Extinction (30 page)

‘We’re pretty much on a war footing at the moment,’ Fielding told his guests. ‘With things as they are, word has come down to increase our threat level to only one stage removed from all-out war. I don’t blame them,’ he continued, and Alyssa presumed he meant the federal government. ‘Things are getting crazy out there, and the military is already having to step in. It’s not just in this country either.’

Fielding led them round two more corners, stopped at a bank of elevators and pressed a button. ‘There have been plenty of attacks on our people abroad too. With all this talk of global destruction, a lot of groups – not just terrorists, but normal citizens too – feel it’s their last chance to make a mark, and we’re the target, yet again. The President just ordered two carrier groups out to southern Asia, and another to the Gulf.’

The elevator doors opened and Fielding stepped in. ‘It’s unbelievable, it really is. I mean, is it our fault this is happening? Of course not. But do we have to step in yet again to pick up the pieces, make sure the world remains stable? You bet we do.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s why people around here aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs at the moment.’

The doors opened again, and Alyssa realized she hadn’t even felt the elevator move. Fielding strode out towards another long corridor, and Alyssa and Jack hurried to keep up.

‘What do you guys make of it all?’ Fielding asked, breaking a smile. ‘Do you think we’re all goners?’

‘People have been saying the same for years,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t suppose now’s any more likely than any other time.’

Fielding grunted, and Alyssa wasn’t sure if it was supposed to have been a laugh.

‘But on the other hand,’ Jack went on, ‘it’s probably gonna be true one day, right? Why not today?’

Fielding grunted again and turned away, increasing his pace. The man wasn’t laughing this time.

‘I’m not telling you pigs anything,’ the grizzled old man said to Anderson, before spitting on the colonel’s shoes.

Anderson responded in an instant, backhanding the man across the face. A stream of phlegmy blood shot out of the man’s mouth, along with two teeth. The man sagged for a moment with the impact and then burst forward, straining for all he was worth against the two soldiers who held him.

There had been a nasty gunfight when they had found the survivalists. Six of the group’s members were killed, along with two of Anderson’s own men. When Anderson entered the camp, he was surprised to see that there were children there; and the surprise had turned to shock when he discovered that the children, too, were armed.

Durham and Murray must have stumbled upon the group and been hunted through the forest.

But who the hell were these people? He’d ordered his men to search the camp for anything that could identify them. In the meantime, he wanted to know what had happened to Murray and Durham.

He turned back to the old man. ‘These people are terrorists! They want to destroy this country. I thought you were patriots.’

But the old man just regarded Anderson with hatred and spat again. ‘You big government pukes are the only ones who want to destroy this country,’ he said vehemently.

Anderson resisted the urge to hit the man again and looked over to where another member of the survival group was receiving medical attention for his maimed eyes. He had refused help at first, and Anderson’s men had had to use drugs to subdue him. Durham or Murray must have gouged them, Anderson felt sure. He couldn’t help but be impressed by their will to survive.

‘Look at your friend,’ Anderson said. ‘I doubt he’ll ever see again. He’ll be completely blind, and I know one of the people we’re after did it to him. Don’t you want to help us catch them?’

The man shook his head. ‘We thought they was government pukes like you at first,’ he said, then smiled, the broken teeth making his face look grotesque. ‘But they ain’t with you, I know that much now. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

Anderson looked at the man a moment longer before anger got the better of him, and he punched the captive square on the jaw, knocking him out cold. He watched with satisfaction as the body sagged into the arms of his men before turning away.

‘Colonel, we’ve found something!’ a voice called and a soldier came running across with a clear plastic bag full of documents and keys.

It didn’t take long to match the various IDs to their captives and the dead bodies, apart from some of the children who may have been too young to have any. The problem was, two of the adults present had no documents. A man and a woman.

Anderson sighed. Two sets of ID were missing, and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out who’d taken them.
Damn
. But if he could find out who the two people were, he’d know what names Murray and Durham were using.

He told his men to take the fingerprints of the two with no ID and send them off for analysis. The problem was, how long would it take?

