Immune Read online

  As the Subaru crested a steep rise, he saw it: an odd little ranch house nestled in a draw, so run-down its rusty tin roof drooped like the brim of a wet cowboy hat. Several wooden outbuildings sat off to one side, the barn so poorly maintained that the back third had fallen down. The entire compound was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, the gate of which lay open, its supporting post having rotted off near the ground.

  As Freddy pulled up in front of the house and killed the engine, the sun finished sinking behind the western hills, painting the sky with scarlet. An old windmill stood silhouetted against the red skyline, several of its blades missing. Freddy was fairly sure that blades was not the correct term for them, but what the hell. Windmills, or any of this farmer shit, weren't exactly his specialty. Still, something about the sight of the tall structure with its missing appendages, backdropped by the red sky, sent a shiver down his back.

  Freddy reached across the seat, grabbed his camera and an old metal flashlight, and slammed the car door. He started to lock it, then stopped. If someone came by and stole the old clunker, all the way out in this godforsaken spot, he just wasn't meant to have the damn thing.

  Turning toward the old house, Freddy flipped on the flashlight. At first, it failed to respond, but after a couple of thumps, the batteries engaged the contacts, bathing the ground in front of him in a yellowish beam. The twilight sky still held enough light that he didn't really need the extra light, but the shadows from the overhanging porch made him skittish.

  Three concrete steps led up onto the porch. It wasn't much, just a dozen feet of poured cement under a six-foot overhang. A rocker that looked nearly as old as the house sat to the left of the front door. It probably gave an excellent view of the broken windmill and crumbling barn. All that was missing was some mangy old mutt humping his leg and he'd be in redneck heaven.

  The screen door didn't squeak when he opened it. Odd. A quick examination of the hinges showed the first sign of recent maintenance that he’d seen in a dozen miles. They were brass and had been recently installed, so someone had been living here. Somehow, Freddy doubted that someone was old man Graves.

  From what he had been able to discover of the old hermit, Delbert Graves hardly ever came to town, a fact that didn't break too many hearts. He was reputed to be an old survivalist, mean as a snake and stupid as a fence post. The man didn't like anyone, and they returned the favor. His taxes were paid up for two years in advance so nobody bothered him.

  From the look of the place, Delbert didn't seem like the type who would have bothered putting new hinges on the screen door. But the squeaking had bothered someone enough to do it.

  Freddy expected the front door to be locked, but it wasn't. The door swung inward into the kitchen. On impulse, Freddy reached over and flipped the light switch. Nothing. The whole house probably ran on generator power, and he wasn't about to go around looking for that. Shit, he probably wouldn't know how to start the thing if he found it.

  Sweeping the yellow beam around the small room, Freddy stepped all the way inside, closing the door behind him. A small rectangular table with a single chair sat against the window. An old wood-burning stove stood beside the sink. The only electrical appliance was the refrigerator. He opened it just long enough to confirm that the generator had been off for quite some time. What may have been food several weeks ago had been reduced to a foul-smelling mess.

  A narrow opening led out of the kitchen into the living room. Lovely. One overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace. If it had faced the window, someone could sit there and watch the weeds grow.

  Freddy moved across to the bedroom and its adjoining bathroom, the last of the rooms in the small house. Here he paused, letting the flashlight play across the walls and furniture. The darkness inside was nearly complete. Considering the tiny dimensions of the rest of the house, the bedroom appeared disproportionately large. A king-size bed, complete with log headboard, occupied the far wall, while a dresser and a small closet took up most of the wall to Freddy's right. A single nightstand occupied a spot next to the right side of the bed. Other than the ceiling light, currently useless, there were no other lamps. Evidently, neither Delbert nor the house's more recent occupant was a big reader.

  Just as Freddy was about to move toward the bathroom, he spotted the rug. It was a six-by-eight-foot rectangle of Indian design and looked out of place in the otherwise undecorated house. Freddy moved closer, bending down to examine the stitching. It was handwoven, obviously authentic and expensive.

