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  Zamora raised a placating hand toward Cutler.

  ‘That’s pushing it, Chief. There’s no motive.’

  ‘There’s always a motive,’ Cutler replied, still glaring at Ethan. ‘Or a reason to cover your tracks. Warner here could have committed the crime in that apartment, then had it blown to pieces. Would have destroyed any biological evidence. You said it yourselves: it would have taken someone with professional knowledge, an outdoorsman or a soldier, to have incinerated that apartment with so little evidence as to the cause.’

  ‘You’re forgetting,’ Lopez snapped, ‘that it was Ethan who realized how it was done. Pretty damned stupid to commit a perfect crime and then reveal to investigating officers how you’ve done it.’

  ‘Or cunning enough to throw the investigators entirely off your scent,’ Cutler mused out loud before looking directly at her. ‘As for motive, money’s always a big draw for two-bit bounty hunters looking for their next quick buck.’

  Ethan was about to reply when Lopez suddenly whipped round and cracked Cutler high across his cheek. The USAMRIID chiefs head flicked to one side as he grabbed his face instinctively before lunging for Lopez, one thick hand shooting out to close around her neck.

  Ethan leapt in and slammed his elbow down through Cutler’s arm, breaking his hold on Lopez. Ethan twisted at the waist and swung his forearm across Cutler’s face, batting him backward a couple of paces.

  ‘You touch her again,’ Ethan snarled, ‘you’ll wind up sucking your dinners through a straw.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Zamora shouted, stepping between them. ‘Cutler, you’ve got jurisdiction here. Either start acting your age or I’ll have you forcibly removed from the scene. Warner, Lopez, with me, now!’

  Ethan, realizing that he was in danger of completely losing it, turned and walked away with Zamora. The lieutenant ducked under the cordon and turned to face him.

  ‘Okay, Tyson, listen up. You pull any other stunts like that, I’ll arrest you my goddamned self.’

  ‘We’re wasting our time,’ Ethan said. ‘Whatever’s really going on here, we’re never going to find it with Cutler blocking our every move. We need to find the men in that photograph and get them to tell us why this is all happening.’

  Zamora glanced back at Tyler Willis’s corpse.

  ‘My guess is that Cutler’s right and money has a role in all of this. You don’t abduct somebody unless you’re trying to find something out, and whatever Willis knew was obviously worth a lot to someone. Enough to kill him.’

  ‘The photograph,’ Lopez said. ‘The faces were the same then as they are now. Somebody, somewhere, must be able to recognize them.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zamora said. ‘But if we put up images and these guys are around, they’ll high tail it out of town the moment they see one.’

  Ethan thought back to serving with the Marines in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.

  ‘They’d have some kind of escape plan, or maybe even permanently base themselves in the desert. You can live in the wild almost indefinitely, if you know what you’re doing. But they must have a contact of some kind in the city, someone they trust, who could do paperwork, arrange medication and such like.’

  ‘And they’d have to meet somewhere that they can move freely,’ Lopez said to Zamora, warming to the idea. ‘You said that Hiram Conley talked with an archaic accent. If these guys haven’t all spent much time within modern towns and cities, they might stand out by the way they talk.’

  Zamora stood still for a moment and then suddenly he gasped and stared at Ethan.

  ‘Damn my eyes! Why didn’t I think of it before?!’

  ‘Think of what?’ Ethan asked. ‘Tell us quickly. Can we find them before we’re thrown out of the county?’

  Zamora chuckled to himself and gestured to the old photographs in Lopez’s hands.

  ‘I’ve got a better idea. I’ll tell the chief of police that you’ve already left,’ Zamora said, and looked at Lopez. ‘You need to go shopping first thing in the morning. By the time we’re done, they’ll never know you’re still here.’

  ‘How?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘You’ll hide in plain sight,’ he said. ‘I know exactly where to find those men. Every single one of them.’

