‘You’ve got about sixty seconds to get every one of those animals out of here.’
Saffron didn’t look back at them. She listened to a moment of silent disbelief followed by a sudden manic scrambling as they began grabbing cages and rushing them out of the laboratory. She studied the computer servers as she produced from her pocket two dirty-looking devices the size of large pears. MK 2 fused grenades, bought from an antique dealer near Cedar City, Utah, and refurbished to operational standard by a retired US army sergeant of questionable motives out of El Paso, Texas.
Saffron waited until the laboratory behind her fell silent. She looked down at the grenades in her hands, gripping them tightly, and took a deep breath.
‘We can’t free this one.’
The voice behind her made her whirl around in surprise. A young woman was standing beside the chimpanzee wired to the robotic arms.
‘What?’ Saffron stammered.
‘He’s hard-wired right now,’ the scientist said. ‘We can’t just unplug him like a toy.’
Saffron’s eyes welled with tears as she shook her head.
‘You bastards, you just don’t know when to stop, do you.’
The woman stood her ground.
‘His name’s Eric,’ she said simply. ‘He’s helping us learn how to help disabled people walk again.’
‘He’s a victim of your Nazi experiments!’ Saffron shouted.
The woman closed her eyes for a second before speaking.
‘He broke his back in a fall in Phoenix Zoo, Arizona. When we learn how he can control these robot arms, we can fix him too.’
Saffron choked on her tears and pointed at Eric, who watched her with intense curiosity.
‘How long?’
‘Ten minutes,’ the woman said.
Saffron cursed mentally, but could not tear her eyes away from Eric.
‘Do it, now!’
Saffron turned as the woman began unplugging Eric from the machines, and she reached into her pocket and produced a slim black portable hard drive. She plugged the drive into the servers and tapped a few keys before dashing out of the laboratory, checking her watch as she ran. She burst into the reception area to see a dozen cages scattered around and a nervous-looking Colin Manx holding court with a fake pistol in his hand pointed at some thirty scientists cowering on the floor in one corner.
‘The cops will be here any minute,’ he wailed. ‘We’ve got the monkeys, let’s get out of here!’
Saffron ignored him, looking at Bobby. ‘You find another way out?’
‘Nothing,’ Bobby said desperately. ‘The labs stand along the back wall of the building. Are we going to be arrested?’
Saffron didn’t reply. She strode to the glass doors of the reception area, cocking the shotgun. Without a moment’s hesitation she blasted the glass clean out of the doors, the tearing report of the gun replaced by the shrieking of the chimpanzees in their cages.
Saffron turned to Colin and Bobby.
‘Bobby, get the van. Colin, get the cages out and into the van first, then let these bastards go.’ She gestured to the scientists with a jab of her thumb.
‘What about you?’ Manx asked in surprise.
Saffron scowled at him.
‘Just do as you’re fucking told and get out of here. I’ll worry about me.’
With that, Saffron hurried away down the corridor back to the laboratory, reaching it as the female scientist was gently lifting Eric’s limp body from his seat and folding him into her arms. She looked up as Saffron burst back in.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded. ‘We’re not hurting these animals, we’re helping them.’
‘Shut up,’ Saffron snapped. ‘Get out, now.’
The scientist looked at the grenades in her hands and the computer servers, her face stricken.
‘There are almost five years of research on those servers,’ she said. ‘Everything we’ve done.’
Saffron turned her back to the scientist and Eric, hissing over her shoulder, ‘Get down behind the counter.’
In the glossy black screen of the computer servers, Saffron saw the scientist stare at her for a moment longer.
‘You disgust me,’ she said, and then ducked out of sight. Saffron stood before the computer servers with a grenade in each hand. She glanced over her shoulder at the seat where Eric had been sitting only moments before. Tears pinched at the corner of her eyes again.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered softly.
And then she pulled the pins on both grenades before tossing them behind the huge computer servers and diving for cover. The explosives rattled behind them for a second or two, and then the servers vanished amid a blast of vaporized metal.
12
Ethan Warner glanced nervously at Lopez before speaking.
‘Hiram Conley was suffering from an infection?’
Tyler Willis nodded, gesturing to one wall of his office where a series of graphs and charts were pinned haphazardly.
‘I tracked the course of the infection over six weeks. Never seen anything like it, some kind of telomere mutating bacterium, not a virus. It shared similarities with Bacillus permians, but appeared to have evolved differently.’
‘Is it transmissible by air?’ Lopez asked, touching her face again.
‘No,’ Willis said firmly, ‘this isn’t something that’s easy to contract. What’s fascinating about it is that I was able to extract a genetic profile of the bacterium, and by tracing its mitochondrial signature I was able to ascertain that Hiram Conley had been suffering from this infection for something over one hundred fifty years.’
Ethan thought for a moment.
‘So, what is it? Was this guy some kind of zombie or something?’
Willis shook his head.
‘No, but that’s not the interesting part. The infection was starting to mutate again, and I was trying to find out what was happening when Hiram Conley was shot.’
‘How was the mutation affecting him?’ Lopez asked.
‘That’s the really interesting part,’ Willis said. ‘He was starting to fall apart and—’
Ethan flinched as the deafening sound of an explosion rocked the office around them as though a truck had crashed right outside the walls and smashed its way across the compound.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Lopez shouted, yanking the office door open. ‘What the hell was that?’
Ethan was right behind her, his ears ringing from the explosion.
‘Grenades,’ he said, recognizing their distinctive sound from his service with the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the infernal devices had thundered through caves in Tora Bora or were tossed into buildings as his men stormed Taliban strongholds. ‘Come on.’
Ethan led the way at a run, unsure of what he would find as they burst out of the administrative building and into the bright sunlight outside. Instantly, Ethan saw the pall of oily black smoke rising from the laboratories opposite. Dozens of scientists in white coats were scattering across the lawns, shouting at each other and pointing uselessly at the destruction behind them.
Ethan looked across the road as he heard a vehicle, and saw a battered old camper pull onto the main road and accelerate away toward the south. Lopez turned toward her car, but Ethan called out to her.
‘Get their plate and let them go! There could be casualties here!’
Lopez obeyed without hesitation, squinting at the license plate of the van for a moment before joining Ethan to dash across to the panicked people.