Dark moon rising, p.1
Dark Moon Rising, page 1
Jefferson managed to reach out and grab the .45 Stone had dropped and he aimed it and blew the back of Blutowsky’s head off.
He grinned once at Jim and winked, and then he coughed up blood and the light faded from his eyes.
Jim slowly rolled over and struggled to his knees. Stone had been a formidable adversary and every muscle in Jim’s body ached and burned.
Crawling on hands and knees, he took the key to the cell out of Stone’s pocket and opened the door to Doreen’s cell. In spite of the fact that she’d seen him fighting for her, she shrank back at his fearsome appearance.
He used his claws to slice through the ropes holding her prisoner, and then he collapsed and lay there panting in exhaustion.
“Be careful,” he growled. “State troopers are about to attack the base. You’d better wait in here until it’s over.”
“Jim?” she said, kneeling next to him. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he said with a low laugh, “kinda.”
DARK MOON RISING
JAMES M. THOMPSON
LYRICAL UNDERGROUND
Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
LYRCIAL UNDERGROUND books are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2005 by James M. Thompson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.
Lyrical Underground and the L logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
First Electronic Edition: May 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5161-0410-9
First Print Edition: May 2017
ISBN-13:978-1-5161-0415-4
ISBN-10:1-5161-0415-3
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
First and always, to my wife Terri for putting up with all of the hassles living with a writer entails and loving me anyway. And to our friends who make life so much fun: Nell and Joe Johnson, Steve and Judi Piner, Mark and Patti Giles, John Ashby, Bob and Debbie Wither, Wayne and Debbie Anderson . . . and too many others to mention. And to my wonderful agent, Robin Rue of Writer’s House, and my editor, Gary Goldstein at Kensington Books, wordsmith extraordinary. We love you guys.
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the moon is clear and bright
—Old gypsy woman,
Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) in The Wolf Man (1941)
Prologue
It was almost seven-thirty in the evening before Dr. George Wright could get away from his desk and drive into Baltimore proper. He had a town house in a fashionable section of the city. He’d moved the year before from a more convenient location in Center City because of the rampant crime that seemed to be taking over.
He pulled his Cadillac into his driveway and parked it, too tired to fuss with putting it in the garage just yet. Besides, he reasoned, knowing his wife and her aversion to the culinary arts, they’d probably be going out to dinner later anyway.
He got out of the car and retrieved his briefcase from the seat next to him, sighing with contentment to finally be home and away from the madhouse his office was turning into. He’d spent the last several hours making phone calls to various and sundry political figures he knew, hoping to put a stop to that madman Stern’s research, but so far none of his calls had been returned. He hoped he’d have better luck when he returned to work the next day.
He felt the first few drops of an evening shower and glanced up, holding his hand out palm upward to catch some of the drops, when he heard a slight whistling sound behind him.
Alarmed, Wright whirled around, his hand going to his mouth in fear. In the gloom of a nearby streetlamp, he saw a white male in his early forties standing only a few feet away from him. The man had a pockmarked face and a scar on his left cheek that coursed down his face from his left eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. The scar drew up the corner of the man’s lips into a perpetual half smile, as if he were smirking at the world. He was dressed in some sort of black outfit and Wright noticed the man’s eyes seemed to shine with an almost fluorescent glow, like those of a deer or cat when caught in headlights at night.
“Dr. Wright?” the man asked, his voice so low and rough it was almost a growl, even though his lips were curved into a benign smile.
“Yes . . . uh . . . who are you?” Wright asked, his heart slowing from his initial fright since the man appeared pleasant enough and had called him by name. Perhaps this was a new neighbor he hadn’t met yet.
The man smiled widely, as if at a private joke. The expression accentuated his scar and turned his smile into a grimace. “I’m your worst nightmare,” he said, as he pulled a battered .38 Special pistol out from behind his back and put the barrel inches from Wright’s forehead. The movement was so quick the man’s hands were almost a blur.
Wright’s eyes opened wide and his bladder let go in terror, and he opened his mouth to plead for his life just as the man pulled the trigger.
