Zero kill, p.24
Zero Kill, page 24
Standing in the kitchen as the children chased chickens in the yard, Howard Zero finished sewing back together Elsa’s old rag doll, which he’d found at the back of a cupboard. A flimsy thing, it was barely more than a musty beanbag, with lumpen stitching for a face and button eyes. It had an arm missing, and one of its legs hung by a thread. Howard thought the girl might like it; maybe the boy too, such was the way of the world these days.
Howard wasn’t a man prone to self-reflection, but he was surprised to discover that he’d miss the noise when Harley and India were gone, and he knew his wife would too.
‘Greta, we should discuss what to do if—’
‘Be quiet!’ she snapped.
He turned to see her at the sink, where she had been washing up; her head was lifted to the window, her hand suspended over a pot on the draining board.
Their farm was deep in the countryside. There weren’t many roads nearby, and few planes flew overhead. It was so quiet you could hear anything approach from far off, particularly at this time of the morning.
Howard felt the noise before he heard it, an ominous flutter in the pit of his stomach. Greta pulled back the grimy curtain and peered out. It was a disagreeable day, and they both hoped they felt the first distant rumbles of an approaching storm.
When they walked into the yard and listened – the kids had run into the field to attack each other with sticks – there was definitely something on the wind, so faint it was barely a change of density in the air.
Howard turned in a circle, trying to locate the source. ‘It’s coming from the south.’
‘Children,’ Greta called. ‘Come inside.’
They were too busy playing to pay her attention, and she raised her voice. Harley and India ran inside, followed by the dogs, just as the cracked glass in the windowpane above the sink began to buzz.
Howard and Greta went to either end of the heavy kitchen table and lifted it to one side, pulling away the threadbare rug beneath to reveal a trapdoor.
‘This is for you both,’ Howard told the children, offering the rag doll.
Harley and India looked at it doubtfully.
‘What is it?’ India asked.
‘It was your mother’s favourite doll.’ They were wasting time, so he shoved it at the girl. ‘Greta will take you downstairs.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said his wife. ‘You take them down.’
‘My eyes are better,’ he insisted.
‘Even with my failing eyesight, I’m still more expert than you, and you know it.’
Howard stared in indignation, but of course Greta was right. Even with her eyes, and the tremor she had in her hands, she would always be the better marksman.
‘Fine,’ he said shortly.
While Greta swept her arm over the draining board to clear a space, smashing plates in the sink, Howard lifted the trapdoor.
‘Down you go, children.’
‘It’s scary,’ said Harley, looking into the darkness.
‘Nonsense.’ Halfway down the wooden steps, Howard tugged a pull cord, illuminating a long, clean cellar full of shelving units neatly stacked with tins and boxes: enough supplies to ride out an apocalypse for several years. ‘Come along now, no more arguments, there’s nothing to worry about.’
India crouched at the top of the stairs and peered down at the pair of cot-beds at the far end of the long space. ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s nothing.’ Greta tore down the net curtains. ‘You won’t be down there for long.’
‘I’ll join you in a minute, but don’t worry…’ Howard snapped his fingers and the dogs trotted down the stairs. ‘Churchill and Montgomery will be with you.’
When the children hesitated, Greta barked with impatience, ‘Get down there!’
Reluctantly, the two children went down the stairs, and Howard shut the trapdoor. The dull throb in the distance had coalesced into an ominous rhythm: thwap thwap thwap.
‘You should go down,’ Greta told him.
‘And leave you on your own?’ said Howard. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
They glanced at each other in brief recognition of their decades of devotion to each other. Howard and Greta had made a solemn promise to Elsa to protect the children, and that’s what they intended to do, but they also knew they may not survive the morning.
Greta went into the parlour and unlocked the gun cabinet. She handed her husband a double-barrelled shotgun, and he chambered a pair of rifled slugs, stuffing more into his pocket.
‘Give me a hand with this.’
Howard helped her move the cabinet from the wall.
