The Extinction Code Page 8

  ‘Everything?’ Lopez uttered.

  ‘Everything,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘If you lose the foundation species, the large populations at the bottom of the food chain, then everything up from them dies out in sequence. If you lose the plankton in the oceans due to acidification, then you next lose the small invertebrates that feed on the plankton, then the fish that feed on the invertebrates, then the sharks and dolphins and seals that feed on the fish: it never ends until all species have collapsed in population or become completely extinct, which all depends on how perfectly adapted they are to their environment.’

  Ethan watched the images of species flickering across the screen as a new thought crossed his mind.

  ‘The policeman who died in Brazil: did he have any contact with other people or the local environment after his infection?’

  ‘That’s what we were afraid of,’ Jarvis said, ‘so we went and checked out local wildlife populations in the surrounding areas, which are part of what’s called the Atlantic Forest. The news wasn’t good.’

  ‘The forest once covered over half a million square miles,’ Hellerman explained. ‘Due to deforestation and logging, that’s now down to fifteen hundred square miles: over eighty five per cent of the forest is gone, forever. The extinction rate is staggering, with over seventy per cent of species lost. But that’s not all we found.’

  The image on the screen changed, and Ethan frowned. ‘What’s that?’

  The image showed a shadowy canopy of dense forest, light filtering down in golden shafts, the camera work unsteady as though the photographer had fought to capture something in motion. In the center of the image, running away from the camera and looking back over its shoulder as it fled through the undergrowth, was a small, gray skinned biped with large, oval eyes.

  ‘The locals have taken to calling them demonios forestales,’ Hellerman replied, ‘forest devils.’

  Lopez eased even closer to the screen for a better look.

  ‘You think that’s what was captured back in 1996, what they tried to cover up in Brazil?’

  ‘No,’ Jarvis replied. ‘We think that it’s more recent than that and we want you both to go down there and check it out, because there’s a damned good chance that whatever that species might be, it’s responsible for the extinction rate in the Atlantic Forest.’

  Ethan raised an eyebrow as he looked at Jarvis. ‘Like the Conquistadores?’

  ‘Just like them,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘We think that the Brazilian government isn’t conducting the logging operations for money. We think that they’re using the work to flush out these creatures on purpose to maintain the cover–up, because they’re ground–zero for the next great extinction event.’

  ‘The next extinction event?’ Lopez echoed. ‘You think that it’s really happening, here and now?’

  Jarvis handed her a sheet of paper, which she read as he went on.

  ‘Intelligence from our sources suggest that Majestic Twelve has a stake in the game,’ he explained. ‘They’re up to something, and I want to know what the hell that might be. Right now, we only have two possible lines of enquiry: the sightings of these supposed forest devils in South America and anybody connected with Channing’s work. According to the old police reports we’ve uncovered the scientist who wrote the letter that led to his disappearance was a man named Eric Schofield.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘Majestic Twelve won’t want to see a mass extinction go ahead, Doug. People of power are only powerful because of the populations they control. Alone, they’re nothing.’

  ‘Agreed, but Majestic Twelve were born out of the Nazi Silver Shirts at the end of World War Two, and we all know what Adolf Hitler really wanted: an Aryan Race, a human future of pure blood. MJ–12 have attempted major pandemics before in order to cull the population and remove what they consider to be “undesirables”. If they’re onto something here we need to find out what it is, get ahead of them, and put a stop to it.’

  ‘Where can we find this Schofield?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘That’s where it gets interesting,’ Jarvis replied. ‘He works at the world’s premier Doomsday Vault, designed specifically to survive the end of the world.’

  ***

  XI

  The deepest, most secretive subterranean section of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s ARIES department was its Research and Test facility, concealed not just from the public but from most of the agency’s many thousands of employees. Most were informed that it contained the agency’s archives, the record of countless covert missions, which was true enough, but Jarvis knew that it did not reveal the whole story.

  In a far flung corner of the archives, in an area purposefully allowed to gather dust, was a door emblazoned with an aged warning sign of high voltages within. The door had a single visible lock, to which only a handful of the agency’s personnel held a key. The key would not work on its own, however, for most of the locks inside the door were on the far side and controlled from a secure location in the Director’s office. One could only access the door with their key if the other locks had been accessed by the director himself, in this case to allow Jarvis and Hellerman access to the secretive bunker.

  Jarvis slid his key into the lock, turned it, and waited.

  Moments later he heard mechanical and electrical locks open and the door hissed open before him. He walked with Hellerman into a narrow tunnel filled with old fuse boxes, cables and pipes, and strode down it until he reached another door. Above this one, a dusty looking camera flashed a red light, and as the door behind them closed again so the one in front of them opened.

  The laboratory within was large, manned by a dozen or so people Jarvis had picked from the agency’s thousands of staff. One of them was Hellerman, who hurried away through the laboratory toward a single experiment shrouded inside a large, transparent cubicle.

  ‘What progress have we made, Hellerman?’ he asked.

  Hellerman controlled himself and pointed down the laboratory. ‘It’s complicated.’

