Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  In the bathroom, Peyton began washing off the face paint. When she looked in the mirror, she saw Desmond standing in the doorway.

  “Be careful.”

  She stared at him in the mirror. “You too.”

  “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “I’ll be there.” And she hoped he would too.

  Chapter 114

  Peyton rode in the back of the electric car with Gretchen and Charlotte. The two Navy SEALs sat in the front, both silent, eyes forward, occasionally glancing around for any signs of trouble along the dirt road that wound through the island. The car’s tiny lamps barely cut the darkness; Peyton assumed that was to avoid being spotted from above. The roads weren’t covered with large canopies; instead, large trees lined both sides, their massive limbs stretching overhead.

  Peyton glanced over at Gretchen. The woman was in her mid forties, fit, with blond hair and an annoyed expression. Peyton wondered what had happened in the house to convince her to take them into the lab building. She assumed some sort of coercion was involved. Most of all, she wondered how a person with a PhD in biomedical engineering, who seemed rational, would ever cooperate with the Citium.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  Gretchen replied without looking Peyton in the eyes. Her accent was German, or perhaps Dutch, Peyton thought. “I dispute the premise.”

  Peyton bunched her eyebrows.

  “You assume we have acted against humanity’s best interest.” Gretchen looked at Peyton now. “I assure you that is not the case. Our actions will save lives. It is you whom I should ask why.”

  “I think distributing a deadly pathogen is just slightly against the human race’s best interest.”

  “Your perspective is myopic.”

  “You have killed millions of people in the last week.”

  Gretchen looked away. “Something we regret. Many of the deaths were due to decisions by your government and others. But the end result will be the same. An outcome easily worth the price.”

  “Which is—”

  The Navy SEAL driving interrupted. “Look alive, ladies.”

  The car exited the dirt road and moved onto a heavily wooded promenade with covered walkways, no doubt with camouflage images on top. A large covered parking area loomed to the left.

  “Take any space,” Gretchen said.

  As they parked, the SEAL in the passenger seat turned and said to her, “I want to remind you of our arrangement—and the consequences of deviating from it.”

  “I require no reminder.”

  LED lights on the dome of the canopy lit their way toward the lab complex. They walked in silence as other staffers joined them on the path.

  Inside, a guard at a desk barely glanced at them. Gretchen led them to an elevator and pressed a button that read B4. At the house, Peyton had considered where to go first. The others had the primary mission: finding the warehouses where the existing cure was housed. But as a backup plan, Peyton’s job was to find where the cure was being created, and gather any information on its mechanism of action. If the others failed, and governments around the world were forced to try to manufacture the cure themselves, that information would be critical.

  Gretchen led them to an office with plate-glass windows that looked down on the floor of a vast manufacturing plant. The facility was clearly underground, but it was the machinery that shocked Peyton the most.

  “What is this?”

  “What you requested.”

  “This is where you manufacture the cure? Impossible.”

  An amused smile crossed Gretchen’s lips. “Again, your premises are incorrect, Dr. Shaw.”

  Peyton activated her comm. “Something’s wrong here.”

  There was no response.

  “Desmond? Avery?”

  She waited.

  “Dad, come in.”

  No reply came.

  Chapter 115

  On another lighted path, Desmond and Avery walked in silence. William and Carl were roughly ten feet ahead of them.

  At the island bungalow, Desmond had changed clothes, wiped the paint off his face, and donned a wig with brown wavy hair. He wore a mustache that itched constantly. The polo shirt was a size too small, the shorts too big. Avery kept glancing over at him.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  “Seriously.”

  She smiled. “You look like a seventies porn star.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “Thanks.”

  “Looked like you were putting the moves on Peyton back at the house.”

  Desmond studied her a moment, but the young woman wouldn’t look at him.

  “Hey.”

  She turned toward him.

  “Before…” he said. “What was our relationship?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not sure it matters to me anymore.”

  Before Desmond could say another word, William stopped in the path and whispered for them to be quiet. The administrative building loomed.

  In the building’s lobby, they each swiped their magnetic access cards; Carl swiped his own, and Desmond, William, and Avery used cards they had taken from residents of the bungalows—people they had verified had access to the building and critical areas. The people attached to the access cards looked vaguely similar to each of them in their disguises, but they certainly wouldn’t fool anyone who actually knew those residents. Desmond just hoped they could get by the guard at the desk—and not be noticed by the staff manning the security cameras.

  To his relief, the front desk guard barely looked up. In seconds, they were past the lobby, at the elevator bank, and Desmond finally exhaled.

  The building was four stories. Carl led them to the server room on the second floor, in the interior. It was expansive, at least a hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, and extended to the two floors above.

