Cold War, I mused. Grace was right.
“You know,” I said, “Church could be eavesdropping on this call.”
I said it just to be mean and Hu looked momentarily unnerved, but he shook his head. More to himself than to me. “Point is, Church initiated a MindReader search on the man and found that almost everything about him has been erased from government databases. MindReader couldn’t reclaim the data but was able to spot the footprints.”
“ ‘Footprints’?”
“Sure… think of them as scars from where data was forcibly erased from hard drives. It’s like forensics… every contact leaves a trace.”
“Except for MindReader.”
“Well… okay, except for MindReader. I think one of the things bugging the boss is that it would take a system a lot like MindReader to expunge this much information. Mind you, MindReader wouldn’t have left a mark, so we’re not looking at someone using our own system… but this is weirdly close.”
“Not sure I like the sound of that.”
“No one does. Anyway, we used MindReader to do extensive pattern and connection searches and located relatives of Gunner Haeckel, the man from the video. Stuff this other system, good as it was, missed. We accessed court records from family estates and pending litigation. His only living relative was an uncle who died in 1978.”
“And…?”
“And everything the uncle had is stored at a place called Deep Iron, which is a private high-security storage facility a mile under Chatfield State Park in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Denver. Mr. Church sent Peterson and his team to the facility at dawn this morning. He never reported in.”
“What kinds of records are stored there?”
“We don’t know. The Deep Iron system only lists them as ‘records.’ Could be a collection of old forty-fives for all we know. All sorts of things are stored at Deep Iron. People store yachts, film companies store old movie reels, you name it. And about a million tons of paper and old microfilm records.”
“And we don’t know how it relates to the video?”
“No, so Church is looking for you to get us some answers. Your boy Top Sims is already in Colorado.”
“Call Top ‘boy’ again, son, and you’re likely to end the day as a girl.”
He blinked. “It wasn’t a racial slur,” he said defensively. “It’s street talk. You know… Echo Team are your boys and all.”
“Doc, you were never cool in school and you’re not cool now. Stop trying.”
He pretended to adjust the nosepiece of his glasses, but he did it with his middle finger. You could feel the love just rolling back and forth between us.
“Video,” I prompted. “Do I ever get to see it?”
Instead of answering me, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious. “What do you know of cryptozoology?”
“Crypto-what?” I asked.
“Cryptozoology,” he repeated, saying it slower this time. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor branch of biology or a pseudoscience. In either case, it’s concerned with the search for cryptids — animals that do not belong to any known biological or fossil record.”
“You lost me.”
Hu smiled thinly. “It’s simple. Cryptids are animals that are believed by some to exist… but which usually don’t.”
“What? Like the Loch Ness Monster?”
Hu gave me a “wow, the caveman had a real thought” sort of look but nodded. “And Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, El Chupacabra, and a bunch of others.”
“Please don’t tell me that I busted my ass to dodge the NSA just to go on a Bigfoot hunt. I’m just starting to not entirely dislike you, Doc; don’t make me have to kill you.”
His smile would have wrinkled a lemon.
“No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “we’re not searching for Bigfoot. However, there have been instances of presumed mythological creatures being found. Until a few years ago the giant squid was considered a myth. And two hundred years ago the first people to report an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, a duck’s bill, and a poisonous sting were branded as liars, but we now know the platypus exists.”
“Platypuses are poisonous?” I asked.
“Male platypi are,” he said, correcting me with a sneer. “Some of these animals may be UMAs, or Unidentified Mysterious Animals, that, due to lack of physical evidence, spoor or DNA, resist scientific classification in the known biology. Others are relicts — that’s with a t—surviving examples of species believed to be extinct or so close to extinction that living examples are rarely found.”
“Wow, this is fascinating, Doc,” I said. “By the way, did anyone mention that the Vice President of the United frigging States of America wants us all arrested?”
Hu peered at me for a moment. “Exciting,” he said. “Another more exotic example is the coelacanth, a large fish believed to have become completely extinct over sixty million years ago, and yet one was netted in December of 1938 by the crew of a South African trawler. Since then living populations of them have been sighted and caught in the waters around Indonesia and South Africa.”
I grunted. “Sure, I’ve seen them in the Smithsonian.”
“Generally cryptozoologists search for the more sensational mega-fauna cases — like Bigfoot — rather than new species of beetles or flies. And before you ask, ‘megafauna’ means ‘large animals.’ In biology it’s used to describe any animal weighing more than forty kilograms. And we occasionally find relicts or UMAs that do exist.”
“Okay, I get that this is like porn for you science geeks, but if there’s some reason I have to sit through it then for Christ’s sake get to it.”
“I wanted you to have this in mind before I played the video.”
“Church said he wanted me to watch it without preconceptions so I could form my own opinions.”
From Hu’s look it was clear that he didn’t think me capable of anything as complex as an “opinion.” He tapped a few keys. “This video was blind e-mailed to us. Someone logged on from an Internet café in São Paolo, created a Yahoo account, sent this, and then abandoned the account. We hacked Yahoo, but all of the info used to create the account was phony. All we have is the file.”
“Sent to whom?”
“To an old e-mail account owned by Mr. Church. Don’t ask about the account, because he didn’t tell me. All he said is that it’s one he never uses anymore but which he occasionally checks as a matter of routine.” Hu rubbed his hands together in a way I’d only ever seen mad scientists do in bad movies. “Now… watch! I can guarantee you that this is going to blow you away.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“We have a virus,” said Judah Levin. He couldn’t help smiling.
It was an old joke in the CDC’s IT department, and it always got a laugh, or at least a groan.
His boss, Colleen McVie, looked up from the papers on her desk. She wore her glasses halfway down her nose and measured out half a smile.