Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [69]
Might as well put the time they had left to good use, Ford thought. He said, “All right, Earl, tell me more. What are they making at this House of the Devil?”
Earl hesitated, then shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t guess it really matters anymore, does it? We’re all gonna die anyway.”
“Just in case we don’t, the more people you tell, the better. The more people who know the secret, the less reason those guys back there have for wanting you dead.”
Earl frowned. “You know, I never really thought about it that way.”
“You planned on blowing the whistle when you stole that laptop and ran away from there, right?”
“I didn’t steal the laptop,” Earl objected. “It was mine. Well, the government owned it, I suppose, but it’s the one I used all the time. And yeah, I figured I ought to tell somebody what was going on there before a lot of people died.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Earl shook his head and sighed. “I … I got scared. I thought maybe I was making a big mistake. So I decided to take a few days and think it over while I made up my mind.”
“And to do that you rented a room at a fancy resort hotel in Corpus Christi?”
“Hey, did you see the babes at that place? I figured I might as well partake of a little eye candy while I was pondering the fate of the world.”
Ford couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a skuzzy little weasel, aren’t you?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the government murdering its own citizens.”
Ford glanced sharply at him as the pickup bounced over a stretch of road that resembled an old-fashioned washboard. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Those bio-weapons … they’re not being developed for the military. I don’t think the army even knows about them.”
Ford muttered a curse. This was starting to sound even worse than he’d thought.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
“Okay. There are several projects in development at Casa del Diablo, but the one that’s closest to being finished, the one I was working on, is a new nerve gas. It’s incredibly lethal. A tiny amount will stop a person’s heart in less than two seconds.”
“Nasty stuff, but it doesn’t sound like anything all that new.”
“There are two things different about it,” Earl explained. “The first is that it’s tailored to the human genome. Dogs, cats, livestock … they can breathe the stuff all day without it doing a thing to them. Even chimps have enough genetic differences from humans that it doesn’t affect them. The second thing is that the gas’s window of viability is extremely narrow. It lasts less than five minutes. After that it becomes inert and harmless.”
“So you could spray a town with the stuff from the air and then waltz in five minutes later to find all the people dead but everything else intact, including the pets.”
Earl nodded. “That’s right. Like you said, nasty stuff.”
“It seems to me, though, that its only applications would be military in nature. You’d only use it in a war, right? And we couldn’t even do that now, with all the laws against bio-weapons.”
“You could use it against anybody you wanted to get rid of. The thing that made me decide I had to get out of there was …” Earl stopped and blew out a breath, as if he had to work himself up to telling what he knew. “Was when I found some documents I wasn’t supposed to find. A report from the chief of the project to the Department of Homeland Security and the director of the Federal Protective Service.”
Ford’s hands tightened on the pickup’s steering wheel. He had been overseas a lot during the past ten or twelve years, but that didn’t mean he was completely ignorant of what was going on in the country. Like many in the intelligence community, though, he had believed that what he did was separate, for the most part, from politics. It didn’t matter who was in the White House. The country would always have enemies who wanted to take it