The Extinction Code (13 page)

Garrett smiled his thanks, and handed the man a thin wedge of notes that made the young man’s eyes bulge in amazement.

‘Sir, I couldn’t possibly…’

‘Make sure nobody interrupts me, understood?’ Garrett said as he pushed the money into the man’s hands.

The aide turned on his heel with another deep bow and hurried away. Garrett waited until the door to the suite was closed before he set the briefcase down on the immense leather couch that dominated the suite and looked around. He walked to the balcony doors and threw them open to take in the extraordinary view. Fresh air billowed in from across the Persian Gulf, devoid of the stench of the human stain.

Soon, that stain would no longer be a problem.

Inside the chrome briefcase was a simple laptop computer, one that before the end of the day would have its hard drive removed and crushed to a pulp, while the rest of the device would be thrown from Garrett’s helicopter on the flight over the bay to the airport and his private jet. Now, all he needed to do was tend to his guest and await the arrival of a very powerful group of men.

Garrett walked to the bathroom door, which had been locked on his instructions after his package had arrived about an hour before he had. Delivered just as he had been by helicopter, it had been placed here for safe keeping. Garrett unlocked the door and walked into the spacious bathroom, saw the marble tiles, the gold–plated taps, the polished floors. He ignored all of it and walked across to the shower, then yanked the curtain back.

Curled up inside the shower was a man, dressed only in soiled shorts, his body covered in bruises and his face swollen and puffy. The beating he had endured had been designed more to terrify than to cause permanent injury, and that was important to Garrett. He needed this man to be in good shape when his guests arrived – not
perfect
shape, obviously – for he also needed them to see that he would perform any act in order to achieve his goal. Then, once the information the man held in his mind was delivered in person before his guests, he could again demonstrate his resolve in a final and undeniable act of loyalty.

Garrett reached down to his wrist watch and pressed a button. Moments later, the door to the suite opened and two burly men strode efficiently inside and joined Garrett in the bathroom.

‘Get him ready,’ Garrett ordered as he turned and walked from the room. ‘They’ll be here within the hour.’

*

ARIES, DIA Headquarters,

Washington DC

‘We’ve got something.’

Hellerman hurried across the Watch Room to Jarvis’s side, carrying with him a tablet computer that he handed to Jarvis as he explained what was on the computer.

‘Surveillance at the NSA picked up some shielded chatter coming out of Dubai International Airport. There are not one but
three
private jets landing there right now that are known to be on the books of members of Majestic Twelve. Given that they’ve been laying low for some time I thought that you ought to know.’

Jarvis nodded, immediately sensing the urgency of the situation. ‘What assets do we have in play in Dubai?’

‘The FBI has a field office there, as do we, and two safe houses inside the city,’ Hellerman replied. ‘We could probably put a tail on any one of them right now, maybe even ask local law enforcement to...’

‘Not a chance,’ Jarvis cut him off, ‘police there are far too vulnerable to bribes. We’ll have to keep watch using trusted assets. Put any available agents that we have on watch, find out what they’re doing out there and where they’re going, understood?’

‘Got it,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘What about Ethan and Nicola?’

‘They’re in Norway,’ Jarvis replied, ‘but I’ll fill them in on this and get back to you.’

Hellerman rushed off as Jarvis walked into his office and closed the door behind him. He pulled a cell phone from his jacket and dialled a number, waited for the line to connect. A voice answered on the third ring.

‘Yes?’

‘We’ve got contact, confirmed sightings of at least three of the cabal in Dubai. Where are you?’

‘I’ll be there by tomorrow and will pick up the trail.’

‘There won’t be much time. They must know about Wilms by now.’

‘You let me worry about that.’

The line cut off abruptly and Jarvis pocketed the phone, conscious of his surroundings and hoping that the shielding on the burner cell was sufficient to protect the call. Although he was inside one of the most secure buildings on earth, there remained in all government facilities an institution known as “trust”. People like Edward Snowden existed because without trust there was no security. The DIA monitored signals from all over the world in conjunction with the National Security Agency, but unless a specific search was made they would have very little control over who was calling out from within the building. Jarvis knew that as long as he kept his calls short and infrequent, there was little chance of his duplicity being noticed.

