The Lethal Agent (The Extraction Files Book 2) (13 page)

CPI-AO-301, NEW YORK

SEPTEMBER 6, 2232

An afternoon of peace and quiet? Silas didn’t want to believe such a thing was possible anymore. Jane promised to get on board. Maggie was safely on a shuttle back to CPI. Kaufman her diligent guard. It was almost too good to be true.

Silas occupied himself getting caught up on his files, approving purchase orders, and responding to certain delicate inquiries. There was even an ecomm from Masry yet to be handled. He pushed it to the back of his mind and concentrated on the day to day. With all the commotion lately, he’d fallen behind. He didn’t need another distraction.

Evening approached, and then night fell, and all was quiet. Too quiet. Maggie and Kaufman should have been long back by now.

Silas made the necessary motions on his tablet to locate their global coordinates. Still a few hours out over the Atlantic.

What had delayed them?

He felt the rising tide of concern fill him, constricting his chest until he found himself with a glass in his hand and brandy on his lips. Then the meep-meep-meep sounded.

Silas failed to recognize the sound at first, but when he did, he stood baffled. Who would use the alarm system to summon him? Usually, it was the other way around.

He could think of only one person.

Several quick steps brought him to Nick’s open door, where Vicereine Indra Masry’s face hovered in hologram above his desk.

“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Arrenstein,” she said in her cool, dismissive manner. Her eyes found the glass of brandy in his hand.

Nick sat in his desk chair with a barely concealed smirk.

“Good evening, Dr. Masry. I hope Dr. Pastromas hasn’t disturbed you.” Silas kept his eyes on the Scholar commissioner, refusing to give Nick the satisfaction of looking ruffled.

“He has brought some concerning facts to my attention. I’d like you to see me tomorrow morning. I’m at the Olympus Genetics Facility in the northwest sector. Cressida has canceled my 0900 to accommodate you. Please don’t be late.”

She was gone before Silas could respond. He would have to catch the early morning shuttle to Washington. He would lose an entire day of work.

But that was hardly his concern. His blood boiled so hot it threatened to spill over.

Nick sat in his chair looking smug yet unsatisfied. He probably wanted to witness Silas’s demotion. With Silas going to Olympus, Nick would only hear about it in the aftermath. In fact, it would probably be mentioned in an ecomm with news of Nick’s promotion a few sentences later.

As Nick had wanted all along.

Now was not the time to lose his cool. “Well done, Nick,” was all he managed before he shot back the last of his brandy, strolled into his office, and closed the door behind him.

It took him an hour to calm down.

Silas knew he should go to bed, it was already late, and he would have to leave by 0600 to catch his shuttle, but he waited for Maggie and Kaufman all the same. Even with several glasses of brandy in his blood, he couldn’t sleep knowing she was out there.

Maggie and Kaufman showed up sometime around midnight, spirits high as they chatted easily on the way up to their rooms. Silas caught them in the hallway when he heard them.

“You look awful,” Maggie started. She looked him up and down, taking in the glassiness of his eyes and the wrinkles in his shirt. He would have been irritated had he not thought it the last time he might ever see her.

“I’ve been waiting for you. You were supposed to be back hours ago,” he reminded her.

To Silas’s surprise, Kaufman stepped between them. “It was my fault. I asked her to take me to a restaurant for lunch, and we stayed too long. She wanted to come right back.”

Silas doubted it was true, but he was beyond caring. Ignoring Kaufman, he spoke to Maggie. “I’m headed to a meeting with Masry in the morning.”

Based on the slight narrowing of her eyes and downturn of her lips, Maggie caught his meaning. “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us,” she said.

Silas didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like he and Maggie would hug it out and bury the hatchet, but it felt strange to leave her this way. Maybe he would come back, and it would all be fine. Or maybe he would be exiled and end up in the Sri Lankan prison complex he’d threatened to send Jane to. Wouldn’t that be poetic?

But Silas did know he was relieved that Maggie was back and that she would be cautious in the future. That was about as much as Silas could ask of her.

That was far more than he deserved already.

“Get some sleep,” Maggie said, squeezing his arm. “Do you need us to walk you back to your room?”

“No, no. I’m fine.” He waved her off.

“You look more drunk than fine.” She put her arm around his. “Go on, Theo. I’ve got this. I’ll meet you upstairs in a few.”

