Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  Reading people was part of my job. After a few weeks, I knew what Lin saw in genetics: the promise of a civilized human race. She believed that somewhere in the human genome lay the answer to why some people were evil. To her, the key to the Looking Glass was simply identifying the genetic basis for all the traits that ailed the world and getting rid of them.

  Yuri, on the other hand, didn’t believe that the threat of nuclear war was humanity’s greatest enemy. Pandemics, he argued, had decimated the human population far more than any war. He believed that globalization and urbanization made an extinction-level pandemic inevitable.

  It was then that I realized the truth: no one knew what the Looking Glass was—even the scientists working on the project. I would later learn that the entire project had begun as a mere hypothesis—a hypothesis that a device could be created that would secure the human race forever. The scientific experiments being conducted on the Beagle were simply gathering data to test that hypothesis, to figure out exactly what that device might be. To these scientists, the Looking Glass represented an abstract concept, like paradise. Something we all understood, but no one knew exactly where it was or precisely what it looked like. To some it was a sandy beach, to others a cabin in the woods or a penthouse in the city with unlimited wine and theater tickets. Paradise was the product of one’s life experiences and desires. In the same way, every scientist saw humanity’s greatest threat through the lens of their field of expertise; they imagined themselves and their work in the starring role in the device’s creation. If you put seven Citium members in a room and asked them to name the most likely extinction-level event in humanity’s future, you might get seven different answers: robotics, artificial intelligence, pandemics, climate change, solar events, asteroid impacts, or alien invasion.

  Creating one device that shielded humanity from all these threats seemed impossible to me. I would later learn that it was in fact possible, but it came at an unimaginable price.

  Peyton stood from the couch and paced away from the pages, which lay beside Desmond. He sprang up and joined her, seeming to read her feelings.

  “Just because your mother was in the Citium back then doesn’t mean she’s involved with what’s happening now.”

  She stared into his eyes. He still knows me so well.

  “And what if she is?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “We will. Together.”

  He pulled her into his arms and held her, neither speaking for a long moment.

  With her mouth pressed into his shoulder, she whispered, “What does it mean, Des? All the connections. My mother and father were both in the Citium. So was Yuri—the man who recruited you. Your uncle met my father in an orphanage in London. It’s like… we’re all entangled.”

  “I don’t know. But I think you’re right: there’s a larger picture here. I just can’t figure out what it is.”

  He released her and stepped to the corkboard, as if he were searching it for the answer. He reached out and pulled a piece of scrap paper from the pin that held it. It read, Invisible Sun — person, organization, or project?

  Peyton thought he was going to reveal what he was thinking, but he merely slipped the note in his pocket and turned to her. “Let’s keep reading, see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

  Chapter 81

  The Beagle put ashore at ports all over the world. I got to use my knack for foreign languages, but I didn’t get to enjoy the scenery much. I was always on guard, planning for what might go wrong, and making contacts in case they did.

  In Rio de Janeiro in 1967, I was glad I had made contingency plans, and that I had the contacts to execute them. I was at the hotel on a Wednesday night when one of the researchers, a female biologist in her early thirties named Sylvia, threw open the lobby’s glass door and ran in. Blood covered her face and matted her brown hair. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She barreled past the bar and the people checking in, yelling my name. I was sitting in the lobby reading a book. I rose, caught her by the arm, guided her to a phone booth, and closed the folding door. I finally got her calmed down enough to speak.

  “They took them!”

  “Who?”

  “Yuri and Lin.”

  “Who took them?”

  She was sobbing now. “I don’t know. They wore masks.” She shook her head as if she didn’t want to remember. “They said they’d kill them if I didn’t come back to the bus stop with twenty thousand dollars in two hours.”

  I took her up to my room after that, questioned her more, then called for two of my intelligence operatives. I sent one of them to the Beagle to get forty thousand dollars just in case. We kept a lot of money on hand for scientific provisions as well as kidnap and ransom operations. I sent my other operative to make inquiries with a few of my old MI6 contacts, to find a man I knew only by reputation, but who I was confident would ensure my operation’s success.

  When I was left alone with the trembling woman, I poured her a tall glass of brandy and sat her on the bed. She winced when the liquid hit her cut lip, but with a shaking hand, she finished it quickly.

  “Listen to me, Sylvia.”

  She looked up at me with her good eye, which still leaked tears.

  “Everything is going to be okay. I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to make the person who did this very sorry.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the back of a Portuguese restaurant, waiting for my host. He entered, sat without introducing himself, and stared at me with blank eyes. He was a corpulent man, with long, greasy black hair plastered to his scalp. Two men stood by the door to the private dining room, hands stuffed in their pockets, fingers no doubt curled around the triggers of snub-nosed revolvers pointed in my direction.

  I knew the man by his alias—O Mestre—but I didn’t use the name to address him. I simply said, “We have a common enemy.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “A wannabe gangster named Ernesto.”

  His accent was thick Portuguese, his English broken. “Never hear of this man.”

  “He’s kidnapped two associates of mine. He wants twenty thousand dollars for their return.”

  “Is police matter. I not police.”