  Freddy had always had a reporter's nose. That, along with his annoying habit of putting it into everyone else's business, was what had made him one of the best. Something about this rug just smelled wrong.

  A soft creaking sound caused him to swing the flashlight back toward the doorway. Just as he was about to lay it off to his imagination, he heard it again. It sounded like a loose board moving under weight.

  Freddy straightened and moved back to the door into the living room. There was no use sneaking. If someone was there and hadn’t seen his flashlight, they were blind. The living room was empty, as was the kitchen beyond that. Once again, Freddy paused to listen. There it was again, along with another sound: the wind.

  Freddy shook his head. It was only the wind picking up as the temperature dropped that was causing the old structure to shift and complain. Jesus H. Christ. He was getting jumpy as an old woman. But then again, Benny Marucci had never before warned him to be careful.

  Freddy moved back into the bedroom and resumed his examination of the Indian rug. Why was it here?

  Un-slinging the Nikon and checking the flash, Freddy began snapping pictures in rapid sequence and from a variety of angles. Sometimes just looking at the film as it developed in his darkroom revealed some little detail he missed while on location. Although this room appeared benign enough, something about that rug gave him the creeps.

  Satisfied that he had captured everything, Freddy knelt down and gently pulled the rug to one side. No attempt had been made to conceal the trapdoor beneath it, except for the rug covering, which stood out like a sign along an empty highway. A simple handle with a sliding dead bolt secured the thing. There was no lock.

  The dead bolt opened easily, another unusually well-maintained piece of this run-down property. Well, the people he’d talked to at the courthouse had said that Delbert Graves was a survivalist. You’d expect some sort of underground bunker on his place. How else would he survive the nuclear war?

  Somehow, Freddy doubted that fear of impending nuclear attack was behind the well-oiled latch. Well, he wasn’t going to find any answers just staring at the closed trapdoor. Inhaling deeply, Freddy lifted it open.

  He played the beam around the opening, leaning forward to look down into the hole. Iron rungs had been set into the concrete wall about a foot apart. The narrow opening continued downward for a few feet before opening into a room further down. Beyond that, the flashlight’s yellow beam was too dim to provide detail.

  “Anyone down there?” The echo of his voice startled him, making Freddy feel even stupider than when he yelled out the question.

  Looping the camera strap back over his shoulder, he swung his legs into the dark opening, gently lowering himself until his foot found a rung. It seemed solid. With the flashlight angled downward, he began climbing down, almost immediately enveloped by a coolness common to poorly insulated underground spaces. The place probably felt great in the heat of a New Mexico summer day, even at this high altitude. But with the arrival of night and the rapidly dropping temperature, he had become chilled.

  Hell. That was probably why his hands were shaking.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Freddy paused, shining the flashlight around the room. It was about ten feet across and of a similar width and constructed of unpainted concrete blocks. The ceiling was a dozen feet above his head. As he shined the flashlight around the room, Freddy wondered if the beam was getting dimmer. It was probably just his imagination. He was pretty sure he’d
changed out the D cell batteries not long ago.

  A steel door in the far wall was closed with yet another dead bolt. To his left, a large metal closet jutted outward into the room. Beside it, a long workbench contained an odd-looking assortment of tools and equipment. It took Freddy a couple of moments to realize what he was looking at. It was an ammunition-reloading workbench, complete with gunpowder scale, reloading dies, and other unfamiliar tools.

  He opened the metal closet doors.

  Holy shit. The bastard had been preparing for World War III. At least a dozen rifles and handguns hung in mounts along the back wall of the gun closet, although several of the racks were now empty.

  Freddy moved to the closed steel door in the far wall. As he got close, he saw that the dead bolt had not been engaged and that the door was open a crack. As he touched the handle, he paused, listening. Nothing. Down here in the concrete underground bunker, the silence was nearly perfect. Even the roar of the wind outside and the creaking of the old house had been completely damped out.

