Extinction

1

One hour later, Colonel Anderson’s airplane touched down. He had to show his military credentials to be allowed the continued use of his cellphone, although he still experienced a dead spot as he was ushered through the airport.

When he reached the arrivals lounge, there were several military officers waiting for him. ‘Where are they?’ he demanded before anyone had the chance to introduce themselves.

‘Due to the helicopter being forced to circle for so long, fuel was a problem,’ the nearest officer said. A tall, athletic man in his mid-thirties, he led the group through the glass doors and outside to a waiting army limousine. Other men moved ahead to open the doors for them.

‘They had to land at DuPont Airfield, just outside the city,’ the tall man continued when they were inside the car. ‘The airfield’s only about ten miles from the city’s internment camp where the rioters and protesters are being held. It’s the most secure place in the area at the moment, so the prisoners are on their way there now.’

Anderson considered the situation. He would have liked Durham, Murray and Stevens to be isolated, but it could have been worse. At least they were in custody, and on the way to a secure location. He could deal with Durham and Murray, but Stevens posed another set of problems entirely. How much did he know? And what could be done about him? It was clear that the mayor was taking a keen interest in this, and Anderson didn’t want the situation getting blown out of all proportion. Would a ‘tragic accident’ be too obvious?

The majority of the government wasn’t involved in the Spectrum Nine programme. Almost nobody had any idea it even existed, and that was the way Tomkin wanted it kept. So yes, Anderson decided, an unfortunate accident for Ray Stevens seemed best. Anderson was pretty sure that Tomkin would authorize the same fate for the mayor himself if he continued to pry too deeply.

There was James Rushton too of course, the editor of the Post. What should be done about him? Urgent action was required. It just wasn’t worth taking the chance that Rushton would say or, even worse, print something about what he thought he knew. Any hint of what was really going on would cause untold damage to the plans.

From the car, Anderson called Tomkin. There was going to have to be a media curfew put in place, connected to today’s ‘terrorist’ incident; and then he would need authorization for James Rushton to be dealt with.

‘My hands are tied, James,’ said Harry Envers, the city’s mayor, regretfully.

James Rushton was sitting on the other side of the desk in Envers’ large, well-appointed office. ‘I understand that, Harry,’ he said reasonably, ‘and I appreciate what you’ve done so far, I really do. But is there really nothing we can do to get them out of there?’

Envers raised his palms. ‘My remit is this city, James, you know that. Only this city. And hell, martial law is in action here anyway, it’s amazing I’ve got any pull left at all. But outside the city limits I’ve got no authority at all. And that camp is way out of the city limits.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s under full military jurisdiction too. You know I’d help if I could. Hell, I’ve known Ray Stevens for over thirty years; I’ve had his wife on the phone most of the morning wanting to know what I’m doing about it — that is, when I’ve not been trying to explain things to the board of York Investments.’

Rushton looked down at the desk. He knew Envers was right; there was nothing he could do. But there was something Rushton himself could do. He still had no evidence, no cold, hard facts, but he now believed in his heart of hearts that Alyssa was right. Elements of the government were using the HIRP base as a covert weapons programme. She’d gone up there to investigate — with my blessing, damn me! — and then days later had become a ‘dangerous terrorist’, at least to hear the authorities tell it. He’d known Alyssa Durham for years and knew she was nothing of the sort. It was obvious what had happened — she had found out too much and was being silenced.

Well, to hell with it. He was going to run the story anyway.

Still sitting across from the mayor, Rushton pulled out his cellphone and called his office. His deputy editor, Hank Forshaw, answered.

‘Hank,’ he said, ‘I want you to compile everything we’ve got on the story Alyssa’s been working on and get it in this evening’s edition.’ He paused as Hank spoke excitedly on the other end of the line. ‘What?’ he asked in anger. ‘When?’ He listened for a few more moments, then hung up.

Envers looked at him. ‘What’s wrong?’

Rushton shook his head in disbelief. ‘They’ve shut us down,’ he replied.

‘The Post?’ Envers asked.

‘All of us,’ Rushton answered. ‘Jeffries has declared a national emergency due to the terrorist threat and ordered a total media blackout.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Envers exploded. ‘That’s completely unconstitutional!’

Rushton opened his mouth to add his own vitriolic opinion when the large mahogany double doors behind him burst open and armed military police marched into the office.

Behind them, the mayor’s secretary looked close to tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘they just walked straight past me.’

They approached Rushton, who jumped up out of his chair and backed away as two of the men reached for him, ignoring Envers’ shouts of outrage.

‘James Rushton,’ the lead officer pronounced, as his men managed to secure the newspaper editor and cuff his hands behind his back, ‘you are under arrest for assisting in the planning and execution of terrorist attacks against your country.’

‘What?’ Rushton cried out as he was escorted from the office. ‘Harry, do something!’ he yelled.

The lead officer nodded to two more of his men, who went round the desk towards the mayor, handcuffs at the ready. ‘Mayor Envers,’ the man intoned, ‘I hereby arrest you for the crime of treason.’

Harry Envers, the anger leaving his body to be replaced with the cold, helpless feeling of total despair, uttered not a further word of protest as the arresting officers led him away after his friend.

The prison bus bounced along the dirt road that led from the well-paved highway to the makeshift internment camp just a few more miles away.

‘Don’t worry,’ Stevens said to Alyssa and Jack from his seat behind them. ‘I know the mayor, known him thirty-four years. There’s no way in hell he’s gonna let anything happen to us. That’s why we got arrested and not just shot. He—’

‘No talking!’ came a shout from the front, and Alyssa watched as a uniformed guard strode down the bus, brandishing a night stick at Stevens. ‘You shut your mouth, you hear me?’ He regarded the three prisoners with contempt; hatred, even. ‘You traitors make me sick,’ he said with true vehemence, following up with a gob of spit to their feet.

He walked away, shaking his head and muttering to himself. Alyssa wanted so badly to speak to Jack but she wasn’t willing to risk the wrath of the guards. They’d obviously been told what she and the others were supposed to have done, and with things as heated as they were right now, it was possible that someone would just lose it and shoot or beat them to death. And so she remained quiet.

But what would happen next? The relief when the handcuffs had appeared and they had merely been arrested instead of executed was wearing off now. Stevens seemed confident of the mayor’s intervention but Alyssa wasn’t so sure. She thought it more likely that they hadn’t been killed because they were being filmed at the time. When the cameras were off, and they were ferreted away in some government installation somewhere, what would happen then?

To make matters worse, in the frantic race for the rooftop, Jack had left the flash drive still connected to the computer in Stevens’ office, leaving them once again with no evidence. She prayed that someone might pick it up and hand it on to the authorities but didn’t hold out much hope.

But maybe the right people had been watching the broadcast from the news helicopter; maybe Rushton, or even the mayor himself. But then again, maybe—

The next thought never materialised in her head however, as an explosion burst from underneath them and sent the bus spinning on to its side, sliding across the wasteland next to the track. The impact knocked the breath from her, and she thought that she must have lost consciousness at least for a short while, because when she opened her eyes, there were masked gunmen on board the bus, coming towards her.

She looked to her left and saw that Jack, too, was only just regaining consciousness, blood leaking from a gash to the side of his head. They both hung down from their tipped-up seats, their hands still secured to the guard rail of the bench seat in front.

She looked beyond the gunmen and saw the driver and three prison guards lying in pools of blood on the side of the bus interior, executed by the men who were now approaching.

She again peered beyond the men with guns, tensing as she prepared to take the bullets she knew were meant for her, and saw a curious sight: other gunmen, instead of executing the prisoners, were freeing them with bolt cutters.

The masked man nearest to her and Jack now did the same thing, slinging his rifle and using a pair of bolt cutters to free them of their cuffs. He must have seen the quizzical look on Alyssa’s face, and he winked at her over his mask. ‘We’re the Resistance,’ he said conspiratorially.

‘The Resistance?’ Jack asked from beside her, rubbing life back into his wrists.

The man nodded as he moved past to free Stevens. ‘You better believe it. You think we’re just gonna take this federal government crap?’ He shook his head. ‘No way, pal. In that camp up there,’ he continued, gesturing with the bolt cutters towards the windscreen and beyond, ‘they’ve got over two thousand red-blooded patriots, imprisoned illegally. And we’re not gonna take it any more. Soldiers on the streets? Dammit, we’re gonna take the streets back.’

The man released the prisoners behind them and headed back to the front, where he turned to them. ‘Well, what you waiting for, a signed invitation? You’ve been rescued, say thank you and get your asses off the bus!’

Alyssa took the lead, murmuring thank yous as they followed the other prisoners down the sabotaged, half-destroyed bus, careful to avoid the flames that licked at the broken windows.

Out on the road, Alyssa could see the camp in the distance, a huge place for a temporary internment camp, covered with barbed-wire fences and gun posts. She watched as the gunmen made their way towards the camp; some on foot, some in vehicles, but all armed to the teeth.

Alyssa shook her head. ‘What the hell is happening to this country?’

Jack put his arm round her and checked behind for Stevens just as the ground shook beneath them.

Alyssa recognized the impact as being from an artillery shell, and realized that the camp must have seen the ‘Resistance’ coming. She heard Jack gasp and then she turned to look for Stevens too.

But instead of the big, heavy, well-dressed banker, what she saw was a horrific mass of blood, internal organs and widely-strewn body parts. Stevens had been hit by shrapnel from the shell, and the result was devastating.

Alyssa noticed that Jack’s eyes were wide, and knew that the sight of all that blood and gore might well cause panic to set in, and so she grabbed him by the arm and started to run, pulling him with her.

To all sides she saw masked members of the Resistance, along with many of the transport’s escaped prisoners, fall like leaves from the trees under a hail of gunfire; cars, bikes, trucks and people were shredded by more artillery shelling, until the scene was exactly like the worst parts of her tour in the Middle East. It was a slaughterhouse out there, plain and simple.

She thought she saw some of the masked gunmen make it as far as the fences, their impressive numbers making up for their suicidal tactics, but had no time to watch any more; she was leading Jack over the broken wasteland, stumbling over rotten dirt tracks and unused paths until the sounds of battle started to grow fainter and fainter.

They were in a protected lee now, the low lip of the bank providing some much-needed protection. Alyssa had no idea for how long they had been running, but the other prisoners were all gone, either run off in their own direction or killed by the horrendous cross-fire, and Alyssa and Jack were alone, their breathing ragged and hoarse.

‘What are we going to do?’ Jack whispered to her.

Alyssa looked at him with steely determination. ‘I think we should count our blessings,’ she said calmly, ‘and get the hell out of here.’

2

‘This whole thing is getting out of hand, David,’ John Jeffries said, looking his old friend in the eye. General Tomkin stared straight back, until Jeffries had to turn away.

The two men had decided to meet in private and were now ensconced in a duplex apartment which Jeffries kept for his mistress, who was out of town for a few days. The apartment was registered in a false name, and had no connection on paper to either of the two men. Tomkin had still insisted that his own bodyguards conduct a thorough check of the building for both physical and electronic surveillance, but the place was clean.

‘It’s too late for second thoughts now, John,’ Tomkin warned. ‘Way too late. We’re past the point of no return, I hope you understand that.’

‘I think you’re wrong,’ Jeffries replied. ‘I don’t think we’ve gone too far yet. The weapon’s been tested, yes. But we still haven’t gone ahead with the plan. We don’t have to.’ He shook his head. ‘We don’t.’

