He waited until the professor began describing the day of the assassination attempt. If this was all rote to the man, then he would raise his cane and use it to point to the large photo that covered one wall, tapping the photo with the cane tip to indicate where Stauffenberg and Hitler had each stood. All throughout the talk Veder pretended to take photos with his digital camera. Sure enough, the professor turned and began tapping the wall.
If Veder was a different kind of man, he might have either taken pleasure in how easy it was or been disappointed that it did not challenge his skills, but Veder had the cold efficiency of an insect. Insects are opportunistic and they don’t gloat.
He pressed the button on the camera and the tiny dart shot out of a hole beside the fake lens, propelled by a nearly silent puff of compressed gas, traveling at a hundred feet per second. Freund flinched and swatted the back of his neck.
“Moskito,” he said with a laugh, and the hot, sweaty tourists chuckled. It was hot and flies, gnats, and mosquitoes were everywhere. The lecture continued, the moment forgotten. Veder remained with the tourists until they finished the tour, and as the crowd boiled out into the courtyard he detached himself and strolled idly across to the opulent market hall. He bought clothes in different stores, changed in a bathroom, and became another kind of tourist who vanished entirely into the crowd.
Veder had no desire to linger. He did not doubt the efficacy of the pathogen on the dart, and he had no need to see his victim fall. He would read about it in the papers. It would make all of the papers. After all, how often does a German scholar die of Ebola?
By the time the first symptoms appeared, Conrad Veder was on a train to Munich. He was asleep within twenty minutes of the train leaving the station. By then Jerome Freund was already beginning to feel sick.
Part Three. Gods
If the gods listened to the prayers of men,
all humankind would quickly perish since they
constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
– EPICURUS
Chapter Fifty-Two
The Dragon Factory
Sunday, August 29, 12:51 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 9 minutes E.S.T.
Hecate and Paris stood together on a small balcony that jutted out from a metal walkway built above and around the central production floor of their primary facility. Below them over a hundred employees moved and interacted with the mindless and seamless choreography of worker bees. It was an image they had discussed and one they always enjoyed. Everything was color coded, which added to the visual richness of the scene. Blue jumpsuits for general support staff, white lab coats for the senior researchers, green scrubs for the surgical teams, orange for the medical staff, charcoal for the animal handlers, and a smattering of pastel shades for technicians in different departments. Hecate liked color, Paris liked busy movement.
The production floor was circular and a hundred feet across, with side corridors leading to labs, holding pens, design suites, bio-production factories, and computer centers. The lighting made it all look like Christmas.
Rising like a spike from the center of the floor was a statue of the tattoo each of the Twins wore in secret: a caduceus in which fierce dragons were entwined around the shepherd’s staff to form a double helix. Dragons were each carved from single slabs of flawless alabaster, the milky stone a perfect match for their skin. The central staff was marble, and the wings were made from hammered gold. The Twins had no personal religion, but to them the statue was sacred. To them it revealed aspects of their true nature.
Paris leaned a hip against the rail and sipped bottled water through a straw. He and his sister always drank from a private stock of Himalayan water. The general staff was provided with purified water. Their dockside warehouse, however, was filled to the rafters with bottled water from the bottling plant in Asheville owned by Otto on behalf of Cyrus. No one at the Dragon Factory was allowed to drink any of those bottles. Hecate and Paris certainly wouldn’t.
Generally the water shipments went directly from the bottling plant to the customs yard and then by ship to ports all over the world. The current store was scheduled for distribution to several islands here in the Bahamas. The cargo ship was scheduled to dock in ten hours.
“You really think Dad put something in the water?” asked Paris.
“Don’t you?”
He shrugged. “Like what? We’ve tested it for toxins, mercury, pollutants, bacteria… it’s just water.”
“Maybe,” Hecate said neutrally. “Maybe.”
“If you’re that concerned with it, then dump it into the ocean and fill the bottles with tap water.”
“We could,” she said. “But wouldn’t you like to know what’s in it?”
“You ordered a battery of new tests as soon as we got back. Let’s leave it until our people finish their analysis.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or… do you think you know what’s in it?”
She took his bottle from him and sipped it. “Know? No, I don’t know, but I have some suspicions. General suspicions…”
“Like…?”
“Genetic factors.”
Paris looked at her in surprise. “Gene therapy?”
“It can be done in water. It’s difficult, but Dad could do it. We could do it.”
“What kind of gene therapy?”
“I don’t know. If Dad was just a corrupt businessman I’d think he was adding something to create an addictive need for the water. For that particular brand of water.”
“We tested for hormones…”
“No… Dad’s all about genetics these days. And viruses.”
“We checked for viruses,” Paris said nervously.
“And found none, I know. That’s why I’m having the water tested for DNA.”
“What do we do if we find something in there?”
“Well, Brother… that depends on what the gene therapy is intended to accomplish. If it’s just an addictive component, then we let it slide but ask for a bigger cut of the water market.”
“What if it’s something bad?”
“ ‘Bad’?” She smiled at that. “Like what?”
“Like something destructive. Something that will kill people.”
Hecate shrugged. “I don’t know. Why? Are you getting squeamish?”
“After what the Berserkers found in Denver? What if I am?”
“God! It’s a little late to start developing a conscience, Paris.”
His eyes met hers and then shifted away. “I’ve always had a conscience. Something like a poison or a plague… that would be different.”
She shrugged.
Paris said, “The stuff we recovered from Denver. That’s Nazi death camp stuff. That’s… that’s wrong on a whole different level from anything we’ve done.”
“It’s fascinating.”
“Christ! It’s gruesome. I can deal with some slap and tickle. And, yes, I can deal with a little snuff… but the systematic torture and extermination of millions of people?”
His sister gave another dismissive shrug.
“Why the hell does Dad want that crap?”
“Why would any geneticist?” she asked.
“I don’t want it.”
“I do. I wish we had the Guthrie cards. Hundreds of thousands of blood samples, all neatly indexed with demographics. They’d be useful for collecting genetic markers.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’d like to build our empire on those kinds of bones.”
“What… you don’t like being an evil mastermind?”