Armageddon, page 4
part #5 of Liars Series
‘That’s their job,’ he said. ‘To be in dangerous places.’
‘We still have a responsibility for their safety,’ Rizvi said.
The words triggered something. That journalist, Dana Reynolds, had been hassling him again about Malburse. Every time he thought that whole mess was behind him, it found a way to rise back to the surface.
He had quashed the story, for now. But if more soldiers died, and he got the blame, someone might talk.
‘Pull the troops out of Kelton,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Pull them out. Like you said, we have a responsibility.’
‘But then they won’t find the weapon,’ Rizvi said. ‘The toxin could spread for hundreds of kilometres, making the area uninhabitable for decades—’
‘Does fire kill it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Fire,’ Fisher said. ‘If we hit Kelton with a fuel-air bomb, will the virus die?’
‘It’s, uh, not a virus—and I don’t know.’
‘Well, find out. And get the troops out of there, so it’s an option.’
‘But . . . what about all the people still in Kelton?’ Rizvi demanded, aghast.
‘They’ll have to evacuate. After the blast, they can come back and rebuild—which they couldn’t do with bioweapon particles hanging in the air. Fire is easier to recover from.’
‘Some people can’t evacuate,’ Rizvi insisted. ‘They don’t have access to cars, or they have mobility problems, or they’re hard of hearing and don’t know the evacuation is happening—’
‘I’ve done my job,’ Fisher said. ‘I’ve made a decision. Now you do yours. Make it happen. Discreetly.’
Rizvi looked ready to mount further objections. Why are all my deputies so uppity? Fisher wondered. Can’t get good help these days.
‘Do I need to remind you who’s in charge here?’ he asked. ‘Or what happened to the last assistant minister?’
Rizvi lowered her eyes. ‘No, sir.’
‘Good. Schedule the launch for 11 a.m.’ Fisher paused with a forkful of food halfway to his mouth. ‘One more thing. Viper never said that he would use botulism—he only said he would make the town uninhabitable. So leak a story that he might have access to a fuel-air bomb. When it goes off, I don’t want to get the blame.’
THE LONG CON
Anya and Scanner—he still hadn’t told Jarli his real name—had abandoned their four-wheel drive on the shoulder of the highway half a kilometre away. The long trudge back to it, through the bush, out of sight of the road, gave Anya plenty of time to tell Jarli the whole story.
She and her family had been sent to Kelton as part of Operation Snake Basket—a secret police task force set up to catch Viper and dismantle his criminal empire. They had posed as a normal family for two years. A fake paper trail had been set up, making it look like Scanner had a criminal record and some bad debts. Eventually, that had been enough to lure Viper in.
‘He sent a messenger with my first job,’ Scanner said. ‘A test. Viper told me to pick up some stolen cash from a warehouse on the southeast edge of town. Then he wanted me to break into someone’s house and plant the cash there, framing him for a bank robbery.’
‘So what did you do?’ Jarli asked.
‘Exactly what I was told,’ Scanner said.
‘But what about the guy who owned the house?’
‘He went to jail. We’ll get him released once Viper is caught.’
Anya wouldn’t meet Jarli’s eye.
‘After that, I was in,’ Scanner said. ‘To prove my loyalty, I let Viper—that is, one of his doctors—put a radio-activated poison capsule in my hand. Then he started giving me bigger and bigger jobs. And I’ve been getting closer to his inner circle, while also passing on everything I know to the task force.’
The poison capsule would have sounded farfetched if Jarli hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. One of Viper’s employees had died right in front of him, killed in seconds by a signal from a phone.
‘The doctor,’ Jarli said. ‘Was it Doctor Vorham? A tall, thin guy with grey hair?’
‘No, it was a woman. Why?’
‘Doctor Vorham has been treating Dad. I thought he might have helped Viper make the swap.’
‘Hmm,’ Scanner said. ‘If he’s not involved, it’s certainly suspicious that he didn’t notice the change . . . although neither did you, of course.’
Jarli felt his cheeks redden. He changed the subject. ‘If you’re all from Russia, how come Anya and her mum have accents, but you don’t?’