Tomkin sighed inwardly. He had been waiting for this moment; it was bound to come sooner or later, and he was surprised it hadn’t been sooner. The week’s events had been enough to test any man. First, the repercussions from the testing of the device; not only the strange phenomena themselves but the chaotic, violent backlash that had been unleashed across the globe as a result. People were literally scared for their very lives, thinking the world was about to end. Tomkin sympathized with Jeffries on that score; there was a hell of a job on to control the rioters and protesters.

And then there were those two fugitives that Anderson was chasing, the only people who had so far made the connection. The newspaper editor and the mayor had been taken care of, and bits of Ray Stevens had been identified scattered about the wasteland near the prison camp, after an unsuccessful attempt to liberate it by a group calling itself the ‘Resistance’. The existence of such a group was another major worry, of course, but of more concern was the fact that no remains had so far been found of Alyssa Durham or Jack Murray. He had to assume that they were still alive, and potentially dangerous.

Still, at least the media was now under control. Tomkin relaxed into one of the comfortable leather couches which dotted the apartment’s oak-floored living area. With the mayor under arrest, Jeffries had been worried about the political implications, but the attack on the internment camp had played right into their hands. ‘Evidence’ was fabricated that linked both Envers and Rushton with the resistance movement, and they had since been transferred to a tactical base for further investigation, a decision backed by the President himself. Other figures, in media and politics, would be scared to move against the authorities now, even if they knew anything, which they probably didn’t.

So, while Tomkin understood that the past few days had been testing, he did not see the problems as insurmountable. In fact, a lot of it played into their hands; when the entire thing was over, his country would have not only a military grip on the rest of the world, it would be able to claim the moral and even spiritual high ground.

Tomkin knew what was really bothering his friend. He took a sip of his drink. The fact was, Jeffries was getting cold feet about the agreed utilization of Spectrum Nine. Tomkin knew that it was one thing to talk about things in the abstract, but to see the results — as they had with that little island recently — tested the mettle of even the strongest man.

‘John,’ Tomkin said reasonably, placing his drink down on the coffee table between them, ‘I know you are a patriot of the first order. You want what’s best for your country. You want what’s best for your countrymen. Isn’t that so?’

‘Of course it’s so!’ Jeffries exclaimed. ‘But—’

Tomkin cut him off with a wave of his hand. ‘But nothing,’ he said firmly. ‘But nothing. This country is being attacked on all sides. Terrorists everywhere, regimes building their own long-range missiles to wipe us off the map.’ He banged his hand down on the coffee table. ‘And are we going to just sit here and take it? Are we going to let them?’ He shook his head. ‘We sure as hell are not. I can’t even believe you’re faltering at this stage. Don’t you remember what happened to Adam?’

‘Don’t you dare speak to me about that boy!’ Jeffries spat back, but his vehemence was short-lived. ‘Don’t remind me about him,’ he added softly.

Adam Jeffries, John Jeffries’ eldest son, had lost his wife and child in a terrorist bomb attack. Adam had been a fireman and was first on the scene, horrified that it was his own dead family he had to pull from the burning wreckage. He had left the fire service and signed up with the army the very next day. Sent to the Gulf, the young man only lasted three weeks before an improvised explosive device blew both his legs off, leaving him to bleed slowly to death in a ditch by the side of the road, his fellow soldiers unable to retrieve the body because of enemy sniper fire.

Terrorists had taken John Jeffries’ son, daughter-in-law and grandchild in as horrible a way as could be imagined. Tomkin knew all of this, and it was one of the reasons why he had approached his old friend with the plan. Tomkin had needed some real political muscle behind the scheme, and Jeffries was the perfect match.

The trouble was, he was not a military man himself. He was the Secretary of Defence for the world’s largest superpower but he had never fired a shot in anger, nor been shot at himself. He saw things like a civilian, and had a civilian’s weaknesses.

Tomkin understood compassion, but compassion would never win wars. And that was what they were fighting. A damn war.

‘Look, John, I know it’s a morally repugnant act, what we’re doing,’ Tomkin said. ‘Maybe we’ll even be sent to hell for it. But that’s why we need to be strong. You and me. Willing to sacrifice ourselves, even our mortal souls, to protect our great nation.’

Jeffries picked up his glass from the table and took a long drink, then looked across at Tomkin. ‘You said we were going to present Spectrum Nine to the President. It was going to be his decision to use it, not ours.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Tomkin said. ‘But we both know that he would never give the go-ahead. The project would just end up being mothballed, never used. Or even worse, the technology would get into enemy hands and then be used against us. How would you feel then?’

Jeffries’ hands tightened round his glass. ‘It would just be…’

‘Easier?’ Tomkin finished for him. ‘Of course it would be. Give the responsibility to the other guy. Pushing the button yourself is much harder. You need to be stronger, much stronger.’ Tomkin paused, levelling his gaze at his friend. ‘John,’ he asked, ‘are you strong enough to go through with it?’

Jeffries finished his drink in one action and lifted his eyes to the ceiling as he asked himself the same question. Eventually, he looked at Tomkin.

‘Yes,’ he said evenly. ‘I am. We will proceed as planned.’

Tomkin nodded his head, pleased.

Now he just had to hope that Anderson could find Murray and Durham, and take care of the only two people who could still cause problems.

3

‘So what do we do now?’ Jack asked as they sat shivering under the trees.

The forest protected them from the wind, but it was unseasonably cold, chilling them to the bone. They still had on the clothes they had been wearing since the meeting at the train station — jeans, pullovers and thin jackets — which had been sufficient for daytime in the city but were proving to be grossly insufficient for night-time in the forest.

‘Now,’ Alyssa said with chattering teeth, ‘we make a fire.’

She set about telling Jack what type of leaves, twigs and branches to look for, and then they set off to gather what they needed.

As Alyssa searched in the undergrowth which bordered the clearing they had found, she suppressed a smile, despite their situation. Jack was such a city boy, she didn’t think he’d ever had a night outdoors before. Luckily for him, she’d had plenty. Yet another thing that she and Patrick had liked to do together; nights out camping went hand in hand with the adventure sports they had always enjoyed.

Alyssa could at last think of Patrick without guilt; she was with Jack now. Through circumstance perhaps, but she was with him nevertheless, and she was finally able to accept it.

She and Jack had walked — or rather limped in exhaustion — for the entire day, careful to avoid roads and any other signs of civilization. She didn’t know how far they’d gone, but estimated their pace as no more than two miles per hour; twelve painful hours would have put them about twenty-four miles from the internment camp. Not far enough, to her mind. An attack on a federal internment camp? A resistance movement in her own country? And the response from the camp! Returning gunfire was one thing, but the use of artillery shells on native citizens was just too much. She truly never thought she’d live to see such a thing.

She had no idea where they were now, but assumed they’d made it to one of the vast national parks that bordered the city. Wherever it was, they should be safe for the time being. Nobody would be out here now; there was a curfew in place, and it wasn’t likely that people would be allowed out of the city.

They were lucky in a way, she considered as she brushed aside some surface leaves to gather the dryer leaves below. If they hadn’t been arrested and transported to the internment camp, they might never have made it out of the city. She paused, thinking about Ray Stevens. It was a shame he’d not been so lucky.

‘Alyssa!’ Jack called. ‘Alyssa! Get over here!’ He clearly didn’t seem to consider the fact that other people might hear him.

She found him kneeling by a tree, his hands hidden down some sort of large hole.

‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said, beckoning her over with a muddy finger.

The hole Jack was looking down seemed to be man-made and out of it he was lifting wallets, mobile phones, car keys, money.

Alyssa bent down to look at the cache. There were passports, driving licences, social security cards for a whole host of people, men, women and children, probably about two dozen in all.

Jack looked up at her. ‘I was looking for dry wood, like you said, and I found a big pile right here. I started to pick it up,’ he pointed to the stack of branches and twigs he’d placed to one side, ‘and then found this hole, covered with a bit of earth on top of a tarpaulin.’

‘What does it mean?’ Alyssa wondered.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, pocketing two of the wallets, along with car keys and some cash, ‘and I don’t care. But now we’ve got ID, transport, and money. That solves a lot of our problems. I’ve got IDs for a man and a woman, about our age and description. The photos are no good, but we can work on that later. I’ve no idea where the cars are, but we might get lucky.’

Alyssa knew it made sense, although she felt guilty about taking other people’s things. And that was another thing, she thought. ‘Never mind the cars,’ she said to Jack, ‘where are the people?’

‘Who cares?’ Jack said.

‘Why would they bury their ID and money out in the middle of a forest like this?’ she wondered out loud. ‘The only reason would be if they wanted to leave their old lives behind, start afresh.’

‘Why not burn it then?’ Jack asked.

‘In case they need it again. Once the threat has passed.’

‘What threat?’ Jack asked.

‘The end of the world. I would guess these people have escaped into the woods to get away from what they think might be coming. They must be survivalists, maybe even extremists of some kind. You know the sort,’ she said. ‘But they don’t know for sure if it’s really true, so they’re hedging their bets.’

All of a sudden, Jack looked unsure. Scared. ‘They probably… They probably wouldn’t go too far from where they buried it, would they?’ he asked nervously.

‘I’m not sure,’ Alyssa answered, looking around the small clearing anxiously. ‘But—’

She never finished the sentence, interrupted by the supersonic blast of a large calibre handgun echoing from the trees behind them, and the spray of wood bark as the tree in front of them erupted from the bullet’s heavy impact.

‘Get the hell away from there!’ an angry male voice shouted from the woods and then Alyssa could hear other voices too — Did you get them? — Where are they? — Come on! — There!

There was another loud crack, and Alyssa pushed Jack aside as the tree trunk exploded just where they had been crouched, more wood splinters hitting them even as they raced for their lives into the forest, angry screams and gunfire pursuing them all the way.

Five minutes later, Alyssa and Jack crouched low, motionless behind a long row of ferns. After an all-out sprint through the forest, they were struggling to control their breathing, trying to keep as quiet as they could. They hadn’t heard the sounds of feet crashing through undergrowth for a while now, and hoped that the survivalists had either gone the wrong way, or given up altogether.

‘Do you think it’s safe to move?’ Jack asked, his voice strained from the chase.

‘I’m not sure,’ Alyssa whispered back to him.

‘It ain’t safe to move, darlin’,’ came a cold, hard voice from directly behind them.

Alyssa and Jack turned to see a large bearded man in a camouflage bush jacket staring at them, a wicked-looking hunting knife in his hand, the serrated blade ten inches long.

‘I’ve got ’em!’ he called out loudly. ‘Over by the stand of ferns!’

Alyssa felt her heart rate quicken even more as the sounds of people moving through the forest reached her once more. They were running out of time.

‘Damned government pigs,’ the man drawled through his thick beard. ‘How the hell did you find out about us?’ When his captives didn’t answer, he inched towards them menacingly. ‘Ain’t no matter,’ he said. ‘Ya goin’ tell us everything anyway.’ He turned his knife to admire the blade. ‘Ol’ Carol-Ann’s gonna see to that, ain’t ya, darlin’?’

He was talking to the knife, Alyssa realized with a sick feeling. She heard footsteps getting closer, and knew that she had to act.

The man was still admiring his knife and Alyssa surged forward, her fingers snaking out towards his face. She ignored the knife, knowing she wasn’t strong enough to wrestle it from his grasp. Instead, she drove her thumbs into the inside corners of his eyes, gouging deeply, the way she had been shown by some of the special ops soldiers she’d worked with in the Gulf.