Without so much as a questioning glance, Kaufman nodded and headed to the elevator. A dog obeying his master.

“I don’t need your help,” he said as he tried to push her off.

“You’re on thin ice as it is, remember?”

Silas didn’t appreciate having his words thrown back at him. “And whose fault is that?”

“Both of ours,” she replied. He couldn’t believe it. Did Maggie just take responsibility for something?

Despite his protests, Maggie pulled him down the corridor, around the elevator tube, and into the small hallway that housed both his and Nick’s rooms. “How’d you know where to go?” His personal quarters weren’t exactly on the tour.

“Where else could it be? First floor is cleaning and galley. Second floor is recruit quarters. Fourth through sixth floors are for off-site agents and handlers. Seventh is for the lab. That leaves you and Nick with the third floor for your offices and rooms.”

Silas scoffed. She was too smart for her own good. “The one on the left.” He pointed at the door and tried to lean on her as little as possible. He would have made it on his own, as he had countless times before, but he did appreciate the help, even if he wouldn’t let her know it.

And he couldn’t figure out why she would help him in the first place. It wasn’t like she owed him anything.

Maggie opened the door to his room and led him in, though he was the one who lived there. “I’m fine, really. You can go.”

“Think Masry’s going to give you the can tomorrow?” She sat beside him on the bed.

“If I’m lucky,” he admitted.

“What happens then?” In the darkness of his room, Silas couldn’t see her features, but her tone was one of concern. He wondered how genuine it was.

“Nick will probably be director. He can do what he wants after that.” Silas didn’t want to think of what CPI would become with Nick at the helm.

“We’ll manage. One way or another. You know, you never did give us that meeting. About what we found out with the bugs. Want me to tell you now?”

Silas smiled. “Sure, I’d love to hear it.”

“Okay, so when we measured the metal components, they were really high, but we also figured out that the masses for each bug species is identical. Not close, but exactly the same.” Maggie rattled off her discovery, the excitement spilling out uncontrollably. It made Silas’s heart swell to see her that way.

“But that’s not really possible in living organisms. There are differences in masses between individuals, even at different times of day based on food intake. But the bugs are all the same.”

Maybe it was the brandy, but Silas didn’t understand. “I don’t follow. Who cares if they’re the same?”

“Well, I just thought it was strange, so we went to see Ramona and talked about it and—”

“You went to see Ramona?” Silas froze in shock. Since when did Maggie do what he asked? And why didn’t Ramona say anything about it?

“Yeah, but anyway, we went to your office to tell you. We think the bugs are manufactured.”

“What?”

“You know, like made in a factory.”

“I know what manufactured means, but as I’ve already told you, they’re living. They’re organic. They have DNA. Highly modified, but they have it.”

Maggie didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. “I know, but it makes so much sense. All the hosts are Scholars who somehow compromise their own research or change the direction of their research or something. Then, everyone they work with gets infected, but not in the same way or with the same species. There’s too much coincidence. Someone makes the bugs and selects the hosts. They’re a biological weapon, not a parasitic organism.”

Silas didn’t know what to say, what to think. Had they really had it so wrong all this time? “I hope that’s not the case.”

“Why? I thought you wanted us to figure this out.” For the first time, Maggie sounded disappointed.

“Oh, believe me. There’s nothing I’d like more than for you to figure out the bugs. Then we can all go live normal lives. But if they are what you say, if someone is controlling them, then this is going to be far more difficult than we ever thought.”

“Well, we’ll figure it out. One way or another.” She sounded confident, not in a false bravado sort of way. She really believed it.

“You like him don’t you?”

“Who?”

“Kaufman.”

“Oh, I guess. He’s fine.” She sounded less sure than she’d been before.

Silas flopped back on his bed and laughed.

“What?” she asked above him.

“It’s good. If there was only one good thing I’ve done for you so far, it’s putting you with Kaufman, and I didn’t even do it.”

“You didn’t?”

Silas chuckled. “No, Nick did. He insisted. I couldn’t fight him without telling him too much. Turns out he was right all along. Maybe he should run this place.”

A long moment of silence passed until she finally said, “I don’t think so.” Then, she collapsed beside him, curled into a ball so her knees touched his side.

“You know I tried to take care of you. That’s probably hard to believe, but I did.” He was drunk and rambling, he knew, but he might not get another chance.