Jarvis had worked for far too long in the intelligence game to be certain that the apprehension and trial of figures as powerful as those within Majestic Twelve was at best a futile gesture and at worse a waste of time, resources and even lives. He had himself seen massively wealthy and powerful drug lords negotiate “deals” to avoid lengthy prison sentences, politicians found guilty of massive fraud given jail sentences less prolonged than those daily dispensed with joy against less powerful citizens for shoplifting. In a society where the powerful lived under a different set of laws to the general populace, there would never come a day when Jarvis would see Majestic Twelve’s cabal rotting behind bars for mass murder. He knew that even if caught, tried and prosecuted, not one of them would ever likely serve a day in a real prison, their lawyers too numerous and too powerful, their wealth too great, their friends in the Capitol and even the administration able to pull strings and quote laws that he would never be able to oppose.

Jarvis looked in the mirror, saw his rheumy eyes looking back at him. His white hair was thinning now, his features tired and drawn. He had spent far too long in this game already and he knew that it was only a matter of time before his role went to another, younger and more energetic soul than he. But he was damned if he would go down without first seeing one of the most dangerous cabals ever conceived brought to its knees, crushed from existence. Jarvis knew that the greatest punishment he could mete to the members of Majestic Twelve was to take away their
power
, for it was that upon which they feasted, that and the fear of the powerless citizenry who suffered as they profited.

Jarvis’s hand clenched the burner cell in his pocket tightly, threatened to crush it. He forced himself to relax a little, to breathe. Anger at the hopelessness of the ordinary man when confronted with people like MJ–12 was as clear to him as the next man on the street, perhaps even clearer because he, uniquely, was in a place to do something about it.

Jarvis took a breath and opened his office door, headed out to a desk in the Watch Room and quickly accessed a terminal. Within moments he was able to identify his own out–going cell signal from the DIA building, and then identify the nearest cell tower from which the answering cell had pinged.

He smiled ruefully as he noted the location of the cell.

‘Saudi Arabia,’ he whispered to himself as he deleted the call trace and data from the server.

Aaron Mitchell was already in a position to strike.

***

XV

Burj Al Arab Hotel,

Dubai

Professor Rhys Garrett stood on the balcony of the Royal Suite and watched the distant waves of the Persian Gulf hundreds of feet below roll serenely toward the beach behind him, which was covered with tourists from countless countries blissfully unaware of the cataclysm rushing toward them.

His men had dressed their victim and planted him firmly on a chair in the lounge, to which he was heavily bound and his mouth gagged. That anybody would venture up here by chance was unthinkable, especially now that there were literally dozens of discreetly placed security agents scattered throughout the hotel and watching the movements of every single person who entered or exited the building.

Majestic Twelve had sufficient power to topple governments, provoke stock markets and engineer economic crashes, create or destroy lucrative drug trades and even influence the President of the United States depending on who held office at a particular time. Thus, creating a security perimeter around an already highly exclusive hotel was not a stretch for them.

A soft buzzing intruded on his reverie and he turned with some reluctance from the stunning vista outside and closed the balcony doors behind him. He pulled the blinds closed to prevent any observation from outside, and then moved across the lounge to the entrance and opened the door.

Outside stood a tall, gaunt looking man whom he recognized instantly although most people could have walked past him in the street and had no idea who they were looking at.

‘Good morning, Rhys,’ the man greeted him with a hand shake and a sombre voice. ‘May we come in?’

‘Of course,’ Rhys said as he backed away from the door and gestured for the men outside to enter.

One by one they walked into the room, each wearing a tailored suit that would have cost most people a month’s salary, wrist watches worth more than many luxury cars and colognes from brands too exclusive to even be available to the general public.