  He tugged. Damn the door was heavy, a blast door. God, it must have been a bitch getting the damn thing down here. It must have been lowered before the ceiling had been constructed.

  Freddy edged inside, directing the flashlight beam at the ground before his feet. The cement floor looked cold, and indeed the chill in this room was worse than in the adjacent one. As it swept the room, the yellow beam of the flashlight revealed walls lined with red candles, a sink, a toilet, and a double bed. There was no other exit and only a six-inch airshaft in the ceiling provided ventilation.

  Ahead, the sink looked filthy. As Freddy moved closer, the reason for the mess became clear. It and the floor around it were splattered with dried blood—lots of it.

  Freddy swung the flashlight toward the bed. The blankets and sheets lay wadded at the end of the stained mattress. A set of chains and cuffs dangled from the steel frame. But it was the sight of the pillow and its pink pillowcase that brought moisture to his eyes. The pillowcase was covered with faint tearstains.

  He moved back over to the sink, looking closely at the splatter pattern on the wall and on the floor. Strange that the blood trail did not extend more than a few feet from this spot. There was no sign that the sick bastard who had done this had bothered to clean it up.

  Once again, Freddy began snapping pictures, pointing the camera by instinct as the bright flashing torched his night vision. Except for his own labored breathing, the only other sound to break the cellar’s stillness was the whine of the Nikon’s auto winder.

  He changed film rolls twice. Then, deciding that he had recorded the scene from every angle, Freddy exited the room. As he readied his camera to capture the details of the weapons room, he froze.

  There on the workbench beside the reloading press lay a journal, the corner of the book jutting out beyond the edge of the bench. Freddy knew he had been a bit distracted, but he was a reporter, a damn good one too. There was no doubt in his mind. That fucking book had not been there ten minutes ago.

  16

  “Shut the door behind you.”

  From his seat at the head of the table in the National Security Agency conference room, Vice President Gordon watched as the handful of NSA senior staffers filed out. They looked tired. Hell, it wasn’t all that long ago that George Gordon would have felt exhausted himself. The meeting hadn’t even started until ten p.m. Not that he felt bad about having them recalled from home for a late-evening session. That thought never even crossed the vice president’s mind.

  He had called them back into the black glass structure nicknamed Crypto City because he had just received the picture of Jack Gregory and he needed to know whether that was the same person these people had seen meeting with Jonathan Riles. And even though the picture was terrible, having been taken at the church hospital in India where Gregory had almost died back in 1996, the staffers had still been able to recognize his face.

  Having dismissed all of the NSA people, Gordon stared across the room at Garfield Kromly. The old CIA trainer had been the only person, other than the vice president’s driver and Secret Service team, to accompany him on this nighttime jaunt from D.C. up to Ft. Meade. Now the man sat as he had throughout the meeting, his face an unreadable mask as his eyes watched Gordon’s every move.

  The vice president leaned back in his chair. “We’ve got our man.”

  “I’ll want to pick the team,” Kromly said.

  “Bullshit. The FBI will handle this by the book.”

  “I don’t recommend that.”

  Gordon smiled. “And I don’t care. You just take care of briefing the operations folks over at FBI headquarters. I want every member of Gregory’s team IDed before they move, and I want you to personally let me know when they’re ready.”

  “And the president?”

  “I’ll have the FBI director brief him. Like I said, by the book.”

  “This one is going to get bloody.”

  “That’s okay. We can handle a few dead rogue operatives.”

  “That’s not what I meant. The press secretary better be ready to explain a lot of dead FBI agents.”

  The vice president leaned forward once again. It was amazing how the CIA man could irritate him. “You just take care of your part. I’m sure the FBI special units can handle Gregory.” He started to rise and then stopped. “Why the Ripper?”

  Kromly raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

  “I want to know about Gregory’s nickname.”

