The Ghost Pattern (14 page)

...36

...Sunday, May 8, 7:56PM Local Time (UTC+3:00 hours)

...Vitaliy Myatlev’s Residence

...Moscow, Russia

...Eleven Days Missing

Myatlev gave his half-smoked cigar a disappointed, frustrated look, as he rolled it between his thumb and index finger. A wave of humid heat had taken over Moscow, and the polluted, stinking haze ruined his smoking enjoyment, bringing a faint smell of gasoline exhaust to the otherwise perfect Arturo Fuente cigar.

He flicked the cigar over the terrace railing and leaned back in his lounge chair, thinking, letting his mind wonder, reliving the bear attack. He could have delayed taking that shot just a few seconds, and it could have been no more Abramovich. No more unstable, moody, arrogant bastard to order him around and tell him what he could and couldn’t do. No more having to go to work in his office at the Ministry of Defense. No more fear of having the president’s favor turn into persecution, and no more threat of Siberia looming over his head. It would have been an easy, clean kill, brought to him as a peace offering from destiny itself. Abramovich’s life, offered to him on a silver plate, and he chose to save that life.

Yet, in the heat of the moment, he’d chosen to pull that trigger and save the bastard, and he didn’t regret it. Despite his unpredictable stubbornness, Abramovich was worth more to Myatlev alive than dead. The possibilities were endless, his to explore, materialize, and reap benefits from.

Even if that meant, every now and then, yielding to the bastard’s will and doing what he was told.

“
Tvoyu mat
,” he muttered under his breath, then called out, “Ivan!”

Ivan instantly appeared out of nowhere.

“
Da
?”

“Blow up that 747, Ivan, and do it soon,” he said, feeling his jaws clenching at the thought of it. Such a waste…a senseless, stupid, cowardly waste. But blatantly disobeying a direct order from Abramovich and irritating him wasn’t an option.

“Sir?”

“Yes, yes, you heard me,” Myatlev confirmed. “And you heard Abramovich yesterday. It has to get done. ”

Myatlev stood up, straining, feeling a pinch under the right side of his ribcage. Maybe it was time to give his liver a checkup. So much stress wasn’t good for anyone, and the vodka didn’t help, but he wasn’t going to stop living before actually dying.

“Send someone you trust, Ivan,” he continued. “Tell him to pack it with C4 and blow it up.”

“Yes, sir,” Ivan acknowledged. “Consider it done.”

“Route a satellite over it and record the explosion, in case Abramovich wants to see some proof.”

Ivan nodded, getting ready to leave.

A cunning smile appeared on Myatlev’s lips. “Tell your man to collect some of the plane’s debris after the explosion, and take that out to sea. Tell him to throw that debris in the water near where they said it crashed. This way they’ll stop looking.”

Ivan smiled widely.

“Consider it done,” he repeated before leaving.

...37

...Sunday, May 8, 10:26AM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...Tom Isaac’s Residence

...Laguna Beach, California

...Eleven Days Missing

A feverish sense of anticipation anxiety crept up on all of them, as they watched the hours slip by and counted each hour obsessively, waiting for DigiWorld’s call to come in with a possible location. They responded to that anxiety in different ways, suited to their individual personalities.

Sam smoked, playing with the smoke as it left his lungs, at times competing with Steve in the art of blowing the perfect smoke ring. Was cigarette smoke better than cigar smoke when it came to smoke rings? They debated that for almost forty minutes, driving Alex crazy.

Blake analyzed the news, as he did with every chance he got, looking to the media for any new information about the missing plane. By the bleak look on his face, there was nothing new in the press.

Tom had started heating up the grill, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, but that was Tom’s stress relief; he liked to cook.

Alex had nothing to do, just paced back and forth on the patio, occasionally biting on her right index fingernail, so unsettled she couldn’t even sit down. How much longer would they have to wait? Were they still going to find the passengers alive? Or just piled up in a superficial mass grave somewhere? If the UNSUB had taken the plane to get a hold of nine neuroscientists, what about the rest of the people? What had become of them? If satellite scans failed, what other means would she have to find the missing XA233? Has she been wrong all this time, focusing on Russia? Had she been wasting time and people’s lives on her obsession with V? Damn waiting…There were too many questions and not enough answers, and it pissing her off.
I hate this powerlessness shit,
she thought.
Now I’m almost like Lou, I just wanna shoot whoever took that damn plane.

“Hey, I got us a crew,” Lou said cheerfully, coming out in the backyard with some papers in his hand.

They gathered around him hastily. Finally, some damn news.

