by Arno Joubert
Alexa held out a hand. “Leatherman, please.”
Neil slipped it out of the pack and handed it to Alexa. She opened the pliers and proceeded to cut the fence. Neil pulled it back then sauntered to the front of the door. He tried the door handle. It wiggled slightly, but it was locked.
Alexa chuckled. “That was optimistic.”
He grinned sheepishly then pulled a lock-picking tool from the backpack. He inserted the tension wrench and turned it slightly then inserted the pick and listened closely as he worked it in and out of the lock. He grunted and turned the wrench clockwise, and the door clicked open.
“One day you’re going to show me how that works,” Alexa said and stepped inside.
She looked around the place. The walls and floor were solid casted cement. The building covered a stairwell leading down below. Alexa thought it could have been a maintenance entrance to the dam. The metal pipe they had been following terminated in the wall then connected to some white conduit. Neil tore the covering strip from the conduit. It was filled with a thick black cable as well as a thinner yellow cable.
Alexa pulled at the yellow cable in the conduit. “High-speed fiber-optic cable. Why would they need that to go to the dam?”
Neil shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
There were no light switches. Alexa fished a flashlight from her backpack and led the way down. Four flights down, the stairwell opened up to a large tunnel. It was wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. The concrete floor was painted with a transparent, glossy paint, and a straight yellow line divided it into two lanes. She followed her instinct and turned right, heading back toward the dam. The tunnel ran dead straight, no inclines or declines.
“I guess we have another seven klicks back to the dam. You didn’t by any chance pack some form of transport in that bag of yours?”
“No, but I have this,” Neil said and tossed Alexa a water bottle. “At least it’s cooler down here than up there.”
She caught it and gulped down a couple of swallows then handed it back. “Thanks.” She started jogging. “Well, come on, we don’t have all day.”
Neil sighed and started to jog as well, trying to catch up.
They kept a brisk pace for twenty minutes when Alexa held up her arm. “We’re close.”
They noticed a white doorway in the distance. A sign on the front said, “Research.”
As they approached it, they saw that it was a reinforced steel-mesh door. Neil inspected it, running his hand along the edges. There was no sign of any locking mechanism. “It uses an electromagnetic lock. It probably has magnets up here and down at the bottom,” Neil said, pointing out the areas to Alexa.
She leaned against the wall, catching her breath. “Can you open it?”
Neil looked around uncertainly. “If we could somehow cut the power to this place.”
She walked toward the door, shaking her head. “They probably have backup generators.” She turned to him. “Come on, strong guy, just kick it down.”
Neil shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
He pushed firmly against the door. “Some of these were built to keep people in and not necessarily to avoid burglaries. The typical holding force of the low-end systems is about five hundred pounds. With time, it could become even weaker.” He nudged the door with his shoulder. “So if you’re inside, it’s difficult to get out because you have to pull against the magnet. The door handle is likely to come off first.”
He grunted as he gave it another shove and the door budged slightly. “But if you’re outside and pushing against the magnet, you can exert a lot more force.” He strained against the door and then rammed it with his shoulder. Alexa admired his strong back, a drop of perspiration running down his hairline and neck. Something cracked and the door flew open, and Neil burst into the room, struggling to regain his balance. He landed on all fours then looked up.
“Good day, Captain, Sergeant.”
It was Dr. Wattana. Standing behind him were five armed guards.
“Shit,” Alexa said.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Voice was thinking. He did that a lot these days, Thak summoning him regularly.
Poor Thak. He had had a crappy childhood; his parents were monsters. His father, Taichi, was always at work. His mom, Natsuko, was even more useless. She was a whore and a drunk. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was screwing or drinking, usually both at the same time.
His dad had always harbored these high expectations for Thak. His achievements were never good enough. If he received an A for an exam, his dad wanted an A+. Then he would bring back and A+, and his dad wanted to know why he hadn’t gotten a hundred percent.
He graduated as a doctor when he was only twenty-two. He was a phenom, an outlier. No one else had ever achieved what he had, graduating with an almost perfect average of ninety-nine percent.
His father hadn’t attended his graduation ceremony. Said he still had a lot to learn, that this was only a baby step and shouldn’t be celebrated. Thak had worked his ass off four seven years. Studied until he passed out, reciting the material until he knew it off by heart.
His mom was there, sure, wearing too much make-up and acting boisterous. “That’s my boy,” she told everyone willing to listen, then she sneaked a couple of swallows from her hip flask whenever she thought no one was watching. She was a nobody, a spoiled rich girl from a royal family.
One day he confronted his dad and told him that there was no way in hell that he could have graduated medical school with a better average than he, Thak Wattana, had achieved. No one ever had, and no one ever would. The man looked him up and down then snorted. “This is not a competition, boy.”
He later found out that his dad hadn’t even graduated from medical school. He flunked out after his second year, not passing any of his subjects.
He shivered. His grandfather used to visit his room when he was a boy. He said he was going to tell him a bedtime story. It was a strange story, and granddad said it would be better if he showed him. He remembered the intense pain of his first intercourse with the man. He was rough, pinning the boy’s arms behind his back as he raped him.
