Patient Zero

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker

GAULT HAD TO crawl through two access tunnels and climb down four cold metal ladders to reach the very heart of the facility, far below the Bunker. He was making for a set of controls that he’d had built into the Bunker from the beginning, just in case all other options failed. He was careful not to make a sound in case Amirah or some of her creatures-alive or dead-had followed him. It was nearly black down here, with security lights spaced out only every hundred feet, so he had to pick his way. It was also terribly hot down here.

Below the Bunker was a deep drill hole that had punched into a lava stream buried far beneath the desert. The geothermal energy that powered the Bunker was virtually limitless, and a series of six vents-each a half-mile-long segment of reinforced piping-kept the heat converters from building up too much of a charge. If even half of them collapsed the venting would still keep the station safe from a critical overload. But there was a single point where they all joined: a huge vertical shaft that was bored straight down into the cathedral roof of the lava chamber. Superheated gasses rose up into the shaft and then dispersed through the six upward-slanting vents. Heat always rises, and that kept the engines turning and at the same time created a vulnerability because heat could only vent if nothing prevented it. Block the vents-all of them-and the heat would be trapped below the generators. With lava funneling that much heat it would be a matter of minutes before the generators either melted to slag or blew up. In either case it would trip all of the Bunker’s fail-safe devices-protocols that were hardwired into the station’s structure with so many redundancies that even a deliberate attempt to disable them would trigger them. Once triggered the fail-safe would send electrical signals to explosive bolts that would slam every door shut and then burst-weld them into place. The fail-safe system would then start a series of asbestos-coated alloy fans that would take the superheated gasses and blow them into every room and chamber in the Bunker. Gault had designed the Bunker that way to keep his pathogens from escaping. He really did not want to destroy the world. All he wanted was to become the richest man in it.

He crawled along the tunnel, pouring sweat, inching toward a spot that could only be found by touch: markings like Braille that Gault himself had etched into the plate steel. Behind that plate were six hydraulic levers. Each one would cause about a ton of rock to crash down onto a separate vent pipe. Easy as pie.

Forty feet to go.

Thirty. Twenty. Then he heard it. A voice whispering in the darkness somewhere behind him.

“Sebastian,” she called. Low and sweet and dreadful.