  “I think you can help me more. I think you can guarantee my friends come home safe.”

  He looked away.

  “There’s forty thousand dollars in the bag.”

  “I am not bank.”

  “The money is for their safe return. And for protection in case this happens again. Here in Rio, and in São Paulo.”

  With his head, he motioned to the two men. One opened the bag and began counting the money. The other jerked me up from my chair, frisked me, then reached inside my shirt, making sure I wasn’t wired. I wasn’t stupid enough to carry a gun into a meeting like this.

  The man who frisked me nodded at O Mestre, who rose and left the room. I had held back on the fact that I spoke Portuguese, hoping it would provide an advantage, but these men seemed to have a language all their own, communicating entirely with their eyes and slight motions of their heads.

  The man holding the bag took twenty thousand dollars out of it.

  His associate said to me, in Portuguese, “The fee is twenty thousand dollars per year. You will return to this room next year on this day with payment.”

  I nodded. So they knew more about me than I suspected.

  “Tonight, you will go to the bus stop. Here is what will happen.”

  Exactly two hours after the thugs had taken Yuri and Lin off the street and assaulted Sylvia, I stood in the drizzling rain, wearing a fedora and a black trench coat. Rio was hot year-round, but in August it was coldest, and rainy. The wind from the Atlantic carried a cold front from Antarctica into the city, past the cranes that were building skyscrapers by the dozen, erasing the old city, erecting a shiny new one.

  People from Brazil’s countryside were pouring into Rio. Illegal immigrants cam
e too, all in search of jobs and a better life. Large slums called favelas grew like ant colonies, seeming to spread overnight. In the glow of the streetlamp, I could see the shanties stretching up a green-forested mountainside, a pocket of poverty in the vast city. From my vantage point, they looked like tiny cardboard boxes stacked at the feet of the Christ the Redeemer statue, which towered over all the people below.

  The harsh quality of life in the favelas was a stark contrast to Copacabana Beach a few hundred yards away, where ritzy hotels, night clubs, bars, and restaurants glittered just off the Atlantic. Palm trees towered over the sandy beach and lined the promenade. Music thumped into the night, an out-of-tune anthem of the two worlds that existed here in Rio. I was about to descend into the other world, the underworld, where desperate people took desperate actions to survive—and just maybe lift themselves out of poverty. The situation had forced me to do something I didn’t like, but such was this world. My people were in danger. More than that: my friends were in danger. It was as simple as that.

  The bus pulled away, puffing thick black smoke the rain couldn’t force down.

  Beside me, Sylvia started to tremble. I knew it wasn’t because of the cold wind or the rain.

  “It’s all right, Sylvia.”

  I could tell she wanted to cry, but she resisted. One of my intelligence operatives was in the cafe behind us, the other in the adjacent alley.

  A rattling Volkswagen pulled up, and a man wearing a bandanna over his mouth and a stained white tank top got out. In the back seat, another man pointed a handgun at Sylvia. Her cry broke forth then. I held my arm out, across her, and stepped in between the man and the trembling woman.

  “The money!” he yelled.

  “Give us our people first. Then we pay.”

  He shook his head. He was high on amphetamines of some sort. His eyes were wide, darting back and forth. “No! You pay now. If I not back in five minutes, we kill one.”

  I held my hands up. “All right. Fine. We’ll pay. But I want to see them first. Show me they’re alive, I make a call, and the money is delivered here.”

  Bandanna Man made eye contact with the driver, who nodded. He grabbed my arm and shoved me in the back of the tiny car, between him and the thug who had the gun. The thug pressed his old revolver in my side. His friend searched me quickly, found no weapon, then jerked my hat off and tied the bandanna from his face around my eyes. It stank of sweat and cigarettes, forcing me to cough.

  They bounced me around in the back seat for ten minutes; the roar of the German car’s engine was nearly deafening. I wondered if the divider between the back seat and engine compartment had been taken out.

  Finally the car stopped, and they stood me up and perp-walked me down a cobblestone street. They were rough with me each time I tripped. I heard a wooden door scrape open and slam closed behind us. They walked me slower, then pulled the bandanna off in a room with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  Yuri and Lin were in wooden chairs. Electrical wire bound their hands together behind them, and more wire bound their ankles to the chair legs. They looked painfully uncomfortable. Yuri’s nose was busted; dried blood covered the area around it. More blood ran from his hair. One eye was closed, just like Sylvia.

  My heart broke when I saw Lin. They had struck her in the cheek. It was swollen and bruised, like a jellyfish tattooed on her skin. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  A man wearing a Che Guevara hat rose from behind a desk. The edges of his nose were red from snorting drugs. He fidgeted as he moved, stared at me, disgust plain on his face.

  “You think you can play games with me?” He took a knife from his belt. “I’m going to show you how serious I am.”

  I made my voice even. “Before you do, I have a message for you. From O Mestre.”

  He stopped, stared, still enraged, but I could see hesitation now.

  “He’s a friend of mine. He wants you to call home.”

  He screamed obscenities at me, but he didn’t move toward Lin or Yuri.

