Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  I could never bring myself to use the words “genetic defect,” but to Lin, the answer clearly lay in genetics. After that, the Looking Glass took on a whole new meaning for her. Drive became obsession. She talked about a world where no mother would see her child born with a defect, where no child would have to face the world at a disadvantage or endure daily ridicule from his peers.

  His condition most certainly didn’t change our love for him. Andrew was a smart kid (which I believe he got from his mother) and adventurous to a fault (perhaps my contribution). He was brave and curious and never backed down.

  Changes were afoot within the Citium. The experiments were growing in scale, and that required increasing amounts of money. So new members were recruited: billionaires, financiers, people with their hands on the levers of government research spending. They were all cut from the same cloth: people who believed the world was on the brink of catastrophe.

  The influx of new members was a turning point for the organization, a Rubicon crossed unceremoniously. On the surface, things remained the same. Dozens of Citium cells were conducting Looking Glass research, and the members met every quarter at a conference we called our conclave. But behind the scenes, the organization was fraying. Each member increasingly thought that their own Looking Glass project was the sole solution for humanity’s problems—and jockeyed for the funds they needed to make their vision a reality.

  In 1972, I became head of Citium Security, a new organization dedicated to securing the cells and keeping our secrets. Only four of us, me and three of the Citium’s oldest members, knew the full breadth of the Citium. We were creating a monster.

  At home, life had settled into a pattern. I was gone a good bit, but when I was home, I spent every spare minute with Lin and Andrew. He was growing up so quickly. We welcomed a daughter in 1973. We named her Madison—my mother’s maiden name. Andrew was the most dedicated older brother I’ve ever seen; he may have been even more protective than Orville Hughes had been in that orphanage in London after the war.

  Lin worked herself to exhaustion. I worried about her, but the subject of how much she worked was a non-starter, so I gave up arguing about it. In marriage, as in war, some battles are unwinnable.

  Our second daughter was born in 1977. We named her Peyton—Lin’s paternal grandmother’s maiden name. On the whole, she was more serious than Madison, and more inquisitive. She had the same curiosity and passion for adventure as Andrew.

  I spent countless hours on planes and trains wondering what the three of them would be like when they grew up. And what sort of world they’d live in.

  Then, at the Citium’s Winter Conclave in Geneva in 1983, the unthinkable happened. A cell unveiled a plan for the Looking Glass—a functioning device that would accomplish our dream of securing humanity. The scale and cost of the project was incredible. Much of the science was still theoretical then (but has been proven since), but it was a working solution. War. Famine. Disease. Climate change. Meteor impacts. Cosmic events. Extraterrestrial interference. Artificial intelligence. The Looking Glass proposed that night at the lavish home overlooking Lake Geneva would protect us from all those threats—and many more. Even more impressive, it had the potential to unravel the great mystery the Citium had pursued since its founding: the purpose of humanity—the very nature of the universe and human existence itself. The scientists who proposed the Looking Glass saw it as the next step in the march of human experience, our inevitable destiny.

  Not everyone was convinced.

  The group of rational, even-tempered scientists I had come to know turned savage that night. The debate began as a spirited discussion and ended in screaming. I finally realized that we had been playing a zero-sum game. At the end of the Looking Glass project, there would be only one winner; only one device would be built. All other projects would be shuttered, the funds funneled to the winning project. And whoever controlled that device would have a power never before seen on Earth. Indeed, they would control the entire human race.

  The night ended in a stalemate. Members made threats. Some said they would quit the organization and continue their research on their own, starting a new kind of arms race. Others threatened to expose the entire project; if their solution wasn’t chosen, they would prevent anyone else from succeeding. Scientists, like all humans, can be very vindictive.

  If I am guilty of anything, it’s negligence. I didn’t sense the ground moving beneath my feet. I took the words screamed that night for what they appeared to be: idle threats. Others did not.

  A month later, I was flying from Cairo to London on a British Airways flight when it happened. Around the world, Citium scientists were assassinated. I had twelve Citium security agents in my employ; all were killed. I was unaware of this when I arrived at Heathrow. Indeed, in the cab on the way to the flat in Belgravia, my mind was only on Madison’s birthday party, which was the following week.

  The door to the flat was locked. When it swung open, I saw instantly that our home had been ransacked. I drew my sidearm, but I was too late. In my peripheral vision, I saw a figure, dressed in black, standing in my office off the foyer, the glass pocket doors closed, obscuring him. I spun, bringing my weapon up, but he was quicker. The bullet ripped through the glass, into my side, and blew me back against the console table and the antique mirror that hung above it. But I didn’t lose my grip on the Sig Sauer P226. I squeezed the trigger, fired three rounds, and saw the man fall.

  I spun, moved to the dining room. That action saved my life. The second man was in the kitchen. His shots into the foyer barely missed me. I fired through the wall, blind, then burst into the kitchen through the butler’s pantry, catching him from behind. I had winged him. I didn’t wait for him to turn; I shot him through the shoulder. He dropped the weapon.

  I stood over him, held the gun in his face, listened for movement from my study, but heard none.

  “Who sent you?”

