The Colony

by A. J. Colucci

  Despite studies showing that pheromone manipulation was ecofriendly, highly effective and could potentially yield up to a 1,000 percent return on its investment in one year, it remained grossly underutilized, a tiny fraction of pest management. Not only was the process of isolating, identifying and synthesizing pheromones extremely difficult and expensive, the biggest problem by far was the world’s pesticide-dependent mentality. The six agrochemical giants were multibillion-dollar gods of the farming industry that were only too happy to unveil the next generation of toxic chemicals, as insects became resistant to the old ones. Poison was the solution of choice, despite the fact that only 2 percent of pesticides usually hit the intended targets, and 98 percent ended up in the air, soil and drinking water, while killing off beneficial, indigenous insects. IPM was meant to break the cycle of chemical dependence and Kendra was slowly making a name for herself in the small circle of IPM researchers.

  “You people like to complain about bug spray,” Cameron said, “but God forbid there’s a worm in your apple.” He laughed at himself.

  Kendra turned up her lip. “There are some creatures in the world more annoying than insects.”

  Cameron nodded, seeming to have missed the joke, and then asked, “You mean like members of COP?”

  Kendra knew he was referring to Citizens Overseeing Pesticides, a somewhat radical group of entomology students at Harvard. Kendra had been a member in graduate school and written a number of journal articles for the organization. COP had become notorious by uncovering secret memos and documents inside the EPA and various chemical companies, finding links between pesticides and such phenomena as colony collapse in honeybees, the rise of ADHD in children, and elevated hormones in girls. They made national headlines with claims that the average American is exposed to more than ten different pesticide residues on their food each day, and the fact that more than 50 percent of the insecticides used in poor countries was neither monitored nor approved.

  “Bunch of communists,” the agent said under his breath.

  Kendra’s ears popped as the plane seemed to drop, and she threw her attention toward the window. They had reached the coast. New York Harbor was shimmering gold in the late afternoon sun. The Statue of Liberty looked smaller than she remembered, with a melancholy face.

  Kendra blew out a disgruntled breath. “So what’s in New York?”

  “Christ, where’ve you been for two weeks?”

  “Why don’t you check your folder?”

  “All right,” Cameron said with a leer that rattled her. He settled back comfortably in the seat and leafed through the folder. “Parents were both entomologists. That explains a lot … died when you were seven years old … murdered in South America.” He looked at Kendra straight-faced. “How very sad.”

  Kendra stiffened.

  “Well, well. The cactus has a brain. Six years at Harvard … married your professor … Dr. Paul O’Keefe.” He flipped the last page. “Then the promising star of the bug world disappeared into the desert.”

  For a moment, all she could manage was a cold stare, but then the muscles of her jaw relaxed into a grin. “You’re funny, you know? Clean-cut. Slick suit. Probably specialize in waterboarding, right?” Kendra didn’t flinch when the agent scowled. “Know what? I didn’t break any laws. I’m not your prisoner. The second we land—I’m gone.”

  Cameron turned away with a slow nod and appeared calm. Kendra felt victorious but then he stood up tall, casually brushing away crumbs from his suit, and sidestepped across the aisle. A chill hit Kendra in the marrow of her bones when he fell into the seat next to her, smelling of fresh linen and testosterone and fixing his pale blue eyes upon her. He lifted an arm over her chair and pulled back his jacket to reveal a gun holstered to his chest. For some reason Kendra found it alarming that this particular federal agent was carrying a weapon.

  In his most sarcastic tone he said, “You know, Professor, that’s really brave of you, standing up to the government like that. I really admire that kind of spunk.”

  She turned toward the window.

  “Just one thing,” he whispered. “Now look at me, dear.” His thumb reached out and drew her face back toward him. Kendra was jolted by his touch. “This is a very serious matter of national security,” he explained softly. “You could call it a matter of life and death.”

  Kendra tried to be cool, forced a sarcastic chuckle.

