Origin, page 9
There was nothing so far, but Eldridge knew they couldn’t have gone too far. Both of the fugitives’ passports had been red-lighted, and if they were used, an arrest would be made instantly. Photo surveillance at all airports, ferry ports and transnational bus and train stations was being constantly analysed, and there had been no hits so far. This indicated two things to Eldridge. The first was that the fugitives were still in Chile, somewhere within her borders. The second was that they were using the roads, probably driving stolen vehicles or hitchhiking.
Eldridge put in requests for the national police and the Carabineros to stop suspect vehicles and check IDs, as well as to check on stories of hitchhikers. He also requested all information on recently stolen vehicles to be fed directly to him.
As he studied the maps of Chile’s road system, he figured that there were again two options: they would either take their time along the slow, empty back roads, in the belief that they would be less likely to be seen; or they would take the major roads, hoping to blast along them and use speed as their ally, putting as much distance between them and their pursuers as possible.
Eldridge ordered detailed satellite analysis of the vehicles travelling along the country’s back roads, the NSA’s systems programmed to report any anomalous driving behaviour, and then put in another call, direct to the Chief of National Police.
‘Señor Vasquez,’ Eldridge began, not needing to give his own name, ‘I’m afraid I have another request.’ With the apparent full backing of the US government, it was more of an order than a request, but niceties had to be observed.
‘What is it you want, my friend?’ Vasquez replied obsequiously.
‘I want roadblocks,’ Eldridge replied. ‘On every interstate, at hundred-kilometre intervals.’
There would be no escape, Eldridge promised himself. No escape.
14
ADAMS DIDN’T SEE the roadblock until it was almost too late, so tired that his eyes closed involuntarily every so often, travelling blind for dangerous distances before his vision returned.
It was hard to judge distance against the desert backdrop but he guessed the roadblock was set up about a mile further down the long, straight highway. From this distance, he could make out what looked like three police cars straddling the interstate, waving down vehicles to check their documents.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ Adams told Lynn, nudging her awake from her own sleep.
Opening her eyes, she instantly took in the sight ahead of her. ‘Oh no,’ she moaned. She felt the car slow as Adams took his foot off the gas.
Adams wasn’t using the brakes, not wanting to draw attention to the car by slowing suddenly, but he did want to slow the car enough to figure out a plan of action.
‘What are we going to do?’ Lynn asked, and Adams struggled to come up with an answer. If they stopped, it would be instantly suspicious, and the police would immediately come to them. If they got to the checkpoint, their identification would almost certainly get them instantly arrested. And Adams wasn’t sure if the little Fiat was capable of smashing through the roadblock.
‘I guess we’re just going to have to make it up as we go along,’ he said finally.
Police Sergeant Manuel Vega sat on the hood of the lead car, chatting to his men. Sitting out in the middle of the Atacama waiting for vehicles to come along was nobody’s idea of fun. The temperature out in the desert could drop well below zero, and although it was the middle of the day, the men were all starting to feel the effects of the cold.
Stamping their feet to keep warm, one of the officers suddenly pointed down the road at the small car coming towards them.
Vega slid off the hood and clapped his hands together. ‘Oh joy,’ he said, feeling nothing of the sort. ‘Another one. Still,’ he joked to his men, ‘at least we get overtime, eh?’
As Adams rolled the car to a stop in front of the lead police car, he rolled his window down and cold air spilled into the cabin. The sweat started to freeze on his body.
He watched with interest at the reaction of the police chief and his men. First there was total disinterest; then, as they realized the car held a Caucasian woman and an Amerindian man, there was a flutter of concern, a narrowing of the eyes, and then rapid movements as orders were given.
Adams saw the police chief check an A4 sheet of paper, presumably with their pictures on, then bark orders at his men, who then surrounded the vehicle, weapons drawn.
‘Get out of the car, hands on your head!’ shouted the sergeant. ‘Now!’
