Sean Ellis - Callsign - King

From that point forward, Sara had simply allowed herself to be carried along, quite literally as was now the case, by forces beyond her control. Her expertise counted for nothing; she was just another piece of equipment the team had to lug around. The passage from the support ship to the target vessel seemed to take hours. In total darkness, enveloped in the soup-warm waters of the Indian Ocean, it was all she could do simply to stay awake.

She knew they had arrived at their destination when the DSV’s humming screws stopped turning and the submersible coasted to a stop, but even then, there was nothing to do except wait for Fulbright to give the signal to surface.

Despite her earlier bravado, she was dismayed by the knowledge that, perhaps less than a hundred feet away, people were being killed. It was easy to be sanguine about the death of terrorists and criminals when it took place thousands of miles away; less so, she had discovered from personal experience, when it was happening right in front of you. She had to keep reminding herself that these were the people who had brutally executed her friends, and that given the chance, they would have done the same to her.

The assault team went in from two locations on opposite sides of the vessel. Their movements were guided by a remote surveillance aerial vehicle-a drone-that identified targets and relayed the information in real time to the shooters. With suppressed weapons and night-vision goggles, Fulbright’s team visited swift and silent death on the Manifold security team. Less than ten minutes later, Sara felt a tapping on her arm, and knew that the bloody part of the job was finished.

She surfaced to find herself facing a wall of steel. The research ship, which had looked so small and insignificant in satellite imagery, appeared massive up close. Fulbright bobbed next to her, a red-lensed flashlight casting an eerie glow on the dark water and revealing an aluminum scaling ladder hanging from the side of the vessel. Following his lead, Sara scrambled up the ladder, clinging tightly to the rungs, lest her neoprene clad feet lose purchase on the slippery metal. Fulbright was waiting for her at the top, and offered a steadying hand as she clambered over the side rail.

“We’ve secured the ship,” he told her as she stripped off her gear and unzipped her thin wetsuit to allow some of the heat to dissipate. “No friendly casualties. The lab is just below.”

Sara hefted the water-tight bag that was her only piece of mission essential equipment. “Lead on.”

Guided by radioed instructions from the leader of the commando team, they descended a metal staircase and traversed a short companionway to what looked to Sara like a repurposed cargo hold. But as Sara entered, all sense of being on a marine vessel disappeared.

The familiar equipment and computer workstations, illuminated by banks of fluorescent lights, would have looked right at home at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

The assault team had found two men working in the lab, and per Sara’s request, had managed to take them alive. This was not a matter of mercy or squeamishness on her part; the computers would almost certainly be locked-out, and compelling the prisoners to give them access was critical to the success of the mission. The two scientists, both bearded men about Sara’s age, wearing jeans and t-shirts, were presently kneeling with their hands atop their heads, under the watchful eye of the commandos.

Fulbright advanced and introduced himself. “Gentleman, let me get right to the point. You’ve been doing some very bad things. Developing weapons of mass destruction-”

One of the men started to protest, but Fulbright shushed him as a mother might a wayward child, and kept talking without missing a beat. “It’s downright criminal. No, it’s worse than that; it’s terrorism. And my friends and I have a standing policy when it comes to terrorists: immediate execution.

“You are still alive for one reason, and one reason only. I am going to give you a chance to repent.”

Sara had little interest in Fulbright’s interrogation methods, and instead began searching the lab to locate the physical products of the ongoing research. Near the center of the compartment, in a sealed Lexan containment chamber, she found the ape skull that had been taken from Felice Carter.

“Now I’m not going to go all Jack Bauer on your ass,” Fulbright was saying. “This is simple really. We already have what we want. We’ll be taking your computers and all your research back with us, and our techies will be able to hack your passwords and break through your firewalls…whatever it is that they do…and then we’ll know everything you know. But see, that takes time, and I’m kind of in a hurry. So here’s what I’m offering.

“You’re smart guys, right? Educated? You’ve got special skills that could be very useful. It’s not your fault that you wound up working for the wrong side. But that’s all over now. You’re done working for Manifold. Period. But I’d like to help you find a new job.

“The thing is, I’ve only got one position available, so think of this as a job interv-”

“I’ll do it!” one of the men shouted suddenly. “Please don’t kill me.”

A murderous look flashed in the eyes of the second scientist. “Dave, you son of a bitch.”

Fulbright shushed again. “Dave, is it? You’ve made the right decision. Welcome to your probationary period. Now, if you’d be so kind, step over here and log on.”

Sara tore herself away from the skull and moved over to the workstation where Dave was tapping in his password. She leaned over his shoulder. “Bring up all the files related to your current research.”

Dave complied, and as he did, Sara took a portable flash-drive from her bag and plugged it into the USB port. There wasn’t time to be choosy about which files to copy, and she knew that workstation probably wouldn’t have the really important stuff, like the genome of whatever virus Manifold was monkeying with. Genetic mapping typically required a supercomputer with memory measured in terabytes. Sara was primarily interested in the synthesis of their research. She pushed Dave out of the way and started dragging and dropping files into the flash-drive directory.

“That looks interesting,” she said, clicking on a file icon that read “Summary Report (draft).”

A text document opened, and despite the fact that it was both a summary and a work in progress, Sara saw that it was more than eighty pages long. She skimmed through it, ignoring the more technical aspects, and tried to get a general overview of what the project was really all about. Words began to leap out at her: retrovirus; evolution; consciousness.

“My God,” she whispered. “I know what they’re trying to do.”

“Well done, Dave,” Fulbright said. “Looks like you’re hired.”

“Son of bitch!”

The scream from Dave’s co-worker startled Sara, but not as much as what happened next. The man sprang to his feet and hurled himself across the room. Before he’d taken a single step, a storm of silent lead ripped into him and his chest erupted in a spray of crimson.

The man must have known he would die. Perhaps he had interpreted Fulbright’s comment as a tacit pronouncement of his own doom and decided he had nothing left to live for. Whatever the reason, when he decided to make his move, he tapped into his deepest reserves of determination, and when the bullets tore through his vital organs, he kept going. There was only one thing he wanted to accomplish.

Sara saw where he was headed, and in a flash of insight, understood what was about to happen. She had passed the conspicuous looking red button on the way in and recognized it as part of the lab’s emergency fail-safe containment system. The CDC employed a similar mechanism, which could be triggered by any number of remote sensor devices, or by a manual device just like that big red button. Evidently, even bioweapons designers were concerned about the accidental release of a deadly pathogen.