2041 Sanctuary (Dark Descent) (57 page)

In that instant the building’s low-level illumination switched back to ordinary bright, white office lighting. They’d transferred to another power outlet, a tertiary generator, Samson presumed. A huge blast from down the hall made him stagger back. The booby trap on the stairs had been triggered, the high-yield mine destroying the surrounding fabric of the building and sending the floor sagging down.

Making haste, he thundered down a carpeted corridor, a few administrators screaming in terror at his passing. On the other side of the building he went up another flight of steps, his exertions liberating. He felt calm and relaxed. He lived for moments like this; in the midst of a storm his mind became centred. Tenth, eleventh, twelfth, the levels flashed past. The thirteenth came and went and then he was bursting out onto the fourteenth floor.

Looking this way and that, he saw the area was open-plan and empty of people. Damn it! Where was everyone? More importantly, where was Agent Taylor? Walking between the unending rows of desks, searching, his rifle’s scope guiding his vision, Samson re-evaluated his previous thoughts on the professor. He’d been too quick to buy in to Steiner’s supposed intelligence, the man failing him when it came to the crunch.
If he’s a genius then I’m a fucking saint
, he thought.

A ping sounded at the far end of the room, announcing the arrival of an elevator. He whirled around and ducked to watch the doors slide open. Nobody emerged, the interior void of occupants.

‘Drop it,’ a steady voice said from behind.

Samson checked his visor, wondering why his movement sensors hadn’t detected anything.

‘I said, drop it,’ the woman said again.

Samson stood and placed his rifle down on the desk in front of him.

‘Turn off your cloak.’

Samson reached out to his left wrist.

‘Slowly,’ she said.

Samson completed the movement with care, unsure what kind of weapon she possessed. At point-blank range, in the right place and with the right ammunition, his armour could be breached. Switching the camouflage system off, Samson’s green and brown panelling reappeared.

‘Turn around.’

Samson did so, his hands in the air. In front of him stood an FBI agent in a grey suit, a semi-automatic rifle pointed squarely at his visor.
Clever girl
, he thought in admiration; worthy adversaries were hard to find.

‘Get on your knees,’ she told him.

Samson glanced at the identity badge clipped to her breast pocket before kneeling down.

‘Interlock your fingers and place your hands on your head.’

Samson did as he was bade, noticing two separate units of FBI agents, dressed in full combat gear and armed to the teeth, exiting from opposite stairwells at the far end of the room.

With her colleagues bearing down on them, the agent stared into Samson’s mask, her eyes full of fire and hatred. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said, ‘but I’ll make sure you fry for this and I’ll be there to watch!’

Samson wasn’t paying attention. His eyes darted over his visor’s internal display, using the visual command system to divert his helmet’s internal power supply to his armour’s chest panel. With a final flick of his eyes he initialised the process he’d just prepped. A blinding flash of light made the agent blink and Samson surged upwards. She pulled the trigger. The report from the gun echoed out, the bullet missing him by inches. Grasping the agent’s shoulder in a bone crushing grip, he threw aside her rifle and placed his pistol to her head before pulling her back against his chest to face the forty agents who rushed to encircle him.

‘Back off!’ Samson dragged his captive with him while turning in sharp, quick movements to prevent anyone from risking the shot.

‘You’ve got nowhere to go.’ The lead agent moved to the fore. ‘Put down your weapon and surrender.’

Samson kept moving away, the crescent of rifles in front of him following his every motion.

His captive struggled. ‘Shoot him!’

Samson grasped her tighter and pushed his pistol harder against her head. ‘Take another step forward and she dies.’

The lead agent put his hand up to halt his team’s advance.

This was an unusual position for Samson, face-to-face with an adversary but unable to strike them down. Whenever he’d faced a hostage situation previously, he’d always been on the other side and he’d always taken the shot. To the casual observer it would appear to be a stalemate, but both sides knew the status quo couldn’t and wouldn’t endure. Soon another FBI team would come up from behind him and the game would be up.

