The Extinction Code (26 page)

A heavy boot thumped across his chest as Forbeck staggered upright and lashed out. Ethan’s lungs convulsed and he slammed onto his back in the boat’s stern, Forbeck rushing toward him and raising his boot again to stomp it down on Ethan’s face and end the confrontation.

Ethan threw his hands up to attempt to block the blow when the terrible sound of splintering fibreglass and metal crashed out and the speedboat lurched across the waves. Forbeck stumbled sideways and crashed into the wheel as Ethan saw Lopez briefly as her boat smashed into Forbeck’s vessel’s hull and threw him off balance.

Ethan scrambled to his feet even as Forbeck recovered himself and the gunman’s hand fell upon a crowbar lodged behind the wheel. Forbeck grinned maliciously as he yanked the crowbar from its braces and staggered toward Ethan, blood spilling from where his head had hit the wheel during Lopez’s collision.

Forbeck raised the thick crowbar and brought it crashing down toward Ethan, who leaped to one side and let the weapon smash down onto the deck as he dashed past Forbeck and rolled along the deck.

Forbeck turned and raised the crowbar once again as Ethan’s hand rested on his lost pistol and he whirled, aimed at Forbeck’s left knee and fired.

The gunshot smashed through bone and muscle and Forbeck screamed as his leg gave way beneath him amid a fine spray of crimson blood that splattered the boat’s pristine deck. The gunman slammed down onto the deck as Ethan, his chest heaving, crawled to one side and reached out to close the speedboat’s throttles. The vessel slowed on the ocean until it became stationary on the swells, and Ethan could hear Lopez’s craft turning nearby and closing in on them.

‘Are you okay?’ she yelled as she guided the speedboat in alongside Forbeck’s and saw the gunman writhing in agony on the deck, both hands clasped around his knee.

‘Never better,’ Ethan gasped and wiped blood from a cut on his lip that stung sharply. ‘You wanna call an ambulance for this asshole?’

*

Ambokala Hospital,

Manakara

Madagascar did not possess the kind of medical facilities that most western people considered a human right, and that was something that Ethan was determined to capitalize on as he stepped out of Rubinar’s jeep and looked at the building before him. A hospital designed to treat mental patients that had recently been refurbished, it had only a rudimentary emergency service, which he and Lopez witnessed as they walked into a small ward of bare walls and minimal furnishings to see Forbeck lying on his back on a metal bedstead with a mattress that might possibly have been older than the town itself.

A saline drip had been inserted into Forbeck’s right arm and his leg had been set and dressed, but Ethan had quietly ensured that there was little in the way of pain relief for the wound Ethan had inflicted. The dressings were clean but thick blood stained the mattress beneath the wound and Ethan knew that Forbeck could hardly expect to escape without an infection at best and the loss of his leg at worst.

Ethan eased alongside the bed and looked down into Forbeck’s strained eyes.

‘Greetings,’ Ethan said. ‘Remember me? We took a little boat trip a couple hours ago?’

‘Go to hell,’ Forbeck seethed through gritted teeth.

‘How’s the leg?’ Lopez asked, then looked at it and sucked her teeth as she shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t put much on you walking out of here on that thing. Mind you, I wouldn’t put much on your ever walking again if you stay here too long.’

Forbeck glared at her.

‘I’m an American citizen,’ he snapped over his pain. ‘I demand that you contact the consulate and have me repatriated so that I can receive proper treatment after I was attacked and shot by this assho….’

‘Ahh that’s the problem you see,’ Ethan cut across him. ‘You’re an American citizen all right, but there’s no record of you entering the country. That makes you an illegal immigrant and therefore not eligible for medical treatment here other than at your own expense.’

‘Furthermore,’ Lopez went on smoothly, ‘not only do we have witnesses who saw you steal that speedboat from the docks, but also witnesses who saw you open fire on us. You do know that we’re Defense Intelligence Agency, right?’

Ethan saw trepidation on Forbeck’s face, and then shock as both he and Lopez flashed their badges at him.

‘Opening fire on an intelligence agent carrying out the course of their duties is a federal offence anywhere on earth,’ Ethan said, ‘and the attempted homicide of not one but two agents will get you… what do you think, Nicola?’