  “That night in 1996, Jack was attacked by a group of six men in an alley in Bombay. Jack killed them all, but he suffered some serious knife wounds. By the time he stumbled into the catholic missionary clinic, he had lost so much blood that he died on the operating table. At least that’s what the doctor thought.”

  Kromly paused. “There was one old nurse who stayed behind to clean up before wheeling his body out. She was bending over him when Jack awakened. They say the shock of what she saw in his eyes as he came back from the dead drove her insane. After that she just kept repeating the same phrase over and over again.”

  “Which was?”

  “‘Dear Lord, the Ripper walks the earth.’”

  Vice President Gordon laughed. “And you believe that?”

  Kromly looked up at him. “No, sir. But you asked me how he got his nickname. The truth is, that isn’t even what the old woman said.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I went to see her, just before she died in 1998, at a small convent outside London. By then, Sister Mary Judith was almost catatonic, but every once in a while, she would still mutter the phrase.”

  Garfield Kromly rose and started to move toward the door.

  “God damn it, Kromly. What did the old woman say?”

  Kromly stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned back toward the vice president.

  “‘Dear Lord, the Reaper walks the earth.’”

  Once again, Gordon chuckled. “The Reaper, my ass.”

  The old CIA man’s eyes narrowed momentarily, then he shrugged and walked from the room. As hard as it was to believe, George Gordon thought he had just glimpsed something he had never expected to see in Garfield Kromly’s eyes: fear.

  17

  Freddy Hagerman held his breath, every bit of his concentration focused on listening. Nothing. Not a fucking sound.

  But somebody else had just been in here, and he had made sure Freddy found the journal. As his eyes once again locked on the book, Freddy remembered to breathe. After all, he was still alive. Somehow, he thought that if the ghost wanted him dead he already would be.

  Steadying the camera, Freddy began to capture the room. He was sorry he hadn’t done this the first time he had come through here, just in case something else had been moved since then. Oh well, he’d spot it anyway when he got a chance to spend some time with the film.

  Satisfied, he moved over to the bench where the journal rested. It was a nicely bound book with a soft gray hardback binding. Not wanting t
o have his own fingerprints disturb any potential evidence, Freddy extracted a kerchief from his pocket. Luckily, he hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. This New Mexico desert didn’t have the Kansas plants that set off his allergies.

  He grasped the journal by the edge of the cover and carefully opened it. The first page had a spot for the owner to fill in his name and personal information. In stylized handwriting that filled the block, someone had written two words:

  “The Priest.”

  Freddy snapped a picture. For the next hour, he stood there, carefully turning page after page, reading and then photographing each one. What began as fascination quickly gave way to shock and then disgust. Within half an hour, Freddy thought he would become physically sick, but he kept at it, changing film rolls as needed, until he was finished.

  Straitening, he wiped his damp brow on a sleeve. If he hadn’t already seen the other room and gotten Benny’s report, he would have thought he was being had, that this was some sort of sick joke. This guy Priest had been compulsive in his journal entries, but not in the sense of a normal diary. The journal had started less than a year ago and only covered events that Priest regarded as exciting. The first entry was the strangest.

  Priest had apparently been an unwilling participant in an experiment conducted by none other than Dr. Donald Stephenson, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez. They had injected Priest with some gray fluid, the pain of the process so great that he had regarded it as a quasi-religious experience. The gray goo had given him tremendous healing powers.

  The remainder of the journal had described the killing of Abdul Aziz and the capture, torture, and killing of Priest’s female “guests,” all of whom had been dumped down a shallow well on the property.

  One thing was very clear to Freddy; the experiment conducted on Priest by Dr. Stephenson had not been an officially sanctioned one. He had been trying to test something derived from his study into the Rho Ship, but that test had gone horribly wrong. The same fluid that had given Priest such unbelievable healing powers had apparently rendered him violently insane, setting loose the darkest desires hidden deep in his psyche, accompanied by feelings of invincibility that led him to act out those needs.