  Blood oozed from his mouth. He was European, with a close-cropped haircut, military or former military.

  He gnashed his teeth, grunted. I grabbed his jaw, dug my fingers into his cheeks, separating his clenched teeth, but I was too late. He had cracked the tooth. The poison had already slid down his throat. I grabbed a ladle from the kitchen, forced the handle down his throat, and tried to gag him, but his body was already going limp.

  Holding my side, I raced to the study. The other man was dead too. My files were gone. The safe lay open.

  I grabbed the phone and dialed Lin’s office at the university. No answer. I tried to stop the bleeding in my side. I’d need a doctor soon. I dialed my Citium assets in London. No answer. Berlin. No answer. Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco. They were all gone.

  I raced to our master bedroom. Drawers lay open. Our luggage was gone. So was the children’s. I counted that as a good sign.

  I heard footsteps in the foyer. I peeked out into the main hall, expecting to see a bobby, but instead saw two more black-clad former military men, guns drawn, sweeping the hall, moving toward me.

  I squatted, took a spare magazine from my belt, thrust the Sig Sauer around the door frame, and squeezed off round after round. I wanted the men alive, but I wanted to live more.

  I heard them collapse to the floor. I put a fresh magazine in, retreated to Madison’s bathroom, found a hand mirror, and used it to peer into the hallway without exposing myself. They were down, unmoving.

  I put on a black overcoat and fled into the London night. Going to a hospital was a risk I couldn’t take. A doctor we had used in my MI6 days patched me up.

  In a cheap bed and breakfast near Tottenham, I made the rest of my calls. They confirmed my worst fears: an all-out purge of the Citium had occurred.

  I still had several false identities; I used them to leave the country. I had no clue where Lin would have gone. Hong Kong was my first guess. I was wrong; she wasn’t there. I tried everything to find her. I called her colleagues, but no one knew anything; she had given no warning about he
r departure. I placed ads with hidden meaning in the newspaper, with no luck. I tried calling Citium members, but everyone was either dead or had gone underground.

  So I did the same.

  I waited, hoping the Beagle would make its scheduled docking at Nome, Alaska, but it never appeared. I saw three possibilities. My hope was that the vessel had been commandeered and the crew and researchers taken prisoner. Or that someone aboard had learned of the purge and that the Beagle and all souls on board had gone into hiding. I looked for proof of either scenario, but found none. That left the final option, my worst fear: they’d sunk her. The loss of the ship was tough. I had made a lot of friends on board during my time there. The research it carried was impossible to value—and essentially impossible to find.

  I didn’t try. I was entirely focused on locating Lin. She was a needle in a worldwide haystack, but I dug into it. I rented a small cottage in the country, a hundred miles from London, kept to myself, and spent every second investigating who had conducted the purge. There was no internet in 1983, no cell phones. People were much harder to find back then, but I made progress. Slowly, pieces began to emerge—Citium cells still operating. The names had changed, but there was a trail. A company called Invisible Sun Securities had absorbed much of Citium Security. I began putting the pieces together. I never stopped looking for Lin or the children.

  The years went by, and my hope faded little by little. By 1991, I had designed an operation I hoped would reveal the truth about the purge. Everything was in place. But a week before I was to make my move, a package arrived at my door, delivered by an unmarked parcel van. No signature required. The house was like a fortress. I even had a bomb shelter under it.

  With an extension arm, I cut the package open.

  What I saw inside broke me.

  It was a San Francisco Chronicle article about a medical student, Andrew Shaw, who had died in Uganda the previous week in a bushfire. He had been working for the WHO on an AIDS awareness campaign. I recognized my son’s face, but I didn’t want to believe it. Yet underneath the article were several photos of his burned body. Tears streamed down my face.

  A handwritten note on a scrap of paper was also in the box.

  Leave us alone, or the other two will be next.

  Happiness and fear fought a war within me. Andrew was dead. Madison and Peyton were alive. But what of Lin?

  I left that night, and I went deep underground. Off the grid. I never stopped researching the Citium, but I did it in a passive way now. I kept a folder on every known Citium cell, and year after year, I gathered more and more information. Several cells had survived the purge, and one of them was responsible for the slaughter. But I didn’t know which.

  I had gained one thing from Andrew’s death: a last name. And with that single clue I discovered that Lin was alive in America. I debated for weeks whether to contact her, but finally decided against it. I followed her career at Stanford. I celebrated when Peyton was accepted to medical school. I cut out Madison’s wedding announcement. And years later, I saw my children for the first time in twenty years: on YouTube. I watched videos of Peyton, sometimes for hours. She had grown into a fine woman, a wonderful doctor, with her mother’s passion for her work. She reminded me so much of Andrew; I wondered if his death had influenced her career path.

  I longed to reach out to her and Madison and Lin, but I knew it might put their lives at risk. Those years after 1991 were like prison for me. I dreaded the future. I saw the life I could have had slip away. I never got to be the father I wanted to be for my children, or a husband to Lin. My life was torture, but I held on to hope, and I prepared for a day when I could stop the Citium. Or, in the worst case, when they would find me—or force me to act.

