The Ark tl-1

by Boyd Morrison

  Dilara agreed with the email from John Coleman. Why did projects — particularly military operations — always have to have some mysterious name? Must be something about control and power. Men who were into that liked secret clubs, and what better way to be exclusive than to have a code name?

  But something about Whirlwind had spooked Locke. He wasn’t the sort who made such bold statements without reason. The thought of the way he said it sent a shiver down her back, as if she were privy to some clairvoyance of a seer peering into a crystal ball. If he was a psychic, whatever was coming was too horrible to contemplate.

  With Coleman’s files exhausted, they silently turned to the files of the other engineers who had been killed. They were equally unsuccessful with those. The organization that had cleansed the files knew exactly what they were looking for.

  By the time she and Locke realized that nothing would be gained by further searching, it was 9:45.

  “Are you hungry?” Locke asked.

  Dilara had been so caught up in the search that she hadn’t even thought of food. But as soon as he mentioned it, hunger pangs thudded in her stomach.

  “Starving.”

  “We’re done here. Do you like seafood?”

  “Anything cooked. Sushi makes me gag.”

  “And I’m allergic to shellfish, but we’ll figure something out.” They locked up the office and found one of the bodyguards waiting in the lobby. The three of them got in the car with the other one.

  After a stop at the grocery store, it only took ten minutes to reach his home in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. She had been expecting a bachelor pad apartment in a high rise. Instead, they stopped outside a Mediterranean-style mansion that was perched on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound.

  The bodyguards took up a post on the street outside. After Locke disabled the alarm and made sure no one had tampered with it, he let Dilara inside. The lights inside the house were off, but moonlight flooded through floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the house. Then he switched on the lights, and she saw a home that looked like it could have been featured in Architectural Digest.

  Bamboo flooring extended as far as she could see. The living and dining rooms featured highly polished antiques, and an immense kitchen showed off shiny granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. The effect was sleek without being sterile, the decorations and wall hangings chosen to give the house a comfortable feeling. It certainly didn’t look like the home of a single guy who was never home. The only thing that marred the effect was one white living room wall that was painted with five two-foot by two-foot squares, all various shades of yellow. Then it hit her. His deceased wife must be responsible for the interior décor, and the unfinished wall had been her project.

  Suddenly, the house didn’t seem so perfect. It felt more like a mausoleum, as if it was preserved in the state it was the day she died.

  Locke noticed her eyeing the color swatches.

  “Karen’s work,” he said, confirming her suspicion. His voice was tinged with regret. “She liked the sunny feeling of the yellow on a cloudy day. She never told me which one she preferred. I keep thinking I’ll paint it, but I can never choose one of them.”

  Locke picked up a remote, and a Vivaldi concerto wafted from hidden speakers. Dilara wandered over to the windows. A patio door led onto a deck that thrust to the edge of the cliff. The twinkling lights of downtown Seattle provided the perfect backdrop for the Space Needle. She could see a ferry plying the waters of Elliott Bay.

  “On clear days,” Locke said as he unloaded the groceries, “Mt. Rainier is right behind the skyline.”

  “It’s an amazing view.”

  “It’s the main reason Karen and I bought the house.”

  Again, she could hear the sadness in his tone. He went back to preparing dinner. Dilara sensed the awkwardness.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  “Here,” he said, showing her where the knives and cutting board were stored. “You can cut the ends off the green beans.”

  Dilara watched him work. He handled himself deftly in the kitchen, smoothly choreographing his every move. A couple of times, she saw him unselfconsciously nodding his head to the music. This was a man who enjoyed life, even with the grief that weighed on him at times. She couldn’t deny that his attitude and competence were attractive, but those thoughts were ridiculous considering their current situation. She caught herself looking at him more than she should and focused again on the green beans.

  Other than a couple of questions about where things were, they were silent. Her mind drifted back to what they had found in the email message. Finally, curiosity got the better of Dilara.

