The Extinction Code

by Dean Crawford

  The Center for Disease Control was the country’s most elite scientific unit tasked with the containment of infectious diseases. Any mention of it was enough to bring the average person out into a cold sweat.

  ‘Just do it!’ Channing bellowed, his voice echoing away across the canyons. ‘Tell them what happened here and pray you get there fast enough!’

  Whatever Weisler saw in Channing’s eyes was enough to get him scrambling away up the rocky slopes as Channing sat down in front of the ancient fossilized bones and waited until the silence enveloped the site once again. The wind moaned across the hillside, laden with boiling heat, and the few scattered clouds drifting across the hard blue sky brought little shade with them.

  Channing let his eyes lose focus as he stared at the tyrannosaur bone before him, at the deep pitting that lined the massive jaw. He knew that they were not the scars of some ancient, titanic battle with another tyrannosaur. He knew that they were not the result of an impact of some kind, or bite.

  Channing recognized the pitting as the scars of some horrific disease, an affliction deep enough to deform the very bones of a gigantic carnivore that weighed some six tons. He knew that no asteroid impact had killed this huge creature.

  The asteroid that hit the earth sixty five million years ago had unleashed something else entirely.

  ***

  IV

  Logan Circle,

  Washington DC

  The sound of incessant banging reverberated through the apartment and jerked Ethan Warner out of his slumber. He opened his eyes and saw the faint light of pre–dawn glowing lethargically through the blinds of his bedroom window. One hand reached for the Beretta M9 pistol he kept under his pillow and he whipped the weapon across to point at the bedroom doorway as a figure loomed before him, the bed sheets falling onto the floor.

  ‘Nice piece.’

  Nicola Lopez leaned on the door jamb, her arms folded and a mischievous smile on her face as she looked into his eyes, clearly trying not to cast her gaze across his body as he stood up and scowled at her.

  ‘You ever learned how to knock?’ he uttered as he grabbed the bed sheets and covered himself.

  Lopez dangled a key from one finger. ‘You gave me a key, remember? After what happened to…’

  Her cheerful mood subsided a little and Ethan nodded. ‘Sure. I forgot.’

  An awkward silence filled the room for a moment and then Ethan recovered his bravado. ‘So, what drove you to cross town and wander into my bedroom at six in the morning?’

  ‘Not your weapon,’ Lopez managed a faint smirk as she pocketed the key and jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Jarvis has a fresh lead on Majestic Twelve and we’ve been summoned.’

  Ethan rubbed the sleep from his eyes and yawned mightily as he trudged into the bathroom. ‘How come they don’t ever get leads at a sociable hour, like three in the afternoon?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  Ethan could see her from the corner of his eye as he cranked the faucet and splashed hot water across his face. A diminutive five foot three, with long black hair and olive skin, her petite frame belied a ferocious temper and formidable right hook. Brought up on the tough streets of Guanajuato, and later Washington DC where she served in the blues of the Metropolitan Police Department, Lopez was an enigma that both fascinated Ethan and worried him. Both of them had risked their lives on numerous occasions in the work that they did as contracted agents to the DIA, and not six months before they had lost an agent on a highly classified mission in Antarctica. That loss had hit Ethan harder than he would ever have believed possible, to the extent that he now found it difficult to form long–term attachments of any kind other than Lopez. He saw his own reflection in the mirror, a man who was starting to look older than his years, the rigors of life etched deeply into his skin.

  His hair was thick and light brown in the mirror, his eyes gray and his jaw a little too wide to be considered attractive, and his chest and back bore the scars of numerous confrontations. He pulled on a shirt and jeans, then padded back out to see Lopez scoping the apartment with interest.

  ‘Still haven’t bought anything to personalize the place,’ she observed.

  The walls were bare, as were the cupboards, but then he didn’t want to remember much these days about his past and the traumas it contained.

  ‘It’s a roof and four walls,’ he replied. ‘Are we going?’

