The Extinction Code (7 page)

In the course of those investigations, Mitchell had seen his own position within MJ–12 compromised, and ultimately he had been required to make the choice between killing for employment and killing for a reason. Mitchell, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had long since lost any real sense of sympathy for or empathy with the human race. Dedicated it seemed to destroying itself, mankind was to Mitchell an uncaring, selfish, blind and irresponsible creature for whom the future was somebody else’s problem. But the orders to murder a man who had developed a device which provided electrical power virtually for free, simply because his device would remove power from Majestic Twelve and the Bilderberg Group, had been too much for Mitchell. Worse than that, the assassination target had not even intended to make any money from his “fusion cage”, as it had been named, despite knowing that he could have made billions of dollars overnight. To Mitchell’s astonishment he had intended to give the device away to mankind, for nothing other than the sheer joy of altruism.

The death of Stanley Meyer had affected Mitchell greatly, and when he had then been ordered to murder a former President of the United States he had gone rogue. No longer would he answer to men who were powerful only because of their money and the offices they held. Mitchell would himself do something out of sheer altruism, and destroy for once and for all the incomparable greed that grew outward from MJ–12 like a cancer spreading across the globe.

A door opened from one of the cell blocks, almost a mile and a half away, and Mitchell’s train of thought slammed to a halt as he saw four guards exit the block, between them a small, white–haired man in orange prison overalls and weighed down by steel chains that glinted in the sunlight. Mitchell leaned down and pressed his eye to the military–grade optics. The scope did not have any zoom function, designed instead to provide the clearest image of a distant target possible. Mitchell had positioned the scope based on previous prisoners he had seen escorted from the block, and in the meantime he had watched birds of prey wheeling in the sky above to judge the thermals and the light winds between his lonely mountain hideout and the prison before him. Conditions were perfect, light winds, few thermals, clear visibility. Even at such extreme range, Mitchell knew that he could not miss, and with the gentle breeze in his face he knew that not only would his target be dead before anybody heard the shot, they would likely barely hear the shot at all. Mitchell would be long gone before the security guards would be able to pinpoint where the shot had come from.

His gloved finger rested on the trigger as his left thumb turned the rifle’s safety switch to
off
as he prepared to fire.

***

VIII

Ethan hadn’t been sure what he had expected to feel when he saw Victor Wilms being dragged out of the sally port of Florence ADX, but sympathy hadn’t been high on his list. Yet despite himself, the sight of an elderly man on his knees was still something that compelled him to reach out, to assist, to help in some way. It was only his knowledge of what a cruel man Victor Wilms had become that forced him to stand firm.

‘Doesn’t feel so great, does it?’

Lopez’s voice was calm but cold on the morning air as they stood alongside four armed guards, who were themselves arrayed before an armored truck. The security around a figure like Victor Wilms was in fact staged by Doug Jarvis back at the DIA: had they really wanted to move Wilms and not have him iced by Majestic Twelve, they would have slipped him out quietly under cover of darkness in a goods truck or similar, the security hidden out of sight. Jarvis had felt that highly visible security would make it easy for MJ–12 to spot and track Wilms to whatever hellish gaol he was destined for, and that Wilms would know it.

‘You think he’ll fold?’ he asked Lopez.

‘He’ll fold,’ she replied, for once in agreement with Doug Jarvis. ‘He doesn’t have the stones to survive in general population even if MJ–12 weren’t gunning for him.’

Wilms shuffled to stand before them, and Ethan looked down at the old man.

‘Last chance, Vic’,’ he said, mimicking Lopez’s talent for subtly irritating Wilms. ‘You talk now, or you spend what little will be left of your life waiting for a shiv in your kidneys.’

Wilms visibly trembled, and not from the cold. Ethan could see the fear in his eyes, running like poison through his veins. The old man’s shoulders sagged, and he spoke softly with the voice of a broken man.

‘There was a new player,’ he whispered, ‘a man who had approached Majestic Twelve a short while before the Antarctic expedition with a proposal.’

‘What kind of proposal?’ Lopez demanded.

‘It was something to do with old bones,’ Wilms replied, clearly not sure on the details of a science he probably knew very little about. ‘I figured this guy was trying to resurrect extinct species in order to extract living samples of some kind of super–virus from them.’

Ethan shot a glance at Lopez. ‘A link with Channing.’