  “What’s Whirlwind?” she asked. He stopped chopping the potatoes and looked at her. His expression was unreadable, but she got the feeling that the word itself bothered him.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That came out more bluntly than I planned.”

  He went back to chopping. “It’s a top secret Pentagon project I worked on briefly.”

  “You mean the Defense Department is behind all this?”

  “The people who hired me said it was a Pentagon project. It’s the reason I was initially hesitant to tell you. But now that I think about it, I’m not so sure it was the military.”

  “I don’t understand. How can you be unsure?”

  “When you work on a black project, everything runs through dummy corporations. You can’t just call up the Pentagon and ask to speak to the project manager. They’d deny its existence, so there’s no way to confirm that it’s really a government operation. But the way these guys were throwing money around, I had to assume they were with the government.”

  “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “The project was budgeted at $400 million.”

  Dilara whistled at the figure. “What was the project? A space flight to Mars?”

  “A bunker. The reasoning was that the old nuclear fallout shelters for the government were outdated and susceptible to new types of biological and chemical attack. Instead of retrofitting the old bunkers with the latest hardware and computer systems, they wanted to build in a new, undisclosed location with everything up to date and upgradeable. It was going to be the most advanced bunker ever designed. It’s the kind of challenge that makes any engineer salivate.”

  “But they fired you?”

  “I was going to be the chief engineer on the project,” Locke said while he grilled the salmon. “We had just begun to get a handle on the specs and schematics. Then two months after they awarded the contract to Gordian, they pulled out. Said Pentagon budgets had been revised and there was no money to fund the project. It seemed fishy to me at the time. You don’t just cancel a project worth almost half a billion dollars out of the blue. But they paid our hefty cancellation fee, and we moved on. I assumed it bit the dust and didn’t think about it again until today.”

  “But they didn’t cancel it. They just hired Coleman’s firm and changed the name to Oasis.”

  “Apparently. We’re talking about a bunker big enough to sustain over 300 people for at least four months. Self-contained power, water desalination plant, air filtration, extensive food stores, and every amenity you’d expect at a five-star resort. All built underground. It was even supposed to have room for animals and hydroponic gardens.”

  The mention of the animals made Dilara flash back to the man who’d dropped from the Space Needle.

  “All flesh has corrupted his way upon the earth,” she said.

  Locke stared at her. “That’s what the gunman said just before he let go. I asked him why. Why he was after us.”

  “They’re building a new ark. But instead of a boat, this ark is subterranean.”

  “What?”

  “That phrase,” Dilara said. “It’s from the Bible. Genesis chapter eight.”

  “The Flood story?”

  “It’s what God told Noah just before he decided to wash away the sins of man and beast.”

>   “I’m not a biblical scholar,” Locke said, “but as I recall, God said he wouldn’t do that again. It was a one-time deal.”

  “You’re talking about his covenant with Noah. ‘And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.’”

  “Sounds ironclad to me. Of course, this group may not believe in God.”

  “Do you?”

  “As I told you, I’m a skeptic.” He stopped there and waited. He obviously wasn’t going to say more.

  “On the other hand, they could very well believe in God,” Dilara said. “Many people take the Bible literally, and it specifically said that God would never again cleanse the earth.”

  “So if you want to get technical, somebody else could take care of the dirty work this time around?”

  “I’m just saying that somebody could look at it that way.”

  “I’ve known a few people who might,” Locke said.

  “But they’d have to be insane to carry it out.”

  “You don’t think that’s possible? After everything that’s happened to us?”

  “How could they create a flood that would destroy the world?”

  “Oasis was designed to protect the occupants from radiation, biological contagion, and chemical agents. In Noah’s era, a flood may have been what wiped out humanity, but I think they are planning to repeat the job this time with whatever killed the people on Rex Hayden’s plane. Maybe the link to Noah’s Ark is an allegory.”

