Callsign: King

13.

The Indian Ocean, 200 miles southeast of Mogadishu, Somalia

It’s like the Brugada incident all over again, Sara thought.

Two years ago, in order to find a cure for a lethal retrovirus that threatened the very survival of the human race, she had left the familiar environs of the research lab, joined a team of lethal Spec Ops warriors, and HALO jumped out of a stealth aircraft into the middle of a free-fire zone.

This felt a lot like that.

Except without Jack.

She and Fulbright had boarded a transport plane in the early hours of the morning following their escape from the hospital, and traveled to Mogadishu, where she was introduced to a team of commandos ostensibly running pirate interdiction operations.

Somalia was a shock to her system. It was everything she had expected Addis Ababa to be; dirty, primitive, a constant assault on her senses. Even sequestered as she was at a highly fortified military style base, surrounded by massive Hesco barriers that looked like the building blocks of an ancient pyramid, the sounds and smells hammered at her. Only her unyielding sense of purpose, in this case, focusing on getting ready to accompany Fulbright in the raid on the floating Manifold lab, allowed her to shut out some of the tumult.

Now, thirty-six hours after arriving in Mogadishu, she was being whisked under the tepid waters of the Indian Ocean. Like the rest of the team, she clung to the exterior of a commercial variant of the Mark VIII Mod 1 Swimmer Delivery Vehicle. The SDV looked like an enormous black torpedo, and had originally been designed to covertly ferry an entire US Navy SEAL dive team and all their gear, to water-borne objectives.

Sara didn’t think Fulbright’s team were Navy SEALs. She hadn’t asked, but her impression was that they were private security contractors, working for the CIA. That probably meant that there were at least a few former SEALs on the team, doing the same job, but presumably for better pay. She had mixed feelings about that. It seemed to be the way things were done in the modern age, but as a civil servant herself, and a close friend of many military personnel, she was uncomfortable with the idea of a paramilitary force that was ultimately motivated only by greed.

She had put these concerns aside in order to focus on the intensive training that would prepare her to accompany the assault team. A certified SCUBA diver, she felt comfortable underwater, but much of the equipment was unfamiliar to her. The team employed Drager LAR-V rebreathers, which utilized carbon scrubbers and a small bottle of pure oxygen to recycle a diver’s air in a closed-circuit. The device, worn on the chest, was about the size of a large lunch box, considerably lighter and less bulky than traditional SCUBA tanks. Sara spent nearly two hours getting used to the rebreather, while being towed around by the SDV. There hadn’t been time for more than that. The SDV and its future passengers had been loaded aboard a heavily armed support ship, and the mission had gotten underway.

From that point forward, Sara had simply allowed herself to be carried along, quite literally as was now the case, by forces beyond her control. Her expertise counted for nothing; she was just another piece of equipment the team had to lug around. The passage from the support ship to the target vessel seemed to take hours. In total darkness, enveloped in the soup-warm waters of the Indian Ocean, it was all she could do simply to stay awake.

She knew they had arrived at their destination when the DSV’s humming screws stopped turning and the submersible coasted to a stop, but even then, there was nothing to do except wait for Fulbright to give the signal to surface.

Despite her earlier bravado, she was dismayed by the knowledge that, perhaps less than a hundred feet away, people were being killed. It was easy to be sanguine about the death of terrorists and criminals when it took place thousands of miles away; less so, she had discovered from personal experience, when it was happening right in front of you. She had to keep reminding herself that these were the people who had brutally executed her friends, and that given the chance, they would have done the same to her.

The assault team went in from two locations on opposite sides of the vessel. Their movements were guided by a remote surveillance aerial vehicle-a drone-that identified targets and relayed the information in real time to the shooters. With suppressed weapons and night-vision goggles, Fulbright’s team visited swift and silent death on the Manifold security team. Less than ten minutes later, Sara felt a tapping on her arm, and knew that the bloody part of the job was finished.

She surfaced to find herself facing a wall of steel. The research ship, which had looked so small and insignificant in satellite imagery, appeared massive up close. Fulbright bobbed next to her, a red-lensed flashlight casting an eerie glow on the dark water and revealing an aluminum scaling ladder hanging from the side of the vessel. Following his lead, Sara scrambled up the ladder, clinging tightly to the rungs, lest her neoprene clad feet lose purchase on the slippery metal. Fulbright was waiting for her at the top, and offered a steadying hand as she clambered over the side rail.

“We’ve secured the ship,” he told her as she stripped off her gear and unzipped her thin wetsuit to allow some of the heat to dissipate. “No friendly casualties. The lab is just below.”

