Extinction (8 page)

It was this skill that had brought John Jeffries, the Secretary of Defence, to call him that morning. ‘John,’ Tomkin said warmly as he picked up the secure line, ‘how are you doing?’

‘Good, David,’ Jeffries responded with equal warmth. ‘How’s the family?’

‘Can’t complain. Got us another grandson on the way, Maggie this time, her first.’

‘Congratulations, that’s terrific. How many’s that now? Six?’

‘Seven,’ Tomkin corrected. He had four children, three of whom were married with kids of their own, one who had just finally got engaged. He’d been married himself for nearly forty years – something of a success story for a career military man – and he was enormously proud of his family. ‘It’s gonna make Christmas expensive, that’s for sure,’ he joked.

‘That’s true, my man. I’ve got six of my own, I know just how it is.’ There was a chuckle on the other end of the line, then a pause. Tomkin realized that the small talk was over, and Jeffries was about to get down to business. ‘So how’s Spectrum Nine advancing?’

Tomkin cracked his neck from one side to the other and straightened in his chair, pain running through each vertebra of his spine. ‘Tests are going well,’ he answered. ‘The system should be ready soon.’

‘Is anybody else aware of the project?’ Jeffries asked nervously.

‘No,’ Tomkin answered immediately. ‘That would be impossible. Funding for the project has been buried so deep that even
I
don’t know the full details any more.’

‘But the human element?’ Jeffries persisted. ‘Could anyone talk?’

‘Nobody that’s connected to the programme will talk. They’re all patriots, vetted beyond all normal classification. Besides which, Colonel Anderson is there to keep an eye on things.’

Tomkin could hear Jeffries grunt on the other end of the line, and wasn’t surprised by the reaction. Colonel Anderson had a reputation.

Tomkin decided not to trouble Jeffries with the recent business about Karl Janklow, even though the latest news from Anderson was not exactly what he’d been hoping for. Janklow was dead – that was the good news – but there was now a new troublemaker, as yet unidentified. Tomkin had recently ordered a full-scale identity search for the woman based on the pictures Anderson had sent over, but the situation was still unresolved. It was a major concern, but it was too early to brief Jeffries on the matter. It was an operational concern, not a strategic one, after all.

‘Glad to hear it,’ Jeffries replied finally.

There was another pause, and Tomkin could sense that Jeffries was about to address the real reason for the call. ‘But,’ he ventured gingerly, ‘might there be any possible ramifications from recent incidents?’

It was Tomkin’s turn to pause as he considered the matter. He had given it a great deal of thought already, and still couldn’t be entirely sure. Anything was possible, after all. But he would not be telling Jeffries that. ‘None, John, you can be sure of that,’ he answered confidently. ‘There is absolutely nothing, and I mean
nothing
, that could lead anyone to us. Believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ Jeffries said quickly. ‘I just want to be sure, that’s all. If we go to the President with a finished project, something that works, something that’s guaranteed, that’s one thing. He’ll listen to us, maybe even use it like we want. If he finds out some other way, though, somebody lets something slip, somebody discovers what we’ve been up to, then that’s it – we’re talking jail, plain and simple.’

‘I know that, John,’ Tomkin said soothingly. ‘I do. But trust me. He won’t find out until it’s ready. Nobody will.’
And
, Tomkin thought silently,
he won’t even find out until it’s already been used in anger, maybe not even then, maybe not ever
. Because General Tomkin knew what John Jeffries didn’t: there was no way in hell that the President would ever authorize the use of Spectrum Nine. You’d have to be crazy to even consider it.

Tomkin smiled to himself. What the President didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, Tomkin was sure. It never had before.

J
ACK
M
URRAY RECLINED
and stretched out, balancing precariously on the swivel chair beneath him as he made a straight line with his body from his toes to his fingertips.