The man screamed and dropped the knife. Alyssa ignored her feelings of disgust as she continued to drive her thumbs in, before turning them outwards, scraping the eyeballs from their sockets.

Clear, warm liquid ran down her thumbs on to her hands and wrists; one thumb slipped out with the fluid, whilst the other one came out with the eyeball itself, still attached by the slick, greasy optical nerve.

The man continued to scream as he went into a seizure, jerking in Alyssa’s hands. She let go, disgusted with herself, and felt no satisfaction as the man fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

Jack just stared in stunned amazement. Alyssa picked up the hunting knife, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away from the ferns.

She pushed through bushes and leapt over small streams and scattered branches, her mind on nothing at all but getting out of there alive. She could hear gunshots now, from different weapons — a big handgun, what sounded like a small-calibre hunting rifle, even a shotgun — but the rounds never found their mark. They came close once or twice, but mainly Alyssa could hear the bullets impacting trees well wide of their mark.

The darkness of the forest, occasionally punctuated by the light from the stars and moon whenever they reached a clearing, was both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, they couldn’t see very well where they were going, which meant that they tripped up over logs or found themselves wading through muddy bogs too many times for a fast getaway. On the other hand, their pursuers were equally disadvantaged and the likelihood of their hitting anything was remote. They were probably aiming towards the noise that she and Jack made as they crashed through the forest, but sounds could be deceptive in such an environment. Anyone aiming a weapon would also have to stop to listen and then take aim, which would slow them down. The shotgun, whose scatter-shot effect covered a large area, was a worry, though. These guys also would undoubtedly know the forest much better than she and Jack did; it was possible some of their group was circling round to some known point ahead of them to cut them off. But what options did they have? They had to keep on running, it was as simple as that.

She could hear Jack’s ragged breath next to her. At least he was keeping up. She had worried about his condition before, when they were working their way up the skyscraper’s stairwell. Sheer terror was probably doing the work for him now. Sure, there had been armed men chasing them back in the city, but out here, things were different; the alien environment and irrational, unseen pursuers ratcheted up the terror to a whole new level.

Yes, she thought as they continued to race along, terror would keep Jack right by her side.

After all, it was having the same effect on her.

Five minutes and two terrifyingly close shotgun blasts later, Alyssa and Jack came bursting out from the forest’s undergrowth into bright moonlight.

They could hear rushing water, just feet away. ‘A river!’ whispered Jack. He tugged at her arm. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’

But Alyssa could hear that the river was strong; they would have no chance crossing it. Instead, the current would simply take them downstream — to where? There might be rapids, and she imagined their bodies being smashed to pieces on the rocks.

‘Have you got a better idea?’ Jack asked, taking her hands and looking into her eyes. ‘Come on, we’ve got to do this. It’s our only chance.’

Alyssa was still reluctant. Maybe they could make their way down the river bank instead? But then another shotgun blast sounded, and Alyssa felt the passage of warm air over her shoulder as the wide-spread pellets barely missed her.

She knew he was right. She gripped his hands, nodded once, and then they turned and threw themselves into the crashing river.

The two bodies were carried downriver at a frightening pace, swept along by the violent current.

Alyssa kept trying to find Jack, grasping hold of him before losing him, time and time again. She struggled to keep her head out of the freezing, surging waters, gasping for breath in the small moments she had before the water came crashing down on her again.

The channel narrowed, the pace quickened and swept them towards huge boulders that glinted in the moonlight. But they came through unscathed, the path of the water guiding them straight down the middle, between the rocks which would have meant instant death if they’d come too close.

Alyssa lost all sense of time as the river swept them along, and was starting to lose all sensation in her body too. Somewhere in her mind, she realized she was starting to become hypothermic. She looked across the dark river for Jack, and found him moments later. Was he still alive? Spun this way and that by the current, it was hard to tell.

They would have to leave the river soon, she knew that in her befuddled mind. If they didn’t, they would die.

‘Jack!’ she called out, swallowing river water as she was taken under by the current. Her head pulled free and she called again. ‘Jack!’

‘Alyssa!’ she heard him call back, a huge wave of relief flooding her. ‘We need to get out of this river!’ he shouted.

‘Start to head for the left-hand bank!’ she yelled back. It was the closest, and would also put them on the other side of the river to their pursuers.

‘OK!’ Jack shouted back, and she watched as he started to struggle sideways against the current. She did the same, pushing hard against the seemingly solid wall of water.

They weren’t going to make it. It was just too fast, too powerful, and she was too weak now, her body failing after all it had been through.

‘I can’t do it!’ she heard Jack call through the dark night, hearing the struggle in his voice as he continued to try and push towards the riverbank.

‘Me neither!’ she answered. She closed her eyes. Was this the end? After coming so far, would they die in this cold, dark river?

But then the sensation of the river changed ever so slightly, seeming both to widen out and get even faster at the same time; and then she heard the roar ahead of her, a sound that began to fill her head completely.

She was carried forwards faster and faster, only able to get small breaths now and again when she forced her head up out of the water. She thought she could hear Jack screaming but couldn’t make out his words.

And then the vista opened out ahead of her, the moonlight showing the river coming to an abrupt end just twenty feet away, and she understood.

‘Waterfall!’ she heard herself screaming, even as she was pulled under and her mouth filled with cold water. Her mind went blank as she was pulled inexorably over the edge, her body plummeting two hundred feet into the watery abyss below.

4

It was over three hours later when Alyssa finally awoke, coughing and spluttering as her eyes opened, still convinced she was drowning.

But then she saw Jack, his arms wrapped close around her, and her anxiety eased. But where were they? She felt warm, at least. Then she realized there was a fire. She looked around her and saw they were inside a small shelter made from branches lined with ferns. Maybe Jack had more of an idea of what he was doing than he let on, she thought idly.

She saw their clothes hanging on makeshift drying poles over the fire, and realized that they were both naked, entwined on a bed of ferns.

‘What happened?’ she asked at last, when the dryness in her mouth eased slightly.

‘We came down over the waterfall,’ Jack explained. ‘The water was deep, and you must have passed out when you hit, but it was a lot slower at the bottom and I managed to drag you to the bank. The left-hand side, like you said.’

She clutched his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed.

He squeezed her back. ‘You would have done the same,’ he said.

She licked the dryness from her lips again. ‘What happened then?’ she asked.

‘I realized we were both going to go hypothermic if we didn’t get warm, so I followed your advice about how to make a fire, and got one started. You didn’t tell me how hard it was!’ he said light-heartedly. ‘Without matches or a lighter, it must have taken me about forty minutes to get the damned thing going.’ He smiled. ‘But finally it caught, and I used some other bits of wood to make this little shelter, then stripped us both off, and… well, here we are.’

Alyssa nodded. ‘Here we are,’ she murmured and kissed him, a gesture of relief in being alive more than anything.

Jack reached forward, checking their clothes. ‘They’re nearly dry,’ he said.

‘Good,’ Alyssa replied. ‘It’s must be nearly dawn. We’re going to have to move.’

Jack nodded. ‘Bad news about our travel plans,’ he told her.

‘Oh?’

‘The car keys have gone, all of them. Not that we’d have been likely to find the cars anyway. I mean, they could have been parked anywhere.’

‘The IDs?’ Alyssa asked anxiously.

Jack pointed to the fire. ‘Drying out along with the clothes. About three hundred in notes too, and some bank cards we might be able to use.’

‘OK, that’s not so bad. At least with ID we can rent a room or a car.’

Jack shook his head. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that,’ he said. ‘At least not until we’ve had a chance to change our appearance somewhat. The likelihood is that our pictures have been flashed across the country on every news channel in existence. They’ve probably had time to sort through the bodies by now, and realized we weren’t there.’

‘Did you manage to think of a plan while I was out of it?’ she asked hopefully.

Jack smiled at her. ‘Kind of. We need to find out who’s behind Spectrum Nine. We can’t go to the authorities; we’ve already seen that they’re willing to kill friends of the mayor himself. The media’s out too, as they’ve probably already spread stories about us which will make us less than reliable sources. Essentially, if we present ourselves, we’ll be arrested again, and they’re unlikely to make the same mistake twice and let us escape. So we’re on our own. But I noticed back in Stevens’ office that a lot of the information you found on the base’s files was authorized by the user of a computer based in the headquarters of the Department of Defence.’

‘And you can trace the user?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Jack said.

‘So all we need to do is get to a computer, right?’

Jack shook his head. ‘The DoD uses a closed system, probably one of the most sophisticated anti-hacking programs in existence. You can’t pull the user ID from outside.’

‘You mean…’

‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘We’re going to have to break in.’

‘But that’s impossible!’ Alyssa exclaimed. ‘We’re wanted fugitives, and you think we can just walk into one of the most secure locations in the entire country and access their computer systems? And what do we do then, even if we can get in?’

‘I told you,’ Jack said with a wink. ‘I have a plan.’

They decided to follow the river, which eventually led them to a tourist parking lot. There were a couple of cars parked up, but luckily no people. Neither of them knew how to hot-wire a car so they followed the access road through the trees on foot, and out on to a main highway that cut through the park. They debated about what to do, whether to keep on walking or try and hitch a lift. Desperation won; they had no idea where they were, or how long they would need to walk before they came to civilization.

Traffic was light, no doubt due to the curfew and military lockdown, but the road did still have a fair number of users, people who were probably designated as having jobs vital for the economy or industrial infrastructure.

Alyssa and Jack were aware they looked bad — their clothes torn and barely dry, their appearance dishevelled and covered in cuts and bruises — but at least it meant they looked quite different from any photographs of them which might have been shown on the news recently.

When they saw a likely car — an ancient SUV driven by a kindly looking elderly couple — they showed themselves, and were rewarded when the car stopped moments later. Alyssa gave them a hastily concocted story about going on a camping trip days before and getting lost in the wilderness, which evoked the couple’s sympathy and got them an invitation into the car.

The man told them about the roadblocks in the area and Alyssa asked to be dropped off at the nearest shopping mall, hoping there would be one before the first roadblock came up.

They arrived at a medium-sized retail park just forty minutes later, without having had to pass through any roadside security checks. They also discovered that they were now over sixty miles south-west of the city. They thanked the couple and made their way inside, careful to keep their faces away from the mall’s CCTV cameras.

Alyssa went shopping for clothes for the two of them — conservative, muted colours that wouldn’t attract attention — and also for spectacles and hair dye. She picked up two new cellphones at the same time.

Jack, meanwhile, found an internet café. As well as checking out the latest news on their situation, he spent the next hour researching how to make fake IDs.

When they met up later, Jack told her that very little information had been reported in the press — there was next to nothing about the attack on the internment camp — but their pictures had indeed been flashed across the nation’s media as dangerous terrorist suspects.

In the bathrooms, they changed clothes, put on the clear-glass spectacles, and dyed their hair. Then they went to a passport photo booth to have their pictures taken.

While Alyssa shopped for more supplies, Jack went to a stationery store to pick up scissors, superglue and plastic laminate and then made his way back to the bathrooms.

When they met up another hour later, Alyssa showed Jack the fleece tops which she had bought, with embroidered logos on them that another store had done for her. Large lettering across the back, company logo on the breast.

‘Perfect,’ Jack said, before showing her their new IDs.

Deciding that they had stayed long enough at the mall, they went to a car rental desk and used their new identification to hire a small family car. Their fake IDs were accepted with no sign of suspicion. Sterner security faced them at the roadblocks but there, too, they got through without a hitch and continued their journey southwards to the capital. On the outskirts of the city they stopped at a small roadside diner, where they changed into their fleece tops and pinned their brand-new company ID cards to their lapels before sitting down to eat, and to wait.

