Ripper (42 page)

As he started to reach for Perdition’s Fire, gunfire erupted out in the hallway. As he turned he saw the black man rise and once more tackle the man closest to the door, sending Mendenhall and Smith’s man into the exposed corridor. He gestured for his men to take
cover, but it was too late. Colonel Bannister acted first. He raised his long arms up and pushed all of his people through the still-open doorway. Virginia saw this and dove herself. Bannister then quickly closed the door and locked it just as sixteen bullets struck him in his back, sending his head into the glass inside the door.

Gloria hit the floor, turned on her back, and looked up just in time to see her father’s face hit the glass in the upper half of the door. He looked in shock as he was shot in the back. Several rounds hit the safety glass, sending shards into the observation room and making the lone mercenary turn away from the action in the hallway. Virginia, with her football prowess still intact, sent her body
in a headlong plunge at the man’s ankles. He stumbled and fell backward, and she was struck in the face with hot blood as one of the attacking security team members placed a bullet into his hooded head. Virginia rolled and was soon picked up by Will Mendenhall who pushed her into the arms of another man. Virginia looked up and saw Captain Everett.

Mendenhall frantically gestured for the others
to crawl forward out of harm’s way. As they did, he reached down and pulled Gloria Bannister to her feet. She immediately wrapped her arms around Mendenhall as he threw both her and himself back against the wall as more bullets started flying out of the clean room.

“My father!” she screamed as Will held her in place.

Mendenhall just shook his head as he pulled the CDC doctor onto the floor.

“How many?” Everett shouted over the gunfire inside the clean room.

“There are four, plus their commander,” Virginia answered.

Everett nodded and turned to the twenty men he had lining the hallway. He gestured for them to take up station on either side of the open doorway. Then he turned to Will and tossed him his headset and radio. “Get on the horn and have Sergeant Sanchez bring up an assault
package. We need flash bangs and gas.”

“Yes sir,” Will said as he placed the earphone into his ear and made the call. “Then get to the Europa terminal and order the rest of the staff out of the complex. Tell them not to wait for the buses; get into the desert and stay there.” Everett turned to Virginia and the CDC team. “Did you hear any names?” he asked them, covering his head as more gunfire
erupted from inside.

“Smith,” said a voice from their right.

Everett turned and saw Sarah as she limped forward. She was literally covered in blood. He ran to her and eased her onto the carpeted hallway.

“Jesus,” he said as he used his large hand to wipe some of the blood from her head.

“I think he killed Jack and Alice,” she said as the words threatened to catch in her throat.

Everett acted
as though he didn’t hear her as even more bullets came flying out of the clean room. Large holes stitched random patterns in the plastic wall behind them. Then he lifted Sarah’s bruised and battered face upward.

“He’s been dead before—he didn’t like it much.”

“Smith is the same man that rescued you in Mexico,” Sarah said as she started to regain her senses. She saw Everett go blank for a moment.
Then anger set into his features as he placed her against the wall.

“Goddamn it,” Everett said as he crawled back toward the doorway. He looked up at Will and he nodded his head, letting Everett know that his orders had been successfully passed on. Carl then got as close to the doorway as he dared and placed his nine millimeter next to the frame. “Will, get these people to the gymnasium and then
up through the cargo platform to level one.”

“Captain, I think—”

“That’s an order Lieutenant,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

“Yes sir,” Mendenhall answered with a sour look on his face. “But I’m coming back,” he said, daring the captain to say something to the contrary.

“Don’t worry; I’ll save pieces of these guys for you,” Everett said as twenty more rounds smashed through the remaining
glass in the double-paned windows above. “Will, get to a phone and get Farbeaux out of here. Tell his guard to put one in his leg if he has to to make sure he doesn’t run.”

“I’ll perform that little task myself,” Will said as he started herding the civilians away at a crawl.

Everett turned and looked at Virginia. “You too, Doc, take Sarah and meet up with the director. He should be out of here
by now.”

