Extinction Game (25 page)

I got home later that afternoon, tired and feeling less rattled after a few beers and something to eat. I slept for nearly twelve hours, into the next day, dreaming I was running away from an
explosion that pulled me up off the ground and threw me high above the clouds, until I floated among the stars and the air froze in my lungs.

When I woke, I knew I could delay no longer. I picked up my predecessor’s final diary and turned to the first entries, a cup of coffee by my side.

The first entries were as I remembered them: identical to my own. It was strange how quickly the memories came back of what now seemed another life, and I found myself remembering also how it
had all started, and how I came to be alone in the world for so many years.

If it hadn’t been for an old college friend, I might never have survived the end of the world.

Not long after graduation I had got myself hired by a research outfit named GreenTech based in San José, on the strength of my PhD thesis on experimental biogenetics. GreenTech liked the
predictive computer models I’d developed to help in combating antiviral-resistant diseases. Then, over the course of my first year working for them, I gradually became aware that GreenTech
had a number of research contracts with the US military.

Now, this was far from unusual, even in biotech, and the money that kind of work could bring in often made the difference between life and death for companies like GreenTech. I never had cause
to think any more of it, until the day I got an email from Floyd Addison, an old friend from university, saying he was passing through town and asking me to meet him for lunch.

As it turned out, however, Floyd was doing anything but ‘just passing through’.

We met at a diner a short walk from my work. I was still unused to the dry air and heat of California, after years of studying in Britain and dealing with its blustery rain and
four-seasons-in-a-day weather. We talked about old friends, and about my recent wedding to Alice Crosby, and he apologized for not being able to make the wedding. We made small talk about buying vs
renting, and the shocking rental prices in San José. I only realized that this was more than just an unexpected social call when he dropped a fat manila folder on the table between us.

‘Have you ever heard of Red Harvest?’ Floyd asked me, eyeing me speculatively.

‘I don’t think so.’ I glanced uncertainly down at the folder and wondered what was going on. ‘What is this?’

Floyd responded by pulling some photographs out of the folder. ‘Know any of these people?’

I gave him an appraising look, then glanced through the photographs, feeling as if I’d just stumbled into some ridiculous spy movie. ‘Sure,’ I said warily. ‘That’s
Marlon Keene, the other one is Herschel Nussbaum. They’re colleagues at GreenTech.’ I laughed uneasily. ‘What are you these days, some kind of spook?’

‘Red Harvest is a religious group,’ said Floyd. His Oxford education had smoothed out the rougher edges of his Kentucky accent. ‘A cult, by any other name, and one with
strongly millennialist leanings.’

‘What does that even mean?’

Floyd’s eyebrows rose by a couple of millimetres. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that they’d really like to bring about the end of the world.’

‘Oh, come
on
.’ I could hardly believe I was hearing this. ‘Marlon and Herschel are smart guys. They’d never get involved in crap like that.’

When I thought of Herschel, I thought of someone quiet and introspective and calmly intelligent. Marlon, like Floyd, was from the American South. He was the first in his family to go to
university. When I thought of cults, I thought of glassy-eyed drones in matching jumpsuits, or wild-eyed Charles Manson types roaming the desert in pickup trucks looking for victims.

‘Smart people are just as likely as anyone else to wind up in a cult,’ Floyd insisted. ‘And smart people aren’t always that good at reading other people. Maybe they get
lonely, or they lack certain social skills, or maybe they’ve got the kind of spiritual questions they don’t think they can get the answers to from a church.’ Floyd leaned back,
tapping a finger against his coffee cup. ‘After that, it’s the proverbial long, slow slippery slide into believing the craziest shit. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.’

‘What’s going on, Floyd? Why are you even telling me this?’

‘Were you aware GreenTech is about to be the subject of an external audit?’

I looked at him, stunned. ‘I had no idea. How do you know?’

‘I work for the government,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Somehow I’d figured that.’

