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  ‘CCTV footage,’ Saffron said finally to Ethan. ‘He had it digitally stored and then had the cameras erased before the police could confiscate them as evidence.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ethan asked. ‘Why were you there?’

  ‘To make a statement,’ Saffron said, ‘to expose what people like my grandfather were doing to animals all in the name of cosmetics. We managed to get into the SkinGen compound and began attacking the building with stones and rocks. We were there to make a fuss, but not to hurt anybody.’ She shook her head. ‘One of the protesters got out of line, began assaulting staff as they tried to leave the building.’

  ‘And you got involved,’ Lopez guessed.

  Saffron nodded.

  ‘There was a fight, between protesters, staff, everyone. It got real hectic. The guy that died was hitting one of the SkinGen scientists, and I was behind him trying to pull him off. He turned and hit me instead, and I just snapped. There were rocks lying everywhere from when we’d been pelting the windows with them. When he came forward to hit me again, I picked one up and let him have it.’

  Saffron fell silent, staring at her boots.

  ‘Unlucky hit,’ Ethan surmised.

  ‘Blood clot on the brain,’ she replied bitterly. ‘I must have caught him at a million-to-one angle. He died two days later in hospital. The confusion of the fight meant that nobody knew who did it other than my grandfather, who’d had the cameras erased to prevent any lawsuits against his own staff. He watched the digital copies, saw what had happened, and has used it against me ever since.’

  Ethan sighed, looking out over the darkened wilderness for a moment.

  ‘You need to come clean about this.’

  ‘I tried!’ Saffron retaliated. ‘I whacked Colin Manx in the hopes that he’d spill everything to the police. I was waiting for them to pursue us out here, where I’d conveniently lead them to all the data Jeb’s been blackmailing me to steal from other companies and tell them how it’s all happened.’

  ‘You copied everything you stole,’ Lopez guessed. ‘But Jeb could still worm his way out of it.’

  ‘I recorded the conversations I had with him whenever I delivered data.’ Saffron nodded. ‘There’s almost an hour of it. My plan wasn’t foolproof but I’m tired of running. It was working out until you two showed up and got in the way of the police.’

  ‘It has to stop,’ Ethan said finally. ‘If you don’t come forward with this information Jeb’s got you over a barrel until the day he dies – if he ever does – and I’d put money on it that he’ll find a way to control you from beyond the frickin’ grave.’

  ‘The guy’s a creep,’ Lopez added. ‘He’ll pay someone to keep you under control. He knows you’re in line to inherit the entire company and he’ll want to make sure you don’t just sell it off for nothing as revenge.’

  ‘He’s my grandfather,’ Saffron snarled at her. ‘It’s called loyalty.’ Saffron coiled the last word up and spat it into Lopez’s face. Ethan looked at both of them curiously, but didn’t dare push Saffron too hard while she was still talking.

  ‘Why did he agree to leave the entire company to you when he died, if you’re so opposed to him?’

  Saffron’s lips curled into a bitter smile.

  ‘He didn’t. His wife, my grandmother, Eloise Oppenheimer, suggested that he should from her deathbed after my parents died in a car crash – the same one that eventually killed her. She was the polar opposite to Jeb: kind, caring, compassionate. Even Jeb was still passably human back then, but when Eloise died it’s like he turned into a monster.’

  ‘One who will kill to get whatever he wants. Jeb Oppenheimer killed Tyler Willis, probably to find out what Tyler knew of Hiram Conley. It’s possible that Hiram was trying to find a cure for their condition and Lee Carson was helping him. The remaining old soldiers figured it out and came after Carson while Oppenheimer was chasing Hiram Conley’s body after he was shot and killed.’

  Saffron frowned.

  ‘Tyler Willis was probably trying to isolate whatever was in Hiram Conley’s blood, to figure out why he hadn’t aged,’ she said. ‘I doubt he would have been able to resist trying to patent what he found. If some kind of anti-aging drug could be made from whatever bacteria were within Hiram Conley’s body, it would have made Willis a multi-billionaire.’

  ‘True,’ Lopez said, ‘but at least he wasn’t slicing people up to achieve it. Hiram probably realized that Tyler was in danger of selling out and they argued about it up at Glorietta Pass.’