In a hidden recess behind it was a Dragunov SVD semi-automatic sniper rifle. Greta took it out and picked up a magazine loaded with ten rounds of 7.6254mmR cartridges. Squinting at the weapon, she put her finger to her forehead. ‘Where are my glasses?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ Howard rolled his eyes. ‘You won’t be any good to anyone without those.’
‘I’m a better shot than you, even without them.’ She fluttered her fingers, trying to think. ‘I left them in the loo, I think. Go and get them for me, will you?’
When he left, she set up the weapon beside the sink; fitted the curved magazine into it, made adjustments to the bipod. It had been decades since she had fired the Dragunov in a professional capacity, but Greta still took it apart regularly, cleaning and lubricating it, reassembling the component parts with a fluidity and grace that thrilled Howard. They still fired it occasionally, too, in preparation for the end of days.
‘They’re not in the bathroom,’ said Howard, coming back down the stairs.
‘проклятие!’ Greta cursed. ‘Look on the mantelpiece in the parlour!’
As Howard shuffled next door, Greta broke the glass in the window with the stock. Placing the barrel of the rifle through it, she leaned over the draining board, trying to get comfortable behind the PSO-1 telescopic sight; the chevrons were a blur in her vision. A helicopter appeared in the distance, its downdraught making the upper branches of the trees sway angrily.
Howard came back with her glasses. ‘You really need to hang them around your neck, I’ve told you repeatedly.’
‘Because you never forget where you put things, do you?’ she replied.
Greta took her time placing the glasses on her nose – Howard stood tensely beside her, rubbing his fingers against his palms – and then made adjustments to the scope.
The weapon was several decades old now, there were many better models available, but it was the rifle that Greta was most comfortable with, and with which she had made the most kills. It wasn’t the most ideal weapon in the circumstances – she prayed the helicopter would land at least seven hundred yards away; and the targets would move fast once she made the first shot – but she would do her best.
‘Good luck.’ Howard moved a stray cup off the draining board and hung it on a mug tree. ‘How’s your back?’
‘Please be quiet.’ Greta lowered herself over the rifle. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’
Howard stood behind her with his hands clasped in front of him, peering over her shoulder like a referee watching a snooker player line up a shot. Greta readjusted her position and grip, but it was awkward leaning across the uneven surface of the draining board, so she lifted the back end of the rifle and placed a chopping board beneath it. Squinting into the scope, she adjusted her glasses.
The EC145 came slowly over the field outside in a roar of noise, making the horses scatter. Rotors slapping the air, it tilted towards the ground eight hundred yards away.
The skids were almost touching the grass. As soon as it landed, Greta knew she’d have little room for error. She sensed her husband close behind her and said, ‘Don’t stand there like a nincompoop, go look after the children.’
He didn’t want to leave her, she knew that – together for more than fifty years, she could count on one hand the number of times they had spent even a night apart.
‘I’ll be down soon enough,’ she told him. ‘Don’t worry about that.’
But Howard lifted the shotgun. ‘And I’m not leaving you, don’t you worry about that.’
And then the helicopter touched down, and Greta didn’t have time to worry about the tremor in her hands, or her failing eyesight, or the aches and pains she felt leaning over the draining board. She tried to let her heartbeat settle – at her age, if it ticked over any slower, it was in danger of stopping altogether – as figures jumped from the helicopter.
They were young, fit people who moved with dexterity and speed, who understood the deadly business of killing, and who didn’t have arthritic joints.
Three of the figures dropped out of the bird on one side and four on the other. They approached the farmhouse in a hunched run.
The noisy blast of the blades would give Greta a brief window of opportunity. The figures wore Kevlar armour, so she would have to aim for the face. Greta pulled the bolt handle into position and went to work.
Targeting one of the figures at the rear, she lined up the reticules of the scope, and fired. The rifle recoiled in her hands.
The bullet pulled wide. The scope wasn’t properly calibrated. There was no paper target she could examine, not this time, so she had to use her instincts as she made adjustments. But the seven intruders, still close to the roaring helicopter, hadn’t realized what had happened. They knelt in the grass, semi-automatic weapons lifted, to survey the farmhouse. Greta settled back behind the scope, and fired again.