  Jarvis followed him to the cubicle, inside which was an array of robotic arms surrounding a Perspex box that contained a perfect chrome sphere of material that looked to him like a ball of mercury, the liquid flowing around itself as though it represented the weather patterns on a tiny planet. Beneath it was a golden disc, broken now into two pieces.

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Jarvis pointed out as Hellerman sat down at a workstation that allowed him to control the robotic arms.

  ‘The technology we’re looking at here is hundreds of years in advance of our own,’ Hellerman said.

  ‘Hundreds?’ Jarvis echoed. ‘I figured that you’d say thousands, or even millions.’

  ‘No, believe it or not we’re not too far behind this kind of memory storage device,’ Hellerman explained. ‘We know at the moment that it is a highly advanced computer drive, a liquid metal, variable state memory system.’

  Jarvis knew that the device was something that Majestic Twelve had spent decades trying to acquire. The problem for them had been that the device had been aboard a structure that had been orbiting planet Earth for some thirteen thousand years, and only when it had come crashing down into the Antarctic ice had there been any opportunity to obtain it. Ethan Warner had led a team into the icy wastelands of the continent and managed to retrieve the device, but at a great cost in lives.

  ‘The thing is, we have something similar already,’ Hellerman went on as he reached down and picked up a small, transparent disc that looked to Jarvis to be made of plastic. ‘This is a 5D photonic or light–based memory chip, developed by researchers at Oxford University and Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It uses waveguide technology to move light from lasers to and from a germanium, tellurium and antimony alloy nano–coating, creating a memory chip a hundred times faster than anything we have today.’

  ‘Is it as fast as that thing?’ Jarvis asked, pointing at the silvery sphere.

  ‘No, but it’s already been surpassed by
another non–layered glass chip developed by scientists at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. The University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre also used femtosecond laser writing, but their disc has a three hundred sixty terabyte disc data capacity, thermal stability up to a thousand degrees Celcius and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature – that is, it could last as long as the age of our universe, some fourteen billion years. They’ve already saved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Newton’s Opticks, the Magna Carta and the Kings James Bible on a single chip and barely made a dent in its capacity. They’re calling the devices “Superman memory crystals”, because they’re like the memory crystals seen in the Superman movies.’

  Jarvis leaned closer to the sphere. ‘So we’re catching up with whoever made this.’

  ‘In a sense,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘It’s been in orbit around our earth for thirteen thousand years, and we have no idea how long it took to get here, so it could have been constructed millions of years ago, but the level of technical ability is almost within our grasp.’

  ‘Can you access it yet?’

  Hellerman shook his head.

  ‘I’ve deconstructed the way that 5D crystal memory works, and we’re applying it now to computer models of this sphere to see what happens. The use of fluid dynamics and crystalline memory storage means that this device is infinitely more powerful than our new 5D chips. It’s a bit like asking our current weather technology to accurately predict global weather for the next ten years or so, when we struggle to get an accurate local forecast for the next twenty four hours. It’s going to take time, boss, a lot of time.’

  ‘We need a computer to decipher the computer,’ Jarvis mused as he watched the silvery sphere’s surface coil and swirl like weather patterns across the surface of the earth. A thought occurred to him as he watched those swirls. ‘Does it spin?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does it spin, the sphere? Have you measured any rotation?’

  ‘We hadn’t got that far yet,’ Hellerman admitted. ‘We’ve mostly been preoccupied with getting it into a stable state in the cubicle. Why?’

  Jarvis gestured to the swirling patterns on the sphere.

  ‘Those patterns look a little like the Coriolis Effect,’ he observed, the force that caused circular weather systems on earth driven by the planet’s rotation.

  Hellerman stared at the patterns for a moment. ‘You’re a genius.’

  ‘I’ve often said it myself.’

  ‘I’ll get the tech team on it right away,’ Hellerman said, agitated and excited all at once. ‘If we could map the Coriolis to known fluid dynamic forces in closed–state spheres and…’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Jarvis said as he stood to leave. ‘Call me if you figure anything out.’

  Jarvis left Hellerman where he was and walked out of the Research Department and back through the eerily quiet surroundings of the basement complex. To travel back to the ARIES Watch Room and then up to the fourth floor took him several minutes, but before long he was knocking on the door of the Director DIA’s office. He heard a muffled enter from within and he strode inside and shut the door behind him.

  ‘Take a seat, Doug.’

  Jarvis sat in a comfortable leather chair. Opposite him sat Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, the Director of the DIA. Nellis was a former United States Air Force officer who had been appointed DNI by the current president.

  ‘Where are we with MJ–12 and Mitchell?’ Nellis asked. ‘I heard about Wilms.’

  ‘Mitchell’s made the hit,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘Ethan and Nicola couldn’t locate him but he left his calling card.’

  ‘What’s your best assessment of his plan?’

  ‘Mitchell served MJ–12 as an assassin having come in at the ground level after the Vietnam War,’ Jarvis said. ‘He doesn’t consider himself one of them, especially now after all that’s happened. He considers them weak men in positions of great power. My best guess is that he’ll hit them one after the other, drive the remainder underground and then finish them off. Do we know where MJ–12’s members are right now?’

