Ancestor (11 page)

“Can you see what he’s doing? Where is he?”

“Looks like he’s in front of the Humvee. No, he’s moving to the back of the hangar. He’s going for the cattle!
Move!
”

Colding’s voice sounded on the same channel. “Brady, slow down. I’m on my way outside.”

Gunther saw Brady’s heat signal close on the hangar’s front door.

“Gotta take him now,” Brady said as he closed the last ten feet. “Can’t let Tim kill the cows.”

“No,”
Colding said. “Brady, just wait!”

On the black-and-gray monitor’s picture, Gunther saw Tim’s white heat signature sprint away from the hangar’s back door. The signature stopped for just a second, then Gunther saw a tiny flicker of white moving back toward the hangar. Very small, not human-sized at all, and moving fast.

“Brady, be careful, I’ve got another heat source …”

BRADY BARELY HEARD Gunther’s words as he put his big shoulder into the hangar’s front door, slamming it open with a clang. He ran through, cut left, then knelt and leveled his Beretta in the direction of the Humvee and the fuel truck, the best spots for cover if there was a second enemy soldier.

But it wasn’t his eyes that detected danger.

It was his nose.

What he smelled in that last second of his life told him he had made a really,
really
bad mistake. The thick, rotten-egg scent of natural gas. In a fraction of a second, his eyes flicked to the radiant heater inside the door, to the shattered plastic gas pipe leading into it. Hacked open, he realized, with a fire axe.

Brady didn’t have time to see that all sixteen ground-level heaters had suffered identical damage. For thirty minutes, sixteen cracked one-inch PVC pipes had poured gas into the hangar’s closed environment, where it floated up to the ceiling, gathering in an invisible cloud.

A gasoline-soaked rope made a simple fuse. The saboteur had left one end inside the back door, then trailed the rope fifty feet outside. One flick of a lighter had done the rest. Just two seconds after Brady Giovanni’s muscled mass slammed through the front door, the rope’s flame danced into the hangar and kissed the gathered cloud of gas.

The fireball started at the back of the hangar and grew exponentially, lashing out at a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch, the equivalent of a gust of wind traveling at 470 miles per hour. The shock wave smashed into Brady, throwing the big man back. Had he gone through the door he might have lived, but he hit the hangar’s inside wall and was knocked cold. He didn’t feel the three-thousand-degree Fahrenheit fireball engulf him, didn’t see his clothes burst into flame, didn’t sense his skin bubble.

The cows fared no better. The shock wave knocked them about like little dogs, not the fifteen-hundred-pound creatures they were. Cows tumbled, burned and smashed into stalls. Some hit the hangar walls with a
gong
audible even over the explosion.

The hangar’s huge roof seemed to lift up, balanced on a growing cloud of flame, then crash down, smashing the Humvee and the fuel truck, punching through the truck’s tank and exposing aviation fuel to the still-roiling fireball. Dark orange flames shot up from the destroyed hangar, scorching metal and melting plastic.

BEFORE ANDY’S MOTHER had abandoned him to try her hand at whoring for Alberta loggers, she had always said he could sleep through a herd of buffalo stampeding through his room. That was before the military. While there were many things he
could
sleep through, such as Gunther’s annoying voice on the vid-phone, a ground-shaking explosion was not one of them. If Andy knew one thing in this world, it was how to wake up fast to avoid getting killed.

He was off the bed, crouched on the ground, Beretta in his hand before he even processed what he’d heard. Gunther had tried to get him up.

“Oops,” Andy said.

He started scrambling into his clothes.

IN ERIKA HOEL’S bed, Tim Feely rolled over, the covers falling away from his face. Who was making all that damn noise? And he was hot.
Someone had tucked the covers all up over his head. Damn, the room still spun like crazy. One thing about those Dutch women, they sure could drink. Drink, and fuck like nobody’s business. He often wondered what Erika Hoel had been like in her twenties, and he often reminded himself he probably didn’t want to know—the woman was forty-five, and he barely lived through their lovemaking sessions.

He reached out for Erika only to find her side of the bed empty. She was probably taking a leak. The room spun again, and Tim Feely dropped back into a deep sleep.

WHAT AN EXPLOSION, what a
rush
. Erika Hoel couldn’t believe how well her plan had worked. Simpletons. And the back door wasn’t guarded. In her projected timeline, she’d figured Andy would be there by now. She checked her watch, and waited. Another few seconds before the final hacking program kicked in. When it did, she could slip back inside, make sure the bioinformatics lab’s petabyte drive was erased, then crawl into bed with Tim and just play stupid. If she ran into Colding along the way, she’d just say she was trying to get away from Tim, who’d suddenly started making threats and acting crazy. The ruse wouldn’t last long, of course, but Fischer and his gorillas would be here soon. When Fischer arrived, Erika would be safe—then she could rub it in Claus’s face and her former lover would know that
she
had destroyed all of his work.

She stared at her watch and counted down the seconds.

GUNTHER JONES GAVE up trying to reach Brady. The man wasn’t going to answer. The hangar fire made the exterior infrared cameras useless. The hallway monitors were still looping, but he had good coverage in all the rooms, and the normal exterior cameras worked fine.

At that moment,
all
of his monitors simultaneously filled with static. His computer terminal beeped a pointless alarm:

“No fucking
shit
,” Gunther said as he reached under the counter for the system manuals.