‘I worked in counter-intelligence for years,’ Scanner said, and suddenly his voice changed completely. ‘I was trained in five languages and a dozen accents.’
‘I am still learning,’ Anya said. ‘G’day, mate!’
Jarli winced. ‘So where’s my dad? And how did you know that Cobra had taken my father’s place?’
‘You know Throwaway?’ Scanner asked. ‘The old prison on Edward Street?’
Jarli shuddered. Yes, he knew it. He had been held captive there when the defence minister was still using it for juvenile detention.
‘The police think it’s sealed up and abandoned. But my task force just discovered that Viper has secretly taken it over. He’s been using it as a base of operations for months.’
The trees thinned out, and the mud-spattered four-wheel drive appeared up ahead. Scanner unlocked the door, and they all climbed in. But the road was still blocked by the traffic jam, so they couldn’t go anywhere.
‘This morning Viper started getting all his people and equipment out of Throwaway,’ Scanner was saying. ‘Presumably because he’s about to destroy the whole town. I was sent in to assist with the move. I helped the guards load a dozen prisoners into a transport truck. While I was there, I saw your father on one of the security monitors, in a cell. Later I established that his family hadn’t reported him as missing. The only explanation was that he’d been replaced.’
It felt like a hand was squeezing Jarli’s heart. ‘Did my dad end up on the transport truck?’
‘No. They were evacuating a different section.’
‘Did he seem OK?’
‘I didn’t get a good look at him,’ Scanner said.
Viper replaced my dad, Jarli thought, and I didn’t even notice. The guilt was crushing. How long had his father not been his father?
‘I bet that’s the same place Doug is,’ Jarli said. ‘We have to go get them.’
Anya began, ‘That’s where we’re—’
‘No,’ Scanner interrupted.
Anya looked confused. ‘What do you mean? I thought—’
‘The guards may be gone, but the prison has an automatic security system, and it’s extremely dangerous. We don’t have time to work out a way past it. In twelve hours Viper will turn this whole town into a graveyard.’
‘Exactly.’ Jarli drummed his fingers impatiently on his jeans. ‘We have to get my Dad out of there—and Doug, too—before that happens!’
‘I need to find and neutralise the canister of botulism H.’ The traffic shifted, and Scanner eased the vehicle forwards. ‘That’s the best chance of survival for your father, and for everyone else in Kelton.’
‘We can’t just leave them!’
Anya spoke up. ‘We do not know where the canister is. Correct?’
Scanner nodded. ‘I’ve ruled several places out, but there’s still a huge search area. Without Cobra, we have no more leads. That’s why we can’t afford to waste any more time.’
Jarli realised that Scanner hadn’t cared about him at all—he had only wanted to question Cobra about the toxin. Rescuing Jarli had been ‘a waste of time’.
‘Have you ruled out the prison?’ Anya asked carefully.
‘I see what you’re saying,’ Scanner said. ‘But it’s unlikely to be there. The building is airtight. If Viper released the botulism there, it wouldn’t infect the rest of the town.’
‘Unless Viper put it on the roof,’ Anya pointed out. ‘It would disperse well from up there.’
Jarli’s mind was racing. ‘And even if it’s not in the building,’ he said quickly, ‘Dad could help you figure out where it is. He used to work for a company called CipherCrypt, and Viper was connected to it. Dad knows all sorts of things about Viper’s organisation.’
‘He shared that information with the police already,’ Scanner said.
‘You don’t know what he’s overheard or figured out since he got captured, though,’ Jarli insisted. ‘Doug, too. I last saw Doug at the same hospital that Viper stole the botulism from. He might know where it is.’
Scanner glanced in the rear-view mirror, thinking.
‘Jarli makes a good point,’ Anya said.
‘He does,’ Scanner said finally. ‘But it’s too dangerous. The security system includes an autonomous robot. It can’t be bribed, threatened or reasoned with.’
‘I bet it can be switched off, though,’ Jarli said.
