The Phoenix Variant: The Fifth Column 3 (7 page)

But it was the bubble that drew her attention. It seemed to almost agitate its surroundings.

Her breath fogged the window. She wiped it away with her sleeve. She knew she had to get inside. But through the clean window she noticed someone in a white NBC suit. It was a one-piece body suit with matching white boots and gloves. The person was unarmed and looked to be a civilian contractor, not one of the sentries from outside.

Nasira moved deeper into the half pipe and found a door that connected to the inner dome. That was where she wanted to go. She took care to open the door slowly, listening for sound. There was an in-between chamber and a door that connected to the inner dome. She opened it slowly as well.

She set foot in the inner dome. She relied only on her lack of movement to avoid detection. There wasn’t much cover she could use to cross from there to the bubble in the center. The inner dome, like the half-pipe, lacked cameras. The base must be extremely temporary, she figured, if there were no cameras.

She spotted the white-suited civilian behind the workstation cubicles, bent over to collect something at his feet. She checked the edges of the inner dome and was pleased to find no one else lurking. She breathed in slowly and exhaled halfway.

Then she moved. Quickly.

For the other side of the cubicles. This close to the bubble, she could almost feel it humming. From her end of the cubicles she listened to the footsteps of the civilian. His boots squeaked on the vinyl floor. He moved away from the bubble to the edge of the inner circle. As he did so, she carefully moved around the cubicles, keeping them between her and the civilian. She heard him open a door and move through into another portion of half-pipe. He’d left the dome. She was clear for now.

Turning to face the cubicles, she realized they weren’t cubicles at all. They were square containment cells. In the cell before her, a crumpled human body in a powder blue hospital gown. Spidery blue veins worked along his neck. His eyes were a dull white, pupils wide. Blood had dried across the Plexiglas wall in mid-drip, leaving long crimson fingers.

In the cell adjacent, a second human body in a gown lay in the fetal position. Thin arms curled over knees. Underneath, a pool of dark deoxygenated blood. Nasira stepped back from the row of five cells, struggling to draw breath. She could see a third body, limbs mottled in purple bruises. A fourth, the same. But the body at the end was different.

Nasira pushed herself closer, to the fifth cell. To the body that sat upright, hands clasped in her lap. Although just as dead as the other poor fuckers, she seemed less distressed. There was no blood. No mottled skin. No sign of illness. Sitting in her hospital gown, she looked perfectly healthy.

New footsteps.

From Nasira’s right. She was completely exposed. She darted past the cells and took a position on the end, hidden from the footsteps as they approached the cells. These footsteps sounded slightly different, but only slightly. The civilians were wearing boots so it was hard to tell them apart. And the echo through the inner dome made it tricky to pinpoint the location of the boots as they moved around. Nasira drew her knife and kept it below her waist.

The bubble in the center drew her focus. She had to blot it out with her mind and focus on the ground, on the contours of the earth. She could see its magnetic field slide away from her. Although
see
wasn’t the right word. She just knew it was there.

The person—civilian or sentry—fizzled into her awareness. He was behind her, near the other end of the containment cells. She turned to the containment cells and noticed a certain distortion in the wall of the cell. But it wasn’t the cell at all. It was through the cell. The person on the other side. And through the indistinct shape, she knew he was carrying a long weapon, a carbine. He was definitely a sentry.

And he was moving towards her.

She circled around the back of the containment cells, each step carefully placed with the outside of her feet first, then the inside. It helped her avoid stepping on things that might make an unexpected sound, like the empty blister pack in front of her, discarded after someone finished their medication. She stepped off the blister pack without applying any weight and continued until she was on the other side of the dome from the sentry. And completely exposed to the dome’s main entrance.

The sentry continued along the containment cells, perhaps inspecting them as he went. She wondered whether he was as disturbed as she was, or interested, or perhaps didn’t give a shit either way. That was the worst of the three, she decided.

He seemed to spend some time in that position before continuing on. She could feel his movements. They were indistinct—she had a general idea of his position and his movement, and she could almost see him move across the ground behind her.