The sound of the gunshot, sharp and short and harsh as a dog’s bark, echoed around the trees in the neighborhood, but no one even bothered to look out of their windows. Wright’s head snapped back, his plea for mercy unspoken, and he dropped to the ground like a rag doll. The shooter dropped the gun next to the body along with a do-rag like the gangbangers all wore on their heads in the inner city and dusted his gloved hands as if he’d just finished taking out the trash, which in one way he figured he had.
He pulled his gloves off and stuck them in his pocket as he strolled unhurriedly down the sidewalk, whistling as the light mist continued to fall.
Suddenly a large dog bounded out of the darkness, barking and snarling as it attacked the man. He grinned, his shining eyes glowing as he crouched and faced the oncoming beast. The dog launched itself into the air and its barking changed to a squeal of terror and pain as the man’s hands whipped up and grabbed the dog’s head and twisted it clear around.
The dog fell to the ground, howling pitifully, its neck broken. As window lights began to come on and at least one door opened a few houses down, the man turned and took five quick steps and bounded over a six-foot-high fence and raced into the darkness like a shadow.
Running across backyards and dodging obstructions and leaping over fences as if it were broad daylight instead of pitch-black darkness, the man disappeared into the night.
Chapter 1
Earlier that same day
There was a standing-room-only crowd in Conference Room C-3 deep beneath the ground at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The fort was the home to USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. As the Department of Defense’s lead laboratory for investigating the medical aspects of biological warfare defense and offense, USAMRIID conducted research to develop vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics for laboratory and field use in the event of an attack on the United States.
Virtually every man and woman in the room was an MD, a PhD, or both, and all were involved in formulating strategies, information, and procedures for medical defense against biological threats to the U.S.
“I just don’t understand it,” one of the scientists said to a man standing next to him in the doorway.
His companion cocked an eyebrow and gave a half smile. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit that there was something you didn’t understand, Carl.”
Carl chuckled. “I’ll agree, Fred, it’s not a common occurrence, but I looked up the curriculum vitae on our speaker today and it says he is an MD with a combined specialty of neurology and neurosurgery and that his m
Fred nodded as the line they were in inched forward another couple of feet. “Yeah, so?”
Carl shrugged. “It just struck me as odd that such a man would be the keynote speaker today since his field has absolutely nothing to do with chemical or biological warfare.”
“What was his name again?” Fred asked, grunting as he managed to push his way forward to grab a couple of empty chairs at the extreme rear of the room.
“Stern. Dr. Albert Stern,” Carl replied, sighing with relief when he took his seat next to Fred.
The room quieted as a tall, cadaverous-looking man who was thin to the point of emaciation stood and strode confidently to the front of the room to stand next to a screen. The speaker had coarse, uneven features and his thick jaw and rather long face made him look more like a common street thug than an internationally acclaimed scientist.
Fred elbowed Carl and whispered, “His name should be Karloff with that face.”
Carl shushed his friend and stared at the speaker, anxious to find out what a brain surgeon would have to say that would interest a bunch of microbiologists and chemists.
Dr. Albert Stern smiled out at the crowd, or at least his features curved into what would have been a smile for anyone else. On him, it more closely resembled a grimace of pain or indigestion.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen . . . fellow scientists,” he began. “I am here today to enlist your help in an experiment that will undoubtedly usher in a new age of incredibly sophisticated medical treatment.”
He glanced at the screen next to him and it lit up with a multicolored representation of a DNA double helix molecule, one every scientist in the room had seen thousands of times.
“The stuff dreams are made of, gentlemen and ladies,” Stern said, his eyes glittering as he stared at the screen. “This is the basis for every life on our planet, and we are this close”—he held up his hand with his index finger and thumb an inch apart—“to unlocking the key to the very mystery of life itself.”
There was a murmur among the crowd, for no one had heard the slightest inkling of this in any research papers published in the last year.
“What the hell is he talking about?” Carl whispered.
Fred didn’t answer, though he too wondered just what rabbits this man was going to pull out of his sleeves.
“For the past five years,” Stern continued, “my team and I have been working on a project to map the human genome in its entirety, and we have almost finished our work. We now know the precise location on the human DNA double helix of virtually every gene involved in our inherited characteristics.”
A hand in the first row went up, causing Stern to scowl at the interruption. He forced the look of irritation from his face and finally nodded his head. “Yes, Dr. Wright?”