  The place buzzed with the sound of countless servers. Rows of metal cabinets and cages stretched out. Some enclosures lay open, cords spilling out like the entrails of a mechanical monster that had been gutted by a tech. Some of those techs were in the room. They stood at carts piled high with server parts, worked on laptops, and typed on keyboards below fold-up flat screens that extended from the racks themselves. The room was windowless, lit by fluorescent lights, and cool. Air conditioning blew down on them, an artificial breeze from above. Plastic tiles formed a raised floor in a gridded metal framework, and the space underneath the floor allowed conduits and wiring to reach all areas of the data center. Their feet thumped as they walked across the tiles.

  The scale of the data center was far beyond what Desmond had expected. What are they doing with this much computing power?

  At various points, Avery attached a small camera to the end of a row of servers. The cameras had magnetic bases and snapped right onto the metal frames.

  Carl stopped at a rack and punched in some numbers on a keypad next to a small door. The door opened with a click, and Carl pulled out a laptop. He attached an Ethernet cord to a port on a switch above the servers.

  “This terminal has administrative privileges on the network.”

  He stepped aside, and Avery took his place. She set a tablet next to the laptop and brought up a view of all the security cameras she had placed. Thus far, no one was following them.

  She typed furiously on the laptop. A second later, the logo for Rook Quantum Sciences appeared.

  “I’m in.”

  Chapter 116

  Peyton tried the comm again.

  “Desmond. Dad. Avery.”

  She waited.

  “Please respond.”

  To Gretchen she said, “Why are the radios down?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “It’s not really my department.”

  “Meaning?”

  Gretchen sighed. “Industrial espionage was one of the biggest risk
s we faced.”

  “What does that mean?”

  A humorless smile formed on the woman’s lips.

  Peyton thought a moment. Yes, they would have done anything to prevent anyone from taking information off-site—including blocking electronic transmissions. “The building’s shielded, isn’t it? Comms won’t work inside.”

  Gretchen’s silence confirmed her theory. If the administrative building was shielded as well, Avery wouldn’t be able to upload the location list via the satellite internet link. She needed to know that—quickly.

  Even more concerning was what Peyton saw below—the massive machines manufacturing the cure. They were all wrong. Peyton had toured dozens of facilities that manufactured vaccines, antivirals, and monoclonal antibodies that fought infectious diseases. And they all had one thing in common: they were based on biological material.

  Most vaccines were simply a form of the actual virus they provided immunity for. The vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, oral polio, chicken pox, and shingles were weakened forms of the target viruses. The weakened forms reproduced poorly inside the body, allowing the immune system time to study and attack them. The body eventually manufactured antibodies, then committed the formula for those effective antibodies to memory—so that when the real virus appeared, the immune system could neutralize it quickly.

  Another set of vaccines worked via a chemical process that inactivated the virus so it couldn’t replicate inside the body. The vaccines for polio, hepatitis A, influenza, and rabies worked that way. Inactivated vaccines had no chance of causing even a mild form of the disease they were inoculating against, making them ideal for anyone with a weakened immune system.

  Vaccines, however, were mostly ineffective in treating patients already infected with a virus, especially if the pathogen was prone to mutation—as was the case with influenza and HIV. For patients already infected, antivirals were the key.

  Like vaccines, many antivirals were grown from living matter. Monoclonal antibodies, for example, were predominantly grown in cell cultures that fused myeloma cells with mouse spleen cells that had been immunized with an antigen. Other antivirals were chemical in nature and targeted a virus’s protein layer or enzymes.

  But whether vaccine or antiviral, the bottom line was that all known solutions to fighting a viral outbreak required a manufacturing process with a biological or chemical component. And here, Peyton saw no evidence of that. Was the cure a fake? Were the videos of Paris and Athens staged? Or was the Citium cure something else entirely? And if so, what would distributing it do?

  Peyton pulled Charlotte close and whispered, “We need to get out of here and warn the others.”

  A shot rang out, then three more. The Navy SEALs who had accompanied Charlotte and Peyton spun. Blood spilled onto the white floor. They never even had a chance to draw their weapons.

  The three men who advanced through the doorway wore security uniforms similar to the one worn by the man at the front desk. They swept the office, then walked over to Peyton and Charlotte and began patting them down.

  The tall man reached under Peyton’s armpits and ran his hands down and over, across her chest. She pushed him back, but he grabbed her arms.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  The voice was like a lightning strike.

  When Peyton saw the face of the person who had spoken, her jaw dropped. It was impossible.

  Chapter 117

  Desmond stared at the tablet that showed the cameras they had placed throughout the data center. Thus far, there had been no movement except the technicians who walked between the rows and occasionally opened an enclosure to service the equipment inside. Lights blinked throughout the room, flashing green as data packets were exchanged on the network and hard drives served up data. There were blinks of yellow and red when packets collided or hardware failed.

  Desmond leaned close to Avery. “How much longer?”

  “Almost there.”

  From his peripheral vision, Desmond saw movement on the screen, someone running fast. He stopped, studied the tablet. No—it was just another technician, rushing to a cabinet to work on a server.

  Over the next sixty seconds, the server room filled with more technicians. Two or three entered at a time and broke off from each other, veering to different server enclosures and opening them. The scene bothered Desmond, but he didn’t know why. It was off somehow.

