He was almost there when he saw two security guards flanking the doors, talking to an old man in a smart blue suit. Wolfe froze on the spot as he recognized Douglas Jarvis, gasping for breath, his face flushed with urgency, gesturing wildly at the two guards.
Wolfe turned and hurried away to take a different exit from the hall, walking across the connection between the General Assembly Hall and the Conference Building, cantilevered over Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. He then took an elevator to the fourth floor. He weaved his way to the Delegates’ Dining Room and just beyond it, to a kitchen that served VIPs in the dining room and was often used as a short cut by delegates between the Conference Building’s dining rooms and the General Assembly Hall. Wolfe strode into the kitchens, one hand in his pocket as several members of staff within glanced at him.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
Wolfe smiled at the head chef, gesturing to the kitchens beyond.
‘Just a routine search of the premises before the assembly convenes,’ he said, flashing his USAMRIID identity card. ‘Ask your staff to give me the room, if you will. I’ll walk through here, then exit the same way I came in and report to you there. Is there anything out of order today in here that I need to know about?’
‘No, sir.’ The man shook his head and headed for the kitchen door, instantly recognizing Wolfe’s identity and rank. ‘All’s running smoothly.’
Donald Wolfe waited until the staff had all left the kitchen, keeping his head up and his eyes alert as he turned to stride between the endless worktops, steel vats, pans and ovens. As he walked he saw two rows of approximately fifty large glass jugs filled with water. Each would be taken down to the Assembly Hall and used to fill the glasses of hundreds of world leaders as they sat listening to the lectures and speeches that were part of the General Assembly’s convention.
Wolfe lifted his hand from his pocket, a large plastic syringe concealed beneath his sleeve. As he walked casually past the huge jugs, he lifted his hand and squirted brief jets of clear fluid, one for each jug, one after another. He then turned at the end of the row and repeated the action down the second row on the other side, dumping jets of infected water into the jugs until his syringe was empty. Wolfe slipped the syringe back into his pocket and walked toward the exit, leaving the kitchens and nodding to the chef by the door as he departed.
By his best estimate, given the travels of world leaders, the handshakes, the hordes of staff, the telephones and faxes and interviews, cars, aircraft and beds, from the United Nation’s General Assembly Building to a world pandemic would take less than two weeks.
And the best of it was, nobody would show symptoms for at least four days after infection. Within ten, they would be dead.
Doug Jarvis ran across the connection between the General Assembly Hall and the Conference Building, staggering into the elevator and punching the button for the fourth floor. He sucked in air with ragged gasps as he leaned on the aluminum walls and watched the digital floor counter change agonizingly slowly. The elevator alarm pinged, and the doors slid open.
Jarvis took a step out, and stared straight into the eyes of Donald Wolfe.
The colonel filled the corridor before him, resplendent in his uniform. Before Jarvis could react, Wolfe rushed forward and slammed his shoulder into Jarvis’s chest, plunging them both back into the elevator with a crash of bodies against metal. Wolfe thumped down on top of Jarvis and the impact forced the air from the older man’s lungs. Jarvis saw him punch a fist out at the buttons beside them and the elevator doors closed behind them before he reached down and drew a small ceremonial silver pistol from a holster at his waist.
Jarvis struggled against Wolfe’s iron grip, but the younger man was too strong for him.
‘You’re finished, Colonel,’ Jarvis growled up at him. ‘Doesn’t matter what happens here now. We know everything: Brevig Mission, the flu corpse, SkinGen’s involvement. It’s over.’
Wolfe nodded, jabbing the pistol against Jarvis’s cheek.
‘Yes, it is indeed over. Or at least it is for the majority of the world’s population. It doesn’t matter what happens to me now, Mister Jarvis. This is more important than my survival, or yours. This is about the survival of our species. One way or another, by the end of today one hundred ninety-two world leaders and their staff will walk out of the United Nations plaza carrying the most virulent influenza virus ever to have existed. They will contaminate each other, pass the infection on at a trimetric rate throughout the global population. Hundreds of millions will meet an early grave, for the benefit of those remaining.’ Wolfe grinned a hawkish smile. ‘Cruel to be kind, as they say.’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘You’ll never get that far,’ he said. ‘SkinGen’s already being raided as we speak, and Jeb Oppenheimer’s little experiments in New Mexico have unraveled already. The police will be here any moment.’
Wolfe chuckled as he glared down at Jarvis with his piercing gray eyes.
‘Not soon enough,’ Wolfe said. ‘I’m due on stage in ten minutes. This will all be over by then, if not before. As for you, your time’s already done.’
Wolfe raised the pistol above his head and brought it crashing down on Jarvis’s temple with a sickening crack. Jarvis felt an instant of skull-piercing pain, and then everything turned black.
61
Ethan jogged forward in a low crouch, dodging left and right between bushes of thorn scrub as he tracked north along a dry riverbed weaving through a rugged valley. The tops of the hills were now bathed in brilliant sunlight that flared brightly off the rocks. The flutter of bat’s wings whispered through the air above him as the tiny mammals raced away from the spreading dawn. Behind him Lopez followed his every footstep, whispering as she did so.
‘You sure you know where you’re going?’
Ethan, his pistol held before him in both hands, nodded.
‘Damn straight I do. Be quiet, we’re nearly there.’
Ethan saw that the valley ahead became steeper, and to his right a narrow track heavily lined with trees and scrub climbed the side of the hills before vanishing entirely on a ridge above them. Somewhere within, he now knew, was an entrance to the caverns concealed from humanity by Ellison Thorne and his men over one hundred fifty years before.
Ethan crept up to the ridge and looked over the edge as Lopez joined him.
Below them, the angular, stacked rocks of the hillside vanished into a yawning chasm perhaps thirty feet across, surrounded by trees and the lechuguilla bushes that had given the mysterious cave somewhere within its name.
‘Misery Hole,’ Lopez said. ‘Looks deep.’
Ethan peered over the edge into the depths and felt his guts convulse as vertigo scrambled his senses.
‘Maybe a hundred feet,’ he whispered, sweating from more now than just the heat. ‘I can’t see the bottom, too dark.’
‘We’ve got to get down there,’ Lopez said. ‘Fast.’
Ethan nodded as he stepped back from the edge and took a deep breath, staring into the distance. Lopez looked at him for a moment and then chuckled.
‘Oh, you’re kidding me,’ she said in delight. ‘The rough and tough Marine’s scared of heights?’
‘Why do you think I joined the Marines and not an airborne unit?’ Ethan muttered.
‘Oh come on.’ Lopez punched his shoulder. ‘Surely you must have jumped out of airplanes or something?’
‘Sure we did.’ Ethan nodded. ‘Never had a problem with that, due to having a goddamned parachute on my back. But this…’ He gestured to Misery Hole. ‘This is different.’