He emerged at the end, where Nasira had been hiding only moments ago. She matched his movements, placing herself at the other end of the cells. She caught sight of his back. She watched him continue in the same direction with a degree of purpose and increased speed. He moved for the very doors she’d come through.

Nasira didn’t move from the end of the containment cells. She kept herself low to make herself smaller and waited for the door to close behind the sentry. Then she made her move.

She moved for the bubble and reached an open zipper. She was closer to the source now. And it made her hands shake. Pressure welled inside her head. It spread to her body and buzzed across her. She clenched her teeth and stepped through the open zipper.

Inside, another much smaller bubble, only this was sealed up tight. It was completely transparent, unlike the other bubble, and she could see everything inside.

Rubble. Just rubble in a bubble.

But there was something about the rubble. It shimmered, looked like honeycomb had fused with liquid silver. It seemed to pulse around her. She recalled the meteor that passed overhead the night before.

‘Just a big chunk of rock.’ She shrugged to herself. ‘And RDX explosives in a ring around—’ Nasira paused in mid-step. ‘Oh shit.’

Inside the smaller bubble she noticed a rectangular timer with a display.

00:00:41.

Nasira sheathed her knife and rolled her eyes. ‘Great.’

She stepped from the bubble and broke into a run. There was no one in the inner dome to see her escape. They had the good sense to escape already. She moved for the same doors she’d come through, hoping that sentry hadn’t lingered. And if he had, she gripped her knife.

She ran for the doors, noticed something different.

She felt it. It was blunt, fuzzy. Near the door. A sudden chill fired from her stomach to her lungs, stealing her breath. In mid-run, she spotted a trail of wiring that weaved its way through intervals of square boxes the size of a house brick.

The buzzing made sense now. She was sensing another demolition charge. Not just the bubble, the entire base was wired to blow.

She ran harder.

Her vision widened. Blood shunted through her limbs. She shouldered through the connecting chamber and into the half-pipe, a new release of adrenalin almost knocking the doors off their hinges. She moved at double speed. No one was in the half-pipe. She kept moving. Ran for the door at the rear. She stuck to the exit she knew.

She opened it without hesitating. There was no time to check. She sprinted through the snow towards the severed razor wire at the rear of the base. She felt the snow cold against one foot and realized she’d lost a boot. She couldn’t go back for it. She kept running.

Her back warmed suddenly. Heat knocked her face first into the snow. Debris singed the air above. She didn’t move, stayed pressed deep in the snow. Her ears rang with the explosion. Her body felt the depths of the charges roll through the earth, shaking her. Searing hot air roared overhead. Bits of the base’s exterior rained down around her.

She couldn’t hear anything. She got to her feet, checked her body for injuries. No bleeding. Her limbs worked. But she staggered, collapsed. She got to her knees, her feet. She felt her body sway. She stepped in every direction to compensate but her body was unsteady and just kept toppling. She collapsed again. Her balance was fucked.

She lay in the snow, breathing, thinking. What did she do now? Her ears were still ringing from the explosion, only now she could actually hear the ringing. Worse, she could feel the presence of people nearby. And voices. Muffled at first.

She tried to move, went for her knife. But it didn’t happen. She lay there, disoriented and immobile. She cursed herself. She hadn’t gotten far enough away from the detonation in time. She realized just how stupid she was to have ventured in there, even with almost no staff and few sentries.

The voices hummed into focus overhead. ‘Whatever they had here, it’s gone. The meteorite too.’

‘What about her?’

‘Plain-clothed. She’s one of Denton’s,’ he said. ‘We take her with us.’

She was sharp and exquisite. Everything about her was unapologetic. Despite her chipped ear and missing eye, Denton thought she was perfect. Her name, after all, translated to
perfection
. And he knew why.

His assistant, Czarina, looked past the glass-encased limestone statue. In her red jacket, she watched a frantic man push past a distracted couple and linger to apologize. The man stepped inside the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins and made a precise line toward them.

