Ethan knew that Lopez was right, that Majestic Twelve had more than enough assets to organize a covert operation even out here in the Madagascan jungle. However, that ability could also be their Achilles Heel, requiring a presence of some kind that could likewise be tracked to an individual or perhaps a charter company. A bribed pilot, whose family had been threatened directly, was much less likely to talk than an honest charter.
‘If they came here, we could track them,’ Ethan summarised his thoughts. ‘So they play the blackmail card against local people instead and hope that it’s enough to cover their tracks.’
‘Which it is, right?’ Lopez said. ‘Even though the pilot talked, we’re no closer to the perpetrators now than we were yesterday.’
‘Except that we are,’ Ethan said. ‘Christiano, you said that the air force knew what aircraft were in that area at the time of the blasts, so they must keep records of all flights made by military aircraft, right?’
‘Sure,’ Rabinur replied, ‘the Malagasy air force isn’t very big, it’s easy for them to keep tabs.’
Ethan looked again out across the distant jungles and mountains. ‘Although it would be easy for a helicopter or similar to fly out over there and drop the fungus that caused the outbreak, somebody would have noticed, right? They couldn’t sneak it in and out, and the scientists in the area would have noticed.’
Rabinur shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but nobody mentioned anything about aircraft operating in the area.’
Ethan looked at Lopez, who got it straight away.
‘Drone,’ she said.
‘Small, silent at altitude and easy to crash into the jungle to disperse whatever biological terror it is they’ve cooked up, but practically impossible to find afterward,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Plus it would have been incinerated in the napalm attack we witnessed.’
‘But that won’t lead you to whoever was behind this,’ Rabinur said. ‘It’s untraceable, surely?’
‘A drone also has a very short range,’ Ethan pointed out, ‘and it would be hard to smuggle one through X–ray machines at customs, if not impossible. Therefore the only likely way to have done it would be to have launched it from a ship that never made landfall here.’
Rabinur’s eyes widened.
‘They could have sailed straight on by,’ he said, ‘nobody would have known a thing.’
‘Especially if the drone had climbed high enough by the time it reached the shore,’ Lopez agreed. ‘They could even have placed a GPS beacon on it, so they could locate the drone once the disease had spread and target the right area with the napalm.’
Rabinur’s eyes widened further and he suddenly shuffled through the paperwork in his folder.
‘The pilot,’ he said quickly, ‘he said something about how he used a GPS device to locate the target area, and then he aimed his weapons visually once he saw the white patch in the forest!’
Ethan nodded, clenched his fist at their minor victory. ‘If we pick up the record of every vessel that’s sailed these waters in the past few weeks, I’m willing to bet that one of them will lead back to Majestic Twelve.’
‘I’ll get right on it,’ Rabinur said. ‘It won’t take more than a few hours to collate the data.’
‘As fast as you can,’ Ethan urged him. ‘If we’re lucky, any ship we can link to this might lead us directly to the person responsible.’
*
Ilha Ferando de Noronha,
Atlantic Ocean
The deck of the yacht flared white in the brilliant sunshine as Professor Garrett leaned back in a chair and let the warm sunshine wash across his body. Anchored in a harbor off the bay of an island most people on Earth had never even heard of, the massive vessel dwarfed most of those around it.
One of an archipelago of twenty one islands in the Atlantic Ocean and over two hundred miles from the Brazilian coast, Fernando de Noronha was one of Garrett’s favorite bolt–holes. Although the island promoted tourism, it was a difficult place to reach and some three quarters of the entire island was designated as a national maritime park. Thus, the population was less than three thousand and the interferences minimal, especially when Garrett remained on the deck of his vast vessel and had local cuisine shipped aboard at his pleasure.
He was soaking up the sunshine when a crew member approached him with a satellite phone and coughed discreetly.
Garrett reached out for the phone without otherwise moving or acknowledging the crewman’s presence, and the young man handed him the phone and walked out of earshot across the deck as Garrett put the phone to his ear.