Sara hefted the water-tight bag that was her only piece of mission essential equipment. “Lead on.”

Guided by radioed instructions from the leader of the commando team, they descended a metal staircase and traversed a short companionway to what looked to Sara like a repurposed cargo hold. But as Sara entered, all sense of being on a marine vessel disappeared.

The familiar equipment and computer workstations, illuminated by banks of fluorescent lights, would have looked right at home at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

The assault team had found two men working in the lab, and per Sara’s request, had managed to take them alive. This was not a matter of mercy or squeamishness on her part; the computers would almost certainly be locked-out, and compelling the prisoners to give them access was critical to the success of the mission. The two scientists, both bearded men about Sara’s age, wearing jeans and t-shirts, were presently kneeling with their hands atop their heads, under the watchful eye of the commandos.

Fulbright advanced and introduced himself. “Gentleman, let me get right to the point. You’ve been doing some very bad things. Developing weapons of mass destruction-”

One of the men started to protest, but Fulbright shushed him as a mother might a wayward child, and kept talking without missing a beat. “It’s downright criminal. No, it’s worse than that; it’s terrorism. And my friends and I have a standing policy when it comes to terrorists: immediate execution.

“You are still alive for one reason, and one reason only. I am going to give you a chance to repent.”

Sara had little interest in Fulbright’s interrogation methods, and instead began searching the lab to locate the physical products of the ongoing research. Near the center of the compartment, in a sealed Lexan containment chamber, she found the ape skull that had been taken from Felice Carter.

“Now I’m not going to go all Jack Bauer on your ass,” Fulbright was saying. “This is simple really. We already have what we want. We’ll be taking your computers and all your research back with us, and our techies will be able to hack your passwords and break through your firewalls…whatever it is that they do…and then we’ll know everything you know. But see, that takes time, and I’m kind of in a hurry. So here’s what I’m offering.

“You’re smart guys, right? Educated? You’ve got special skills that could be very useful. It’s not your fault that you wound up working for the wrong side. But that’s all over now. You’re done working for Manifold. Period. But I’d like to help you find a new job.

“The thing is, I’ve only got one position available, so think of this as a job interv-”

“I’ll do it!” one of the men shouted suddenly. “Please don’t kill me.”

A murderous look flashed in the eyes of the second scientist. “Dave, you son of a bitch.”

Fulbright shushed again. “Dave, is it? You’ve made the right decision. Welcome to your probationary period. Now, if you’d be so kind, step over here and log on.”

Sara tore herself away from the skull and moved over to the workstation where Dave was tapping in his password. She leaned over his shoulder. “Bring up all the files related to your current research.”

Dave complied, and as he did, Sara took a portable flash-drive from her bag and plugged it into the USB port. There wasn’t time to be choosy about which files to copy, and she knew that workstation probably wouldn’t have the really important stuff, like the genome of whatever virus Manifold was monkeying with. Genetic mapping typically required a supercomputer with memory measured in terabytes. Sara was primarily interested in the synthesis of their research. She pushed Dave out of the way and started dragging and dropping files into the flash-drive directory.

“That looks interesting,” she said, clicking on a file icon that read “Summary Report (draft).”

A text document opened, and despite the fact that it was both a summary and a work in progress, Sara saw that it was more than eighty pages long. She skimmed through it, ignoring the more technical aspects, and tried to get a general overview of what the project was really all about. Words began to leap out at her: retrovirus; evolution; consciousness.

“My God,” she whispered. “I know what they’re trying to do.”

“Well done, Dave,” Fulbright said. “Looks like you’re hired.”

“Son of bitch!”

The scream from Dave’s co-worker startled Sara, but not as much as what happened next. The man sprang to his feet and hurled himself across the room. Before he’d taken a single step, a storm of silent lead ripped into him and his chest erupted in a spray of crimson.

The man must have known he would die. Perhaps he had interpreted Fulbright’s comment as a tacit pronouncement of his own doom and decided he had nothing left to live for. Whatever the reason, when he decided to make his move, he tapped into his deepest reserves of determination, and when the bullets tore through his vital organs, he kept going. There was only one thing he wanted to accomplish.

Sara saw where he was headed, and in a flash of insight, understood what was about to happen. She had passed the conspicuous looking red button on the way in and recognized it as part of the lab’s emergency fail-safe containment system. The CDC employed a similar mechanism, which could be triggered by any number of remote sensor devices, or by a manual device just like that big red button. Evidently, even bioweapons designers were concerned about the accidental release of a deadly pathogen.

Before she could so much as squeak in protest, the man’s essentially lifeless body slammed into the button, and the fail-safe was activated. She knew that it would do a lot more than simply sound an alarm.