  Unfortunately, the worst case has indeed come to pass. As I write these words, our opportunity to stop them is slipping away.

  Stop them. Don’t give up. Use everything you know, take nothing for granted, and trust no one.

  Desmond watched the words hit Peyton like punches in a boxing ring. She took them, her teeth gritted, for as long as she could—but eventually even this strong-willed woman he had met in Palo Alto twenty years ago reeled under the weight of her emotions. She had seen her EIS team killed, had discovered she was infected with a deadly virus—and now she had learned that the Citium had destroyed her life and killed her brother—and that her parents had once been members of the group… It was too much for any person to take, no matter how strong.

  A tear ran down Peyton’s cheek. Then another. He pulled her into his arms. Her body heaved as she cried. He had never seen her cry so hard, even that day in California, when he had driven away pulling the Airstream trailer. He held her tight and made a promise to himself: he would save her life, and right the wrongs that had been done to her. He would do it, because in some way, he was responsible for what was happening.

  And because he loved her. He couldn’t say the words back then, and he didn’t dare say them now, but at this moment, for the first time in his life, he knew them to be true. He loved her more than anything. He had loved her for a very long time.

  He was so absorbed in holding her that he didn’t hear the footsteps on the porch.

  Chapter 83

  The door to the cottage flew open before Desmond could rise. The man moved quickly, closing the distance to the couch, a handgun pointed at Desmond. His eyes studied the back of Peyton’s head, which rested on Desmond’s shoulder.

  She turned and froze, her eyes wide.

  “Dad.”

  Peyton stood and threw her arms around her father, either unaware of or unconcerned about the gun in his hand. She hugged him with a force that made his eyes bulge. He was tall, with short white hair neatly combed over. His face was rugged, a few days’ beard on cheeks that were red from the wind that swept the island. He was fighting back tears as Peyton held him.

  But the events of this last week had confirmed to Desmond the wisdom of the advice in the pages on the table: Trust no one. With the blanket still covering his hands, he reached for his handgun.

  William raised his own weapon.

  “Don’t, Desmond.”

  Peyton released her father, looking from him to Desmond.

  “Hey, we’re all on the same team here.”

  William’s eyes never left Desmond. “We’ll see about that. Take the gun, Peyton. Hand it to me.”

  Standing between the two men, Peyton hesitated. She reached over, threw the quilt off Desmond, and slid the gun out of his shoulder holster. She kept her body in front of his, shielding him, turned, and held out her free hand to her father, just inches from his gun.

  “You too, Dad.”

  He scrutinized her, then seemed to read the There’s no negotiation look Desmond had come to know so well. He smiled just a little as he handed her the gun.

  “You’ve been watching us,” Desmond said.

  William moved out of the way of the windows and put his back against the stone wall. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I’ve been investigating the Citium for over thirty years—since the purge. I’m the only one with any chance of stopping them. And now, on the eve of the Looking Glass, they can’t afford to leave me alive. It makes sense to me that they would send someone to kill me. Someone with a great story. Someone who could leverage perhaps the only thing in this world that could make it possible for anyone to get close to me.” He looked at Peyton, indicating that she was that leverage—implying that Desmond had used her to get to him.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” Desmond said. “Just the opposite. I want to help you. To stop them. More than anything.” His tone grew skeptical. “But I’m not the one who needs to explain. In ’91, they sent you that box. They knew exactly where you were. Why didn’t they just take you out?”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot over the last twenty-five years.”

  “And?”

  “And when
I trust you, I’ll tell you why I think they left me alive.”

  Peyton placed the guns on the kitchen table. “Let’s start trusting each other right now. We don’t have time to waste.” She coughed, then inhaled deeply.

  She’s getting sicker, Desmond thought.

  William studied her, seemed to realize it too. “Yes. Time is certainly of the essence.”

  Peyton motioned to the letter. “Let’s start over. Dad, you wrote this letter to Desmond. Why?”

  “Three weeks ago he contacted me online. I had developed a number of websites and identities related to the Citium and former projects. They were like breadcrumbs back to me in case someone ever surfaced. I expected maybe a scientist from before the purge.” William motioned to Desmond. “Somehow, he found me. He said the Looking Glass was nearing completion. That he had been lied to, that what they were planning was very different from what he was promised.”

  He faced Desmond. “You told me you were going to stop them. Expose them. You wanted to meet. I refused. I told you to go public first. I didn’t trust you. Again, I thought it might be an attempt to draw me out, eliminate me before the Looking Glass went live. I gave you the coordinates in the forest.”

  “Where we found the metal box.”

  “Correct. There were a hundred pounds of C4 under it. I would’ve blown you to tiny little bits if Peyton hadn’t been with you.”

  Desmond looked over at her. “Well, thanks for that.”

  “I assumed you’d brought her along as leverage. But I needed to know for sure.”

  “You let us read your story to see my reaction.”

  “Yes.” William walked closer to Peyton. “And to explain. I wrote most of it long ago, for you, Peyton, and for your sister. I wanted you to know what really happened. I thought about sending it to you a million times, but the risk was just too great. I decided it would be better for you to live not knowing, than to die for my peace of mind.”