The 6th Extinction (10 page)

Still, she found her hand covering the phone in her pocket.

I want answers
.

Crowe turned to the colonel. “Could we have some privacy?”

“Certainly.” Bozeman waved to Drake. “Let’s give them the room.”

Drake followed him out, but not before bumping his fist with the blond man who remained leaning against the door. “Good to see you, Josh.”

“Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“Me, too.” He grinned broadly. “But that’s why they pay us the big bucks, isn’t it?”

As the two Marines left and the door closed, Crowe turned his laser focus back to Jenna. “Ms. Beck, you’ve been through a lot, but I was hoping you could give us some additional information about what happened tonight. Run through events in as much detail as possible. I’m especially curious about the group of men who attacked you atop the hill.”

She stood her ground. “Not before you tell me what really was going on inside that research station. It’s put the entire basin at risk. Not only the fragile ecosystem here that took millennia to build, but also endangering my friends and colleagues.”

“I wish I could tell you,” he answered.

“Wish or won’t?”

“To be honest, we don’t know the exact nature of the work. The base was headed by Dr. Kendall Hess, a very secretive fellow.”

Jenna frowned, remembering the astrobiologist who had come down to Mono Lake. She recalled her conversation with him over a cup of coffee at Bodie Mike’s. Even back then, she’d been struck by how guarded he was, how carefully he chose his words.

“I met him,” she admitted. “When he was collecting core samples of the mud at the bottom of the lake.”

Crowe turned back to his companion, Lisa Cummings. He silently communicated with her, as if the two were judging if this detail was important or not.

Jenna glanced between them, her frown deepening. “What was Dr. Hess working on?”

Crowe faced her again. “All we know for sure is that he was studying and experimenting with exotic life-forms.”

“Extremophiles,” Jenna said with a nod, remembering the details of their brief talk. “He said he was looking for unusual organisms—bacteria, protozoa—anything that might have developed unique strategies to survive in harsh environments.”

Lisa stepped closer. “More specifically he was investigating shadow biospheres, environments where nonstandard life might exist in secret. We believe his interest in this area came about after some NASA scientists found bacteria in Mono Lake that could be trained to live on arsenic.”

Jenna understood. “So that’s why Dr. Hess chose this location.”

Crowe nodded. “Perhaps to continue that line of research, or even take it a step farther. We believe he might have been trying to engineer something new, something that never existed on this planet.”

“And it got loose.”

“That’s what we believe, but we don’t know if it was an industrial accident, lab error, or something more malicious.”

Jenna rubbed Nikko. He remained calm and relaxed at her side, showing no tension. He plainly felt no wariness in the presence of these strangers. Over the years, she had grown to trust her partner’s judgment of character. Along with that, she sensed no subterfuge in the trio’s manner and appreciated their willingness to share information.

Taking a chance, she opened herself up a bit. “I don’t believe it was an accident, Director Crowe.”

“Painter is fine, but why do you think that?”

“I saw a helicopter leaving the base between the time the mayday was sent out and when everything went to hell. It was the same helicopter that offloaded a squad of mercenaries atop that hill. They must have spotted me fleeing from the toxic cloud.”

“And went after you to eliminate the only witness.”

She nodded. “They came darned close to accomplishing that.”

“Can you describe the helicopter? Did you note any insignia or numbers?”

She shook her head. “But I did get a photo of it.”

She took a small measure of enjoyment at his shocked expression. As she pulled out her cell phone, she related what had happened at the ghost town, going into as exacting detail as she could. She also called up the camera roll on her phone and went through the pictures. She stopped at the photo of the giant carrying a flamethrower.

“This guy seemed to be the leader of the assault team.”

Painter took her phone and zoomed in on his features. “You caught a clear shot of him. Good job.”

She felt a flush of pride. “Hopefully he’s in some database.”

“I hope so, too. We’ll definitely run him through facial recognition software, both here and abroad. We’ll also get the photo of the helicopter into law enforcement bulletins across the Southwest. They can’t have gotten too far.”

“They also have a prisoner,” she warned. “One of the scientists. Or at least the man was wearing a white lab coat. He tried to escape, but that guy with the flamethrower recaptured him, dragged him back to the helicopter and took off.”

Painter looked up from the phone. “Did you get a picture of their prisoner?”

“’Fraid not. By that time I had already hid my phone with Nikko.” She patted the husky’s side.

Painter studied her closer, then spoke as if reading her mind. “Let me guess. You hoped that once they killed you, the enemy would leave. Then later someone would find Nikko and your phone.”

She was impressed. She had mentioned none of that, but the man had figured it all out anyway.

Lisa spoke up. “If they kidnapped someone, I’d lay money on it being Dr. Hess. He would be the highest-value target at that base.”

Painter turned to Jenna.

She shrugged. “I couldn’t say if it was him. It all happened so fast, and I never got a good look at his face. But it could have been Dr. Hess. Still, there’s one other thing. Whoever it was, he was trying to run
into
that toxic cloud before he was recaptured, like he would rather die than be taken away.”

“Which suggests the prisoner must have secrets he didn’t want the enemy knowing.” Painter sounded darkly worried.

“Secrets about what?” she asked.

“That’s what we need to find out.”

“I’d like to help.”

Painter studied her for a long moment. “I’ll admit we could use your eyes during this initial investigation. There may have been some detail you’ve forgotten or didn’t think was important at the time. But I must warn you, it will be dangerous.”

“It’s already dangerous.”

