Free Revolution by J.S. Frankel Page B

secrets
stay with me.”
    The room was large, white-walled and sterile
smelling. As Harry walked in, he automatically took in the details.
A large wooden table stood in the center of the room with a number
of chairs around it and ashtrays on top. A few laptops sat on the
shelves in the far corner. Three glass cabinets that contained
surgical instruments. That was it for the furniture, with the
exception of the receptacles for the dead.
    A heavy odor of disinfectant hung in the air.
“Ordinarily, we don’t need disinfectant, but this is summer and the
bodies have begun to decay,” Bartok said.
    He walked over to the wall where the deceased
were ensconced in their temporary metal shells. He pulled one open
and removed the sheet. Half a man was on the slab, the right side
of him. The left side was missing, all of it, from head to toe.
Dried blood kept the intact half stuck to the cold metal. Istvan
immediately turned away and Harry suddenly experienced a bout of
nausea. He fought it down. Tossing his lunch wouldn’t help
things.
    “Jesus,” Farrell whispered. “Who was this?”
That comment seemed to sum it all up.
    With an air of detachment, Bartok waved at
the body. “This happened two days ago. His name is Tomas Marucz, a
farmer near Gemenc. He was killed at night. Unfortunately, there
were no witnesses. Naturally, we conducted an investigation, but
there were no prints, no leads and no way to find the killers.”
    At first, Harry chalked up the Hungarian army
guy as being a cold fish, but then figured that he was used to
seeing death up close and personal. Harry had been forced to
kill—once—when he faced off against Piotr. He had no taste for
killing. He’d only done so in order to save his life. After viewing
this corpse, he had the feeling that a lot more death would be
coming his way.
    Bartok pulled the sheet over the head of the
corpse and slid the tray back into the cigar tube. He pulled out a
pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit one and blew out a
plume of blue-gray smoke. Anastasia pulled a face. “You have to do
that here?”
    “I will smoke near a vent.”
    He took an ashtray from the table, went to
the corner and pressed a button. The sound of a whirring fan
started. The offending smoke got sucked away. He waved them to the
chairs, and they sat down and waited while he smoked in silence.
Finally, he ground out the butt in the ashtray.
    Upon taking his seat at the table, he let out
a sigh. “We had heard of secret laboratories and experiments in the
past, but were never able to find them. It was a certainty that the
research was exclusively Russian.”
    “How do you know that?” Harry asked.
    Bartok cast a quick glance at Farrell. “Your
American superior provided me with the documents. They indicated
that this research goes back as far as your father. Is that
correct?”
    “Yeah, it is.” Harry’s father had been one of
the foremost transgenic researchers in the world up until roughly
one year earlier, but he’d confined his research to fruits and
vegetables. After he passed away prematurely from cancer, Harry had
continued the research, furthered it, but he’d never tried to
combine human and animal DNA. The Russians had, and monstrosities
were the result. “I guess I’m the resident expert here.”
    “You contacted the Russians, though, right?”
asked Anastasia, breaking through Harry’s moment of
self-reflection. She then shut up as Farrell speared her with a
glance that read I’m conducting this investigation. “Sorry,”
she muttered.
    “Well?” Farrell prompted.
    Bartok gave a brief nod. “We did, but they
are having troubles of their own. They’ve had twice as many deaths
as we have in the last few months. They can only share information,
the information they have received from you. There have been other
reports from Serbia. We...” a look of fear temporarily crossed his
normally stoic features, “do not know what to do.”
    Harry and Anastasia exchanged