Lopez nodded.

‘What’s that got to do with Varginha, and who are they?’

‘It’s not a
them
,’ Wilms said, ‘it’s a where. It’s in Brazil.’

Ethan couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain that Wilms could be relied upon, but the figure that he cut in the dawn, thin and pale and beaten, suggested that Wilms was a spent force who had finally realized that spilling everything was the only way to ensure that he wasn’t murdered in some filthy prison shower by young thugs who would pull off the homicide for nothing more than a packet of cigarettes.

‘All right,’ he said finally, willing to show Wilms an act of kindness in the hopes that it would encourage him to say more. ‘You just bought yourself a reprieve, but we need a name. Who was this new player that approached Majestic Twelve?’

Wilms looked up at Ethan and parted his lips to speak.

There was no sound as Wilm’s head snapped suddenly to one side as the side of his skull splattered across the asphalt at their feet and his body dropped in free–fall, the light gone from his eyes.

The sound of the shot boomed across the compound an instant later, even as Ethan and Lopez stood still and watched Wilms’s lifeless body collapse into a heap on the ground before them. It took Ethan a full second to whirl and look in the direction of the shot, scanning first the nearest watch tower even as he realized that the delay in hearing the shot must mean that the shooter was much further away.

‘Holy crap!’ Lopez uttered as she spun on her heel, one hand on her pistol.

The guards around them scattered, weapons drawn as Ethan and Lopez dashed for cover behind the nearest towering walls surrounding the compound. Ethan ran and looked up as he did so, to see a low ridge of hills something over a mile away and silhouetted against the bright dawn sky.

Lopez hit the wall and turned her back to it as she gasped.

‘Where the hell did that come from?!’

Alarms began droning across the prison as Ethan checked his pistol’s magazine.

‘At least a mile to the north east,’ he replied and looked up at the sky. ‘Sniper rifle, maximum range, perfect conditions, no wind and minimal thermal interference. A professional hit.’

‘Mitchell,’ Lopez growled.

‘It’s a fair bet,’ Ethan confirmed, ‘either that or MJ–12 contracted somebody else to silence Wilms.’

Ethan called across to a sergeant sheltering behind the thick wall of the nearest watch tower. ‘You guys got a helicopter here?’

The guard shook his head. ‘Marshall’s office, or the local airfield, but they won’t be up here at short notice!’

Ethan shoved his pistol back into its holster and dashed for the nearest of the prison trucks. Lopez rushed after him, and they climbed into the cab as Ethan started the engine and yelled out of the window.

‘Get the damned gate open or the shooter’ll be in the wind!’

Ethan crunched the truck into gear and drove it toward the main gates as a guard rushed into the control room and opened the gates. Motors whined as the gates slowly opened, and beyond them a second solid set also rumbled apart to let them through.

Ethan hit the gas and the truck lurched through the open gates and into the parking lot outside, accelerating toward the exit as Lopez leaned forward to peer out to the east at the distant hill.

‘Jesus, that’s a long way to shoot.’

Ethan nodded as he turned onto the highway, the truck’s wheels screeching on the asphalt. The chassis shuddered as the rubber bounced and then caught again, and he slammed the gas pedal down as he replied.

‘Bullet drop due to gravity must have been damned near four feet at that range, and there was no way the shooter could have tested the shot without alerting the prison. First time, at a mile: even with the perfect conditions it’s the shot of a lifetime.’

‘Especially for Wilms,’ Lopez uttered dryly. ‘He was about to give us another name. That’s why I keep telling you, we need these assholes alive. They know enough to give us info on bad guys for years.’

Ethan changed gear and gritted his teeth, but he said nothing. He wasn’t sorry to see Wilms fall dead right in front of him, had even felt a brief sense of elation. But he realized too that Lopez had been right all along, as usual: with Wilms dead there was nothing else he could do for them. All of his knowledge of Majestic Twelve and all that it had done had died with him, information that could have brought more of their kind to justice.

The line of hills drew closer, but even as they sped along Ethan knew that their chances of finding anybody up there were almost nil. The deserts beyond were vast and empty. If the shooter was a smart man, and Ethan had to figure that he was, he wouldn’t have a getaway vehicle. Instead, he would cross the deserts to another town and slip away into obscurity once more, the deserts themselves far too vast to search effectively. Even basic camouflage and concealment skills would be enough to evade detection, and the heat of the desert would remove any advantage in using infra–red cameras on helicopters until nightfall.