‘Yes?’
The voice that replied was gruff but recognizable as one of many freelancing mercenaries employed by Garrett through shell companies in the Cayman Islands, a man named Forbeck.
‘It is done,’ the voice said. ‘Initial reports suggest the entire area is now toast.’
‘Good,’ Garrett replied. ‘Make your way back to Brazil and await further orders.’
‘There was a problem.’
Garrett felt irritation rise up inside him and he clenched his jaw as he replied. ‘What problem?’
‘Two agents from the Defense Intelligence Agency were apparently at the site when the attack occurred, and both were killed. We picked up radio chatter last night confirming their deaths and suggesting the USA would enact reprisals if the matter was not dealt with immediately. The pilot we coerced into making the strike sang like a canary when he was picked up.’
Garrett cursed under his breath. He generally disliked hiring unknown third–parties to carry out such delicate work. A scientist would not have used such blunt instruments to perform such sensitive task. Now, there would be US agents crawling all over the site and questioning locals, and although there could be little physical evidence of what had occurred remaining at the site, it was not impossible that the presence of the yacht off Madagascar could be identified and linked to the outbreak.
‘We will leave immediately,’ he replied, unable to keep the anger from his voice. ‘Meet me in Brazil, and make damned sure you aren’t tailed or I swear when you get here I’ll feed you to the local wildlife myself!’
Garrett slammed the satellite phone down onto the deck and it shattered into several pieces that skittered along the polished wood. The deckhand hurried across and began picking up the pieces as Garrett lay back on his chair and forced himself to calm down.
‘Inform the captain to get underway and head for our facility off Brazil, no radio contact, understood?’
‘Yes sir.’
The crewman hurried away as Garrett closed his eyes and thought. The DIA would not take long to figure things out, if they weren’t already on his case. He would have to act faster than he had hoped, but that would be fine: he would soon have fresh test subjects now that the sample was almost ready to distribute.
Whoever reached his island first would get a great deal more than they bargained for.
***
XXVIII
‘We’ve got something!’
Ethan heard Rubinar’s voice before he even reached the hotel door, and then he realized that the agent’s voice was coming not from the corridor but from the ground floor outside the veranda.
Ethan hurried across to the veranda and looked down to see the agent waving wildly in his direction.
‘Get down here, now! It’s time to leave!’
Lopez was already on her feet as Ethan ducked back inside, as keen to leave the stifling heat and humidity as he was, a day bag slung over her shoulder. Ethan grabbed his own meagre belongings, already tucked into a similar bag as he followed her out of the hotel room and shut the door behind them.
Rubinar was waiting for them outside in the parking lot as they stepped out, sitting in a small jeep with the engine running as they hurried across to him and Ethan climbed into the passenger seat.
‘Start talking,’ Ethan said.
‘A man named Ryan Forbeck,’ Rubinar said as he drove out of the lot and onto the coast road toward the airpo
rt. ‘American national, landed here three months ago on a tourist visa. He’s been staying at one of the local hotels barely a mile from here.’
‘Why is he a person of interest?’ Lopez asked.
‘Financials,’ Rubinar explained. ‘He’s having a thousand bucks a week wire–transferred to his accounts, which he’s drawing a bit at a time. That wouldn’t raise alarm bells on its own, but we got in touch with the DIA in DC, who pulled in the National Security Agency to back trace the accounts from which the funds were originating, and we got a hit on a company called Pacific Leasing Corp.’
‘Shell corp?’ Ethan guessed.
‘Yep,’ Rubinar agreed, ‘except that this time that corporation is also linked to maintenance payments on a luxury yacht named San Ferdinand, registered in San Diego, California, and guess where that yacht was sailing six weeks ago?’
‘Damn me,’ Ethan said, ‘good work, Christiano! Who owns the yacht?’
Rubinar handed Ethan a folder, and he opened it up to reveal an image of a middle aged man with thin–rimmed spectacles and a refined, almost superior expression.