  Nellis nodded, glancing at an intelligence report on his desk.

  ‘Most of them,’ he acknowledged. ‘But it’s not easy keeping tabs. Many of them use doubles, and travel incognito as much as they can. Now that Mitchell’s targeting them they’ll go to ground and that’s only going to make our job harder.’

  Jarvis shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s not a bad thing?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Let’s just let Mitchell do our work for us,’ Jarvis replied, ‘see how many of them he can take down.’

  Nellis raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re talking about agency sanctioned homicide.’

  ‘I’m talking about justice,’ Jarvis said. ‘General, you and I both know damned well that even if we arrested every member of that cabal tomorrow, laid out everything we have on them in front of the Attorney General and assembled a prosecution team allied to our administration, not one of those self–serving bastards would see the inside of a jail cell.’

  Nellis exhaled noisily and leaned back in his seat as Jarvis went on.

  ‘Look at all the bankers, the politicians, the corporate CEOs who have screwed the people of our country over and over again only to retire on pensions that make our salaries look like a joke while we all have to abide by the same laws that they ignore, laws that often they created!’

  ‘It’s not our job to cherry pick policy, Doug.’

  ‘It’s not my job as a human being to waste years chasing convictions that will never stand in court. Majestic Twelve’s members are too powerful, too well connected. We can’t go after them ourselves, so why not let him do it for us?’

  ‘Because then we’re no better than they are. Mitchell hit Wilms, but he doesn’t know the identities of the other members, right?’

  Jarvis shook his head, looked away from Nellis. ‘As far as we know, but he’ll follow the same leads that we do, figure things out as we have done. He’s been quiet for six months – for all we know he’s onto them already.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ Nellis agreed. ‘He wants revenge on MJ–12, wants to take them down himself while he’s still capable enough to do it. If he succeeds, he’ll be satisfied, but others will rise to replace the dead members as they always have done and we’ll be back to square one. I want this mission to completely destroy Majestic Twelve, Doug, nothing else will do. We have to stop them, and we have to apprehend and imprison them before Mitchell can put a bullet in their heads.’

  ‘You realize that, effectively, you’re asking me to protect MJ–12, right?’

  ‘I’m asking you to protect our right to see them rot in security max prisons for the rest of their lives, Doug. A painless bullet between the eyes isn’t good enough for these people, we both know that, after all that they’ve done and all that they no doubt plan to do. Your job is to bring them to face justice Doug, our country’s justice, not Mitchell’s. You need to make a choice right here and now about which side of the law you’re standing on: theirs, or ours.’

  Jarvis stood up, and without another word he strode from the General’s office and closed the door behind him. He turned down the corridor and kept walking, then pulled out his cell phone as he dialled a number from memory.

  ***

  XII

  Svalbard Global Seed Vault,

  Spitsbergen, Arctic Circle

  ‘Damn me it’s cold!’

  Lopez looked at Ethan as they stepped out of the warm cab of an Arctic track vehicle, puffs of warm vapor spilling out into the frigid air.

  ‘Do you ever stop complaining?’ she asked. ‘Too hot one day, too cold the next.’

  ‘C’mon,’ Ethan protested, ‘just take a look around at this place!’

  The estuary of a nearby river spilled into the bitter black water of the Greenland Sea, which was littered with a silent armada of icebergs visible through the dense mist cloaking the island and its so
aring mountains. The frigid air and midnight–sun location was hardly somewhere that Lopez felt at home despite the thick Arctic jacket she wore, her face barely visible within her fur–lined hood.

  ‘Agreed,’ she capitulated, and turned with Ethan toward a large rectangular building built directly into the side of a nearby mountain.

  Spitsbergen was the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway and bordered the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea and the Greenland Sea. After landing on an ice strip and checking in with the local authorities at Longyearbyen, Ethan had travelled with Lopez to this, one of the most remote scientific establishments in the world. Only the Russian mining community of Barentsburg, the research community of Ny–Alesund and the mining outpost settlement of Sveagruva accompanied the vault on the archipelago.

  ‘What the hell do you think that somebody like Schofield would be doing out here?’ Lopez asked as they crunched through thick snow coating the path to the seed bank.

  ‘He’s a scientist,’ Ethan pointed out, ‘they do this sort of thing all the time.’

  ‘He’s a long way from home,’ she said in reply. ‘I’d want my job to be well worth it to be stuck out here for any longer than one day.’

  As they neared the building’s entrance a small, stocky looking man wrapped up in dense layers of protective clothing and flanked by two armed soldiers approached them.

  ‘Eric Schofield?’ Ethan asked and introduced Lopez.

  Schofield looked far older than he had in the picture that they had been given from his days in Montana.

  ‘Welcome to Spitsbergen,’ Schofield greeted them. ‘Let’s get inside, shall we?’

  Schofield led the way at an impressive pace to the building’s entrance, where they were required to undergo a number of security checks by a pair of armed guards, who confiscated Ethan’s and Nicola’s weapons before they entered the building proper. A blessed wave of warmth washed over them as they walked into a bizarre tunnel carved into the living rock, which extended into another tunnel lined with blue lights that encircled the tunnel walls.