“I don’t need you to take care of me. I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

Silas sighed into the black void that was his bedroom. “I know. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Need anything else?” she didn’t move, but Silas, too, sensed that moment was gone.

“No. I’ll sleep it off. Just promise me you’ll be good?”

Maggie pushed herself up and off the bed. Standing over him, she said, “I’ll be good. I’ll figure out the bugs, and put an end to it. I give you my word, for all that it’s still worth to you.” Then, her feet shuffled out of the room and left him alone.

How long ago had he said those words to her? It had been weeks since her recruitment interview, and she could recite it word for word. Silas laughed aloud. Maggie had been the right girl from the start, and now that Masry would remove him from CPI, Silas’s guilt couldn’t get in her way anymore. Maybe then, Maggie really would do it.

LUNA COLONY

SEPTEMBER 6, 2232

“This was the Earth in 1974, the first photo ever taken,” Charlene began. Above the kitchen table, a blue, green, brown, and white planet rotated. “And this is the Earth today.” She swiped to reveal a second planet, this one brown, orange, and grey. It looked nothing like the first, except they were both spherical.

“By 2020, there were some pretty serious issues going on in the world. There were over 200 countries, each with individual laws and political systems. Some wanted to save the Earth—prohibit oil drilling, save the species, study the ecosystems. Others wanted to profit. There were nations that hunted whales in massive numbers and some that strip-mined whole mountain ranges. Every few years there would be some sort of issue between nations that didn’t agree. Add in four major world religions with a claim to own the heavens, and it was a recipe for disaster.”

Siya chimed in with, “There is but one god, and he is called Allah.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Charlene said to dismiss him. “Anyway, there was a lot of little stuff at first. School shootings. Border disputes. Radical regimes that did the dirty work for larger groups. Then, in 2049, it just sort of boiled over.” Charlene’s hands mirrored her words, a bomb going off on the table before her.

“It started in Jerusalem, though no one was really surprised. Muslims, Jews, and Christians had been fighting over it for literally centuries. There had already been wars fought for it, and every few years, the city changed hands, never really at peace. Then, a Christian killed a Muslim. It was just one man who killed one woman. One death among the thousands that were killed every day across the world back then, but it was the one that started it all.”

“Her name was Ramada Al-Ghazal.” Both Abraham and Charlene turned to stare at Siya who spoke of the woman as if he’d known her personally. “She wore a hijab of yellow silk. Her hair was black, and her eyes grey.” Siya’s eyes grew distant with memory. “She was the prophet, the one Allah sent to show us the path. When she was raped by Christians, they cut her cheeks to steal her beauty. She still wanted peace in the city. When a Christian man killed her, Muslims heard Allah’s command. They cleansed the city.”

Abraham’s stomach churned, though not from the wine.

Charlene accepted the tale with more grace. “A warning was sent out to Muslims. They had three days to leave the city. At sunset on the third day, a nuclear warhead flew straight into the center of Jerusalem. They still don’t know where it came from. Some said Pakistan, others Saudi Arabia. It didn’t really matter. Christians attacked Muslims in retaliation for the lost city. Muslims attacked Christians in return. Any group with religious affiliation took up arms.”

“World War Three,” Siya laughed. “It was the first world war if you ask me. The first time the whole world fought in a war. In South Africa, they call it Mwisho.
The End
.”

“It lasted six years. Estimates say over five-hundred nuclear bombs were dropped, most of them in the Fertile Crescent region, central Africa, and Russia. The radiation leached out into the oceans before they really knew what happened. They say the oceans turned brown in less than ten years.”

With the planet rotating above them, Abraham saw the wide swaths of brown with newfound understanding. They were the oceans, and they were dead.

“In 2066, the International Commission was formed. Later it became the Global Council. First, they nullified national borders and created the sectors. Then—”

“People actually let them do that?” Abraham sat in awe, thinking the whole world had given their homes to a handful of strangers.

“Well, yeah. Everyone was starving. There was so much radiation back then, whole regions were killed off or became refugees. Millions became homeless, and no one could take them all in. The survivors let the Council take over because it was the only way to stay alive.”

“Why? How does giving up their countries keep them alive?”