A narrow, dusty track led off the main road toward the hills, the truck bouncing and bumping around and leaving clouds of dust spiralling away across the hot wastelands. Ethan could hear above the engine noise the wailing of sirens as police pursuit vehicles alerted to the crisis raced to catch up with them.

‘Call the Sherriff’s office,’ Ethan said to Lopez. ‘Have them send the cars to surrounding towns, and circulate an image of Mitchell in case he shows up somewhere local.’

‘Might not be him,’ Lopez said, but pulled out her cell without question. ‘Besides, he’ll have thought of that.’

By the time they had driven to the edge of the hills and Ethan had been forced to abandon the truck, the shooter could have covered a fair distance out into the desert from wherever he had set up his laying–up position. Ethan scanned the hills, and spotted a likely location. He climbed up the hillside, leaving Lopez talking on her cell, powering his way up the steep slopes until he was a hundred feet or so above the plain.

He could see the prison clearly from up here, and down into the entrance compound and some small areas of the exercise yards. The watch towers were close enough to be able to make out the guards patrolling within them, watching over the prison and likely also watching him now climb the hill.

Ethan scouted around the hillside for a few minutes until he found what he was looking for.

Alongside a narrow track on the hill was a shallow depression, and around it had been placed a loose assembly of rocks that was a little too circular to be natural. Ethan climbed down into the depression, and underneath one of the rocks he saw a small slip of paper folded between them.

He knelt down and tugged the piece of paper out, unfolded it, and read the words printed there in a hurried script.

THIS IS THE BEST WAY. DON’T TRY TO STOP ME. A

Ethan folded the piece of paper once more and looked over his shoulder to where the crest of the hill vanished. He stood up and climbed to the top and looked out over the vast empty desert, the sun rising in a blaze of glory before him and the wastes devoid of life and movement.

Lopez climbed up to join him, and he handed her the slip of paper.

‘He’s on the warpath,’ she said softly, and let the piece of paper fall from her fingers. ‘That asshole’s gonna cost us dear if we don’t shut him down.’

Ethan nodded, but he knew that there was no real way they could catch up with Mitchell now.

‘C’mon, let’s get back to DC with what we’ve got.’

***

IX

Westin Excelsior,

Rome

‘In questo modo, signore.’

A concierge attached to the luxury Villa La Cupola Suite guided the eleven men through the silent corridors of the exclusive hotel situated in the Via Veneto district of the city. The suite occupied two entire floors of the hotel, making it the largest in Italy and ensuring absolute security and privacy for its occupants.

The concierge led the men to the room, opened the ornate doors and then stood to one side and allowed the men to file past him. As soon as they were inside he closed the doors behind them and left.

The suite had recently been refreshed with a seven million dollar makeover to ensure that any individual or group hiring the suite would be surrounded by the finest that Italy could offer. Furnished in the grand old style, with hand–frescoed cathedral–like domes and a grand piano in the main conference room, it was also peppered with tastefully incorporated high–tech gadgets controlling heating, lighting, drapes and other extraneous fittings, along with a private fitness room, dining room, sauna, steam bath and Jacuzzi.

Samuel Kruger had never before visited this particular hotel, the location of their meeting chosen by one of his personal assistants, but he approved of her selection as he turned to the ten men who had accompanied him.

‘Gentlemen, it is time to discuss our next move.’

Samuel Kruger was a tall, gaunt man who had just enjoyed his sixty fourth birthday surrounded by his family and close friends on an island in the Bahamas that he had hired for the occasion. Throughout his long years Samuel had known only the finest things in life, from his education at Eton College in London to his business life managing the sizeable property empire that his father had built in the wake of World War Two, when so much of Europe had needed re–building. Samuel had inherited the immense fortune and then gone on to swell it further with numerous wise investments and forays into global property development, especially those that allowed him to snap up land cheaply from native populations and then eject them in order to build multiplex hotels and resorts. His last major acquisition, the ravaged shores of Aceh, Thailand that had been shattered in the wake of the tsunami that had taken tens of thousands of lives, had been made possible by considerable bribes to government officials. With the land reclaimed from the families who had owned it, he had built an immensely profitable new development.