‘Even if I knew how to do that—and I don’t—we’d never get close enough. The thing will shoot us on sight.’
Jarli never wanted to see that prison again, especially not if it was guarded by a KILLER ROBOT. But he was going to rescue Dad and Doug, no matter what.
‘I know someone who can help us,’ he said.
THE WRONG MEMORIES
Kellin Plowman sat on a camping chair on the roof of his house, a flask of peppermint tea in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. From up here he could see all of Kelton. It looked like a disintegrating galaxy, the lights in the centre going dark one by one, red tail lights streaming outward as the people fled.
Plowman wasn’t leaving. His house was at the top of a hill on the edge of town. However Viper was planning to disperse the botulism, it wouldn’t reach him up here.
He squirted some more insect repellent on his upper arm and pulled his sling aside so he could rub it under the rim of the cast. The cold made his injuries ache. He wrapped the shawl more tightly around himself. It was past midnight, but he couldn’t sleep. As a boy he had often sat on the roof of his parents’ house, waiting for his father’s car to turn the corner at the end of the street. Then he would race down the stairs to tell his mother, who would pretend to be excited. Sitting up here was bringing back memories, but not the ones he wanted.
Something was tugging at the edges of his mind, but it seemed to VANISH whenever he looked directly at it. The more he chased it, the further away it got, like a mirage. The tugs got stronger whenever he was tinkering with his robots, which seemed like a clue. Had one of his robots or drones led him to Viper’s identity?
But the missing memories themselves never resurfaced. Viper had defeated him. And Kellin Plowman didn’t suffer defeat lightly.
His phone rang, and he jolted in his seat. The camping chair wobbled, and nearly toppled off the roof. He shouldn’t be up here. If he broke his other arm, life would be impossible. Cursing, Plowman found his phone and checked the screen. Jeremy Dillon. There was no such person—wary of getting hacked, Plowman always saved his contacts under aliases.
He answered. ‘Jarli. Have you learned anything new about Viper?’
‘Uh, not exactly.’ Jarli sounded like he was in a vehicle. Evacuating, presumably. ‘But we have a lead.’
Plowman shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Who is “we”?’
It took Jarli a few minutes to explain about Cobra, his father, Throwaway and the automated security system. Plowman didn’t interrupt. When Jarli was finished, Plowman said, ‘Tell me more about this robot.’
A new voice came on the phone. ‘Fully autonomous, 360 degree scanning LIDAR, armed with an anaesthetic spray and a stun gun. It weighs eighty kilos, but the body is carbon fibre, so most of that weight is the battery. It can run for two days between recharges. Less if it has to stun somebody.’
There was that tugging again. A strange sense of familiarity.
‘Who are you?’ Plowman asked. Jarli hadn’t told him who he was with.
The man didn’t answer.
‘OK,’ Plowman said slowly. ‘And this thing can move around?’
‘Yeah. It has four legs. Sixteen joints in total. It can open doors, pick itself up if it gets knocked over—the works.’
‘And how do you switch it off?’
‘If I knew that, we wouldn’t be calling you.’
Plowman thought about this. ‘Well, it would make sense to have a remotely triggered shut-down feature,’ he said, ‘and a manual off-switch on the robot itself for backup.’
‘Makes sense,’ the man agreed. ‘I don’t have login details for Viper’s network, so I can’t access the controls for the robot. Viper uses your encryption, so Jarli was hoping you could help us hack it.’
‘My encryption is unhackable,’ Plowman said. ‘Jarli should know that.’
‘Then how did Viper get into your network?’
Plowman gritted his teeth, and winced—his jaw was still sore. ‘I assume he got the password somehow,’ he said.
There was some arguing at the other end of the line. Plowman climbed through the window, back into his house. He climbed down the stairs past piles of old books, wove through the boxes of mechanical junk in his living room, and entered the four-car garage through an internal door.
For a moment, he hesitated. To help Jarli, he’d have to leave his hilltop fortress. If he went back into the town, the toxin could kill him.
But if he didn’t help Jarli, Viper would win. Plowman started shifting boxes around in the garage.