‘Professor Rhys Garrett,’ Rubinar said, ‘American national and biochemist, made his name selling advanced genetic profiling kits. He has countless patents to his name, many of which have earned him tens of millions of dollars. He no longer works in general science and has instead opened his own labs which are rumored to be working alongside departments of the United States military, which might well make this whole investigation a great deal more difficult than we thought it might be.’
Lopez looked at the image and frowned.
‘If this guy’s tied in with DARPA or something then we’re going to run into big trouble once we show up on their radar,’ she said.
‘Does Jarvis know about this?’ Ethan asked Rubinar.
‘I sent him the same file,’ Rubinar acknowledged. ‘He’s in the loop as though he’s the only person who is aware of what I’m working on. This hard copy was one I made at home, so nobody knows that you’re either alive or in on this.’
‘Good,’ Ethan said, and then looked at the agent. ‘You know that this means you’re a part of the loop as far as Majestic Twelve are concerned. If this Garrett is involved with them, this chink in their armor could lead right back to you.’
‘I agree,’ Rubinar said as he drove, ‘which is why we’re headed to the airport. Ryan Forbeck’s on the move and in a hurry. Following him and locking him down is the only way I can be sure that word won’t get back to MJ–12 on who broke through their security. If Forbeck shows up wherever he’s headed, with two agents on his tail whom I reported dead in Madagascar, I don’t want to think about what kind of knock on the door I’ll get.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Fine, we’ll take Forbeck down.’
‘What about DARPA?’ Rubinar asked.
‘They’re not the bad guys,’ Lopez replied for Ethan. ‘Sure, they’re government and they can be as shady as the CIA but they’re not in the revenge game. Doing your job won’t bring them down on you, but if Forbeck walks out of here you’re right, MJ–12 will back track him and clear up any loose ends. How much of a head–start does he have?’
‘Not far,’ Rubinar said, ‘and the next charter flight out of the country doesn’t depart for another hour. He bought tickets last night, so he’s planning to leave.’
Ethan rubbed his face to keep himself alert and urged Rubinar on.
‘Step on it,’ he advised. ‘If Forbeck suspects the authorities might be on to him he’ll try to conceal his trail. The tickets might be a ruse to do that. Do you have a tail on him?’
‘No,’ Rubinar admitted. ‘He left his hotel real fast, but he took a cab and we have the company name and the registration number of the vehicle.’
‘Find it,’ Ethan advised, ‘as soon as you do, we’ll take over.’
Rubinar nodded as he pressed on the accelerator pedal and the jeep surged forward along the highway, the wind rumbling past outside.
*
‘How much further?’
Forbeck checked his watch as the irritable cab driver replied in heavily accented English.
‘Twenty minutes sir, please.’
The heat inside the cab was oppressive and the stench of what might have been weed stuck to the back of Forbeck’s throat as he tried to ignore the garish decorations inside the cab’s interior and focus instead on the rear view mirror, which was angled sufficiently for him to maintain a watch behind the vehicle on the road.
Forbeck had worked in surveillance and as a mercenary for over a decade, and the military for twenty years prior, and he knew well what dangerous and powerful men were capable of. Professor Garrett did not frighten him physically in the slightest: at two hundred thirty pounds and six foot three, not many people frightened Forbeck at all. But Garrett’s threat was one to be taken seriously by anybody who wanted to survive in this cut–throat world of espionage. Forbeck had learned early in his military career that a weak man at the top of the chain was vastly more powerful than a strong man at the bottom, and that care and caution was essential in dealing with men who considered themselves to be a law unto themselves. What frightened him about Garrett was the fact that he was a man dabbling with powers that were far beyond Forbeck’s comprehension. Hired five years previously to maintain security on a facility on an island that Garrett apparently owned, as if that itself wasn’t enough evidence of the man’s tremendous financial power, Forbeck had already seen enough to know that the further he was from Garrett the safer he was. The professor’s experiments were both fascinating and terrifying by turns, and Forbeck wanted nothing to do with them. He had decided a year previously that he wanted out of the contract, but the lure of tens of thousands of dollars per month had kept him in place until now.
