Raff nodded. He and Jaeger had stayed there once or twice, when rotating through Nairobi with the British military. For a hotel in the centre of the city, it was a rare island of peace and tranquillity.
‘They can’t stay there,’ Raff remarked, stating the obvious. ‘They’ll get noticed.’
‘Yeah, so we figured. Dale’s taking him to a remote retreat. Amani Beach, several hours south of Nairobi. That’s the best we could come up with for now.’
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the dark and deserted grounds of the Falkenhagen bunker. Oddly, considering the gruesome testing that Jaeger had been subjected to here, it felt somehow good to be back.
He woke Narov. She’d dozed through the journey curled up on the Audi’s rear seat. They’d hardly slept at all in the last twenty-four hours. Having extricated themselves and the kid from the knife-edge chaos of the slums, they’d been on a whirlwind journey ever since.
Raff checked his watch. ‘Briefing is at 0100 hours. You got twenty minutes. Show you to your rooms.’
Once in his bedroom Jaeger splashed some water on his face. No time for a shower. He’d left his few personal effects in Falkenhagen: his passport, phone and wallet. Since he’d travelled to Katavi under a pseudonym, he’d had to make sure he was one hundred per cent sterile in terms of being Will Jaeger.
But Peter Miles had furnished the room with a MacBook Air laptop, and he was keen to check email. Via ProtonMail – an ultra-secure email service – he knew he could check his messages with little risk of Kammler and his people being able to monitor it.
Before discovering ProtonMail, all their previous communication systems had been hacked. They’d used a draft email account from which messages were never actually sent; all you ever did was log on to the account using a shared password, and read the drafts.
With no messages being sent, it should have been secure.
It wasn’t.
Kammler’s people had hacked it. They’d used that account to torture Jaeger – first with photos of Leticia Santos in captivity; then with photos of his family.
Jaeger paused. He couldn’t resist the urge – the dark temptation – to check it now. He hoped that Kammler’s people would somehow mess up; that they’d email something – some image – from which he could extract a clue as to their whereabouts. Something via which to track them – and his family.
There was one message sitting in the draft folder. As always, it was blank. It simply had a link to a file in Dropbox – an online data storage system. No doubt it would be part of Kammler’s ongoing mind warfare.
Jaeger breathed deeply. A darkness descended upon him like a black cloud.
With shaking hands he clicked on the link, and an image began to download. Line by line it filled the screen.
The image showed a dark-haired, emaciated woman kneeling beside the figure of a boy, both dressed in nothing but their underclothes. She had one arm thrown around the child protectively.
The boy was Jaeger’s son, Luke. His shoulders were thin and hunched, as if he had the weight of the world piled upon them, and in spite of his mother’s protective stance. He was holding a strip of torn bedsheet before him, like a banner.
On it was written: DADDY – HELP US.
The image faded out. A blank white screen replaced it, with a message typed in black across it:
Wir sind die Zukunft: we are the future. It was Hank Kammler’s calling card.
Jaeger clenched his hands into fists to try to stop them shaking, then slammed them repeatedly into the wall.
He doubted if he could go on. He couldn’t do this any more.
Every man had his breaking point.
69
At Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft was in the process of being loaded. A forklift raised crate after crate marked with the KRP logo and slotted them into the hold.
When fully loaded, this flight would be routed to the east coast of the USA, to Washington’s Dulles airport. America imported some 17,000 primates every year, for the purposes of medical testing. Over the years, KRP had grabbed a good chunk of that market.
Another KRP flight was scheduled to fly to Beijing, a third to Sydney, a fourth to Rio de Janeiro… Within a matter of forty-eight hours, all those flights should have landed and the evil would be complete.
And in that, Hank Kammler had just received an unexpected boost, although he wasn’t to know it.
After the British, Kammler hated the Russians almost as much. It was on the Eastern Front, mired in snowy wastes, that Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht – his war machine – had finally ground to a halt. The Russian Red Army had played a pivotal role in its subsequent defeat.
Accordingly, Moscow was Kammler’s second key target, after London. A 747 cargo aircraft had recently touched down at the city’s Vnukovo airport. Even now, Sergei Kalenko, Vnukovo’s quarantine officer, was busy overseeing the transfer of the caged primates to the nearby pens.
But this was Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where everything was somewhat negotiable. Kalenko had directed that a few dozen cages – containing thirty-six vervet monkeys – should be stacked to one side.
Centrium – Russia’s largest pharmaceutical testing company – had run out of animals for an ongoing drugs trial. Each day’s delay was costing the company some $50,000. Money – bribes – talked in Russia, and accordingly Kalenko wasn’t about to object to a few dozen of his charges evading quarantine. He figured the risk was negligible. After all, KRP had never once sent an unhealthy shipment, and he didn’t expect them to have done so now.
Quickly the cages were loaded on to the rear of a flatbed truck and sheeted over with a dull green canvas. That done, Kalenko pocketed a large wad of cash and the vehicle sped away into the frost-kissed Moscow night.
He watched the truck’s red tail lights disappear before reaching into the voluminous pocket of his overcoat. Like many airport workers, Kalenko took the occasional nip of vodka to ward off the mind-numbing cold. He treated himself to an extra large gulp now, to celebrate his lucky windfall.
The heater in the Centrium truck cab was on the blink. All day, the man at the wheel had been likewise fighting off the icy chill, and mostly via the bottle. As he headed towards Centrium’s vast facility, he swung the vehicle into the first of a series of bleak suburbs that lay on the south-eastern fringes of the city.
The truck hit a patch of black ice. The driver’s reactions – numbed by the alcohol – were a fraction too slow. It took only an instant, but suddenly the vehicle had skidded off the highway and tumbled down a snowy bank, the canvas ripping open and throwing its load across the ground.
Primates screamed and cackled in fear and rage. The door of the cab had been thrown open at a crazed angle by the impact. The bloodied and dazed form of the driver stumbled out, collapsing in the snow.
The door to the first of the cages was pushed ajar by a terrified hand. Small but powerful fingers tested the strange coat of glistening cold – this alien whiteness. The confused animal sensed freedom – or a freedom of sorts – but could it really walk on this frozen surface?
Up above, vehicles drew to a halt. Faces peered over the incline. Seeing what had happened, some decided to film it on their mobile phones, but one or two actually made the effort to help. As they skidded down the icy bank, the monkeys heard them coming.
It was now or never.
The first broke free from its cage, scattering a cloud of powdery snow in its wake as it made a dash for the nearest shadows. Other cages had likewise burst open, and those animals followed the first monkey’s lead.