The head of one of the squad snapped back and he fell. The other two on the left side of the helicopter immediately began to run in opposite directions, zigzagging across the grass.
Greta locked the breech and pulled the trigger again. One of the figures on the right spun and hit the ground.
The pair on the left rushed around the side of the farmhouse, and the two on the right towards the back door, leading directly into the kitchen. Like other sniper rifles, the Dragunov was not designed to hit a fast-moving target at short range.
Ignoring her sciatica, Greta stood stiffly. ‘Get downstairs, while there’s still time.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Howard.
He couldn’t hope to kill any of the armoured intruders, but he could slow them down. As the door flew open at the front of the house, he stepped into the hallway to fire the shotgun at the chest of the first figure who came inside. The impact of the slug in his armour sent the man tumbling back out the door, but the recoil also blew Howard back against the wall.
Pain crashed along his spine, stars spun in his vision, but he lifted himself immediately and went back into the kitchen to pull the second trigger, firing at the camouflaged figure at the back door.
The glass in the door exploded as the man ducked away. The recoil caused Howard to topple again and he fell to the floor. Greta had tipped over the kitchen table and Howard crawled over to join her behind it as the man came in the back door and sprayed bullets.
The contents of the shelves, the china cups and jugs and plates and dishes that had sat there for decades, were obliterated. The glass in the windows shattered and the cupboard doors splintered. Howard hinged the shotgun and pressed in two more cartridges. Bracing himself, he fired again over the top of the table.
‘Come on!’ The next thing he knew, Greta was tugging at his arm, trying to lift him off the floor. ‘Get moving!’
Together they stumbled down the stairs into the basement, Greta snapping in place all the locks on the trapdoor from below.
The children stood at the back of the long, cramped room. The dogs sat whining in front of them.
‘We’ll not keep them out for long,’ Howard told his wife. ‘They’ll have explosives.’
She nodded grimly in agreement. Footsteps stomped noisily on the floorboards above their heads as the assault team moved about, the murmur of voices drifting down.
‘Well,’ Howard told the children. ‘It’s not always as exciting as this around here.’
Greta opened a box on a shelf and took out a pair of Walther handguns, snapped in magazines, and gave one to Howard.
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ Harley asked.
‘Nothing is going to happen to you,’ said Greta. ‘Not if we have anything to do with it.’
But Howard and Greta shared a glance; they knew they wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. They were trapped like rats.
‘Howard,’ said Greta, as they listened to the footsteps of the intruders.
‘Yes, Greta?’
‘I’m sorry if I’ve been difficult.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped again, irritated by the idea she could think such a thing. ‘Every single day I have spent with you has been a privilege.’
‘We got up to some things, didn’t we?’ Greta said.
The footsteps above retreated from the trapdoor.
‘Oh, yes.’ He smiled. ‘We certainly did.’
‘For the children, then,’ said Greta.
‘For the children.’
Howard and Greta lifted their weapons, just as the trapdoor disintegrated in an explosion of wood and metal, and smoke grenades bounced down the steps.
39
Elsa walked to the clear plastic wall of the biolab to study the man and the boy in the isolation chamber.
Their ashen faces were covered with oozing sores. Black with gangrene, the man’s hands reached for his throat as he retched bile and blood onto his chest.
‘My head gardener and his son. The pathogen has been in their bodies for only a few hours, but it has spread at an astonishing speed.’ Arkady sounded surprised. ‘Replicating, destroying cells, turning the body’s immune system against itself. Luke… the poor lad is gone, and his father will die also of massive organ failure soon. It will be a merciful release.’
‘You said I did this.’ Elsa tried to contain the rage she felt. ‘What did you mean?’
‘Without you, Elsa, none of what we’re doing here would have been possible.’
A man who had been undergoing decontamination procedures let himself out of the airlock of the biolab. With his dark beard and glowering expression, Elsa recognized him immediately as Noah Pettifore, the synthetic biologist.
