The Extinction Code

by Dean Crawford

  Lopez blinked. ‘Er, and?’

  ‘There have been discoveries of Triceratops fossils supposedly above the K–T boundary,’ Hellerman said. ‘Most explain this away as the fossils being located in areas where the overlying rock formations have dipped, or erosion in the distant past has caused the sedimentary layer to descend compared to other geographical locations. The process is called bioturbation, and is often used by Creationists as supposed evidence that the historical record is false and so on, when in fact it’s not.’

  ‘So what’s the big deal?’ Jarvis asked. ‘Channing finds remains that look like they’re above the K–T boundary but aren’t? Surely that means they’re nothing special?’

  Hellerman shrugged. ‘Something spooked him, because that’s about when he took off. The reporter claims he acted as though he were somehow contaminated.’

  ‘Contaminated?’ Lopez repeated. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound possible,’ Ethan said. ‘Fossils are effectively stone, minerals that have replaced the bones of an animal buried in ancient sediment. They can’t contain anything that could be considered infectious.’

  Hellerman leaned back in the seat and shook his head. ‘That’s not strictly true.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Lopez asked. ‘You can catch a cold from dinosaur bones?’

  ‘Not quite, but researchers working in Montana recently identified soft tissue in the remains of an eighty million year old Hadrosaur fossil. They compared proteins extracted from the tissue to modern birds and confirmed that they were actual dinosaur veins, ruling out contamination from other sources such as bacteria. Myosin was the protein found in the tissue, which is also found in the walls of blood vessels.’

  ‘So they got dino–DNA out of a fossil after all?’ Lopez said. ‘Michael Crichton would have been proud.’

  ‘Again, not quite,’ Hellerman cautioned, ‘as red blood cells don’t contain DNA. However, collagen–like tissues have also been found in the bones of a Tyrannosaur, and from those hardier substances genetic material could be recovered. Whether it would be intact or even useful after so long is another matter.’

  Ethan thought for a moment.

  ‘Is it possible that Channing feared that something in the bones that he found could have been preserved for tens of millions of years? Did they even have that kind of knowledge back then, enough to understand that he could have been in danger?’

  ‘That depends on what Channing saw that spooked him,’ Hellerman said. ‘The reporter went back to the Montana site shortly before his death, hoping to seek answers to what happened. He said that the bones were gone, that the site had been excavated professionally and that had he not photographed the scene when Channing had been there and known that he was in the right spot, he would never have known that the bones had been in the rock face at all.’

  ‘Somebody cleaned up real good behind them,’ Ethan suggested, ‘which means they had something to hide.’

  ‘Including Channing,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘I take it that the author of the original letter is long dead?’

  Hellerman shook his head. ‘No, quite the opposite, although whether you can get them to talk is another matter. Since the disappearance in 2002 they have never again mentioned what happened, even when the report was finally publicized a couple of years back. They had their name blocked from the report, had lawyers acting for them. We’ve only got their identity because of the police investigation.’

  ‘You got an address?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Norway,’ Hellerman replied, ‘which means you’re back on a plane again.’

  Ethan nodded wearily and turned to Jarvis as Hellerman hurried off.

  ‘What’s next for MJ–12?’

  ‘We keep the pressure on,’ Jarvis replied with a casual shrug, ‘and find out what their connection to Aubrey Channing was. If we can find a body, we might be able to connect it to one of their own.’

  ‘I doubt they would have got their own hands dirty,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘although if we could locate Mitchell he might know something about what happened.’

  ‘He’s on his own,’ Jarvis replied, ‘and we don’t know what he’s planning either. I doubt that he’ll just retire into the sunset.’

  ‘Me either,’ Ethan agreed. ‘We’ve got to track him down and fast before he starts killing off our suspects. It took us long enough to identify the members of Majestic Twelve – I don’t want Mitchell knocking them off on a revenge spree and MJ–12 becoming a new set of faces we can’t identify.’

