The Chimera Vector (32 page)

‘Benito!’ Sophia yelled. ‘Inject Renée. Now.’

Benito did as she ordered, then Lucia and Cassandra helped Renée off the table.

Sophia checked her com again. The Berets were almost on them. She snatched her memory stick from Jay, then checked the west corridor. If there was any chance of escape, it would have to be here.

‘Damien’s stopped breathing,’ Benito said solemnly.

Sophia saw a silent rage burning in Jay’s eyes.

‘Two troops closing fast,’ Sophia said to Lucia. ‘We have to get Renée out of here.’

Nasira covered Cassandra and Lucia as they helped Renée move. Having done all he could for Damien, Benito followed Nasira out. Jay intercepted him and took the syringe with the remaining vector inside. He’d done all he could for Damien. The only person that remained was Jay. He stood by Damien, struggling to inject his own arm.

What the hell was he doing?

‘Fuck.’ He fumbled some more.

She didn’t know why he was bothering. The bandage on his injured arm was tight and would limit the distribution of the Axolotl Chimera vector through his bloodstream.

‘Jay!’ she yelled. ‘Move it!’

He strode over and handed her the hypodermic syringe. ‘Inject me. In my good arm.’

‘It’s experimental, we don’t—’

‘Those Blue Berets are going to pay for what they did. I need this. Do it!’

She felt his saliva hit her face. It would be quicker to do this than argue. He held his good arm out. Fuck it. She sank the needle into a thick blue vein, injected the Axolotl vector that had failed to save Damien.

‘Get out of here,’ Jay said.

She removed the syringe. The Berets wouldn’t attack Jay. As far as they knew, he was still playing for their team. Unless they’d been ordered otherwise.

She didn’t bother looking at her com. There was only one way out and checking troop movements a third time wasn’t going to help her get there any faster. Her boots hit the PVC tiles in a frenzied rhythm. Adrenaline poured through her, stinging like acid on freshly severed veins. The rhythm of her boots became louder, faster. Then she realized it wasn’t just her boots any more. The Berets were almost in the lab.

***

Damien’s lungs burned, ached for air. He felt his arms. His legs. His body. Heard the sound of boots. Fluorescent light penetrated his eyelids. His fingers tingled. He opened his eyes.

‘Thank fuck,’ Jay said. He started laughing and raised his hands over Damien. ‘Rise and walk, my child.’

Damien blinked. ‘What happened?’

‘The faithful don’t ask questions. They just thank Jesus for the miracle,’ Jay said. ‘But you can thank me later.’

Damien sat upright and was rewarded with a wave of dizziness. He didn’t say so, but he was relieved to see Jay. For a moment, he wished nothing had changed. That everything in the past hour had been erased from time. He looked down to find himself topless. He peeled the dressing off his wound to find it had scabbed over.

‘Where’s Sophia and—’ He looked up to see an entire troop of Berets staring at him from the other side of the glass wall.

‘The insurgents attempted to interrogate you.’ Jay’s voice was officious now. ‘I managed to wound one of them. That should slow them down.’

‘Instant healing, huh?’ the Blue Beret sergeant said. He had a bad complexion that reminded Damien of a pineapple. ‘Nice trick.’

Damien looked down at his healing wound. ‘I wish it was instant,’ he said. ‘And it’s not nice.’

‘Colonel Denton has re-established communications,’ the sergeant said, still staring at the scab on Damien’s chest.

‘Good,’ Jay said, helping Damien to his feet.

‘We’ll be able to coordinate a search of the facility,’ the sergeant said.

‘That won’t be necessary.’ Jay strode out of the lab. ‘We know where they’ll be, Sergeant.’

Damien followed Jay out. He felt light-headed, and bumped into the corridor wall twice as he tried to catch up with Jay.

Once there was enough distance between them and the Blue Berets, he grabbed Jay’s shoulder. ‘What are we doing?’

Jay looked at him as though he’d asked what color the sky was. ‘We’re going to see Denton, what else?’

‘You know what I mean.’ Damien didn’t let go. ‘Are we in with Sophia?’

Jay brushed him off and kept going. ‘That was the plan, right?’

Damien closed the gap between them. ‘No, I mean not just pretending like Denton wants us to. Actually in?’

‘We’ve discussed this,’ Jay said. ‘We’re in. I’ve got it under control.’

Damien grabbed his arm. This time Jay didn’t flinch. ‘What if Denton gives us the order to kill her? And the others?’

Jay pulled his arm away. ‘Then we do what we think is right.’