‘Noah.’ Arkady gestured at him to come over. ‘Let me introduce you to Elsa.’
‘We’re almost finished,’ Noah told Arkady, ‘I think the results are pretty conclusive.’
Elsa moved towards Arkady with the intention of beating the truth out of him, but Camille and Kieron stepped in front of her.
‘Take one more step.’ Camille’s grip tightened around her handgun. ‘I’d like that.’
‘I understand, Elsa.’ Arkady lifted a hand in apology. ‘You’re frustrated and want answers. Twelve years ago I stole a virus, a very deadly biological agent genetically engineered in a secret underground lab by my own government. A synthetic form of yersinia pestis, bubonic plague – transmissible by air, and therefore highly virulent.’ He nodded at the victims. ‘You see what it does to a person in less than a day. Release the pathogen in a crowded public place and the results will be catastrophic – and irreversible. I stole the genome sequence, the instructions, if you will, on how to replicate the genetic structure of the virus, which would allow me to construct a doomsday weapon.’
Elsa couldn’t believe her ears. ‘And why would you do that?’
Arkady wagged a finger, we’ll come to that. ‘I stole the data, Elsa, but then I had a problem. In this day and age, it’s impossible to hide such a thing. Anxious about the consequences of such a terrible item becoming available on the open market, the Russian government took the unusual step of revealing its existence to its allies and enemies alike. A number of states, traditionally antagonistic, were even prepared to work together to find it.’
Steve Carragher had led some kind of inter-agency task force to find the data and destroy it, Elsa knew. But the mission had got him killed.
‘That put me in an uncomfortable position. If it was proved I had stolen it, they would have come for me; I certainly wouldn’t be standing here now. I needed to find someplace to store the data until everybody got tired of looking for it. But in this world of cyberattacks and hacks, it’s so difficult to know where to hide it. Put it in the cloud and it’s vulnerable. Place it in a vault and it can still be stolen. The most obvious thing to do was trick the world into thinking the data was destroyed, and then place it somewhere nobody would ever find it… So we hid it in you.’
Elsa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘SIS did a battery of tests, and so did RedQueen. If you planted any kind of data chip inside me, they’d have found it.’
‘There’s no capsule or microscopic device.’ Arkady grinned, pleased at his own cleverness. ‘The genome sequence is written into the cells in your bloodstream, Elsa, like ink on a page. It’s encoded into your own DNA.’
It wasn’t possible. ‘You’re lying.’
‘Noah can explain the process better than me,’ Arkady said.
‘The instructions for the genome were encoded directly into memory T-cells in your bloodstream.’ Pettifore spoke in a distracted monotone as he tapped at a keyboard. ‘Cells in the blood you were given in the medical facility outside Buenos Aires contained the data. Memory cells are only woken up if activated by a particular antigen that causes an immune response. Until those cells are activated, the data is completely hidden. It can’t be detected, even if anyone knew what they were looking for.’
Arkady nodded. ‘Camille injected you with the antigen, I believe.’
Elsa remembered she was pricked with the stubby needle at the hotel in Soho. Camille had said she was neutralizing tracking devices.
‘And then all we had to do was take a sample of blood. It would have been preferable to have done it before RedQueen sent you down into the vault; there was a danger we may never have seen you again, but we had to ensure the memory cells were properly activated.’
Camille had drawn Elsa’s blood in the van later that night, on the way to Dougie’s.
‘Noah used a genome sequencing device to read the data and recreate the synthetic virus. He’s such a clever man, it’s been a privilege to finance his work. His technology has opened up a fascinating can of worms, Elsa, which will forever change the way mankind stores information. Human DNA is capable of storing trillions of gigabytes of information, did you know that? That’s far more space than on any network of computers. One day, every speck of knowledge will be stored in our own DNA, retrievable at a moment’s notice. We’ll all be walking encyclopaedias. But you, Elsa – you were the first! That’s something to be proud of, no?’