  Dilara paused. “The connection can’t be simply symbolic. Sam said my father found it. The real Noah’s Ark. There’s more to this. I know it.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out more from the wreckage of Hayden’s plane. We can begin looking through it tomorrow when we fly down to Phoenix. In the meantime, we need a rest.”

  “It’s just frustrating. It seems like we should be doing something.”

  “You should,” Locke said. “Crack open that bottle of chardonnay.” He pointed to a bottle lying in the built-in wine chiller and slid the steaming salmon steaks onto a couple of plates. “Dinner is served.”

  * * *

  Locke poured the last of the wine into Dilara’s glass. His mind felt fuzzy. He hadn’t had a drink since his project on Scotia One started, so the wine had more of an effect on him than it normally would. He was glad to have the excuse to cook. Because he traveled so often, he didn’t get to do it much, but when he did, he enjoyed it.

  The conversation at dinner stayed away from their current predicament. Locke told Dilara about some of his more interesting engineering jobs, and she regaled him with some of her more colorful dig anecdotes. When she got to the part about her department head and the flatulent camel, he found himself laughing out loud.

  “It sounds like you’re not home much,” Locke said. “I’m guessing you don’t have kids.”

  Dilara shook her head. “No time or inclination. You?”

  “No. Karen wanted kids, and I did, too — eventually — but I kept putting it off.” He didn’t know why he volunteered that. Must be the wine.

  “I don’t have the space, either,” Dilara said quickly. “I just live in a crummy apartment. But your house is beautiful.”

  “That was mostly Karen’s doing. I put in a TV room down in the basement, and she took care of the rest. Ironically, the TV room is the one I use the least. I’ve watched a few races on it, and that’s about it.”

  “Well, she had a wonderful eye. What did she do?”

  “She was a therapist who worked with disabled children. She couldn’t get enough of it. Always taking the extra time to help them out. That’s why she was driving home so late the night she died.” What was he doing? He never talked about Karen with people he’d just met. He barely talked to anyone about her. It was too hard.

  “When was that?” Dilara asked.

  “Two years ago next month. It was a rainy night. Her anti-lock braking system failed approaching an intersection. She’d mentioned a few times that her brakes felt sluggish, but I was busy on a project at the time. I didn’t think it was serious, so I promised her I’d look at them when I returned from my business trip. It didn’t cross my mind again until that night. She slid right through a red light, and an SUV hit her at 50 mph.”

  “How awful.”

  His breath caught as he relived getting that terrible phone call. “I was in Russia working on a pipeline installation when I got the news about the accident. Took me two days to get home on commercial flights. Weather and connection problems. She hung on for a day. Died while I was in the Hong Kong airport.” His throat had gone suddenly dry. He swallowed and looked at the unpainted wall. “I missed saying goodbye to her by 12 hours. That’s one reason we have corporate jets now.”

  Dilara was silent, but something about the concern in her face made Locke go on.

  “I didn’t sleep well for almost a year,” he said. “I combed through the accident data. Ran through it over and over in my head, trying to convince myself there was no way I could have known.” He chuckled ruefully. “I mean, here I am, an expert in system failures and accidents, an engineer with three degrees, and she dies from exactly the kind of thing I’m hired to prevent.”

  “And could you have?”

  Locke shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. The car was too badly damaged. The possibility kept me awake for a long time. I can sleep now, but her face is what I see every night when I turn out the lights.”

  Everyone at Gordian that he worked with knew the story, but he’d told it to only a handful of others. He supposed the death-defying he and Dilara had done together made him feel like he owed it to Dilara to tell her. He also realized that she would be the first woman to sleep in the house since Karen’s death. Somehow it didn’t seem right for Dilara to stay if she didn’t know the history, like he would be betraying Karen.

  “Well,” Locke said, “now that I’ve brought conversation to a screeching halt, I suppose it’s time for bed.”

  Dilara gave him a sympathetic look but let it go.

