“What’s the problem?”
A complex series of circles linked together by thin lines of various colors rotated on the screen. “See, the conformation of that protein isn’t right. The structure looks too weak.”
“Can you tweak it?”
Buzz shrugged. Every time his simulation registered a failure, he felt his mood dip. He knew he was close, but he wasn’t yet ready to unwrap the cigar.
“Yeah, but every run takes several hours. I mean, how am I supposed to work with equipment like this?” He gestured at the laptop. It had been given to him by Kessler, who could hardly have chosen an older, slower device. He was used to working in a top-of-the-line laboratory with the best equipment, not thirdhand cast-offs he wouldn’t give to an intern.
“I thought you said you had the answer—you know, on the Raspberry Pi?”
He looked at her. Smart as they come, but uneducated. “My simulation established the best candidate, but there’s still a lot to be done. Think of those raw 3D models animation studios use to lay out a movie—they’re ninety-five percent there, but it’s the final five percent that turns them into believable, realistic characters, and that can take longer than the rest of the process.
“Working through the options takes computer power, and this piece of junk is barely faster than the Pi.”
“So, ask Kessler. Ooh, spooky,” Jodi said as they heard the unmistakable soft tap of the president’s special advisor.
Kessler slipped into the room. “Ah, Doctor Baxter, how is your work progressing?” he said, not giving Jodi’s legs a second look.
“Slowly. This laptop is a piece of sh—”
Kessler raised his hand. “We are all having to operate within regrettable constraints, but I wonder, could I have a word with you in private?”
Buzz shrugged. “Why? You brought her halfway across the country, she deserves to be informed, surely?”
“Some things are on a need to know basis, Doctor.”
Jodi got up off the corner of Buzz’s desk and shot Kessler side-eyes that he completely ignored before exiting the room and slamming the door behind her.
“Petulant.”
“She’s just a kid,” Buzz said. “She didn’t ask to be here. Now, what do you want? If you’re not going to magic a decent laptop out of thin air, then I need to get this steam-driven pile of junk going if I’m going to succeed any time this century.”
Kessler moved closer, causing goosebumps on Buzz’s arm. “That is what I wished to discuss. You see, Doctor, I would very much prefer it if you did not succeed.”
“What?” Buzz staggered back, banging his leg against the corner of the desk. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly serious.”
“But, why? And after bringing me all this way!”
“That was not my choice. I would have preferred our friends at SaPIEnT find you first.”
Buzz froze. “What?”
“The problem with you, Baxter,” Kessler said, his polite demeanor entirely vanished, “is that you don’t consider the wider picture. I don’t doubt that you are a competent scientist in your own way, but there are far greater powers at play that you know nothing of.”
“How is it in anyone’s interest for things to remain as they are?” Buzz managed, struggling to breath as his ribs seemed to be squeezing his lungs.
Kessler shook his head. “That is not relevant to you. What is relevant is that you fail in your work.”
“No! I won’t do it!”
“That would be a shame. You see, Baxter, you might not care too much for your own safety, but the wellbeing of your pretty niece…that is a different matter.”
His jaw dropped. “You’re threatening a young girl?”
Kessler shrugged. “I would rather not see her harmed, but the stakes are high. Keep working on your problem for as long as you like. Enjoy our hospitality. But fail, Doctor, or both you and your niece will regret it. Oh, and I suggest you don’t tell Miss Baxter; the more she knows, the more danger she will be in.”
#
Buzz sat and fumed as Jodi plied him with questions he dared not answer. His entire career as a scientist had been spent trying to answer questions, and now he was being told not to. Worse, he had to pretend to continue looking, and fail.
And yet he had no doubt that Kessler was capable of acting on his threat. The man had given him the creeps since the moment he met him and he found himself wondering what the president saw in the reptile. Could she be in league with him? No, that didn’t make sense: for starters, she didn’t make his skin crawl. And he couldn’t think of a plausible reason for going to such trouble to bring him across the country. Which audience would she be playing to, after all?
No, if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that SaPIEnT was behind this. But that, in turn, begged the question: how did they benefit from this global catastrophe? Surely they hadn’t deliberately caused it.
He gasped. Was that it? Was that why they’d ignored his warnings? And why they were blaming him now?
For what purpose, though? What possible reason could there be to kill billions of people?
No, he didn’t buy it. Lundberg was certainly ruthless, but she wasn’t that much of a monster and he simply couldn’t conceive of Frederick Rath being complicit in genocide.
What, then? Why stop him from at least trying to partially put right the disaster? He couldn’t bring the dead back to life, but he could, perhaps, restore some of the lost land and give humanity a chance to rebuild.
But then, he wasn’t sure he could find the perfect form for the new xenobot. He was close, certainly, but this wouldn’t be the first project that had held such promise only for those apparently tiny gaps to prove unbridgeable.
“Well, if you’re not going to tell me what’s bugging you, I’ll have to go find out for myself.”
Buzz had been so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t register what she’d said until she’d shut the door. He sighed, but he didn’t move. He’d deal with her later. She had nothing to go on and would meet a wall of silence, however hard she played the cute and dumb role.