  35

  SANTA FE PLAZA

  SANTA FE

  16 May, 8.46 a.m.

  Saffron Oppenheimer stood unobtrusively beside a small shop selling trinkets on Lincoln Avenue, a grubby baseball cap pulled down low to shield her eyes. She watched the cars flowing lazily through the morning heat flaring off the asphalt, windows down and stereos blaring. Rush hour. Across the street was the plaza, filled with trees and dominated by a large petroglyph, the city’s national historic landmark. The plaza was ringed by structures in the Pueblo, Spanish and Territorial styles, tourists and locals alike bustling past adobe shops with cameras and day sacks on their backs. She kept a particular eye open for squad cars amidst the traffic, ready to take flight at a moment’s notice. The rush hour would ease her escape, letting her outmaneuver the cops and dash into the warren of Santa Fe’s alleys before heading south on the Old Santa Fe trail. Most all cops were either out of shape or downright overweight, having spent their careers sitting in vehicles gorging themselves on donuts, and she had no doubts about her ability to outpace them.

  The only man that concerned her was the mysterious Ethan Warner. His tenacity had presented the only real threat she’d encountered so far, apart from the overbearing presence of her grandfather.

  The thought of Jeb Oppenheimer coincided almost perfectly with the sight of a nondescript silver Lexus rolling down Main Street. The giveaway was the tinted windows and the unique license plates that betrayed the vehicle as belonging to SkinGen. As the car slid into the sidewalk next to her, a door opened smoothly. The vehicle didn’t stop rolling as Saffron reached out, resting one hand on the roof as she slipped into the vehicle and closed the door.

  Three men were sitting inside the vehicle. Two were up front, wearing identical gray suits and emotionless expressions. Bodyguards, one driving and the other watching her in the rear-view mirror. The third man sat beside her in his customary white suit.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the overbearing smell of the polished leather seats and upholstery.

  Jeb Oppenheimer didn’t look at her as he replied. ‘Traffic,’ he said, looking out of the tinted windows. ‘Too many automatons, robotically going to work for people they’ve never even met.’

  ‘Without people like them,’ Saffron sneered, ‘your company would be impotent.’

  Jeb turned to examine her, his piercing gaze appraising and distrustful at the same time.

  ‘Without my company they would be jobless,’ he countered. ‘The chicken and the egg, my dear, and this time the egg that is SkinGen wins.’

  Saffron smiled without warmth. ‘Pity it’s rotten inside.’

  ‘Do you have the data?’ Jeb snapped.

  Saffron shrugged, not looking at him but instead watching the streets pass by outside as the Lexus slowly circled the plaza. Jeb tutted and shook his head, a throaty laugh tumbling breathlessly from between his thin lips.

  ‘Not this charade again, surely? You have a role to fulfill, my dear, no matter how much it offends you. We all have to meet our targets.’

  Saffron finally looked at her grandfather, mastering the revulsion she felt welling up inside.

  ‘There’s more to life than your damned targets.’

  Jeb leaned close to her in his seat.

  ‘Not for you,’ he whispered. ‘Now pay your dues, before I change my mind.’

  Saffron strained against the overwhelming urge to punch the old bastard as hard as she could, pummel him right here and now in the back seat of his disgustingly luxurious car. An image of his ruined, bloodied and bleating face flickered darkly through her mind and she saw him smiling at her.

  ‘Yes, do it, little Saffy,’ he rattled. ‘Please do it, and th
en spend the next sixty years rotting in a high-security cell. It would, I can tell you, make life so much easier for your poor old grandpa.’

  Saffron caught a sickening waft of peppermints and decay on his breath, and felt her stomach heave. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a small hard drive, tossing it into Jeb’s lap with more force than was necessary. The old man coughed in alarm at the impact, but he still managed to get one hand on the drive.

  ‘There, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Saffron snarled. ‘What did you do to Tyler Willis?’

  Jeb Oppenheimer handed the hard drive across to one of his bodyguards, who pocketed it without looking at Saffron. The old man leaned back in his seat, examining the tip of his cane.

  ‘Mister Willis suffered an unfortunate incident,’ he replied, ‘a fatal one.’

