“I thought you said the NDAs were invalid?”
Harrington held his hand out to one of his men. They passed him a tablet. “The NDA isn’t the issue. It’s that you may be the only top-tier researcher left alive.”
Reese shivered, and it had nothing to do with the bite in the air. “I don’t understand.”
Harrington handed Reese the tablet. He took it. For a moment there was only the chaos of red and white on the screen, then like some macabre optical illusion, details emerged. An equipment cage on the back wall was the only recognizable object left in the ready room on the third floor of the Utah Facility. The rest a collage of human remains and shattered lab equipment.
“My tech guys have managed to tap into the cameras. Not all of them are working, but the ones that are…?” Harrington tipped his chin at the tablet Reese held. “Right now, I have to assume Dr. Pok and Dr. Lewis, who were both listed as in the lab, are possible victims.”
“What about Echols?”
“We haven’t located him.”
“He practically lived at the lab.” Like Reese had. Every day had potential for a new discovery. Sleep could wait. Time off could wait. Possible answers to the universe lay in the glass vials they’d unearthed, and neither of them had wanted to waste a second not looking for them.
“That’s the impression we were given when we interviewed the off-shift personnel.”
Reese found himself staring at the tablet again. His mind still didn’t want to believe what his eyes told him. Those remnants had been people. People Reese had known. People he’d worked with.
His eyes burned. To make himself quit staring at the scene, he handed the tablet back to the colonel.
Reese cleared his throat. “What have the project managers told you about Anubis?”
Harrington handed the tablet to one of his men. “They’ve sent us a three-inch-thick project overview with thousands of fancy words carefully chosen to make the ‘subjects’ as innocuous as possible.” Shadows darkened Harrington’s eyes. “Nothing innocuous does that kind of fucking damage, Dr. Dante.”
No. And Reese wasn’t about to claim the betas weren’t anything but potentially dangerous.
“Therefore, I need you to tell me what they won’t. What in god’s name tore those people apart?”
Pointing the finger at the betas would be the logical reply, but Koda never allowed his team to display aggression toward personnel. Even when it was beta to beta, he’d always been quick to stop them.
“I don’t even know where to start?”
“The more you can tell us, the more prepared we are.”
If only the man knew how impossible that statement was. No one could prepare for the betas. It’s what made them so effective.
“About seven years ago, Dr. Jermone Markus approached Dr. Echols. Markus had been working in Egypt with their government gene-mapping tissue samples from various tombs. Grunt work, considering he’s one of the world experts on archaeogenetics with a doctorate in Egyptology.”
“Why was he doing it?”
Reese laughed a little. “Because even experts have to pay the bills.” Echols hated doing anything not cutting-edge. Before New World Genetics, grunt work was pretty much all Reese did. “While doing PCR on a batch of samples, Dr. Markus saw something that didn’t make sense, so he contacted Echols.”
“Echols is a physicist,” Phillips said. “Why would an expert on genetic archeology go to him for answers in their field?”
“Because what Dr. Markus saw had nothing to do with genetics. He wasn’t sure what it was, only that it broke a lot of biomolecular laws.” Echols had still been on the high of that impossibility when he’d phoned Reese. And Reese had been so desperate to do something in his field rather than continue teaching High School Biology, he hadn’t questioned the validity of Echols’s claims.
Ones that any sane man would have doubted. And anyone with a soul would have refused to work on.
“Echols called it the answers to life. Dr. Markus called it ichor.”
“Ichor?”
Reese tucked his fingers between his knees, but the tips were too numb to feel any warmth. “It’s the substance Dr. Markus saw traces of in the tissue samples he analyzed. When Echols looked at the samples and confirmed every impossibility Dr. Markus had discovered, they approached New World Genetics about funding the search for the source.”
“And they gave Echols the money?”
“Oh, god no. Like I said, what Dr. Markus and Echols found in those samples wasn’t possible, at least on a molecular level.”