The Dragon Factory (35 page)

They moved very quickly, angling toward the main building, making maximum use of solid cover—trees, other buildings—to block sensor sweeps.

They were forty feet from the rear wall of the factory when the lights came on.

Suddenly four sets of stadium lamps flared on, washing away every scrap of shadows, pinning the two men like black bugs on a green mat. They froze in the middle of a field, too far from the forest line, away from the shelter of buildings.

“Shit!” Homler growled, wheeling left and right, looking for an exit, but the lights were unbearably bright. They blinded the men and their
sensors, and even though their night vision was cued to dim in the presence of a flare, this light crept in through the loose seal of their goggles.

“Remain where you are!” demanded a harsh voice that bellowed at them from speakers mounted on the light poles. “Lower your weapons and lace your fingers behind your heads.”

“Fuck this,” snarled Pinter, and opened fire in the direction of the nearest set of lights. He burned through half a magazine before the bulbs began exploding in showers of sparks.

Homler stood back-to-back with him and fired at the lights on the opposite side. He and Pinter moved in a slow circle, blasting the lights, waiting for the crushing burn of return fire.

The last of the lights exploded and the sparks drifted down to the grass as darkness closed in over them.

Instantly they were in motion, running like hell toward the fence, swapping out their magazines as they ran. They didn’t care about stealth now. Homler punched a button on his vest that began pulsing out a signal to a pickup team in a Zodiac somewhere out beyond the surf line. If he and Pinter could make it to the water, they could get the hell out of this place.

Pinter caught movement on his right and fired two shots at it without breaking stride. There were no friendlies to worry about on this island. There was no return fire, though. A miss or a mistake—it didn’t matter.

They could see the fence ahead and Homler reached it first. He leaped at it from six feet out, stretching for the chain links. Then he was snatched out of the air and flung ten feet backward by something huge and dark that seemed to detach itself from the shadows.

Homler crunched to the ground, rolled over onto hands and knees, tore off his mask and vomited onto the grass. Pinter wheeled and fired at the shadow, but there was nothing there. He spun and chopped every yard of foliage on either side of the fence, but nothing screamed and his night vision showed nothing. Pinter fitted in a new magazine as he backed up and knelt beside his partner.

“Sundance,” he hissed. “How bad you hit?”

Homler tore off his goggles and turned a white, desperate face to Pinter. “I . . . I . . .” Whatever he tried to say was cut short as Homler’s body suddenly convulsed.

Pinter stared down at his partner for a second and saw a deep puncture on the side of his neck. A dart? A snakebite? Pinter put two fingers against the side of his friend’s throat, felt a rapid heartbeat. Homler’s entire body was rigid now; white foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth. Pinter recognized the signs of toxic shock, but whether this was poison or some natural neurotoxin was uncertain. All that was clear was that he had to escape and he could not carry Homler over the fence.

Pinter felt bad about it, but self-preservation was a much stronger drive.

“Sorry, Sundance,” he murmured, and as he rose and backed toward the fence he swept his rifle back and forth, searching the shadows with night vision. The grass stretched away before him, and except for wild-flowers blowing in the wind, nothing moved. It made no sense. What had attacked his partner?

When Pinter felt the metal links of the fence press into his back he turned and started climbing. He made it all the way to the top before the darkness reached out of the trees and took him.

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, August 29, 4:39
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 79 hours, 21 minutes

We gathered around a conference table you could have landed an F-18 on. Grace and I on one side, Dr. Hu across from us, Church at the head, and a dozen department heads and analysts filling out the other seats. We all had laptops and stacks of notes. As usual there were plates of cookies on the table as well as pitchers of water and pots of coffee.

Church said, “We have a lot to cover, so let’s dig right in. Yesterday was a very bad day for us, and not just because of the acrimony of the
Vice President and the unfortunate injuries sustained by Sergeant Faraday. Yesterday none of us were playing our A-game. We reacted to the NSA issue as if it was the only thing on our plate. Our operational efficiency was so low the numbers are not worth discussing.”

Hu started to say something, but Church shook his head.

“Let me finish. I think we’ve been played.” He studied how that hit each of us. “As you know, I’m not a big believer in coincidences. I am, however, a subscriber to the big-picture approach. When I say that I think we’ve been played, I mean that too many important things happened at the same time, and all of it was timed to coincide with our need to pull back virtually all of our resources. Imagine how things might have played if the NSA had succeeded in either obtaining MindReader or forcing us to shut it down. It would have been the same as being handcuffed and blindfolded.” He looked around the room. “Does anyone disagree?”

We shook our heads. “Actually, boss, not to sound like a suckup, but this is what I’ve been thinking. It’s what I wanted to tell you before I left Denver.”

He nodded as if he’d already guessed that. “Do you want to venture a guess as to what’s happening?”

“No. Or at least not yet,” I said. “There are still some blanks that need filling in. You told me a little about the Cabal and some Cold War stuff. That has to be tied to this, so why don’t you bring us up to speed on that and then I’ll play a little what-if. That work for you?”

“It does.” He poured himself some coffee and addressed the whole group. “Based on what Captain Ledger found in Deep Iron, I think we’re seeing one thing, one very large case. Because we’ve been out of the loop and off our game, we haven’t caught a good glimpse of it. It’s like the story of the three blind men describing an elephant. However, we don’t yet know if this is something that has years to go before it becomes a general public threat or if it’s about to blow up in our faces. My guess? There’s a fuse lit somewhere and we have to find it.”