  Saffron stared at the creature sitting beside her, an inhumane and emotionless shell that had once harbored her grandfather.

  ‘That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re a murderer.’

  Oppenheimer glanced out of the Lexus and gestured to the masses passing by outside.

  ‘One person’s death is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. You see all these people, Saffy? They’re out there in their hundreds, thousands and millions. In just a few generations they’ll be gone and all of society’s problems will disappear along with them.’

  Saffron’s eyes narrowed as she struggled to comprehend what her grandfather was talking about.

  ‘That will never happen,’ she said. ‘No matter how you go about it somebody, somewhere will stop you, even if it costs them their own life.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Oppenheimer growled, ‘and your pathetic little friend Willis would no doubt have been one of them. Suffice to say, my dear granddaughter, that I had nothing to do with his untimely passing – it was actually unexpected, indeed infuriating. However, soon his plight and that of millions will be an irrelevance.’

  ‘You talk like you’re doing the world a favor,’ Saffron muttered, nausea twisting inside her throat. ‘All you’re doing is trying to deny people the right to have children, to have their fair share of the world’s resources, so you can take everything for yourself. You’re not protecting humanity, you’re sacrificing it for your little army of elitist businessmen and politicians.’

  ‘The needs of the powerful few outweigh the needs of the powerless many,’ Oppenheimer murmured. ‘You will learn that truth one day, my dear, most probably the hard way.’

  ‘More bullshit,’ Saffron uttered in disgust. ‘You’re basing everything that you’re doing on myths. The entire population of planet Earth could live comfortably in large houses in the state of Texas alone. We live on just one-twentieth of a percent of the world’s available land mass. Half the world’s population has a fertility rate below replacement level: Europe, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Tunisia – the list goes on. Even in religious countries like Iran and Brazil, birth rates are falling despite the ranting of mullahs or priests.’

  ‘Population alone is not the concern,’ Oppenheimer replied, gesturing to the shopping malls outside, ‘it is consumption.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should sell off your private jets, your luxury houses and this vehicle,’ Saffron pointed out tartly. ‘The world’s richest half-billion people, about seven percent of the global population, are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. But the poorest fifty percent of the population are responsible for just seven percent of emissions. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?’

  Oppenheimer ignored her but Saffron kept going.

  ‘The carbon emissions of just one American today are equivalent to those of about thirty Pakistanis, forty Nigerians or two hundred fifty Ethiopians. It’s us that should leave the planet because of consumption, not others.’

  Oppenheimer continued to ignore her, and Saffron shook her head slowly before gesturing for him to command the vehicle pulled into the sidewalk on East San Francisco Street. As the car slowed she looked at her grandfather.

  ‘They tried this before,’ she said, ‘years ago. Called it eugenics. Nowadays people don’t even talk about it, it was such a sick idea. It was like slave labor and theocracy: they didn’t work because they were inhumane and those who championed them were outcast and reviled.’ She recalled a line she’d heard once at school. ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are forced to relive them.’

  Oppenheimer gurgled a laugh that sounded like a clogged drain.

  ‘I’m doing this for all of the right reasons, my dear, using evolution to control a species that has lost its ability to regulate itself. We’re nothing more than a parasite infecting a diminishing world. Somebody has to bring about a cull . . .’ He smiled. ‘As humanely as possible, of course.’

  The car stopped and Saffron grabbed the door handle, but she hesitated and turned to look at Jeb.

  ‘Economic Darwinism failed too,’ she said. ‘The survival of the fittest attitude to corporate business ended up being rejected.’

  ‘It’s worked well enough for me.’ Jeb smirked at her.

  ‘And for a few very fortunate, very wealthy others,’ Saffron acknowledged. ‘But the problem was that natural evolution is neither predatory nor altruistic – it is in balance. When it was used in a predatory manner, with small numbers of self-serving members seeking power to control and eliminate those less capable, the gene pool became so small that all that remained was a tiny number of elitists all willing to cut the throats of their competitors in order to survive, because they all believed themselves to be the best.’

