Andy shook his head. “What about the gunshot?”
Colding gestured to the empty room. “You see anyone else coming to see what happened?”
“Colding’s right,” Magnus said. “We’ll board up the door, say we had to break in to reach her when she flipped out. We’ll lock up her room. No one gets in but Colding, because he’s the only one she really trusted. Work for you, Bubbah?”
Colding nodded, feeling the extra burst of guilt brought on by Magnus’s words.
“Good,” Magnus said. “Colding, hurry up and bury her before anyone gets back.”
Colding stood up. “Are you joking?”
“We can’t leave the body here stinking up the place,” Magnus said. “And I’m not putting her in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer where Clayton can stumble into it. If you’d been better at your job, she’d still be alive, so this is your mess. Do it. Now.”
Colding thought for a moment, still fighting to control the rage. All that mattered now was getting Sara off the island. He had to do whatever it took to make that happen.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Magnus turned and walked out the door. Andy followed him, leaving Colding alone with the corpse of his friend.
NOVEMBER 30: ENDGAME
Implantation +21 Days
MAGNUS SAT IN front of the secure terminal, thick fingers drumming a relentless pattern on the desktop—babababump, babababump, babababump. He waited for Danté’s face to appear. While he waited, he read the email again.
FROM: FARM GIRL
TO: BIG POPPA
SUBJECT: FUNNY STUFF AT HOME
I HEARD ABOUT THAT FUNNY PRANK CALL TO DAD. CRAZY PRANK CALLERS! ROTFL! IT WAS A SILLY THING FOR THE PRANKSTER TO DO. DAD’S GUYS AT THE OFFICE ARE GOING TO TRACK THAT DOWN. WILL TAKE FIVE DAYS AT LEAST, SIX AT THE MOST. OH, AND I WOULDN’T TAKE THE CAR. DAD’S LOOKING FOR IT. LOOKING HARD.
TTYL—FARM GIRL
It was over now. Even Danté had to see that. No place left to run. Taking the C-5 out again was a crapshoot at best, and even if they got it off the island undetected, they didn’t have any more secret facilities. Fischer would have access to satellite coverage. He’d have people watching. He couldn’t see everywhere at once, granted, but the word would be out about the C-5—no more buying off air traffic controllers. If the C-5 passed near an airport radar system, even a small airport, that might be it.
Five days at best, maybe six.
Finally, the Genada logo disappeared, replaced by his brother’s panicky face.
“Magnus, what the hell is going on? My computer guys told me our system called USAMRIID?”
“It was Jian,” Magnus said. “She hacked into the secure terminal, used your end to call Fischer.” He watched Danté’s face, the predictable wave of emotions—disbelief, anger, then anxiety.
“What… what did she tell him?”
“The usual chitchat. What she had for lunch, ancestor research, that kind of thing. The only piece of luck was she didn’t get a chance to give our location.”
“You broke the connection in time?”
“You could put it that way, sure.”
“You… you didn’t,” Danté said. “Magnus, please tell me you didn’t.”
Magnus said nothing.
“But she’s the whole project. You idiot! What the fuck are we going to do without her?”
Magnus was the boots on the ground, making real-time decisions, saving Genada’s ass, and Danté was calling him an idiot?
“So what now?” Danté screamed, shaking his fist at a camera hundreds of miles away. “That’s just a brilliant business decision on your part, you fucking psycho. What the hell do we do now?”
“We cut our losses,” Magnus said. “We cover our trail, move on to the next opportunity.”
“What do you mean, cut our losses?”
“Big brother, you’d better pull your head out of your ass and do it quick. Don’t you get it? Jian called Fischer. He wants Colding and Rhumkorrf. He thinks he’ll get them to roll over so he can nail us on other charges. But when we give Colding and Rhumkorrf to Fischer, we make sure they won’t talk. Ever. He set up the game this way, not us. He gets what he asked for, and the G8 know without a doubt that Genada is out of the transgenic game. That’s all the governments really want. Our lawyers unfreeze the accounts. Presto chango, we move on.”
Danté leaned in toward the camera until his face filled up the screen. “We can’t do that! Those are our people, and we’re so close! Once the ancestors are born, the public and press won’t let anyone get in our way. We’ve won, we just need a few more days!”
Magnus kept his face expressionless, but inside he felt a rare spurt of sadness. Poor Danté. Never able to make the decisions that had to be made.
Danté’s face lit up, like the answer to the world’s problems had just flashed in his head. It made him look like a special-ed kid who just caught a bug after hours of failed attempts. “Manitoba! Listen, let’s move the C-5 to Manitoba. I’ll have crews start building facilities that can hold something the size of a tiger.”
Magnus nodded. Sure. Why not? “Okay, brother. How do you want to do this?”
“Let’s think it out. There’s a major blizzard coming across Lake Superior tonight. The fringes of it are probably already hitting Black Manitou. Our weather report says that’s going to last the better part of two days, and there’s another storm right behind it. I assume you talked to Farm Girl?”
“Got an email from her,” Magnus said. “According to her, we have five days.”
“Perfect,” Danté said. “I’ll have to do some travel jumping to lose Fischer’s men first. I’ll be at Black Manitou in four days, as soon as the second storm fades a bit, with flight plan and strategy in hand. Okay?”
“How big are these storms?”
Danté reached for his keyboard. The picture changed to a weather map of Michigan. The land was brown, the water was blue, and the two-fisted storm was an angry green mass hung like a massive shroud over the northern shore of Lake Superior.
“Well well well,” Magnus said. “That is a big storm.”
The picture switched back to Danté’s face. “Almost hurricane-class winds. Nobody will fly in that, and any boat will be a death trap. Just give me four days, Magnus. I’ll be there on December fourth. We’ll find a way to get the C-5 out of there, in secret, and to Manitoba. We have to find a way.”
Magnus nodded. “Four days? I think I can handle that.”
“Wonderful,” Danté said. “You’ll see, little brother, we’ll pull through this, together.”
Magnus smiled, then disconnected. Family was such a funny thing. You can pick who you fuck, who you kill, but you can’t pick your own brother.
Fly to Genada headquarters? In a massive plane that Fischer was looking for? Danté had lost it.
Magnus called up the computer’s password program, locking out all access except for his own. When he finished, he left the security office and headed for the hangar.
NOVEMBER 30: COLDING SAYS GOOD-BYE
COLDING WIPED THE back of his hand across his forehead. It just smeared dirt on his skin more than it wiped away the sweat. How had it come to this? How?
He bent to scoop up a last shovelful of dirt, dumped it, and patted it down. For all of her genius, for an intellect that should have been celebrated all across the world and in the history books forever and ever, Liu Jian Dan ended up in a shallow, frozen, unmarked grave.