Two DIA agents were dead and it was without a doubt that within hours the island would be crawling with more agents driven by typical patriotic desire to root out those responsible and ship them back to the states for a public trial. With their forensic power they would soon uncover whatever the hell it was Garrett had unleashed in the Madagascan jungle, along with whatever was left of the drone Forbeck had purchased to deliver the samples into the wilderness.
Forbeck had no intention of flying out of Madagascar, and certainly no intention of showing up in Brazil so that his jumped–up squirt of an employer could have him fed to sharks or something as an example of what happened to people who “failed” in their duties. There were plenty of other ways off the island, provided one had cash, and Forbeck had ensured that he had sufficient funds to bribe his passage on a private vessel bound for just about anywhere but Brazil.
‘Head for the docks,’ he instructed the driver.
‘But you said that you…’
‘I changed my mind,’ Forbeck growled. ‘The docks, as fast as you can.’
The driver obeyed, sensing the threat of violence in Forbeck’s voice. He kept one eye in the rear view mirror as they headed toward the docks, and after a couple of minutes he spotted a distant vehicle following them on the road. Forbeck was not the world’s most paranoid former soldier – he had learned long ago that while paranoia was a useful defense mechanism, it also could prove one’s undoing just as quickly. But now he found himself staring at the jeep whenever it appeared in the mirror far behind them. Something about it sent alarm bells ringing in his mind, but he couldn’t tell what it was that had sparked his instincts.
The cab driver continued blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding in the rear seat as Forbeck’s hand reached down beneath his thin jacket and rested on the butt of his pistol, nestled in a shoulder holster. Reassured, he watched the vehicle behind them and noted that it was closing in, moving faster than they were.
He realized the source of his concern. The vehicle was moving with a great purpose, its lines on the road sweeping, moving fast, dust spiralling from its tires as it turned corners. But it was when he saw it move out and pass another vehicle on the road behind th
em that he suddenly and clairvoyantly knew that it was a threat.
‘Go faster,’ he ordered the driver.
‘This road is for vehicles driving at no more than…’
The pistol was out of Forbeck’s holster and pressed against the driver’s head before he could finish his sentence.
‘I go faster, I go faster!’ the driver squealed, his features flushed with panic as he pressed the accelerator to the floor.
***
XXIX
‘He could be anywhere!’
Lopez leaned between the jeep’s front seats as the vehicle descended a coastal road toward a small town nestled against the endless rollers of the Indian Ocean, a busy dock filled with countless boats and yachts.
Ethan raised his hands and used his fingers to make a box before his eyes, an old trick he’d learned in the Marine Corps, focusing on one small area at a time just as he searched the road ahead and the docks themselves, seeking anything unusual or out of place. A few moments later he spotted a vehicle that was weaving in and out of traffic barely a mile ahead of them.
‘There!’ he shouted, pointing ahead. ‘He’s in that cab!’
‘Are you sure?’ Rabinur asked.
‘Only one way to find out,’ Lopez said.
Rabinur slammed the accelerator down and the jeep flew down the hillside, Rabinur showing considerable driving skill as he weaved in and out of the traffic on the main road, horns hooting him and angry shouts whipped away on the hot wind as they rocketed toward the docks.
‘Told you he wouldn’t make for the airport,’ Ethan said. ‘Too easy for him to be traced. He’ll have paid for a ride out of here on a private vessel.’
Rabinur replied as he drove, gripping the wheel tightly.
‘There are a lot of tourist vessels that run out to the islands or across to the African mainland! He could pay for a ride on any of them, and the captains will easily turn a blind eye to him getting ashore in Africa without paperwork.’
The Extinction Code Page 19
