The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  I had seen the image before, many times. This was a photo—an original, printed by someone who was there at the first atomic bomb test. I had never known Father was involved.

  “I have regretted it every day since. Do you know how many nuclear warheads exist today?”

  Still studying the picture, I said. “Thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-one. Give or take.”

  “And they’re far more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan.”

  He paused, waited for me to look at him.

  “Communism isn’t humanity’s greatest enemy. Indeed, we are the greatest enemy we now face. For the first time in history, we have the means with which to destroy ourselves. I helped give that deadly weapon to the world. I’ve spent the years since trying to ensure it is never used again.”

  “How?”

  “I’m part of an organization that’s creating a new device, a device that will change the human race. Its reach will be unlimited. It will affect every person, of every nationality and race and religion. It will save us. It may well be our only chance of survival.”

  I was skeptical. In fact, I half wondered if the long hours in his lab had finally gotten to him.

  “What sort of… device?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you that in due time. You of all people know the importance of secrecy.”

  I was sure of it then: he knew I was a spy.

  “The Looking Glass is the culmination of my life’s work. It’s in danger now. We’re entering a phase of the project where our work will be more exposed. There’s greater risk. I need someone to protect it. I think you might be that person.”

  He stared at me a moment. “Will you come with me to Hong Kong?”

  I agreed instantly. I felt pride that day—that he had asked me, that I had grown into someone who could help him, after everything he had done for me.

  Hong Kong in 1965 was booming. The streets were clogged with people, and factories were springing up at every turn. More than half the population were young people about my age, in their mid-twenties and early thirties.

  Walking the crowded sidewalks, with double-decker buses zooming by, belching heavy black smoke and releasing passengers every few blocks, I realized that Hong Kong in so many ways was an Asian facsimile of London: British-style government and capitalism, but with a fusion of culture from the East and West.

  That night, my father and I strolled through the city, lit not by yellow streetlights like the London of my youth, but bathed in red and blue neon signs that stretched from street level to high above, featuring words written in Cantonese. Disco music wafted into the street as strongly as the scent of roasted pig and beef from the eateries. We’d had a drink at our hotel and another at dinner. I’ve forgotten the names of the hotel and the restaurant, but I remember how I felt about Hong Kong that night: as if I were seeing the future, as if every city would one day be like this blooming metropolis, a melting pot of human culture. Young people were flocking in from China and the rest of the world.

  Hong Kong was the first trip I had taken with my father as an adult. Our relationship had changed, and that was evident now, as we embarked on this adventure together.

  In the harbor lay the vessel that would change my life—and perhaps soon the world. It was a submarine, the largest non-military sub I had ever seen. It was nuclear-powered, with a diesel-electric backup. The tour of the vessel lasted an hour. I was shocked by what I saw: it was a massive laboratory capable of circling the globe. I paused at the nameplate, which read:

  RSV Beagle

  hong kong

  1 May 1965

  Ordo ab Chao

  I translated the Latin words in my head: From chaos comes order.

  My line of work had taken me behind the Iron Curtain routinely. Order existed there, but the price was high: freedom. I wondered what this vessel’s builders demanded for the order they sought. And what that order was.

  Back in our hotel that night, my father told me the role I was to play.

  “The Beagle’s mission will require it to travel to dangerous places. Some are hard to reach physically. Others are dangerous politically.”

  “The Soviet Union. China.”

  “Among others,” he said.

  “I was in the army, not the navy.”

  “Your role will be securing operations on the shore. That’s where the true danger lies. The sub will dock at ports all over the world. You’ll need to think fast, be ready for anything, negotiate with customs, get our people out of sticky situations.”

  He paused, letting me consider the words.

  “I know your current work is very important. But so is this. If I’m right, it’s the most important thing the human race has ever done. The world may well avoid a nuclear holocaust, but there will always be another device, another war. We are the enemy we face. The human race is on borrowed time. We are far too uncivilized to possess the weapons we do. We’re racing the clock, just as we were during the Manhattan Project. Will you help us?”

  I agreed then and there in that hotel room. I wondered what sort of device the Looking Glass was. I assumed the answer would be revealed in those first days aboard the Beagle. What I found was far more intriguing.

  Chapter 80

  In the small cottage in Shetland, the sun had risen, driving the fog away. The wind still whipped across the stone, rattling the ancient windows every few minutes.

  Desmond stood to stretch his legs. At the corkboard he scanned an article about the Invisible Sun Foundation donating ten million dollars to a genetics project at Stanford.

  Peyton moved toward him, but he turned and motioned her back to the couch. “Let’s keep going.”

  As he sat down, an object caught his eye. It was in the corner of the room, where the wall met the ceiling. It was well hidden by several trinkets at the top of a bookshelf, but there was no mistaking what it was: a camera. At the bottom, a small light glowed red.

  Desmond hoped the camera was simply a left over security measure the cottage owner had installed. There wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment except run, and that would tip off anyone watching. He focused on the pages of the story and began reading again.