For the most part Garrett did not recognize the men as they filed into the room, accompanied by two armed escorts. The apartment door was closed behind them and they variously sat or stood as he turned to face them. Of those that he did recognize, he knew them to be reclusive trillionaires who had forged their fortunes in stock markets, real estate, agriculture and military technology. Not one of the men was less than fifty years of age, and there were just eleven of them, not twelve. Their number had been reduced a few years previously when a Texan oil billionaire named Dwight Opennheimer had met his maker, and his replacement had recently disappeared from the streets of New York City, never to be seen again. That disappearance weighed heavily on Garrett’s mind as the eleven men looked at him and then at the man strapped into the chair nearby.

‘What brings us here, Mister Garrett?’ asked Samuel Kruger, the gaunt man who had greeted him at the door.

Garrett took a breath and began.

‘As you know, gentlemen, I have spent most of my career involved in the study of genetics, and have achieved my status both profesionally and personally as a result of the patenting of novel coding techniques that allowed mankind to map his own genome, among other things. In more recent years I have been involved in a new study, and during the course of that work a groundbreaking discovery was made which I would like to share with you all.’

‘We didn’t come here for a lecture,’ one of the men said in a dismissive tone that suggested he felt his time was being wasted. ‘You’ve got two minutes.’

Garrett reeled momentarily, but he forced himself to smile at the man through his teeth. ‘Unless you have a degree in biogenetics, you won’t know what hit you.’

‘One minute fifty,’ the man replied without interest.

‘Let him speak,’ Kruger chided his companion gently. ‘Rhys, if you will?’

Garrett turned to the man trussed up in the chair beside him.

‘This is Professor Martin Beauchamp, a leading expert in the field of palaeontology,’ he introduced his victim. ‘Believe it or not, this man holds the key to the survival of the human species.’

Garrett was met with silence this time, but an expectant silence that urged him on. He reached down and pulled the gag from Beauchamp’s mouth as he went on.

‘Professor Beauchamp here would like to share with you a discovery that was made by Doctor Aubrey Channing on a hillside in Montana some decades ago, when Martin was his undergraduate student.’ Beauchamp looked up at the men surrounding him, his eyes bleary and his shoulders slumped. ‘Just tell them what you told me.’

Beauchamp worked his mouth as though getting up the strength to speak, and then he turned his head slightly and spat a globule of phlegm onto Garrett’s polished shoes. Garrett looked down at the mess as he heard a ripple of muffled laughter from the powerful men before him.

Mastering his dignity, he turned to his guards. Without a word they stalked toward Beauchamp and grabbed his arms, then lifted him almost off the ground and carried him toward the helipad outside. Garrett ignored them as he turned to the men of Majestic Twelve.

‘Professor Beauchamp is the former undergraduate of a scientist who worked in Montana,’ he said. ‘That scientist received a letter in 2002. I believe that you know about that letter and intervened in the excavation performed by Aubrey Channing.’

The eyes of several of the men raised up to his at that point, their interest piqued.

‘Go on,’ said their gaunt leader.

‘Channing discovered the remains of a species of dinosaur in the rocks of Montana’s badlands, something that has rarely been seen before: a dinosaur that was alive after the asteroid impact that supposedly sent them extinct.’ Garrett said. ‘Channing has never been seen again since and nor have the remains that he found. I contend that you intervened, and had them taken from him. Would that be correct?’

Kruger raised his chin as he peered at Garrett.

‘I cannot confirm nor deny that.’

Garrett smiled. ‘I understand that you do not wish to implicate yourselves without good reason. That’s why I brought Beauchamp along with me, to redress the balance.’

Outside the helicopter lifted off the helipad and turned away from the suite, climbing high into the hard blue sky as Garrett strolled across to the balcony doors and watched it fly away as he spoke. ‘It’s a remarkable thing, a temperature inversion. It’s what creates mirages in the desert and on roads, bending the light so that the impossible seems to occur and objects float in the distance above the horizon, or ghostly lakes shimmer in the desert. It’s all about bending light, and what few people know is that it can also occur somewhat in reverse: that is, something that should be visible is not under certain conditions, which are most often experienced when air is being rapidly heated.’