Extinction (29 page)

He picked up the phone and dialled a number he had memorized long ago.

‘Beltway Security Systems, how may I help you?’ a cheerful female voice answered.

Reluctantly, Ward explained the situation and asked for help.

Alyssa hung up, smiled at Jack, and zipped up her Beltway Security Systems fleece.

Back at the mall, Jack had not only spent time in the internet café learning how to make fake IDs; he had infected the live, internet-connected part of the DoD’s internal mainframe with a virus. He had also found out which external companies were used to deal with hacking and virus problems, and discovered that one communications security contractor was used almost exclusively.

Beltway Security Systems was based just outside the capital and did a wide range of work for the government, and for top multinational firms in the area. Its own security systems were good, but Jack had nevertheless managed to get his and Alyssa’s new identities registered on to the company’s database as long-term employees.

Jack knew that when the virus was detected, procedure would dictate that the DoD’s own internal people would try and deal with it, and when they failed – as Jack was confident they would – they would contact Beltway Security Systems and arrange for contractors to come in and deal with the problem. He had hacked Beltway’s telephone system to redirect calls from the DoD’s computer centre to one of the cellphones Alyssa had bought. Pretending to be the Beltway control centre operator, she had taken Colonel Ward’s direct number and told him a senior technician would call him back immediately. Ward had demurred, demanding the technician’s number instead, which Alyssa had provided.

As they reached the car, Jack’s own phone began to ring.

‘You’re on,’ Alyssa told him, and Jack answered as he opened the car door.

‘Dave Jenkins, Beltway,’ Jack said, sliding into the passenger seat.

He listened to the voice on the other end for some time before speaking himself. ‘Yes, sir, I understand. You’ve been passed through to me because my colleague and I are only twenty minutes away. We’ll take a look, report back to Beltway, and then decide what sort of resources need to be mobilized.’

There was another pause before Jack gave the details of their new identities, including their employment codes at Beltway. He knew Ward would check the names against Beltway’s database, but was confident their new identities would be there; security passes would be duly issued.

‘Yes, sir,’ Jack said again, before hanging up and turning to Alyssa, who was manoeuvring the car on to the highway. ‘He’s sending a man to meet us at the east gate. He’ll escort us straight to the offices of the Cyber Warfare Division.’

Alyssa smiled. ‘We’re in.’

O
SWALD
U
MBEBE SURVEYED
the young men and women in front of him with pride.

They came from all over the world, members of elite special operations forces from a huge variety of countries. Indeed, some of the men and women in this room would once upon a time have been sworn enemies of one another. They may even have faced each other across a hostile battlefield, Umbebe considered as he appraised them. But not now. Now they were brothers and sisters, united within the Order of Planetary Renewal. True believers, all of them.

Some had been with him from the start, others had been recruited more recently. But all could be trusted, Umbebe was sure of that. He had a sixth sense for such things.

They were at a disused military airfield, which was to be the staging ground for the next phase of Umbebe’s strategy. The travel had not agreed with him, and his condition was getting steadily worse. He was in a great deal of pain now, almost constantly. And yet he didn’t let it trouble him. Why would he? There wasn’t long left for any of them anyway.

He had nearly forty soldiers in this personal attack force, all elite commandos. There would be other elements in the background too, a further sixty men and women with military experience to deal with logistics and security, but the soldiers in front of him now would be the spearhead.

The main attack force would come in four sections of eight commandos, with another section in reserve. Umbebe had rented land further south where the team had been rehearsing the attack for weeks. They had been at this airfield for the past two weeks, training and acclimatizing to the altitude and freezing temperatures. As Umbebe walked up and down their lines, he could see that they were ready.

‘My brothers and sisters,’ he intoned, ‘true believers. The time has almost come for us to make the supreme sacrifice. You are all experts in your field, selected and trained to be the best. And you are.’ He nodded his head to them. ‘It is time now to use those skills to achieve our ultimate aim. The rebirth of our planet!’

