‘If no one cares for a drink,’ said Lantern, ‘I’ll just sit down and finish mine.’
He went to an armchair from which he could watch them, and he picked up a glass of white wine from a small table beside the chair.
The rest of them remained on their feet.
To Proctor, Jilly said, ‘An autopsy would prove the poor son of a bitch wasn’t you.’
He shrugged. ‘Of course. But when the gentlemen in the black Suburbans were closing in on me, the big boom distracted them, didn’t it? The diversion bought me a few hours, a chance to slip away. Oh, despicable, I know, to sacrifice an innocent man’s life to gain a few hours or days for myself, but I’ve done worse in my life. I’ve—’
Interrupting Proctor’s wearisome self-accusatory patter, Jilly said, ‘Who are those guys in the Suburbans?’
‘Mercenaries. Some former Russian Spetznaz, some American Delta Force members gone bad, all former special-forces soldiers from one country or another. They hire out to the highest bidder.’
‘Who’re they working for now?’
‘My business partners,’ Proctor said.
From his armchair, Parish Lantern said, ‘When a man is so badly wanted that an entire army has been put together to kill him, that’s quite an achievement.’
‘My partners are extremely wealthy individuals, billionaires, who control several major banks and corporations. When I started to have some success with experimental subjects, my partners suddenly realized that their personal fortunes and those of their companies might be at risk from endless liability suits, billions in potential settlements when… things went wrong. Settlements that would have dwarfed the billions squeezed from the tobacco industry. They wanted to shut everything down, destroy my research.’
‘What things went wrong?’ Dylan asked tightly.
‘Don’t go through the whole dreary list like you did with me. Just tell them about Manuel,’ Lantern suggested.
‘A fat angry sociopath,’ said Proctor. ‘I should never have accepted him as a subject. Within hours of injection, he developed the ability to start fires with the power of his mind. Unfortunately, he enjoyed burning things too much. Things and people. He did a lot of damage before he could be put down.’
Dylan felt queasy, almost moved to a chair, but then remembered his mother and stayed on his feet.
‘Where in the name of God do you get subjects for experiments like this?’ Jilly wondered.
The dreamy smile kinked up at one corner. ‘Volunteers.’
‘What kind of morons would volunteer to have their brains pumped full of nanomachines?’
‘I see you’ve done some research. What you couldn’t have learned is that we progressed secretly to human experimentation at a facility in Mexico. Officials are still easily bribed there.’
‘More cheaply than our best senators,’ Lantern added dryly.
Proctor sat on the edge of a chair, but he kept the pistol aimed at them. He looked exhausted. He must have come directly here from Arizona the previous night, with little or no rest. His usually pink face was gray and drawn. ‘The volunteers were felons, lifers. The worst of the worst. If you were condemned to spend the rest of your days in a stinking Mexican prison, but you could earn money for luxuries and maybe even time off your sentence, you’d volunteer for just about anything. They were hardened criminals, but this was an inhumane thing I did to them—’
‘A wicked, wicked thing,’ Lantern said, as though admonishing a naughty child.
‘Yes, it was. I admit it. A wicked thing. I was—’
‘So,’ said Dylan impatiently, ‘when some of these prisoners dropped sixty IQ points, like you said, your partners started having nightmares about hordes of attorneys thick as cockroaches.’
‘No. Those who collapsed intellectually or self-destructed in some other manner – they weren’t of concern to us. Prison officials just filled in false information on their death certificates, and no one could link them to us.’
‘Another wicked, wicked thing,’ said Lantern, and clucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘The wicked, wicked things just never stop.’
‘But if someone like Manuel, our firestarter, ever got loose and burned his way through customs at the border, got into San Diego and went nuts there, destroying whole blocks of the city, hundreds if not thousands of people… then maybe we couldn’t distance ourselves from him. Maybe he’d talk about us to someone. Then… liability suits from here to the end of the century.’