  The Beagle was an incredible vessel, but most impressive to me were the people aboard. They were drawn from all over the world: American, British like myself, Germans, Chinese, Russians, Japanese. They were nearly all scientists, except for the staff who operated the submarine and me and my three security personnel. I must say, we non-scientists felt a bit out of place at first; on the mess deck, all the talk was of the experiments. I had expected there to be just one experiment. On that point, I was very wrong.

  The Beagle was in some ways a floating university with multiple departments, each with specialists in the field, all of them conducting different research. We took ice core samples in Antarctica, collected soil samples from the ocean floor, and took on animals from all over the world. Human test subjects were common—people from all nations and races—and were taken to labs that were off-limits to non-essential personnel. All this activity baffled me. How could all of this be related to one project?

  Of course, nothing inspires curiosity like a secret. Like the sailors, I did my share of speculating and prodding the scientists about what they were researching. I knew the vessel’s namesake, the HMS Beagle, had carried a young Charles Darwin on the voyage around the world that helped him form his theory of natural selection. I wondered if the scientists on this vessel were testing a theory as groundbreaking.

  I have never been claustrophobic, but my time on the Beagle tested my comfort level with confinement. The crew quarters were small and separated by gender. The bunks were stacked three tall, with twelve of us to a berth. We shared a shower the sailors called a rain locker (they called the bunks racks or bunkies). Indeed, the men who ran the sub seemed to have a language all their own, mostly comprised of curse words. Sailors not pulling their weight were called bent shitcans. Sailors who only looked out for them
selves were check valves. Surface ships and sailors were skimmers (a derogatory term, apparently). Passageways were p-ways. Radiation was zoomies. Marine life spotted on sonar—dolphins and whales—were called biologics. Clear your baffles meant to look behind you. Poking holes in the ocean meant we were underway. There was a locker dedicated to holding porn, known as the smut locker.

  On the whole, I felt more of a connection to the sailors than to the scientists. That changed when I got to know my bunkmate, Yuri Pachenko. Yuri was thirty-three, about two years older than me, and smaller. But his size belied his strength, which lay mostly in his mind. He was the most intense person I’d ever met. His story revealed why.

  He had been a child in Stalingrad when the German Sixth Army had arrived in August of 1942. I had read about the battle, of course; it was one of the deadliest battles in the history of warfare, with millions of lives lost. Hearing his story firsthand made my experience during the war seem like a holiday in the country. The evacuations had largely spared Britain’s children the horrors of the war, but in the Soviet Union, there had been nowhere to run. Yuri had fought for his land and scraped to survive.

  And now, he wanted to create a world where Stalingrad never happened again. I have never seen anyone so focused on anything. His field was virology, and he was learning from the best in the world, who apparently were on board the Beagle.

  In August of 1967, we docked in Mombasa. Yuri and a team rushed to Uganda to investigate a viral outbreak. They brought samples back. Containment was instituted in the labs, and for good reason: I later learned the virus they’d brought on board was Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever close in nature to Ebola (which was discovered in Zaire about ten years later).

  I found one scientist much more interesting than the others: Lin Keller. She was the child of a Chinese mother and a German father, and she had grown up in Hong Kong during the war. She described, in vivid terms, living through the fall of the island. On the same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they also attacked the British colony of Hong Kong. Local troops, as well as British, Canadian, and Indian units, fought hard for the island but lost to the overwhelming Japanese forces. They surrendered on Christmas Day in 1941—what the locals would call “Black Christmas.”

  The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong followed. From the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, the Japanese ruled with an iron fist. Lin and her mother were separated from her father, who was in Germany, forced to work for the German government. Though he could have brought his family to Germany, he had felt she was safer in Hong Kong, despite the conditions. They barely scraped by during the “three years and eight months,” as the occupation came to be known.

  The situation on mainland China was far worse. The Japanese had invaded in July of 1937, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conflict was massive in scale and loss of human life; it would account for the majority of civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War and claim the lives of ten to twenty-five million Chinese civilians and over four million Chinese and Japanese military. The war in China exemplified a fact often forgotten about the Second World War: globally, more non-combatants perished than uniformed participants. Civilians in China and the Soviet Union suffered the most, but hunger and violence were a fact of life around the world in the early forties.

  That was the world Yuri, Lin, and I had grown up in. It was a world we didn’t want our children to grow up in. We were going to change it, no matter the cost. And in each other, we found kindred spirits, linked by a shared childhood across thousands of miles and two continents.

  Lin’s field was genetics, and the subject was an obsession for her. Her father was also conducting genetic research on the Beagle, which meant that in addition to the research opportunity, her time here was a chance to reconnect with him. This was something Lin and I shared in common: the Citium was an opportunity to connect with our fathers, to share in their life’s work, and perhaps even to fill in some of the years of our childhoods we had lost.