Jack had just picked up the menu to select a dessert when Alyssa’s cellphone rang.

Jack looked up at her, and their eyes met, searching for mutual reassurance.

Alyssa answered the call. ‘Beltway Security Systems, how may I help you?’

Phase one of the plan was about to commence.

5

The headquarters of the DoD was one of the world’s largest buildings, at least in terms of floor space.

Built to house an amalgamation of several government departments, it had been decided to position the huge structure just over the river from the President’s own famous residence and the rest of the congressional and senatorial machinery on the hill beyond.

It was a bulky, ugly structure made out of visually unsympathetic concrete built on three hundred acres of what had once been swampy marshland, but it was an architectural marvel nevertheless; its creators had managed to cram nearly twenty miles of corridors into its floor plan. With close to seven million square feet of internal space, the building housed over thirty thousand employees. Almost four thousand of these employees worked within the Cyber Warfare Division, trying to protect the DoD’s fifteen thousand separate computer networks from the ever-increasing threat of cyber attack and cyber terrorism. The department was based right in the heart of the building, in a huge cluster of offices connected to the main server rooms where the building’s supercomputers and internal mainframes were housed.

Lieutenant Colonel Evan Ward was the lead cyber warfare technician currently assigned to the operations room, and he contemplated the department’s problems as he stared at the three separate flat-screen monitors that sat in front of him.

The main trouble was the large number of networks that operated within the building. Most office complexes used one system, but here, mainly as a result of numerous departmental mergers over the decades, there were now fifteen thousand vaguely interconnected systems. This was simply too many for the staff to even monitor, never mind adequately protect against external threats, especially for those networks connected to the outside world via the internet.

The really sensitive stuff — black projects, lists of agents, details of ongoing sensitive operations — was held exclusively on so-called ‘closed’ systems, able to be used internally only. Someone would have to get access to the room Colonel Ward now stood in to have a chance of accessing the information on those computers.

But still, he thought, his task was an unenviable one. Although he was good at his job, he was a military man first and foremost, as DoD protocol dictated. An outside computer expert — although arguably better at the job — would never be allowed to run a DoD department. And the problem ran right through the Cyber Warfare Division’s staff from top to bottom. The government simply didn’t pay enough to attract the very top people, which meant that Ward often had to outsource to private companies, at great expense. It was a perverse irony that more money was spent on external contractors than on the four thousand men and women directly under Ward’s command.

The system was archaic, the staff underpaid and undervalued, but they somehow managed to struggle on. Ward took a sip from his steaming mug and thanked his lucky stars that the intelligence resources of other countries were in an even worse state than his own. It would be a dark day indeed if any enemy nation were to launch a concerted, technically thorough attack on the country’s computer infrastructure.

‘Sir,’ a voice said from behind, and Ward swivelled in his chair to face the man.

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he replied.

‘We’ve got something in one of the systems.’

‘What sort of something?’ Ward asked, not too concerned. There was always something.

‘A virus,’ the sergeant replied. ‘We’ve been working on it a while now, I know you don’t like to be bothered normally, but it’s a tough one.’

‘Which system?’ Ward asked, still not unduly concerned.

‘Alpha Two Bravo,’ the man said, then stopped as his boss’s phone rang.

Ward answered instantly, listened for ten seconds, then put the phone down. ‘Four more systems have gone down,’ he said, more urgently now.

And then he saw more people heading for his desk, messages began to appear on his computer, and the phone started to ring again; all of his fears appeared to be coming true.

The virus was spreading everywhere.

Half an hour later, Ward received his damage report.

An unknown but highly dangerous virus had infected two hundred and forty-five of the DoD’s ‘open’ networks, and although its progress had seemed to slow, other networks were still being sporadically infected. No major systems had yet gone down, but it was just a matter of time unless Ward could get a grip on it.

Nothing his staff was doing seemed to be working. He had called in people from across the division, pulling them from all but the most vital projects, until he had seven hundred people trying to stop the virus. But another half an hour later, a hundred more networks had become infected, and Ward knew the time had come to bite the bullet. It went against the grain, but he had to do it nevertheless.

He picked up the phone and dialled a number he had memorized long ago.

‘Beltway Security Systems, how may I help you?’ a cheerful female voice answered.

Reluctantly, Ward explained the situation and asked for help.

Alyssa hung up, smiled at Jack, and zipped up her Beltway Security Systems fleece.

Back at the mall, Jack had not only spent time in the internet café learning how to make fake IDs; he had infected the live, internet-connected part of the DoD’s internal mainframe with a virus. He had also found out which external companies were used to deal with hacking and virus problems, and discovered that one communications security contractor was used almost exclusively.

Beltway Security Systems was based just outside the capital and did a wide range of work for the government, and for top multinational firms in the area. Its own security systems were good, but Jack had nevertheless managed to get his and Alyssa’s new identities registered on to the company’s database as long-term employees.

Jack knew that when the virus was detected, procedure would dictate that the DoD’s own internal people would try and deal with it, and when they failed — as Jack was confident they would — they would contact Beltway Security Systems and arrange for contractors to come in and deal with the problem. He had hacked Beltway’s telephone system to redirect calls from the DoD’s computer centre to one of the cellphones Alyssa had bought. Pretending to be the Beltway control centre operator, she had taken Colonel Ward’s direct number and told him a senior technician would call him back immediately. Ward had demurred, demanding the technician’s number instead, which Alyssa had provided.

As they reached the car, Jack’s own phone began to ring.

‘You’re on,’ Alyssa told him, and Jack answered as he opened the car door.

‘Dave Jenkins, Beltway,’ Jack said, sliding into the passenger seat.

He listened to the voice on the other end for some time before speaking himself. ‘Yes, sir, I understand. You’ve been passed through to me because my colleague and I are only twenty minutes away. We’ll take a look, report back to Beltway, and then decide what sort of resources need to be mobilized.’

There was another pause before Jack gave the details of their new identities, including their employment codes at Beltway. He knew Ward would check the names against Beltway’s database, but was confident their new identities would be there; security passes would be duly issued.

‘Yes, sir,’ Jack said again, before hanging up and turning to Alyssa, who was manoeuvring the car on to the highway. ‘He’s sending a man to meet us at the east gate. He’ll escort us straight to the offices of the Cyber Warfare Division.’

Alyssa smiled. ‘We’re in.’

6

Oswald Umbebe surveyed the young men and women in front of him with pride.

They came from all over the world, members of elite special operations forces from a huge variety of countries. Indeed, some of the men and women in this room would once upon a time have been sworn enemies of one another. They may even have faced each other across a hostile battlefield, Umbebe considered as he appraised them. But not now. Now they were brothers and sisters, united within the Order of Planetary Renewal. True believers, all of them.

Some had been with him from the start, others had been recruited more recently. But all could be trusted, Umbebe was sure of that. He had a sixth sense for such things.

They were at a disused military airfield, which was to be the staging ground for the next phase of Umbebe’s strategy. The travel had not agreed with him, and his condition was getting steadily worse. He was in a great deal of pain now, almost constantly. And yet he didn’t let it trouble him. Why would he? There wasn’t long left for any of them anyway.

He had nearly forty soldiers in this personal attack force, all elite commandos. There would be other elements in the background too, a further sixty men and women with military experience to deal with logistics and security, but the soldiers in front of him now would be the spearhead.

The main attack force would come in four sections of eight commandos, with another section in reserve. Umbebe had rented land further south where the team had been rehearsing the attack for weeks. They had been at this airfield for the past two weeks, training and acclimatizing to the altitude and freezing temperatures. As Umbebe walked up and down their lines, he could see that they were ready.

‘My brothers and sisters,’ he intoned, ‘true believers. The time has almost come for us to make the supreme sacrifice. You are all experts in your field, selected and trained to be the best. And you are.’ He nodded his head to them. ‘It is time now to use those skills to achieve our ultimate aim. The rebirth of our planet!’

Umbebe could see that some of the commandos wanted to cheer but were held in check by military discipline.

‘You will have to kill,’ he continued. ‘We will all have to kill. And, likewise, we will all have to die. But we do so knowing it is for a better world! A new world, free of human vice, industry, pollution; a world where nature will once more reign supreme, allowing the green lung to fill again, to breathe once more.’

Symbolically, he breathed in deeply. ‘Ah, to breathe air that is clean and fresh. This is what we give to the world. Mankind will be driven from the planet but, if fate decrees it, we will rise again, perhaps wiser than we are today. But that,’ he said, raising his arms skyward, ‘is not in our hands. What will be, will be. Our sole duty is to purge this diseased earth, to wipe the slate clean so that life can start anew and afresh. This is our divine responsibility, and I thank you, my brothers and sisters, for joining me on this crusade.’

His hand went to his chest, his head bowed, and the hundred men and women gathered on the airfield did the same. After a few moments of quiet reflection, Umbebe raised his head to address the crowd one final time. ‘Our mission is sacred, let us never forget that. We will die so that the earth may live!’

He raised one fist high into the air in a gesture of defiance, letting out an animal roar that pierced the cold blue sky beyond.

And, despite the pain in his stomach, he smiled with undiluted joy when his chosen people raised their own fists in return, letting out their own screams of joy, pride, exultation and defiance.

Yes, he thought to himself, they are ready.

Now all he needed were the codes.

Anderson stood at the edge of the river, seething with anger. The dogs had lost the trail.

They had followed the scent for over twenty miles, right into the forest, tracking the fugitives through the trees and undergrowth. But then they’d got to the river — a wide, fast-running monster — and the dogs had come to a dead halt.

Durham and Murray hadn’t trekked along the riverbank, that much Anderson could be sure. But had they swum to the other side? With the water as fast as it was, he wasn’t sure if the pair could have made it. Still, he reasoned, adrenalin was a powerful thing. He’d send a team across with the dogs to check the other bank just to be sure.

Another possibility was that they’d tried to swim across and been swept downstream. Where did the river go? Anderson checked the map he carried, saw quickly that it led to a waterfall a couple of miles further down. Could they have survived if they’d gone over the side? He just didn’t know.

Quickly, he organized his search teams into two groups; one would search this bank downstream and try and pick up the scent in case they’d managed to get to shore, either before or after the waterfall, while the other would try and get across the river to do the same on the other side.

Until he had evidence to the contrary, Anderson had to assume that they were still alive. Certainly, no bodies had been reported having washed up anywhere recently.

‘Colonel!’ came an excited voice from behind him, and Anderson turned to see one of his men racing from the trees. ‘We’ve found evidence of a gunfight in the forest!’

‘What?’ Anderson asked with sudden interest.

‘We’ve got casings for various different weapons, handguns and rifles, as well as shotgun shells. Damage to trees and foliage too, in keeping with a firefight. Well, a one-way firefight anyway,’ the soldier continued. ‘This early it’s hard to tell, but it looks like the gunfire was just going one way.’

‘Anything else?’ Anderson asked.

The soldier nodded. ‘We’ve got some blood in a small clearing, and some sort of man-made hole in the ground, with a tarp sheet to one side.’

‘What’s inside?’ Anderson asked.

‘Nothing,’ the soldier replied. ‘It’s empty.’

Anderson thought for a moment before giving his orders. ‘OK, here’s what I want to see happen. We’ve got a gang of armed people in these woods, and I want them found. That blood’s not from our targets or the dogs would have picked it up, so that means one of their party is injured. If we can find them, they can tell us what happened.’ He quickly assigned men to the task, and they raced off back into the woods, along with two dogs to follow the blood trail.

