Page 72 of Mastermind

“The disease.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ANATOMY

Jessica and I are sitting in an observation room, watching through a window as Dr. Leonid, Ukraine’s top forensic specialist, performs an autopsy. Unfortunately, the chimpanzee mass grave wasn’t the last hidden burial site that we encountered. There are four bodies in the room, filling up all the available tables, and another nineteen in freezers waiting to be examined.

Leonid is wearing hazmat gear from head to toe, not only to protect himself from the normal infectious agents you encounter when you pull a rotting corpse from the ground, but also because whatever killed these men may have been engineered.

Poor Zlate was arrested soon after we called the Ukrainian authorities. We’ve been given assurances that if she fully cooperates, they won’t punish her.

Jessica and I explained as best as we could that only a saint would stay there trying to take care of those men by herself. It even turned out that she had tried calling Ukrainian authorities on multiple occasions and was either dismissed as crazy or handed off to someone else to deal with.

The surviving men were another mystery. Nobody knew where they came from until a sister of one the patients recognized her brother’s photograph on the news. He’d been committed to a mental hospital in Belarus years ago and abandoned.

We expect that break in the case to lead to clues about the others. Jessica’s suspicion is that they were acquired from various mental institutions throughout Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Many asylums are understaffed and might look the other way when offered the opportunity to make a difficult patient someone else’s problem.

According to the sister of the one we identified, he’d been a problem teenager and prone to violent behavior. Regardless of his past, it’s tragic that he ended up with his mind taken from him, the victim of some cruel experiment.

But what is that experiment? The other surviving men are now receiving medical care, but aside from malnourishment due to Zlate’s dwindling supplies, they’re otherwise healthy. Physically, at least. Mentally they’re gone, but bodily, even the patients that Zlate said were incredibly ill when they arrived are doing fine. Just like with our chimpanzees, it’s unclear which was the control group and which was the experimental group.

Dr. Leonid steps over to the microphone by the window, strips off his gloves, and speaks in English to us. “I can’t find any sign of unusual infection. While antibody tests are difficult with this stage of necrosis, I was able to get some viable blood from deep in the tissue. But I don’t see the symptoms of a respiratory infection. Their lungs and digestive tracts are also fine.”

“Okay, then, what killed them?” I ask.

“This I don’t know for certain. But if you were to ask me what killed this man”—he points to the nearest body—“his liver, spleen, and lymph nodes show all the signs of someone suffering from aggressive lymphoma. Cancer.”

Cancer. When Zlate said they had the disease, that’s what she was referring to.

“What does that mean?” asks Jessica.

I say the three hardest words for me to utter: “I don’t know.”

This wasn’t what we were expecting. Our fear was that the experimenters had weaponized some infectious agent like a coronavirus into something even more deadly, but Leonid’s autopsy looked for the symptoms of coronas, influenzas, even Ebola, plus a whole host of other infectious diseases. What he found was death by natural causes.

But was it?

“Theo?” asks Jessica.

“Some viruses can cause cancer. This is well known. And there are some forms of cancer that may be transmitted via a virus that we haven’t identified yet. What if . . . ?” I think the question through, then shake my head. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“That they’ve weaponized cancer?” she asks.

“You could, in theory. That is to say, you could take a very innocuous virus that we’re already familiar with and maybe give it a payload that triggers a cancer response. It just seems like doing things the hard way.”

“Maybe they want to do things the hard way. Maybe the point is to make us watch our loved ones linger.”

The way she says this makes me suspect she has some personal experience with that, but I don’t know if it’s a good time to ask or get into the subject. I’ve never been good at understanding what lines we’re not supposed to cross.

“I don’t know. There’s a pattern here, but we’re just not picking it up. I don’t think we understand the question well enough to know what’s going on.”

“We’ve got dead bodies, dead chimpanzees, and some kind of clandestine medical experiment . . . that’s a lot going on,” Jessica says. “God knows what other experiments are taking place we don’t know about.”

“Yes. But none of this ties back to Michael Heywood. At least not directly. It doesn’t even directly connect to the Void. It’s not impossible that we stumbled upon something completely separate.”

“That seems highly improbable, to quote you,” she replies. “I think it’s time we push this to the next level. Gerald has kept our connection to this out of official channels, but I think we need more resources and more people on the case.”

The news only mentioned that two tourists stumbled upon the facility. This was our attempt to make Heywood or whoever is behind this unaware that our investigation has reached this far. Now we’re at the point where the cat is about to be let out of the bag. To bring in the kind of international cooperation we’ll need to find out what’s behind this means that the entire investigation and Jessica’s and my role in it will all ultimately become a matter of public knowledge.