  Lopez shrugged and led the way.

  An SUV awaited them by the sidewalk outside, glossy black as always and bearing government plates. Ethan climbed in and shut the door behind him, and two agents in the front seats drove them away toward Anacostia–Bolling Airbase, Washington DC, the home of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Ethan and Nicola had worked for the agency for several years, both officially and unofficially depending on who was in charge of the agency at the time and who was in the White House. The current Director of the DIA was Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, a former United States Air Force officer who had been appointed DNI by the current president

  Their task was to investigate cases the rest of the intelligence community had rejected as unworkable. The connection to a high level agency like the DIA had come from a former colleague of Ethan’s named Douglas Jarvis. The old man had once been captain of a United States Rifle Platoon and Ethan’s senior officer from his time with the Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their friendship, cemented during Operation Iraqi Freedom and later, when Ethan had resigned his commission and been embedded with Jarvis’s men as a journalist, had continued into their unusual and discreet accord with the DIA where Jarvis continued to serve his country.

  Since joining the agency they had completed nine investigations, involving everything from alien remains excavated from ancient cities around the world, free energy devices, technology so advanced it had allowed terrorists to infiltrate the minds of key government and military figures, and alien technology that had crash–landed deep inside the Antarctic. It had been there that Agent Hannah Ford had lost her life, the victim of an extremely well equipped rogue organization that operated entirely outside the US Government.

  The SUV reached the DIA building within twenty minutes, blue lights allowing them to bypass the traffic already building up around the Potomac and Capitol Hill. Ethan got out and followed Nicola to a security check point inside the entrance to the Defense Intelligence Agency where a pass was clipped to her shirt by a security guard.

  The DIA’s south wing entrance, in front of which was a fountain before perfectly manicured lawns, made up only a tiny part of the vast complex. Huge, silvery buildings with mirrored windows contained some of the most sensitive intelligence gathering equipment in the world, including vast 24/7 Watch Centers manned by agents monitoring events across the entire globe.

  Lopez led the way through a barrage of security measures, enduring full X–Rays and pat down searches. They finally passed through the checks in time for Jarvis to meet them in the main foyer of the building, the polished tile floor emblazoned with a large DIA emblem in the manner of all the intelligence agencies.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Jarvis greeted them, his hands in the pockets of his dark blue pants, his white hair stark against his suit and shirt, all a similar shade of blue. ‘How are you holding up, Ethan?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Ethan replied without elaborating. ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Ethan followed him as large numbers of civilian staff strode this way and that through the building. Surprisingly, for a highly secretive intelligence agency, two thirds of the DIA’s seventeen thousand employees were civilian, which allowed selected freelance operatives to act in concert with official employees like Jarvis. Represented in some one hundred forty countries and with its own Clandestine Service, to which Ethan and Nicola were now attached, the agency suffered only from a lack of influence in law enforcement, often forcing Ethan and Nicola to work alongside police and federal law agencies arou
nd the country who were less than inclined to open up to direct interference from such a clandestine agency.

  Jarvis led the way into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Research and Intelligence Engineering Section, otherwise known as ARIES.

  Created to support the work of other agencies such as the NSA, CIA and DARPA, ARIES was tasked with emulating the technology of other nations that had been uncovered by overt overseas operations, for the purpose of finding effective defenses against those technologies. In a world where digital and cyber–warfare was more widespread now than ever, where foreign hackers were capable of accessing everything from the computers of major film studios to even the Pentagon and other defense installations, the need for absolute security had never been more paramount.

  ARIES was a giant pool of desks arrayed before banks of large plasma screens showing news feeds from around the world. Essentially the hub of the DIA’s intelligence gathering force, what came in to the room rarely left except to be investigated by agents like Ethan and Nicola.

  As they entered the station they were greeted by a slim, bespectacled and bearded young man with an infectious enthusiasm radiating from his gaze.

  ‘Guys, you’ve just gotta see this!’