He told his mom, but she didn’t believe him. When he told his father, the man lost all the color in his face then turned around and didn’t speak to him ever again.
In some perverse way, Thak thought that his father may have been jealous because he never had a proper relationship with his own dad. On his deathbed his last words to Thak were, “I hope you rot in hell for making my father love you more than me.”
In his early teens, Thak started developing the Voice, his alter ego, someone who didn’t care what anyone thought about him, someone who would take over whenever the old man would come read him his bedtime story.
He had always been a reserved boy, scorning the advances of women. His mother arranged his marriage with a girl named Ming Li. She was beautiful, and Thak thought he could grow to love her, so he accepted.
On their first night together, Thak became afraid and summoned the Voice. Ah, he had so much fun. The first time was always the best. When he had finished with her, Ming was beaten so badly that she fell into a coma. Thak begged for forgiveness, but she never wanted to see him again. It suited the Voice; he didn’t know how a man was expected to live with the same woman for the rest of his life.
Thak found solace in his sister. They went on long walks and talked about life and love. One day she admitted to him that their father had chosen her for his nightly visits. What a sick little family they had become.
She cried for hours and he held her, and then she kissed him like she loved him. There was no stopping their relationship from developing. She didn’t mind the aggressive lovemaking; she held her own and embraced it, like she deserved to be beaten.
After his father passed away, his grandfather came to visit him at the hospital where he had practiced. Such a funny word, practiced. Because it was true, you never knew for sure if you were causing more harm than good t
o a patient. You were always practicing, making educated guesses.
Thak was afraid that the older man was going to hurt him again, but his grandfather had turned old and weak and wrinkled. Thak didn’t need to fear him anymore. The old man tossed a large black folder filled with scraps of pages and notes onto his desk. “Read this,” he said and left.
The old man needed someone to continue his research, and Thak couldn’t allow the groundbreaking work to stop. So he accepted his grandfather’s offer to move to Thailand and take over his position at the Happy Sunshine Clinic in Thailand. And the rest, as they say, was history.
The Voice looked up as Andre` rapped on his door. “What?”
“I think you better see this,” the guard said.
The Voice stood up and grabbed the tablet that Andre` held in his hand. The two Interpol agents were jogging down the complex tunnel. They had broken in somehow.
He handed the tablet back. “Let’s go.”
Laiveaux redialed the number, but it went straight to voice mail. He slammed his fist on the table. “Merde.” Why was the girl always getting herself into these situations? He glanced up at Bruce, who was pacing the room impatiently, three long strides from one side of the room to the other. He must be worried sick. He was going to take the matter into his own hands if Laiveaux didn’t do something soon.
“Have you heard anything from Moolman yet? Have they finished searching the PEP premises?” Bruce asked.
Laiveaux rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “They found nothing.”
“Why are their bloody GLD signals disappearing?”
Laiveaux sighed then stood up slowly. He was getting old. At times like these he felt it in his bones. He didn’t know why the GLDs were disappearing. All agents were required to wear the Geolocation Devices so that they could be tracked twenty-four hours a day. Interpol agents knew stuff that other agents didn’t. Top secret stuff. Some governments could view this as very valuable information. Agents could be kidnapped. Wearing a GLD was a part of the contract which Alexa often disregarded; she said she hated feeling like Big Brother was watching her. But Neil’s was always on.
Laiveaux cracked his knuckles then sat down. “OK, let’s backtrack on this. What do we know? The little girl, Yumi, her GLD signal disappeared after she landed at the PEP airstrip.”
Bruce nodded. “And Alexa and Neil’s disappeared seven kilometers from the road up to Mueller’s Dam. Halfway between the PEP plant and the dam.”
Laiveaux turned in his seat. “There’s something down there, Bruce.”
Bruce held his chin, seemingly deep in thought. He nodded, as if he had made up his mind. “How many men do you have on standby?”
OK, party time. “How many do you want?”
“I need a small group. Three men and myself.”
“What’s the plan?”
Bruce chuckled. “The plan?”
Laiveaux knew what he meant. He was going in, he was going to extract his daughter, and there were going to be a lot of casualties along the way. And there was nothing that Laiveaux could do about it. “I have men on standby at Youngsfield.”
“Any Israelis?”
“One. Max Rizak.”
“Rizak?”
Laiveaux shrugged. “Polish Jew. He’s Mossad. He hasn’t seen any action in a couple of years, more of an administrative placement.”
“I don’t mind rusty Mossad agents.”
“OK, I’ll get the team assembled,” Laiveaux said, standing up and picking up his phone from the table.
“Good,” Bruce said and slipped his duffel bag over his shoulder. “Oh, and one more thing. I want Latorre as well. He would die for Alexa after she gave him his second chance.”
