbit’s body and vice versa!

These
were the Archaeus trials he’d held; playing God with animals’ minds. He’d altered the carbon atoms in the creatures’ brains and in the process he’d managed to transfer their consciousness and personality from one to another. As the memory faded Mitchell’s headache waned and he stared reluctantly at the refrigeration room door, dreading what he would find behind it. There was no choice but to look; he couldn’t run away now.