  ‘When Conley finally shot Willis and tried to flee,’ Ethan said. He thought for a moment, and then looked at Saffron. ‘There’s another hostage in all of this.’

  ‘Who?’ Saffron asked.

  ‘Lillian Cruz,’ Lopez explained. ‘She’s the medical examiner who disappeared, and the main reason we’re down here is because we’re searching for her. Hiram Conley’s remains were stolen at the same time and we’re pretty sure it’s Jeb Oppenheimer who’s behind it all.’

  Saffron nodded.

  ‘He’ll be trying to extract useful biological remains from Lee Carson’s corpse now that he’s got it.’

  ‘And using Lillian Cruz to do the work for him,’ Ethan said. ‘Your grandfather was willing to torture and then kill Tyler Willis to get what he wanted. Now he’s got Lee Carson’s remains too. Lillian Cruz may yet be alive and she’s an innocent caught up in all of this. We couldn’t save Tyler but we might be able to help Lillian if we can get into SkinGen’s premises.’

  Saffron looked at them for a moment and then closed her eyes before she spoke.

  ‘Probable cause,’ she said, almost a whisper. ‘The police would need a good reason to obtain a search warrant.’

  ‘You’re that reason,’ Ethan said. ‘Give yourself up to state police, tell them everything you’ve just told us and we’ll have Jeb Oppenheimer by the balls.’

  Saffron shook her head.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t?’ Lopez echoed. ‘Or won’t?’

  ‘It’s not that straightforward,’ Saffron shot at her, before turning to Ethan. ‘I killed another human being. Do you have any idea what the media will do with that? The estranged anti-vivisectionist daughter of a billionaire vivisectionist is arrested, not for killing animals but one of her own activists? I can see the goddamned headlines already: Saffron Oppenheimer opposes the killing of animals but is happy to murder her friends. The prosecution will smash any defense I might have. I’ll be up for second degree murder at the least, no parole. My life will be over. I’ll become the world’s only multibillionaire heiress who can’t spend a single dime of her fortune!’

  Ethan kept his voice calm.

  ‘People are dying,’ he said. ‘If Jeb Oppenheimer gets his way a lot more will follow, starting with Lillian Cruz. You’re the only person who can stop this.’

  Saffron ran a hand through her long blonde hair, her skin tight across her knuckles. Ethan was suddenly struck by how vulnerable she seemed at that moment, still just a young girl struggling to find her way in life and dealing with far more than she should be at her age.

  ‘It’s not just that,’ she said finally. ‘If I give myself up and send the police in, Jeb will be arrested. He’s too old for prison, he’ll never survive.’

  Lopez said out of the darkness, ‘The old man’s a tyrannosaur who’s just about universally hated by the entire population of this planet. Who gives a damn?’

  ‘I give a damn!’ Saffron wailed, and Ethan saw her hand move to the handle of a Bowie knife lodged in her pants.

  ‘Nicola,’ he said, sensing that whatever was between the two of them was about to explode into violence, ‘why not head down to the camp. See what you can find out about where those soldiers might have been headed?’

  Lopez shot him a severe look, but she got up and walked off into the night down toward the camp below. Ethan turned back to Saffron.

  ‘Why defend him?’ he asked gently. ‘He may have killed pe
ople.’

  ‘So have I,’ Saffron replied.

  ‘Not for financial gain. It was an accident – Jeb Oppenheimer killed for information.’

  Saffron sighed.

  ‘He’s all the family I’ve got left,’ she said. ‘Even if he is twisted and bitter, it’s not him. He was never the same after my grandmother died, because he couldn’t save her. That’s what’s driven him to become so completely focused on wealth and power: he really believes that if you have enough influence you can control anything.’

  Ethan inclined his head in understanding. He had once traveled dangerous streets, scoured a land by day and night for years in search of Joanna Defoe, yet despite all his painstaking efforts he had never heard from her again. If he knew one thing for sure, it was that when you loved somebody you really would travel to the ends of the earth and sacrifice everything, even your own life, in order to protect them.