ERIKA POSITIONED THE axe under one arm and looked at her watch. Her program would have just launched and shut down the cameras. She had to go. Now or never. She peeked in the rear airlock’s small window—no one there. She punched
6969
into the keypad, then walked inside and shut the door behind her. The airlock pressure cycle took only five seconds, but it felt like five minutes—Gunther, Andy, Brady or Colding could be anywhere inside, or even following her from the outside. And they had guns.

The five-second cycle finished, the interior airlock door beeped and opened. Erika ran silently into the facility and headed for the bioinformatics lab. If her program had worked, it was over. If Jian had countered it, Erika would have to destroy the petabyte drive by hand.

COLDING OPENED THE front airlock to see flames billowing up from the shattered hangar. Thick smoke twisted in the night wind, blocking out the stars. Even fifty yards away, the heat was damn near blistering. He crouched behind a boulder off to the left, both to take cover in case Tim was out there and to shield himself from the fire’s radiating rage.

He still couldn’t quite grasp the fact that Tim had waited for
two years
, worked away on the project, really
contributed
to it, pushed for its success, only to suddenly do this. Colding had thought he knew the man.

“Gunther, where the fuck is Tim?” His earpiece let out a burst of static, followed by Gunther’s voice.

“All the cameras are out. I can’t see a thing. And Brady was in the hangar when that thing went off.”

Shit
. “Brady, come in,” Colding said.

No one responded.

“Brady, if you can hear this, tap your earpiece twice. Anything to let us know you’re there.”

Colding waited for three slow breaths, but still no response. If Brady had entered the hangar, he was already dead.

And that made Tim Feely a murderer.

Colding had to protect the scientists. That meant neutralizing Tim first, searching for Brady second. A fucked-up prioritization, because if Brady was bleeding out somewhere, unable to respond, delaying a search might cause his death. But Brady Giovanni was paid to put his life at risk if need be—Rhumkorrf, Jian and Erika were not.

Colding scanned the area as calmly and as patiently as he could. He saw nothing.

The front airlock door opened. Colding turned, instantly leveling his Beretta, ready to fire at Tim if the man made one wrong move. Only he wasn’t pointing his gun at Tim … he was pointing it at Andy Crosthwaite.

Andy Crosthwaite, who was supposed to be guarding the back door.

“Motherfucker,” Colding said to himself as he took his aim off Andy and once again knelt behind the boulder.

Andy ran in a half-crouch, reached the boulder and knelt at Colding’s left. The smaller man swept his vision from straight out to his left, automatically counting on Colding to sweep from straight out to the right. Andy wasn’t panicking; he was calm and patient, doing everything right … except, of course, staying by the back door that he’d been ordered to guard.

“Andy, you keep your ass right here,” Colding said. “I’m going inside to round up the staff, and I’ll bring them back to the front airlock where you watch them. You don’t move until I call you. Do you understand?”

“Back off, dick-face,” Andy said. “I know what the fuck I’m doing.”

A rage grew inside Colding, but there was a time and place for every battle. “Just
stay here,”
Colding said, then scooted to the front airlock and slipped inside. Unless Gunther fixed the cameras, he’d have to check each room one by one.

ERIKA SLIPPED SILENTLY into the bioinformatics lab and saw the one thing she did
not
want to see—Liu Jian Dan, sitting at her multi-screened computer station, fat fingers
click-clacking
away.

Jian turned in her chair, heavy black hair falling over her face like a mask. Erika’s eyes automatically flicked to the upper-row monitor above Jian’s head.

“You did it,” Erika said. “I don’t believe it.”

“You …” Jian’s voice was a chilling whisper. “You put that down.”

Erika looked at her hands. She’d forgotten she was holding the fire axe. So close to pulling it off and getting back to her room undetected. But now Jian had seen her. Erika’s word against Tim’s was one thing, but Colding would automatically believe anything Jian said.

So now they would know it was her. So what? What were they going to do,
fire
her? There was nowhere for anyone to go, and Fischer’s men would be here soon.

All that mattered was the data.

Jian stood, reached under her desk, and in one smooth motion pulled out the foot-long petabyte backup cartridge.

The two women stood there, facing off, Jian holding the project’s future, Erika holding a fire axe.

“Jian, just give that to me.”

Jian stood, shook her head no, then stepped back.

Erika stepped forward.

GUNTHER’S FINGERS TRACED the printed pages of a three-ring binder. He had to figure out how to reboot the system. The support docs said that would clear out Fuck-You Feely’s damn loops and hacks.

Colding’s voice hissed in his earpiece. “Gun,
come on
, where is that bastard?”

“I’m trying.” Wait. There it was. Just call up the prompt window, enter that bit of code …

“Gun!
Fix
the
friggin’
camera!”

“Hold on!” Fingers typed the code, then hit
enter
.

The monitors flickered, then all popped back to life. “Got it, hold on!” Once again he had a complete view of the facility’s security system. He flipped through the cameras, scanning for motion. Empty hall, Rhumkorrf crouched at the foot of his bed, empty hall, empty genetics lab, Erika’s room … the blankets thrown back but that wasn’t Erika … then the bioinformatics lab,
that
was Erika, holding an axe and moving toward Jian.

“Holy
fuck
, Colding! It’s not Tim, it’s Erika!”

“What?”

“Tim’s sacked out in Erika’s room. Get to bioinformatics, fast, Erika is going to kill Jian.”

A new beep joined the cacophony of security room alarms. Gunther knew that sound—the radar system.

“And we’ve got another problem. One aircraft inbound. ETA … five minutes.”