He settled back and stared at the ancient laptop screen. He was so close. He just couldn’t bear the idea of not solving the problem, not succeeding at least in the intellectual challenge.
So, he decided he’d do that. He would find out whether he could invent a better xenobot, and then he’d decide what to do about it.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait for long.
#
“I know you did it, I can tell by the look on your face,” Jodi said as she sauntered into his room the following morning. “Well done, Uncle. Now, when are you going to tell the president?”
Buzz yawned, rubbed his eyes and sipped his coffee. He’d been given a tiny room in the building next to the one containing the government of the United States. It had no window and, judging by the smell of Clorox, was once home to a janitor. Jodi had been asleep on a camp bed on the floor when he got in, but had managed to get up and out without him noticing in the morning.
“I need to double-check everything,” he said. “I don’t want to make a complete fool of myself in front of the leader of the free world. Such as it is.”
“Well, I brought you a bagel. They’re a bit stale, but not bad. Oh, and make sure you have a shower before you do anything. It’ll wake you up. And you’re a bit gnarly.”
As she left to go do whatever she was going to do that day—flirt with some airman probably—and he bit into the bagel, he wondered why she hadn’t resumed her badgering of the night before. It wasn’t like her to let an unfinished argument go. But he didn’t have the energy to bother about her. He had to decide what he was going to do, before he thought about how he’d protect his niece.
The choice before him seemed, on the face of it, pretty straightforward. The xenobot he’d designed would reverse the effects of the mutated bot that had drowned the world. It had been engineered to outcompete the mutant and remove its eff
ect on ice formation. However, that wasn’t enough on its own. It would take thousands of years for the Antarctic ice sheet to reform, and even that depended on the flood not having irretrievably borked the world’s climate.
No, the true genius of his design was what transformed it from a mere hunter-killer of the original xenobots to the savior of humanity—or, at least, that part of humanity that had survived the flood. By introducing a new strain that raised the temperature at which water froze, he could create a new ice sheet in years rather than millennia. All it would take was a reliable delivery mechanism and, it seemed, Buchanan had one ready to go. Fire a rocket containing the xenobots to the South Pole and relax as the ice expanded, drawing water from the oceans and lowering the sea level. And the pièce de résistance? His xenobots had a built-in limit on their existence. They would do their job and then, over the course of a few generations, they would die out, leaving no trace of either species in the world’s liquid water.
He chuckled to himself. It was masterful and, with it, he would go, at a stroke, from being partly responsible for the potential extinction of his species, to its savior.
And only Kessler stood in his way.
He finished the bagel and washed it down with the last of the instant coffee. His pride at his accomplishment faded a little to be replaced with anger at that lizard who stood in his way. He realized, as he picked up his towel and headed for the showers that, one way or another, he was going to find a way to get his discovery out there. One way or another. All he had to do was work out a way to do it while outmaneuvering Kessler. And then it struck him—as soon as his data was in the hands of the president, Kessler wouldn’t be able to touch him or Jodi. The cat would be out of the bag and he could receive his acclaim.
Jodi had been right; he did feel better after his shower. He dressed himself with a sense of purpose. He would write up a report for Buchanan and present it without Kessler knowing. He’d have to surprise the president with it as he didn’t know how many of her staff were on Kessler’s side—if Pope was, then that would make things a lot tougher. One way or another, however, it had to be done. The world needed him.
Kessler was waiting for him when he returned to his office. Buzz felt his gut tighten as he saw him, standing beside the precious laptop.
“Ah, Doctor Baxter. I’m so sorry to hear about your mishap. All that research wasted.”
“What?” Buz spat, panic rising in his throat,
Kessler gestured at the laptop. “Your laptop. It seems you were correct to ask for a replacement. This one, it seems, has given up the ghost.”
“You’ve been snooping on my computer?”
Kessler’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Snooping? No, of course not. Our IT technician received an alert of a virus on your system. He was forced, I’m afraid, to wipe and discard the hard disk for fear of contaminating the network.”
“You utter b—”
Kessler raised his hand. “Now, now, Doctor. You chose to ignore our talk last night, and I can only imagine that you overworked this admittedly ancient piece of hardware.”
Buzz could find nothing to say. He didn’t dare say anything. He wasn’t that good an actor.
“I have scheduled a meeting with the president at which you will explain your failure. You will then be returned to your island paradise, provided you…behave yourself.”
Buzz would have sworn that a forked tongue flicked from between Kessler’s lips, but he said nothing. This wasn’t the moment to speak or to act.
Kessler turned as he reached the door. “Oh, and Doctor, if you had taken any backups, please be assured that they are useless.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a handheld electromagnet that he waved across Buzz’s body before he could stop him. “In any case, I will have you searched before you enter the president’s presence.”
The walls came tumbling down as Buzz’s last hope was extinguished. He’d thought himself so clever when he’d taken that backup. It took his final shred of self-control to stop himself patting his pants pocket where the flash drive—the now-useless flash drive—sat.
