James Rollins - The 6th Extinction

After a few seconds, the machine erupted with a noisy clacking, and the table holding Nikko slowly slid through the ring of those magnets. They did a double pass to make sure.

All the while, she paced the room nervously, chewing a thumbnail.

Gonna need a manicure before the wedding .

“That’s it,” the technician announced over the intercom.

Lisa quickly took a syringe from a rolling plastic cart and drew a blood sample from Nikko’s catheter. She injected the syringe into a Vacutainer tube. Then sealed both it and Edmund’s tube into a hazardous waste bag, which she handled only with sterile gloves. She left it near the door and stepped back.

Edmund risked collecting it himself.

“Hurry,” she said.

He nodded and raced off, heading to his lab at the hangar.

It was the longest ten minutes of her life. She used the time to pass her own body through the scanner to kill any contamination from handling Nikko. She then sat on the table with him, cradling his head on her lap.

Finally a call came through, patched through the intercom.

She heard the triumph in his voice. “Dead. It’s all genetic mush. Both the raw sample and the viral load in Nikko’s blood.”

She closed her eyes and bent over Nikko.

“See what a good boy you are,” she whispered to him.

She took another moment to collect herself, then picked up the phone and spoke to Edmund. “What’s the plan from here?”

She heard arguing in the background, raised voices, most of it coming from Raymond Lindahl.

“Still trouble,” Edmund said. “And you can guess from who.”

She hung up and stared at the door, wondering what she should do.

Before she could decide, the door shoved open, and Sarah flew in, pointing a finger at her. “I heard. You’d better get over there. I’ll dog-sit. Dennis will drive you.”

She smiled, hugged the corporal, and flew out the door.

Dennis drove his Ram truck at top speed over the quarter of a mile to the hangar. She was out the door before it had even stopped moving. She ran into the hangar to find Lindahl with his back to her, nose to nose with the head nuclear technician.

“We stick to the original plan until I hear otherwise from D.C.,” Lindahl said. “All these new results are… are at best preliminary. And in my opinion, still disputable.”

“But, sir, I can readily modify—”

“Nothing changes. We stay the course.”

Lisa strode up behind Lindahl and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned with a look of stunned surprise to find her there, she drew back her arm and punched him hard in the face. His head snapped back, and he slumped leadenly to the floor.

Wincing, she shook her hand and nodded to the head tech. “You were saying?”

“From what we just learned, I should be able to lower the yield of our nuke to as little as a single kiloton. If we can get that bomb to blow four miles up — which that drone chopper can reach — it should produce an electromagnetic pulse of at least 0.5 Tesla. It’ll cover more than enough territory to sweep the hot zone with negligible radiation. Nothing worse than what you’d get from a dental X-ray.”

“How long will it take?”

“I can still make that noon deadline.”

She nodded. “Do it.”

“What about D.C.?”

“Let me worry about D.C. You get that nuke in the air.”

As he hurried off, she looked at her bruised knuckles.

Definitely will need a manicure .

Kendall watched the tepui drop below as the V-280 Valor fled from the summit. They had only a minute to spare before Cutter’s charges exploded, destroying his macabre experiment in synthetic biology and genetic engineering.

Good riddance .

He returned his attention to the cabin. The space was packed with people. Cutter’s private helicopter had already left with Ashuu and Jori, but only after ferrying two flights of native workers out into the surrounding rain forest, getting them clear of any danger.

He presently shared the back of the cabin with Cutter, who was strapped down in his stretcher, one wrist handcuffed to a railing. An IV line ran to a catheter in the back of his hand. His deep wounds still needed surgical attention, but a thick compression wrap around his chest should last until the aircraft reached Boa Vista in a couple of hours to refuel.

Cutter stared out the window near his head. “Ten seconds.”

Kendall followed the other’s gaze toward that cloud-wrapped summit. He silently counted down. When he reached zero — a towering blast of smoke and rock shot from the summit, occluding the sun, turning it bloodred. Thunder rolled over that shattered mountaintop, as if mourning the deaths of so much strange life. Then slowly the plateau cracked, shedding a shoulder of rock, like a calving glacier. The pond on top spilled over that fracture, reflecting that bloody sunlight, becoming a flow of fire down that broken rock.

“Beautiful,” Cutter whispered.

“A fitting end to Dark Eden,” Kendall added.

Cutter glanced over to Jenna. “But you saved a sliver of it. For her.”

“And maybe for the world.” He pictured his frantic search for those vials before destroying the lab. “That counteragent may hold some promise of treatments for other mental disabilities. It will certainly bear more study. Some good may yet come from your work.”

“And you saved nothing else? Nothing from my genetic library?”

“No. It’s better off lost forever.”

“Nothing’s lost forever. Especially when it’s all up here.” Cutter tapped a finger against his skull.

“It won’t be there for long,” Kendall said.

The man was simply too dangerous.

With everyone distracted by the show beyond the window, Kendall lifted what he had secretly pocketed back at the lab, what Cutter himself had foolishly left on a tabletop in his panic over his son. He leaned forward and pressed the jet-injector pistol against the side of the man’s throat. It was the same tool used on Jenna. The intact vial still held one last dose of Cutter’s engineered code.

Cutter’s eyes widened with horror as Kendall pulled the device’s trigger. Compressed gas shot the dose into the man’s neck.

With his other hand, Kendall injected a sedative into Cutter’s IV.

“By the time you wake, my friend, it’ll all be over.”

Cutter looked on in dismay.

“This time Cutter Elwes will die,” Kendall promised. “Maybe not the body, but the man.”

“Wasn’t exactly your beachside wedding,” Painter said, swirling a glass of single malt in one hand, the love of his life snuggled under his other arm.

“It was perfect.” Lisa pulled tighter against him.

They had both changed out of formal attire and found this deep-cushioned love seat before the massive stone fireplace of the Great Lounge of the Ahwahnee Hotel. The reception party was winding down behind them as guests either filtered to rooms or headed home.

The wedding had been at sunset on a great swath of lawn, beautifully lit, flowers bountiful, including his wife’s favorite chrysanthemums, each petal a deep burgundy trimmed in gold. The hotel had even picked up the tab, a small thank-you for all the pair had done to save the valley and surrounding area. The generous offer was made possible because tourism was still slow to return.

Bioterrorism and nuclear bombs…

It would take a little more time to shake that reputation, but it made it easier to arrange these last-minute wedding plans. They had held off until Josh was recovered enough to attend, sporting the latest in DARPA prosthetics. He and Monk had plenty to talk over at the dinner table. Lisa’s kid brother was remarkably resilient considering the circumstances, even amped to get back out on the mountains and face new challenges.