The Extinction Code (28 page)

Ethan reached a doorway that led outside to a series of steps with polished chrome grab–rails that climbed up to the bridge deck. He hurried up them, and found another door that led into the bridge itself. He stepped in and came face to face with three rifles.

‘Warner, Ethan,’ he said.

The rifles dropped as the SEALs now occupying the bridge recognized him and turned away. The officer in command was at the controls but he didn’t look happy.

‘The crew’s neutralized,’ he said, ‘but the controls are jammed wide open!’

Ethan was about to say something when he felt something hard jam into his back. He turned and experienced an almost supernatural tingle of alarm as he looked into the eyes of a man he had seen lying dead in the stern of the ship only minutes before. Behind him were a half dozen more men, likewise smeared in blood but pointing weapons at him.

Ethan cursed beneath his breath as he backed into the bridge and the gunmen pushed their way in, the SEALs responding instantly but not firing as the yacht’s crew moved inside and one of them, a stocky, foreign looking man smiled grimly.

‘No sense in shooting us,’ he said as he glanced at a GPS screen. ‘We’ll be in Mexican waters within a minute and you’ll all be free to leave.’

Ethan noted the bullet proof vests on the crewmen, and although two members of the yacht’s team must have taken hits to the head when the SEALs double–tapped them, the rest were back on their feet, the blood likely fake.

‘Shut the engines down,’ the SEAL leader ordered, glaring at the crewman down the barrel of his rifle. ‘My men could drop you all before you got a single shot off.’

‘If that were true, you would have fired by now,’ the crewman replied. ‘You have no jurisdiction here, and the yacht’s controls will not return to us until we’re safely inside Mexican waters. Leave, now, or I’ll take my chances and put a bullet in this asshole’s guts just for the hell of it!’

Ethan felt the pistol jammed harder under his ribs and saw the SEAL team’s expression alter, become cold and calculating. Ethan knew that he was weighing up the odds, and he likewise knew that no Special Forces soldier would risk failing the mission for collateral damage.

‘Take the shot,’ Ethan snapped, and flinched as he started to turn to try to disarm the crewman before he could send a bullet plowing through Ethan’s body.

But before anybody could move the yacht suddenly began to slow. Ethan froze as he heard the distant hum of the engines fade away into silence, the crash and whisper of waves flushing past the gleaming hull break up. He glanced at the yacht’s controls and saw the engine dials wind down to zero, the border of Mexican waters still a few hundred yards away.

The SEAL commander raised an eyebrow at their captor.

‘You were saying?’

Ethan heard the Black Hawk helicopter thunder back in toward them, its rotors hammering the air.

‘Reinforcements,’ Ethan lied as he looked over his shoulder. ‘You guys fancy a crack at two Navy SEAL teams?’

The leader of the crewmen scowled as he saw his men throw down their weapons and put their hands in the air. A SEAL pushed past Ethan and grabbed the pistol from his captor’s hands before driving his forehead into the man’s nose with a dull crack that sent him plunging onto the deck.

The SEALs quickly locked down the ship’s crew, as Ethan looked at the lieutenant. ‘What happened?’

The lieutenant shrugged, but another voice answered. ‘A woman happened.’

They both turned to see Lopez appear and lean in the bridge doorway, her hands shoved casually into her pockets as she smiled at them. ‘While you cowboys were blowing brains out up here, I
used
mine and went down below to shut off the fuel valves.’ She tapped her temple with one finger.

Ethan heard the helicopter settle on the stern as his earpiece crackled.

‘Ethan, it’s Jarvis. What’s going on down there?’

‘The yacht’s ours, but Garrett must already be ashore as there was no helicopter on the landing pad when we caught up with it. I don’t think Garrett’s aboard.’

‘Have the ship searched,’
Jarvis advised.
‘Maybe it’ll turn something up. You both get down to Varginha and speak to Martinez, find out what you can about that island. Hellerman will be in touch soon.’

‘What about you?’ Ethan asked, and suddenly frowned as he realized that Jarvis was outside, the sound of passing traffic clear on the line. ‘Where are you?’

‘Goodbye, Ethan.’

Before Ethan could say anything more, the line went dead.