Dr. George Wright, who was the head civilian scientist at USAMRIID and in charge of most of the scientists and their various research projects, asked, “How can that be, Dr. Stern? We’ve all heard of the human genome project announced a few years back, but everyone had assumed it would take ten years or more to map out the millions of genes in human DNA.”
Stern’s scowl faded and he smiled again. “True, Dr. Wright, but that was before the defense department loaned me two of their ten-million-dollar Cray Supercomputers. By hooking the two supermachines up in tandem, we were able to finish the project much quicker than anyone could’ve anticipated. In fact, since we finished the project on human DNA, we’ve gone on to mapping out the DNA of many of the animals that exist among us.”
He glanced at the screen and the picture changed to one of a fetus, pink and red and yellow, lying on a towel still connected to its amniotic sac. Stern used a laser-pointer pen to direct a red dot onto the head of the fetus. “As you know, fetal brain tissue is undifferentiated, unburdened with the immune pointers and chemicals that make it impossible to transplant tissue from unrelated people into each other. Part of my work lately has been to combine genes for specific characteristics from one animal with fetal brain tissue and then to introduce this tissue into a primate and cause the primate to assume the new characteristics and abilities transmitted by the fetal DNA.”
Now there was more than a murmur among the crowd, it was more of a gasp and then an excited rumble as the spectators whispered among themselves. This was truly what some people called playing God.
“Now, even though the process doesn’t always work,” Stern said, raising his voice to combat the elevated sounds in the room, “we’ve had just enough success to make our government want us to keep trying.”
He glanced at the screen and the picture changed from the fetus to one of a chimpanzee holding a seven-hundred-pound gorilla above its head as if it weighed only a few pounds.
In the next picture, the chimpanzee was ripping the gorilla to pieces with its bare hands, its long canine incisors stained with the dead gorilla’s blood.
“Can you imagine a thousand soldiers with the strength of a gorilla, the speed of a gazelle, and the viciousness of a lion or tiger?” Stern asked, his lips curled in a half smile but his eyes as black and cold as coal.
“This is all . . . very interesting, Dr. Stern,” Dr. Wright said, a look of disgust on his face as he quickly averted it from the gruesome picture on the screen. “But why are you telling this to us?” He looked around and spread his arms to encompass the scientists gathered in the room. “After all, the most sophisticated organism most of us work with is a microbe.”
Stern clicked the remote in his hand and the screen again changed, this time to show a bunch of bacteria and some bacteriophages mingling together.
“You microbiologists have for years now been transferring genes from one bacteria species to another by means of bacteriophages.” He shrugged and spread his arms out wide. “With the resurgence of the religious right in this country, using fetal brain tissue in medical research has become something of a political hot potato. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get Congress to authorize money for this research, so our mutual bosses in the defense department have decided that if we pool our research, perhaps we can accomplish the same results using bacteria to transfer the genes rather than fetal brain tissue.” He paused and then added, “Using bacteriophages would also lower the cost and complexity of the procedure by eliminating the need for surgery on the brain, thus making the technique much more available than it currently is.”
Dr. Wright shook his head, his face pale and drawn. “I . . . I’m not sure this is the correct forum for this to be discussed, Dr. Stern. And I’m equally unsure of the ethics and propriety of this line of research.” He stood up and pointed his finger at Stern. “Personally, I think the idea of playing God with human beings and their genetic code is abhorrent in the extreme! The government had the foresight to ban cloning of human beings, Stern, and this is even worse.” He continued to shake his head back and forth. “No, I can’t let you bring this abomination into our labs!”
He squeezed past the people next to him and strode up the aisle, his back ramrod straight and his face flushed as he stalked out of the room.
Stern’s eyes narrowed and his lips compressed into a white line, until with a force of will, he relaxed his features and turned to the crowd. “I’m afraid Dr. Wright thinks our research is much further along than it is. Right now, we are just exploring the possibilities of gene transfer among primates by using bacteria and bacteriophages.” He smiled benignly. “Surely this is no more playing God than removing a malignant brain tumor so a child can live or giving someone with pneumonia an antibiotic to stop the infection from ending the patient’s life, is it?”
When he heard the sympathetic murmur from the crowd, he spread his hands. “Now, are there any questions or comments about my presentation?”
Carl raised his hand. “Dr. Stern, what is the minimum number of genes you can transfer at one time?”
