THE FLENSE: China: (Part 3 of THE FLENSE serial) Page 5

  "It was you, wasn't it?" she said. She hoped that talking would help slow her racing thoughts. And her breathing. "You killed those people in the village."

  His silence only focused her anger even more.

  "Yeah, I bet it was. I can smell it on your skin, the death. I hope you burn in hell for what you've done, murdering hundreds of innocent people."

  She heard him suck in a sharp breath, though it might've been her imagination. She was surprised that he didn't strike her.

  At last the knot began to give and a few seconds later she had it undone.

  "Now stand up. Back away." He pulled her up, then angled her to the side and pushed her face down against the bench. The gun shifted back to the notch at the base of her skull. "You okay?" he asked, speaking to the other man.

  Angel watched him stand up. He pulled the gag from his mouth and gave Angel a deadly look. "Sorry, boss. The other bitch cold-cocked me when I was—"

  "Go check on her. She's in the hallway. And I think I saw your shoes out there." He handed the man his pistol back and told him not to harm the girl.

  After they were alone, the man pulled Angel up again and guided her back to the stool. "Pick it up, then sit down on it."

  Up until now, she hadn't been able to see his face. She didn't know what she expected to find when she did. A man with scars, perhaps. A face of stone, cold and heartless. Dead eyes. Bald head.

  A tattoo of flames running up his neck.

  She stepped slowly forward, relieved to be away from his hand and the gun. Then she turned to face her captor.

  He'd backed away as well, putting distance between them so he could react if she tried something. He still had the gun trained on her, both hands steadying it. It was now aimed at her chest. Center of mass, she thought, as she slowly picked up the stool. No chance of missing. Her knees were shaking so badly that she almost fell sitting on it.

  She raised her eyes and was surprised to see that his face had no scars or tattoos. His hair was cut short, sprinkled with gray, and thinning. He looked surprisingly normal. And his eyes . . . .

  His eyes showed nothing at all. No anger. No pleasure or sadness. They were flat, toneless, though anything but lifeless.

  "Who are you?" he asked. "Why are you here?" He pulled his phone out of his pocket and quickly glanced at the screen. "And you better talk fast."

  "And if I don't?"

  He tilted his head at her, as if to say, "Do I need to explain the seriousness of your situation?"

  "I saw what you did at the crash site," she said. "I saw it, and I made a video recording. I had it posted online, so now the world knows what you did— what you're doing! They know I'm here and—" After a stuttering start, her words came out in a mad rush, but he stopped her with a simple shake of his head.

  "You're lying. Start over."

  "I'm not lying!"

  "There's no video." He stated this with such conviction that she had no choice but to believe him.

  "I recorded one," she stammered half-heartedly. "I sent it to—"

  "Enough." He held up a hand to silence her, then stepped quickly over to the door and glanced out into the hallway. "You okay out here?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good. Sit tight for a few minutes while I question this one."

  "Will do. But what the hell is wrong with her? It's like she's, I don't know, totally out of it."

  "Just stay alert," the man replied. He kept his eyes on Angel the whole time, studying her like she was a puzzle he needed to figure out.

  He shut the door and leaned against it. He didn't seem at all surprised that Angel hadn't taken the opportunity to grab something to attack him while he was distracted. To be honest, she didn't think she'd have the strength to make a successful go of it. Her body was a quivering mass, and whatever grip her mind had on sanity felt tenuous.

  He stood there for a moment without speaking, without moving, still without showing anything on his stony face. Just studying her.

  "I'm not going to kill you," he finally said.

  Chapter Forty Four

  Angel gripped the edge of the bench, trying to keep herself from falling. "Is that what you told the others before you burned them to death? The villagers? Did you tell them they weren't going to die, either?"

  "They're not dead," he said, keeping his voice low. A muscle in his cheek twitched once, then went still. He lowered the pistol and stepped closer.

  Angel shook her head, confused as much by the statement as by his conciliatory tone. "But— No! You're lying. I saw it all! The mountain and village, the people, everything burned. I saw the plane—"

  "Yes, my orders were to burn it all, including any villagers. No witnesses." He put the pistol back into his shoulder holster and held up his hands, as if to make her believe his sincerity. "What you saw didn't really happen."

  It took a moment for Angel to parse this. "But . . . I was there."

  "I moved them all out. I presume it was probably around the same time you were at the Buddhist hospital rescuing the young lady out in the hallway. I'm curious, though, how did you even know she was there?"

  "We went into town to— Wait, you moved them? What about my interpreter, Jian? He went up to the burial site last night. He didn't come back."

  Something flashed across the man's eyes. "When?"

  "After we returned from the hospital. We were running late. It was around dusk. He went up while I stayed in the village. That's why I saw the plane. I heard it fly over and barely escaped with my own life."

  The muscle twitched in his cheek again. He blinked slowly, then shook his head. "The village and hill were cleared an hour — hour-and-a-half — before sundown. If your man went up there afterward then he . . . . Look, I'm truly sorry. I didn't know."

