Extinction (20 page)

‘But who’s behind it?’ she asked. ‘That’s the question we really need to answer. Obviously Niall Breisner is in on it, as he’s the one that’s been signing off on all the testing. And Anderson almost certainly knows about it. But who’s really behind it?’ Alyssa held up her hands. ‘I’ve got no idea. But if we’re going to stop it, we need to find out.’

‘Stop it?’ Jack asked, surprised. ‘I thought you were writing a story on it. Once it gets out, they’ll have to pull the plug. You’re talking as if we have to stop it ourselves.’

She looked at him, her eyes serious. ‘We do,’ she said gravely. ‘They’re going to use it again. We have five days.’

Anderson was with Dr Breisner on the radar field when the call came through from Jenkins back at the command centre.

He tried to control his expression, trained never to reveal anything to anyone who might be observing him, but a muscle beneath his eye started to twitch involuntarily. He tensed his face to get rid of it, but this only made it worse. Damn them. Damn them to hell!

Jenkins’ news was the worst it could have been. He had managed to decipher Murray’s computer files, find out what he and Alyssa Durham had been looking at. And, as Anderson had feared, they had hacked into the secure HIRP database and accessed the classified information about Spectrum Nine. So now they knew everything. Well, everything technical anyway; there was next to no information on the base’s files about how the device was going to be used operationally or tactically.

He would have to inform Tomkin, who may or may not then decide to inform Jeffries. Doubtless Tomkin would throw more men at the task of finding Durham and Murray, before the pair revealed anything.

Anderson just hoped – for his personal satisfaction if nothing else – that his own men would find them first.

‘I
NEED TO
get a look at the data on that disk,’ Jack said over a plateful of food, his suppressed appetite suddenly returning with a vengeance. ‘Maybe I’ll see something that you missed.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Alyssa agreed. ‘We can’t use any of my resources at the paper but we can hire a computer at an internet café. We don’t need to connect to the web, so they won’t be able to trace us.’

Jack nodded, bowing his head back to his food, and Alyssa watched him as he ate; then he raised his head once more to speak, but something behind her left shoulder caught his attention.

Alyssa tensed as she saw his eyes widen in shock.

Major Rafael Santana was an ex-Special Forces operative, semi-retired and now a unit commander with the local battalion of the National Guard.

He had served under Easton Anderson back when the man was a major, both in central Asia and the Middle East, and they had remained close ever since. Santana had received the call from his old commander just an hour earlier, along with a picture of a man called Jackson Edgar Murray and a woman named Alyssa Durham. These characters were supposed to be agitators, people who wanted to cause some sort of disturbance; home-grown terrorists, apparently.

Anderson had contacted many of his old colleagues, asking them to keep their eyes out for this man and woman, and to ‘terminate’ the subjects on sight if possible. Santana was told that General Tomkin was willing to issue a nationwide arrest order for the man if necessary, but due to ‘sensitive’ issues, everyone would prefer the problem to be wrapped up with a minimum of fuss. Santana hadn’t asked questions; he knew the score. It wouldn’t be hard to kill the pair if it came to it. He could always say that he thought the subjects were armed, and were reaching for a weapon. It happened all the time, and in a nervous, keyed-up environment like the city was at the minute, nobody would bat an eyelid.

And so it was that he had spent the morning scouring the train station for Durham and Murray. He had provided the pictures to his section of soldiers, and they were also out there looking for them. They didn’t know that Santana was going to kill them, but they would alert their chief as soon as they found the pair, and Santana would do the rest.

And there, across the foyer, as arrogant as you could get, the little terrorist scumbag was sitting having coffee with a woman. Who was she? She looked different from the picture, but it had to be Durham.

‘Targets located,’ he said into his two-way radio. ‘Grand Café, central concourse. I’m approaching now.’

He edged forward, past the crowd of worshippers who were taking up one side of the hall, tuning out the white-robed preachers’ messages of death and destruction. He would soon be doing enough of that himself.

