Element Zero by James Knapp Read Free Book Online

direction of the car.
    A few feet away, the body of the man in the black apron lay face down in the snow. I used the backscatter to scan into the bloody hole in his ear, and saw traces of shrapnel that had been pushed from the inside out.
    “That’s Fawkes’s work,” Van Offo said.
    I looked over the body. The only thing the man had on him was a drugstore cell phone. It was clean; no numbers were stored. I pulled the ID from it and fed it back to Alice Hsieh back at headquarters.
    Alice, we’re at the site. I need a number run from a cell phone we recovered. Can you trace the last circuit?
    Hang on.
    The SWAT leader was calling in an EMT, his breath blowing plumes as he barked into the radio. I put in for a biohazard team to come impound the revivors.
    Got it, Alice said. I was able to go back twenty-four hours. One call only; someone named Harold Deatherage.
    Thanks.
    “Last call went to a guy named Harold Deatherage,” I told Van Offo. He shook his head.
    “Do you know that name?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “The car is clear!” a voice shouted. I looked through the thinning smoke and switched to a thermal filter. There was nothing living left inside, and no active revivor signatures.
    I waved smoke away as I crossed to the entrance and through the doorway. The inside of the car was a mess of twisted metal and broken wire cages. There were remains scattered through the car, but it was hard to separate them all out. Some were canine; I could see singed fur and pointed teeth buried in the mess. A human leg and two misshapen arms were sprawled among other, unidentifiable pieces.
    Near the back of the car were several scorched gurneys. I could make out frayed wire and a broken housing for electronics, along with an IV rack that was bent in half. Some kind of test had been run there, but there was no way to know for sure what they’d been doing without a forensic reconstruction. Van Offo crept through the debris behind me and surveyed the scene.
    “Why dogs?” he asked.
    “You got me.”
    In theory, anything with a brain could be revived, but the bottom line was that a real dog was cheaper and easier to maintain. It didn’t make sense.
    Out at the edge of the yard I saw the first group of camera eyes gathering, recording everything they could see. A van pulled up behind them while I watched. In twenty minutes the place was going to be mobbed.
    Alice, this was definitely Fawkes. We’re going to need a forensics team down here. They were able to blow the inside of the unit, but I think we can salvage something from it. We need DNA identification on two bodies, and put a rush on that revivor impound; this is too public.
    Understood.
    I looked around the car. The broken shells of computer terminals were scattered in the wreckage, along with a second gurney. When I scanned the floor, I could make out surgical tools. The head of a dog lay a foot from its body, eyes staring up at me.
    Run Deatherage’s name. See if anything comes up.
    I’m on it.
    The SWAT leader appeared at the doorway behind us and leaned in.
    “Agent, it looks like the techs picked up a transmission just before the explosion,” he said.
    “What kind of transmission?”
    “Some kind of large transfer. We think it was a core dump, to save the data before they blew the place.”
    “They get a destination?”
    He nodded.
    “A copy?”
    “No.”
    Alice, it looks like they did some kind of backup or core dump before they blew the place. We’ve got a destination.
    Where? I checked the SWAT channel. When I saw the name, I grit my teeth.
    Mother of Mercy. It was a clinic downtown.
    Isn’t that facility on our list? she asked.
    Yes. We’d been there several times to pull records and hadn’t even marked the place as suspicious. I’d been there once myself. Things were slipping through the cracks.
    Forensics will clean up the storage site. Take SWAT and get over there. Let me know what you find.
    I looked at Van Offo. “You heard the