He looked out across the river, glinting in the midday sun. With dogs on both sides, and possible eyewitness testimony, he hadn’t lost them yet. There was still hope.

Dr Niall Breisner looked at the telephone with trepidation. It was time to make the call.

A large part of him didn’t want to do it. The ramifications of his actions were starting to plague him, and he had all but stopped watching the news. The strange animal phenomena, the riots, the mounting chaos were bad enough; but he couldn’t stomach any more reports about that little island, swallowed up whole by the ocean. It was just too much to bear.

But this was what he had agreed to, and neither Tomkin nor Jeffries had ever lied to him. General Tomkin had laid it out for him as plain as day, the first time they’d met. His plans were crystal clear. The technological, scientific challenge had been a tremendous lure, Breisner had to admit. Was such a thing possible? Breisner had believed so, and he had wanted to be proved right. His ego had demanded satisfaction.

And what was the result of his years of secretive, covert efforts? The endless months of research, analysis, experimentation, all covered up from the majority of the base’s scientific staff? The fear of discovery, the pain and guilt of Colonel Anderson’s ruthless prosecution of anyone who came too close? The end result, Breisner was loath to admit, was nothing like he had anticipated. He had dreamt of champagne celebration and pride and joy at a job well done, a job everyone thought impossible but which he alone had had the ability to see through to completion.

But now? Now, whenever the pride of success entered his heart for even a second, guilt expunged it in an instant. What had he been thinking? Spectrum Nine was a monster, no sane person should ever have conceived it.

But it was his monster, Breisner thought as he toyed with the telephone handset on his desk. Didn’t he deserve some reward for his work, the decades spent in this Arctic hellhole, separated from his family and loved ones?

He deserved something at least, and the five million bonus promised by Tomkin in his next pay packet would go a certain way to assuage the guilt. Not all the way, but it would be a good start. He could forget about peer adulation or professional recognition; none of his peers even knew about the project. No, instead of awards and prizes, cold, hard cash would have to do.

But still, he found it hard to dial the number. It was too late to turn back, he knew that, but his mind baulked at this final step. He shook his head, downed the contents of the glass in front of him, and dialled the number for General Tomkin.

‘David,’ he said with false cheer, ‘Spectrum Nine is ready.’ He breathed out slowly, trying to regulate his heart rate. ‘Your weapon is now fully operational.’

7

When Alyssa and Jack arrived at the huge concrete bunker which served as the eastern entrance to the Department of Defence headquarters, they were both awed by the sheer scale of the building beyond.

Alyssa had read about it often, but seeing it in the flesh was something else altogether. She looked at the double steel access doors, with metal detectors and armed guards, and wondered, not for the first time, how they could possibly get away with their plan.

They had already passed through two external cordons to get this far — once at the entrance to the parking lot, and again at the perimeter of the actual building. Both times their identities had aroused no suspicion. But the further they got into the belly of the beast, the less confident Alyssa felt. She wondered how well Jack had hacked into the Beltway system. Would they begin to suspect something and contact the DoD? Maybe they were performing a routine check of employees and would come across Dave Jenkins and Elaine McDowell — Jack and Alyssa’s current assumed identities — and wonder why nobody at Beltway had ever heard of them.

Ahead of her, a steady stream of workers filtered through the security checkpoint. She looked past the queue and saw a man in a blue military uniform waving from the doorway, ushering them forward.

Well, she thought as she and Jack walked past the incoming workers, it’s too late to back out now.

Five minutes later, they were being led down one of the complex’s long corridors by their escort, who had introduced himself as Sergeant Adam Fielding. This pleasant young man was a private aide of Lieutenant Colonel Evan Ward, the man in charge of the Cyber Warfare Division, who had placed the call to Beltway.

The only hold-up at the concrete bunker entrance was when the security guards had to wait for the computer to print off their internal passes. They wore these ID cards now and this, combined with the presence of Sergeant Fielding, made them feel almost as if they really did belong here. Alyssa had been worried about people recognizing them from the news, but their simple disguises of glasses and dyed hair seemed to do the trick. Nobody was paying much attention to them anyway — hardly surprising really, Alyssa reflected, in an organization that employed thirty thousand people.

‘We’re pretty much on a war footing at the moment,’ Fielding told his guests. ‘With things as they are, word has come down to increase our threat level to only one stage removed from all-out war. I don’t blame them,’ he continued, and Alyssa presumed he meant the federal government. ‘Things are getting crazy out there, and the military is already having to step in. It’s not just in this country either.’

Fielding led them round two more corners, stopped at a bank of elevators and pressed a button. ‘There have been plenty of attacks on our people abroad too. With all this talk of global destruction, a lot of groups — not just terrorists, but normal citizens too — feel it’s their last chance to make a mark, and we’re the target, yet again. The President just ordered two carrier groups out to southern Asia, and another to the Gulf.’

The elevator doors opened and Fielding stepped in. ‘It’s unbelievable, it really is. I mean, is it our fault this is happening? Of course not. But do we have to step in yet again to pick up the pieces, make sure the world remains stable? You bet we do.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s why people around here aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs at the moment.’

The doors opened again, and Alyssa realized she hadn’t even felt the elevator move. Fielding strode out towards another long corridor, and Alyssa and Jack hurried to keep up.

‘What do you guys make of it all?’ Fielding asked, breaking a smile. ‘Do you think we’re all goners?’

‘People have been saying the same for years,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t suppose now’s any more likely than any other time.’

Fielding grunted, and Alyssa wasn’t sure if it was supposed to have been a laugh.

‘But on the other hand,’ Jack went on, ‘it’s probably gonna be true one day, right? Why not today?’

Fielding grunted again and turned away, increasing his pace. The man wasn’t laughing this time.

‘I’m not telling you pigs anything,’ the grizzled old man said to Anderson, before spitting on the colonel’s shoes.

Anderson responded in an instant, backhanding the man across the face. A stream of phlegmy blood shot out of the man’s mouth, along with two teeth. The man sagged for a moment with the impact and then burst forward, straining for all he was worth against the two soldiers who held him.

There had been a nasty gunfight when they had found the survivalists. Six of the group’s members were killed, along with two of Anderson’s own men. When Anderson entered the camp, he was surprised to see that there were children there; and the surprise had turned to shock when he discovered that the children, too, were armed.

Durham and Murray must have stumbled upon the group and been hunted through the forest.

But who the hell were these people? He’d ordered his men to search the camp for anything that could identify them. In the meantime, he wanted to know what had happened to Murray and Durham.

He turned back to the old man. ‘These people are terrorists! They want to destroy this country. I thought you were patriots.’

But the old man just regarded Anderson with hatred and spat again. ‘You big government pukes are the only ones who want to destroy this country,’ he said vehemently.

Anderson resisted the urge to hit the man again and looked over to where another member of the survival group was receiving medical attention for his maimed eyes. He had refused help at first, and Anderson’s men had had to use drugs to subdue him. Durham or Murray must have gouged them, Anderson felt sure. He couldn’t help but be impressed by their will to survive.

‘Look at your friend,’ Anderson said. ‘I doubt he’ll ever see again. He’ll be completely blind, and I know one of the people we’re after did it to him. Don’t you want to help us catch them?’

The man shook his head. ‘We thought they was government pukes like you at first,’ he said, then smiled, the broken teeth making his face look grotesque. ‘But they ain’t with you, I know that much now. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

Anderson looked at the man a moment longer before anger got the better of him, and he punched the captive square on the jaw, knocking him out cold. He watched with satisfaction as the body sagged into the arms of his men before turning away.

‘Colonel, we’ve found something!’ a voice called and a soldier came running across with a clear plastic bag full of documents and keys.

It didn’t take long to match the various IDs to their captives and the dead bodies, apart from some of the children who may have been too young to have any. The problem was, two of the adults present had no documents. A man and a woman.

Anderson sighed. Two sets of ID were missing, and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out who’d taken them. Damn. But if he could find out who the two people were, he’d know what names Murray and Durham were using.

He told his men to take the fingerprints of the two with no ID and send them off for analysis. The problem was, how long would it take?

He called for the pair to be brought forward, straining against their plastic flexicuffs. Torture wasn’t his favourite thing in the world, but it was sometimes a necessary tool of his trade.

8

Colonel Ward stood and extended a large hand. ‘Mr Jenkins,’ he said courteously, shaking Jack’s hand. ‘Ms McDowell,’ he said next, shaking her hand and inclining his head towards her. ‘Thanks for coming out here so quickly. We’ve got a real ball-buster of a virus here — begging your pardon, ma’am — and we’re struggling with it, to be frank.’

Jack nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What we need is an office where we can get some privacy, four fully networked computers, and a vat-load of strong black coffee.’

Ward smiled, pleased with Jack’s confidence. ‘You’ve got it,’ he answered.

Within a few minutes, Jack and Alyssa were in a corner office. Three more computers were carried in to sit on the desk beside the room’s original unit, and the coffee came moments later.

The only fly in the ointment was Ward, who sat down in the room with them. Alyssa turned to him, smiling.

‘Colonel, thank you for the office. But we really must insist that we are left alone. Some of the code work we use is proprietary information, and Beltway has a legal obligation not to reveal anything which has copyright or other intellectual property ramifications.’

‘You think I’m gonna steal your algorithms?’ Ward asked unbelievingly.

‘We’re a private contractor,’ Jack chipped in, ‘a business. We rely on being the best in the field, and we’ve got to be careful. I’m sure you appreciate that.’

‘And I’ve got the security of the whole damned country to worry about. Surely you can appreciate that?’ Ward responded icily.

‘I do, but our hands are tied,’ Alyssa said. ‘Company procedure.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll just call up your boss and tell him I’m switching our preferred contractor to Armordyne Systems,’ Ward responded.

Alyssa looked nervously at Jack. If Ward called anyone at Beltway, it could cause all manner of problems. They simply couldn’t take the risk. But how were they going to access the system and find out anything with Ward watching their every move?

‘OK, OK,’ Jack said, holding up his hands. ‘You’ve just got to understand, it goes against procedure.’

‘I don’t give a damn what procedure it goes against, I’m staying in the room and that’s all there is to it.’ Crossing his arms, Ward sat back in his seat.

‘OK,’ Jack said again, taking a sip from his coffee cup and turning back round to face the computer, cracking the knuckles of both hands as he did so. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got here.’

Alyssa’s nerves were starting to grate. She was trying to talk to Ward, to get him involved in a conversation so that his attention was off Jack and the computers, but it was proving difficult.

Ward was watching Jack carefully, which meant that he had to go through the protocol to find and eradicate the virus rather than try and identify which computer terminal in the building had been used to sign off on Spectrum Nine. He would be able to stop the virus; after all, he was the one who had embedded it in the first place. But Alyssa could tell he was trying to string it out, maybe in the hope that Ward would have to leave the room to deal with something else, or even just to use the bathroom.

Alyssa was also wondering how long it would take before Ward asked her what her role was here; so far, she hadn’t touched a computer. How could she? Her level of understanding was far below Ward’s own, and it would be pretty obvious as soon as she tried that she had no idea what she was doing.

Finally Ward stood up to go to the bathroom, but he got one of his colleagues to cover the room in his absence. Alyssa watched Ward through the dark glass of the office windows to make sure he actually did head for the bathroom; part of her had worried that he was going to make a call to Beltway anyway.

