Victor glared up at her, his jaw set. ‘I’m no snitch.’
Lopez shrugged. ‘Then I guess you’re all set to go here. You just think about that replacement of yours next time you’re on your knees in front of one of the other cons in general population.’
Wilms did not respond for a moment, but then his features collapsed as he stared in horror at Ethan.
‘Afraid so,’ Ethan forestalled his protest. ‘You were put in maximum security here because of the nature of your crime, but you’re just not considered dangerous enough to warrant your place. You’ll be transferred to Colorado State Penitentiary tomorrow.’
Wilms’ already pallid skin turned even paler as Lopez smiled at him.
‘No more solitary confinement for you, Vic’. You’ll be walking among the murderers and rapists and armed thugs. They’re real violent men, Victor, but then I guess you know that already, right?’
Lopez whirled away and headed for the door. Ethan took his cue and stood to follow her. He’d reached the door and was almost walking out when Wilms’ voice reached them.
‘Wait.’
Ethan hesitated at the door. ‘What?’
Wilms did not look at Ethan as he spoke, his bony hands clasped together, his knuckles white and his jaw taut as though he were being forced to spit the words out.
‘Varginha,’ Wilms uttered, and then slowly looked at Ethan, a hatred of everything he was being forced to do and perhaps of himself shining like a cruel star in his expression. ‘That’s all I’ll give you.’
‘That’s not enough,’ Ethan shrugged in reply as he left the room and pulled the door shut before Wilms could protest any further.
‘Who’s Varginha?’ Lopez asked.
‘I have no idea but if it’s important enough for Wilms to spit it out, it’s important enough for us to check it out. C’mon, let’s get Wilms checked out of here.’
***
VII
Florence, Colorado
The sun was not yet above the horizon, the empty deserts laced with blue shadows and only the peaks of the mountain ranges bathed in a golden glow. The air was brittle with the chill of the night, but he knew that within an hour the searing heat would return. Still, he did not move, utterly motionless on the steep hillside and crystals of frost glistening on the thick blanket that covered his shoulders.
The valley ranged before him for endless miles, the small town of Florence to the north little more than a scattering of twinkling street lights against the wilderness. Between that town and his position on the hillside was a series of geometric buildings set against the nearby highway, glistening razor wire and smoked–glass watch towers.
Aaron James Mitchell watched the facility through the powerful magnifying scope of the rifle before him, cradled in his grasp and set onto a tripod wedged into the rocks. The bolt–action AWM was the world–standard in sniper rifles, chambered with .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges and equipped with a Schmidt & Bender Mk II military scope and suppressor. A British rifle, it had gained a fearsome reputation in the hands of the Royal Marines in Afghanistan and held the record for the longest sniper kill in history with two confirmed lethal hits at over two thousand, seven hundred yards by a British sniper in Musa Qala, Helmand Province. For Aaron’s purposes, the weapon was perfect.
Through the scope he had identified the block in which he was interested, and for two days prior he had been encamped out in the desert, watching and waiting for the perfect moment. One had come the previous day, but the tremendous heat rising up from the desert floor had prevented him from taking the shot that he so desperately desired, the thermals sufficient at such range to affect the flight of the bullet and render what otherwise would have been a confirmed kill a miss.
Now, he had received good enough intelligence to make the shot and even better he knew the precise location from which his target would appear because he had once made the same walk himself. All had been planned, all had been carefully organized, and soon would come the time to strike.
*
‘Wilms, Victor!’
The bellicose shout of the guard jerked Wilms like an electric shock and his guts plunged within him as he realized that Warner and his team had carried through with their threat.
Outside his cell door, through a narrow slot at eye–height, he could see a guard glaring in at him, two more faces behind his, could hear the jangling of the chains and manacles into which he would be forced. Suddenly, despite the Spartan cell in which he lived and the radical collapse of his world, he felt as though he were leaving home for something even worse. Which, he knew, he was.
He dragged himself up off the thin mattress and shuffled to the cell door, then turned and placed his hands behind his back. A second shutter opened, and strong hands cuffed him before the cell door was opened and the guards barged their way in and began manacling his ankles, and linking them with the heavy chains to his wrists. Within moments, he was weighed down by the steel and turned forcefully to march out of the cell.
‘Where am I going?’ he asked the nearest guard, hoping against hope that he was not being moved from the security max to a general prison.
‘Where we tell you. Move!’
The guards hustled him down the sterile corridor outside; plain walls, no windows, other cells locked and their shutters closed. The doors were sufficiently thick to deaden all sound, and all of the inmates spent twenty three hours per day locked behind them.
Wilms cried out inside for the power that he had once wielded; the ability to end the careers of all three of the guards escorting him with a simple command; the financial power to sway government with a single gesture; the fear and respect that had enabled him to strike terror into the hearts of men far stronger than he. One of the guards shoved him from behind and he realized that his power, his strength had been a mere illusion, Wilms the same thin and fragile man he had always been. He had been abandoned, his assets stolen, his fortune ripped from his hands like candy from a child, no trial, no media coverage, nothing. Victor Wilms had been cast into a pit of despair that he knew he would never escape from, but worst of all was the fact that he had been abandoned by his peers – Majestic Twelve and the Bilderberg Group had watched him fall and laughed as they had done so.