Backing further away, his options dwindling, something caught his eye between the agents’ black-clad forms. Without another thought he shifted his hold on his human shield, putting the gun under her chin and pressing it hard up into her windpipe to prevent her from attempting to move. With his free hand he slid a second pistol from a leg holster and fired two quick shots at his abandoned beam rifle, lying on the desk twenty yards away. Both projectiles hit true, exploding on impact with the rifle’s unprotected underbelly, the second piercing the beam weapon’s unstable fuel cell and unleashing an explosion that ripped through the building.

The violent shockwave threw Samson and his hostage from their feet, propelling them backwards to slam into a wall. The FBI agents, who’d been standing close to the blast, were either incinerated or cut to pieces by flying debris. The ensuing fireball erupted through the empty window frames and into the dark sky of Los Angeles, the glass within having already blown out milliseconds before.

Samson rose unsteadily to his feet and shook his head to clear the high-pitched ringing caused by the blast. He saw the crumpled form of the FBI agent lying a few feet away and checked for a pulse; she was alive.

Samson surveyed his surroundings. The entire fourteenth floor had been devastated. A wide gash had been ripped through the floors above and below. Debris hung down from the edges, cabling and pipework exposed, the occasional spark of electricity flashing in the darkness. Samson picked up the unconscious government agent and slung her over his shoulder. He strode to the building’s edge and looked down. People milled about outside in confusion; lights flashed and sirens blared as the LAPD streamed in from outlying areas of the city to heed the distress call from their besieged FBI comrades.

Samson’s visor highlighted the distant approach of a cluster of drones and helicopters. He had to move. Retrieving one of his pistols from the floor, the other nowhere to be seen, he activated his camouflage panels once more and then shot out the floodlights below, plunging the exterior into darkness. Turning round, he adjusted the woman’s body on his back, making sure she wouldn’t fall, and then held out his wrist and fired a small metal bolt into the exposed concrete floor above. Attached to this bolt, now firmly embedded and secure, was a strand of high-tensile cable, capable of carrying great loads over greater distances. Samson might be above ground, but his Terra Force training and equipment was versatile in nature; it had to be, by definition.

Samson abseiled down from the fourteenth floor, increasing his velocity all the way. At the last moment he impeded his rate of descent before touching down on the ground and detaching himself from the cable with the flip of a small lever. Unseen in the darkness, he carried his prize through a gap in those gathered, all of them unaware that the one responsible for their displacement slipped past unhindered.

Samson soon reached the pick-up truck, which sat just off the main road, shrouded in shadow, the floodlights from the beleaguered FBI stronghold now only operable on one side. Police patrol cars screeched to a stop in front of the building, blaring sirens whooping to silence, doors opening and slamming as armed officers rushed to the scene. With more squad cars being drawn in like a swarm of flies to a steaming, noxious landfill site, Samson hurried to offload the FBI agent in the passenger seat before tearing round to the other side and jumping in, yanking the door shut with a bang.

One by one, searchlights from air and ground response teams lit up the area, their discs of light blinking into existence to dance over the area like a disco on an epic scale, its reach immense and intensity bright. Depressing the clutch pedal and sticking the Dodge Ram into gear, Samson put his hand on the key, preparing to turn on the ignition. Before he could, however, a bright white light encompassed the vehicle from above. If he believed in alien abduction he’d be expecting a visit from E.T. very soon. As it was, the blades from a helicopter in the skies overhead beat down their steady rhythm, a giveaway to the illumination’s terrestrial source.

Samson hesitated as the aircraft circled the pick-up, hoping they’d lose interest in a dark immobile vehicle. Tense moments dragged past before the chopper and its searchlight drifted away.

The truck’s interior light blinked on and Samson snapped his head right. The agent had come to and was trying to get out! Leaning over, he tore her hand from the door, shut it, and pushed her down into the foot-well. She was still groggy from the blast and moaned feebly in response. Her attempt at escape had drawn the attention of the helicopter straight back to them. The light was now fixed on their position and Samson sighed as the aircraft sank lower to the ground to project its beam inside the cabin.