‘Just wait a minute,’ Adams said reasonably from his place behind the wheel. ‘Do you know who we are?’
‘Terrorists, damn it!’ the police sergeant screamed. ‘Get out of the car, now!’
Perfect, thought Adams. Branding people as terrorists was a typical move if you wanted things to happen quickly. Tell people there’s a criminal on the loose, and the wheels will turn very slowly, if at all. Tell them it’s a terrorist, and the reaction couldn’t be more different.
Vega watched the pair in the car with eagle eyes. He couldn’t believe it was his team that had caught them! Terrorists, in his country! And he had caught them! He was going to be rewarded for this, that was for sure. A promotion was a certainty, possibly with a presidential citation to follow.
But why was the man so calm? And why was he asking questions?
The man’s next words caused even more confusion.
‘You’ll know what we are carrying then,’ he said, a smug smile on his face.
What did he mean? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. ‘Get out of the car! This is your last warning! Get out now, or we will open fire!’
And then the woman moved, her hands raising something up to the windscreen for them to look at. What was it?
He peered forward, trying to make it out.
It was a . . . a test tube?
Lynn held one of the DNA samples of the frozen body up to the windscreen. She had been reluctant to show it, but Adams had argued that if they were arrested, the samples would be lost anyway, and so she had agreed to go along with his off-the-cuff plan.
‘Bacillus anthracis,’ she heard Adams tell the nervous police sergeant through the open window. ‘Anthrax.’
Anthrax? Vega’s head started to spin. He’d been told nothing about this! But there it was, something in a cold-storage test tube, just like you’d find in a laboratory.
Would it be anthrax? Vega just didn’t know. What else could it be? Why would terrorists be carrying test tubes of anything, if it wasn’t a weapon of some sort?
‘Once I let go, and you gentlemen breathe in the spores,’ he heard the man continue, ‘you’ll start to feel the effects by later this afternoon. It’ll feel like flu to start with, then get rapidly worse, your body’s systems collapsing until – in maybe a week’s time, if you’re lucky – it progresses to lethal haemorrhagic mediastinitis.’ The man flashed him a smile. ‘Fatal in ninety per cent of cases.’
It took less than thirty seconds for Vega to make up his mind.
‘Drop your weapons,’ the sergeant ordered his men, and both Adams and Lynn sighed with relief. They’d bought it, hook, line and sinker.
As the policemen lowered their weapons, Adams progressed to phase two of the plan.
‘Now put your guns on the ground and step back two paces.’
The police sergeant barked a translation of the order to his men, and they all did as they were told. Passionate about their work as they might otherwise be, the threat of infection with a lethal bioweapon was more than enough to ensure their compliance.
Adams and Lynn slowly stepped out of the car, Lynn keeping the fearsome test tube held up where everyone could see it. After assessing the assembled men, Adams picked two of the most promising candidates. ‘You two,’ he said, gesturing at them, ‘handcuff the rest of the team.’
The sergeant again translated, and the handcuffing was quickly done, the fear writ large across the faces of the officers. The handcuffed men were told to lie face down on the ground, and Adams turned back to the two policemen who had done the handcuffing.
‘Now,’ he said to them, ‘take off all your clothes.’
Like many things in life, the discovery of the handcuffed police officers was down to sheer bad luck. Adams and Lynn were only sixty miles from the border; if the policemen had been undiscovered for only an hour, then the two of them would have made it in their stolen police car, their borrowed uniforms allowing them to cross over into Peru unquestioned. On the empty desert roads of the Atacama, it was certainly feasible. Traffic here was scarce, and it certainly wasn’t unheard of for hours to pass without any vehicles whatsoever.
Adams had taken the police team fifty yards off the main road and hidden them behind a small copse of trees. He had considered taking the vehicles off the road as well but had decided against this, as he couldn’t be sure if the area was being monitored by satellite. It was unlikely such units would be zoomed in, but the absence of vehicles at a requested roadblock would certainly be noticed. He had just prayed that no driver would come across the empty vehicles in the next hour or so.