“How do we start?” asked Grace.

He took a cookie from the plate, bit off an edge, and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. “To the general public the Cold War was about the
struggle between democracy and socialism. That’s the kind of oversimplified propaganda that both sides found useful to perpetuate. What it was in fact was a struggle for power during a time of massive political and technological change. During the war there was a massive spike in all kinds of scientific research, from rockets to medicine. Those decades saw the development of everything from the microchip to the cell phone. Some of the most groundbreaking work for the development of many of today’s scientific marvels, however, predated the Cold War to the thirties and early forties in Germany.”

“Absolutely,” interrupted Bug. “There was wild science-fiction stuff going on back then. Z1, the first binary computer, was developed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1936, and his Z3, developed in 1941, was the first computer controlled by software. People today seem to think computers started with the PC.”

“Exactly,” said Church. “And there were similar landmark moments in medicine and other sciences. After the fall of Berlin there was a scramble to acquire German science and German scientists. Even people who should have been tried as war criminals were pardoned—or simply disappeared—by governments that wanted these scientists to continue their work. Openly or, more often, in secret. There are many—myself included—who believe that all of the information gathered by Nazi scientists should have been destroyed. Completely. However, governments often don’t care about the cost of information so long as the information itself has value.”

Grace said, “So, you’re saying that we kept that stuff . . . and used it?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Sure,” said Dr. Hu. “Most of what we know about how the human body reacts to fatal or near-fatal freezing comes from research done in the camps. Virtually all of the biological warfare science of the fifties, sixties, and seventies has its roots in experiments done on prisoners at the camps and by Japan’s Unit Seven Thirty-one—their covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit.”

“We pay the Ferryman with the Devil’s coin,” said Grace.

“Indeed we do,” said Church.

“You’d think we’d learn, but my optimism for that died a long time ago. Many of the doctors and scientists involved in these experiments were given pardons. Much of this research was intended for use by the military and intelligence communities, though some had more directly beneficial uses for the common good. Some became the property of corporations which exploited the beneficial aspects of these sciences in order to bring lucrative products to market.”

“Big Pharma,” said Grace with asperity.

“Among others,” Church agreed. “There were also groups within governments or formed by like-minded people from various countries, who desired to see less savory lines of science carried through to their conclusions, and that’s where our story begins.”

Church pressed a button and a dozen photographs appeared on the big TV screen. The faces were all of white men and women, and some were clearly morgue photos. I recognized none of them.

“There was a very powerful group active from the end of World War Two all the way to the last days of the Cold War. They called themselves the Cabal, and their individual biographies are in the red folders you each have. They belonged to no nation, though many of their members had strong ties to the Nazi Party. At least three of the Cabal members were themselves former Nazis, while others may have been sympathizers but were actually citizens of the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Argentina, and several other countries. These were all very powerful people who could draw on personal and corporate fortunes to fund their goals.”

“And what were those goals?” I asked.

“They had several. Ethnic cleansing was one of their primary goals. They waged an undeclared war on what they called the ‘mud people,’ which is a blanket phrase for anyone who isn’t descended from a very specific set of Caucasian bloodlines.”

“Guess no one bloody well told them that we all evolved from a bunch of apes in Africa,” said Grace.

Church smiled. “They would not be the first—or last—group to view evolution as a ‘theory.’ One of the key players in the Cabal, a brilliant
geneticist known only by the code name ‘Merlin,’ apparently believed that humankind had been visited by aliens, angels, or gods—accounts of his beliefs vary—and that the purest human bloodlines are descended from those celestial beings.”

“Oh brother,” I said, and even Hu gave me a smile and nod.

“The Cabal made hundreds of millions by exploiting science stolen from Berlin after the fall, or from science that was begun in Germany during the war and continued uninterrupted by scientists who fled before the Allies won. Using a variety of false names and dummy corporations and relying on support from a few of the world’s less stable governments, they were able to amass great wealth and possess some of the most advanced technology of their time. When they came onto the radar of one country or another they would close up shop, change names, and vanish only to reemerge again somewhere else.”

“You said that they had been taken down,” I said. “How and by whom?”

“Each of the world’s major intelligence networks caught glimpses of the Cabal, but no one country saw enough of it to make an accurate guess as to its full size, strength, and purpose. It was only after a number of agents from different countries began tripping over each other that it became clear they were all working on aspects of a single massive case. Naturally when these agents individually brought their suspicions to their governments it was not well received. Partly because the sheer scope of the case, their story was doubted. The agents were forced to waste time and resources to bring in proof that their governments could not ignore.

“These agents eventually formed a team of special operators working under joint U.S., Israeli, German, and British authority. This predates DMS and Barrier by quite a long way. Officially this group did not exist. The only code name ever used was
the List
. The List came into it much as we are now—catching glimpses of something already in motion—and like our current matter there were some losses before the List was able to make the transition from outsiders to active players.

“Once the existence of the Cabal was proven, the threat it posed shook the foundations of the superpowers. There are some—a visionary
few—who understood then, as now, that the end of World War Two did not mean the end of this enemy. All that changed was the nature of the war. Instead of tanks and troops and fleets of warships, the Cabal waged its war with germs, weapons of science, and enough money to destabilize governments. Instead of using armies to slaughter groups they considered to be racially inferior, the Cabal financed internal conflicts within troubled nations in ways that sparked ethnic genocide.”