‘Oooohh, I’d say about thirty years, no parole,’ Lopez replied. ‘You look to be about forty Forbeck, so you’ll get out just long enough to use what’s left of your leg for a year or two before you drop dead of old age.’

Forbeck scowled and spat weakly in her direction. ‘Get me a doctor or I’ll sue the pair of you and your department for a breach of my human rights!’

Ethan smiled as he leaned against the wall and folded his arms.

‘Well, you see that’s the other problem. You travelled here without visas or passport, so there’s no record of you actually being here at all. So, we figured, y’know what? If Forbeck doesn’t play ball, that’s just fine. He’s not going anywhere on that leg and since we just froze his bank accounts and recovered his cash assets, we’ll just pretend this whole thing never happened.’

Forbeck frowned in confusion and Lopez smiled brightly.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We’ll just let you go.’

Ethan pushed off the wall and took a moment to look around the hospital ward at the stained walls, the emaciated bodies of two dying men laying in nearby beds, the sickly aroma of lousy disinfectant and urine heavy in the air.

‘This is as bad a prison sentence as you’ll ever get back home,’ Ethan said. ‘We already know who you’re working for so I guess there’s not so much you can do for us anyway. I doubt you’ll make it out of here alive. Best of luck with that.’

Ethan walked away from Forbeck’s bed, Lopez turning on her heel and following him toward the ward exit. He got to within two paces of the door when Forbeck’s strained voice cried out.

‘Wait!’

Ethan turned at the door and looked at Forbeck expectantly. His face was flushed red both from pain and the incessant heat. Ethan knew that he wouldn’t last long in here, that he would probably not survive the wound in his leg if he wasn’t shipped to America real fast.

‘Talk,’ Ethan said, ‘and make it damned fast and equally good or I’ll walk out of here right now, something that you’ll never be able to do.’

Forbeck grit his teeth, but he knew that he had no place left to go.

‘I work for a man named Garrett.’

‘Tell us something we don’t already know,’ Lopez insisted.

‘He has an island,’ Forbeck gasped as a fresh wave of pain washed over him and he squirmed in agony, ‘off the coast of Brazil.’

Ethan walked back to the bedside. ‘An island?’

Forbeck nodded.

‘I don’t know exactly what he does there but he leases the island from the Brazilian government for experiments of some kind, and whatever it is that he’s up to is not good. I don’t go there if I can avoid it.’

‘Why?’ Lopez asked, interested now. ‘What is it that you don’t like about the place?’

Forbeck clasped his wound with both hands. ‘I need pain killers,’ he whimpered.

‘You’ll get them,’ Ethan promised. ‘Talk.’

Forbeck managed to get himself under control and spoke in a weary, ragged voice, the tone of a man in total defeat.

‘I saw some of the things they have there,’ he whispered, ‘creatures.’

‘Creatures?’ Lopez echoed, almost nervously.

‘People,’ Forbeck said, ‘but they’re not people, not really. They’re… they’re not human.’

Ethan felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he considered what Forbeck was saying. If the man was trying to stall for time he was doing a damned good job of it: nobody in their right mind would make up such an outlandish story if they were trying to convince government agents that they were telling the truth. The pain alone wasn’t enough to make Forbeck delirious.

‘This island,’ Ethan asked. ‘What’s it called?’

***

XXXI

‘It’s called Ilhabela, and is two hundred miles south west down the coast from Rio de Janeiro.’

The interior of the Lockheed C–5 Galaxy was blessedly cool compared to the dense humidity of Madagascar. Ethan sat at a communications terminal inside the aircraft’s cavernous fuselage, just behind the cockpit, the immense Galaxy having been diverted south from a flight out of Iraq to collect them under the pretence of collecting the dead bodies of two US agents killed in the line of duty in Madagascar. At the same time, Forbeck had gotten himself a ride back to the USA and the medical attention he so desperately needed.

A monitor before Ethan showed an image of Doug Jarvis in his office in Washington DC, while a small window to Ethan’s right revealed the twinkling lights of Madagascar’s coastal towns vanishing beneath swathes of cloud as the Galaxy climbed out toward the African coast and the vast South Atlantic Ocean beyond.

‘Tell me about it,’ Ethan said as he leaned back in the seat. ‘Forbeck is convinced that whatever Garrett’s up to, it’s happening on that island.’

