As the October sun dropped lower, the chilly Adirondack night bit at Tremont’s cheeks and seeped through his jacket and trousers. Still, he was in no hurry to go inside. He savored the thick cigar he smoked and the taste of the fifty-year-old Langavulin he sipped. It warmed his blood and coated his throat with a satisfying burn. The Langavulin was perhaps the globe’s finest whiskey, but its heavy peat-smoke flavor and incredibly balanced body were little known outside Scotland. That was because Tremont bought the entire supply each year from the distillery on Islay.
But as he stood in the last golden rays of the sunset on the veranda, it was the wilderness rather than the whiskey that brought a smile to his patrician lips. The pristine lake was only a short canoe portage from overpopulated Raquette. The tall pines swayed gently, and their pungent scent filled the air. In the distance, the naked peak of 5,344-foot Mount Marcy shone like a finger pointing at God.
Tremont had been attracted to the mountains since he had been an unruly teenager in Syracuse. His father, a professor of economics up on the hill at the university, had not been able to control him then any more than the fat-ass chairman of Blanchard could control him now. Both were always insisting upon what could not be done, that no one could do everything he wanted. He had never understood such narrowness. What limitation was there except your imagination? Your abilities? Your daring? The Hades Project itself was an example. If they had known in the beginning what he envisioned, both would have told him it was impossible. No one could do it.
Inwardly he snorted with disgust. They were puny, small men. In a few weeks, the project would be a total success. He would be a total success. Then there would be decades of profits.
Maybe it was because this was the final stage of Hades, but he had found himself occasionally drifting off in reverie, thinking about his long-dead father. In a strange way, his father had been the only man he had ever respected. The old man had not understood his only son, but he had stood by him. As a teen, Tremont had been fascinated by the movie Jeremiah Johnson. He had seen it a dozen times. Then, in the dead of an icy winter, he had taken off for the mountains, determined to live off the land just as Johnson had. Pick berries and dig roots. Hunt his own meat. Fight Indians. Pit himself against the elements in a heroic venture few had the courage or imagination to attempt.
But there had been little that was noble about the experience. He killed two deer out of season with his father’s 30-30 Remington, mistakenly shot at and almost killed some hikers, got violently sick on the wrong berries, and damn near froze to death. Fortunately, because of his missing rifle, parka, and backpack, plus his constant talking about the film, his father had guessed where he had headed. When the forest service wanted to give up the hunt, his father had raged and pushed all the levers of academia and state politics. The result was the forest service grumbled but soldiered on, eventually finding him, miserable and frostbitten, in a cave on the snowy slopes of Marcy.
Despite everything, he counted it as one of the most important experiences of his life. He had learned from the mountain fiasco that nature was hard, indifferent, and no friend to humanity. He had also discovered physical challenge held little allure for him; it was too easy to lose. But his greatest lesson was the critical point of why Johnson had gone to the mountains. At the time, he had thought it was to challenge nature, to fight Indians, to prove manhood. Wrong. It was to make money. The mountain men were trappers, and everything they did and suffered was for one goal— to get rich.
He had never forgotten that. The boldness and simplicity of the goal had shaped his life.
As these thoughts flickered through his mind on the rustic veranda, he realized he wished his father were here for the conclusion of Hades. The old man would finally recognize that a man could do anything he wanted as long as he was smart enough and tough enough. Would his father be proud? Probably not. He laughed aloud. Too bad for the old man. His mother would be, but that was meaningless. Women didn’t count.
Abruptly he came alert. He cocked his head, listening. The chop-chop of helicopter rotors was growing louder. Tremont knocked back his scotch, left his cigar in a large serpentine ashtray to die a natural death, and strode into the enormous high-beamed living room. Peering down from the log walls were the glass eyes of mounted trophy heads. Adirondack wood-and-leather furniture stood on hand-knotted rugs around the walk-in fireplace. Tremont continued past the crackling fire and along a back hall where the aroma of hot baking-powder biscuits scented the air from the kitchen.
Finally he stepped out on the other side of the lodge into the cool dusk. The chopper, a Bell S-92C Helibus, was settling down in a clearing a hundred yards away.
The four men who descended were in their mid-forties or early fifties, like Tremont himself. Unlike Tremont, who was dressed in custom-made chinos, pewter-colored bush shirt, Gore-Tex lined safari jacket, and a broad-brimmed safari hat that hung from its chin strap down his back, they wore expensive, tailored business suits. They were smooth-looking men with the sophisticated manners of the privileged business class.
As the noisy rotors thundered, Tremont greeted each with the broad smile and vigorous handshake of an old friend. The chopper copilot jumped out to unload luggage. Tremont waved toward the lodge and turned to lead his visitors there.
Moments after the Helibus took off into the twilight, a smaller 206B JetRanger III helicopter settled into the clearing. Two men very different from the occupants of the first helicopter stepped from the JetRanger. They wore ordinary, off-the-rack suits no one would look at twice. The tall, swarthy man in the dark blue suit had a pockmarked face with heavy-lidded eyes and a nose as curved and sharp as a scimitar. The round-faced, bland-looking man with the big shoulders and lanky brown hair wore charcoal gray. Neither had luggage. It was not only the ordinary clothes and lack of suitcases that marked them as different. There was something about the way they moved… a trained predatory manner that anyone who knew about such things would recognize as dangerous.
The pair ducked under the JetRanger’s flashing rotors and followed the others toward the lodge.
Although Victor Tremont never looked back, the four other men noticed the last two. They glanced at each other uneasily, as if they had seen both men before.
Nadal al-Hassan and Bill Griffin showed no reaction to either Tremont’s indifference or to the nervousness of the other four. Silently, their gazes swept all around, and they entered the lodge by a different door.
__________
At the long Norwegian banquet table, Victor Tremont and his four guests dined on a feast that could have come from Valhalla itself— wild duck confit with shitaki mushrooms, poached local lake trout, and venison shot by Tremont himself, with braised Belgian endive, potatoes dauphin, and a Rhone Hermitage reduction sauce. Flushed and sated, the men chose overstuffed chairs in the vast living room. They indulged in cognac, Remy Martin Cordon Bleu, and cigars— Cuban Maduros made exclusively for Tremont. After they were settled in around the blazing fire, Tremont finished his status report on the project that had consumed their imaginations, hopes, and lives for the last dozen years.
“…we’d always hypothesized the mutation would take place in the American subjects as much as a year later than it did in the non-American subjects. A matter of general health, nutrition, physical fitness, and genetics. Well…”
Tremont paused for emphasis and to study their faces. They had all been with him from the start— a year after he had returned from Peru with the odd virus and the monkeys’ blood. There was George Hyem far off to the right, like a wing gunner. Tall and ruddy, in those days he had been a young accountant who had seen the financial potential instantly. Now he was chief accountant for Blanchard while actually working for Tremont. Next to him was Xavier Becker, going to fat, a computer genius who had shortened research on improving the virus and the serum by five years. Opposite Tremont sat Adam Cain, postdoc virologist who had seen George’s numbers and decided his future was with Blanchard and Tremont, rather than with the CDC. He had found a way to isolate the lethal mutated virus and keep it stable for as much as a week. On Becker’s other side was Blanchard’s security chief, Jack McGraw, who had covered all their asses from the start.