‘I know a lot of things about the work GreenTech does,’ he continued. Then he rattled off a list of current projects, some of which I recognized, partly because my employers had
required me and everyone else working at the facility to sign a number of frankly punitive non-disclosure agreements. Hearing those projects even named outside a lab environment made my heart
freeze.

‘Just to be clear,’ I asked, only partly joking, ‘
which
government?’

He smirked, then pulled out his wallet and showed me his Central Intelligence ID.

‘You were a maths major,’ I said. ‘How the hell does a maths major . . . ?’

‘Codes and ciphers,’ he replied. ‘And that’s all I’m saying on the subject.’ He put his wallet away. ‘Maybe if you help me out, I can shield you from
the fallout that’s going to come from that audit. Because, believe me, it’s going to be a bitch.’

‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, hating myself for whining.

‘Dirt clings to the guilty and the innocent alike,’ Floyd said. ‘All I ask is that you keep an eye on Marlon and Herschel.’ He scribbled some numbers on a napkin and
pushed it over. ‘And call me if you see or hear anything that strikes you as odd.’

Just before the audit came in, I managed to jump ship with Floyd’s help, becoming an independent consultant. Things were tight for a little while, and Alice and I had to
cancel our plans to buy our first house. In the end, we were priced out of San José anyway, so when a job came up back in the UK I grabbed it while I could.

In some ways, the move back across the Atlantic was easier for Alice than it was for me. English by birth, she had never been comfortable with the dry, hot Californian weather, whereas I, after
too many years enduring rain and long, dark winters in our student days, had grown to love the West Coast weather.

Meanwhile, amidst all the furore around GreenTech, Marlon and Herschel quietly vanished without trace.

‘We know they had help.’ It was a different restaurant, this time on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in London. The people around us had Selfridges bags piled against their tables like
sandbags around machine-gun nests. A thin grey drizzle carved tributaries through layers of dirt streaked across a street-facing window. I hadn’t seen Floyd in two years.

‘From who?’ I asked. ‘Red Harvest?’

‘Who else?’ Floyd gave me a look. ‘Which brings me to why I’m here.’

‘Ah.’ I looked down at my steak tartare. ‘No such thing as a free lunch, right?’

He smiled at that. ‘Just before GreenTech’s directors went before the board of inquiry, some gene cultures went missing.’

‘You think Marlon and Herschel took them?’

The way he looked at me made me wonder if he’d had special training in how to make people feel there was nothing they could possibly hide. ‘That’s my belief, yes.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘That’s where you come in. Your calendar is free for the next five weeks. You’re not due to take part in another consultation until at least March, and you won’t even
have to travel that far from home.’

How do you know all that?
I almost asked him, then let it go. I had the same, unsettling feeling I’d had when Floyd had first remade my acquaintance.

I promised to make careful enquiries. I tracked down another former colleague from GreenTech, with Floyd’s help. From him, I learned that the missing cultures had been
ordered to be destroyed. Perhaps Marlon and Herschel had indeed done this, but Floyd clearly thought otherwise.

The third and last time I met with Floyd was in a pub we had often frequented, and which was still popular with other American students studying at Oxford. I had taken the train up, hoping this
might be the last time Floyd required my services.

‘Marlon and Herschel have set up a regular little home from home not far from here,’ he told me. We were in a garden area at the rear of the pub, a wooden table and a half-finished
shepherd’s pie separating us. ‘A farmhouse, set back from the road in the middle of a couple of acres.’ He sipped at his latte. ‘Nice place, too.’

‘Last time I spoke to you, they’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.’

‘We think they had prepared identities,’ he replied. ‘Ones they could just walk into when things got too hot.’

I laughed uneasily. ‘This is all getting a bit James Bond for me.’

He regarded me stonily. ‘This is all quite serious, Jerry.’

‘And you really still think they’re working on these . . . these cultures they stole?’

‘They’ve been ordering lots of specialist equipment,’ he explained, ‘through shell companies. It took a great deal of work to trace them. That kind of thing takes an
enormous amount of planning.’

‘You’re talking about Red Harvest again, aren’t you?’

