“This look right to you?” Jabba’s fingers trembled as he pulled the thread through.
Matt didn’t look down. His sweaty face winced under the strain. “You’re the movie buff. You must have seen them do it a few times, right?”
“Yeah, but I usually turn away when they’re doing it,” Jabba grimaced as he pulled the two sides of the wound closer to each other and tied a knot in the thread, adding, pointedly, “which, by the way, they usually do to themselves.”
“Yeah, but then they end up with these Frankenstein-like scars, whereas with Dr. Jabba on the case . . .”
“. . . the Frankenstein look’s guaranteed,” Jabba quipped as he cut the end of the thread off. It wasn’t a particularly elegant piece of stitching, but at least the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore. “See?”
Matt shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. I hear the ladies just love the hard-ass scars,” he cajoled him. “When you’re done with me, maybe you could take a look at mending that hole in my jacket? It’s kind of an old favorite, you know?”
Seven stitches and half an hour later, they were done.
As he cleaned up the bloody mess around them, Jabba filled Matt in on what he’d discovered while he was out, which wasn’t much. He’d given the deadbeat receptionist ten bucks to let him use his computer. He’d logged into his Skype account and made a few calls while burrowing through the Internet, trying to find out more about the team that had died in the helicopter crash.
He’d managed to come up with two other names to add to Danny’s and to Reece’s—a chemical engineer by the name of Oliver Serres, and a biomolecular engineer named Sunil Kumar.
“Both were at the top of their game and highly regarded,” he told Matt. “But it’s weird, dude. I mean, Kumar’s a biologist. So far, we’ve got him, a chemist, Reece—an electrical engineer and computer scientist—and Danny, a programmer. The last three, I get. But Kumar . . . what’s a biomolecular engineer have to do with this?”
The nuance was beyond Matt at the best of times. In his current state, it just streaked past him. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know, man,” Jabba said with visible discomfort. “These biomolecular guys, they’re into rearranging DNA, playing around with the building blocks of life. Pulling apart and rearranging atoms and molecules like they were Lego bricks. And this sign in the sky, the way it looks organic, alive even . . . the gray area between biology and chemistry, between life and non-life, you know? It’s giving me a creepy feeling. Like maybe what they’re doing has more to do with some kind of designed life-form than a projected image.”
Matt frowned, trying to wrap his head around what Jabba was saying. “You’ve spent too much time watching The X-Files.”
Jabba shrugged, like it wasn’t a bad thing. “These biotech guys, they’re always getting flak for messing around in God’s closet. God’s closet, man. Who knows what they found in there.”
He let it drift and ran the cold tap. He drank from it, then splattered water across his face before filling up a glass and handing it to Matt. He didn’t have much more to tell him. He hadn’t been able to find any mention of who was backing Reece’s project, let alone what it involved.
Darkness was closing in fast outside their room, which suited Matt just fine. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. He needed to rest. Jabba went back out and picked up some blood-free clothes for Matt and brought back some food and some Coke cans. They wolfed it all down greedily while watching the news. The footage from the cave in Egypt was hogging the airwaves, and the warm pizzas, though welcome, weren’t doing much to quell the cold, dismal feeling inside them.
“This is getting bigger,” Jabba noted glumly. “More elaborate.”
Matt nodded. “They know what they’re doing.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
“These people. They’ve got serious resources at their disposal. Think about what they’re doing. First, they rustle up some major brain power, put them to work somewhere for, what, a couple of years? Then they kill them all off.” He noticed a hint of resistance on Matt’s face and quickly amended his words. “Or, whatever, maybe lock them up somewhere and fake their deaths—even more complicated to pull off. But no one seems to know anything about what this scientific dream team was working on, and there’s no record of who they were all working for. The one thing that’s sure is that there’s some serious moolah involved. Danny, Reece, and the others, they wouldn’t have gotten involved if they didn’t know they had all the backup they needed. And the kind of research they do, it ain’t cheap. Plus the rest of it, all this,” he said as he waved at the screen. “Seriously deep pockets, dude.”
“Okay, so where’d the money come from?”
Jabba thought about it for a second. “Two possibilities. Reece could’ve raised the money privately,” he speculated, “though not from a VC or a public company. There’d be a trace of it, especially after the deaths. No, it would have to be private money. Not easy, given the scale of it. And practically untraceable, given that the entire creative team was supposedly wiped out.”
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Reece was doing this for a government agency. A highly classified project. Which sounds about right to me.”
Matt’s face darkened with uncertainty. He’d been wondering about the same thing. “Any particular candidates?”
Jabba shrugged. “DARPA. In-Q-Tel.”
Matt looked a question at him.
“DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s part of the DoD. They fund a ton of research. Everything from micro bots to virtual battlefields. Any technology that can help us win these wars and defeat those who hate our freedom,” he added mockingly.
“And the other one?”
“In-Q-Tel. It’s the CIA’s venture capital arm. They’re early stage investors, which is actually very savvy of them when you think about it. Get in on the ground floor. Find out about any useful technology while it’s still being dreamed up. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of tech companies—and that includes a few of the big, household-name Internet sites you and I use on a daily basis.” He gave him a pointed, big-brother-is-watching-you look.
Matt absorbed what Jabba was trying to say. “A government op.”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean, if what we’re saying is true, if they’ve really faked this thing, they’re on their way to convincing everyone out there that God’s talking to us. Maybe even through the good Father Jerome. Who else would try to pull off something like this?”
Matt could see the sense in what Jabba was saying, only deep down, something was nagging at him. He winced with doubt. “You’re probably right, but . . . I don’t know. Something about the guys in the van. Their place down in Brighton.”
“What?”
“They’re a small unit. Working with good resources, but not overwhelming ones. Bunkered down in a small house in a quiet neighborhood. I don’t know. If it is a black op, it’s not just off the books, it’s way off the books.”
“Even worse, then,” Jabba added emphatically. “Officially, they don’t exist. Whoever sent them’s got full deniability. They can do anything they want to us and no one will ever know they were there.” He fixed Matt with a sobering stare. “We need to quit asking questions and disappear, dude. Seriously. I mean, I know he’s your brother and all, but . . . we’re outgunned.”
Matt processed his warning. He was too tired to think straight, his nerves numb with fatigue and apprehension. But one thought kept coming back to him, a steadying keel that was keeping his head above water in the storm of confusion that swirled around him. He looked at Jabba, and just said, “What if Danny’s still alive?”