  “Yes, I know it sounds cliché,” he continued. “But I want to make sure you understand the gravity of the situation and possible consequences of your actions. I am authorized to use force to get you to New York.” His fingers casually rubbed the edge of his lapel so that his jacket opened wider and the gun was completely exposed. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod your head so I know that you do.”

  Kendra stayed perfectly still, except for a slight tremble of her bottom lip.

  Cameron searched her face and found what he expected. “Good. Now we understand each other.”

  Kendra didn’t move until Cameron returned to his seat, and then she shut her eyes and exhaled.

  The agent closed his laptop and straightened his tie. “Better fasten your seat belt.”

  The Cessna seemed to take a dive and Kendra grabbed the armrests to steady herself. They were descending somewhere over Long Island. The plane eased down on the runway at LaGuardia, then taxied to a restricted area for government aircraft. The pilot parked next to a row of matching Cessnas and when the engine fell silent, he released the door and it unfolded into a staircase.

  Agent Cameron put away his folders and laptop and motioned Kendra toward the exit. She stopped at the doorway, staring up at the blue sky over Queens and a hazy, far-off view of the Manhattan skyline. She breathed in air that wasn’t anything like that of the desert and wiped her watery eyes.

  The pilot took Kendra’s hand as she came down the stairs. LT. COLONEL DALE HASKIN was printed on the gold wings pinned to the lapel of his uniform. He hadn’t said a word during the flight but now he was friendly, smiling, and picked up her duffel bag.

  “Trip okay?”

  “Terrific.”

  A black-windowed sedan was idling on the tarmac. Cameron waited by the open door and slipped into the backseat after Kendra, but this time she wasn’t afraid. Anger blunted fear. And besides, her curiosity was piqued. She found it intriguing to be back in this particular city and wondered if it had anything to do with the one person she knew in New York: her ex-husband.

  CHAPTER 10

  KENDRA GAZED AT THE overlapping skyscrapers through the tinted windows of the car. She had grown accustomed to the vastness of the desert landscape, layered in earth tones and unbroken sky. New York City seemed like another planet with its gray sooty streets and towering granite buildings, throngs of pedestrians, steaming metal carts of food, vendors hawking knockoff designer watches and handbags. Angular women in bright-colored suits and white sneakers walked briskly by and swarthy men in hard hats relaxed along a chain-link fence.

  It was close to rush hour and the car moved slowly. Kendra tried to figure out which direction they were headed. The street numbers were getting smaller, so it was definitely downtown, away from the Museum of Natural History and Paul. That was some relief. Besides, she thought, with all the traveling Paul did it was unlikely he was even in New York. He was probably in some exotic country or lecture hall or picking up an award for being so damn perfect. It was Kendra, after all, being summoned by the FBI as a scientist for her expertise and knowledge. Something her former husband never seemed to notice.

  Still, she could almost feel Paul somewhere in the city and suddenly found herself reeling back in time, to the first moment she’d set eyes on him. It was her junior year at Harvard. Paul was teaching insect ecology and Kendra fell head over heels on the first day of class. His velvety brown eyes seemed to look into her soul and he had the hands of an artist, long and graceful with large bony knuckles. They moved slowly and sensually. She remembered one particular day when Paul
was tracing the exoskeleton of an enlarged plastic termite, his fingers gliding across its body, his soothing voice in a whisper that transfixed her. A delicious feeling of excitement was building inside her and when he placed his hand down on the figurine, cupping its enormous petiole, she actually moaned out loud. Fortunately, hers blended in with a dozen other moans. Unbeknownst to him, there was a fairly large consensus among the female student body that Dr. Paul O’Keefe had some kind of mystical power over women’s libidos and they began to refer to his lectures as “quickies.”

  Kendra grew warm in the back of the sedan, thinking about their sizzling romance in the early years, but her skin cooled as she recalled five trying years of marriage. Paul insisted she play the part of the doting wife. She moved to New York and gave up her research while he flew around the world. Paul was on retainer for a chemical company and they had endless fights over everything from pesticide use to corporate control of the world’s food supply. Finally, she had enough and started a research company in California. They excelled in their careers but on opposite coasts, and while their passion for each other never waned, work seemed to overtake their lives, especially for Paul, whose visits and phone calls became more infrequent.