‘I see you have excellent taste, sir,’ he said.

The man’s face glistened. He must have run the entire Museum of Natural History to reach them.

‘I haven’t seen her since Germany,’ Denton said. ‘Just as I remember her.’

‘Yes, it’s normally displayed at the Neues Museum in Berlin,’ the man said, gathering his breath. ‘You saw her there?’

Denton shook his head, unable to take his gaze from the statue. ‘No, in a bunker,’ he said. ‘Hitler showed me.’

The man laughed.

‘Her elongated skull is particularly interesting,’ Denton said.

‘Skull deformation was not an uncommon practice,’ the man said, his chin almost disappearing into his neck. ‘Even as recently as the Middle Ages.’

Denton tapped the glass cube. ‘Not exactly. Her followers deformed their skulls, yes,’ he said. ‘Vulgar imitations. Hers was … you can alter the shape—’ he tapped his own shaved head ‘—but you can’t make a skull grow three times its volume.’

The man winced. ‘Well now, I’ve never seen a large skull in person.’

Denton frowned. ‘Yes, they’re usually classified. I often forget.’ He moved for his ID. ‘I’m a specialist with the CDC. Infectious diseases.’

He imagined the sweat on the man’s face turn cold as he stumbled a response.

‘Is there … something wrong?’ he said, failing to register the badge.

Sometimes Denton wondered why he even bothered arranging accurate IDs. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

He strode off through the hall into the circular chamber at the end of the museum, passing a pair of security guards. He stepped into the Ross Hall of Meteorites without a word. The man followed, waiting for an explanation.

Glass cabinets of meteors spiraled upward into the center, where a truck-sized meteor was perched under an array of lights. Denton wasn’t interested in the truck-sized meteor. He checked the appearance of each specimen as he strode past. The man pumped his arms to catch up while Czarina paced herself behind them in jeans and black sneakers.

‘One of your samples was recently reclassified,’ Denton said. ‘CM1 class. Extremely rare.’

The man finally caught up and pointed to a glass case at the top of the spiral.

‘Yes, I know the one,’ the man said.

Denton couldn’t be bothered walking around the spiral so he leaped over the handrail to reach it. Behind him, the man hesitated to consider the same maneuver, but apparently thought better of it and took a more proper walk around the spiral.

The meteorite looked similar to the rock he’d encountered in the Bavarian castle during World War II. It glistened like honeycomb covered in molten silver. During the war, the Nazis had recovered a total of seven meteorite samples, CM1 class—Carbonaceous Chondrite Type 1—from Siberia, Tibet and Antarctica. They had been found during expeditions that would fuel conspiracy theories of Nazi secret bases for decades to come. Since the war, the Fifth Column had classified 38,660 meteorites.

Only sixteen of those were CM1 class meteorites.

The most recent meteorite discoveries were in northern Africa and Nevada. The fragile matter he was looking for in these almost unattainable meteorites could survive entry into the Earth’s atmosphere but once it crashed and fragmented, it was vulnerable. Exposed to the desert heat, the virus would perish in two to eight hours. The Nevada meteorite was not observed at the time it landed and had been buried in the desert for some time, so Denton didn’t bother to dispatch a team for it. This meant it became the first CM1 class meteorite to become available to the public.

The other fifteen CM1s, however, had landed in the Antarctic, where the cold temperatures had hardened the outer coating of the virus into a rubbery gel that protected it from deterioration. Unfortunately, the fifteen meteorites did not contain a virus. But this newly reclassified meteorite was a new addition. While other classes of meteorite might have brought plague and disease, either sprinkled from above or after impact, Denton knew the CM1 class carried greater promise.

Since the castle in Bavaria, instrumentation advances had come a long way. Denton had had teams of cosmochemists on standby to analyze the meteorites for many years.

In the seventy years he’d spent hunting the CM1 class meteors as they fell, he had only ever seen known of one other Phoenix virus in the hands of the Fifth Column.

