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“Hybrid species? There is no hybrid species.”
“Like I’m going to believe you.”
The woman stood up even higher on her spine. If that was possible. “You’re right. We were experimenting, but not to create anything that didn’t exist. The research was on the immune system and cell division as it relates to longevity. The wolves were used because the packs on the preserve are isolated and from a single line of ancestors courtesy of the reintroduction of the species that took place in the nineteen hundreds. Further, their life cycles are short enough so that we could measure whether the drugs were working to keep them alive longer. It was not to synthesize—werewolves or something.”
Lydia shook her head. “Like I said, I don’t believe a word you—”
“I don’t care whether you believe me. The truth is what it is without regard to you blessing it with your opinion.”
And then the woman just shrugged as she stared Lydia right in the face with a bored expression.
“You have your proof,” C.P. Phalen said. “And I have mine. Come, I’ll show you.”
I BOUGHT THIS HOUSE more because of what was under it than anything above ground.”
As C.P. Phalen’s narration started, Lydia walked along with her and decided this was like some kind of fucked-up museum tour, where the exhibits were unbelievable and the docent a madwoman capable of anything.
The two of them were descending a set of steel stairs that were shiny and new, positively sparkling, and when they came to the bottom, Lydia got a load of all sorts of whitewashed concrete walls.
Even though they were well underground, the air smelled fresh, like it was being blown in from the surface.
“Back in the seventies and eighties,” the woman said as they walked forward down a well-lit corridor wide as a living room and long as—well, the damned thing seemed to go on forever—“there was word of experiments being done on things that didn’t exist. Things that had no evolutionary basis and supposedly no existence outside of Halloween myth.”
The floppy disks, Lydia thought. The vampires.
“As I told you, I’ve been in the pharmaceutical sector for my whole career, investing in companies, promoting their research and development. I heard the whispered talk. I didn’t believe it. It was just too fanciful, something out of a novel.”
Lydia glanced around. There were no doors, no cameras, no offshoots from the main drag. No sounds other than the soles of her boots and C.P. Phalen’s stilettoes over the concrete floor, either.
“I brushed the stories off as gossip told by drunks at annual meetings, nothing but drama created by businessmen who had to believe they were more powerful than Charles Darwin. But then something changed in my own life and I decided to look into it further. That’s when I discovered it was true, all true. There were facilities, hidden out of sight, protected, defended, doing groundbreaking work that could change the landscape of human life. Over time, however, many of them had been abandoned, either from lack of funding or from incompetence. Or accidents.”
No reason to ask about the “accidents,” Lydia thought.
Finally, a corner, up ahead.
And then a door.
C.P. Phalen put her thumb on a reader and there was a loud, hollow thunk! The stainless steel panel seemed to open on its own, and on the other side …
“Holy shit,” Lydia breathed.
“Welcome to my laboratory.”
Lydia forgot all about the other woman as she stepped over the threshold. The open area was easily as big as a sports arena, and it was filled with people in white coats at stations full of equipment. No one looked up or paid any attention to her or the lab’s owner. No one was nervous or afraid. It seemed like … a legitimate operation.
“The FDA and the regulatory systems of this country strangle innovation,” C.P. Phalen said. “I got sick of it. I decided to just do it on my own and deal with the consequences if the breakthrough I expect comes through—and it will. Maybe it already has. Immunotherapy is in its infancy, and the medical community is thinking too small. It’s not just about curing cancer, it’s about prolonging life. The immune system is so much more than merely the guardian of the human body’s health. It’s part of the expiration date for life. But it doesn’t have to be.”
The woman turned to Lydia. “You’re right. I did pay Peter Wynne and he did what he had to at the Wolf Study Project with Rick to get me what I needed. But this hybrid thing you’re talking about? That was never part of it. Yes, I broke the law, and I’m not going to apologize for that. But it was about the work I wanted to do here, that is now being done here after I renovated this old facility and staffed it. My relationship with Peter and Rick was coming to an end. They’d fulfilled what they’d promised to do for me, so we’d completed our business. And immune system work was all I was a part of. That’s as far as I went. I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about with humanoid experiments. That is not my field of interest at all.”
Lydia walked forward, not sure how much to believe of that speech. “This laboratory is …”
“Magic in test tubes,” C.P. Phalen said. “That’s what we’re doing here. Come on, let’s keep going.”
As they proceeded along the periphery of the stations, the woman kept talking. “We’re so close. I can feel it. I just need a little more time—which is what we all need, right? Just more time to be alive, stay alive. And be healthy while we’re here.”
She opened the door into a conference room with a long table and projection screens at both ends. A couple of sideboards set with water bottles and soft drinks created an odd—and misplaced—sense of security. Because the boardroom was a spot of normal in a sea of not-normal-at-all.
With the door closing them in, the sounds of the laboratory drifted off, but through the glass wall, Lydia could continue to watch the scientists striding back and forth to each other’s work areas.
“I already run a company that does DNA sequencing,” C.P. Phalen said as she sat down. “As well as one that does ancestry profiling. I have mined the data of millions and millions of people—”
Lydia glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t do that.”
The woman held up her forefinger. “Oh, but I can. It’s in the disclosures that every single person who paid for the services had to sign. It’s not my fault if they don’t read what they’re getting into, and besides, all the data is blinded. No names or addresses, just demographic information. It’s entirely legal, trust me.”
As Lydia looked back out, the woman said, “When you were standing in my foyer, you honestly expected to be killed on my premises. I can assure you, you’re free to go. You can walk out and drive away anytime you want. And I’m not going to try to stop you from going to the authorities—if you haven’t already. You’re not going to get far with all that, though. I’ve set things up so that the legitimate businesses are a full cover for what we’re doing here, and I’ve already had challenges, even from the U.S. government. Like you, though, they’re free to sniff around. I have unlimited resources, the very best lawyers money can buy, and you’d be amazed what things people will look away from, under the right circumstances.”