  Saffron opened her door and stepped out, leaning back in to look at her grandfather.

  ‘In the end only one remained, the strongest of them all, but as that individual was now entirely alone they were worth nothing and collapsed and died, having eradicated their purpose for existing: power over their peers.’ She smiled at him, genuinely this time. ‘I don’t doubt for a moment that you’ll suffer the same fate, dear Grandpa.’

  Saffron closed the door behind her, moving swiftly across the street toward the plaza. She strode past the monument, pulling her baseball cap down and vanishing between the trees. As she walked, she could see the silver Lexus moving around the square as it flowed in with the traffic heading toward Albuquerque.

  Suddenly the vehicle slowed, and Saffron watched as it pulled into the sidewalk once more alongside a diminutive woman with long black hair. Saffron instantly recognized the woman and watched in amazement as the Lexus door opened and she got in.

  36

  Nicola Lopez heard the heavy Lexus roll up alongside her as she walked toward a Five & Dime, searching for the garments Enrico Zamora had sent her to buy, and then the weighty clunk of the door as it opened while the vehicle was still moving. Instinctively, she rested one hand on the baton under her light jacket and glanced over her shoulder into the vehicle’s gloomy interior.

  ‘Miss Lopez? A moment of your time, if I may?’

  Lopez recognized the gravelly tones of Jeb Oppenheimer and glanced furtively around her at the street. ‘I won’t keep you long,’ came the voice from the interior.

  Lopez released her hand on the baton, letting it fall past the pocket of her jacket. She felt the hard cylindrical surface of a pepper-spray can within, and felt emboldened. She turned and climbed into the vehicle.

  Oppenheimer offered her an appraising grin as she closed the door and checked out the two bodyguards in the front.

  ‘I feared for a moment that you would not have the mettle to get in,’ Oppenheimer said.

  Lopez shot him a dirty look.

  ‘Given your habit of abducting people, it should hardly have come as a shock.’

  ‘Baseless accusations,’ Oppenheimer intoned. ‘Besides, if I’d wanted to abduct you I’d hardly have done so on a crowded street, would I? This was, I assure you, a fortuitous opportunity and I just happened by. Had I been und
er any real suspicion of such a crime would I not have been arrested by now?’

  ‘We know you’ve got USAMRIID in your pocket,’ Lopez muttered. ‘Playing innocent isn’t going to win you any laurels.’

  ‘Nor will playing guilty,’ Oppenheimer said, his friendly expression hardening in an instant. ‘This is not a game, Miss Lopez, it’s a serious business and there are many people who would gladly see my company fail.’

  Lopez looked around her at the flashy vehicle, the hired hands and Oppenheimer, then rested her hand on her baton again.

  ‘You’re one of the richest men alive,’ she spat with contempt. ‘Loose change to you is a lifetime’s salary to most people. Don’t insult me again or I’ll shove that cane of yours somewhere you’ll remember for the rest of your days.’

  Both of the guards, who had been staring straight ahead with blank expressions, now turned their heads in unison and focused on Lopez. She met their gazes steadily.

  ‘Laurel and Hardy here won’t stop me either,’ she added.

  Oppenheimer chuckled, a noise that to Lopez sounded like any normal person drawing their terminal breath. The old man waved his bodyguards down, patting the air before him with one skeletal hand.

  ‘Calm yourself, Nicola, you’re in no danger here.’

  ‘It’s Ms Lopez to you,’ she said hotly. ‘And I’m sure you made the same promise to Tyler Willis.’

  Oppenheimer shifted position in his seat, resting his hands on his cane and leveling a serious gaze at her.

  ‘We have a mutual purpose here, Ms Lopez. Yours is to discover what happened to Hiram Conley. So is mine. Everything else is irrelevant, mere distractions obscuring a much greater goal.’

  ‘Which is?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘The very thing which Hiram Conley possessed,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘A mutation, caused by bacteria, that causes human cellular senescence to cease entirely, rendering the infected individual biologically immortal.’

  Lopez took a moment to digest what she’d heard.