Tears pinched at his eyes and he realized that he was thinking of his parents, of the quiet Ohio town in which he had been raised. Crying for his momma. That’s what the jocks had sneered at him back in high school, the geeky, bespectacled Wilms no match for their strength and courage. In later years, he had revelled in destroying their careers one by one from afar, and watching them succumb to suicide, prison, drink or drugs. Now he realized he would perhaps encounter them again, in the general population, angry, embittered, aggressive men with nothing left to lose…
His betrayal by Majestic Twelve suddenly burned bright in his mind and he knew that he no longer had a choice. If he was truly to fall, then he would damned well take them with him.
‘I want to talk to Douglas Jarvis of the Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he announced.
The guards did not respond to him. Wilms, cultivating some of his recently lost superior–air, glared at the man to his left.
‘Did you hear what I said?!’
The guard whirled, twisted on his right boot as he brought his left knee up with a brutal jerk into Wilms’s guts. The blow ejected the air from Wilms’s lungs in a great rush as his legs folded up beneath him and he slumped to the polished floor with a cry of agony. The guards lifted him bodily, twisted his arms painfully up behind his back and dragged him toward the exit gates.
‘You’re done talking,’ the guard sneered into his face as he was hauled out of the cell block. ‘By this afternoon you’ll be in general population, and by tonight you’ll either be in the infirmary with a shiv sticking out of your guts or you’ll be in the morgue. Have a nice day.’
The guard shoved Wilms through the gates and he collapsed onto his knees, his aged bones cracking on the unforgiving floor as he fi
nally wept openly. The guards ignored him and dragged him toward the next exit gate, with every step bringing him closer to his doom.
*
Mitchell lay in the silence and ignored the cold that seeped it seemed into his bones, aching there as he waited. Most men his age would have long ago retired from field work, but Mitchell was driven by forces far beyond his control, his desire for not just revenge but the utter annihilation of Majestic Twelve and its Bilderberg representatives of far greater importance than his own wellbeing.
Members of the Bilderberg, together with their sister organizations – the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, were charged with the post–war take over of the democratic process. The measures implemented by the groups provided general control of the world economy through indirect political means. Originally conceived by Joseph H. Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, they formed a proposal for a covert conference to involve NATO leaders in general discussion on international affairs. The meeting would allow each participant to speak his mind freely because no media representative would be permitted inside. If any leaks occurred, the journalists responsible would be “discouraged” from reporting it. From the outset the American group was influenced by the Rockefeller family, the owners of Standard Oil – competitors of Bernhard’s Royal Dutch Petroleum. From then on, the Bilderberg business reflected the concerns of the oil industry in its meetings. Around a hundred and fifteen participants attended the meeting, coming from government and politics, industry, finance, education and communications. Participants were invited to the Bilderberg meeting by the Chairman, following his consultations and recommendations by the Steering Committee membership. The individuals were chosen based on their knowledge, standing and experience – just like the members of Majestic Twelve.
Although MJ–12’s origins could be found much further back in time in the wake of World War Two and the flight of the leaders of the Third Reich from Germany to South America, Mitchell knew that their agenda was reflected in the Bilderberg meetings, especially now that the west’s obsession with oil was being replaced with a keen desire to develop alternative fuels that would render the relevance of the Middle East’s powerful royal families a thing of the past. Mitchell was well aware that a paradigm shift was coming, a drastic alteration of the balance of power around the world, all of it engineered by the heads of state at the annual Bilderberg meetings and influenced directly by the members of Majestic Twelve.
Until now.
The work of the Defense Intelligence Agency had begun to unravel the vast network of informers and employees of Majestic Twelve, and in the course of several investigations they had succeeded in blowing wide open some of MJ–12’s most ambitious and secretive programs, agenda so classified that even the President of the United States was completely unaware of their existence.
In the course of those investigations, Mitchell had seen his own position within MJ–12 compromised, and ultimately he had been required to make the choice between killing for employment and killing for a reason. Mitchell, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had long since lost any real sense of sympathy for or empathy with the human race. Dedicated it seemed to destroying itself, mankind was to Mitchell an uncaring, selfish, blind and irresponsible creature for whom the future was somebody else’s problem. But the orders to murder a man who had developed a device which provided electrical power virtually for free, simply because his device would remove power from Majestic Twelve and the Bilderberg Group, had been too much for Mitchell. Worse than that, the assassination target had not even intended to make any money from his “fusion cage”, as it had been named, despite knowing that he could have made billions of dollars overnight. To Mitchell’s astonishment he had intended to give the device away to mankind, for nothing other than the sheer joy of altruism.