How long had he been here? As he settled back into the uncomfortable chair behind his workstation, Murray did the calculation.
Fourteen hours
. Fourteen hours behind this damned desk, crunching numbers.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have any other option; he could have signed off six hours ago. But where was there to go? The research base was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and there was a blizzard coming down outside that was ferocious. All personnel had been confined to base for their own safety for the duration of the storm. Murray’s apartment in the small town of Allenburg was more than a forty-minute drive away, and he resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be seeing it again for some time. Not that it was anything special anyway.

Accommodation was laid on for them at the base – bunkhouse dorms like you’d get in an army barracks – but he wanted to avoid going there until the last possible minute. And so he had volunteered for overtime, and was going to put in another two hours before he’d head off to the bunkhouse. As he stretched out again, he wasn’t sure which was worse – the swivel chair here, or the iron cot in the staff dormitory.

At least there was work to be done. Ever since Karl Janklow had been lost in an avalanche a few days ago, there had been two jobs to be getting on with. In fact, Karl’s tragic death was one of the reasons the staff were now confined to base. The weather had been bad then too, and poor visibility was the probable reason for Karl losing control of his car. It was too short notice to get a replacement, and Murray had therefore been doing Karl’s job as well as his own ever since.

It upset Murray to think of Karl. They’d been sitting across from one another for over a year now, trading jokes and banter. Karl lived – had lived, Murray corrected himself sadly – in Allenburg too, and the pair had regularly met up for nights on the town. Allenburg wasn’t exactly the most exciting town on earth, but the nights had been good, and more often than not had ended in female company. At least they had for Murray, blessed as he was with his rough good looks, lilting baritone voice, and an ability to charm anyone he met. Karl, smart and funny though he was, had never had the same kind of appeal. Whereas people were always surprised that Murray was a computer technician – with a doctorate from the country’s leading technical university, no less – somehow they would always be able to guess what Karl did for a living.

Damn
, Murray thought as he looked over at the empty workstation opposite him.
I miss him
. Good ol’ Karl, computer geek extraordinaire.
My friend
.

Murray pushed Karl from his mind, telling himself that these things happened. People died. The world went on. It was the nature of things, and the world couldn’t be any other way. What had his father said when he’d asked him, all those years ago, why people died?

‘Jack,’ his father had said, placing both of his big workman’s hands on his five-year-old son’s shoulders, ‘if we all lived forever, how would we find the space? The food? The world’s only so big. That’s just the way it is.’

It was logical really, and he’d never asked again. Not when his mother had been taken from him two years later, when a car had hit her at sixty miles per hour and shattered every bone in her body. Not when his sister had drowned whilst trying to save her dog when she was just twelve years old. And not when his father was on his own deathbed, dying of blood poisoning from unregulated chemical leakages at the factory he had worked at his entire life. He had cried, he had grieved, he had felt all the things a normal person would, but that was life. There was no other way.

When he’d applied for the job here, the location had not bothered him in the slightest – it wasn’t as if he had anyone to leave behind. Run as it was by the military, he had undergone thorough vetting and security checks. He was not surprised when there had been questions asked about some of his political ideas – college friends must have talked about some of his campus activities, although they had been harmless enough. It meant, however, that he was employed lower down the food chain than his academic achievements might have warranted, but that was OK. He was here, and that was the main thing.

Unfortunately, nobody at the base would even understand the real reason he was there. It was a shame, he reflected as he looked around the large room, filled with technicians behind workstations, a hundred feet under the huge radar array on the snow-covered surface. He would have liked to be able to talk about it with at least one of his friends or colleagues here. But he knew what response he’d get; everyone was too conditioned – by society, by religion, by all sorts of constraints and controls meant to keep the status quo – to accept his true aim in life.

Because Jack Murray knew that this project had the capability to save the world; and his aim in life was to make that happen.

I
T WAS LATE
afternoon by the time Alyssa Durham got back to the city. A thousand questions were racing around her brain, but there were no answers. What had Karl wanted to tell her? Who had killed him? Who were the people who were now trying to kill her?