  In the end, though, it was Kendra who had an affair and severed their marriage. It was stupid; she’d been angry and she never told Paul about the other man.

  Kendra gazed out the window, to the United Nations complex and its majestic array of colorful flags slapping against the wind. The car slowed as it approached the General Assembly building. They rounded a corner to a massive windowless fortress of concrete and steel. A metal bar was raised and they parked in a garage with ten other black sedans.

  Agent Cameron led Kendra to the back of the garage, checked his watch and muttered that they were running late. He traveled through a series of hallways and doors that required the swipe of an ID tag, a thumbprint match or iris scan. A rather odd-looking elevator was waiting at the end of the journey. It was circular and made of polycarbonate glass. Cameron touched the small of Kendra’s back to hurry her inside. There were no buttons on the wall but the curved transparent doors shut quietly. As they descended, a burst of air shot down from the ceiling as if from an exhausted locomotive, startling Kendra.

  “You’ll wear this while you’re here,” Cameron said, patting his jacket and retrieving an ID tag that displayed a photo of Kendra.

  She eyed it hesitantly, rubbing a thumb over the photo and wondering when it was taken. In the snapshot she was wearing a bright yellow blouse. She didn’t remember ever owning a yellow blouse. She clipped the card to her breast pocket.

  Through the clear walls of the elevator Kendra could see that they were dropping swiftly through a narrow tunnel that seemed to be cut right out of the earth.

  “How far down are we going?” she asked.

  “About three hundred feet.”

  Kendra felt her throat tighten. “To where?”

  Cameron didn’t answer but rattled off another warning about restricted space, an oath of secrecy and then repeated the threat of twenty-five years in federal prison. “You’re not to tell anyone about this place. Ever,” he concluded. As the elevator made a smooth but abrupt landing, he added, “It’s an underground bunker, the largest in the world.”

  Kendra felt her stomach drop. The doors slid open and her mind flashed to Dorothy, opening the door to Oz.

  They were at the entrance to an enormous cavern, fifty feet high and the size of a gymnasium. Kendra couldn’t imagine what sort of monstrous drill could have sculpted such a colossal space. The bedrock walls were rough and jagged with flecks that glittered like diamonds, but the technology inside looked like something out of a futuristic movie. Scattered about the room were aerodynamic workstations; curved black oval chairs under floating touch-screen monitors that displayed 3-D images of places in New York City: crowded intersections, famous streets and buildings. The floor was covered in shiny metal, and thick steel plates climbed one wall. A network of pipes floated overhead like a silver spiderweb, along with panels of black grating, backlit with colorful luminescent patterns. Three identical elevators sat inside clear tubes that vanished into the rock ceiling.

  You’re not in Kansas anymore. Kendra stepped out of the elevator. The industrial floor was covered with tiny holes and she felt cold air flow against her shoes, as another burst of wind shot out from somewhere above.

  “Radiation checkpoint,” Cameron said, “but it detects anything chemical, biological. Real high-tech stuff. The whole place is surrounded by a ground-penetrating radar system that can spot a mole tunneling through the dirt. We can tell if anyone tries to get in,” he said, “or out.”

  She followed him to a procession of crazy-shaped golf carts. Titanium potato chips on wheels, Kendra thought as she eased into the seat next to him. There was no steering wheel or controls, but Cameron muttered, “B-Seventeen,” and the driverless cart took off.

  It was a smooth, fantastic journey through white hexagon-shaped hallways that were narrow enough to kick Kendra’s claustrophobia into overdrive. The cart followed a pattern of diamonds on the ceiling, backlit in bright shades of red, blue and green, as a mechanical voice repeated several times, “Please keep hands inside … This vehicle stops for pedestrians…” The cart traversed down straight paths, and other times it would turn or spiral downward and take a new direction. After several sharp turns Kendra felt dizzy.