  "But—"

  "Listen to me," he told her, his voice gaining some urgency. "We do not have much time. You need to tell me your name and who sent you here." He nodded at the microscope, and his eye caught on the bone shard. "You brought that girl back here for a reason. Why? Tell me what you know. What do you think's going on here?"

  "Why should I tell you?" Angel snapped. "Why should I believe a word you're saying? I don't even know who you are! And I still don't believe you didn't kill those people. I saw it with my own eyes! You're just saying that to trick me into trusting you."

  "You do need to trust me." He inhaled deeply and frowned. "I don't work for the people who run this factory, the ones who killed their employees and ordered the others dead. I did what I could to save the villagers. Now, you can either choose to believe me or not, it doesn't really matter one way or the other because you will tell me what you know." He gestured at the door behind him. "If you wish to save your life and hers, if you want to save a lot more lives than just your own, then, please, tell me who sent you here and why."

  Angel blinked numbly at him for a moment before it sunk in. He was asking for her help, begging for it.

  Or, maybe, another voice inside her head warned, that's just what he wants you to believe.

  Chapter Forty Five

  "What I'm about to tell you," he said, sweeping around the corner of the bench, "is off the record."

  "Off the record?" She stared warily at his hands as he approached, afraid that he was going to strike her. She didn't like how unreadable his face was.

  "You're a reporter, right? Then you know what that means." He waited until she nodded before continuing. "So you also know that means you agree you can't publish any part of this conversation or any of the details. Not . . . yet, anyway. I need your word on this."

  "And I need your word you'll let us go."

  "I already gave it to you."

  "Excuse me if I don't believe you."

  He sighed. "You can at least tell me your name, right? What news organization do you work for, and how did you know about this place?"

  She stared at him for a moment, hoping for a sign that might dispel her doubts. How could she trust him? Why should she?

 
"Look, lady, I can't tell you anything until I know who I'm talking to."

  "That goes both ways."

  He continued to stare at her without saying anything, and Angel knew that he had her backed into a corner. He would extract the information from her sooner or later, by force or finesse, whether he was being honest about his intentions or not. Her only hope of learning anything — even if she had no way of verifying any of it herself — would be to do as he said.

  "It's Angel." She shook her head and turned back to the microscope so he wouldn't see the turmoil on her face. And because she needed time to think. "Angelique de l'Enfantine. I'm a medical investigative reporter."

  "Yes, I guess you are," he said after a moment.

  She pulled away from the instrument and saw that he was on his phone. He held it up next to her and nodded. "This picture they have of you on the Newsweek site doesn't do you justice."

  She turned back to the instrument, blushing despite herself. He was obviously trying to keep her off balance by stroking her sense of self-image. Such attempts usually had the opposite effect on her, making her question the speaker's motives. And yet, she found herself desperately wanting to believe what he'd told her. She wanted to believe that the villagers were still alive.

  All but Jian, she reminded herself. And his death is your fault, because you made him go to Bairin Zouqi so he wasn't in Baoyang for the evacuation.

  "You're from France originally, Miss de l'Enfantine?"

  Missus, she silently corrected. "I-I moved to the United States after my second year at Sorbonne, transferred to Stanford. The French medical training program is much more de rigueur than America's, but I needed to get away from—" She stopped herself from finishing.

  "Away from what?"

  "Rien. Nothing."

  "So, you're a medical doctor?"

  "My parents died during the third year of my residency, and I just . . . . I couldn't finish." Why are you telling him all this? "I moved back to France with my husband and became a reporter instead. Freelance. I like to pick my assignments, sell my stories to whomever I choose."

  "Husband?"

  She didn't answer the implied question.

  "I see."

  The vials clinked together as he picked up the plastic rack box from the benchtop. "And what is this?"

  "I don't know. I found it in that room over there." She pointed. "Some kind of stem cell . . . stuff. Cells maybe, or not. I don't know exactly. Each bottle is labeled with a different tissue type: liver, heart, bone, skin—"

  She stopped herself with a gasp as she realized something. "Bone! Oh, mon dieu! I should have seen it before."

  Fumbling for the glass slide on the microscope, she asked him if he could find some saline solution. "Look in the cabinet behind me. Quickly!"

  He did as she asked, surprising her with his willingness. "How did you know about this place?" he asked.

  She extracted an unused slide from the box and scraped some of the bone shavings onto it. "I've told you enough," she said. "It's your turn to talk. You still haven't told me your name. Who do you work for?"

  "Not until you tell me how you knew about this operation. You were supposed to meet with the accident investigator, but the crash was never publicized. Nobody knew about it. How did you?"

  "Rumors," she lied. "I was on another story on Huangxia Island when I heard about the train crash. I was told there might be a survivor."

  She could hear him rummaging about behind her and wondered if he bought her deception.

  "Will this do?" he asked. He dropped a liter bag of Ringer-Locke's solution onto the table. "There's a whole case of it down there."

  "Yes. Thanks. One'll do." The solution was meant for intravenous rehydration, but all she needed was a couple milliliters of an isotonic liquid to resuspend the dry bone shavings. She inserted a new syringe into one of the injection ports on the bag and withdrew a fresh syringeful, then added a drop to the new slide with the bone shavings and slipped it onto the microscope.