“OK, here it is,” Lou said, showing them his notes. “We have a crew of fourteen standing by, with two choppers, ready to fly in when we call them. They didn’t seem overly preoccupied with operating behind the Russian border.”

“American?” Alex asked. “Or Japanese?”

“American. There’s an American military base in Wakkanai, at the northern tip of the Japanese islands. These guys, Dark Ravens they’re called, are a contractor with troops over there. Starting tomorrow morning at 0600 they’re on the clock, and that’s costing us $160,000 a day, whether we use them or not.”

“Whoa,” Alex said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Blake dismissed her reaction to the cost of the operation. “I just wish we knew where to tell them to go.”

“Will fourteen be enough?” Alex asked, thinking of Lou’s estimation of potentially fifty armed forces working for the UNSUB.

After a quick moment of silence, he frowned a little, and then replied, “They’ll have to be.”

...38

...Monday, May 9, 10:24AM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

...Undisclosed Location

...Russia

...Twelve Days Missing

Dr. Adenauer sat on a lab stool, hunched over the tile-covered table, rubbing his forehead obsessively. He couldn’t do what they asked; yet he had to. There was no way out. All these people were there, enduring captivity because of him, so if his soul was going to burn in the hell of his conscience, then so be it.

He stood and walked toward the cot where Declan Mallory lay, breathing shallowly and sweating profusely. The heat was unbearable; it was getting hotter from one day to the next, and that made it even worse for Mallory. Every breath he took must have been excruciatingly painful, regardless of the improvised pain medication they’d been able to offer. Luckily, so far there didn’t seem to be any evidence of internal bleeding, a common side effect of the type of trauma he’d been subjected to.

Dr. Adenauer summoned everyone to join him around Dr. Mallory’s cot.

“There’s no other option,” he spoke, his voice heavy with the burden of conscience. “We have to increase the strength of the compound.”

“No, you can’t do that!” Gary Davis said. “They’re people, for God’s sake; you can’t test that on people! You could kill them!”

Dr. Adenauer rubbed his creased forehead again.

“Don’t you think I know that?” he snapped. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else. But what you fail to understand is that if they decide we’re worthless to their…their quest for this drug, they will kill us all. All of us, including the hundreds of others who were on that plane. Everybody.”

His words fell heavy, bringing deafening silence with them. He knew he was right, and he knew he was the one who needed to make the difficult decisions the rest couldn’t stomach.

“Can’t we at least find a way to test safely?” Gary Davis insisted. “Can we ask for lab rats?”

That made sense; Adenauer had to admit, although the precise dosing of the compound in their makeshift lab would probably pose some issues. It did make sense, nevertheless.

He approached King Cobra, who was watching them from a distance, with his eyes half closed, succumbed to the heat.

“Tell your boss we need lab rats,” Adenauer said firmly, “and by that I mean rodents, not people.”

...39

...Monday, May 9, 1:31AM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...DigiWorld Corporate Headquarters

...Los Angeles, California

...Twelve Days Missing

Despite the very late hour, none of them felt anything but eager anticipation. Alex had been so anxious to get there after receiving the call, that she didn’t even replenish her coffee. She’d just grabbed her jacket and left, waiting for Blake and Lou with her engine running, muttering “C’mon, c’mon,” every ten seconds.

Now the three of them stood in front of DigiWorld’s huge screens, squinting hard and trying to see what the operator was saying.

“We’ve brought you here,” the operator said, “because we’ve captured an image, a ghost as we call it. See? It’s right here.”

They stared some more, but were unable to discern anything.

“It's a faint haze, almost thin as clouds, but the haze shown on the image is displayed in a pattern compatible with that of a plane,” the operator clarified. She looked very young for her job, but seemed sure of herself.

“Where?” Alex asked.

The operator moved her mouse and circled a certain area on the huge screen that showed a stretch of forested land with small puddles of water, maybe a swamp.

“Right here, see? This is where we think we have what we call a ghost pattern.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that while it’s not really the discernible image of a plane, this haze has a few points in common with the plane’s shape. It’s almost as if we captured the ghost of the plane…that’s why we call these types of images ghost patterns. They look like wisps of thin cloud. Umm…they look just like how ghosts are shown in the movies, but match the pattern, the shape of our search subject, the 747-400.”

She touched a few keys and grabbed the image of a 747-400 from a library of images. Then she rotated it a little around the horizontal and vertical axes, positioning it at a certain angle, then overlapped it on top of the ghost pattern she was seeing.

The screen flickered green dots where the two images matched. There were twelve green dots on the screen, blinking.

Blake was holding his breath. “What does this mean?” he asked, pointing at the screen.