  Jarvis did not reply, as clear on their dilemma as Ethan was.

  Majestic Twelve, a secretive cabal of powerful industrial and political figures, had been formed in the aftermath of World War Two after a series of events involving unknown craft observed in flight around the world. Although unidentified flying objects had been observed throughout history as far back as ancient Egypt, it was only in recent times that any understanding of what the craft actually were and the nature of their purpose had been reached. When one such craft had crashed in New Mexico in 1947, close to a town called Roswell, and aviator Kenneth Arnold had observed “saucer like discs” flying at terrific speed near Mount Rainier that same year, the Eisenhower administration had created Majestic Twelve to coordinate a study of the phenomenon. What the administration had not appreciated was that the founders of Majestic Twelve were men who had been aware of Nazi experiments with supposed extra–terrestrial technology during the Second World War, and involved in spiriting that technology away from the United States Government after the fall of Berlin. Majestic Twelve, as it had turned out, was not just a cabal of industrialists intent on the control of governments – it was actively continuing the work of the Nazis.

  ‘If Mitchell knows anything about Montana, he’s going to show up there too,’ Lopez said. ‘He’ll follow the same threads that we do, maybe even have informants of his own showing him the way.’

  ‘Majestic Twelve must have pissed off a lot of people over the years,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Enough that Mitchell may be able to leverage some of them into helping him.’

  That list, Ethan reflected, might even include serving members of the administration. Majestic Twelve was, in effect, a descendent of The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts, an underground American fascist organization founded by William Dudley Pelley in 1933 that had been headquartered in North Carolina. A white supremacist group based on Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Silver Shirts had built a fortified headquarters in the hills of Los Angeles and had been some fifteen thousand strong. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 killed off public support for the legion, but the remaining members were ready when the Nazis were defeated to bring into America survivors of the Third Reich along with all of the wealth stolen from within Germany during the final days of the conflict.

  After the war, the founding members of the Silver Legion used their wealth to invest in the industrial–military complex. They prospered, became powerful and when in 1947 the first hints of extra–terrestrial technology coming into the hands of the United States government began to circulate, they were there to pick up the threads of what had begun in Germany many years before with Die Glocke, a rumored extra–terrestrial device captured by scientists and designed to bring a crushing defeat to the allied forces. Ethan and Nicola had located just such a device in an abandoned German facility six months before, buried deep beneath the ice floes of Antarctica.

  ‘We need to get onto this first and figure out what it is that brought Channing to the attention of MJ–12,’ Jarvis said finally. ‘If MJ–12 are making another play for dominance then whatever they’ve got in mind it won’t be healthy, and that mention of biological experiments gives me the creeps. I’ll have Victor Wilms transported out of Florence ACX as soon as possible and we’ll give him a hint of what life’s like in general population to see if he’ll fold. Why don’t you go down there before Norway and find out if Wilms knows anything about Aubrey Channin
g?’

  ‘If we make him think he’s going into general population, we might lose any trust he has in us,’ Lopez pointed out.

  ‘His resolve will fail a lot quicker if he feels really threatened,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘We just have to make him think we genuinely don’t give a damn about him. What’s left of his bravado is due to him believing he’s still important, still has leverage.

  Hellerman hurried across and handed Ethan a scribbled note.

  ‘The professor behind the original note works in Spitsbergen, at the Doomsday Vault.’

  ‘The what now?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘The Doomsday Vault,’ Hellerman said in reply. ‘It’s a facility used to store seeds and DNA in the event of a global extinction event.’

  Ethan tucked the address into the pocket of his jeans and looked at Lopez.

  ‘Nothing like doom and gloom, huh?’

  ***

  VI

  Florence, Colorado

  ‘Damn me it’s hot here.’

  ‘Quit whining, this is nothing.’

  Ethan Warner drove along Highway 67 beneath the flaring white orb of the sun that scorched the barren deserts surrounding them. The sky was a flawless light blue, the temperature forecast to be in the high nineties.