They were going to have to do something, that was for sure. But what? Alyssa checked the time. Three thirty-five in the afternoon. She thought for a few moments. Ward hadn’t left the room for over an hour, and presumably wouldn’t now be needing another rest break for some considerable time. During that hour, nobody had disturbed them, which indicated that Ward had asked to be left alone, probably delegating his other duties temporarily to a junior officer. Any change in shifts would be on the hour or the half-hour, which gave them until four o’clock. Twenty-five minutes.

Alyssa rose from her chair and went to the window to lower the blinds. The other man looked up at her, eyebrows raised. ‘The noise bothering you?’ he asked.

Alyssa nodded her head. ‘Yeah, Dave likes it a little more quiet than this usually,’ she answered.

The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Figures,’ he said. ‘You can hardly hear yourself think out there on the best of days.’

Alyssa smiled, hoping that when Ward returned, he wouldn’t immediately notice that the windows had been covered. He might not, she reasoned, as the room was still well-lit, and not dramatically quieter.

Moments later, Ward re-entered the room. ‘OK, Corporal,’ he said, ‘thanks for that, you’re relieved.’

The corporal left, and Ward sat back down in his seat, seemingly unaware that the interior of the office could no longer be seen from the outside.

Alyssa waited until Ward’s attention was on Jack, watching as he leant forward in his chair to peer at the monitors, asking how he was progressing. Jack saw Alyssa moving, and started to involve the colonel in an intense discussion of what he was doing, and how far he had to go, capturing the man’s attention completely.

Having manoeuvred herself directly behind Ward’s chair, Alyssa hefted her own collapsible steel chair above her head and swung it down as hard as she could on top of the colonel’s skull.

Ward looked dazed, his eyes focusing and unfocusing for what seemed like minutes but was probably under two seconds, while Alyssa wondered if she’d hit him hard enough. She readied the chair to hit him again but then his eyes turned upwards, closed completely, and he toppled unconscious to the carpeted floor.

As Alyssa went to bind and gag him, she looked up at Jack who was staring at her in open-mouthed surprise. ‘OK, Jack,’ she said, checking her watch, ‘you’ve got eighteen minutes.’

9

‘David Nathaniel Jenkins and Elaine Jolene McNulty,’ Anderson repeated to himself as he wiped his hands clean on an old rag, now stained red with blood.

The bodies of the real Jenkins and McNulty hung before him from a tree, pools of blood beneath their feet. They were still alive, but only by a hair’s breadth. They were tough sons-of-bitches, but Anderson had still managed to break them ahead of the fingerprint lab.

‘Cut them down and get them medical attention,’ he called to one of his corporals.

Anderson flipped open his cellphone and called Tomkin. ‘Sir, it’s Anderson. We have reason to believe the fugitives may still be at large. We’ve tracked them to a river but we’ve not found any bodies, so we have to assume they are still alive. Also, they may have acquired identification which they could be presently using.’

He read out the names of the man and woman, along with other details he had gleaned from them — dates and places of birth, home addresses, car registrations. He knew he didn’t have to tell Tomkin what to do with the information. The general would instantly activate every resource to track the fugitives.

‘Leave it with me,’ the general’s gruff voice responded. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Anderson said.

His radio blipped. He pushed the button to receive. ‘Anderson here, over.’

‘Sir,’ the digitally-enhanced voice came back, crystal clear, ‘we’re on the far bank a mile downstream from the waterfall. We’ve got tracks. The dogs are ready to follow, over.’

‘Good,’ Anderson replied. ‘I’m going to stay here to clear up what we’ve found, but I’ll send the other patrol to your side, over.’

‘Yes, sir. Over and out.’

Anderson replaced the radio on his belt and smiled. Durham and Murray wouldn’t get much further, he was sure.

James Rushton banged against the steel door again and again. It seemed as if he had been banging against the cold, hard surface all afternoon; and, when he thought about it, he supposed he had.

He looked at his hands, and saw they were deep purple with bruising. But dammit! Here he was, locked up without charge and unable to see a lawyer. He knew that somewhere else in the building Harry Envers was also an unwilling prisoner, unable to use his right to legal advice. The damn city mayor! It was entirely unconstitutional, but Rushton was beginning to understand that this was becoming an issue of less and less importance. The city — hell, the whole country and maybe even the entire world — was changing. Events were out of control and had gathered a momentum of their own.

Rushton had assumed he would be tortured, or at least subjected to tactical interrogation, but he had been left alone. He thought that that was probably because the government’s limited resources were being stretched to breaking point. They had achieved their aim by locking him up anyway; he was away from his beloved newspaper and couldn’t get a word out to anyone about anything.

This was why he had been trying to get someone to come to his cell all afternoon; if he could tell someone — anyone — what he knew, questions might start to get asked in the right places. It was something to hope for, at any rate.

He wondered what had happened to Alyssa and Jack Murray. Were they still alive? He hoped so.

He approached the door to bang again, but thought better of it. He’d break his hands if he wasn’t careful, and what good was it doing anyway? It was working off his frustration, but that was about it.

He turned to the other side of his cell and stood on the iron bed to look out of the small, barred window. He knew where he was, at least — the city’s historic political prison, on the other side of the government plaza from the mayor’s office. It had once housed dissenters and protesters, coming into its own during the civil war years ago. It was open now only as a museum, but Rushton saw that the cells were as practical as ever they had been; there was no way to escape.

He peered through the window to the plaza, six storeys below. He’d tried to attract attention, but the citizens who still dared to be out and about were keeping themselves to themselves and wouldn’t have looked up towards his window even if they had heard him.

He was about to lie back on his bed to nurse his aching hands when he saw a curious sight down in the plaza. Whereas most people walked with their heads bowed, ignoring everything around them in the hope that the situation would just go away if they pretended it didn’t exist, a group now rounded the corner with an air of confidence that was in stark contrast to this attitude.

The group were dressed in clean white robes and were wearing what appeared to be gold armbands, but it was the way they carried themselves that made them conspicuous: proud, confident, their bearing that of soldiers on parade.

Their clothes reminded him of that man on television the other night, Oswald Umbebe, the ‘high priest’ of — what was it? — the Order of Planetary Renewal. Rushton had been seeing more and more of these characters over the past few days, the order really seemed to be speaking to people, and men and women were signing up in droves. A part of him could see why. If people were going to die — as millions clearly thought they were — then it was easier if they believed it was for a purpose.

But what were they doing now? Rushton held on to the window bars with his bruised hands and pulled his head nearer to get a better look. They were spreading out around the plaza, ringing it in a huge circle. How many were there? Rushton tried to count them, and thought it must be at least fifty, all dressed in identical white tunics. They made quite a sight.

They knelt together on the concrete paving and started to chant. Rushton strained to hear but he was too far away. He wondered how long it would be before soldiers came to move them along. This sort of mass prayer was now regarded as an illegal demonstration, and the robed figures were liable to be arrested if they didn’t disband soon.

And then, as a crowd started to gather and people began to record the event on cameras and cellphones, one of the group stood and walked to the middle of the circle of devotees. He pulled what looked like a tin from under his robe, and started to empty the contents over his head, dousing himself in some sort of liquid.

Rushton gasped as the man then lit a match, realizing that it must have been gasoline that he had poured over himself. And then, before Rushton could fully comprehend what he was watching, the man touched the match to his head and his body went up in flames.

Rushton looked on in horror as the man stood there, engulfed in fire; time seemed to stand still as first his robes and then his body visibly melted away until he finally fell, first to his knees, and then to his hands, until all that remained was a burnt, charred corpse.

Rushton was stunned. The man had never even screamed.

And then Rushton, even after nearly four decades of reporting from all corners of the globe, looked on in utter astonishment at what happened next. As if called to action by the man in the middle, each of the other robed followers produced their own cans and poured the contents over themselves before lighting matches and setting themselves on fire. Within seconds there were fifty flaming, burning bodies writhing on the plaza. Some didn’t have the self-discipline of the first man, and screamed. Rushton could hear their agonized cries through the thick glass of his sixth-floor cell.

Some of the onlookers left, appalled at what they were seeing; others carried on filming, and Rushton knew, media ban or no media ban, these images would be all across the world within minutes.

He watched for the remaining minutes that it took for the men and women to burn to death, the soldiers, police and fire officers who raced to the scene with extinguishers and blankets simply too late. All that was left were charred remains and gold armbands scattered across the plaza.

Rushton knew it was impossible but he was sure he could smell the horrific stench of charred human meat, even all the way up here in his cell.

His face pale, shaken to his core, Rushton staggered off the bed and just made it to the toilet in the corner of his cell before he threw up.

What were they thinking? he sobbed into the toilet bowl. What were they thinking?

10

‘Come on,’ Alyssa said, looking over at Jack as she waited nervously by the office door.

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ Jack told her. ‘Leave me alone.’

Alyssa didn’t say another word, knowing he was right; her nagging him wouldn’t help anything. She turned back to the windows, peeking through the slats of the blinds. The sprawling complex of offices and cubicles outside was a seething mass of humanity, but nobody appeared to be paying any attention to their own small office.

Alyssa checked her watch. Just seven minutes to four. Her heart rate increased automatically. They had seven minutes to get out of here. It was true that nothing might happen at four, but she didn’t want to take the chance. It was a time many people left for the day, and Ward might be expected to be somewhere else.

Come on, she urged Jack again, silently this time.

‘OK,’ Jack said instants later, ‘I’ve got it. The computer is located in the office of General David Tomkin, which is…’

His voice trailed off, and Alyssa realized he was trying to memorize the route. ‘Why are you checking where it is?’ Alyssa asked. ‘I thought all the information was here?’

Jack shook his head, still studying the screen. ‘I’m afraid not. I said this system was secure. What we need is on this general’s personal computer, possibly nowhere else. This system just told me who the computer belonged to and where we can find it, that’s all.’

‘So now we need to break into a general’s office?’ she asked, aghast. Jack hadn’t explained that to her. ‘And what do we do about him?’ she said, pointing at Ward, who was starting to drift back to consciousness.

‘I didn’t ask you to smash him over the head with a steel chair, Alyssa,’ Jack said.

‘Well, excuse me for coming up with a plan,’ Alyssa shot back.

‘You call assaulting a senior military officer in the headquarters of the Department of Defence a plan?’ Jack asked, eyebrows raised.

Before Alyssa could respond, Jack held up one hand to stop her and picked up a telephone handset with the other. He checked the screen again, and dialled a number.

‘Is that General Tomkin’s office?’ he asked. ‘Is he in?’ There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Alyssa checked her watch. Four minutes to four.

‘OK, not to worry,’ Jack continued. ‘This is Colonel Ward, head of cyber security, clearance access code delta two four nine alpha tango three four nine. You’re probably aware of the virus that’s been going through our systems, and we’ve traced it to General Tomkin’s computer. I’m going to need access to his office for two contractors we have here from Beltway Security Systems, David Jenkins and Elaine McDowell. They have full authorization from my department.’

There was another pause, then Jack spoke again. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They will be there in five minutes.’

He replaced the receiver and looked at Alyssa. ‘It seems that whoever this General Tomkin is, he’s just left. Flying off somewhere, apparently. But that means his office is wide open.’ Jack stood and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘And him?’ Alyssa asked, pointing at Ward.

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something,’ Jack said.

Tomkin smiled at the people he passed in the long corridors, something he rarely did. Breisner’s phone call was the reason. The news that Spectrum Nine was ready produced the same feeling as a parent had on the day of their child’s birth. It was relief and pure joy, albeit mixed with subconscious tinges of fear and anxiety. But after so long, so many years of toil, it was ready.