  ‘But you never can, no matter how wealthy you become,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll destroy himself,’ Saffron said. ‘And most likely take me with him just for the sake of it. We’re doomed one way or the other, but I can’t bring myself to betray him. I did it once before when I attacked his buildings and started this whole goddamned charade. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Even though he blackmails you into those attacks?’

  ‘I’d have done them anyway, most likely,’ Saffron said, and then looked at him. ‘You got family?’

  Ethan nodded. ‘Parents back in Illinois, a sister too.’

  Saffron smiled.

  ‘You’re lucky to have them,’ she said. ‘Do you speak to them often?’

  ‘I call my sister now and again,’ he replied.

  ‘And your folks?’

  Ethan considered lying, but he instantly decided that Saffron Oppenheimer had most likely inherited her family’s bullshit detector. He shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ Saffron pressed him.

  ‘Because I left the Marine Corps,’ Ethan breathed finally. ‘My dad’s a Vietnam veteran and wanted me to reach higher in the ranks than he did. I served my commission in Afghanistan and Iraq but decided to do other things with my life after.’ He shrugged. ‘Guess he couldn’t understand why.’

  Saffron moved closer to Ethan, and he felt a small but strong hand grip his forearm.

  ‘Call him,’ she said seriously. ‘Don’t leave it another day, you understand? Crap like this separates families all the time and then when someone dies all they can say is pathetic crap like: I wish I could have said goodbye. Get on the phone and do something about it, okay?’

  ‘He wouldn’t answer the phone,’ Ethan said, then realized almost immediately how thin the excuse sounded.

  ‘Like hell,’ Saffron shot him down. ‘Tell him you’re from the corps, organizing a veteran’s dinner or something. You’ve been there, you know how to pull it off. Who cares if it’s crap? Just talk to him.’

  ‘For what?’ Ethan asked gently. ‘We don’t get along, always at each other’s throats. I doubt it would do any good: it would probably make things worse between us.’

  ‘They can’t get any worse than when you’re not speaking,’ Saffron pointed out. ‘I’ve been trying to change Jeb’s ways for years. It probably won’t work, but I daren’t give up in case I lose him and then spend the rest of my life wondering “what if?”’

  ‘I don’t think my old man’s going anywhere fast yet,’ Ethan pointed out.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Saffron conceded. ‘But you’re sitting in the middle of one of the most dangerous deserts on earth and being shot at on a regular basis. You want him to suffer if it’s you who goes first?’

  Ethan had a momentary vision of Joanna, and of how he had suffered when she had vanished without trace from his life. Suddenly, making a phone call seemed trivial in comparison.

  He nodded.

  ‘I’ll do it, but only if you’ll turn yourself in and provide evidence against Jeb Oppenheimer.’

  Saffron was about to say something when Ethan heard Lopez calling up to him from below.

  ‘Ethan, get down here! Now!’

  49

  SKINGEN CORP

  SANTA FE

  11.17 p.m.

  Lillian Cruz looked down at the operating table before her, breathing slowly as she observed Lee Carson’s naked body.

  In life, Lee Carson had been an impressive figure, that much she could tell from the corpse. The broad plain of his chest met wide shoulders, and his flanks reached a narrow waist that led down to long, muscular legs. He had the chiseled features of a matinee idol, thick and wavy black hair that fell to his shoulders and piercing blue eyes.

  Although those features still shone through, what remained was a rapidly decaying carcass of graying flesh that even now was beginning to fall in clumps from Carson’s arms and sagged from his ribcage in drooping folds. Despite being on ice for several hours, Lee Carson’s remains were aging at a terrific rate, internally as well as externally. The large ‘Y’-shaped incision across his chest and down through his sternum to his pubic bone, where Lillian had opened him up, revealed his internal organs crumbling within. His kidneys and liver were shriveled, his intestines and stomach reduced to leathery rags coiled like the discarded skins of desert snakes. Lillian pushed the dried sacks of Carson’s once vibrant lungs up into his chest cavity to cover his heart.

  ‘Well?’

  Lillian had almost forgotten about the man standing watch over her, his every breath rasping as though he were Darth Vader without the black outfit. Jeb Oppenheimer leaned on his cane, his face glaring at her like a wrinkled prune.

