“Estimated time to target is six minutes, thirty seconds…mark.”
“I don’t suppose you can ask the navy to self-destruct those missiles. You know, maybe say ‘pretty-please.’” He tried to sound lighthearted, but he was beginning to worry. In the past, the only people who would miss his passing were the team, who shared the risk and understood it and his mother, who he now realized may or may not have cared about his welfare after all. But now there was Fiona, whose parents died when she was young and whose grandmother was killed in front of her during the attack on the Siletz reservation. She’d put on a tough-girl routine when he left, but he knew his death would affect her profoundly. He’d considered retiring from the field for her, but she’d actually convinced him to stay active. “If you don’t fight,” she’d said, “the world would be a bad place to live.” So here he was fighting, and, it seemed, about to make Fiona regret that little speech.
“You know I can’t.” Deep Blue sounded distraught. He knew the stakes for King were higher than ever. “Believe me, I’m trying everything. Director Boucher is working the official channels for us and Aleman is trying to hack his way in, disable the missiles, or change their trajectories.”
Dominick Boucher was the director of the CIA, Deep Blue’s friend and confidant, and the one man who knew everything about Chess Team’s new black ops gig. After all, he’s the one who set it up. Lewis Aleman was the team’s genius techie. An injury took him out of the field, but he’s been waging cyber war for the team since. If anyone could take care of the missiles it was them, but stopping several missiles midflight was no easy task, especially when some of the people in danger don’t officially exist.
“I know you’ll do your best. I’m gonna sign off now. If you don’t hear from me in seven minutes…well, you know.”
He severed the connection and then turned to Sara and Felice. “Graham was down here with us. Now he’s gone. There has to be another way out. Find it.”
Sara immediately pointed to a door set against one wall. “I thought that might be a closet, but it’s locked.”
“I have a key.” King loaded a Beehive shell into the SCAR’s FN40GL attachment, and took aim at the doorknob. The gun thundered and the entire lock mechanism disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and metal. The door swung back to reveal a landing with a stairs going both up and down. “Go!”
They hastened up the dark stairwell and emerged a few moments later in the elevator foyer on the first floor of the villa. In the distance, there was the roar of a jet engine; not incoming cruise missiles, but the Gulfstream V taking off, presumably with Graham on board.
Sara steered them toward the front door, and they ran from the house, across the courtyard, and through the gate out into the desert. They were still running when the explosions began.
EPILOGUE
Afar District, Ethiopia-One week later
The Old Mother made one more journey to the elephant graveyard.
Felice had spent the week resting and recuperating from injuries she hadn’t even realized she’d suffered. Her deepest wounds of course were not physical in nature, and some of them were only now manifesting themselves in the form of chronic insomnia and panic attacks. She had been referred to a specialist in treating post traumatic stress disorder, but deep down she felt there was more to it than that. She knew that she carried within her the ability to undo hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution-to utterly destroy human civilization.
That was a lot for one person to carry.
Good thing that I’m not just one person, she thought. There’s two of us in here.
But how much longer would that last? The Old Mother’s memories were a source of comfort and strength to her, but sometimes she felt that her connection to the past was slipping. She thought about Sara’s theory of quantum entanglement; it was as good an explanation as any other she’d entertained. Was it possible to become disentangled?
She hoped so.
“We’re just about ready,” Jack Sigler announced.
Distracted from her thoughts, she glanced over to where Sigler and Sara were gazing out across the floor of the Rift Valley, to the cave entrance leading into the elephant graveyard, and then went over to join them. Sigler was hunched over a small laptop computer, holding a small joystick controller. The computer display showed the interior of the cave, and when he adjusted the stick, the image on the screen moved.
But nothing else moved in the elephant graveyard. There was no sign of her former co-workers; the men and women who had been transformed into mindless drones were nowhere to be found. Even though she knew in her heart that she was in no way responsible for what had happened to the Nexus team, Felice felt a pang of guilt whenever she thought about them. She hoped that they had at last found peace.
“Coming out now,” Sigler announced.
Felice looked to the cave exit, about a hundred yards away, and saw what looked like a miniature bulldozer come rolling out of the opening.
Sigler called it “the Wolverine.” The remote controlled military utility robot moved around on tracked wheels, like a battle tank or bulldozer, and was equipped with several surveillance cameras and a powerful manipulator arm that could lift almost two hundred pounds. The Wolverine was primarily used by the military for explosive ordinance removal, but Sigler had used it for almost exactly the opposite purpose.
“Do we really have to do this?” she asked, not for the first time.
Sara nodded grimly. “We can’t be sure that the cave doesn’t contain some form of the virus that Manifold and Brainstorm were looking for, and we can’t take the chance that it might be inadvertently released.”
“I know you’re right, but I can’t help but think about Moses, and his dream to use the ivory in the cave to make Africa a better place.”
“It was a noble idea,” Sigler said. “But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the discovery of some new source of wealth almost never makes things better. Look how quickly his dream was perverted by those rebel fighters.”
“And of course, every single one of those elephant carcasses is a potential source of the contagion,” Sara added. “To say nothing of the possibility of further quantum contamination.”
Felice sighed. “I know that you’re both right. But what’s the answer? If we can’t use something like this to make the world a better place, what’s left?”
“You focus on what you’ve already got,” Sigler answered. “Use your skills, your strengths, your passions…that’s all any of us can do.”
Felice considered this. With everything that had happened, she had lost sight of the simple fact that she was a scientist. Her interest in genetics had grown from a childhood dream of discovering a cure for cancer. Maybe it was time to return to that dream.
Sigler steered the Wolverine across the open expanse and drove it up the ramp of the waiting CH-47 Chinook helicopter that had brought them here. He closed the laptop and tucked in under one arm. “Time to go.”
# # #
The twin-rotors lifted the massive Chinook into the sky above the Great Rift Valley and the site of the elephant graveyard. The helicopter circled the area, gaining vertical distance with each pass, until the pilot called back to let King know that they had reached the desired altitude.
King flipped off the red safety cap on the remote triggering device, and then took Felice’s hand and placed her finger on the switch. “Would you like to do the honors?”
He could see the hesitation in her eyes. Even though the cave had been the source of unimaginable horrors for her, the uncertainty of what might happen next probably seemed even more terrifying. But King knew well that the first step toward healing was to get some closure.
He nodded to her. “Whenever you’re ready.”