He called for the pair to be brought forward, straining against their plastic flexicuffs. Torture wasn’t his favourite thing in the world, but it was sometimes a necessary tool of his trade.

C
OLONEL
W
ARD STOOD
and extended a large hand. ‘Mr Jenkins,’ he said courteously, shaking Jack’s hand. ‘Ms McDowell,’ he said next, shaking her hand and inclining his head towards her. ‘Thanks for coming out here so quickly. We’ve got a real ball-buster of a virus here – begging your pardon, ma’am – and we’re struggling with it, to be frank.’

Jack nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What we need is an office where we can get some privacy, four fully networked computers, and a vat-load of strong black coffee.’

Ward smiled, pleased with Jack’s confidence. ‘You’ve got it,’ he answered.

Within a few minutes, Jack and Alyssa were in a corner office. Three more computers were carried in to sit on the desk beside the room’s original unit, and the coffee came moments later.

The only fly in the ointment was Ward, who sat down in the room with them. Alyssa turned to him, smiling.

‘Colonel, thank you for the office. But we really must insist that we are left alone. Some of the code work we use is proprietary information, and Beltway has a legal obligation not to reveal anything which has copyright or other intellectual property ramifications.’

‘You think I’m gonna steal your algorithms?’ Ward asked unbelievingly.

‘We’re a private contractor,’ Jack chipped in, ‘a business. We rely on being the best in the field, and we’ve got to be careful. I’m sure you appreciate that.’

‘And I’ve got the security of the whole damned country to worry about. Surely you can appreciate
that?
’ Ward responded icily.

‘I do, but our hands are tied,’ Alyssa said. ‘Company procedure.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll just call up your boss and tell him I’m switching our preferred contractor to Armordyne Systems,’ Ward responded.

Alyssa looked nervously at Jack. If Ward called anyone at Beltway, it could cause all manner of problems. They simply couldn’t take the risk. But how were they going to access the system and find out anything with Ward watching their every move?

‘OK, OK,’ Jack said, holding up his hands. ‘You’ve just got to understand, it goes against procedure.’

‘I don’t give a damn what procedure it goes against, I’m staying in the room and that’s all there is to it.’ Crossing his arms, Ward sat back in his seat.

‘OK,’ Jack said again, taking a sip from his coffee cup and turning back round to face the computer, cracking the knuckles of both hands as he did so. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got here.’

Alyssa’s nerves were starting to grate. She was trying to talk to Ward, to get him involved in a conversation so that his attention was off Jack and the computers, but it was proving difficult.

Ward was watching Jack carefully, which meant that he had to go through the protocol to find and eradicate the virus rather than try and identify which computer terminal in the building had been used to sign off on Spectrum Nine. He would be able to stop the virus; after all, he was the one who had embedded it in the first place. But Alyssa could tell he was trying to string it out, maybe in the hope that Ward would have to leave the room to deal with something else, or even just to use the bathroom.

Alyssa was also wondering how long it would take before Ward asked her what her role was here; so far, she hadn’t touched a computer. How could she? Her level of understanding was far below Ward’s own, and it would be pretty obvious as soon as she tried that she had no idea what she was doing.

Finally Ward stood up to go to the bathroom, but he got one of his colleagues to cover the room in his absence. Alyssa watched Ward through the dark glass of the office windows to make sure he actually did head for the bathroom; part of her had worried that he was going to make a call to Beltway anyway.

They were going to have to do something, that was for sure. But what? Alyssa checked the time. Three thirty-five in the afternoon. She thought for a few moments. Ward hadn’t left the room for over an hour, and presumably wouldn’t now be needing another rest break for some considerable time. During that hour, nobody had disturbed them, which indicated that Ward had asked to be left alone, probably delegating his other duties temporarily to a junior officer. Any change in shifts would be on the hour or the half-hour, which gave them until four o’clock. Twenty-five minutes.

Alyssa rose from her chair and went to the window to lower the blinds. The other man looked up at her, eyebrows raised. ‘The noise bothering you?’ he asked.