  ‘The decay is irreversible,’ Lillian said, more sickened by the presence of the live man in the room than the dead one. But she was also intrigued by her findings, even in her current predicament unable to quell her fascination with the bizarre human biology she was witnessing before her. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. You say that this body was frozen within twenty minutes of death?’

  Oppenheimer nodded.

  ‘Give or take a minute or two. USAMRIID was on the scene within fifteen minutes of the shooting. I put them on standby myself, in case any of these men used the re-enactment in Socorro as cover to move freely.’

  Lillian shook her head.

  ‘Then any bacterial activity, whether beneficial or detrimental, should have ceased once the body had cooled. That’s the very reason why biological remains are chilled to preserve them, to reduce bacterial activity. But this body is still decaying regardless.’

  Oppenheimer moved closer, looking at Carson’s remains.

  ‘How could that be?’

  Lillian shook her head.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is an entirely new kind of biology, something that hasn’t yet been described by science. It could take weeks or even months to understand what’s happening here at a cellular level, but this corpse will be nothing but dust by lunch-time tomorrow.’ She turned to look at Oppenheimer. ‘What’s left of Hiram Conley?’

  Oppenheimer gripped the top of his cane more tightly.

  ‘Not enough to fill a bag,’ he rattled. ‘I need results from this body.’

  Lillian raised her hands helplessly.

  ‘Results of what?’ she demanded. ‘Even if I took tissue samples they’d crumble before I could do anything with them. This decay is not the action of bacteria eating the flesh, or even of biodegradation. This is a human body decaying at a cellular level: complete and utter disintegration. Even the bones are starting to crumble.’

  Lillian turned, and with a blunt instrument tapped Lee Carson’s forearm sharply. The pallid flesh sagged beneath the blow and the bone within splintered with a dull crack.

  ‘What do you need?’ Oppenheimer asked.

  Lillian put the instrument down and folded her arms. She knew there was only one way in which she could identify what had happened to Hiram Conley and Lee Carson. If she could understand that, then she had a possible ticket out of Jeb Oppenheimer’s hands.
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  ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, to me or to anyone else,’ she replied. ‘What you need is a live specimen, nothing less. You won’t need to carve them up or torture them. You’ll just need to sit them down, run some blood through a bypass machine so that it doesn’t decay when it’s outside their body, and study it. Whatever is inside these men, it is as reliant upon them as they are upon it. Apart, they are nothing.’

  Oppenheimer glared at Lillian angrily for a long moment, and then turned.

  ‘Keep working while there’s still something left,’ he ordered, and left the theater, slamming the door after him.

  Lillian waited for a moment until she was sure that he had gone, and then turned her attention back to Lee Carson’s remains. She stretched over his chest and peered down into the depths of his ribcage, deliberately keeping her own body between Carson and the cameras she knew were watching her from the corner of the room. She pushed aside the brittle tissue of Carson’s lungs with her gloved hands until she saw what she’d been looking at for the past half-hour, before Oppenheimer had stalked into the theater.

  Buried deep within Lee Carson’s heart, at the end of a ragged passage where it had torn through the tissue, was a single musket ball, the dull metal gleaming at her from within the left clavicle of the heart. Lillian felt her own heart skip a beat. The ball was gleaming because the tissue around it was still moist, as live and fresh and healthy as it had been for over a hundred fifty years. Whatever had kept Lee Carson young for over a century and a half had relied upon the one thing that his body could supply, and when death had finally come, whatever wonders it had achieved were lost with it. Only the musket ball, buried within his heart, had provided it with the fuel it required to stay alive in that tiny vicinity. Tyler Willis had been right.

  Iron.

  Oppenheimer took the elevator from the operating theater to the first floor of the SkinGen building, then turned right and walked through a warehouse packed with boxes of pharmaceutical tools and chemicals. His cane clicked through the open spaces until he reached a loading bay where ten men were waiting for him. All were dressed in black jump-suits, their bodies festooned with weaponry. He knew that they represented the command element of a combined force of some one hundred men, who were already waiting at a prearranged location out in the deserts of New Mexico.