The sample was kept in right there in New York, in an old OSS/Fifth Column base beneath Grand Central terminal. The same base he once worked from, the same base his father once worked from, and the same base his son once worked from. His son had mislabeled it on purpose. No one knew it was there except him.

Denton recalled the Czech prisoner, Yiri, who he’d plucked from the SAS assault. He’d made sure Yiri survived the war. Yiri had stayed briefly at the OSS base in Grand Central, where some testing had taken place—albeit fruitless, since the Fifth Column’s science, although decades ahead of anything mainstream, had still been crude by today’s standards. Yiri returned to Prague and started a family. Denton had kept tabs on Yiri’s descendants while he waited for each meteorite to fall.

Just that week, a rare CM1 meteorite had landed in Peru. Denton’s team scooped it up immediately and ran the tests. The heavens had looked fondly upon him because it matched the precise Phoenix virus he’d lost at the castle, the same Phoenix virus he’d lost with Sophia’s defection. And it was, at that very moment, on its way to New York.

Denton checked his watch. Within the hour, he might well have all three viruses. By the time the Fifth Column realized what he’d accomplished they would be too late to do anything about it.

Timing was everything.

‘We had quite a few meteorites come through here lately,’ the man said, finally rounding the spiral to reach Denton. ‘So many meteorites the last few years, we’re running out of room!’

Denton didn’t want to look up from the unmistakable honeyed crystal of the CM1 meteorite. ‘Yes, the sun’s dark twin slings them through here every cycle,’ he said. ‘Like a cosmic pinball machine.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

The man’s face creased under the lights. ‘The sun’s what?’

‘Ah,’ Denton said. ‘Something I read on the plane.’

He looked around the chamber. Since they’d posted security at both entrances to the chamber, Denton, Czarina and their new friend were the only ones present.

Czarina stood at the bottom of the spiral. For a moment she looked like a fixture on display as she inspected the chamber walls. She peered up at them from under her Cleopatra haircut. He quite liked her deep red lipstick. It matched her ruby leather jacket and cinnamon skin. It wasn’t often operatives wore lipstick. But this was an unusual circumstance.

‘What temperature do you have this room set at?’ Denton said.

‘Sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit,’ the man said. ‘And fifty percent relative humidity.’

Denton nodded. It was extremely likely that this CM1 meteorite had never reached room temperature; only the shell would have heated when crashing through the Earth’s atmosphere. If it had contained the Phoenix virus when landing in the Antarctic, the virus could still be intact and dormant. The very idea sent a shiver of excitement through his fingers as he ran them across the glass.

‘This could be the one,’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ the man said. ‘Do we need to evacuate the building?’

Denton took a moment to respond. ‘No. Not yet,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to bring a prelim team in to check it out. There’s no need to concern ourselves yet, but if you’re as cautious a man as I am, you will keep anyone from entering this wing.’

The man nodded. ‘I can do that. It’s a good idea.’

Denton turned to him. ‘That’s a nice suit.’

The man tried to conceal his pleasure as he extended his arms. ‘Oh this, just a Hugo Boss. Tailored, of course.’ His smile faded. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, back at that statue, how did they get the skulls that big?’

‘Maybe she was born with it, maybe it was Maybelline,’ Denton said.

The man blinked and, at a loss for words, left Denton alone with the meteorite and Czarina. Denton waited for him to completely disappear before turning to Czarina. She hadn’t moved since he arrived; her attention diffused across the chamber.

‘Can you do it?’ Denton said.

Czarina gave a single nod. ‘We’ll need a large amount,’ she said. ‘A very large amount.’

‘The explosives under Grand Central should do it,’ Denton said. ‘Don’t use it all though.’

‘Shall I bring in the cosmochemists?’ Czarina said.

Denton returned the nod. ‘Have everyone else stand by,’ he said. ‘If this is it, we have to do it right.’

Czarina turned and walked out of the chamber, leaving him alone with the meteorite.

He touched the glass that surrounded the meteorite. ‘Perfection.’