But it was not to be. Not more than twenty minutes after Adams and Lynn had accelerated away in the sergeant’s police car, a small livestock truck came trundling slowly up the road. The driver had slowed even further, and then stopped. After waiting in his vehicle a few moments, he had got out and wandered over to the first car. Seeing nobody, he had then checked the second police car, and then the Fiat. Still nobody. Not a soul.
The driver stood there wondering what to do when he caught motion out of the corner of his eye. His head turned, and he first of all saw the copse of trees further back from the road. And then he saw the movement again – a leg, kicking out from behind one of the trees.
Nervous, he had grabbed the shotgun from the passenger footwell of his truck and tracked slowly across the dirty scrubland towards the trees. Under a minute later he was at the copse, rounding the first tree, shotgun at the ready.
His eyes widened in disbelief as he saw the six police officers, bound back to back on the ground, screaming silently at him through their gags.
Once freed, Vega found that the police radios had been broken. Likewise, their personal cellphones had all been smashed to pieces by the crazed terrorists.
Upon quizzing the truck driver, it appeared that he had a cellphone, and Vega quickly commandeered it, finally managing to get through to headquarters.
‘We have a major situation here,’ he told his commander breathlessly. Terrorists were on the loose with anthrax.
Eldridge heard the conversation between Sergeant Vega and his captain in virtual real-time, and cursed his own bad luck. They were low on fuel, and were holding position as they waited for aerial refuelling. The refuelling aircraft would be with them within the next ten minutes, but the delivery of fuel would take a further hour. During this time, they would continue to head towards the fugitives from their current position due east of Santiago, but at a seriously reduced speed.
Given the current speed of the stolen police car, Eldridge knew that it was unlikely that he and his onboard team would make it to the border in time. His other men, currently scattered at various points around central Chile, would also not be able to make it in time, which meant he was going to have to trust the local authorities to pick the pair up.
But what was this about anthrax? The police sergeant had said that the pair had shown them a glass, freeze-packed test tube, which they claimed contained weaponized anthrax.
Did they? Eldridge thought it highly doubtful. Where the hell would they have got such a thing? Did they have contacts in Chile? Or did Adams use his old government contacts and get some before he came here? But if that was the case, how would he have got it past customs?
The fact that it was in a test tube was also strange, given that weaponized anthrax was designed to be used in aerosol form. But they nevertheless had a test tube, which led Eldridge to consider whether—
Damn!
What if Edwards had collected samples from the body? She always seemed to have a backpack with her, and as Eldridge cast his mind back to the Antarctic, he realized that it was the same one she had boarded the helicopter with. Why the hell hadn’t he picked up on that before?
Thinking back further, he remembered their conversation in the dining room of the Matrix base camp.
‘So since talking to Atkinson last night, you didn’t go back out to the body until this morning?’ he had asked her, pretending at the time to be Major Daley of the US Army Engineers.
Edwards had looked at him, and then shaken her head. ‘No,’ she had replied. ‘Samuel ordered us to return here and stay until you guys arrived.’
Eldridge tried to examine his memory of that day, extract the image of Edwards from the recesses of his mind, examine it for any evidence of lying. It was a hopeless task, he knew, and yet he tried, searching his image of her face for any waver, anything that hinted at dishonesty.
But he already knew the answer. Of course they had been back out. What scientist wouldn’t? It hadn’t seemed an issue at the time, as Eldridge knew he was going to kill them all anyway, but it was now apparent that he hadn’t given it enough consideration at the time. Yet another mistake.
It wasn’t one he would bother Jacobs with yet. If the pair was stopped at the border, he would be there within another hour, and the whole sorry incident could be wrapped up.
