The Strain (The Strain Trilogy 1)

Eph turned back to his boss. "They have gone home."

"Home?" said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. "To heaven?"

"To their families, Everett."

Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.

"They are dead," said Barnes.

"They aren't dead. At least, not in the way we understand it."

"There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim."

Eph shook his head. "Not anymore."

"Ephraim." Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. "I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles..."

Eph said, "Hold on. I don't think I understand what the hell this is."

The FBI agent said, "This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care."

Eph hid a chill. "Get a court order and I'll answer your questions."

"Maybe you'd like to explain this."

He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.

It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern's throat with the circular blade.

There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.

Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern's body was being held. Then it showed them leaving with a heavy body bag.

The two people looked very much like Eph and Nora.

Playback stopped. Eph looked at Nora-who was shocked-and then at the FBI agent and Barnes. "That was...that attack was edited to look bad. There was a cut there. Redfern had-"

"Where are Captain Redfern's remains?"

Eph couldn't think. He couldn't get past the lie he had just seen. "That wasn't us. The camera was too high to-"

"So are you saying that was not you and Dr. Martinez?"

Eph looked at Nora, who was shaking her head, both of them too mystified to mount any immediate coherent defense.

Barnes said, "Let me ask you one more time, Ephraim. Where are the missing bodies from the morgues?"

Eph looked back to Setrakian, standing near the door. Then at Barnes. He couldn't come up with anything to say.

"Ephraim, I am shutting Canary down. As of this moment."

"What?" said Eph, coming around. "Wait, Everett-"

Eph moved fast, toward Barnes. The other cops started toward him as though he was dangerous, their reaction stopping Eph, alarming him even more.

"Dr. Goodweather, you have to come with us," said the FBI agent. "All of you...hey!"

Eph turned. Setrakian was gone.

The agent sent two cops out to get him.

Eph looked back toward Barnes. "Everett. You know me. You know who I am. Listen to what I am about to tell you. There is a plague spreading throughout this city-a scourge unlike anything we've ever seen."

The FBI agent said, "Dr. Goodweather, we want to know what you injected into Jim Kent."

"What I...what?"

Barnes said, "Ephraim, I have made a deal with them. They will spare Nora if you agree to cooperate. Spare her the scandal of arrest and preserve her professional reputation. I know that you two...are close."

"And how exactly do you know that?" Eph looked around at his persecutors, moving past bewilderment and into anger. "This is bullshit, Everett."

"You are on video attacking and murdering a patient, Ephraim. You have been reporting fantastic test results, unexplained by any rational measurement, unsubstantiated and most likely doctor-manipulated. Would I be here if I had a choice? If you had a choice?"

Eph turned to Nora. She would be spared. She could perhaps fight on.

Barnes was right. For the moment at least, in a room full of lawmen, he had no choice.

"Don't let this slow you down," Eph told Nora. "You may be the only one left who knows what's really happening."

Nora shook her head. She turned to Barnes. "Sir, there is a conspiracy here, whether you are willingly a part of it or not-"

"Please, Dr. Martinez," said Barnes. "Don't embarrass yourself any further."

The other agent packed up Eph's and Nora's laptops. They started walking Eph down the stairs.

At the second-floor hallway, they met the two cops who had gone after Setrakian. They were standing side by side, almost back to back. Handcuffed together.

Setrakian appeared behind the group with his sword drawn. He held its point at the lead FBI agent's neck. There was a smaller dagger in his other hand, also fashioned of silver. He held that one near Director Barnes's throat.

The old professor said, "You gentlemen are pawns in a scheme well beyond your comprehension. Doctor, take this dagger."

Eph took the weapon's handle, holding the point at his boss's throat.

Barnes said, breathlessly, "Good Christ, Ephraim. Have you lost your mind?"

"Everett, this is bigger than you can know. This goes beyond the CDC-beyond regular law enforcement even. There is a catastrophic disease outbreak in this city, the likes of which we have never seen. And that's just the half of it."

Nora came up beside him, reclaiming hers and Ephraim's laptops from the other FBI agent. She said, "I got everything else we need from the office. Looks like we won't be coming back."

Barnes said, "For God's sake, Ephraim, come to your senses."

"This is the job you hired me to do, Everett. To sound the alarm when a public health crisis warrants. We are on the verge of a worldwide pandemic. An extinction event. And somebody somewhere is pulling out all the stops to make damn sure it succeeds."

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

ELDRITCH PALMER switched on a bank of monitors, showing six television news channels. The one in the lower-left-hand box interested him most. He angled his chair up a few degrees and isolated the channel, raising its volume.

The reporter was posted outside the 17th Precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, getting a "No comment" from a police official concerning a rash of missing persons reports being filed throughout the New York area in the past few days. They showed the line of people waiting outside the precinct house, too many to be allowed inside, filling out forms on the sidewalk. The reporter noted that other seemingly unexplained incidents, such as house break-ins in which nothing appeared to have been stolen and no one appeared to be home, were being reported also. Strangest of all was the fact of the failure of modern technology to assist in the search for the missing persons: mobile phones, almost all of which contain traceable GPS technology, had apparently gone missing with their owners. This led some to speculate that people were perhaps willfully abandoning families and jobs, and noted that the spike in disappearances seemed to have coincided with the recent lunar occultation, suggesting a link between the two occurrences. A psychologist then commented on the potential for low-grade mass hysteria in the wake of certain startling celestial events. The story ended with the reporter giving airtime to a teary woman holding up a JCPenney portrait of a missing mother of two.