‘Still, I promised that I wouldn’t interfere.’
‘You weren’t interfering. You were venting. Believe it or not, I’ve been known to snap at colleagues from time to time.’
Dial smiled, glad that Eklund wasn’t holding a grudge. ‘All cops do. In fact, I think I saw it during your phone call. What was that all about?’
Eklund laughed. ‘That wasn’t anger. That was confusion. I thought we were finally getting a grasp on the science at the lab. Now I don’t know what to think.’
‘About what?
‘Five of the victims had criminal records.’
Dial shrugged it off. ‘Well, I assumed the gunmen had rap sheets, and it stands to reason that a few of the scientists got popped over the years. What’d they do? Smoke a little pot?’
‘I’m not talking about either group. When the coroner ran the fingerprints and dental records of the victims, he discovered that five of them weren’t scientists. They were convicted felons.’
Dial pondered that statement for a moment, his mind working through a series of ‘what ifs’, each more terrifying than the last.
What if the scientists were being forced to work in the lab?
What if they had stumbled across a new biological agent?
What if they planned to sell their weapon to the highest bidder?
What if the weapon was taken from the lab before the fire was set?
Dial realized the worst thing he could do was jump to conclusions, so he tried to find out more. ‘Can we tie the five together?’
Eklund shook his head. ‘So far we haven’t been able to establish any connection between the men — except that they’re felons and all of them spent time in Scandinavian prisons.’
‘The same prison?’
‘Nope, different — so they didn’t meet inside.’
‘What were their crimes?’ Dial asked.
Eklund reviewed the notes he had scribbled during the phone call. ‘The first was a Finn convicted of more than a hundred counts of battery and aggravated assault. He was supposed to be serving a thirty-year term. Instead, he was paroled after serving only six years of his sentence. Same thing happened with a kidnapper from Denmark. He was to spend the next twenty years inside, but he was paroled after half of that.’
‘Were they paroled around the same time?’ Dial asked.
‘Two days apart,’ Eklund replied.
‘I doubt that’s a coincidence.’
‘It gets worse. Right about that same time, two men, a rapist and a murderer, were walking out of their respective facilities in Norway without anyone noticing. The prison authorities swear that the prisoners died and were cremated on site. They have no idea how they could have escaped, never mind how they could have ended up in a laboratory in Stockholm.’
‘The same story at both prisons? Why don’t they just shine a spotlight on themselves and announce that something fishy is going on?’
‘Agreed. Someone knows something they’re not telling us. These weren’t so-called country club facilities. These were maximum-security installations with protocols to ensure that someone couldn’t simply vanish.’
‘You said five. What about the last guy?’
‘An arsonist from right here in Sweden. He was transferred from Kumla prison to a psychiatric facility in the northern part of the country. Three weeks later he was released with a clean bill of health. From felon to freedom in less than a month.’
‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’
‘Odd? I haven’t even gotten to the odd part yet.’ Eklund clenched his jaw and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. ‘To identify the bodies, they ran the same procedure I explained earlier.’
‘Rehydrating the fingertips to expose the ridge patterns,’ Dial recalled.
‘Right. Well, we also told the coroner to run the whole battery of testing. Given the scientific nature of the scene and our inability to say for certain that it was the fire that killed everyone, we asked for toxicology reports to determine whether they were drugged, virology reports to ascertain the presence of biological agents, you name it. If they had the means of performing the test, we wanted it done.’
‘And?’
‘When they examined some of the tissue samples under a microscope, they found something that goes way, way, way beyond odd. So much so that no one really quite knows what to make of it.’
‘What did they find?’
‘You might not believe this — I’m still trying to comprehend it myself — but some of their cells are still alive.’
‘Alive? As in living?’
‘That’s what they’re telling me,’ Eklund confirmed. ‘The fire should have destroyed them, or at the very least damaged them beyond repair, yet the coroner says he found viable tissue in some of the bodies. In fact, more than viable. He said the tissue was thriving.’
31
Payne and Jones had known about Kaiser for more than a decade, but they didn’t really know him. No one did, which was one of the things that kept him alive.
Back in his former life as a supply sergeant, he had set up shop near the Kaiserslautern military community in eastern Germany. With more than 50,000 soldiers and civilian contractors, Kaiserslautern was the largest military base outside of the continental United States, but one of the trickiest to pronounce. To make things simple, American troops referred to it as ‘K-town’. And the man who could get them anything was known as Kaiser.
In the beginning, Kaiser had focused on the comforts of home — items that the displaced men and women of K-town had grown to miss, whether that be American food, clothing, movies or video games. And he sold the products at a fair yet profitable price. Then, much to his chagrin, the rise of the Internet meant he wasn’t the only game in town. Suddenly his clients could order almost anything online, so he was forced to shift his business in another direction.
Weapons. Smuggling. Fake IDs.
Pretty much everything except drugs.
Payne and Jones knew he operated beyond the limits of the law, but they had experienced enough during their time as MANIACs to know that even the noblest causes sometimes required the support of bullets, grenades and the occasional surface-to-air missile. Likewise, Kaiser had heard of their exploits, and he realized that men of their skills were good to know.
They had a mutual respect for one another.
Not a true friendship. More like allies.
The phone belonged to DJ, but Payne grabbed it first. He smiled at Jones, hit the correct line to answer the call, then put the phone to his ear, despite a loud protest from Jones.
Before he said a single word, he realized something was different about the call. Normal phone calls — regardless of whether they originated from a landline, a cell phone, a satellite phone, or through voice-over Internet protocol — carried some degree of ambient sound. The hum of a computer. The horns and sirens of traffic. Even the steady breathing of the caller. These were typical background noises that were layered into the signal. Even the newest noise-canceling technology left telltale traces of white noise. They were virtually inaudible, but they were not imperceptible.
This call was different. It wasn’t hollow, it was silent. It was as if the caller was standing in the vacuum of space. Payne quickly realized the call was being scrubbed — his word for when high-tech gadgetry was used to ensure that no one was listening in. He knew the caller was running the signal through a computer, routeing the call through a series of lines and servers while at the same time erasing any digital footprint that might lead back to him.