Class Fives: Origins (4 page)

Beneath his feet was a thick stew of brackish water and rotting vegetation. Around him the scorched, bare trunks of endless trees jutted sadly up at the empty sky.

He paused, sensing his stationary weight driving him down a few inches into the sludge that surrounded his boots, and slowly turned his head to scan the endless horizon. It was just past noon. He’d been stumbling his way through this muck since just after sunrise, when he’d left the strange little tracked vehicle resting in the first few inches of stinking groundwater that squished beneath its treads.

Was that ten kilometers back? More?

He would allow himself one more hour before he turned back. With luck that would give him enough daylight to make it back to the vehicle, where he could rest and then try to find another path toward where the sensitive instruments built into the conveyance told him his goal lay.

He unclipped his canteen from his thick belt and took a deep swallow.

He knew it could get hot in parts of his motherland, but he never imagined it could be like this. It was like standing in an oven.

But he was being paid handsomely and that crushed all other considerations. If a few days of misery would provide him with a bit of financial stability, particularly in the economic chaos that was Russia since the collapse of the Communist regime, then it was well worth it.

Snapping the canteen back onto his belt, he unclipped the bulky electronic device and slipped the power switch to “on”. He needed to take another reading to make sure he was traveling in the right direction.

The small computer powered up, its screen filling with the various blips of awakening software, and finally stabilized on the menu screen.

He thumbed the small arrow buttons to select the tracker, and the screen was replaced by rows of numbers showing his exact position on the planet, thanks to the many satellites orbiting the earth and talking to the little device he now held. But then the target location data rows began to blink.

Grigori drew the device closer, his brows contracting in concentration.

The rows of data showing the location of the target, based on very precise remote reading of a very unique energy signature it was emitting, were doing something very strange. The first line of the data showed the longitude of where the energy signature was being detected in degrees, minutes and seconds. The second line displayed the same data for latitude. What was strange was that the numbers representing the seconds of both axis kept changing. They would race up by a few tens, then drop down by a few tens, always hovering within the same degree and minute.

Now what the Hell
does that mean, he asked himself.

He hadn’t been told to expect anything like this. The entire job was to come out to this godforsaken nothingness, deep in the heart of the continent, and simply locate the origin point of the energy and plant the electronic beacon, that was all.

Only whatever it was that was being tracked was apparently moving, more or less all around him. That did not make Grigori feel comfortable. He had known about Chernobyl from childhood and that things you can’t see, hear, taste, touch or smell, can kill you stone dead in very unpleasant ways.

He had to call this in. He thought a moment. If it’s noon here, then…

He would most likely wake him up. But there was no choice. He was standing in the middle of this wilderness of vegetable stew, the day was racing along and he did not want to have to face the idea of spending the night in a place where one literally could not lie down, or even have anything firm to lean against.

Reaching into the large pocket on his thigh, he removed the slightly bulky satellite cellular phone and pressed speed dial for the only number programmed into it.

It rang only twice before it was answered.

“Yes?” the voice said, and Grigori could hear the calm alertness in the tone. He hadn’t been asleep, even though it was the dead of the night where he was.

“Sir?” Grigori said, “it’s Grigori. Grigori Flezoff.”

“I know,” the voice replied. “What can I assist you with?”

“Sir,” Grigori began slowly casting his gaze around to take in the desolation of his surroundings, “I’m in the marshes right now. About ten kilometers from the vehicle. I couldn’t get it any further in so I had to come on foot.”

“Go on,” the voice responded calmly.

“Well, it’s the instrument. The one you gave me. The locator device. I think it’s experiencing a malfunction.”

“Explain,” the voice said, now slightly more focused.

“Well, it’s the target numbers. The reading for the seconds. They keep changing.”

“Changing how?”

“Going up and down. It looks like between zero zero seven up to six one three or so, and then back down, over and over.”

“Longitude or latitude?”

“Both, sir.”

There was a long pause and for a moment Grigori thought he might have lost the connection.

“Sir? Are you there?”

“Describe your surroundings,” the voice said, now with a hint of tension.

“They stink, sir. What a terrible place this is. And it’s endless, in all directions.”

“Describe it,” and now there was growing annoyance in the tone and the hint of clenching teeth.

“Well, it’s a swamp. I don’t know how deep but it feels spongy under my boots. And it’s full of dead plants.”

“Are there trees?” the voice interrupted.

“Yes sir. Or what’s left of them. They are all… burned, sir. Long ago. And they are brittle, like charcoal. Just these needles of black in all directions. I can smell the charring.”

“Grigori, listen to me,” the voice cut in.

“Yes sir.”

“Place the beacon and activate it.”

“Now, sir?”

“Yes, now. Right where you are. Stay on the phone while you do so.”

“Okay, wait a moment.”

Grigori fumbled with the phone, momentarily glancing around for a place to put it and realizing there simply wasn’t one, then gently slipped it back into the wide pocket and shrugged his shoulders to slip off the small backpack. He swung it around and undid the strap buckles, tossing back the flap to reveal the oddly egg-shaped metal object inside.

He tried to grip it to pull it from the confines of the pack, but then realized that if he was planting it here, he wouldn’t need the pack, and simply scooped the object into his palm and shook the pack from around it, discarding it into the slime by his side.

His employer had explained what to do with the beacon, how to extend the long, spindly legs, how to activate its power supply. Strangely, he hadn’t actually explained how to turn the thing on.

He managed to get the long, thin metal legs extended and drove them into the thick stew at his feet. At first he thought it would simply sink into the slime, perhaps wind up floating on it, but it sagged only an inch further once he released it and then became still and stable.

He flipped the small switch on the side of the object, activating something within it.

Grigori dug into the pocket, extracting the phone.