Laiveaux nodded. He remembered the incident well. One of Alexa’s fellow recruits at the French Foreign Legion, a man with a bad history, had a run-in with Alexa. Unbeknownst to Laiveaux, the man had escaped from an Italian jail where he was imprisoned for having raped and murdered three young women. He found refuge at the only place police were not allowed to come looking for him, in the Legion.
He was planning on murdering Alexa, but two of Alexa’s friends in the Legion, Reg Voelkner and Bis Latorre, took him out first. They later confessed to the crime, but Laiveaux didn’t prosecute them. They became Alexa’s best officers and men whom Laiveaux personally trusted with his own life.
“That’s a damn fine idea, Colonel.”
Dr. Hannes Petzer tossed the research printout on the coffee table, kicked off his shoes, then lay down on the leather sofa in his office. He propped the pillow under his neck, trying to get comfortable. He turned on his side then gazed into the eyes of the buffalo head mounted above his desk. It gave him the shivers. Wattana had shot it and had insisted on giving it to him to decorate his office; how could he refuse?
He switched off the light on the lampstand then closed his eyes. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and he dug it out impatiently. He read the message; it was from Marie. Tonight was Jake’s graduation ceremony, and she would appreciate it if he could make it. Apparently he had won a prize, as well. Probably for listening to the loudest music in the class, Hannes thought. The kid barely scraped through on his ass. He had his mother’s genes, certainly not the sharpest knife in the block. He flipped onto his back. Screw that, he wasn’t going.
He placed his arm on his forehead, trying to drift off. He had gotten Marie pregnant in his final year of study. She was quite a looker but had nothing between the ears. His parents forced him to marry her, telling him it was the right thing to do, and she refused to have an abortion. Why his wife had wanted children in the first place he didn’t know. They were such a damn burden. Learning disabilities, sicknesses, stupid gadgets and designer clothes and crap.
Dr. Wattana understood what he was going through. His research would ensure that only the best attributes would be preserved in offspring, that stupid kids like Jake could never happen.
Sleep wasn’t coming easy tonight. The incessant critical voice in the back of his head refused to go away, that nagging doubt that he was missing something. They weren’t moving forward with the research as fast as he had hoped; the expected results were not forthcoming.
Here he had the opportunity of a lifetime. He could win a Nobel Prize if he could only find that elusive breakthrough, but he was staggering along like a blind man in a maze.
Could it be that they were doing this all wrong? They weren’t doing double-blind experiments like he was taught to do at college, they were simply injecting and hoping for the best. He knew each person’s genetic makeup was different; medication that worked for someone might not necessarily work on another. Some people had natural resistance to viruses and bacteria, others didn’t.
Their assumptions were wrong. By treating subjects with exactly the same genetic makeup, it was like going to a shoe store and buying a pair of shoes that you needed to use for jogging and wearing to work and climbing mountains and doing ice skating. That’s where Thak’s thinking was flawed. They had to start developing cures for certain gene types; for example, blood pressure medication targeted at diabetics. They needed to be more specific. That’s why they weren’t seeing results.
He knew he needed a more diverse test base, but this was all that he had, so he had to make use of it as best he could. He sure as hell wasn’t going to bring in subjects from the outside; that would be unethical.
He knew he had to talk to Wattana about his findings soon. He was afraid. The man was brilliant, but he had an aggressive streak, something that had started to rub off on Petzer as well. Take what you want at all costs, no matter what the consequences were. They were pioneers in their fields, so they were allowed to bend the rules, almost like they were demigods. They had the right.
He sighed. The nagging feeling didn’t want to go away.
Wattana smiled. “Due to a previous escape attempt, we had surveillance cameras fitted. We were following your every move.”
Neil glanced sidelong
at Alexa.
“Cuff them,” he ordered the guards.
The guards bound their hands behind their backs with zip ties.
“Follow me for the grand tour,” Dr. Wattana said. Alexa and Neil followed the doctor, the five armed guards forming the rear of the procession, their weapons raised to Alexa and Neil’s backs.
They entered a wide passageway with thick wooden doors on either side, stretching down the passageway as far as Alexa could see. It was dimly lit, and the floor was shiny and clean, just as the one inside the tunnel had been. Metal grids lined the sides of the passage. Alexa had once seen something similar in a horse stable. It allowed the stables to be cleaned more easily; the water and muck could be washed away into the drainage area below the grids.
The doors were numbered with what looked like reflective tape, like the kind you stick on your car. Above the number was a small window with metal bars. They were grimy and dirty.
And then Alexa started noticing the smell. It was awful. Sweat and bodily fluids mixed together to form a vile stench. They walked past a guard who was cleaning a cell with a garden hose and a broom, and Alexa peeked inside.
In the cell, a young girl, probably fourteen, sat in a corner. She looked Asian. Alexa saw no bed or toilet or sink. The girl was sitting on straw, trying to prop herself up against the wall. In the opposite corner was a plastic bucket. She was dirty, her hair matted and knotted, pieces of straw sticking out of her hair. Her skin was scabbed and her lips chapped. And then she started to moan, the most horrendous wail escaping her mouth. She stuck out her arms toward Alexa.