*

Washington DC

Jarvis climbed into a hire car three minutes after calling Ethan, having tossed the cell phone into a trash can on Sumner Road. His own car had been GPS tagged, a basic precaution that he felt sure General Nellis would have undertaken the moment Felix Byzan had died. Jarvis had quickly taken care of that before walking into a convenience store and purchasing a change of clothes.

He drove out of the car hire lot having paid cash and then used a fresh burner cell to call Lucy Morgan. When she answered, he gave her no time to ask questions.

‘Tortola,’ he said. ‘Get there and wait for me. It’s very important, Lucy. Just trust me and do it, I’ll explain everything when I get there.’

Jarvis rang off and then dialled another number, this time only getting an answer on the fifth ring, his heart being faster with every passing second.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Can you finish what we’ve started?’

‘I can,’
came the reply.
‘Are they on their way?’

‘We’ve tracked Majestic Twelve as far as Sao Paulo,’ Jarvis confirmed, ‘but I’m out of the loop now and headed south. We have agents following them, try to ensure they don’t get caught up in all of this. It’s all down to you now.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’
came the reply.
‘I’ve waited a long time for this.’

***

XXXIII

Varginha, Brazil

‘Now
this
is more like it!’

Lopez climbed out of the ramshackle taxi and opened her arms to absorb the sweltering sunshine blazing down from a flawless blue sky as Ethan paid the driver, whom they had hired in a nearby village to avoid being tracked in their hire car from Sau Paulo into the town. He watched the cab trundle away with a cough and splutter of oily brown smoke from its exhaust, then turned and found himself looking at a towering silver cylinder that was topped with a gigantic silver disc that looked alarmingly like the classic UFO “saucer”.

‘You’re kidding me?’ he uttered as he moved to stand beside Lopez.

‘They’re proud of their UFO heritage,’ Lopez said as she slipped a pair of sunglasses over her eyes and pushed her hair back into a ponytail. ‘It’s not every day that a small Brazilian coffee town finds itself becoming international news. I think that this monument is actually a water tower.’

Ethan looked around for any sign of Jarvis’s contact in Brazil, a man named Rodrigo Martinez, but none seemed to emerge from the listless pedestrians shuffling along the baking sidewalks.

‘You think he’s running late?’ Ethan asked.

Lopez turned a pitying smile on him. ‘Honey, in South America
everybody’s
running late and nobody cares. C’mon, let’s go take a look around, y’know, catch some rays?’

Ethan felt irritation rise up inside him, but then he saw Lopez’s infectious smile as she slipped her arm through his and urged him to walk with her.

‘You could do with the rest,’ she advised as they strolled toward a small market. ‘All this stress, being shot at and all, it’s no good for your heart and soul.’

‘Are you my doctor now?’

‘I think so,’ Lopez opined. ‘Your treatment should begin with a leisurely examination of this market, followed by a soothing lunch that you can buy me.’

Despite himself, Ethan laughed. ‘How kind of you.’

‘It’s all for your benefit,’ she assured him as she patted his chest with one hand. ‘You’ll be thanking me later.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ Ethan replied.

They were walking through the market place when a man in casual clothes, his features partially concealed by a hat, approached them and moved to walk alongside Ethan.

‘I am glad you could make it here,’ he said in a heavy South American accent.

‘Rodrigo Martinez?’ Lopez asked as she peered around Ethan to look at the man and saw the white collar of the priesthood about his neck.

He looked older than in the photographs that Ethan had seen from the original incident, his black moustache now white, his hair gray at the temples, but his eyes were unmistakably the same.

‘I must remain incognito if possible,’ Martinez said as they walked, purposefully keeping his head down. ‘There is a coffee shop, a hundred yards ahead on the right that has a secluded garden at the rear where we can talk. I will go there, please join me in a few minutes.’

Martinez moved off, while Ethan and Nicola perused the wares of a trinket stall in the market place.

‘It’s been decades since the incident,’ Lopez said as they waited. ‘Surely he doesn’t fear for his life after all this time?’

‘We’ve seen this before,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘People are scared out of their wits when a close encounter occurs, and sometimes it’s not by the extraterrestrials they claim to have seen but by the government soldiers who visit them afterward. This kind of intimidation goes on in every country on earth.’