“Okay, sir,” he said, “The device is placed and activated. Now what?”

“Now you must walk at least sixty paces away from it and stop. I’ll tell you how to turn it on, but you mustn’t be standing near it when you do. It emits something you really don’t want to be close to. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Grigori replied, a little unnerved at the slight, sudden quiver in his own voice.

He began moving, briskly though not quite hurrying, back along the path he had taken to this place.

“So, this is all you need from me?” he said into the phone, more to just keep himself calm and focused against the increasing nervousness about things emitted from unknown devices he was about to unleash. “I am available for other work if you wish.”

“Thank you, Grigori, I shall bear that in mind.”

“So what is this thing you are looking for? And why did the tracking device go bad?”

“It didn’t malfunction. Far from it. It is giving the most accurate readings it can, based on the locally sampled data.”

“But what does it mean? The numbers going up and down like that?”

“It means,” the voice replied, and there was a kind of quiet in the tone, “That you have found it, Grigori. It’s all around you. In fact, you’re standing on it.”

Grigori hesitated, his step catching.

“Standing on it?”

“Yes.”

“Standing on what, sir? What is it?”

For the first time the voice on the other end of the line emitted a small, quiet chuckle.

“It would be a little difficult to explain, I’m afraid. But suffice it to say it has to do with energy. Large amounts of it. The trees around you, for example. At one time, a few decades ago, it discharged a large amount of energy. Enough to char the trees.”

“Energy,” Grigori repeated thoughtfully. Of course, he realized. Energy. Petroleum. Oil. The whole of Russia was supposed to be full of the stuff. And this mysterious man to whom he’d only ever spoken on the phone, was an American. That explains it, he decided. He’s an oil prospector, and I’m just the donkey that’s carrying his equipment for him, taking it here and there while he sits at home in some plush office somewhere in the US and directs me like a monkey on a string.

For the first time he began to consider that maybe he should have asked for more money. The whole trip had been long and grueling just to get here, and now that he’d pinpointed what must be a vast fortune in oil, maybe he could request a little bonus.

“Where are you now?” the voice said patiently.

Grigori cast a glance back toward where the device was planted. He could barely make it out amid the blackened spikes of the dead trees.

“About a hundred meters away from it.”

“Excellent. You can stop now.”

Grigori stopped and turned fully toward where the little glimmer of the metal sides of the device was barely visible in the distance.

“I’ve stopped,” he said.

“Now,” the voice instructed, carefully, “Take the tracker device and enter this code. Six, one, seven, eight, five, then press Enter.”

Grigori fumbled the phone around and plucked the tracker from his belt, glancing at the screen. The numbers of the seconds continued to rise up and down steadily. He punched in the code and pressed Enter. A small red light he hadn’t noticed since he’d been using the device suddenly lit up and began to blink, and the Enter key itself lit up with a dull yellow glow.

Grigori fumbled the phone up to his ear.

“Ok, it’s blinking a little red light now.”

“Is the Enter key illuminated?”

“Yes, it’s lit up.”

“Good. Please press it.”

“And that will turn on the device?”

“It will.”

“Okay, hang on.”

Grigori fumbled the tracker around to place his thumb on the Enter key and pressed it.

From a distance it would have appeared odd. The sudden, bright blossoming of the first blast as the tracker detonated, followed an instant later by the smaller blast of the cell phone and, within a second, the much larger, distant detonation of the vehicle. Within a few seconds the flaming debris that had been Grigori Flezoff, and all that he had brought into this barren place, had dropped into the water and sizzled out.

The oddly egg-shaped beacon began to emit its signal.

Dr. Montgomery slowly placed the handset back into the cradle, his hand remaining on it a moment as he contemplated.

He’d found it. After all this time, he’d finally tracked it down. The information he had taken decades to collect had proven correct. Rumors, hints, vague bits and pieces of stray data, had combined into something solid. And now that the beacon had been placed he could turn his attention to the next component. Only a few more to go now, he told himself. He was getting close. It really was going to happen. He was going to make it happen.

He leaned back in the chair and raised a hand to stroke his chin absently. This time it would work. He would make it work, because he was so much smarter, so much more brilliant than Korillan had been. And in the three and more decades since that first experiment, the increases in the power of technology of all kinds had provided him with the means to make sure it was fully functional.

He glanced at his watch. Hours until dawn yet. He would call and start the next task. For now, time to sleep.

He rose from behind the desk and reached down to snap off the small lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

John sat in his car, leaned back against the worn seat, an elbow propped on the sill of the open window, a hand absently stroking his face as he turned the thoughts over and over in his mind.

He somehow felt that he should know of some way to deal with this situation, but he simply couldn’t think of anything that would solve it, make it go away and just leave him alone.

I’m just an ordinary guy, he thought. I’ve never been in trouble before, at least not like this. Never been arrested, hardly ever even stopped for a traffic ticket. And now the police were looking for him. And he hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really. But how could he prove it?

There’s nothing that prepares you for this, he thought. It’s not like the movies where the innocent hero gets thrust into some insane situation and somehow manages to pull himself out with some fancy footwork and a few car chases. This was his actual life. A life that was now threatened for no damn good reason.

It wasn’t like he could simply disappear. How would he manage that? He didn’t have some secret stash of crisp hundred dollar bills in some safe deposit box somewhere, along with passports and driver’s licenses in different names. Everything he owned was in his apartment or somewhere in this car. And now he didn’t even dare to go home, for fear of finding a black and white cruiser parked outside just waiting for him.

He considered simply driving out of the city, finding some quiet, rural corner somewhere and sleeping in his car again tonight. But then what? What would he do tomorrow? And the day after?

And what had he done that had been so terrible? He’d saved a life, that’s all. He’d prevented a death.

And look what it got you, he heard his mind argue back at him.