“It means we’ve found your plane, Mr. Bernard. It’s hidden under something, it’s shallow, not buried deep, yet still hidden somehow. Because the plane itself is hollow, not solid, the resonance scanner sees it as a ghost pattern rather than a solid, well-contoured shape. But it’s there.”

“Bring the satellite to focus on that area, as close and high-res as possible,” Alex said. “Give me maximum zoom; let’s see what we can learn about that place. Lou,” she turned toward him, “can you see if there are any drones in Japan we could use? Maybe that military base has some?”

“I’m on it, boss,” he replied, yanking his cell phone out of his pocket and taking a few steps away to make his call without disturbing anyone. “If I remember correctly, NanoLance had a testing program in place in Japan, a dual research project on fully automated UCAVs. I happen to know some people,” he added with a wink, “I’ll make some calls.”

“Where exactly is this place?” Alex asked.

The operator zoomed out, the ghost pattern turning into a tiny red dot on the map.

“It’s in Russia, 200 miles inland from the Sea of Japan coastline, near a small town called Mayak. It’s an abandoned airbase. Has an airstrip too.”

“Get me high-resolution angular shots,” Alex asked the operator. “Let’s see who and what’s down there. Prepare for a long night.”

...40

...Monday, May 9, 8:22PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

...Undisclosed Location

...Russia

...Twelve Days Missing

Dr. Adenauer finished injecting the third rat with the compound, then picked up a second syringe, and gave the squirming little animal a second shot.

“This is the antidote,” he explained to the small group in attendance.

The group included Gary Davis, Marie-Elise Chevalier, Klaas Fortuin, and Wu Shen Teng. One-Eye was also observing, any attempt to keep him away or distracted having failed miserably, yielding only angry grunts from the taciturn gorilla.

Dr. Adenauer finished injecting the antidote, then marked the rat with a touch of methylene blue on its white coat, making it easy to identify from the others. Then he placed the rat in the same cage with the other two he had injected earlier.

Minutes passed in silence, while nothing remarkable happened in the rat cage. The test subjects behaved like normal rats, sniffing, chewing on the occasional speck of dirt, moving around in the cage, but ignoring one another.

Then suddenly one rat jumped at another, making a barely audible growl. It attacked the other animal fiercely, plunging its teeth in the other’s throat, while its front claws tore at the victim’s belly. The other rat fought back as hard as it could, tearing pieces of the attacker’s coat with its claws, gurgling sounds coming out of its throat as the attacker squeezed its jaws tighter, killing it. The rat bearing a blue mark on the back of its neck stood trembling in the corner of the cage, watching the fight with big, round, beady eyes.

Within seconds, the fight was over, leaving one dead rat in a pool of blood, another one heaving and dying from a deep laceration that had cut open its abdomen, and a third, alive, unharmed, but paralyzed with fear.

“May God forgive us all,” Dr. Chevalier said quietly, holding her hand over her mouth, as if to smother a scream of horror.

“He won’t,” Dr. Adenauer replied through clenched teeth.

“Great job,” One-Eye spoke. “I will tell my boss,” he added, then left the room.

They stared at the scene in front of them, unable to move or react. Dr. Adenauer picked up some gauze, soaked it in alcohol, and began cleaning the spray of blood that had stained the table around the cage.

“The dose was too concentrated,” Bogdanov spoke, startling everyone. He had entered the lab unheard and unseen, while they were only paying attention to the horrible aftermath of their test. “We want them aggressive, but not like this. We want control. We want the rage to appear natural; I’ve told you that. What are you going to do?”

He was actually waiting for an answer, making sure they understood they had to deliver.

Theo Adenauer cleared his throat, still choked after he’d watched the experiment, and offered a plan.

“We could try slow-release capsules next, to see if it’s the strength of the compound, or the delivery mechanism that allows the best control.”

“We need the compound aerosolized,” Bogdanov replied. “How are slow-release capsules going to help with that? Reduce the concentration and try again. What are you using?”

“SSREs,” Adenauer replied, surprised. It was the first time Bogdanov had asked any technical question about their work.

“Decrease the strength, but add some steroids, maybe it will help,” Bogdanov replied. “You’re supposed to know that. Is this rat the one injected with the antidote?” he asked, pointing at the survivor.

“Y–yes,” Adenauer hesitated, unsure where he was going with that.

“They need to attack the non-violent test subjects, not each other. Fix that.”

“How?” Adenauer asked, surprised at the request.

“You world-famous researchers figure it out. You have 24 hours, or else he starts dying,” Bogdanov replied, pointing toward the cot where Declan Mallory lay on his back. “I think I have already taken care of a few ribs, yes
?
Only 24 hours, that’s it. Then I continue breaking his bones, one at a time.”