Chapter 34

Sophia leaned against the wall in a dark, disused sub-level. The anxious breaths of her comrades circled her in symphony. She checked the countdown on her watch. Cecilia would be arriving at the facility in nine minutes, with the expectation that Sophia had captured Denton.

And she hadn’t.

It wasn’t Denton’s fault. He’d just done what any good-for-nothing psychopath did best. Screw everyone else over. But the least she could do was not make it easy for him. She was responsible for Leoncjusz’s death, and now she would be responsible for the deaths of every single person on the planet that she cared about. Her team. Cecilia. Benito. Even those knuckleheads Damien and Jay, who’d proved that she wasn’t the only operative who could break her programming without intervention.

‘Well, this is fucking great,’ Nasira said.

Lucia looked more optimistic than the others. ‘What’s our next move?’

Sophia rubbed her temples with her thumb and index finger. Her mind reeled with half-formed plans to grab Denton and meet Cecilia, but they all came crashing down.

She shook her head. ‘It can’t be done. We don’t have enough time.’

‘We should cut our losses and get the hell out while we’re still in one piece,’ Nasira said.

Sophia pulled out her com and, using an encrypted signal, called Cecilia. White noise hissed into her ear. She pulled the com away. The hiss was still there. It was in her earpiece as well. She pulled it out, as did everyone else—except Benito, who wasn’t wearing one.

‘Shit.’

Frantically, she double-checked her encryption key. It was working.

‘We’re in way over our motherfucking heads,’ Nasira said.

Sophia checked the jamming system interface. She couldn’t connect to it. It seemed she wasn’t the only one who’d thought of electronic countermeasures.

‘Denton’s blocked us, hasn’t he?’ Lucia said.

Sophia lowered her now useless com. ‘It didn’t take him long.’

Nasira said, ‘So not only are we heavily outnumbered—’

‘But we’re blind and deaf as well,’ Sophia said.

Nasira ran a hand over her cropped hair. ‘That’s one hell of a handicap.’

‘That’s not the worst of it,’ Sophia said. ‘Cecilia’s about to walk into a trap.’

‘Then Denton gets the Chimera vectors,’ Benito said. ‘You don’t want that. Trust me.’

‘Oh, we know,’ Nasira said.

Sophia pocketed her com, then checked the mag on her P90. ‘We have to warn her off.’

‘I’m guessing we can’t do that by email,’ Nasira said.

‘We have to go to the rendezvous point,’ Lucia said. ‘To warn her away.’

Sophia didn’t want to admit it, but that was the only way. ‘Denton will have all entries to the BlueGene lab covered.’

‘And how do we get in?’ Nasira said.

Sophia met Nasira’s doubtful gaze. ‘We just walk right through.’

***

Wearing a new para-aramid vest, Damien walked alongside Jay through the facility’s aircraft hangar. Four menacing-looking Speedhawk helicopters were perched in a row. Denton stepped out from the cockpit of the far left Speedhawk, which he appeared to be using as some sort of temporary base of operations. His Toughbook was open on the cockpit floor, an open suitcase beside it. From the suitcase sprouted four large antennae. A multi-band jammer. Damien hoped Sophia had some sort of electronic counter-countermeasure.

‘We tried to contact you before Sophia got to the Vector labs,’ Jay said as they approached Denton. ‘The communications were jammed.’

‘Sophia hijacked the facility’s jamming system. We had to destroy it and use our own instead,’ Denton said, removing his suit jacket and slipping on a para-aramid vest. ‘Not as much wattage, but it does the job. As of now, you can communicate, they can’t.’

He studied Damien and Jay carefully, then said, ‘Feel free to give me your sitrep.’

‘We rolled with Sophia and her insurgents, like you wanted,’ Jay said. ‘We were on the railcar and Sophia tried to go all Jedi mind trick on us. There wasn’t much time so we played along, listened to her bullshit. Found out she’s meant to RV with McLoughlin in the BlueGene lab. Five minutes from now. She’s also meant to have captured you.’

The light from the Toughbook made Denton’s smile appear to be cut deeper than usual. ‘Naturally,’ he said.

Damien felt sick. Anxious. He didn’t want to be here any more. Sophia and her friends weren’t going to make it out alive. And there was nothing he could do to change that. They were going to die because he betrayed them.

‘She knows this isn’t possible,’ Jay said. ‘Not with the heavy Blue Beret and shocktrooper presence. One of her own is badly wounded.’

Denton zipped his vest up. ‘Combat ready?’

