Chapter 8 - The Nursery in the Deep
The descent into the central core of Silo No. 4 was like descending through the chambers of an industrial hell designed by men who held degrees in clinical genetics and federal administrative law.
The interior of the sixty-foot-wide concrete cylinder had been gutted thirty years ago.
Where forty thousand bushels of winter wheat had once dropped through iron funnels, a five-story modular structure of brushed aluminum, acoustic privacy glass, and medical-grade stainless steel had been suspended from the reinforced roof trusses by twelve heavy steel bridge-stay cables.
It was an air-gapped, subterranean research enclave—a facility that drew its power directly from the 138-kilovolt underwater transmission cable that fed the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, its existence concealed beneath the derelict shell of an EPA Superfund site that no federal inspector had visited since the Clinton administration.
Dante and I moved down the spiral maintenance stairs that circled the perimeter of the silo wall, our weapons raised, our boots landing without a sound on the neoprene treads we had wrapped around our soles.
At the third-floor landing, the glass was transparent.
I stopped.
My hand, resting against the cold painted steel of the handrail, froze.
Inside the thirty-foot-wide central laboratory, illuminated by the harsh, shadowless glare of ultraviolet ceiling arrays, stood twelve vertical glass cylinders, each six feet tall, filled with a pale, amber-tinted saline solution that circulated through peristaltic pumps mounted to the floor.
Eight of the cylinders were empty, their interior surfaces stained with the dark, brownish residue of dried biological material, their drainage valves open to the central waste trough.
In the ninth and tenth cylinders... were children.
They were not infants. They were boys—perhaps two years old, suspended in the fluid by nylon harnesses attached to their shoulders, their eyes closed, their chests rising and falling with the rhythmic, mechanical pulse of membrane oxygenators fitted to their tracheas.
Their faces were identical.
The same high forehead. The same straight, narrow nose. The same slight, aristocratic cleft in the chin that had been passed down from Antonio Moretti to the boy he had bought in an alley in Palermo in nineteen eighty-five.
Standing before the eleventh cylinder, holding a digital tablet and an automatic syringe filled with twenty milliliters of a viscous, opalescent liquid, was Dr. Julian Vance.
He had removed his slate-gray overcoat, wearing a short-sleeved white lab coat over his charcoal trousers, his thin silver hair combed neatly across his high, intellectual forehead. He looked sixty-five, distinguished, completely unbothered by the fact that twelve hours ago, he had ordered thirty-four men to fire automatic weapons into a suburban living room.
Beside him stood Senator Marco Moretti.
The eighty-year-old patriarch of the Chicago Outfit was sitting in a leather executive wheelchair, an ivory-handled walking stick resting across his knees, a cashmere traveling rug draped over his withered legs. On his lap sat a portable encrypted satellite communications transceiver, its digital screen glowing with the seal of the UNITED STATES SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE.
"The fourth cohort is failing, Julian," Marco said, his voice carrying that thin, aristocratic rasp of an old man whose lungs were turning to wet tissue. "The telomere degradation on subject eleven is tracking at forty percent above baseline. Look at the cellular turnover in the kidney epithelium."
Dr. Vance didn't look up from his tablet.
"The cellular turnover is a consequence of using thirty-year-old cryopreserved seed stock from the Walter Reed repository, Marco," Vance replied, his tone clinical, bored, and entirely devoid of human empathy. "Antonio was an old man when he gave the sample in eighty-five. If you want genomic stability that exceeds six years, we need fresh somatic tissue from the primary carrier."
"Alejandro is dead," Marco wheezed, coughing softly into a linen handkerchief embroidered with his senatorial monogram. "The boys on the lawn... Vance, the automated guns at the house—"
"The automated guns at the house were silenced twenty minutes ago by an airstrike from the National Guard detachment at Waukegan, Marco," Vance said, tapping his screen. "The estate is an ash heap. The four subjects Elena stole have been incinerated. We have zero surviving biological material from the primary line."
"Then what are we looking at here, Julian?" the old senator whispered, gesturing with a trembling, liver-spotted hand toward the two boys floating in the glass tanks.
"We are looking at twenty million dollars in unrecoverable research expenditure," Vance said, turning toward the drainage valve at the base of cylinder ten. "And an administrative necessity to clear the facility before the state environmental monitors arrive on Monday."
He reached out his hand toward the red mechanical toggle that controlled the drainage sequence.
The toggle that would have dropped two living children into the industrial waste pipes leading to the harbor bottom.
CRACK.
The three-quarter-inch tempered acoustic glass of the laboratory window shattered inward in an explosion of five thousand diamond-shaped crystal fragments.
Dante cleared the frame first, his Benelli twelve-gauge firing from the hip before his boots had even touched the vinyl floor.
BOOM.
The heavy three-inch magnum copper slug struck the steel support arm of the drainage valve, shearing the mechanical toggle in two with an ear-splitting ring of tortured metal, throwing a shower of sparks across Vance’s white coat.
Dr. Vance shrieked—a high, undignified, wet squeal of pure terror—as he stumbled backward into a stainless-steel instrument tray, sending scalpel blades, sterile forceps, and digital thermometers crashing to the floor in a clattering avalanche of metal.
I dropped through the shattered window frame, my boots landing with concussive, heavy finality on the linoleum six feet from Marco Moretti’s wheelchair.
I did not draw the carbine.
I did not draw the Kimber .45.
I walked forward with my bare hands, my long wool coat flaring behind me like the wings of an executioner’s raven, my gray eyes locked dead onto the throat of the man who had sat at my father's right hand for fifty years.
"Alejandro..." Marco choked out.
The old man tried to lift his ivory-handled walking stick, his hands shaking so violently that the polished cane slipped from his fingers, clattering uselessly against the footrests of his chair.
"You're dead," the senator wept, his watery blue eyes bulging until the broken red capillaries showed across the sclera. "The helicopter... the strike from Waukegan—"
"The strike from Waukegan was unauthorized, Uncle Marco," I whispered, my voice dropping into an octave that stopped the peristaltic pumps in the glass cylinders from sounding loud.
May you like
I reached down, my left hand closing around the lapels of his three-thousand-dollar cashmere traveling rug, hauling the eighty-year-old United States Senator six inches out of his wheelchair until his purple, liver-spotted face was level with mine.
"And the pilot," I continued, each word landing like an iron spike through his skull, "was my cousin Roberto. The one whose sister you put in an unmarked grave behind the convent in Door County."