‘We can wear hazard suits to protect us from the anaesthetic spray,’ a young, female voice was saying.
‘We don’t have any,’ the man replied. ‘And anyway, the stun gun would punch straight through.’
Jarli was back on the phone. ‘Mr Plowman—you said there would be a manual off-switch on the robot,’ he said. ‘There must be a way to get to that switch without the robot shooting us on sight. Right? Otherwise, what’s the point of having a switch in the first place?’
‘I assume the robot has facial recognition software.’ Plowman opened a plastic crate and started rummaging through the pieces inside. ‘It will be programmed to recognise Viper, and anyone else he trusts to manage the robot. So Viper and his people can get close enough to turn it off at the switch, but the robot will shoot anyone else who tries.’
‘So we need to add our faces to the database somehow.’
‘Again, we’d need to hack an unhackable network for that.’
‘Well, maybe we . . .’ Jarli trailed off. Plowman could sense his desperation. ‘Electromagnetic pulse. We use an EMP to shut down the robot.’
‘I was thinking along exactly the same lines,’ Plowman said, still digging through the box.
‘The robot will just restart itself,’ the man put in.
‘But that will take time,’ the girl said. ‘Correct?’
‘Fifteen minutes, give or take.’
‘OK,’ Jarli said. ‘We hit the building with an EMP. We go in, grab Doug and my Dad, and get out. We’ll just need to generate the pulse somehow . . . Mr Plowman, do you have a microwave oven we can use? And some heavy metals?’
Plowman lifted a metal tube out of the box and blew the dust off, revealing the letters EPFC.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I have an explosive-pump flux compressor.’
A pause.
‘That’ll work,’ Jarli said.
NOT ALONE
Detective Zee Arno crouched behind her car, watching as Dana Reynolds knocked on the double doors of the Kelton cinema. There were no lights on inside, and the street was deserted.
The tap on the journalist’s phone had been a wash. Her calls were encrypted. But the location tracking had worked, and Arno had been able to follow Reynolds here.
Reynolds didn’t wait for anyone to answer the door. She pushed it open and disappeared into the cinema.
Arno hesitated. If she followed, she could be walking into a TRAP. But if she didn’t, she was unlikely to learn anything. And Viper’s deadline was less than eight hours away.
She stood up and ran towards the doors.
The inside of the cinema was dark except for a trickle of light from the streetlamp outside. The carpet was sticky. Arno crept past the box office, an abandoned popcorn machine and a row of posters before entering the first of the two theatres.
It was deathly silent, rows of seats and dusty velvet curtains absorbing all the sound. The blank screen loomed over the room, monolithic. No sign of Reynolds.
Arno edged back out, and then snuck over to the other theatre. She could hear voices from inside.
‘Anything?’
‘No. I thought this might be a good spot.’
‘Why?’
‘The video was . . . theatrical.’
Arno needed to know who was in there. She eased around the corner. The other theatre was larger than the first. Reynolds was standing in the aisle. Someone else was bent over, looking under the seats. When she stood up, Arno recognised her: former Constable Irena Blanco.
Arno leaned back, staying in the shadows. Blanco was a severe-looking woman with dark, watchful eyes and a chipped tooth. She had been suspended when her partner was caught working for Viper. Most people in the department assumed she had been involved too. No-one had managed to prove it so far. But whenever Viper was up to something, Blanco had a way of showing up.
If Blanco was Reynolds’s source, that explained how Reynolds had found out where Arno lived. Blanco had given her a ride home from work once.
‘If not here, where?’ Reynolds asked.
‘Somewhere high,’ Blanco said. ‘For good dispersal. There’s no way of knowing exactly where in Kelton the target will be.’
‘The roof?’
Her heart pounding, Detective Arno reached into her pocket and pulled out a phone.
‘I talked to your former colleague,’ Reynolds was saying. ‘Arno. She doesn’t seem to know anything.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me much—hey, did you hear that?’
The sound had been the click of Arno unlocking her phone. Holding her breath, she edged backwards out of the theatre.
