“Supplies?” Augustine asked hopefully.
DeWitt shook her head.
42
PENNSYLVANIA
On the state route, the traffic was light, three or four cars in the last fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to be caught driving. Simply being out on the road would be suspicious. George had said the turnoff to the cabin was tricky, hard to see. He had nailed a red plastic strip to a large pine tree to mark the spot.
Mitch drove more slowly, looking for the red plastic strip and a wooden plaque that joy-riding vandals tended to splinter with ball bats.
Suddenly, the interior of the Jeep filled with shadow. He felt immersed in inky night. The sensation passed, but it scared him; he could almost smell the darkness, like crankcase oil.
“Too damned tired,” he told himself, and wondered whether they had heard him in the backseat. He could feel both of them back there, both alive, both quiet. Stella's breathing had lost some of its harshness, but Mitch knew her fever was high.
Maybe he was coming down with it, too. That would be more than Kaye could stand, he suspected. So, I will not become sick.
Whistling in the dark. In the oily dark.
43
OHIO
“Jurie left the number codes in a desk drawer,” Middleton said as Augustine and DeWitt followed her into the concrete cube of the research building. “Dr. Dicken told me to bring you all here.”
Dicken came through the opposite door, carrying a thick folder of papers. He glared at Augustine. “You rotten son of a bitch,” he said.
Augustine took this without blinking. “You've found something,” he said.
“You're goddamned right I've found something. How much did Americol pump into the schools? The camps?”
“To my knowledge, nothing.”
“You're going to blame it all on Trask, right?”
Augustine shook his head cautiously. He looked around the big room and focused on the wall of steel refrigerators. “I don't even know what itis.”
“What would Marge Cross want with all these children?” Dicken held out the folder. Augustine reached forward, leaning on his cane, and Dicken pulled it back, then dropped it on a desk next to the stainless steel cold storage units. Photographs spilled out: color photographs of autopsy proceedings. Even from a distance, it was obvious the subjects were children, some of them infants.
Dicken took a step away, as if too disgusted to let Augustine come near him.
Augustine shifted his eyes from face to face, facial lines deepening. He pushed aside the photos, then lifted the cover page on the folder and leafed through it.
“I know you too well,” Dicken said. “You wouldn't be stupid enough to just let this happen.”
“Show me the rest,” Augustine said.
Middleton punched in the code numbers that unlocked the first stainless steel refrigerator door. Fog fell, revealing ranks of jars. Augustine immediately recognized the contents for what they were. The jars on top were small and contained anonymous meaty lumps in colorless fluid.
The jars below, on taller shelves, contained whole internal organs.
Middleton's skin had faded to a sickly shade of olive, and her eyes were almost closed.
“How many?” Augustine asked.
“There're the remains of maybe sixty or seventy children here, and more scattered throughout the building,” Dicken said.
“What do you think . . . what purpose?”
“I won't even hazard a guess,” Dicken said.
“We never lost this many children,” Middleton said, “and Dr. Jurie . . . Dr. Pickman . . . left before . . .” She did not finish. She closed the first door and opened the second. Trays of thousands of frozen tissue samples, mounted on slides or stored in solution in smaller bottles, had been stacked to the top of the compartment.
Augustine surveyed the trays, then stepped forward and motioned for Middleton to open the third door, and the fourth. His cane made rubbery squeaks on the linoleum floor. “You're positive none of these were from the last two days,” he said, grasping at some reasonable explanation for all the jars and tubes and dishes sealed, neatly numbered, and marked with yellow-and-red biohazard labels.
“It's a tissue library,” Dicken said. “Healthy tissue, pathological specimens, whatever they could get. There's a fully equipped laboratory for analyzing them. Jurie and Pickman autopsied all the children who died at this school, and all the schools in this region. I presume they were bringing the dead here from wherever they could get them,” Dicken said. “A central clearing house for cadavers.”
“Cross paid for the equipment?” Augustine asked. His demeanor was so quiet, his expression so utterly devastated, that Dicken pushed back his anger.
“Americol,” he said.
“Mm hm,” Augustine said. He took the list of codes from Middleton and unlocked and examined the next three doors. Two contained the by now familiar stacked trays of specimens. The last contained five cadavers, wrapped in transparent plastic, suspended by hooks and slings from rails at the top of the compartment.
“My God,” DeWitt said.
“I should have known,” Augustine murmured. “That's certain. I should have known.”
Middleton approached the open compartment. “Autopsies would be standard, wouldn't they? Is that what we're looking at, a pathology study being done on behalf of the students, to protect them?”
“No,” Augustine said abruptly. “No studies were ever passed up to Washington, and I doubt they were even sent to the Ohio Central authority, or I would have heard of it. Before this week began, a total of three hundred and seventy-nine children in custody of the schools have died. Very low mortality, statistically speaking. Many of them are probably here. They were supposed to be returned to their families or buried if left unclaimed.” Augustine closed the door. “I did not authorize this.”
Dicken stepped forward. “Was there any value to the children in doing this . . . research?”
“I don't know,” Augustine said. “Possibly. Doubtful, however. Anatomically, the children are so much like us that storage of organs or whole cadavers for research never seemed strictly necessary. Biopsies and specific tissue samples from the dead were all I ever authorized. You would have done the same.”
Dicken admitted this with a quick nod.
“This implies some sort of large-scale morbidity study. Whole body assessments, thousands of tissue analyses . . . I need to sit down.”
DeWitt brought a chair. Augustine slumped into it and leaned forward, shaking his head. “I'm trying to make sense of it,” he said.
“Try harder,” Dicken urged.
“I know of no reason other than retrovirus expression,” Augustine said. “Tracking expression of novel HERV in the new children. A statistical sampling of expression in dozens or hundreds of individuals, correlated with known biographies, stress patterns. That would require an unprecedented effort. Monumental.”
“To what end?”
“It could be an attempt to understand the whole process. What the ancient viruses are up to. What dangers they might present.”
“To predict incidence of Shiver?” Dicken asked. “That's being done elsewhere. Why do it here, unauthorized?”
“Because nowhere else do they have access to so many new children, dead or alive,” Augustine said.
“This is making me sick,” DeWitt said, and leaned on the small desk, pushing aside the folder.
Augustine looked up at Dicken. “I'm not the puppet master, Christopher. They broke me in the ranks months ago. I've been trying to keep whatever responsibility was left to me in order to maintain some sense of order.” He waved his arm feebly at the stainless steel doors. “People died, Christopher.”
“That's what Marian Freedman said, last time I visited Fort Detrick. Some excuse. Anything goes. You're not the bad guy here?” Dicken asked.
“Were they bad guys, really?” Augustine asked. “Do we know that?”