The death of Stanley Meyer had affected Mitchell greatly, and when he had then been ordered to murder a former President of the United States he had gone rogue. No longer would he answer to men who were powerful only because of their money and the offices they held. Mitchell would himself do something out of sheer altruism, and destroy for once and for all the incomparable greed that grew outward from MJ–12 like a cancer spreading across the globe.
A door opened from one of the cell blocks, almost a mile and a half away, and Mitchell’s train of thought slammed to a halt as he saw four guards exit the block, between them a small, white–haired man in orange prison overalls and weighed down by steel chains that glinted in the sunlight. Mitchell leaned down and pressed his eye to the military–grade optics. The scope did not have any zoom function, designed instead to provide the clearest image of a distant target possible. Mitchell had positioned the scope based on previous prisoners he had seen escorted from the block, and in the meantime he had watched birds of prey wheeling in the sky above to judge the thermals and the light winds between his lonely mountain hideout and the prison before him. Conditions were perfect, light winds, few thermals, clear visibility. Even at such extreme range, Mitchell knew that he could not miss, and with the gentle breeze in his face he knew that not only would his target be dead before anybody heard the shot, they would likely barely hear the shot at all. Mitchell would be long gone before the security guards would be able to pinpoint where the shot had come from.
His gloved finger rested on the trigger as his left thumb turned the rifle’s safety switch to off as he prepared to fire.
***
VIII
Ethan hadn’t been sure what he had expected to feel when he saw Victor Wilms being dragged out of the sally port of Florence ADX, but sympathy hadn’t been high on his list. Yet despite himself, the sight of an elderly man on his knees was still something that compelled him to reach out, to assist, to help in some way. It was only his knowledge of what a cruel man Victor Wilms had become that forced him to stand firm.
‘Doesn’t feel so great, does it?’
Lopez’s voice was calm but cold on the morning air as they stood alongside four armed guards, who were themselves arrayed before an armored truck. The security around a figure like Victor Wilms was in fact staged by Doug Jarvis back at the DIA: had they really wanted to move Wilms and not have him iced by Majestic Twelve, they would have slipped him out quietly under cover of darkness in a goods truck or similar, the security hidden out of sight. Jarvis had felt that highly visible security would make it easy for MJ–12 to spot and track Wilms to whatever hellish gaol he was destined for, and that Wilms would know it.
‘You think he’ll fold?’ he asked Lopez.
‘He’ll fold,’ she replied, for once in agreement with Doug Jarvis. ‘He doesn’t have the stones to survive in general population even if MJ–12 weren’t gunning for him.’
Wilms shuffled to stand before them, and Ethan looked down at the old man.
‘Last chance, Vic’,’ he said, mimicking Lopez’s talent for subtly irritating Wilms. ‘You talk now, or you spend what little will be left of your life waiting for a shiv in your kidneys.’
Wilms visibly trembled, and not from the cold. Ethan could see the fear in his eyes, running like poison through his veins. The old man’s shoulders sagged, and he spoke softly with the voice of a broken man.
‘There was a new player,’ he whispered, ‘a man who had approached Majestic Twelve a short while before the Antarctic expedition with a proposal.’
‘What kind of proposal?’ Lopez demanded.
‘It was something to do with old bones,’ Wilms replied, clearly not sure on the details of a science he probably knew very little about. ‘I figured this guy was trying to resurrect extinct species in order to extract living samples of some kind of super–virus from them.’
Ethan shot a glance at Lopez. ‘A link with Channing.’
Lopez nodded.
‘What’s that got to do with Varginha, and who are they?’
‘It’s not a them,’ Wilms said, ‘it’s a where. It’s in Brazil.’
Ethan couldn’t be one hundred per c
ent certain that Wilms could be relied upon, but the figure that he cut in the dawn, thin and pale and beaten, suggested that Wilms was a spent force who had finally realized that spilling everything was the only way to ensure that he wasn’t murdered in some filthy prison shower by young thugs who would pull off the homicide for nothing more than a packet of cigarettes.
‘All right,’ he said finally, willing to show Wilms an act of kindness in the hopes that it would encourage him to say more. ‘You just bought yourself a reprieve, but we need a name. Who was this new player that approached Majestic Twelve?’
Wilms looked up at Ethan and parted his lips to speak.
There was no sound as Wilm’s head snapped suddenly to one side as the side of his skull splattered across the asphalt at their feet and his body dropped in free–fall, the light gone from his eyes.
The sound of the shot boomed across the compound an instant later, even as Ethan and Lopez stood still and watched Wilms’s lifeless body collapse into a heap on the ground before them. It took Ethan a full second to whirl and look in the direction of the shot, scanning first the nearest watch tower even as he realized that the delay in hearing the shot must mean that the shooter was much further away.
‘Holy crap!’ Lopez uttered as she spun on her heel, one hand on her pistol.
The guards around them scattered, weapons drawn as Ethan and Lopez dashed for cover behind the nearest towering walls surrounding the compound. Ethan ran and looked up as he did so, to see a low ridge of hills something over a mile away and silhouetted against the bright dawn sky.
Lopez hit the wall and turned her back to it as she gasped.
The Extinction Code Page 5
