Joshua’s hands shook as he kept hosing down the bottle and the air around him, hoping he was getting everything, but knowing that he couldn’t. The best he could hope for was to get enough.
That would be victory, for now.
He sprayed for three minutes, until the portable machine stopped, it’s reservoirs empty. Then he stopped, slumping against the hood as he watched the poison continue to hiss from the canister. He looked over his shoulder, and saw the face of the Interpol man staring at him from the other side of the thick glass.
“Get out of here!” He yelled, waving violently at him, only to lose his balance as his vision blacked out for a moment.
He was on the floor when the light returned, blood starting to run down his face from where he’d bounced his head off the plexiglass of the hood, but he ignored that.
There had to be something.
He cast about, struggling to his feet again, though his head was swimming.
Maybe, maybe if he was lucky, this was everything Gorra had developed. He could stop it permanently, here and now. He stumbled across the room, grabbing at another canister, this one marked `flammable’.
He checked the lettering, and nodded.
It would do.
It was a propane tank, likely used to fuel the burners used in the lab. He spun the valve open, then shook his fist at the door again.
“Get the fuc.the fuck out of here!” He gasped, the blood running down his belly feeling cold of a sudden.
He then grabbed an oxygen cylinder from another section of the lap and spun it’s valve all the way open as well. The hard part came next, getting just the right mix in the air to burn the whole place out.
Corvine slumped against the cabinet, sliding down to the ground, and held up his gun, pointed at the canister of oxygen. He looked over at the door, and saw the Interpol man’s eyes widen and the face finally disappear.
“Bout time, you dumb swede.”
Anselm stared in shock as Corvine pointed his gun at the canister of pure Oxygen and finally had to admit that he wasn’t getting to the CIA man. The poison in that room, even if Corvine had destroyed ninety nine percent of what had already escaped, was probably going to kill the CIA man even if he could get him out of there, but what the man was planning was suicidal.
It was also perhaps one of the only ways to ensure that the virus inside the room was truly destroyed.
The Interpol man knelt down quickly to retrieve the item that Corvine had tossed through the doors at the last moment, recognizing it as a Portable, then bolted for the stairs. He took the stairs three at a time as he ran, not looking back.
Anselm was out through the Director’s office and making his way hurriedly out of the administration offices of the Project when the ground rumbled for a moment and he paused in his flight, leaning against the wall for a moment.
He recalled his comments with Inspector Dougal, the jokes they’d shared about the CIA.
He didn’t think he’d be telling anymore of those.
Anselm pushed himself off the wall finally, and headed for the Monorail access.
“What happened here”
The voice was quiet, not angry or even stressed, but it cut through the confusion and general noise of the area like a razor. Men stopped for a moment, looking back at the dark haired man who had spoken, then looked quickly away for fear of attracting his attention too closely.
“We had a break in, Amir.”
Abdallah Amir frowned, tilting his head slightly. “Pardon A break in Jacob, we are not based in downtown Brooklyn.”
“No Sir.”
“Then what happened”
Director Jacob took a breath, looking tired, “What I said, Amir. A break in. We haven’t yet figured out who it was, but he made entry into the lab. One of our men surprised him, and there were shots fired.”
“I see.” Amir walked to the edge of the lab, holding a portable gas mask over his face as he did.
He looked over the threshold of the broken doors, eyeing the destroyed equipment with a critical eye. The small lab was in shambles, equipment torn and twisted into barely recognizable shreds of its previous forms, and his computer work station utterly destroyed.
No matter.
He had a complete backup of all pertinent data on a secured folder located in an encrypted Grid node. It was disguised as research made by a noted, though second rate, pharmaceutical company whose owners would be quite surprised if they knew what research `they’ were actually involved in.
The destruction of the sealed hood that contained the test canister was somewhat more concerning, but again it seemed to be contained. The fact that none of the men who had blindly responded to the fire were ill boded well for that at least. Initial symptoms were very quick, even in the irradiated nanotube delivery systems.
Within ten minutes a man would begin to cough, partially from the initial delivery of the virus, and partially from the alpha and beta radiation the nanotubes delivered to keep the virus partially dormant. That prevented initial fatalities from occurring too soon, prolonging the period of contagion in the patient zero group.
So the flames must have destroyed the virus before the men arrived.
That much was good.
There were nowhere near enough people in the facility above to reach the critical mass that Abdallah had projected in his initial plans. He needed at least five thousand people for that, though the more the better, of course.
With the nearly eighty thousand he’d projected to take advantage of during the anniversary festival three days away, the numbers indicated that virus concentrations would be enough to literally encircle the world.
A global act of terrorism.
Unlike many of his `peers’, though Amir didn’t feel he had any, he liked the word terrorist. He didn’t hide from it, neither to others or to himself. He was a terrorist, and a very good one. It had started with rage, as so many things in life do, but the death of his mother no longer drove him.
Amir found his calling.
And it was Death.
“Clean this mess up,” He said, turning away and removing the mask. “Find out what happened, and identify the dead man.”
“Yes Amir.”
Gwendolyn Dougal tightened the robe around her as she stumbled out of her bedroom, heading toward the door as the home computer spoke again.
“There is a visitor at the front door,” The faintly electronic voice said pleasantly, “Should I instruct them to leave”
“No. I’m coming,” She growled.
The second part of her sentence was pointless, the computer AI wasn’t smart enough to know what she was saying, but the word `No’ was programmed in to its database so it shut up and stopped telling her about the person at the door.
She reached the door and looked out, then immediately pulled away and flipped open the mechanical lock before yanking the door open. As a cop, one of the first things she’d done when she bought her place was to install a quality mechanical lock. She had seen how easy the electronic ones were to open.
On the other side, Anselm Gunnar was leaning heavily against the side of the porch, looking like he’d just been through a grinder.
“God, Gunnar!” She blurted, “What happened to you”
There were times when you just knew something bad had happened to someone, not because they looked bad exactly, but because they had this aura around them that cloaked them in some sense of horror or tragedy.
Anselm didn’t say anything at first, he just stumbled through the door, “Close the door.”
She pushed it shut firmly behind him, engaging the electronic lock and twisting the knob on the dead bolt. When she turned around, the Interpol agent was back to the hallway wall and sliding down it.