  "So, rumors, eh? Curious." The doubt was thick in his voice. "And a train crash isn't exactly a medical story, is it? What made you decide to investigate it?"

  "One might characterize surviving a crash as a medical miracle, no?" She tapped the microscope stage to encourage mixing.

  "Even we didn't know about the girl. We assumed everyone had died."

  The anger returned at the callousness in his voice. Whether or not he had actually saved the villagers, he seemed to show no remorse for what had happened to the train passengers.

  "Who are you working for?" he asked.

  "I told you," she said. "I'm freelance."

  "And I don't believe you. Stories don't just spontaneously pop into your head out of the ether. Someone had to have given you a heads up. I need to know who."

  The Huangxia story did, she thought idly. Then drew back as she realized that someone must have sent that tweet across her Twitter feed. She'd never really wondered who it might be or why, but now it seemed glaringly obvious that she had been meant to bite on it. Had it been Cheong?

  She moved the slide around until she found a sliver, then concentrated on adjusting the focus. "Why were you sterilizing the crash site? What evidence were you removing?"

  When he didn't answer right away, she looked up at him. "Who do you work for?" she demanded. "If not for this company, then who?"

  "I can't tell you everything, okay? I can say, confidentially, that I work for an American government agency investigating groups who have been linked to potential terrorist organizations and activities around the world."

  "Terrorist?" She thought about what Cheong had said in Shanghai about groups wanting to bring about the end of the world. Was the man talking about 6X or the groups they claimed to be trying to thwart?

  What if they're the same?

  But then again, when Angel had mentioned the Americans at the site, Cheong had seemed genuinely surprised. Did that mean he hadn't known about them? Or had his surprise been because she had? And even if he hadn't known, it didn't mean 6X wasn't part of the cover up. It was possible the group was involved in terrorist activities — perhaps even with this particular company — without Cheong's knowledge.

  That might also explain why the video she'd sent to him hadn't been aired. Maybe he had tried to clear it with his superiors and they had said no.

  "An American group investigating terrorism. Sounds like the CIA," she said. It certainly seemed like that's where he was leading her without actually stating it. "Is that who you work for, the CIA? NSA?"

  "I didn't say that. And, no, I'm not a spy, if that's what you're thinking. I can say that with all honesty."

  Angel sniffed. The man's word still meant very little to her. And yet, she needed to give him something if she hoped to get anything in return.

  "If you're investigating terrorism, then maybe you're familiar with an apocalyptic group called 6X? It stands for the Sixth Extinction. They believe the world is experiencing another mass extinction event and that this one will include our own."

  "Not familiar with them. Are they the ones who hired you?"

  The drop on the slide had turned pink from the reconstituted blood on the bone. There was a lot of debris in the field— platelets, the remnants of dead blood cells. But there were also a couple of those small dark—

  viruses, they look like giant viruses

  —objects floating around after being released from the redissolved clotted blood. They, too, were moving, though only very listlessly at first. Their presence confirmed that that the bone sample had contained them, too.

  "What's your name?" she asked again.

  "It's better that you don't know it."

  She'd half expected such an answer, but it still irritated her. She'd told him hers. Nevertheless, the detail was practically irrelevant.

  The tiny objects from the bone were beginning to awaken. She pushed the stool back and gestured for him to look.

  He hesitated, studying her face carefull
y before acquiescing, and once more his willingness to make himself vulnerable to her, to give her a chance to attack him or escape, struck her as odd. Maybe he'd seen something in her that convinced him she wasn't going to do anything rash. The thought to do something had certainly crossed her mind. She could run, but then there was the man out in the hallway, and as angry as he was at her, he'd probably shoot first, then ask questions.

  "What am I looking at?" he asked. "What are those things? Are they . . . ? Wait, are they moving?"

  "Keep watching. There's more."

  She told him what she was doing as she placed a drop of the black solution from one of the differentiated vials to the drop on the slide. The two liquids merged. She wasn't absolutely certain what might happen, but she had an idea, and her prediction turned out to be correct when he jerked upright a moment later.

  "What the hell?" he exclaimed. "Those things are alive!" It was the first emotion she had seen him express since his sudden arrival. "What are they? Bacteria? Holy hell! Are they infectious?"

  He wiped his hands on his pants.

  She pushed her way back in and looked for herself. The new objects had swarmed over the debris, just as she'd seen before, but now they were vibrating with such frenzy that she couldn't even focus the objective. The difference between these and the inert ones labeled HEPATOCYTES, the ones she had looked at earlier, was that these had come from the bottle labeled OSTEOCYTES. In other words, bone instead of liver. Whatever they were doing, it had no doubt been triggered by the presence of the bone fragment.

  "Those black things I added from the bottle? I don't know if they're viruses or what, but I do know that some of them were already in the bone and dried blood. That means they were inside the person this bone came from before the crash."

  "You think they were extracted out of the crash victims?"

  She held up the bottle. "I think they were being injected with them. They're not natural, or at least not like anything natural I've ever seen before."

  "That's why they had us burn everything," the man whispered. "Evidence of what they had done. That explains the . . . experiment."