  Hellerman had worked for the DIA for less than two years, but already he was one of the chief technicians specializing in novel technologies. Ethan considered him something of a ‘Q’ character from a James Bond movie, but in truth Hellerman’s near–genius level intellect had saved them from certain death on numerous occasions.

  Hellerman led them to an area of the Watch Station where a partition wall with a single door had been erected, right outside the cluttered office where Hellerman created his wondrous gadgets.

  ‘What are we looking at?’ Lopez asked, as ever amused by Hellerman’s excited expression.

  ‘A wall,’ Hellerman replied, gesturing with widespread arms as he moved to the center of the space and spun around to face them. ‘There’s absolutely nothing here but a wall, right?!’

  Ethan blinked and folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘Not exactly the bombshell we were hoping for.’

  Hellerman smiled, dropped his arms, then turned and reached out. He pushed the door, and it swung open before them. Through the door a huge Bengal tiger leaped at Ethan and Lopez, its shaggy coat shimmering in the light, its jaws agape and lined with brutal yellow fangs, hunter’s eyes wide and bright. Ethan flinched and hurled himself to one side as Lopez drew her pistol and flew across the floor, aiming at the savage beast as it soared in full flight toward them.

  The beast’s roar was deafening as it shot between Ethan and Lopez to vanish like a ghost into thin air. Ethan hit the floor and rolled, coming up on one knee with his pistol aimed at where the huge carnivore had disappeared.

  ‘What the hell?!’

  His heart was thumping in his chest, Lopez’s eyes wide with alarm as she too aimed into thin air.

  ‘Hard light!’ Hellerman yelled in delight. ‘Otherwise known as Seven–D technology. You’ve nothing to fear, there was nothing there in the first place, just a three dimensional projection onto thin air using highly focused pulse lasers. We’ve built a projection machine that uses a one–kilohertz pulse laser through a three–D scanner, which reflects and focuses the laser onto an exact place in the air above. The laser ionizes the air’s molecules in that specific spot, which results in the flashes of light that make up each pixel, if you will, of the image.’

  Ethan and Lopez exchanged a glance as they got up, holstering their pistols and stalking toward Hellerman.

  ‘You ever think to warn people about that before you send a tiger flying at their face?’ Lopez growled.

  Hellerman’s delight dissolved into anxiety as he backed up a pace. ‘Now, it was just a demonstration and…’

  Ethan reached out to grab Hellerman’s shirt and almost fell over as his hand passed right through the technician’s body.

  ‘Sorry!’ a voice called out from within Hellerman’s office as the second projection flickered out before Ethan, the partition wall vanishing a moment later. ‘Thought you might do that!’

  From within the office Hellerman peeked out at them, one hand on his door to slam it shut in case they charged him together.

  ‘Jarvis said to make the demonstration as impactful as possible,’ he offered.

  ‘And where did our great and hallowed leader disappear to?’ Lopez demanded, looking around them.

  ‘Right here,’ Jarvis said as he suddenly materialized as if from nowhere behind them, the nearby offices trembling briefly as though in a heat haze as Jarvis popped into existence.

  Ethan could not help but rub his eyes in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘I was hiding behind a projection of the office behind me,’ Jarvis explained. ‘Remarkable technology with huge potential for battlefield evasion.’

  ‘Trust you to figure that out,’ Lopez uttered as Jarvis joined them. ‘There was me thinking that interactive cinema might be a better use for it.’

  Jarvis leaned against the side of Hellerman’s office and shrugged.

  ‘All technologies eventually find their way into the markets as profitable enterprises,’ he replied. ‘That’s just the way of the world. This technology could allow an army to advance undetected, aircraft to become virtually invisible. No respectable military is going to ignore that kind of advantage.’

  ‘Why are we here?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘We have a name and a location,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Aubrey Channing, Montana.’

  ‘Who’s Channing?’ Lopez asked.