Tomkin thought back to the time he had spent in the military, fighting his country’s enemies all over the world in one form or another. He’d been badly injured, and had lost many of his closest friends. Now he was one step further down the path of ensuring that this would happen no more. Not for his country the mindless infantry struggle, or even the more impersonal clash of armoured vehicles or air strikes. No, not any more. Soon it would all be over, the enemy killed, with no more loss of life on his own side. It was a wonderful thought for a career military man.

A helicopter was waiting for him just outside the building, which would whisk him to a military airfield a few miles away. From there, he would get on board a personal jet and fly directly to the HIRP base to take over the operation himself.

Yes, he thought as he walked down another long corridor towards the waiting helicopter, the world is just about to get one hell of a lot better.

After leaving the office, Alyssa had explained to the nearest person that Ward wanted privacy to deal with some sensitive information that had been lost due to the virus.

In the meantime, Jack asked for an escort to General Tomkin’s office, repeating the line about the virus having originated there. Alyssa had been impressed by Jack’s confidence; with an escort, they would be able to pass through security checks with no problem, as long as her own story about Ward was believed and nobody went into the office.

And so it was that within the promised five minutes, they arrived at the desk of Tomkin’s secretary. Jack and Alyssa thanked their escort, who made his way back to the CWD.

‘Now, how can I help you guys?’ the secretary — a blue-suited air force man, back ramrod straight and hair cut short — asked pleasantly.

Jack handed over a sheet of paper. ‘I believe Colonel Ward called about our visit,’ he said.

Alyssa glanced at the paper, which seemed to be some sort of official work order, and was impressed that Jack had managed to produce such a document so quickly.

The man studied the sheet of paper then looked up at them. ‘OK,’ he said, and rose from his desk, heading for the door to Tomkin’s inner office, unlocking it with a key attached to his leather belt. ‘Here you go.’

Alyssa was amazed when he just opened the door and ushered them in. ‘I’ve got a load of work on,’ he said, ‘so I’ll be just out here if you need me, OK?’

Alyssa and Jack thanked him and entered the office, Alyssa thinking that the man, though very pleasant, could do with a talk from Colonel Ward about security. She pushed the door closed behind her.

Jack was already at the general’s desk. ‘Damn,’ he breathed. ‘General Tomkin’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.’

Alyssa gasped. The name had been familiar but she hadn’t been able to place it.

‘That’s pretty high,’ she said. ‘I wonder if it goes any higher.’

Jack turned the computer on. ‘Well, let’s have a look, shall we?’

11

Colonel Anderson waited in the forest clearing, hearing the noise of the helicopter still some way out.

Tomkin had put the names out everywhere, and results were already coming in. The general wasn’t playing an active part himself now as he was about to leave for HIRP to take control of the Spectrum Nine deployment, but he had informed his sources to liaise directly with Anderson.

The fugitives had been traced to a mall not too far from here, where they had hired a car with the stolen ID. Traffic cameras had shown that they were headed towards the capital, but Anderson was now waiting for further updates on the exact location of the vehicle. He knew that when he had the car, he would have the fugitives.

His men had gone from store to store in the mall, trying to piece together what they had bought, if anything. The information that came back indicated that they may have changed their appearance with glasses and hair dye, and they might even have adjusted the pictures on the photo IDs. His men were still there making inquiries, but Anderson had no doubt where they were headed; it had to be the capital.

He shook his head in disbelief. Rather than try and escape, they still wanted to continue with their investigation. They were determined, he’d give them that much.

Anderson looked up and saw the chopper hovering above the treeline. If Durham and Murray were heading for the capital — and they might even be there by now — then that was where he was going too.

The chopper began to descend, and Anderson nodded to his men — his six best, chosen to accompany him on what he hoped would be the last phase of the chase. They started to move with him towards the landing zone.

His cellphone vibrated in his pocket, and he backed off to take the call.

He strained to hear what he was being told over the screaming of the helicopter rotors. He made out, ‘Fleece jackets… Embroidered… Beltway Security Systems…’

An icy premonition hit him, and he gestured at the chopper pilot, who cut power to the engines, slowing the rotor blades and quietening the deafening noise.

Anderson turned away and dialled another number. ‘It’s Anderson,’ he said urgently. ‘I want you to put me through to Beltway Security Systems. Immediately.’

Secretary of Defence John Jeffries couldn’t comprehend what was going on, he really couldn’t.

Spectrum Nine was ready, and Tomkin was on his way to take charge, and that was one thing to be grateful for, but the news coming in from around the country was simply horrific.

Who the hell are the Order of Planetary Renewal? the President had asked just a short time ago. None of the people in the room had been able to answer him. Not the intelligence chiefs, not the Secretary of State, none of his key political or military aides. The closest anyone got was to recognize that the order’s ‘high priest’ had been on television some nights before.

As Jeffries had watched the footage, shown around the world already on social media sites but compiled into one long video by the President’s staff, he had almost been sick. There had been scenes in every major city in the country of white-robed priests and priestesses setting themselves on fire. It was a coordinated effort, the self-immolations occurring at exactly the same time everywhere. The groups of suicidal followers ranged from thirty in number all the way up to over one hundred, in more than two hundred cities. The number of victims was currently estimated at somewhere over twelve thousand.

The number made Jeffries go weak at the knees. And the mayhem that had resulted was almost beyond comprehension.

Amazed and emboldened by what they had seen, citizens all over the country were rising up in arms, ignoring curfews and breaking through security lines. The country was now in a state of dire emergency, if not quite civil war — and the President had been very clear about the distinction. But it seemed like a civil war to Jeffries; he had had to order the full might of the military to step in to deal with the citizens of his own country. It made him feel sick all over again.

When Tomkin had first approached him with his plan, Jeffries had never suspected it would result in the deaths of any of his fellow-countrymen. It was the enemy who were supposed to die, not his own neighbours. The situation was clearly completely out of hand now, beyond any form of control. It had taken on a life of its own, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could be done to stop it. What had this Order of Planetary Renewal been thinking? What kind of evil cult could convince twelve thousand people to kill themselves? And not just kill themselves, but kill themselves in one of the most agonizing ways possible?

Tomkin’s absence from the meeting today was noticed. Where was he? Engaged on a private matter, Jeffries had said, all too aware that, given the current situation, it just didn’t ring true.

Jeffries sagged into his leather armchair. He prayed that Spectrum Nine worked as promised. That was their only hope now.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Jack breathed. Alyssa came close, peering over his shoulder at the computer screen.

‘What have you found?’ Alyssa asked.

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘It’s all here. All of it. All the way from initial discussions, strategy, plans, schematics, results of research, names of all involved personnel, we’ve got everything.’

‘How high does it go?’ Alyssa asked anxiously. ‘Is the President involved?’

‘No,’ Jack said, ‘not the President. The Secretary of Defence is in this up to his neck, but I don’t think it goes any higher.’

‘Can we copy this information?’ Alyssa asked.

‘I’m already doing it,’ Jack pointed to a flash drive he’d put into the unit, having found some spares in Tomkin’s desk drawer. ‘But there’s something else too,’ he said.

‘What?’ Alyssa asked, sitting down next to him.

‘The list of targets. Casualty estimates.’

‘Show me,’ Alyssa said, and Jack brought up the information.

Alyssa’s eyes went wide as she read.

She had thought that Spectrum Nine would be a highly targeted weapon — at worst, a flood taking out a coastal naval base, or a small earthquake destroying armaments factories or missile silos. Not this. It was clear that Tomkin wanted to use Spectrum Nine to its fullest extent, and the targets were whole countries, including entire civilian populations. With horror, Alyssa read what amounted to a battle plan for total genocide. Volcano eruptions and earthquakes would be used to destroy most of northern and central Asia, taking out their own country’s main military and economic competitor in one fell swoop. Sandstorms, floods and earthquakes would be used to decimate much of the Middle East, purging it of its terrorist infrastructure once and for all. Meanwhile, other disasters would befall their neighbours south of the border, forever clearing up the problem with drug lords and leftist guerrillas.

The scale of the destruction Tomkin had planned was beyond comprehension. ‘Casualty estimate… One point two billion men, women and children,’ Alyssa said, collapsing back in her chair.

Jack shook his head. ‘Those aren’t casualty estimates, Alyssa,’ he told her. ‘They’re fatalities.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Those people are all going to die.’

12

The men and women checked and rechecked their equipment as they waited for the helicopters to land. The order had been given, and the attack was about to commence.

Oswald Umbebe also checked his equipment as he waited. People were surprised, given his condition, that he was going to accompany them on the assault, but he wouldn’t miss it for the world. If he was killed, what difference would it make anyway? But he had to be there. Besides, he had been a child soldier once upon a time, back in the seething jungles of his youth, and such work was something he would never forget. It was in his very blood.

He still didn’t have the codes but he had a couple of options open to him on that score. The important thing at the moment was to take advantage of the current chaos and rioting, and attack while the facility was vulnerable. His faithful followers had performed their recent test superbly, sacrificing themselves for the greater good. He knew the effect the simultaneous bodily sacrifice of twelve thousand people would have; it wasn’t just emergency services that would be stretched, but the entire machinery of government as well, including the military. The troops guarding the target up in the snow-covered mountains would have been reduced to a minimum.

Umbebe had wept as he had watched the footage of their brave act, tormented that he had asked them to do such a thing. But he knew, ultimately, that it was worthwhile. If everyone was going to die in a short while anyway, then surely they had only missed out on their last few hours. And their sacrifice would not be in vain.

Evan Ward awoke slowly, his faculties returning to him one small step at a time.

He had seen the two figures leave his office several minutes before but had not registered any more than that. Who they were, he had no idea. In his dazed state, he had only vaguely recognized that they were people.

But as his conscious mind started to reassert itself, recent events came flooding back to him. His eyes popped fully open, and he surged upwards from his chair, but found that he was tied securely. He tried to scream out, to call for help, to raise the alarm, but those damn fake technicians — terrorists? he asked himself in horror — had gagged him, and all that came out was a muffled rumble.

Damn them! What were they up to? It was clear they had wanted access to the computer systems. But why?

Suddenly, it occurred to Ward that they might even have been the ones who planted the virus in the first place. How could he have been so stupid? But he had checked their details on the Beltway database. Maybe they planted the details in the Beltway system — unless Beltway itself was some sort of terrorist/criminal/enemy government front?

He wasn’t going to get any answers while he was strapped to this chair, that was for sure. He looked towards the door, estimated the distance. About six feet; not too far.

The chair wasn’t fixed, and luckily the two intruders hadn’t known enough about securing a captive to tie his legs and feet properly — the soles of both his feet were in contact with the ground. Ward himself would have strapped a prisoner’s lower legs tight to the chair legs so that no more than the tips of the toes were in contact with the floor, making manoeuvring much more difficult.

Ignoring the pain that wracked his head and upper body — he knew he was concussed, and feared he may even have damaged some vertebrae — he started to shuffle his body, using the traction of his feet and a powerful twisting of his shoulders.

Slowly but surely, he worked his way to the door, its window covered by the blind. He tried to use his head to push down the metal handle but couldn’t get the angle right. He shuffled on the chair some more but still couldn’t do it.

He repositioned himself one more time, steeled his nerve, and smashed his head straight through the door’s window into the main CWD control room.

‘Somebody get over here and help me!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’ Shards of glass stuck out of his head, blood flowing freely.

People raced over to him and carefully levered his head out of the shattered window. Even before he was fully untied from the chair, Ward was shouting orders. ‘Alert security! Immediately! Those two Beltway technicians were imposters, we need to find them!’