  Genetics was a booming field. Watson and Crick had figured out that DNA was arranged in a double helix in 1953, and the discoveries had accelerated after that. When Lin talked about the promise of genetics, she lit up. She was unlike any woman I had ever met. Physically, she was an anomaly, the embodiment of Hong Kong itself: distinctly Asian features with a mixture of British mannerisms and behavior. She was unassuming, utterly without ego. Perhaps that was what attracted me the most. She was hardworking to a fault; often I found her in the cramped office outside her lab asleep with her head on her desk. I would lift her small body up and carry her through the p-ways. Sailors stood against the walls to make room for me to pass, never missing an opportunity to heckle me.

  “Finally bagged her, eh, Willy?”

  “What’d it take, Will, tranq dart or a shot of tequila?”

  “Make way for Prince Charming, boys!”

  I endured the jabs without a care in the world. I deposited her in her bunk, pulled the covers up, and turned the small noisemaker on—they were good for helping folks stay asleep; the berths weren’t separated by shifts, and bunkmates were constantly coming and going. The hard surfaces throughout the vessel made for a noisy existence.

  Reading people was part of my job. After a few weeks, I knew what Lin saw in genetics: the promise of a civilized human race. She believed that somewhere in the human genome lay the answer to why some people were evil. To her, the key to the Looking Glass was simply identifying the genetic basis for all the traits that ailed the world and getting rid of them.

  Yuri, on the other hand, didn’t believe that the threat of nuclear war was humanity’s greatest enemy. Pandemics, he argued, had decimated the human population far more than any war. He believed that globalization and urbanization made an extinction-level pandemic inevitable.

  It was then that I realized the truth: no one knew what the Looking Glass was—even the scientists working on the project. I would later learn that the entire project had begun as a mere hypothesis—a hypothesis that a device could be created that would secure the human race forever. The scientific experiments being conducted on the Beagle were simply gathering data to test that hypothesis, to figure out exactly what that device might be. To these scientists, the Looking Glass represented an abstract concept, like paradise. Something we all understood, but no one knew exactly where it was or precisely what it looked like. To some it was a sandy beach, to others a cabin in the woods or a penthouse in the city with unlimited wine and theater tickets. Paradise was the product of one’s life experiences and desires. In the same way, every scientist saw humanity’s greatest threat through the lens of their field of expertise; they imagined themselves and their work in the starring role in the device’s creation. If you put seven Citium members in a room and asked them to name the most likely extinction-level event in humanity’s future, you might get seven different answers: robotics, artificial intelligence, pandemics, climate change, solar events, asteroid impacts, or alien invasion.

  Creating one device that shielded humanity from all these threats seemed impossible to me. I would later learn that it was in fact possible, but it came at an unimaginable price.

  Peyton stood from the couch and paced away from the pages, which lay beside Desmond. He sprang up and joined her, seeming to read her feelings.

  “Just because your mother was in the Citium back then doesn’t mean she’s involved with what’s happening now.”

  She stared into his eyes. He still knows me so well.

  “And what if she is?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “We will. Together.”

  He pulled her into his arms and held her, neither speaking for a long moment.

  With her mouth pressed into his shoulder, she whispered, “What does it mean, Des? All the connections. My mother and father were both in the Citium. So was Yuri—the man who recruited you. Your uncle met my father in an orphanage in London. It’s like… we’re all entangled.” />
  “I don’t know. But I think you’re right: there’s a larger picture here. I just can’t figure out what it is.”

  He released her and stepped to the corkboard, as if he were searching it for the answer. He reached out and pulled a piece of scrap paper from the pin that held it. It read, Invisible Sun — person, organization, or project?

  Peyton thought he was going to reveal what he was thinking, but he merely slipped the note in his pocket and turned to her. “Let’s keep reading, see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

  Chapter 81

  The Beagle put ashore at ports all over the world. I got to use my knack for foreign languages, but I didn’t get to enjoy the scenery much. I was always on guard, planning for what might go wrong, and making contacts in case they did.

  In Rio de Janeiro in 1967, I was glad I had made contingency plans, and that I had the contacts to execute them. I was at the hotel on a Wednesday night when one of the researchers, a female biologist in her early thirties named Sylvia, threw open the lobby’s glass door and ran in. Blood covered her face and matted her brown hair. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She barreled past the bar and the people checking in, yelling my name. I was sitting in the lobby reading a book. I rose, caught her by the arm, guided her to a phone booth, and closed the folding door. I finally got her calmed down enough to speak.

  “They took them!”

  “Who?”

  “Yuri and Lin.”

  “Who took them?”

  She was sobbing now. “I don’t know. They wore masks.” She shook her head as if she didn’t want to remember. “They said they’d kill them if I didn’t come back to the bus stop with twenty thousand dollars in two hours.”

  I took her up to my room after that, questioned her more, then called for two of my intelligence operatives. I sent one of them to the Beagle to get forty thousand dollars just in case. We kept a lot of money on hand for scientific provisions as well as kidnap and ransom operations. I sent my other operative to make inquiries with a few of my old MI6 contacts, to find a man I knew only by reputation, but who I was confident would ensure my operation’s success.