Umbebe could see that some of the commandos wanted to cheer but were held in check by military discipline.

‘You will have to kill,’ he continued. ‘We will all have to kill. And, likewise, we will all have to die. But we do so knowing it is for a better world! A new world, free of human vice, industry, pollution; a world where nature will once more reign supreme, allowing the green lung to fill again, to breathe once more.’

Symbolically, he breathed in deeply. ‘Ah, to breathe air that is clean and fresh. This is what we give to the world. Mankind will be driven from the planet but, if fate decrees it, we will rise again, perhaps wiser than we are today. But that,’ he said, raising his arms skyward, ‘is not in our hands. What will be, will be. Our sole duty is to purge this diseased earth, to wipe the slate clean so that life can start anew and afresh. This is our divine responsibility, and I thank you, my brothers and sisters, for joining me on this crusade.’

His hand went to his chest, his head bowed, and the hundred men and women gathered on the airfield did the same. After a few moments of quiet reflection, Umbebe raised his head to address the crowd one final time. ‘Our mission is sacred, let us never forget that. We will die so that the earth may live!’

He raised one fist high into the air in a gesture of defiance, letting out an animal roar that pierced the cold blue sky beyond.

And, despite the pain in his stomach, he smiled with undiluted joy when his chosen people raised their own fists in return, letting out their own screams of joy, pride, exultation and defiance.

Yes
, he thought to himself,
they are ready
.

Now all he needed were the codes.

Anderson stood at the edge of the river, seething with anger. The dogs had lost the trail.

They had followed the scent for over twenty miles, right into the forest, tracking the fugitives through the trees and undergrowth. But then they’d got to the river – a wide, fast-running monster – and the dogs had come to a dead halt.

Durham and Murray hadn’t trekked along the riverbank, that much Anderson could be sure. But had they swum to the other side? With the water as fast as it was, he wasn’t sure if the pair could have made it. Still, he reasoned, adrenalin was a powerful thing. He’d send a team across with the dogs to check the other bank just to be sure.

Another possibility was that they’d tried to swim across and been swept downstream. Where did the river go? Anderson checked the map he carried, saw quickly that it led to a waterfall a couple of miles further down. Could they have survived if they’d gone over the side? He just didn’t know.

Quickly, he organized his search teams into two groups; one would search this bank downstream and try and pick up the scent in case they’d managed to get to shore, either before or after the waterfall, while the other would try and get across the river to do the same on the other side.

Until he had evidence to the contrary, Anderson had to assume that they were still alive. Certainly, no bodies had been reported having washed up anywhere recently.

‘Colonel!’ came an excited voice from behind him, and Anderson turned to see one of his men racing from the trees. ‘We’ve found evidence of a gunfight in the forest!’

‘What?’ Anderson asked with sudden interest.

‘We’ve got casings for various different weapons, handguns and rifles, as well as shotgun shells. Damage to trees and foliage too, in keeping with a firefight. Well, a one-way firefight anyway,’ the soldier continued. ‘This early it’s hard to tell, but it looks like the gunfire was just going one way.’

‘Anything else?’ Anderson asked.

The soldier nodded. ‘We’ve got some blood in a small clearing, and some sort of man-made hole in the ground, with a tarp sheet to one side.’

‘What’s inside?’ Anderson asked.

‘Nothing,’ the soldier replied. ‘It’s empty.’

Anderson thought for a moment before giving his orders. ‘OK, here’s what I want to see happen. We’ve got a gang of armed people in these woods, and I want them found. That blood’s not from our targets or the dogs would have picked it up, so that means one of their party is injured. If we can find them, they can tell us what happened.’ He quickly assigned men to the task, and they raced off back into the woods, along with two dogs to follow the blood trail.

He looked out across the river, glinting in the midday sun. With dogs on both sides, and possible eyewitness testimony, he hadn’t lost them yet. There was still hope.

Dr Niall Breisner looked at the telephone with trepidation. It was time to make the call.