She knew the key to the answer would be finding out where Karl had been working, and so despite still feeling badly shaken by the day’s events, she had decided to head straight for the office. Her editor, James Rushton, would support her, offer her all the help he could. She wondered if he would recommend going to the authorities, and realized that of course he would. But she would try and convince him otherwise. How did she know they could trust the authorities? Instead, she would convince him to let her investigate. She would use the newspaper’s resources to find out where Karl had been working, and then take it from there.

Another question that plagued her was whether the enemy – for that was surely what they were – knew who she was. The wig and glasses she’d been wearing weren’t the most sophisticated of disguises, but they might be enough to give her some time. Besides which, she’d find out soon enough. If they knew who she was, they’d be waiting outside the office to put a bullet in her head.

Before she went to work, she was curious to see what was going on in the city square but the taxi driver hadn’t been able to get close; traffic was backed up for miles all around the city. And so she had got out, paid the driver, and set off on foot, keen to see if the stories she had been hearing on the radio on the way back to the city were true.

Walking had proved equally difficult, the streets more and more crowded the closer she got to the square. It was clear that everyone in the city wanted to see it with their own eyes too, with the result that pedestrian movement was as restricted as the traffic.

But slowly, ever so slowly, she did move forwards, until finally she was at the square itself, at a barricade erected by the police. A barrier built to separate people from bats.
Millions
of bats.

Alyssa had never seen anything like it. The square was literally crawling with them, piled on top of each other, covering every square inch of the city centre meeting spot, horizontal and vertical. The radio reports had estimated the numbers to be upwards of twelve million, all coming to roost in the square over the past few hours, utterly unprecedented behaviour that only served to encourage those predicting the end of the world.

She looked around the crowd and noticed that the preachers were already here, some from the regular religions, some from the cults of the statue, and even more from apocalyptic sects. Down the line from her she saw people gathered round a man wearing a white robe and gold arm- and headbands. He was dressed like the man who had caught her attention earlier, on her way to meet Karl. Those guys were everywhere. There’d probably be a story in that, she considered, as she started to make her way slowly round the barriers.

Unfortunately, her office was on the far side. She checked her watch. Half past four. She sighed, hoping that Rushton wouldn’t have left for home by the time she got there.

Almost an hour later, she was in Rushton’s office, looking out over the square from the plate-glass windows of the twenty-first floor of the newspaper building. Even from up here, the sight was incredible.

‘And in the daytime too,’ she said in wonder.

‘I know,’ Rushton said, handing her a steaming cup, which she took gratefully. ‘Bats just don’t behave like this. And where in the hell are they from, anyway? We don’t have that many bats in the state, never mind the city. At least, I don’t think we do. But they must have come from somewhere.’ He shook his head, then looked up. ‘But first things first. I think it’s time to call the police.’

‘No,’ Alyssa said immediately, shaking her head.

‘Alyssa, these people are dangerous,’ Rushton said. ‘Snipers? People impersonating the police? And from what I can find out, there’s no evidence of your friend’s body whatsoever. Whoever is behind this, they’re professional. And if they don’t know who you are already, they will soon enough.’

‘James, who can we trust? For all I know, those people
were
the police; maybe corrupt, maybe working for someone else. I’m only assuming they were impersonating cops.’

‘I have friends in the Bureau.’

‘But they’d have to tell someone, wouldn’t they? And then what?’ She shook her head once more. ‘I want to do some digging first. Find out where Karl was working, what sort of things he was involved in. We might have a better handle then on who’s involved, who we can contact.’

Rushton took a sip of his drink, obviously uncomfortable. ‘You really think there’s some connection between where your friend Karl worked and these weird things that are happening?’

‘Someone sure as hell thinks he knew
something
important. Whatever it was, it’s worth killing for.’

‘That’s just what I’m afraid of,’ Rushton answered.