  “So where’s the oxygen come from?” she asked

  “Vents. It’s highly pressurized. You’ll get used to it.”

  Kendra had to admit the bunker air seemed to be doing wonders for her sinuses, but it dried up her contact lenses. She pulled out the bottle of saline from her pocket and squirted a few drops in her eyes.

  The cart came to a gentle pause and the voice said, “State Room B-Seventeen.”

  They were in front of a door marked with the same number. Cameron picked up her duffel bag and stretched his legs. He swiped his ID tag through a keypad and the door slid open noiselessly. He entered the dark room and Kendra followed, her eyes adjusting to the rough bedrock walls and tiny space that allowed only a small cot and dresser.

  The room was a cave. Kendra hated caves. When she was six years old, her parents had brought her to Texas to save the very rare cave-dwelling arthropod Texella reddelli. It had recently been added to the U.S. endangered species list and was quickly becoming extinct due to an invasion of red fire ants. In a cavern of 100 percent humidity, Kendra’s nose had run like mad, but the arthropods preferred moisture and the darkest part of the cave, and therefore so did their predators. Kendra remembered walking toward the ant nest, squeezing her mother’s hand, as her father held up the lantern to the glistening rock wall. The red ants were everywhere, moving like rivers of blood through living veins. Six-year old Kendra had screamed.

  “We’ll drop your things off here,” Cameron said and placed the bag on the cot.

  Kendra left the room wondering how on earth she would ever sleep in such a confined space. She settled in the cart and it took off once again. There was a familiar tightening in her chest that squeezed her heart. The halls seemed to narrow. She closed her eyes and imagined a vast ocean—a meditation technique she’d learned from her mother—but the ocean waves kept pulling her under.

  “Miss Hart?”

  Kendra opened her eyes. They had stopped.

  “You all right?” Cameron asked, with an amused smile.

  Kendra nodded. They were facing a set of doors marked CONTROL CENTER.

  “Is this another one of those tiny rooms?” she asked.

  “Actually,” Cameron whispered in a throaty voice, “it’s enormous.”

  CHAPTER 11

  KENDRA BLEW OUT AN astonished breath. The control center was another quarried cavern but the size of Grand Central Station. More fantastic than its scope was its shape. The four gargantuan walls were triangular and came to a point twenty stories above her head, as if she were inside the Great Pyramid. />
  It was a strange dichotomy of archaic and ultramodern. Despite its primitive walls, most of the room looked like a futuristic NASA control center. A sea of holographic computers, gleaming silver and bathed in ghostly blue light, stretched across the floor to a main command unit: a forty-foot tactical workstation packed with enough silicone to run the entire city of Manhattan. Overhead were circular offices clear as glass that seemed to be floating on air. At one end of the pyramid, long tables faced the gold seal of the United Nations and red velvet carpet flowed over the steps to the podium and stretched along a formal dais.

  Kendra decided this was one of those secret locations the government hides from the public. Places like Roswell and Area-51 and Mount Weather. This was where all the important New Yorkers would flee in the event of a nuclear attack.

  Only now the place was nearly empty, about a dozen men and women sitting quietly at a table off to the side. Kendra froze when she recognized two of them: New York mayor John Russo and Dr. Paul O’Keefe.

  “You must be Professor Hart,” Russo said, squinting over his glasses. He extended a hand toward an empty seat near Paul. “Please, join us.”

  Kendra struggled to recover. Six hours ago, she was counting ants in the Southwestern desert and now she was standing in an underground bomb shelter with the mayor of New York City and her ex-husband.

  She feigned a smile, walked to the seat next to Paul and sat down. He didn’t look at her but leaned back casually in his chair, his eyes fixed on the mayor. He was wearing a lab coat with an ID tag clipped to his pocket. It was the same familiar etching in her dreams: the dark hair, graceful manner and the liquid chestnut eyes that sent shock waves through her body. The beard was new, and made him only more attractive. His left hand, masculine with long, gentle fingers, was wrapped around the back of his neck and Kendra noticed he still wore his wedding ring.