  ‘It’s okay for you, coming from Mexico,’ Ethan complained.

  Despite the air conditioning in the vehicle, he felt uncomfortably hot as the sunshine blazed through the windscreen. Beside him, Nicola Lopez sat with her boots up on the dash as she played some sort of game on her cell phone. Her dark eyes flicked left and right as she played, long black hair framing a perfect face and sculptured lips.

  ‘That’s racist,’ she pointed out.

  ‘It’s not racist to state a fact,’ Ethan defended himself. ‘I come from Illinois, remember?’

  ‘I think you’re just getting feeble in your old age.’

  ‘So I’m old now too?’

  ‘Let’s be honest, you’re getting on a bit.’

  Ethan knew better than to push it. Lopez was several years his junior, a fact that she often reminded him of, and when it came to a chase she usually shot ahead of him like a damned gazelle. It had been many years since he had worn the colors of the Marine Corps, and although he ran three times a week and visited the gym at least once, there was a big difference between civilian and military standards of fitness.

  Ahead of them, flaring white against the desiccated deserts, were a series of low angular block–like buildings surrounded by towers and glittering razor wire fences.

  ‘We’re almost here,’ he told Lopez. ‘You ready for this?’

  ‘You betcha,’ Lopez replied. ‘Just gotta send this last boss–fight down and I’m all yours.’

  ‘Since when did you get into video games?’

  ‘Since I started having to spend hours stuck in a car with you.’

  ADX Florence, as the facility ahead of them was known, was America’s most secure Super–Max prison, designed to house the country’s most feared inmates. The majority of the facility’s thirty seven acre complex was above ground, with a subterranean corridor linking the cellblocks to the lobby. Few journalists had ever been permitted entry, and Ethan and Nicola were here only on the authority of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Services.

  Ethan pulled slowly into the parking lot, stopped at the security gates and showed both their identification and their letter of admittance to the guards before being waved through and parking in front of the southern block.

  They stepped out of the air conditioned vehicle and into the hot sunshine that flared off the asphalt, doubling the heat.

  ‘You think that this facility will be able to hold him?’ Lopez asked. ‘Mitchell managed to get out.’

  ‘Security’s been overhauled after Mitchell’s escape,’ Ethan replied. ‘And Wilms is a different man altogether from Mitchell. He’s not going anywhere.’

  They walked together to the block entrance, where the first of many security gates opened and then closed behind them as they passed through. Prison security teams frisked them thoroughly, checked again their letter of admission before waving them through to a reception area where they were required to leave cell phones, wallets and other personal belongings.

  ‘This way,’ a guard assigned to them gestured.

  They walked through a corridor that descended beneath the block walls and led to more security gates. Each was governed by operators in remote stations and covered by security cameras: there were no keys, no means for a prisoner to escape even if they did somehow manage to get out of their cell. They passed through the gates, and Ethan saw an X–Ray machine sunk into a revetment in the wall that scanned them as they moved by. No alarm was emitted and they continued under the guard’s guidance until they emerged into a cell block.

  Unlike most prisons, Florence had no communal areas for prisoners to mingle for they spent their days on permanent lockdown. Exercise time, one hour per day, was strictly organized so that prisoners never crossed paths. Complete and utter solitude was the facility’s solution to the brutality of its inmates.

  The sergeant led them to an austere room and held the door open for them. They walked in to see a table, steel rings bolted into its surface and poured concrete pillars for seats on either side, more steel rings in the floor either side of the seats designed for ankle restraints. The walls were also built from poured concrete, featureless and bare.

  As the guard left, Lopez turned to Ethan. ‘Okay, I believe it. Wilms couldn’t even think about getting out of here, but there’s no reason that Majestic Twelve couldn’t get in. We know what they’re capable of.’

  ‘We’ve got Majestic Twelve on the run,’ Ethan replied with grim delight. ‘They’re more concerned with distancing themselves from Wilms than taking him down.’