  “Got it!”

  Avery pulled a flash drive from the laptop and inserted it into her cell phone, which had a satellite sleeve attached.

  Desmond continued to study the camera feeds.

  What’s wrong here?

  Were the men moving too quickly? No—that wasn’t it. It was their shoes. Boots—all the same. Soldiers’ boots.

  “Hey, we’ve got a problem here.”

  Avery squinted at the phone. “I know. It’s not connecting.”

  William took Carl by the arm. “Why?”

  The man shrugged. “Phones are banned in the entire building. I—”

  “We need to get outside.”

  Desmond nodded at the tablet. “That’s going to be a problem.”

  They were surrounded.

  The figure who had reprimanded the troops walked closer, never breaking eye contact with Peyton. There was no smile, only a hard stare that Peyton thought said: I’m sorry.

  The person spoke to Charlotte first.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Charlotte.”

  The Australian doctor looked as surprised as Peyton felt. She merely nodded.

  There were a million questions Peyton wanted to ask. She had no clue where to start. Most of all, she wanted to know why. Why this person she loved so much, this person who meant so much to her, was involved with this.

  The person stopped just a few feet from Peyton, and with a sharp head motion, dismissed Gretchen. The soldiers who had cut down the Navy SEAL and attempted to frisk Peyton departed as well.

  “Hello, darling.”

  Peyton swallowed. “Hi, Mom.”

  Chapter 118

  Desmond pushed Carl against the wire mesh wall. “How many exits are there from this room?”

  “Two,” the nervous man said.

  “They’ll be covered,” William said.

  Desmond knew he was right. But Peyton’s father always seemed to be a step ahead. William was already reaching into his bag. He took out three round green cylinders, ran to the end of the row of server racks, and tossed the canisters in different directions. Smoke issued forth as they rolled across the floor. The canisters thumped as they crossed the joints where the tiles fitted together; they sounded like the beat of a drum before the start of a battle.

  William returned and handed Avery a grenade.

  “Go. You’ll have to make your own exit. I’ll buy you some time.”

  Before either Desmond or Avery could speak, the man slipped into the smoke. Gunfire began a second later.

  Bullets ripped through the cages around them. Sparks flew. A dozen electrical explosions and pops went off. Shards of metal and plastic issued from the cages like a lethal mix of confetti.

  “Stay down, Carl!” Desmond shouted as he and Avery left the man behind and sprinted away.

  Overhead, fire suppression nozzles hissed, pumping the room full of gas—argon, or perhaps nitrogen, to reduce the oxygen level and choke off the fire.

  Avery ran ahead of Desmond, tossed the grenade at the end of the row, then drew her handgun from inside her waistband and squeezed off two rounds.

  Desmond had counted to three seconds by the time he reached her. Most US-made grenades went off at four or five and a half seconds.

  He wrapped an arm around Avery’s midsection and pulled her behind the metal cage just before the grenade went off, blowing them to the floor, him on top of her.

  For a moment, all went silent—then the silence was replaced by ringing. Lights overhead went dark. The constantly blowing air conditioning and fire suppression gas ceased. Debris fell onto th
e raised floor like heavy raindrops on a metal roof.

  Avery rolled Desmond off her and stood, gun drawn. She looked left then right, then extended a hand to help Desmond up. He marveled at her. She’s unstoppable.

  His body ached when she pulled him up.

  Seconds later, they stepped through the opening the grenade had created in the wall of the server room, into a corridor lined with offices. Soldiers in body armor stood at both ends of the hall. They dashed across the hall into the closest office, and Desmond ran to the floor-to-ceiling window.

  They were on the second floor; Desmond estimated about a fifteen-foot drop. Doable, but it would hurt—and probably break a few things. He raised his gun, fired two rounds into the glass.

  “Are you crazy?” Avery snapped.

  “Yes. He is.”

  They turned to find Conner McClain in the doorway.

  “You disappoint me, Avery.”

  Desmond moved in front of the woman, shielding her. He knew Conner wouldn’t harm him. And he knew why.

  Chapter 119

  William crept through the room, peering around the servers, moving as quickly as he dared. It reminded him of playing hide-and-seek as a child in a large library in London. But this game was more deadly.

  The smoke was thick now. He could see only a few feet in front of him. The aftermath of the explosion had brought calm. He desperately hoped Desmond and Avery were outside the building by now. He had picked off two soldiers advancing on their opening, and that had driven the rest back, into the smoke.

  He moved around another cage, listened, heard nothing except for the scattered debris falling and the pop of electrical circuits blowing. Gas issued from the overhead nozzles in about half the room.

  If memory served him, he was close to the exit—three rows away.

  He moved to another row, paused, waited. Then another. He was almost out. He desperately wanted to activate his comms—to tell the Marine and Navy SEAL forces to execute a diversion and for Jamison to move in, but the comms still didn’t work.