Ward was standing now, shaking glass from his uniform and wiping blood from his face. ‘Did anyone see them after they left here?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, sir,’ a staff sergeant said sheepishly. ‘I escorted them to General Tomkin’s office.’

‘General Tomkin?’ Ward asked incredulously. This idiot had escorted them to the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs? ‘I’ll deal with you later, Sergeant,’ he said, pushing past him and reaching for his phone.

‘Call for you, sir,’ a female officer shouted to him from across the room. ‘Colonel Anderson. He says it’s urgent.’

It better be, Ward growled silently as he strode across the control room.

‘Colonel Ward,’ Anderson said, airborne in the helicopter with his men now, en route to DoD headquarters, ‘we have a situation. I have reason to believe that a man and a woman posing as employees of Beltway Security Systems may have gained access to your offices under false pretences and—’

‘That’s right,’ Ward barked, cutting Anderson off. ‘One of them smashed my damn head open with a steel chair. Now you better tell me who the hell these people are.’

When Anderson had called Beltway and discoved they had a David Jenkins and Elaine McDowell on their books, who nobody seemed to know, he immediately called DoD headquarters to ask about unusual activity, and found that their computer systems were suffering from a virus. If it hadn’t been the DoD, the obvious target, Anderson would have made some more calls — there were plenty of other options in the capital — but his gut instinct had been proved right. And this call to the Cyber Warfare Division had just confirmed it. But what did they hope to achieve?

‘They’re terrorists,’ Anderson told Ward. ‘Highly dangerous. We don’t know what they’re planning but it is absolutely vital that they are captured immediately. We cannot afford to take any chances with these people. Do you have any idea where they are now?’

Anderson heard Ward clear his throat, and knew the news was not going to be good. ‘I’ve just received word that they have been escorted to the office of General Tomkin.’

Anderson was speechless. No. It couldn’t be. Tomkin’s computer held everything.

Umbebe could see the target with his own eyes now. Access was relatively easy; helicopters had inserted them just five miles out, and 4x4 vehicles had taken them the rest of the way through forested roads. External security hadn’t worried Umbebe in the slightest; it had all been taken care of.

The four frontline eight-man teams had encircled the target from its three approachable, guarded sides. A mile back from the complex’s rear, the land fell away in a jagged cliff, and Umbebe knew there was no point in wasting men and resources by approaching from that direction. It would be suicide, and while he had no problem with that if it served a higher purpose, there was something abjectly wrong with pointless self-sacrifice.

The four teams would attack first, followed by the secondary section if resistance proved firmer than expected. If not, the secondary team would remain outside the target area in order to repel counter-attacks — not that any was likely to come in time.

Umbebe checked his watch. It was time. He withdrew his radio and thumbed the transmit button. ‘Units Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta, you are to proceed on three… two… one… go!’

Umbebe watched through his night-vision binoculars as the sky lit up around him, the four initial assault elements erupting into action simultaneously.

Umbebe would enter the site once it was fully secure. He would transmit a final message to the world. And then all the prophecies of his order would come true at last.

13

When Ward had finished with Anderson, he’d called the security centre and been reassured to find that they had already activated emergency plans. The building was going into lockdown, external communications had been severed, and twenty armed military police officers were on their way to General Tomkin’s office.

Ward was now racing down the corridors towards the office himself. His phone rang and he answered it without slowing his pace. ‘Ward,’ he said.

‘Sir, this is security. We’ve reached the general’s office but the subjects have gone.’

‘Gone?’ Ward asked, slowing.

‘Yes, sir. The secretary saw them leave just a few minutes ago.’

‘Dammit!’ Ward swore, coming to a complete halt. ‘So where are they now?’

‘We don’t know, sir,’ came the reply. ‘But we’re in the process of locking down all exits. They won’t get away.’

Ward stood in the corridor, shaking his head. The security officer’s confidence was sadly misplaced, Ward knew. They were only in the process of locking down the exits? And the subjects had left the office several minutes ago?

He sighed. They could be anywhere by now.

General David Tomkin sat in the luxurious executive helicopter, peering out of the windows as the pilot started to spool up the rotor blades, readying the engines for take-off.

The helicopter landing pad was situated in the massive courtyard that occupied the centre of the DoD complex, an otherwise green space where employees came for some peaceful reflection. Tomkin had always thought it rather unfortunate that it should also be the site chosen for the helipad, the near deafening noise of the regular arrivals and departures in diametrical opposition to the stated aims of the courtyard.

But at least it was convenient, Tomkin reflected. It was a hell of a lot better than driving across town, anyway.

From the high pitch of the engines, Tomkin knew the helicopter was about to take off, and he settled down to relax for the flight. As he did so, he pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, surprised when he saw there were six missed calls, four from Anderson and two from DoD security. What the hell?

He must have missed the phone ringing due to the noise of the helicopter. He moved his thumb to the keypad to call Anderson, when he saw two uniformed generals running across the courtyard towards his helicopter.

Damn, how urgent was this? Two generals? He sighed, and put his phone away, calling for the pilot not to take off. He reached forward to open the door when he saw another helicopter coming in to land, dangerously close to his own. This second chopper wasn’t even going for the helipad but was tearing up the neatly trimmed lawn to the side. What the hell was going on?

Tomkin levered the door open to let the two generals come aboard.

He saw their faces then; furtive, scared, looking with horror at the other chopper. A man and a woman. No. It couldn’t be.

Alyssa Durham pulled a handgun from underneath her uniform and aimed it at Tomkin’s heart. ‘Let’s get out of here, General. Now.’

From his own helicopter Anderson saw the two uniformed officers approach Tomkin’s chopper and cursed. He could see from here that the uniforms were ill-fitting. Couldn’t Tomkin see that too?

But Anderson knew what had happened — during a search of the general’s office, two empty suit hangers had been found in the wardrobe. And they weren’t leaving via one of the protected exits; theoretically, in the courtyard they were still inside the building. It was no surprise they hadn’t been caught.

But what was their plan now? And what were they going to do with Tomkin? There was a 9mm pistol missing from the gun cabinet in Tomkin’s office too, a fact that definitely boded ill for the general.

Anderson couldn’t let that happen, and he wrenched the chopper door open before it had even fully set down on the lawn.

‘I suppose I should have recognized my own uniforms,’ Tomkin said with a self-deprecating sigh, as the helicopter lifted off into the air. ‘The gun’s not loaded, by the way.’

‘Good try,’ Alyssa replied immediately. ‘But even if I hadn’t checked it — which I have — there’s no way we’d be flying now if it was empty.’

Tomkin smiled. ‘Good,’ he said, as if rewarding a clever student. ‘You’re two very impressive people, I’ll give you that. But what now? What are you going to do with me?’

‘I’m going to make you an offer,’ Alyssa replied, as Jack watched the courtyard below. ‘We have enough evidence to bury you, John Jeffries, and everyone else associated with this sick project. Call it off, and we’ll not go public with it.’

‘And if I refuse?’ Tomkin asked with amusement.

‘Then I’ll kill you,’ Alyssa said with a straight face. ‘One life for many.’

Alyssa heard Jack gasp, and then she felt the chopper lurch as if it had been hit by a huge blunt instrument, or as if it had been weighed down on one side suddenly.

‘Jack,’ Alyssa said, ‘what is it?’

‘Anderson,’ Jack said in utter disbelief.

Tomkin’s chopper was already in the air when Anderson made the jump, just managing to catch hold of one of the long metal skids that ran down underneath both sides of the chopper.

His legs dangling freely in the air below as the chopper increased its altitude, the DoD headquarters smaller and smaller beneath him, Anderson forced himself to concentrate, pulling himself upwards with all his strength until his body lay against the skid.

Now all he had to do was get into the aircraft.

All three passengers jumped out of the way of the door as Anderson started firing into the metal skin of the helicopter.

Alyssa tried to keep control of what she was doing, but the impact of the pistol rounds was terrifying and before she knew it, Anderson had pulled the door open and squeezed himself through into the cabin.

Keeping his pistol up and aimed, he shut the door behind him, blocking out the shrieking wind and allowing the pilot to stabilize the aircraft.

Tomkin managed to keep his focus better than Alyssa. His military training and years of operational experience had not been totally lost during his years behind a desk. He used the distraction of Anderson’s entry to snatch the gun from Alyssa’s grasp. In the same fluid action he spun her round, his arm round her neck in a choke hold as he pressed the steel barrel against her temple.

‘Who’s got the flash drive?’ Tomkin asked. When there was no reply, he drove the barrel further into Alyssa’s temple, tightening his hold round her neck. ‘If you don’t tell me, we’ll just shoot you both and search your dead bodies.’

Alyssa saw Anderson raise an eyebrow, and realized in horror that he evidently thought that this was a better idea than asking them. She had to barter for time somehow, before they were both killed.

‘We’ve both got drives,’ she said quickly, to gain precious seconds. Maybe they could distract one of them and get one of the guns back.

But who was she kidding? These were both special forces officers, trained to kill like Jack was trained to use computers. It was what they did for a living. She sagged further into Tomkin’s grasp, a feeling of hopelessness pervading her.

Tomkin pushed Alyssa roughly across the leather-lined cabin, and she landed on a couch next to Jack. ‘Give them to us,’ Tomkin said, his gun still trained on her.

Alyssa looked at Jack and shrugged her shoulders. What else could they do? ‘We don’t just have the evidence on the drives,’ Jack said with more confidence than Alyssa could muster.

‘I don’t believe him,’ Anderson said to Tomkin.

Tomkin nodded. ‘I don’t believe you either,’ he said to Jack. ‘So you better show us those drives before you get yourselves shot.’

Jack held up his hands, palms out. ‘It’s true, I swear. I encoded it with the virus, back in your office. The evidence is living there now, trapped in the DoD system. Unless you permanently sever your computers from the outside world, the evidence will be on the web the moment the system goes back online.’

Alyssa saw Tomkin and Anderson exchange uneasy glances, clearly unsure if Jack was telling the truth. Like herself, they probably didn’t even know if such a thing was possible. She assumed it wasn’t, though, because Jack hadn’t done what he was saying. But it was a great bluff simply because it could be true.

The cabin was tense for several long, drawn-out seconds. Tomkin and Anderson exchanged looks again, clearly wanting to discuss the matter but unwilling to do so in front of them.

Alyssa could feel beads of sweat running down her forehead. Anderson clearly wanted to shoot them, but what about Tomkin?

The heavy silence was broken by the shrill ringtone of Tomkin’s phone, and Alyssa was convinced Anderson’s finger was a half-pound’s pressure away from firing at the sound of it.

Keeping his gun steady and his eyes on Alyssa, Tomkin reached into his pocket and answered the call. ‘Tomkin,’ he said, before listening with what appeared to be mounting horror. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, clearly stunned. ‘How?… When?… OK. Colonel Anderson and I are on our way up there right now. I’ll take control of the situation when we get there. What assets do we have nearby?… You’re joking?… OK. Keep me posted.’

Tomkin hung up, shaken to his core but his gun still up and aimed.

‘Sir?’ Anderson asked, concerned. ‘What’s going on?’

Tomkin didn’t respond.

‘Sir?’ Anderson repeated.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It looks like the HIRP base has been penetrated. Taken over.’ He shook his head in disbelief, and Alyssa thought she could almost see tears in his eyes. ‘The unthinkable has happened,’ he announced. ‘Spectrum Nine has fallen into the hands of the enemy.’