“The Global Council created a uniform set of laws. They instituted the class system, abolished all personal weapons, and quarantined the really bad radioactive zones. Religion is widespread but quiet now. Those of us who believe do so in our own homes, without making claim on the rest of the world. The big thing they wanted was the preservation of Earth. After all the radiation, they had big fears about the future. Militaries were repurposed into the Scholar class. Instead of warfare, they focused on research that could save the Earth.”

“Too late,” Siya said.

Abraham tried to take it all in. The wars, the oceans, the names of places he didn’t know. If Siya knew the history of Earth, then clearly everyone did. Only Abraham remained ignorant of such a huge portion of his past.

It was yet another reminder of what he’d lost.

“With the oceans dead, there was no reason not to farm it for water at least. They’ve pulled so much now, there’s a good mile and a half of exposed shelf around the coast in most places. The poles used to be white with ice. Now they’re white with salt. There isn’t enough surviving plant life to support the human population, so now the atmosphere is maintained with converters. The domes are all outfitted with the converters, but outside them, the air is pretty thin on oxygen.

“The air changed so much that the patterns of wind motion were completely altered. On top of that, radiation in war zones killed the crops and produced these wide bands of dust. The wind picked up the dust and created these massive storms.”

“The haze?” Abraham asked, putting it together.

“The Orange Death. Cloud fire.
Ukungu
. The haze. It has many names.”

“Between the haze and the low-oxygen, almost everyone wears a mask. In Europe and Africa, the haze is highly radioactive. In North America and western Asia, it’s less severe. The dust is still thick enough to choke out the crops. By 2075, there was a global food crisis. Huge areas of farmland were going to waste. There was a big push in the seventies to get food redistributed. Of course, by then, the Scholars had the idea to go off-world.”

“And here we are!” Siya held his arms out like that was the end of the story.

Charlene sipped her wine for the first time since the start of the lesson. “Supposedly, there are teams that are looking for a ‘new Earth’ for us. We won’t see it in our lifetimes, of course, but it’s possible. That’s why we’re here—to investigate survival strategies in off-world colonies. Someday they’ll use our experience to help the human race start over.”

“Now, they mine hematite from Mars and send it back to Earth to make fuel to take people to the moon. No one wants to live on Earth.” His accent was thick as ever, but Abraham finally had some small measure of understanding of Siya. When he wasn’t being an arrogant ass, Siya could even pass as intelligent. Who knew?

Abraham swiped the planet away. The original Earth appeared, blue and green and beautiful. “It took six years?”

“It’s crazy right? It’ll take hundreds of thousands of years to fix the damage they caused in only six. And all of it over one woman. Over the right to live in a certain city under a certain god.”

Siya stood without warning and walked to the far side of the kitchen. He pulled a cup from the cabinet and the carafe of wine from cold storage. Returning to the table, he refilled each of their cups before pouring his own.

Abraham had new appreciation for his sad little wine. He’d grown the grape vines from seeds, harvested them, fermented them, acidified them and here they sat as a too-bitter wine. If the haze was as bad as Charlene said, it had been far easier for him than anyone on Earth. He fed his unconventional family with better foods than most of the world.

They may not have been on the moon. They may have been farther away from Earth than they ever imagined, but Abraham was glad for it.

Charlene and Siya chatted about Earth for a while longer, but Abraham sipped his wine, lost in thought. When Charlene announced she was going to bed, Abraham stood to walk her to her room.

At the doorway, he turned back to Siya who said, “I know. Go straight to bed. Don’t touch the children.” He tossed back the remaining wine in his cup, set it on the counter, and started toward Abraham’s old room.

Abraham put his hand at the small of Charlene’s back as he walked her to her room. He could feel the warmth of her skin beneath the olive-green body suit.

“You okay? That was a lot to take in.”

“Yeah, it just makes me glad to be here,” he admitted.

Charlene smiled up at him. “I’m glad you’re here, too.” When they arrived at her door, she cocked him a crooked smile. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

In fact, Abraham did want to go in. He did want to stay with her, to never consider being apart from her again. To hold her until her breath relaxed in sleep.

But that wasn’t what she meant. “No, I need to get back to the boys.” He kissed the top of her head.

Charlene only giggled. “All right, fine. See you in the morning. When the sun is bright,” she said, butchering his usual phrase. Abraham walked back down the corridor, checking on the girls on his way. He crept between the rows of boys beds and crawled into the largest bed that was still too small. The whole time, he couldn’t keep his heart from hammering in his chest.