  “Call home. Check on your family. Or O Mestre will make you sorry.”

  “I ought to kill you, you imperialist pig. And your capitalist whore!”

  “That would displease O Mestre. I can’t even imagine what he would do.”

  The kidnapper looked away from me. He took a step toward Yuri and Lin, then seemed to reconsider. At the desk, he picked up the phone, dialed, and listened. Whatever was said on the other end scared him to death. He sank into his seat and nodded, as if the person he was talking to could see him. “Of course. My mistake—”

  He stopped; apparently the line had gone dead. He replaced the receiver and shouted to his men to cut Yuri and Lin loose, as if it was all a big mistake they had made.

  Yuri stood on faltering legs, bracing himself on the chair. But when they cut Lin loose, she just tumbled toward the floor. I lunged forward and caught her. If not for the warmth of her skin, I might have thought her dead.

  I hoisted her up and carried her out of the shack in the favela, holding her tightly. I don’t think I really exhaled until the thugs let us out of the car at the bus stop. Lin could stand again, but she still held me tight.

  Yuri hugged me too, an unusual show of affection for the man. “You saved us, William.”

  “Just doing my job,” I mumbled.

  “It was more than that.”

  “You would have done the same for me.”

  “Yes. I would have.”

  Every three months or so, the Beagle docked at an island in the Pacific—the same island every time. I didn’t know its location; no one except the bridge crew did. But I knew it was west of Hawaii, south of the equator, and that it had been uninhabited when it had first come into the Citium’s possession. Everything was new here: the buildings, the port, the roads. There was no government save for the Citium, and no crime. No fear. Perhaps for that reason alone, the Beagle sailed for the island right after Rio. The entire crew was shaken, not just Sylvia, Lin, and Yuri.

  Yuri and Lin had grown up in near-constant danger; he in Stalingrad during the German invasion, she in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. But I think they hadn’t experienced real life-threatening danger in twenty years—since their childhood. It scared them, though Yuri was stoic as usual. On the sub, Lin told me how he had fought them. He had been brave, but it was a useless fight. All the same, I liked him even more for it.

  I don’t know the island’s official designation, but aboard the Beagle we called it the Isle of Citium, or simply the Isle. It had a deep-water harbor on its south side, with a massive seaport that was way too large for such a small landmass. Every time we docked, there was a cargo ship unloading supplies—building materials mostly, and some heavy equipment. The cost of building on the island was enormous, but I saw the logic in it. This place was completely off the grid and extremely hard to find. Most people don’t realize how vast the Pacific is. Every continent and landmass on the planet could fit within the Pacific. It’s larger than the Atlantic and Indian Oceans combined.

  The Isle was the perfect place for the Citium to hide, and in August of 1967, it was the perfect place for our crew to recuperate. We unloaded at the port, rode the electric golf carts to the residential building, and retired to our rooms. The place wasn’t fancy, but it was clean and offered privacy: every bedroom had its own bathroom and a small living room. After three months on the Beagle, it felt like a vast penthouse apartment. Being able to shower in privacy was a luxury. Sleeping without a person above and below you, and three more across from you, was refreshing—and quiet.

  In my time in the field, I have found that a brush with death always changes a person. Some not permanently, but everyone temporarily. That was true for Yuri and Lin. Yuri turned inward. On the Isle, he poured himself into his work. He was more convinced than ever of its importance.

  Lin changed in the opposite direction. She stopped working herself to the bone. In the cafeteria, she laughed more, stayed longer at the lunch ta
ble.

  At our post-tour bonfire on the beach, I saw her have a glass of wine for the first time. She absolutely glowed in her black dress. To me, that night, she was brighter than the moon, and the tiki torches, and the candles in the glass vases that lined the long table. I couldn’t help staring at her. I tried to hide it less with every drink.

  There were six people left at the table when she stood, said goodnight to the rest of the table, and looked me in the eye.

  “Nice night for a walk.”

  I stood and held out my hand.

  Chapter 82

  In the summer of 1967, my life changed forever. I was three months into my second tour on the Beagle when I began noticing a change in Lin. She was more distant, avoiding me. We had been dating (such as it was on board a submarine) for about six months. I cornered her, wouldn’t let her deny something was wrong, and finally got the answer out of her: she was pregnant.

  I was overjoyed. And terrified. I believe people who had a difficult childhood are more averse to having children. That was certainly the case for Lin and for me. If biology hadn’t intervened, who knows where life might have led us. But it did, and I will never regret that. We moved back to London, into a flat in Belgravia that was owned by a member of the Citium (who rented it to us for a song). We got married in a small ceremony a month later. Yuri was my best man. Father and Mother were there, as were Lin’s father and mother.

  On a snowy night in March, our son, Andrew, was born. We both felt that our lives changed in an instant. From then on, nothing was more important than him. The doctors called his condition “amelia,” a birth defect in which one or more limbs are missing. In Andrew’s case, his left arm below the elbow was missing. Lin was crushed. No matter what I said, she felt responsible. She blamed her genes and her behavior: conceiving a child on a nuclear submarine where radiation may have caused the condition.