“But I believe it’ll get much worse. Whatever was started here is likely the tip of something larger and far more deadly.”

“Then luckily I’ve got help.” Jenna placed her palm on Nikko’s head. He thumped his tail, ready for anything. “What do we do first?”

Painter glanced to Dr. Cummings. “At first light, we go into that toxic wasteland. Look for clues to what went down.”

“And perhaps to what got out,” his companion added.

Jenna felt the blood coldly settle into her lower gut as she pictured reentering the trap she had just escaped.

What have I gotten myself into?

7

April 28, 3:39
A
.
M
. EDT
Arlington, Virginia

“Why are we always stuck in a basement?” Monk asked.

Gray glanced over to his best friend and colleague. They were presently buried in the sublevels of DARPA’s new headquarters on Founders Square in Arlington, Virginia. They had accompanied Dr. Lucius Raffee back here. The Biological Technologies Offices took up a large swath of real estate on the seventh floor. Upstairs, the director of BTO continued to make calls, trying to rouse someone in the middle of the night who had more than a cursory knowledge of the research going on at the facility in California.

In the meantime, they had their own business down here.

“In your case,” Gray answered, stretching a kink from his neck as he sat at a computer station, “you’re destined to either be holed up in a basement or swinging from some bell tower.”

“Is that a Quasimodo crack?” Monk scowled from a neighboring station.

“You
are
developing a bit of a hunch.”

“It’s from hauling two growing girls in my arms all day. It’d give anyone a bit of a hitch in their back.”

The third member of their team made a small sound of exasperation and huddled deeper over his keyboard, typing rapidly. Kat had sent Jason Carter to run a digital forensics analysis on the base’s files and logs, to cull through the mountains of data, inventory requests, and countless e-mails for some clue as to what was really going on in California.

The three of them were encased in DARPA’s main data center, a small room with a window that overlooked banks of black mainframes, each the size of a refrigerator. The walls of the subbasement were three feet thick and insulated against any form of electronic intrusion or attack.

“I think I found something,” Jason said, looking up bleary-eyed. An empty Starbucks cup rested by his elbow. “I ran a search crawler through the stacks, using both Dr. Hess’s name and Social Security number. I cross-referenced that with the term
neogenesis
.”

“What did you find?”

“The search ended up still pulling out several terabytes of information. It would take days to sift through it all. So I refined the crawl to cross-reference with
VX gas
.”

“One of the toxins used as a countermeasure by the base?”

He nodded. “I figured those files might address whatever organism that poison was engineered to kill. But look at the first folder that popped up.”

Gray crossed over to his station, joined by Monk. He read the file name.

D.A.R.W.I.N.

“What the hell,” Monk muttered.

“The folder is massive,” Jason said. “I glanced briefly through the first few files. They mostly reference the British Antarctic Survey. They’re the major UK group involved in research on that continent. The first paper was highlighted and detailed the group’s success in bringing a fifteen-hundred-year-old Antarctic moss back to life.”

Gray could see why that would intrigue a scientist like Hess, a researcher interested in exotic life.

“But check out this subfolder titled
History
,” Jason said. “I clicked on it, hoping it would offer some background about how this British scientific group was connected to Dr. Hess’s research in California. But look what showed up instead.”

Jason tapped the folder icon and a series of maps appeared. He clicked on the first one, listed as P
IRI
R
EIS
_1513.

“I’ve heard about that map,” Gray said, leaning closer. “It’s got quite a history. A Turkish explorer, Admiral Piri Reis, compiled this chart on a piece of gazelle skin back in 1513, showing the coast of Africa and South America, along with the northernmost edge of Antarctica.”

Gray ran a finger along that coastline on the bottom of the screen.

“What’s unusual about that?” Monk asked.

“Antarctica wasn’t discovered—at least not officially—until three centuries later, but more mysteriously, some claim that his rendition shows the continent’s
true
coastline, a coastline
without
ice.” Gray looked up. “The last time the coast was likely free of ice was six thousand years ago.”

“But all that’s highly disputed,” Jason added. “The landmass shown here is most likely not even Antarctica.”

“What do you mean?” Monk asked. “The map’s a fake?”

“No,” Gray said. “The map is authentic, but the Turk admits in a series of notes in the margins that he compiled his map from more ancient charts. So the appearance of this Antarctic coastline is likely just a combination of mapmaking confusion and coincidence.”

Monk scratched his chin. “Then what’s it doing in a folder among Dr. Hess’s files?”

Gray had no answer, but Jason apparently did.

The kid spoke while typing. “This map and several others in the folder are all tagged as coming from a Professor Alex Harrington.”

Gray leaned closer.

Jason flashed through various windows rapidly. “I just Googled him. Says here he’s a paleobiologist attached to the British Antarctic Survey.”

“Paleobiologist?” Monk asked.

“It’s a discipline that combines archaeology with evolutionary biology.” With his fingers still tapping, Jason added, “And it looks like the professor exchanged a slew of e-mails and phone calls with Dr. Hess, going back almost two decades. They shared a common interest in unusual ecosystems.”

Jason glanced up at Gray with one eyebrow high.

Gray understood
. If anyone knows intimate details about Hess’s research, it might be this guy
.

“Good work,” Gray said. “But we should run this past Raffee upstairs. Maybe the director knows something more about this relationship with the Brits. Can you print this file up?”

Jason scowled, reached down, and yanked a flash drive from a port. “Already copied everything here. It would take hours to print all of this. When you reach the director’s office, all you have to do is find the USB port on his computer and—”