But they had to be caught first, and so Eldridge immediately contacted Nevada, who in turn ordered the NSA to retask the necessary satellite to provide real-time footage of the escaping police car. He next ensured that the border patrols at the checkpoint at Arica were on full alert, and reinforcements from the Chilean military were en route, just in case.
Talking to the border patrol, it transpired that they had a Lynx scout helicopter on loan from the British Army Air Corps, and Eldridge immediately gave the order for it to fly south on Interstate 5 to intercept the fugitives if possible, or at least to provide close surveillance.
Part of him was tempted to let the pair get to the border, where more forces would be ranged against them, but another part told him that they had lost them several times already, and waiting was no longer an option – the fugitives had been located, Eldridge knew where they were right now, and the border patrol forces had the capability of getting to them within the next ten minutes.
Yes, it was definitely a good idea to send in the helicopter, and send it in hard. Eldridge called back to make sure the men aboard the chopper were well-armed.
And then he called the authorities in Peru, to warn them what was happening over the border. And to get them mobilized.
Just in case.
15
THEY HEARD IT long before they saw it, the slow, steady whump, whump, whump of helicopter rotors, high in the sky above them.
Lynn turned to Adams. ‘How far are we?’
Adams glanced quickly at the odometer. ‘Just twenty miles,’ he answered. ‘Damn.’
Somebody must have discovered the roadblock cops and called it in, or else they must have escaped somehow. Either way, the border had been alerted, which meant they were going to have to come up with a new plan, and quickly.
He turned to Lynn. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked hopefully.
‘It depends what they’re up to,’ she said, craning her neck up to look through the windscreen, catching just a glimpse of the Lynx scout helicopter above them. ‘If they’re just monitoring us, they’ll follow us to the border, where the police will arrest us. We can use the anthrax ploy again, but I don’t know if it’ll work a second time. If the helicopter crew has been ordered to make the arrest, though, it’ll have to land at some stage . . .’
Adams nodded his head, following her reasoning instantly. Given Lynn’s last experience in a helicopter, he hoped she wouldn’t panic. He turned to her. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked gently.
She nodded her head. ‘It’s our only chance.’
Adams returned his gaze to the road, determined. ‘Then we’ve got to get that chopper to land.’
What was this? Captain Marco Delongis saw the police car on the highway below his helicopter brake to a screeching halt, then watched as the two fugitives leapt from the vehicle.
What was the man holding? Delongis narrowed his eyes. Pistol!
He fought the natural urge to command the pilot to pull up, knowing that a 9mm handgun round would do absolutely nothing to harm the helicopter. Instead he continued to watch in dread fascination as the man loosed off all fifteen rounds from the gun until it clicked empty. He then saw the man look at the gun in disgust, and fling it to the ground.
He had obviously taken the pistol from one of the policemen at the roadblock but he hadn’t had the good sense to take their spare ammunition. He saw the woman screaming something at her partner, pointing up at the helicopter, and then they were running, straight off the highway and into the scrubland that bordered it.
They were obviously panicking, the sight of the helicopter causing them to flee on foot in blind fear. Delongis was always surprised when this happened, the effect his little aircraft could have on people, and always glad. It made things substantially easier.
The fact that the pair had stopped the car and fled on foot also made life easier. His orders had been to stop the vehicle and arrest the two fugitives. He would have had to manoeuvre the chopper in front of the speeding car, hovering above the highway, in order to get it to stop, and he was glad he didn’t have to. Who knew how crazy this pair was? They might have driven straight at him.
As it was, he just had to land near them, deploy the four-man team from the rear, and wait for the arrest. Easy, especially as the pair was now unarmed.
But there was, Delongis reminded himself, the problem of the anthrax. The word was that the fugitives had a test tube, which indicated that it wasn’t weaponized, but its presence would still be enough to make his men wary. Their orders were to bring the pair in alive, but Delongis had given his own orders: if it looked like either the man or the woman was going to use the anthrax, they should be shot immediately. There was no point taking unnecessary chances.