Hellerman’s face appeared on the screen as he briefed Ethan.

‘Ilhabela is Portuguese for “beautiful island”,’ Hellerman said, ‘it’s a few miles off the coast, far enough to be clear of most tourists.’

‘How could this guy Garrett hide some kind of experimental facility from so many people?’

‘Because it’s not exactly hidden,’ Hellerman explained. ‘Garrett leases the western side of the island from the Brazilian government, and that side of the island is rarely visited by tourists. The island’s interior is densely forested and virtually impassable, which means that access to the island on the far side of the channel is possible only by boat. Most folks don’t venture inland from there, staying on the secluded beaches.’

Ethan watched as Hellerman’s features disappeared to reveal a satellite image of the island.

‘The facility itself appears to be mostly underground, with thick forest canopy concealing what little is visible from the air. Access is strictly controlled, and as far as we’re aware nobody but employees of Garrett have set foot inside that facility since it was constructed some ten years ago.’

‘Ten years, huh?’ Lopez echoed, ‘plenty of time for somebody to have been busy creating who–the–hell–knows–what. Forbeck claimed that there were creatures on that island, something not quite human. Who the hell is this guy Garrett, anyway?’

‘Professor Rhys Garrett,’ Hellerman explained, ‘a former Professor of genetics at Harvard. Made himself a billion or two during the early rush to decode the human genome among other things, by licensing a series of coding protocols for DNA that allowed computers to crunch biological data more efficiently.’

Ethan saw an image of the professor appear on the screen, a hawkish looking man with thin–rimmed spectacles balanced precariously on the end of his beak–like nose, eyes with an ominous hint of radicalism glittering in them like a distant, volatile star.

‘When was he last seen?’ Ethan asked.

‘Garrett slipped the net at Dulles International two weeks ago,’ Jarvis explained. ‘Went as far as to use a body double, which fooled the tail we had on him. The flight he took was private and was headed to South Africa, but from there the trail goes cold until Madagascar and his yacht, which you both connected to the events on the island.’

The image of the island vanished and Jarvis spoke to them again.

‘As far as Garrett’s aware, you two are dead,’ he reminded them. ‘There’s no way that we can gain rapid access to this facility through normal diplomatic channels. The Brazilians are allies, sure, but they are likely generating huge revenue from whatever Garrett’s doing down there and we’ve got to assume that he’s already well in with the government and other heads of state.’

‘They wouldn’t stand against America,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘We have direct evidence linking assets of Garrett to the attack in Madagascar. Can’t we just point the finger and force the Brazilians to open the place up to an inspection?’

‘They already tried,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Three years ago the US tried to convince Brazil to open the island up for investigators, but Brazil closed ranks around Garrett. It turns out that they’re not particularly trusting of America’s history of concealing UFO events, and they seem to think that this island has something to do with the Varginha event.’

‘You think that the creatures that Forbeck mentioned are the same things that were seen at Varginha?’

‘Maybe,’ Jarvis replied, ‘but without boots on the ground it’s all conjecture. Many witnesses claim to have encountered strange creatures on the island, but few have come forward in recent years.’

‘How come?’ Lopez asked.

‘Recanted their statements,’ Jarvis replied, ‘either as a result of intimidation or bribes. Garrett can do both. The only person I could find who might talk is a former military police officer name Martinez who was a witness to the original sightings in Varginha. He’ll meet you when you arrive in Brazil.’

‘And Garrett?’ Lopez asked.

‘I don’t know what the hell this guy’s up to out there but right now our best bet is to ignore official protocol and get you both onto that island,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You’re off record anyhow, so anything you can gather intelligence–wise will have to pass through an anonymous source in order to be admissible as evidence before Congress.’

‘You think that this can get to the Capitol?’ Ethan asked, somewhat amazed.

‘I think that it’s time to open this up beyond the Defense Intelligence Agency’s walls,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The public needs to know what’s happening here. We’ve been pursuing Majestic Twelve for years and we’re not really any closer to bringing them down, and the attacks you’ve endured on this mission prove that they’re out to finish us off any way they can. Our best bet now is to publicly expose them for what they are and embarrass them in the media as much as possible to force them to back off.’