That was a task much more difficult than it had been to keep the secret when Area 51 was spoken of only as a myth. He had reporters all over the complex now, and the best he could do was keep them out of the Cube and the autopsy area.
The underground room housing the Cube measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator that allowed Quinn to control access.
Quinn sat in the seat in the back of the room that gave him a full view of every operation now in process. In front of him, sloping down toward the front, were three rows of consoles manned by military personnel.
On the forward wall was a twenty-foot-wide-by-ten-high screen capable of displaying any information that could be channeled through the facility’s computers.
Directly behind Quinn a door led to a corridor, which led to a conference room, his office and sleeping quarters, rest rooms, and a small gallery. The freight elevator opened on the right side of the main gallery. There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed by large fans in the hangar above.
A man walked into the control center and took the seat next to Quinn. He looked out of place among all the short-haired military personnel in the room, sporting long black hair, tied in a ponytail that went a quarter of the way down his back. Rimless glasses were perched on a large nose, below which a Fu Manchu mustache drooped.
“What do you have, Mike?”
Mike reached up and twirled the left part of his mustache. “All of the drives recovered from Scorpion Base were wiped clean.”
“Damn.” Quinn sat back in his chair.
Mike shook his head. “Oh, no! That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.” “I don’t understand,” Quinn said.
“When you wipe a computer drive clean, that doesn’t mean it’s totally clean. There’s always residual information. Like a shadow remaining after the object that caused it is gone.”
Quinn had reversed his position, now leaning forward. “What have you got?”
“Nothing coherent yet,” Mike said. “I’m cleaning it up, but it takes time. It’s like putting a puzzle together piece by piece, except you only have a few pieces of each piece rather than the whole piece.”
Quinn blinked, then gave up trying to figure it out. “What do you think you have?”
“I think we have some information about STAAR’s personnel. Also, there’s some intriguing stuff in one of the drives that the report indicates was hooked to a satellite radio. I think it might help us decrypt the Airlia messages going between the guardians.”
“Anything else?”
Mike frowned. “Well, it’s hard to say, but it looks to me like these people…” He paused and looked at Quinn questioningly.
“STAAR,” Quinn filled in.
“Yeah, STAAR, well, they were trying to decode something themselves. Actually, it looks more like they were trying to recover some information from a database, much like I’m trying to do with their hard drives.”
“What was their source for this database?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s among the stuff recovered from the base in Antarctica.”
“How close are you to getting any coherent information off the hard drives?” Quinn asked.
Mike shrugged. “Days. Weeks. Maybe never. It’s hard to say.”
“Have you recovered anything?” Quinn asked.
“A couple of things. First, they were doing a keyword search.”
“The keyword?”
“Ark.”
“Ark?” Quinn repeated. “What kind of ark?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the other thing you found?”
“There was a file pulled from a bunch of sources, and I’m getting ghost images off some of it. Some sort of historical research.”
“On what?”
“Something called The Mission. With a capital T on the The.”
“Anything solid?”
“I should have something shortly on that part of the hard drives.”
Quinn pointed a finger. “Get back to work.”
“How the hell are we getting out?” The man who asked the question had one hand wrapped around a steel cable that ran the length of the plane’s cargo bay. His legs swayed as the low-flying cargo plane followed the contour of the earth outside. He wore camouflage fatigues with no marking or rank insignia — like the rest of the thirty men inside the plane. He was a former French Legionnaire who called himself Croteau.
Elek looked up from the satellite images he had been studying, his eyes hidden behind the black glasses. “Do not worry about that. I will take care of it.”
“Do I look stupid?” Croteau asked. “I don’t trust anyone when it comes to getting my ass out of the frying pan. And the middle of China is the damn fire.”
Croteau looked at the other mercenary leaders inside the aircraft. They were nodding their heads, agreeing with him. The money was good, no doubt about that, now fifty thousand a man, but as every mercenary knew, dead men couldn’t spend good money.
The plane was low to the ground, flying north of Afghanistan, heading toward the Chinese border. Croteau was a little surprised that they had made it this far without being challenged by some country’s air force, but Elek seemed to have no concerns about that. They’d landed at an airfield in Turkmenistan, one of the new former Soviet Bloc countries, and the plane had been refueled by the ground crews there. Croteau had always known that money could buy a lot of cooperation, but the extent of this Elek fellow’s influence seemed to transcend national boundaries.
“Plus how are we going to get past the Chinese army?” one of the other merk leaders, a man named Johanson, a former South African officer, asked. “They got the place surrounded.”
“We jump right on top of the tomb,” Elek said.
“And get our asses shot off coming down,” Croteau said. “You know what kind of target a man hanging in the harness makes?”
“There will be no one shooting at you.” Elek held up a small glass ball. There was a murky green liquid inside that seemed to glow. “This will take care of everyone on the ground.”
“What is that?” Croteau demanded.
“Nerve gas. Developed by the Russians, tested and perfected in Afghanistan,” Elek said. “It works within twenty seconds and dissipates within sixty. Before we jump, we drop the gas. Everyone on the ground will be dead by the time we land, and the gas will be gone also.”
“Jesus,” Croteau exclaimed. “You use that stuff, we’ll have every agency in the world after our ass.”
“You are stupid,” Elek said. “No one will care what happens in western China. And no one will know what happened.”
“No way,” Croteau said. “I’m not—” He froze as Elek held the glass ball under his nose.
“Yes, you will,” Elek said, “or I will drop this right here. The cabin is on a separate pressure system, so the plane will continue, but all of you will be dead.”
“You’re bluffing,” Croteau said. “You’ll die with us.”
“I’ve already been injected with the antidote.” Elek tossed the ball in the air, every eye following it, then caught it. “It does not scare me. But it should scare you. It is a most horrible death. Your brain cannot send any impulses to any part of the body. Your lungs stop working, your heart stops beating. But the impulses coming into the brain, those you feel.”
Croteau swallowed. “All right. We jump.”
Turcotte walked forward along the flight deck, avoiding the bustle that was the normal activity of the aircraft carrier. He turned and watched as an F-14 Tomcat came in for a landing, going from a forward speed of almost two hundred miles an hour to a complete halt in less than a couple of seconds. The intricate choreography of action that followed the landing was just as amazing, as flight personnel unhooked the plane, towed it away, reset the landing cables, and prepared for the next incoming plane in short order.