“I’d like to see the children,” I said. “Are they under supervision?”
“No. As I said, we’re leaving them alone for now. They could be booby-trapped or contaminated.” She was eager to change the subject. “We don’t think there’s been any real activity in most of the building for some time. Even most of the lighting fixtures have had their bulbs pulled out.”
“I need to see the kids,” I insisted. “I want to know how they were being used.”
Delbarco reluctantly agreed. I was the expert, and she had her orders, even though it could be her funeral as well. So I was actually in charge. I didn’t like it.
We all followed Breaker to the next floor. In the stairwell, we walked around another body, a young man no more than twenty years old, sprawled faceup and studying the next flight of stairs with relaxed dismay. He had made random finger-twitch scrawls, then started to write two letters in a river of his own blood as it dripped from tread to tread. The letters were Cyrillic, K and AA. Perhaps he was writing his name, perhaps a farewell to friends.
“Where are the defense troops?” Ben asked.
“We pulled them out once the building was secure. We’re shorthanded everywhere,” Breaker said.
The eighth floor looked like a state hospital suddenly fallen on hard times. A deserted reception desk stood at the center of a semicircular room. Six hallways radiated outward like a sunburst in the surrounding square of the floor plan. At the end of one corridor, in the blinking glare of a single fluorescent light, I saw a gymnasium: pommel horse, stacked play mats, parallel bars, hanging rings.
“We don’t want to be here too long,” Delbarco said.
No sunshine. No windows. Never a chance to go outdoors.
I turned left and walked down a hall, stopped, looked into the first open door. Lights flickered in broken ceiling fixtures. Scattered papers, a kicked-in television, blood tracked and smeared by boots. A Come to Middle Earth poster from the 1960s competed with kids’ drawings of dragons, a hook-nosed witch, airplanes. Below them, a white-enameled iron bed frame supported a bare mattress, the sheets torn off and coiled on the floor. In one corner, someone had left a small pile of yellow turds. Broken glass everywhere.
From the end of the hall came singing, thin but lovely—a young boy or girl. It sounded like a Russian folk song. Closer, I heard crying. I walked past two closed doors, half-expecting a teenager with an Uzi to come leering out and spray us with bullets. Or for the ceiling to crack open and pour down gallons of tagging solution mixed with needles, piercing our suits. Anything was possible. I had been through too much to disbelieve.
The door to my right opened on a room full of steel bathtubs—hydrotherapy, I guessed, but then I saw the tubs were crusted with a dry yellow paste. I was glad to be in the suit and unable to smell the outside air.
This was what Tammy had described to Ben and Rob—a training area. A bathhouse of bacterial indoctrination. Mrs. Golokhova had had to make do, however; she wasn’t able to afford space on the world’s biggest cruise ship. Did she keep up any contact at all with her husband?
I couldn’t picture them lingering over long phone calls like separated lovers.
I slowed at the sound of footsteps. A black girl in a long white gown emerged from a door in the middle of the hall. She was accompanied by a toddler with a thin face and long, silky blond hair, clinging with white fists to her ragged nightgown. They stared at me with suspicious, puffy eyes.
The older girl barked something in Russian. I looked at Ben, a few paces behind me. He shook his head.
I waved my hands at the girl, no savvy, and stared at her bare forearms. Long pink scars reached from her wrists to at least her elbows, where they vanished beneath wide, flopping sleeves. In her long brown fingers she clutched a plastic ampoule with a dangling tube attached to an IV needle.
Three more children emerged from other doors in the hall and walked forward, wary but curious.
The black girl shook her head, then pointed her fingers into her mouth, eyes staring defiantly: Food, you son of a bitch, get it?
A boy of eight or nine padded across the floor in rubber-soled slippers. Yellow strips like plasterboard patches crisscrossed his shaven crown. His eyes were angelically calm, and he grinned as his slippers alternately slapped and squeaked on the hard blue floor.
Ben touched my elbow, giving me a start. “Let’s go,” he said. “Nothing we can do, and no sense taking risks. We don’t know what was going on here.”
I could hazard a guess. The older children, Mrs. Golokhova’s assistants, the same ones who had come out to see Ben and Rob in the loading dock, must have tried to protect the younger. The first team in had killed everyone on the lower floors. Not that many, I guessed; a small operation.
“Mrs. Golokhova was still doing research. She maintained her own runners and subjects,” I said. I shouted to Breaker and Delbarco, “Can you get some food for these kids?”
The black girl glared at us critically from a distance of ten feet. She seemed reluctant to come closer, as reluctant as I was to have her so near. I studied her skin, finely wrinkled, her knowing, weary eyes, and was suddenly not at all certain of her age.
She tried me again with another imperative string of Russian. I could only lift my shoulders in ignorance. Disgusted, she flung her ampoule, needle swinging. It bounced off my plastic-sleeved arm and rolled on the floor. I searched the arm frantically for tears as she laughed.
“Let’s go,” Ben said, pulling me back.
The children darted into their rooms. I heard giggles and small, frightened voices whispering, whimpering.
We climbed past nine, ten, eleven, stopping briefly to examine each floor. More vats, steel-walled isolation cubicles, huge but stripped labs, their doors welded shut, their shadowy interiors visible only through dusty acrylic windows. Storerooms full of hundreds of filing cabinets toppled over and cleaned out, steel drums filled with old ashes, plastic barrels, empty chemical bottles and glassware stacked high in Dumpsters, martial rows of old black typewriters, an IBM 360 half-covered by a ripped and age-browned plastic tarp, broken crates.
On twelve, a dark storage room had been piled high with empty plastic coffins. An obese male in a black windbreaker lay facedown in the middle of the nested coffins. He had been shot in the back.
Ben walked around the darkening pond of blood—an awful lot of blood—and rolled the body over with one foot. It was wearing green loose-fit Dockers, and under the unzipped jacket, a blue golf shirt.
“Norton Crenshaw,” Ben said. “Hello, Melon.”
“Satisfied?” Delbarco asked.
“Fuck, no,” Ben said. He made a quick reconnaissance of the rest of the room, pulled over a stack of coffins with hollow, reverberating booms, no joy. We walked quickly back to the stairs.
“Learning anything?” I asked Ben.
“Too damned much,” he said.
Forty years ago, the Jenner Building had held one of the biggest CBW operations in the entire United States. Right in the middle of Manhattan.
Creating Manhattan Candidates.
“You’re going to have to rewrite all your books,” I told Ben as we climbed.
“No joke,” he said. “This makes Enigma look like a wet firecracker.”
