David Golemon - Ripper

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.

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.”