Apocalypse

48

Ethan leapt from the helicopter that deposited them near the bunker, with Jarvis close behind, running low as the wash from the blades flattened the grass around him with rippling waves of down-force.

The guards inside the bunker had once again been forewarned of their arrival and opened the elevator doors without fuss. Moments later they were descending in the elevator shaft.

‘You really think that Joaquin can cause an earthquake?’ Jarvis asked as he glanced at his watch.

‘Given everything else we’ve seen so far today, I wouldn’t put anything past him,’ Ethan replied. ‘What really maddens me is that he’s doing all of this on the back of men he has killed, the scientists who built the device that he’s been using. He’s a small man standing on the shoulders of giants.’

‘Including his father,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘A man who had some kind of genuine desire to benefit humanity, but whose work Joaquin has twisted to gain power.’

‘What’s his motivation?’ Ethan wondered out loud. ‘There must be more to this than just gaining power, or money, or even creating disasters into which IRIS can heroically sail and save lives, increasing his popularity. He must have some purpose — political, maybe. Purcell said that Joaquin was flirting with high-level figures in government and congress.’

Jarvis nodded.

‘It’s an angle we haven’t checked out. You think maybe he knows people, has friends on the inside who want to see him reach the senate, maybe even the White House?’

The elevator slowed as it reached the bottom and Ethan opened the gates.

‘Men of power and influence — they’re exactly the kind of people who move in his circle,’ he said as they walked down the corridor and into the Project Watchman facility. They hurried toward the main control panels where scientists were already programming the virtual-reality feeds.

A man was wearing a virtual-reality suit and headgear up on the platform as Michael Ottaway turned to them.

‘You got the coordinates?’ Ethan asked.

Ottaway nodded and gestured to a large plasma screen.

‘Yes. Our man’s in position. You can view his perspective on this screen,’ he said, and gestured to a nearby monitor.

Ethan and Jarvis looked at the screen and saw the feed from the VR headset. They watched as the viewer zoomed in on Bryson sitting on his airboat, swigging from a bottle. Behind him, a second airboat drifted silently toward him.

‘Damn it, I told you Bryson was a waster,’ Ethan said.

‘Speed it forward,’ Jarvis muttered to the scientist. ‘About five minutes.’

The scientist obeyed and the scene changed to the two airboats racing away from the spit of land. The viewer changed his position, catching them up as the airboats raced between the reed banks. Ethan saw the assassin firing bullets from his rifle, saw himself, Lopez and Bryson ducking to avoid the bullets and then the assassin broad-siding his airboat in front of theirs and shooting up their engine. Ethan watched himself leap up, sprint across the deck and hurl himself across the void between the two craft to land on the metal cage on the back of the assassin’s airboat.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Ottaway muttered at Ethan. ‘The hell you think you are, James Bond?’

‘Don’t encourage him,’ Jarvis said. ‘Keep moving forward, another couple of minutes.’

They watched as the viewer caught up with Ethan and the assassin fighting on the shore, black smoke smoldering from the crashed airboat, and then the assassin taking off into the woods with the camera.

‘There,’ Ethan said, ‘track him from there, as fast as you can.’

The scientist relayed the command to the viewer, before trebling the frame rate of the satellite’s feed. The viewer flew up to a height of a hundred feet, watching below as the assassin rushed through the forests at comical speed. The image brightened and darkened every few seconds as cloud shadows raced across the landscape. The assassin reached a crumbling old jetty perhaps two miles from the crash site, where a second airboat awaited with two men aboard.

‘He had back-up,’ Jarvis said. ‘But why didn’t he bring them along?’

‘To prevent any connection with IRIS in case we overpowered any of them,’ Ethan guessed. ‘They’re probably employees of the company, whereas the assassin likely stays off the official company books. No paper trail, total deniability.’

They watched for the next few minutes as the airboat made the long journey back to civilization. The three men exited the boat and took a Lincoln from the local lot. The vehicle zipped through the fast-flowing traffic, the viewer doing a skillful job of tracking the car despite the accelerated speed of the footage.

‘He’s heading for the marina,’ Jarvis said.

Ethan watched as the men got out of the Lincoln and boarded a small powerboat moored at Deering Bay Marina, south of Miami. Moments later the vessel raced out to sea.

Ethan checked his watch.

‘Sixteen fifteen hours,’ he said, and turned to the scientist. ‘You got any way of tracking electromagnetic fields out of the Bermuda Triangle?’

Ottaway nodded and gestured to another screen.

‘NASA’s already on it. All satellites monitor or transmit as part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but they’re using a few satellites in geostationary orbit right now to monitor specifically for spikes in the region of the Florida Straits.’

Ethan turned back and watched as the powerboat soared into deep water, toward the Miami Terrace shelf. It almost looked as though it were heading out for the true ocean when suddenly a large vessel appeared on the horizon as the viewer looked up briefly to check his direction.

The powerboat slowed and pulled alongside the huge yacht. Ethan didn’t need to see the name on the back of the vessel to know which one she was.

‘The Event Horizon,’ he said. ‘Joaquin Abell’s personal yacht.’

‘You sure?’ Ottaway asked.

‘We’ve been aboard,’ Jarvis said. ‘Slow the frames back down and zoom in.’

Ottaway obeyed and they watched as the viewer dropped down to the deck of the powerboat, walking amongst the assassin and his two accomplices. A large access door opened vertically from the side of the yacht’s hull, the door coming to rest just above the surface of the water. The powerboat was lifted via a small crane into a hangar within the yacht.

The interior of the yacht was a pixilated black mass, but as the assassin stepped from the powerboat to the very edge of the hangar, still in the sunlight, he held in his hand the camera that he had stolen from Charles Purcell.

A hand reached out from the pixilated blackness and took the camera, while another, which clearly belonged to the same man, vigorously shook the assassin’s giant hand.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ Ethan hissed at the screen, ‘show yourself.’ The big assassin was smiling broadly, his face demonically half-shadowed where the satellite camera had failed to image his face. ‘Come on,’ Ethan urged.

‘He’s not going to be imaged,’ Jarvis said.

Ethan raised a hand to indicate that the old man should wait before abandoning hope.

Suddenly, the big assassin laughed out loud and reached out, one huge arm wrapping around the shoulders of the hidden man and pulling him into a hug. With a flourish, Joaquin Abell was pulled out into the sunlight against his powerful friend as he returned the embrace.

‘Freeze frame!’ Ethan shouted.

The image became static, a moment of time frozen, and Ethan thumped a fist down on the table.

‘Now we’ve got you,’ he said in delight.

‘Not quite, I’m afraid,’ Jarvis replied. ‘This is where our advantage ends.’