Lana's Pack
an excerpt

Chapter 7
Monday, 1:44 a.m.

They rolled south on the dark freeway. Two members of his team were asleep in the back seat, while Morris sat in the passenger seat up front. Ray would finish his turn driving in a little while, and then he could try to catch some sleep.

“So, you think our brunette is connected to ART at all?” Morris asked, more making conversation for the sake of helping him to stay alert.

“I don’t know yet. The Berkeley PD hasn’t said yet whether they’ve managed to track down Morgan, but once we have her we might be able to make some connection between them.”

“They checked her apartment; it looks like she’s been gone all weekend. None of her neighbors have seen her since sometime Friday.”

“Any leads on possible associates? Does ART have a web page or something else that might give us names we can check out?”

“Nothing; they’ve rated a few mentions on some other pages, either praising their efforts or blasting their fanaticism, but they don’t have a web presence of their own. So far, too, they’ve been rumored to have involvement in an incident or two, but if any of their members have arrest records, there’s nothing in the system to tie the information to ART.”

“I want to proceed on the assumption that these two dogs were the real target all along, and the other animals were to draw attention away from that. Was the van actually broke down? Or was it just made to look like it?”

He checked his laptop. “The techs at the lab said the lower radiator hose had a leak, and the engine had overheated. She was running straight water in the cooling system, too, and as the leak blew off pressure, the boiling cascaded until there was nothing but steam left in the system.”

“How many perps did they estimate were involved in the break-in?”

“Four, though there was only room in the van to seat the driver and one passenger. The rest of the space was taken up by crates.”

“Okay, so it’s logical they had a second vehicle with the other two, and maybe additional animals. Perhaps our two dogs were in that vehicle, and when the van broke down, they could only carry the two dogs along with the four humans.”

“That would make sense; whether it was a decoy move or not, releasing the other animals did make for a delay while we tracked them down and inventoried them. We wouldn’t have known how many were still missing until we at least had collar tracks on them.”

“Something bothers me, though; if the activists knew about the tracking collars and purposely used the two to draw us away, why did she have the dogs in the truck stop where she dumped the collars? I would have dumped the tracking devices as fast as I could without risking the dogs being seen, but if she had the dogs out for a walk, she wasn’t planning ahead all that much.”

Morris chuckled. “If they’d planned ahead decently at all, they wouldn’t have taken an older, poorly maintained van on that kind of trip. ART isn’t exactly demonstrating the pinnacle of intelligence and strategic thinking, if you know what I mean.”

“Let’s not make the mistake, though, of underestimating our opponents. I’ll be quite happy if they make a really stupid mistake that does a lot of our work for us, but let’s continue to investigate as though we’re going against a team of masterminds. This one is too high of a profile to risk screwing up because we got cocky.”

“So, did Dr. Sonders give you any idea what made any of these animals so valuable or so special?”

He shook his head. “Not at all, and based on those we’ve already recovered, whatever they’ve done to them is so subtle that most folks wouldn’t notice. He did say the animals were classified by the government, so they have to have some kind of modifications or enhancements that are supposed to be kept secret.”

“That whole concept just bothers me. I remember one of the television preachers once saying that he thought if being gay was genetic, then they should use the technology of genetic engineering to eliminate the trait from the human race.”

“Hmm, did he by any chance say where we should draw the line of that kind of thinking? Are we supposed to engineer out any characteristic that someone might consider ‘flawed’ from the human race? Are we all going to someday look alike, and think alike, and act alike because we’ve programmed out all traces of individuality from humanity?”

“Maybe that’s what these animals were; maybe they were experiments in removing various traits from the animals to prove they can delete what they think is wrong with people.” The pitch of his voice was rising from anger. “I once read that one of the birth control advocacy groups had started out with the idea of providing contraceptives to minorities, in order to put the population of those groups into decline. They could be working on scientific genocide.”

Ray placed a firm hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “They could also just as easily be working to eliminate cancer or to program in a genetic defense against another deadly disease. Don’t let your emotions run away on speculation, Morris. I need you to keep your thinking rational and analytical. We’ll have plenty of time later to be angry over any unethical ideas they might have had with their projects.”

“You’re right, though I have to wonder; if these last two dogs were the real target all along, what’s so special about them? What makes them stand out from the other animals we’ve already recovered and didn’t seem different in any tangible way?”