  Hellerman stepped out of his office with a tablet computer in his hand, which he propped up on a table alongside them.

  ‘Professor Aubrey Channing,’ he announced, ‘studied at and worked for the University of Montana until 1996, when he disappeared somewhere in the Montana badlands while on an exploratory dig. Until his disappearance, he was the world’s leading authority on tyrannosaur remains.’

  ‘What do dinosaurs have to do with Majestic Twelve?’ Lopez asked. ‘Why would they be interested in paleontology?’

  ‘That’s where things get interesting,’ Hellerman explained. ‘According to a reporter named Rory Weisler who accompanied him, Channing was working out in Montana because of a letter sent to the reporter by an unknown individual who had discovered something out there that he wanted nothing to do with. The reporter had been ordered in the letter to contact Channing and have him locate the remains of whatever it was had been found.’

  ‘So far, so mysterious,’ Ethan said. ‘And we know all of this how?’

  ‘The reporter wrote the piece up in the Montana paper he worked for,’ Hellerman explained, reading from the tablet’s screen. ‘But the piece didn’t get published for almost twenty years, because according to the reporter Channing found the remains but then became extremely agitated and ordered the reporter to leave the scene immediately. That was the last that anybody saw of Channing.’

  ‘Could Weisler have murdered Channing?’ Lopez asked. ‘Maybe created this whole thing as a ruse to cover his tracks?’

  Hellerman scanned down the pages on the tablet. ‘According to this, that’s what the Montana Police Department thought but they were contacted privately after Channing disappeared by the man who had written the original letter, who confirmed the reporter’s story. The only reason the piece got published was because the reporter fell sick in his old age and finally felt able to publish the piece.’

  Ethan frowned. ‘He waited until his deathbed to write the report?’

  Hellerman nodded and looked up at Ethan.

  ‘This would all be conjecture for us, were it not for the communications chatter we’ve picked up between members of Majestic Twelve since we identified them all. There have been several mentions of Aubrey Channing, Montana, and biological experiments of some kind.’

  ‘What about family members?’ Lopez asked. ‘Did anybody close to Channing know what happened to him?�
��

  ‘His wife died a few years after Channing vanished,’ Hellerman said as he looked at his screen, ‘and their only son, Robert, committed suicide a year after that. The only other person who might know anything is a scientist named Martin Beauchamp who worked as an undergraduate student with Channing, but guess what? He disappeared two days ago, and a missing–persons report was filed by his family in Ohio.’

  ‘You think that MJ–12 took them out too?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Well, Weisler is on the record as saying that he’d been threatened to say nothing of what happened to Channing, that he feared for his life and that of his family if he had written the report any sooner.’

  ***

  V

  ‘Okay, it sounds like MJ–12 are in on this all right,’ Lopez said, ‘death threats and intimidation are their currency. But it doesn’t explain what they wanted with Channing or what he found out there in Montana?’

  Hellerman slipped into a seat as he finished reading the document.

  ‘The reporter claims in his article that what Channing was led to was a Tyrannosaur jaw bone,’ he said. ‘Channing at the time said that it shouldn’t have been there because it was located above the K–T boundary, a sedimentary marker that depicts the impact debris from a massive asteroid that hit the earth sixty five million years ago and rendered the dinosaurs extinct.’

  ‘Everybody knows about that, right?’ Ethan said.

  ‘Sure,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘but back then the science was not as solid. This all happened not long after Jurassic Park came along and half the globe went dinosaur mad, and science got the kind of funding to finally confirm what many had suspected for years. Even now, the discovery of dinosaur remains above the K–T boundary is a rare but always contentious event.’

  ‘You mean it’s still happening?’ Jarvis asked.

  ‘The K–T boundary is not uniform,’ Hellerman explained. ‘Some sections of the formation in Hell Creek mark the boundary as Paleocene in age, not Cretaceous, so the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary in time does not always coincide exactly with the Hell Creek Formation’s position in the rock.’