Devoted - Dean Koontz Page 0,83
the cloudy backwater of Hayden Eckman’s personal files. The one that looked most interesting was labeled Unofficial Case Notes. Therein he found an entry made this date, regarding his supposed inebriation, argumentativeness, and generally unprofessional behavior when Frawley and Zellman had arrived from Sacramento to effect the transfer of jurisdiction in the Spader-Klineman murders.
Carson was angry, but not enraged. In such a situation, an element of surprise, a sense of unexpected betrayal, must be present for anger to escalate into something stronger. He had thought Eckman capable of both deceit and treachery, so that his anger was hardly more than indignation, lacking violent passion and vindictiveness. Anyway, the lie about his being drunk was not the most interesting thing in the file related to the recent murders.
Of greater interest were Eckman’s notes on his conversations with Tio Barbizon, the attorney general of California. The National Security Agency was not only interested in the case, but was trying to run the investigation—and keep it quiet—through Tio Barbizon’s office. The suspected killer’s Nathan Palmer ID was false. Although Barbizon didn’t share Palmer’s real name, he did reveal to Eckman that the fugitive had been a highly placed executive at Refine, Inc., with oversight of the Springville, Utah, facility where ninety-two had died in a ferocious fire.
Carson backed out of the sheriff’s department computer system. He knew why Nathan Palmer looked familiar. The previous day, he had seen a bit of film on the news, a clip from a two-year-old speech that the CEO of Refine had given concerning the company’s cancer research at its labs outside Springville. He googled it, found it. At the time of the speech, the guy sported a neatly trimmed beard, and his hair appeared blond, not brown. Although his name was Lee Shacket, the resemblance was strong enough that Carson had no doubt the guy was also Nathan Palmer.
According to some news reports, Refine, Inc., was a subsidiary of Parable, which had been founded and was still controlled by Dorian Purcell, the multibillionaire. Instead, Refine was a separate company entirely, private rather than public, largely but perhaps not entirely owned by Purcell.
They said Lee Shacket had been at the labs in Springville when the catastrophic gas leak had destroyed the complex and everyone in it. Given the inaccuracy of that information, Carson made a fearsome assumption: Whatever work Refine might be doing in Utah, cancer research was the least of it or perhaps not a part of it at all; they were preoccupied with something of a much more exotic and dangerous nature, and the explosion had been no accident.
After he brooded about the situation for a few minutes, he made three more assumptions. First, whatever else Refine might be doing in Utah, it must have contracts to perform research for the National Security Agency or for other government entities that relied on the NSA to cover their tracks for them. Second, no accidental explosion and fire at such a large facility could be so sudden and complete as to leave not one survivor; the intensity of the blaze suggested a doomsday device designed to halt the spread of highly contagious pathogens that might inspire a plague for which no cure existed, and the lack of a single survivor implied that a biologically secure lockdown program had intentionally trapped the ninety-three people in the facility. Ninety-two. Third assumption: Lee Shacket had slipped out seconds before he, too, would have been imprisoned.
And something was seriously wrong with him. Extreme violence and cannibalism weren’t symptoms of disease. Rabies? No, not even that retrovirus. In humans, the symptoms of rabies were high fever, muscle spasms, thirst, the inability to swallow liquids, seizures, eventually total paralysis. Outrageous violence and cannibalism suggested mental illness rather than a physical disease.
Or . . .
As Carson recalled the ravaged face of Justine Klineman, it seemed that Shacket must be shedding the customs, conventions, and practices of civilization, descending into a primitive moral state. Not just descending. Plummeting. Carson could think of no condition, physical or mental, that could lead to such an abrupt collapse—until the word devolution occurred to him. He didn’t know what he meant by that, why the word hung stubbornly in his mind. Then halfway through another mug of coffee, he found himself considering genetic engineering, by which some enthusiasts in the scientific community believed human evolution, the opposite of devolution, could be facilitated to improve the health and longevity of the species—and even to give it superhuman powers. Transhumanism