As he moved forward he took the safety off his automatic assault rifle, but then he stopped dead in his tracks. Murray had looked up from the table, looked over the shoulder of the Durham woman.

He had been spotted.

Jack saw the soldier headed towards them, watching in disbelief as the man started to raise his rifle to his shoulder, aiming it towards them.

‘Get down!’ he screamed, grabbing Alyssa and pushing her to the floor as the air above them erupted in gunfire.

Jack quickly upended the table, using it as a temporary shield between them and the soldier. Alyssa peered round the edge of the table, pulling her head back quickly as another barrage of high-velocity rounds impacted the steel that protected them.

Jack and Alyssa exchanged looks of terror, but then Alyssa heard a
click
. ‘He’s empty,’ she shouted at Jack, over the screams of the other patrons of the café, who were running away in all directions, or else cowering behind tables and chairs.

Alyssa grabbed Jack by the arm and pulled him further into the café, through the double glass doors that led to the interior. They heard the glass shattering behind them – the solider must have reloaded – as they raced past the counter towards the rear.

She didn’t know exactly where she was going, but there had to be some sort of rear service access for the café. Jack was looking for the same thing. ‘Here!’ he shouted, pushing through a swing door into the kitchen.

As Alyssa and Jack raced into the busy, hot kitchen, they had to jump over the people who were cowering on the floor, keeping their heads down at the sound of gunshots. They crashed through another door at the end of the kitchen, and found themselves in a long concrete corridor that accessed all of the retail and restaurant units along this side of the terminal.

‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Santana cursed out loud. He’d missed them. Luckily he’d not shot any civilians, but the café was a mess.

He got on his radio instantly. ‘All team members to converge on the main concourse,’ he ordered. ‘Louis,’ he said to his communications specialist, ‘get on to the security chief here, inform him we’re in pursuit of suspected armed terrorists.’

He broke off to shout at the staff and customers of the café to stay down. He looked around, searching for the pair, and saw one of the waitresses pointing towards the kitchen. He peered through the access hatch, saw the door swinging at the other end.

‘Where does it go?’ he barked at the waitress.

‘S-service corridor,’ the waitress stammered.

Santana cursed again, getting back on his radio. ‘Team members to enter eastern service corridor,’ he shouted as he ran through the kitchen, kicking the door open at the other end.

He turned into the passage and saw the man and woman racing away, footsteps echoing off the concrete. Immediately he opened fire again, spraying the corridor with bullets.

Alyssa heard the door opening behind them and instinctively grabbed Jack and dived for the floor. Keeping low, they started to crawl. She heard boots pounding behind them. Then another sound echoed from in front, and she looked up to see three more men enter the corridor ahead of them, rifles up and aimed.

She tried to resist as Jack pulled her up off the floor, flinching as the soldier behind and the three in front opened fire, concrete erupting around her as the high-powered rounds chewed up the passageway.

Santana watched as Murray managed to pull the woman up, narrowly avoiding the gunfire as they slammed through another access door.
Dammit!
Where the hell did that door lead?

‘Louis,’ he spoke over his radio, ‘do we have CCTV feeds through here?’

‘Negative,’ Louis reported. ‘No surveillance in the service areas.’

‘Schematics?’ he asked as he ran down the corridor, meeting his colleagues at the access door. ‘Blueprints?’ He signalled his men to get after the targets.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ came the reply.

His men kicked through the door into the room beyond, guns at the ready. There was a yell as the first man to enter the dark chamber tumbled down a flight of stairs. The second man flicked on a torch and shone it down the narrow staircase.

When the soldier came to rest at the bottom, Santana had no sympathy. ‘Joe,’ he called down after him. ‘Can you see anything down there?’

Joe got unsteadily to his feet, turned on his torch and scanned the area. ‘Nothing,’ he called back up. ‘There’s nothing down here.’

Damn
. Santana took out his cell phone and called Colonel Anderson.