  The door to the room opened, and a thin, pale man shuffled inside, two bulky guards flanking him. Victor Wilms had lost weight since his incarceration for the murder of FBI Director LeMay some months before. The video evidence of the director’s demise, surrounded by the members of MJ–12, had become world news, and the other eleven men in the room had been only too quick to point their fingers at Wilms in return for immunity from prosecution. The sacrificial lamb had thus been sent to the slaughter, a once wealthy and powerful man reduced to a trembling wreck in less than half a year.

  Ethan noted the handcuffs on his wrists and ankles, joined by chains, and the defeated low–watt glow of life in his eyes as he was shoved into a seat opposite them and the guards left the room. As the door closed, Lopez leaned on the table and flashed Wilms a bright smile and a wink.

  ‘How ya’ doin’, Vic?’

  Wilms did not respond to Lopez’s smug smile, as though he occupied another universe and was merely looking in. Ethan eased his way forward and sat down.

  ‘Your friends in high places have forgotten about you, Victor,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left to fight for.’

  Victor sighed, his shoulders slumped and narrow. ‘I’m alive.’

  Lopez snorted. ‘Call this alive, Vic’?’ she said as she gestured at the walls around them. ‘You got a hundred forty years, no parole, no appeals. You’re already deader than my great grandparents. How about you open up and give us the low–down on the creeps that left you here?’

  Ethan winced. Victor may be defeated, but Lopez’s arrogance gave him leverage, the sense that he still had something that the Defense Intelligence Agency did not. He saw the thin little line of Wilm’s mouth crease into a weak smile.

  ‘I had a good run,’ he replied. ‘I’ve nothing to gain by turning snitch.’

  ‘They turned coat on you Vic’,’ Lopez insisted. ‘I didn’t think you were the type to huddle in a corner and weep yourself to sleep?’

  Ethan felt a tingle of interest as he realized where Lopez had been going with her charade. She leaned on the table next to him and peered at Wilms.

  ‘Guess you’ve only got the cajones for this game when you’ve got
money and muscle to hide behind, right Vic’? Cornered and on your own, you’re just a limp–dicked nobody afraid of the bad guys in the cells all around you. Tell me, what’s it like being somebody else’s bitc…?’

  Wilms shot up out of his seat, the chains cracking as they were pulled taut.

  ‘I could still have you iced Lopez!’ he seethed, spittle flying from his dry, thin lips. ‘All I have to do is ask!’

  ‘That’s my point,’ Lopez smirked, ‘you’d have to ask. You’re a spent force, Wilms, you’ve got nothing left in the tanks. MJ–12 won’t come anywhere near Ethan or me because they’re too wrapped up in what happened to LeMay, got their fingers burned and now they’re worried about every cop who passes them in the street. And as for you…? You don’t get calls, you don’t get visitors, you don’t got nothin’!’

  Wilms’ rage withered and he slumped back into his seat.

  ‘She’s got a point,’ Ethan said. ‘MJ–12 have gone into hibernation since LeMay’s murder, they can’t afford the exposure. You know it Victor, just like I do: you’re done and you’ll never get out of here alive. You can choose to die on your knees because MJ–12 abandoned you after years of dedicated service, or you can die on your feet and help us ensure that they too end up where you are.’ Wilms looked up at Ethan, his eyes rheumy with age now, robbed of the vitality and confidence that had once resided there. ‘You can bring them down, Victor, right here, right now. All you have to do is testify.’

  Victor chuckled, and shook his head.

  ‘You think that they’ll take the word of the man who killed the director of the FBI?’ he challenged. ‘They took my money, my homes, my boats, left my family destitute.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean that they won’t use your word to do the same to the remaining members of MJ–12,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Or are you okay with the idea of them still living in luxury, sending their kids to private schools, cruising in yachts around the Bahamas?’ Lopez leaned in again. ‘Think about your replacement, Victor. I guess he’s having a real good time right now.’