He raised his shoulders, then let them fall again. ‘Red Harvest is wealthy,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a lot of rich members. Marlon and Herschel couldn’t manage all
this on their own. The question is, how far along are they with what they’re planning?’

‘What
are
they planning, Floyd?’ I shook my head. ‘You never made it clear.’

‘We don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s what we don’t know that worries us.’

‘That makes absolutely no sense.’

‘Let me describe the equipment they’ve been ordering through those shell companies: incubation units; HEPA filters; lab equipment and sterilizing equipment; hazmat gear. What does
that suggest to you, other than that they’re growing bugs on behalf of their nut-job religion?’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘GreenTech vetted
everyone.
There were psychological tests, batteries of them. If Marlon and Herschel really were that crazy, it would have shown
up.’

‘You can learn how to pass those tests,’ he said, with such an air of authority I hesitated at pursuing it further.

‘If you’re so sure about all this,’ I insisted, desperation edging into my voice, ‘why don’t you just go in there and arrest them?’

It was Floyd’s turn to hesitate. ‘There’ve been some fuck-ups. Technically, we don’t yet have the necessary clearance or authority to be operating in the UK.’ He
glanced around in the most furtive manner possible. ‘The thing is, time is running out, and I don’t know if we can wait much longer.’

Then it dawned on me. ‘You’re not supposed to be here at all, are you?’

‘I need to get in there,’ he said, ‘and see just what they’re up to. But you’re the expert in this kind of thing. I want you to come with me and take a look at
whatever set-up they have running in there.’

‘You mean . . .
break in
?’

‘Why not?’ he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

The ‘farmhouse’ turned out to be a former hotel on a hillside on the outskirts of town, set back among concealing trees at the end of a long, private road.
Officially, the farmhouse belonged to a local startup looking to harvest graduates from the university. I listened to all this, and tried to ignore the small voice in the back of my head that kept
wondering if this wasn’t all some wild delusional fantasy Floyd had dreamed up. But then, if it hadn’t been for his warning about the audit . . .

I listened to Floyd as we drove out to the farmhouse in his rented Land Rover. He spoke of a threat of biological Armageddon I could scarcely credit. He was right, of course, but by the time I
knew that, it was too late, and Herschel and Marlon had already beaten and tortured him to death.

I didn’t ask Floyd how he’d known the two men would be out, or how he’d got keys to get inside. I just assumed it was all spook stuff of some kind, but I
still felt thoroughly scandalized when I saw just how easy it was for us to get inside the farmhouse.

My mind kept trying to find excuses for what we found in room after room. There were weapons, stockpiles of canned food and water filtration units. One room looked as if it had been converted
into an engineering shop. Another had been turned into a miniature ward, filled with an impressive supply of medical equipment. It was like a paranoid’s dream of what they’d need to
survive the fall of civilization.

Even all that wasn’t anything compared to what we found in the basement.

The basement was split into two long rooms, accessible only by a specially installed airlock system. HEPA filters hummed quietly, scraping the air clean. Most of the space was taken up by a
number of temperature-controlled incubation units, and hazmat suits hung on racks next to crates and boxes of yet more supplies. A couple of computers had been set up in a corner on a desk, and
there was sufficient lab equipment to grow bugs on a frankly industrial scale, even with just the two of them working in isolation.

I could no longer deny the obvious: whatever Herschel and Marlon were planning, it was big. Would whatever bugs they had developed be spread by blood, by skin or transmitted through the air? It
was too early to tell, but my stomach roiled at finding that Floyd had been right in everything he had told me.

I don’t know how Marlon or Herschel figured out we were there. Maybe they’d just forgotten something and come back to get it, but I remember clearly the sound of a gun’s safety
being taken off, and the ashen look on Floyd’s face when Marlon appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his face twisted in an angry scowl.

Beside me, Floyd jerked forward, and then I was deafened by gunfire.

Floyd collapsed halfway to the stairwell, one knee a ruined mess.

I started to babble something, but then Marlon stepped forwards, knocking me to the floor before raising his gun above my head butt-first and bringing it crashing down, sending me spinning into
darkness.