  “Where’s my room?” she asked.

  “Down the hall. Third door on the right. Just a minute.” He popped into his bedroom and retrieved a T-shirt he’d never worn. “Brand new. Let me know if it’s not warm enough.” Dilara’s body type was very similar to Karen’s, but he’d donated all of her clothes to charity shortly after her death. Even if he still had them, it would have been creepy to lend them to Dilara.

  “Thanks for dinner,” she said. “And for everything else you’ve done. I didn’t mean for you to get dragged into such a huge mess.”

  “Not at all,” was the only thing he could think to say.

  Then to his surprise, Dilara gave him a kiss on the cheek and exited to her room. The expression of affection caught him off guard, and he didn’t know what to make of it. It lingered just long enough that it seemed more than just for sympathy. When he put the last dish in the washer and turned off the kitchen lights, he was still thinking about the kiss.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The gate at Gordian’s Test and Engineering facility on the north edge of Phoenix looked like it was built to withstand a tank. A concrete guard shack stood between two huge steel grates that rode on tracks to let cars in and out. A ten-foot-tall hurricane fence topped with razor wire extended from each side of the gate and surrounded the property. Dan Cutter hadn’t seen this kind of security outside of a nuclear power plant. But he didn’t have to blow through these formidable obstacles. They were going to let him in.

  He pulled up to the guard shack and unrolled his window, letting in the stifling heat that even at nine in the morning was already billowing from the asphalt. The man in the passenger seat, Bert Simkins, had removed his sunglasses so that he would be easily recognized from his fake ID.

  “Identification, please,” the guard said. He was armed only with a nine-millimeter Glock in his hip holster, but Cutter knew the shack held
automatic weapons.

  Cutter smiled and handed him the IDs they had put together the day before. The two NTSB investigators they were impersonating were expected at the TEC, but not until later in the day.

  The guard looked at each ID carefully and compared them to a pre-printed list. Anticipating that, Cutter had gone to the trouble of appropriating the IDs of two people they knew would be allowed into the facility. Once the guard checked the names on the list, he looked closely at each man. This guy wasn’t your average rent-a-cop. He was well-trained. Cutter was impressed. But no one would be able to detect that the IDs were not genuine.

  Satisfied, the guard handed them back, and the gate slid open. “Third hangar. Park on the south side.”

  Cutter drove through and followed the road to a tunnel that went under the seven-mile banked oval track. The track was so long that it looped around all of the buildings and test facilities, including the runway and airplane hangars. The 30-foot-high tunnel was built so that large test materials and vehicles could be brought into the facility without interrupting track testing.

  They emerged from the tunnel to see three massive buildings with multiple garage doors in each of them. Cutter had studied the layout of the TEC carefully using Gordian’s own web site. These were the vehicle testing labs, with indoor crash test sleds, environmental chambers, and inverted drop facilities, whatever those were. Next to it was the outdoor impact sled, wet and dry skid pads, and a 100-acre dirt track and obstacle course for off-road testing.

  In the distance, Cutter could just make out a red car racing around the oval at over 100 mph. Outside the last vehicle test building, workers were talking next to the biggest dump truck he’d ever seen. On the side of the truck was the word, “Liebherr.”

  Cutter kept driving along the service road until 500 feet later he approached a row of five hangars that each looked large enough to hold a 747. He parked at the third just as an eighteen-wheeler pulled past him, followed by a flat-bed truck equipped with a crane. The flat-bed was loaded down with a mangled aircraft engine. They must have been shipments from the crash site. These guys were working fast, which was to Cutter’s advantage. The media uproar about Hayden’s death had been bigger than anything since Princess Diana’s. Rex Hayden not only was a huge star, but he had cleverly parlayed his celebrity into business deals that had pushed his net worth close to a billion dollars. That had made him a formidable enemy of the Holy Hydronastic Church. Cutter relished the thought of the actor dissolving in agony.