Idiot
. What was Santana doing? Anderson cursed to himself. He wasn’t even airborne yet, still on his way to commandeer the fast jet stationed at the airport which would get him to the city in a little over three hours, and he had to rely on men like this? Santana had been a proven combat vet, once upon a time. Obviously, his time in the reserves had made him soft. The man had lost his edge. Tomkin had wanted to keep things low-key if they could – the less people involved the better, it was felt, which was why Anderson had contacted some of his own people in the city to deal with Durham and Murray. But now he got on to the terminal’s chief of security, a civilian but nominally in charge of all of the units currently on patrol in his building – over a hundred armed men and women. It was time to activate them.

In the dark, Jack and Alyssa had also fallen head over heels down the concrete staircase.

Alyssa had fallen right on top of Jack and bounced off the other side, bursting through another door they may never otherwise have seen. Jack groaned in pain but managed to pull himself to his feet and haul himself through the narrow opening. Once through, he wedged the door shut tight.

This corridor was narrow, and Alyssa could feel both walls with her hands. There was still no light, and she felt her way by touch, ignoring the sounds coming from the room behind them. Ahead she could see a very faint, hazy light. Was it another door? She edged forward cautiously, but no more light came through; it just remained a vague fuzz. Then she bumped into something hard. Her hands went up, feeling ahead of her. Metal. It was another door.

Her fingers quickly scoured the surface for a handle, her hands sweaty now as she heard the door behind her being forced. They’d be trapped like rats if they didn’t get out quickly.

And then she found it, a metal lever. She yanked it up and spilled out through the door, instantly blinded by lights and deafened by the sound of a blasting horn.

Jack grabbed her as the subway train shot past, just inches from her face. Her whole body shook, rippling in Jack’s hands as the high-speed vehicle blasted through the tunnel.

And then it was gone, leaving her reeling. Jack pulled her round, slapping her face lightly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to go. Now!’

Alyssa nodded her head, forcing herself to regain control. Jack pulled the metal door shut behind them and they raced over the tracks, careful not to touch the electrified rails, heading for the door on the other side of the illuminated tunnel. As they reached it, they saw the lights of another train barrelling towards them, the scream of its engines filling the enclosed space.

Alyssa tugged at the door lever but it wouldn’t move. She felt Jack’s body pressing against her, squashing her against the door, and then the train was going past them. Jack’s body was buffeted by the train’s slipstream, threatening to rip him from the door frame, but he hung on for dear life, protecting her, until the train was gone.

She tugged the lever one more time with every ounce of strength she had left, and at last it opened, on to another narrow access corridor.

They pushed through, running for their lives.

‘We’ve lost them.’

Santana’s words came through to Anderson over the satellite phone, and he clenched his fists in rage. ‘You’ve lost them?’ He struggled to control himself. ‘Could you please explain to me how one hundred armed, trained professionals can lose two untrained civilians?’

‘They got into the subway system,’ Santana explained. ‘There’s no surveillance down there, no way to track them.’

Anderson was disgusted. But he also felt something else –
fear
. The consequences of the pair escaping were too much to handle. If they got word out about Spectrum Nine, he, Jeffries, Tomkin, Breisner – they’d all be sent to jail. And Anderson was
not
going to allow himself to be put in jail.

‘Do I have to do your job for you?’ he asked through gritted teeth. ‘If you can’t find them in the tunnels, you monitor the CCTV coverage at the stations and you post your people on the exits for when the pair finally emerge, which they will have to do at some stage. Can you do that?’

Santana replied in the affirmative, and Anderson grunted as he cut the connection.
Amateurs
. He was counting down the minutes until he could land in the city and take over the manhunt himself.

J
ACK AND
A
LYSSA
emerged back on to the city streets less than an hour after they’d entered the tunnel system.

For almost thirty minutes they had wandered the concrete service corridors – some lit, others pitch black; some wide, others barely big enough to push through side on. There was no way to navigate and soon they had become hopelessly lost. So when they had stumbled out of a door on to another track, they decided to trace their way down it until it met a platform. Luckily the timing had been good, and they hadn’t had to dive out of the way of any oncoming trains.