‘Fuck,’ he said and turned the key.

Chapter Thirty Five

Professor Steiner stared in shocked disbelief at the wallscreen opposite, the continuous whir of computer equipment on the desk around him white noise in an otherwise silent room. After Samson had taken it upon himself to launch a full scale assault on the Bureau’s L.A. field office, Steiner had been blind to his activities, the colonel having seen fit to disengage their audio-visual link after Steiner began his protestations.

While Samson committed who knew what atrocities inside, Steiner, housed a few miles away, battled against the trace instigated by the FBI mainframe which endeavoured to reveal his location, the ultimate culmination of such an eventuality being his untimely apprehension. He wasn’t sure what would happen if a top GMRC official like himself, albeit a deposed one, should be arrested on charges of terrorism. He was under no illusions, however, that Intelligence Director Malcolm Joiner would use it to his advantage and the hundreds of thousands of people Steiner strived to rescue from Steadfast would be forever lost. That was an outcome Steiner simply couldn’t allow, under any circumstances.

‘Professor,’ the voice of the artificial intelligence programme said, stirring Steiner from his myriad of thoughts, ‘trace protocol has determined our city of origin. Time until completion, twenty seconds.’

Steiner waited; he’d prepared his countermeasures as best as he could. Watching the seconds on the digital clock on screen tick away to zero, his finger hovered over the Return key. He had to time this right. Ten – nine – eight – seven. The timer flashed red. Four – three – two, Steiner hit the key. The black command code window displayed the following white text:

Trace Diversion: Executed_

Target: GMRC Mainframe;

exuString = "server=NewYork_Hub"

extensionAccess = "NYH_AG896FGae%002"

systemPort = "id=159v;override=directorate"

systemSpike = "id=bypass;password=bypass"

linkStringCrack = "filename=152"

Steiner waited in anxious turmoil as the timer remained frozen on two seconds.

‘Trace diversion completed, Professor,’ A.I. 152 told him. ‘Time until completion—’

Steiner watched the digital numbers on the clock rapidly increase.

‘Thirty-five minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and counting. Well done, Professor.’

‘Thanks,’ Steiner replied drolly to his computerised companion, his mouth dry and his fingers moist with tension-induced sweat. His ploy had worked, redirecting the FBI trace into the monster server array of the GMRC’s North American disaster recovery network. While it had delayed the FBI lifting the veil on his whereabouts, it was only a temporary reprieve; he wouldn’t be able to prevent the trace from completion a second time. He just hoped his infringement into the GMRC computer system wasn’t detected.
If only accessing the GMRC’s highly encrypted communication lines were as easy to manipulate
, he thought.

Having bought himself more time, Steiner’s attention returned to the colonel; he needed to speak to the man, inform him of the finite timeframe available. He also needed to aid their escape from the authorities. Steiner’s threat of abandoning Samson if he killed any agents had been a bluff to prevent unnecessary bloodshed; in actuality he was in no position to enforce any such obligation. As much as he loathed being complicit in the death of any person, in this instance he took comfort from his childhood Sunday school teachings, specifically John 11:50,
‘The securing of one individual’s good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine.’
Or, as one of Steiner’s favourite science fiction characters later famously paraphrased, ‘
the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’
.

No longer able to traverse the FBI computer system, their cameras unavailable to him, Steiner needed to find another way to see what was happening on the ground around the large office block situated on Wilshire Boulevard. Using a quantum processor, now standing idle, Steiner harnessed its power to break into the Los Angeles Police Department’s transmission relay. Coursing through their frequencies like a shot of morphine in the blood, Steiner soon found what he was looking for. With a few purposeful key strokes, four windows popped up on the large wall monitor. Spacing out the windows, Steiner patched in the relevant live streams from his chosen sources. The two on the right were images from separate LAPD aerial drones, while the images on the left were from two police helicopters. He reasoned that if Samson had launched an attack on the FBI, then at least one of the units would be directed to the scene, or so he hoped.