Virginia nodded her head and helped Sarah up as they both bent low and ran for the elevators.

Carl nodded at his men as he saw them ready to strike. He held up a hand.

“In the clean room, cease fire!” he called out.

“No, I think we’ll keep up the Lord’s work,” came the reply. “We have quite a bit of ammunition to play with.”

“Mr. Smith, the complex is now sealed. There’s nowhere
to run,” Carl called out.

“I like that old song, never believed in the theory of running before,” Smith said in his irritatingly smug voice.

“Then it will be my pleasure to kill you, Smith.”

*   *   *

Inside the clean room Smith was behind the cover of the largest of the three robotic arms. He looked around at his men as they covered the only opening. He closed his eyes in thought as he seemed
to recognize the voice coming from the hallway. He figured there was no reason to taunt the man about the murder of his companion in Las Vegas, so he tried to formulate a way out of there without getting himself killed. He realized that surrendering was just a slower way to make that happen.

As he opened his eyes and scanned the clean room, he looked up and saw the jar filled with the amber liquid.

One of his Black Team looked up just in time to see Smith reach up, take hold of the jar, and then bring it down to floor level. Smith knew this could be his only negotiating tool.

“Exactly to whom am I speaking?” he shouted out into the hallway.

“Captain Everett, United States Navy,” Carl answered.

“Well Captain Everett, you seem to have an eclectic outfit here as far as I can see. There is
an old rumor in the outfit I work for that said there was something like this little day care center situated in the desert somewhere. I guess some rumors are true.”

“Surrender now Smith and I’ll give you the grand tour.”

“I think I may have another solution to our predicament, Captain. How about you give me and my men safe passage out of here, and in exchange I won’t contaminate this entire
facility with Perdition’s Fire. Sound reasonable?”

Carl leaned back against the wall and mentally cursed himself for thinking this would be an easy situation. He waited for a few seconds and then leaned to his right without exposing himself to the open doorway.

“You of all people know what that would do to everyone, including yourself. So just lay down your arms and give it up.”

Just as Smith
was about to react to Everett’s command, one of Smith’s own men gaped wide-eyed at the jar Smith was holding and tried to slide a few feet farther away. Before he could move Smith shoved the jar into the hands of the startled soldier.

Smith made sure the man was stable enough to hold the jar, and just as he was about to demand once more the surrender of his antagonists, Smith’s own eyes widened
at a sight that froze the unvoiced demand deep in his throat. As he looked from the startled soldier’s eyes to the jar the man held, he saw that the rubber stopper, cracked with age and with a new three-cc-sized hole in its top, was
leaking
. Drop by drop it hit the floor.

In a panic the young soldier reacted without thinking, dropping the jar not a foot in front of him just as Smith started to
back away. It shattered. Almost instantaneously the fogging agent mixed with the formula and both agents started to do their work. As soon as a massive amount of air struck the compound it started to fog. Smith and the soldier were the first to feel the sting of the mixture as it hit their nostrils. Smith placed a hand over his mouth and tried to stand and run, deciding that surrender would be far
better than the fate of Juan Guzman, but his boots hit the hydraulic fluid that had been released from the hoses and he fell back, knocking the air from his lungs. As he tried to reach for the table over his head, his fingers found instead the blue set of hoses that ran from the floor to the robotic arms. He pulled, trying to gain purchase when the hoses separated from the valve in the tile. A
sudden burst of air, one that supplied pneumatic power to the arms, sprayed onto the pooling formula, sending a large cloud of vapor toward his stunned and shocked men, engulfing them and burying their black-clad bodies in a veil of whitish-brown mist.

The screams of pain and anguish from what was left of Smith and his remaining Black Team started almost immediately.

A flaw in the design of
the Biology Department’s fail-safe system became immediately apparent. The system was a separate entity from Europa, and as soon as the “sniffer” inside the clean room detected the release of the formula, the safety system went into effect.