‘But for this long?’ Lopez repeated. ‘You know what I think that means?’

‘Yeah,’ Ethan nodded, ‘that whatever started back then is still going on. Come on, let’s see what he has to say about it.’

They walked together down through the market until they reached a tiny coffee shop, one where they had to descend two steps and duck into the entrance, the building probably as old as the hills that surrounded it. The interior was dark but cool and filled with the aroma of fresh coffee as Ethan followed Lopez between the empty tables that filled the shop and beyond, through a set of open double doors that led into a small, shaded courtyard with more tables.

Martinez awaited them, a small cup of coffee before him on the table and two more waiting, the table shielded from the sunshine and prying eyes by an open umbrella that was larger than the table itself. Ethan sat down opposite Martinez with Lopez alongside him.

‘So, what can you tell us?’ Ethan asked.

‘First, I want you to tell me something,’ Martinez said. ‘You have come a long way to seek me out and to ask me questions about something that happened here twenty years ago and which people are afraid to talk about even now. I need to know why: why are you here, now? What’s happened?’

Ethan sensed that behind Martinez’s paranoia and fear there was a shrewd mind, and decided to simply tell him everything that he wanted to know in the hopes that he would reciprocate.

‘There have been some reports of small, unusual bipedal creatures in the forests around this area and further south along the Atlantic Coast,’ he said. ‘We’ve been sent here to check them out, especially around the island of Ilhabela.’

‘From America,’ Martinez said, making it sound like an accusation. ‘Forgive me, but I fail to understand what interest your great country would have in a little town like Varginha.’

‘I think we all know what interests us about this town,’ Lopez replied. ‘You have a big water tower advertising what happened here.’

Martinez scowled.

‘An abomination,’ he said, ‘the commercialization of something so important that it has turned it into a circus, something to be laughed at over coffee, as though it never even really happened. Do you know that the media says the entire thing was invented by the mayor at the time, to bring tourists into the town? They say he copied what happened at Roswell, as if the two were even remotely similar.’

‘And what did happen here, Martinez?’ Ethan asked.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Martinez replied.

A silence grew in the courtyard, and Ethan knew that Martinez was not about to divulge anything without first knowing to whom and why.

‘The truth is we’re not entirely sure yet why we’re here,’ Ethan said finally. ‘We have a handful of threads of information that don’t seem to tie up, but are all related to what happened here in 1996. We were hoping that talking to you might give us some insight into what’s going on.’

‘What other threads are you talking about?’ Martinez asked, now genuinely interested.

‘A missing paleontologist from Montana who found dinosaur remains that apparently scared the life out of him,’ Lopez said.

‘And media reports of a new mass extinction taking place all around us even now,’ Ethan added. ‘Something links all of these things and we think that you might know what it is, even if you’re not aware of it yourself. We just need you to tell us what happened here.’

Martinez seemed momentarily distracted, as though he were suddenly considering something that he had never thought of before. His eyes seemed haunted as he looked at Ethan.

‘I saw it,’ he said finally, his voice almost a whisper. ‘I saw it while it was still alive.’

‘You saw the creature that the three girls saw that night?’ Lopez asked.

Martinez nodded, one hand on his coffee cup as though for an anchor to reality as he spoke.

‘I was working with the military police,’ he said, ‘ranked a corporal at the time. We were called to an incident just on the edge of town that was said to be an aircraft crash of some kind. We’d expected to see the fire services or other emergency vehicles on the way too, but there was nothing, nothing at all. It was just us and a handful of military police trucks.’

‘The aircraft crash was a cover, then,’ Ethan said.

Martinez nodded. ‘We never saw anything like that, which is why that damned water tower is such a ridiculous construction: there were no craft, other than a local farmer who reported lights over his land the same night, which I did not see.’

‘But you did see the creature,’ Lopez pressed.

‘We drove into the scene,’ Martinez went on, ‘and as my men began interviewing the witnesses I followed their directions in the hope of capturing whoever had scared the girls. They were wound up pretty tightly, crying mostly as though they’d seen a ghost or something. I wasn’t too worried, but I thought that maybe some drunk had dressed up in a suit and was scaring locals, or similar. Then I smelled it.’