A large part of him didn’t want to do it. The ramifications of his actions were starting to plague him, and he had all but stopped watching the news. The strange animal phenomena, the riots, the mounting chaos were bad enough; but he couldn’t stomach any more reports about that little island, swallowed up whole by the ocean. It was just too much to bear.

But this was what he had agreed to, and neither Tomkin nor Jeffries had ever lied to him. General Tomkin had laid it out for him as plain as day, the first time they’d met. His plans were crystal clear. The technological, scientific challenge had been a tremendous lure, Breisner had to admit. Was such a thing possible? Breisner had believed so, and he had wanted to be proved right. His ego had demanded satisfaction.

And what was the result of his years of secretive, covert efforts? The endless months of research, analysis, experimentation, all covered up from the majority of the base’s scientific staff? The fear of discovery, the pain and guilt of Colonel Anderson’s ruthless prosecution of anyone who came too close? The end result, Breisner was loath to admit, was nothing like he had anticipated. He had dreamt of champagne celebration and pride and joy at a job well done, a job everyone thought impossible but which he alone had had the ability to see through to completion.

But now? Now, whenever the pride of success entered his heart for even a second, guilt expunged it in an instant. What had he been thinking? Spectrum Nine was a monster, no sane person should ever have conceived it.

But it was
his
monster, Breisner thought as he toyed with the telephone handset on his desk. Didn’t he deserve some reward for his work, the decades spent in this Arctic hellhole, separated from his family and loved ones?

He deserved
something
at least, and the five million bonus promised by Tomkin in his next pay packet would go a certain way to assuage the guilt. Not all the way, but it would be a good start. He could forget about peer adulation or professional recognition; none of his peers even knew about the project. No, instead of awards and prizes, cold, hard cash would have to do.

But still, he found it hard to dial the number. It was too late to turn back, he knew that, but his mind baulked at this final step. He shook his head, downed the contents of the glass in front of him, and dialled the number for General Tomkin.

‘David,’ he said with false cheer, ‘Spectrum Nine is ready.’ He breathed out slowly, trying to regulate his heart rate. ‘Your weapon is now fully operational.’

W
HEN
A
LYSSA AND
Jack arrived at the huge concrete bunker which served as the eastern entrance to the Department of Defence headquarters, they were both awed by the sheer scale of the building beyond.

Alyssa had read about it often, but seeing it in the flesh was something else altogether. She looked at the double steel access doors, with metal detectors and armed guards, and wondered, not for the first time, how they could possibly get away with their plan.

They had already passed through two external cordons to get this far – once at the entrance to the parking lot, and again at the perimeter of the actual building. Both times their identities had aroused no suspicion. But the further they got into the belly of the beast, the less confident Alyssa felt. She wondered how well Jack had hacked into the Beltway system. Would they begin to suspect something and contact the DoD? Maybe they were performing a routine check of employees and would come across Dave Jenkins and Elaine McDowell – Jack and Alyssa’s current assumed identities – and wonder why nobody at Beltway had ever heard of them.

Ahead of her, a steady stream of workers filtered through the security checkpoint. She looked past the queue and saw a man in a blue military uniform waving from the doorway, ushering them forward.

Well
, she thought as she and Jack walked past the incoming workers,
it’s too late to back out now
.

Five minutes later, they were being led down one of the complex’s long corridors by their escort, who had introduced himself as Sergeant Adam Fielding. This pleasant young man was a private aide of Lieutenant Colonel Evan Ward, the man in charge of the Cyber Warfare Division, who had placed the call to Beltway.

The only hold-up at the concrete bunker entrance was when the security guards had to wait for the computer to print off their internal passes. They wore these ID cards now and this, combined with the presence of Sergeant Fielding, made them feel almost as if they really did belong here. Alyssa had been worried about people recognizing them from the news, but their simple disguises of glasses and dyed hair seemed to do the trick. Nobody was paying much attention to them anyway – hardly surprising really, Alyssa reflected, in an organization that employed thirty thousand people.