‘Negative,’ Jay said. ‘I bet she’ll try to warn McLoughlin off before the RV can be made.’

Damien clasped his hands behind his back so Denton couldn’t see him fidget. He didn’t even know why he cared about Sophia’s team. He barely knew them and half of them didn’t like him. Sophia was supposed to be the enemy and here he was trying to save her. It was ridiculous. This was ridiculous.

Denton closed his Toughbook and cast his gaze to the portable multi-band jammer. ‘She may try to warn McLoughlin, but she won’t succeed. Her only option is to make the rendezvous.’

From the corner of his vision, Damien could see Jay’s hands also fidgeting behind his back. Jay never fidgeted.

‘Without you,’ Jay said, ‘she has no choice but to forfeit the Chimera vector.’

‘I already know that,’ Denton said. ‘A more pertinent question would be: can she trust you?’

Jay nodded. ‘She thinks she can.’

‘She thinks she can?’ Denton rolled the words in his mouth as if they were a fine wine. ‘I’ve been trying to get her to capture me for the last half-hour. Clearly, I’ve overestimated her.’

He sniffed, nostrils flaring slightly. ‘We have a bunker-buster bomb on its way to this facility as we speak.’ He checked his watch. ‘Due to arrive in twenty-six minutes.’

Damien also checked his watch, made note of the time.

Denton ran a hand over his shaved head. ‘So if Sophia isn’t capable of taking what she wants, then I’ll have to give it to her, won’t I? Before it’s too late.’

Chapter 35

Sophia walked directly towards the two pairs of Blue Berets at the end of the corridor. The Berets were covering the east side of the BlueGene lab and this narrow, under-lit corridor was their chokepoint. She had Benito beside her. Like her, he was dressed in black fatigues, helmets, goggles and was carrying the standard-issue MP5SD submachine gun. Since there were no female Berets, Sophia had taken the liberty of wearing a gas mask to conceal her gender. Still, she would look noticeably slender. This was why she’d concealed Nasira and Lucia behind them. Nasira and Lucia had their weapons cocked and safeties off, but Sophia had kept hers and Benito’s uncocked. Nasira and Lucia would fire on her signal.

As they approached the Berets, Benito said in his best gravelly voice, ‘We’re taking the lab.’

Sophia cringed. The words had come out not so much gravelly as shaky and uncertain. He wasn’t walking like a soldier, and he was holding his submachine gun too tightly. It was like he was made of cardboard.

She waited for the soldiers’ response. They didn’t give one. She counted down from three. If she hit zero and they hadn’t responded, then she’d have to give the signal.

Three.

The two pairs of Blue Berets remained perfectly still, not bothering to acknowledge the newcomers’ existence. The operatives were meant to be the robots, not the Berets. She didn’t like this one bit.

Two.

The Berets were holding their weapons, but kept their aim down. That might be a good sign. But still they didn’t speak. Had they even heard Benito? Their lips weren’t moving, so they weren’t talking to one another.

One.

Benito was at her side, their footsteps in stride. They were getting too close to the Berets now and still there was no response.

Benito cleared his throat. He was going to speak again.

Zero.

She wasn’t going to let him.

She stumbled, her foot catching Benito’s leg. He fell. She leaped to one side, dropped her MP5.

Down on one knee, she drew her pistol. Round in the chamber, suppressor attached. Her first pair of shots struck the Beret’s chest. She aimed higher and squeezed off her second pair at his head. They struck the Beret on the bridge of his nose. He collapsed.

At the same time, the second and third Berets dropped.

She snapped her aim to the fourth. He had a second to take aim. His MP5 leveled on Lucia, but Nasira’s rounds struck him first. His MP5 splintered apart, the three-round burst ricocheting off and penetrating his shoulder. Another burst struck him in the chest and throat. Blood squirted from an artery. He slumped against the wall, shuddered violently. Collapsed.

Sophia checked her six. From the far corner, seventy meters, Cassandra had taken out the fourth Beret. All of the shots had been suppressed. It had sounded more like a staple-gun fight than a gun fight.

Sophia waved Cassandra and Renée over. They were clear to approach. Then she checked on Benito. He was lying on the ground, belly down.

‘Are you hurt?’ she said.

Benito got to his feet. ‘They could’ve just said hi.’

‘Any wounded?’ Sophia asked.

‘I’m OK,’ Lucia said.

‘I’m good,’ Nasira said.

Renée and Cassandra reached them, Renée carrying a satchel bag filled with their P90s and webbing belts.