Lupin the Third: The Del Monte Ruby

Chapter 27

Inspector Zenigata found himself in a rare instance of sharing a car with Lupin; and not the police escort with the metal grate he would have liked to have between them. Instead, he was a passenger to the wild ride that was Lupin's driving as the Fiat zoomed out of the parking garage and onto the highway.

With every sharp turn, Ruby's head alternately bobbed and bounced off Goemon and Zenigata's shoulders. But when Lupin briefly zipped into oncoming traffic and a truck came bearing down on them with high beams on and horn blaring, Ruby came to with a scream.

"AGGGHHHHH!!!!"

It was unclear whether she was screaming at the oncoming danger or the memory of the last one she had faced before passing out. But as the Fiat careened back into the other lane, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision, Ruby began searching for her seatbelt. But with three people crammed into the backseat of the tiny Fiat, two of them grown men, securing her seatbelt, much less finding it, seemed an impossible task.

"LUPIN!" Zenigata yelled. "Are you trying to kill us! I won't hesitate to add 'reckless driving' to the list of charges against you!"

Lupin rolled his eyes. "Give it a rest, will ya, Pops?"

Ruby carelessly clung to Goemon as she half-turned in her seat. "W-What happened?! Is it chasing us!?"

Goemon, looking quite perturbed, kept his gaze averted. "It is chasing naught but the darkness now."

"It died, kid," Jigen translated. "That thing... it just... died."

"It... died? Just like that? On its own?" Ruby slouched in her seat and pouted. "And I thought I was such a badass," she mumbled. She blinked then, as though recalling something. Ruby sat up a little straighter. "It... it spoke. It was like it was crying out for its mother. That thing really was just a dude, wasn't it?" she said, trying not to shudder.

"Or... just a kid," said Lupin. "He called out 'Herzog' before it died. It was calling out to Aderlass."

Zenigata's face twisted in confusion. "Huh? Aderlass? You mean that German dignitary from the party? Is he a part of this, too?"

"Aderlass was involved in ACCSA, the Agency for the Collection and Containment of Spacebourne Anomaly, the same organization my parents worked for," Ruby explained. She was mostly repeating this for Zenigata's sake. If the inspector was going to be on their side and get Interpol to investigate Del Monte – and with any luck, Aderlass – he needed to be kept in the loop.

"Though I didn't know what the acronym stood for until recently. I only knew that my parents were biochemists and did a lot of, like, R&D stuff. Lupin and I discovered this while doing some research into Del Monte Pharmaceuticals. 'Project Stardust' is where most of the company's stock is, and that was also the name of one of the projects ACCSA was researching."

"Patient Zero," echoed Zenigata. "Del Monte called that monster... 'Patient Zero.' Was that a test subject of this Project Stardust??"

"Seems a safe assumption," said Ruby with a shudder. "Research on Aderlass revealed he's long been a proponent of eugenics. So, I thought that might be what Project Stardust is. But when we attempted to hack into the ACCSA database, we couldn't get in. It was encrypted with this, like, crazy hieroglyphic password. But at the party, I overheard Antony and Herzog discussing a serum and a substance that's so rare science doesn't even know it exists yet. They were discussing the need to perfect the serum and weed out the dangerous side effects."

"I'm guessing that monster was more of a 'side effect' than a perfected specimen," commented Jigen through a cloud of stress-fueled smoke, which he blew out the window.