Alyssa nodded her head. ‘Yeah, Dave likes it a little more quiet than this usually,’ she answered.

The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Figures,’ he said. ‘You can hardly hear yourself think out there on the best of days.’

Alyssa smiled, hoping that when Ward returned, he wouldn’t immediately notice that the windows had been covered. He might not, she reasoned, as the room was still well-lit, and not dramatically quieter.

Moments later, Ward re-entered the room. ‘OK, Corporal,’ he said, ‘thanks for that, you’re relieved.’

The corporal left, and Ward sat back down in his seat, seemingly unaware that the interior of the office could no longer be seen from the outside.

Alyssa waited until Ward’s attention was on Jack, watching as he leant forward in his chair to peer at the monitors, asking how he was progressing. Jack saw Alyssa moving, and started to involve the colonel in an intense discussion of what he was doing, and how far he had to go, capturing the man’s attention completely.

Having manoeuvred herself directly behind Ward’s chair, Alyssa hefted her own collapsible steel chair above her head and swung it down as hard as she could on top of the colonel’s skull.

Ward looked dazed, his eyes focusing and unfocusing for what seemed like minutes but was probably under two seconds, while Alyssa wondered if she’d hit him hard enough. She readied the chair to hit him again but then his eyes turned upwards, closed completely, and he toppled unconscious to the carpeted floor.

As Alyssa went to bind and gag him, she looked up at Jack who was staring at her in open-mouthed surprise. ‘OK, Jack,’ she said, checking her watch, ‘you’ve got eighteen minutes.’

‘D
AVID
N
ATHANIEL
J
ENKINS
and Elaine Jolene McNulty,’ Anderson repeated to himself as he wiped his hands clean on an old rag, now stained red with blood.

The bodies of the real Jenkins and McNulty hung before him from a tree, pools of blood beneath their feet. They were still alive, but only by a hair’s breadth. They were tough sons-of-bitches, but Anderson had still managed to break them ahead of the fingerprint lab.

‘Cut them down and get them medical attention,’ he called to one of his corporals.

Anderson flipped open his cellphone and called Tomkin. ‘Sir, it’s Anderson. We have reason to believe the fugitives may still be at large. We’ve tracked them to a river but we’ve not found any bodies, so we have to assume they are still alive. Also, they may have acquired identification which they could be presently using.’

He read out the names of the man and woman, along with other details he had gleaned from them – dates and places of birth, home addresses, car registrations. He knew he didn’t have to tell Tomkin what to do with the information. The general would instantly activate every resource to track the fugitives.

‘Leave it with me,’ the general’s gruff voice responded. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Anderson said.

His radio blipped. He pushed the button to receive. ‘Anderson here, over.’

‘Sir,’ the digitally-enhanced voice came back, crystal clear, ‘we’re on the far bank a mile downstream from the waterfall. We’ve got tracks. The dogs are ready to follow, over.’

‘Good,’ Anderson replied. ‘I’m going to stay here to clear up what we’ve found, but I’ll send the other patrol to your side, over.’

‘Yes, sir. Over and out.’

Anderson replaced the radio on his belt and smiled. Durham and Murray wouldn’t get much further, he was sure.

James Rushton banged against the steel door again and again. It seemed as if he had been banging against the cold, hard surface all afternoon; and, when he thought about it, he supposed he had.

He looked at his hands, and saw they were deep purple with bruising. But dammit! Here he was, locked up without charge and unable to see a lawyer. He knew that somewhere else in the building Harry Envers was also an unwilling prisoner, unable to use his right to legal advice. The damn city mayor! It was entirely unconstitutional, but Rushton was beginning to understand that this was becoming an issue of less and less importance. The city – hell, the whole country and maybe even the entire world – was changing. Events were out of control and had gathered a momentum of their own.

Rushton had assumed he would be tortured, or at least subjected to tactical interrogation, but he had been left alone. He thought that that was probably because the government’s limited resources were being stretched to breaking point. They had achieved their aim by locking him up anyway; he was away from his beloved newspaper and couldn’t get a word out to anyone about anything.