Perdition’s Fire had been released just as every door inside the complex except for the emergency exit in the gymnasium and sports arena shut down and locked
automatically.

Sarah and Virginia were near the elevator doors when Europa became aware of the second protocol warning of the biohazard system inside the clean room. On her own Europa and entirely under her emergency directive that was designed separately into her system by Pete Golding and the onetime supervisor of the Computer Sciences Department ten years before, Dr. Niles Compton, that order
could not be overridden without a code sent out by the president of the United States—she had immediately sealed the Event Group Complex to the outside world, literally cutting them off from any form of rescue.

Hell had come to Department 5656, and Jack the Ripper, a biologically created beast, was reborn. Only this time he was not only one but five supermen.

PART THREE

THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL

Satan, having betrayed God, is himself trapped at Hell’s core, at the sunken tip of the inverted cone he created when he fell to Earth, cast out of Heaven …

—Dante Alighieri

9

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.

The president stood silently at the window that looked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. The street was clear of any protesters for the day and that was when he liked looking out at the quiet Washington night. He felt the Oval Office was most secure at that time. His visitors thought he was intentionally ignoring them, and the two men sitting on the two couches
facing each other waited for the president to speak.

Harlan Easterbrook, the director of the CIA, sat with his glasses at the end of his nose and read the report from the man in front and opposite of him, Director of Operations Samuel Peachtree.

Finally the president turned and faced his guests. “And we have no idea the location of your agent?” the president asked as he sat on the edge of his
desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“No, sir. According to our records Agent Simpson checked out and went to Georgetown. We checked out the address, and as it turns out it’s a model home that is up for sale,” Easterbrook said as he looked up from the flimsy report that had been offered up by Peachtree. He handed the paper over to him and then looked at the president. “I knew you had met the
agent in question before, so when she came up missing we thought you would like to be briefed.”

“I do know Agent Simpson, and my concern for her safety is of paramount importance, but no more so than any other American intelligence employee. Why isn’t Ms. Simpson’s boss here with you gentlemen?”

“The Assistant Director of Intelligence is currently visiting his counterpart in London, Mr. President.
He has been informed about the absence of the North American Desk supervisor.”

The president looked hard into the dull eyes of the recent appointee by the Senate Oversight Committee to the position of director of operations, Samuel Peachtree.

“She has a name, Mr. Peachtree, not just a desk or an assignment or a title.”

“Of course, Mr. President, Miss Simpson,” Peachtree said feeling the heat
of the president’s glare.

“Okay gentlemen, keep me informed.”

With that the brief meeting was over. The two men waited for a word before they left, but the president kept his head down in thought. The two CIA men left the Oval Office.

The president took a deep breath, hit the intercom switch, and then mentally calmed himself. “Please send in General Caulfield.”

A moment later four-star marine
general Maxwell Caulfield walked into the Oval Office and greeted his boss. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff stood rigid at the center of the office.

“Jesus, Max, knock it off and have a seat will you?” the president said as he tossed the pen he was holding onto his desk and stood and walked over to the couch opposite of where Caulfield sat. He rubbed his face and looked up at his own
appointee from almost two years before.

“Max, I need your help with something, and I need you to keep it close to the vest and not ask any questions. Do you understand?”

The general matched the president’s move and leaned forward. “Of course, anything; you know that.”

“That group you think is just a think tank buried under Nellis Air Force Base?”

“The one run by that little bald fella that
shows up here from time to time?”

“You know damn well who I’m speaking of so don’t play games; it’s too late at night.”

“Yes, sir, I know of the rumors that have circulated inside the military for years. I first heard of it at the Academy. Everyone thinks we have secret bases and covert operations all over the country, why—”

“We have a problem in the desert Max. We need an assault team put
together that can not only pull off a hard job, but is able to keep their mouths shut once the operation is complete. A small unit if possible.”