Buzz remembered nothing of the few minutes it took to walk into the building next door where the president held court. All he could think about was his failure. The thought about Clarke, the man from the refugee camp. A man who’d lost his past, and who now seemed to have no future. How could the country recover when half its surface—the half that grew the vast majority of its food—was gone. He envisaged a future where his country was dependent on aid from the very places in the world it had, until recently, been helping. From first world to third world in one tragic day.
“Remember,” Kessler was hissing, unable to keep the victorious tone out of his voice, “your chances of returning home depend entirely on what you now say.”
The meaning was clear. Kessler didn’t merely want to succeed in his mission to scupper Buzz’s plan, he also wanted to get away scot-free and remain like the spider in the center of the web, pulling the strings around the president. He would become the de facto leader of what remained of his country. And then they would discover what he and SaPIEnT had in mind for their future.
The door opened, and Buzz felt pressure on his arm, pushing him unwillingly inside to stand before the president.
“Ah, come in, Doctor Baxter. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
Marian Buchanan looked up at him, and then nodded to two figures standing beside the door. Agents Pope and Delmont stepped forward, and headed toward him.
He waited to be grabbed and restrained as he was forced to lie to save his life and that of Jodi.
And then he saw her. His niece. Standing beside the president. And she was smiling.
Chapter 16
Helmut
Ellie sat fuming in the corner, alternating between rage and fear. Rage at Crossley’s betrayal and her own stupidity for walking into the trap he’d set. I mean, why else would a city executive ask her to come to a meeting? She’d imagined he wanted to know about the general situation to the east from people who’d been there, but that was only the icing on the cake for him.
As soon as he’d announced that the German agent would arrive shortly, he’d ignored their protests and left the room—no doubt to harass his pretty secretary, Ellie thought. Or, perhaps, to go back under the rock he’d crawled out from under. The door had been locked and they’d been reminded that they were on the second floor so even Patrick, who’d crawled along his share of external window sills in his movie career, wasn’t interested in risking it. Anyway, what would be the point? He was the most powerful person in the city and they couldn’t hope to escape if he was against them.
She looked around at the others. Hank was using the time to eat his fill of corporate sandwiches, and Patrick, canape in hand, was looking out the window. Max remained where he’d been sitting, but was now hunched over the laptop.
“Seriously?” she snapped. “Are you trying to get us even deeper into the sh—”
“How can I? He knows where we are.”
“Then what are you doing?”
But, at that moment, the lock clicked and Crossley walked back in. She looked beyond him, but saw no sign of the German.
“Well, I hope you’ve all enjoyed your food. Our friend should be here to collect you shortly. He was forced to spend the night in the emergency ward of our local hospital.”
“You son of a bitch,” Ellie roared, slamming her fists on the table. “He shot one of your police officers! You should be throwing him in jail, not patching him up!”
Anger flashed in Crossley’s eyes for a moment, but then it was gone. “Your problem, Ms…” He made a show of looking down at his paperwork.
“Fischer.”
“Indeed. Your problem is that you are concerned only for yourself and those closest to you. I, on the other hand, have wider concerns.”
Patrick leaned forward, looking the man in the eye. “At least tell us who this…agent is and who he’s working for.”
Ellie caught the look on Max’s face. It almost looked like triumph, as if he’d solved a great mystery.
Patrick hadn’t noticed. “And why do you care enough to go to all this trouble to hand us over?”
“Perhaps they asked nicely,” Crossley said, a wolfish grin spreading across his face. “But no, as I said to your…friend, there are larger matters at play here. I care only about the people of this city, and it suits me to cooperate with this organization.”
“And what will they do with us?”
Crossley shrugged. “Why should I care? I don’t know what they want, only that they do want you, very much. Now, is there anything else you wish to ask me while we await Agent Jager’s arrival?”
“Yes,” Max said. “Who is Lucile?”
For a moment, Crossley’s lips parted, then met again like a fish on dry land. Then, face whitening by the second, he managed to speak. “I…I don’t know what you mean!”
“It’s pretty obvious you do,” Ellie said, looking from Max to Crossley.
Max looked surprised, though Ellie wondered if he was faking it. “Oh, that’s odd. What about…” And at this point, he flipped open the lid of his laptop and very obviously studied the screen. “…Shenice?”
The remaining color drained from Crossley’s face. “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about. Here, let me look at that.” He lunged across the desk, but Max seemed ready and he pivoted away, giving Hank time to grab Crossley’s arm and push back.
“Now then, Mr. Crossley, that belongs to Max.”
“There’s Jamila…”
Ellie couldn’t hold herself any longer. “Max, who are these people?”
“Prostitutes,” he said, matter-of-factly. “All…I don’t know the right word…used? By Crossley. I have another five names.”
Crossley was on his feet, working up a plainly fake indignation. “I don’t know any of these…people. You’d better tell this boy,” he said, pointing from Ellie to Max and back again, “that I could have him thrown in jail to rot at my pleasure for what he’s said.”
Survivors: Deluge Book 3: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Page 13