Colding raised his own Beretta.
The movement caught Andy’s eye. When he turned to look, he stared straight down a barrel.
“Andy, drop your weapon.”
Andy opened his mouth, then closed it. “Fuck a duck, man, what are you doing?”
“I said drop your weapon. Nobody else dies today.”
For the second time in as many minutes, Colding had moved before thinking, caught up in the situation’s express-lane pace. He’d never pointed a gun directly at anyone in his life, and now here he was with a dead man outside, a wounded woman on the floor, a chopper coming in and his pistol in the face of a special forces killer. If Andy got crazy, got mad, if he tried to aim his own weapon, then Colding would have only a split second to pull the trigger or probably be killed himself.
Moving slow, Andy simultaneously stood and pointed his gun to the ceiling. “Okay, okay, chief. I’m going.”
Colding raised the barrel as Andy stood, keeping it pointed right at the man’s face. “I told you to drop your weapon. Take Jian outside.”
“But we have incoming. You want me to go out there unarmed?”
Andy meant it as a rhetorical question, but that was exactly what Colding wanted.
“Andy, drop your goddamn weapon and get out front… now.”
Andy slowly squatted and lowered his gun to the ground. “You’re going to regret this shit. Wait till Magnus hears about this.” He grabbed Jian’s elbow and guided her to the door. She clutched the petabyte drive to her chest as if it were her only child.
When they left the lab, Colding sighed. No good could come of making Andy Crosthwaite an enemy. But no one else was going to die here, and that was that. He picked up Andy’s gun, flipped on the safety, then slipped it into the waist of his pants.
He knelt next to Erika. “Doctor Hoel, I’m sorry I had to do that to you.”
SO MUCH PAIN. She suspected it was just some broken ribs, but she’d never had a broken anything before. The agony consumed her. It felt like big sticks were jammed into her right side. Or maybe spikes. Jagged ones, made of glass.
“Doctor Hoel,” Colding said. “Talk to me. Can you hear me?”
She couldn’t even move. The tiniest shift sent waves of near-blackout pain through her chest. As much as her body screamed, it wasn’t enough to block out the horrid feeling that she’d killed a human being.
It hurt to talk, but she forced out the words. “Is Brady really… dead?”
Colding looked away, then looked back. He nodded. “If Andy was that mad, then yeah. Brady’s dead.”
What the hell had she been thinking? She was a middle-aged woman, not a commando. Was revenge on Claus really worth all this? Certainly not worth Brady’s life. Brady had been a nice kid, polite, respectful. Maybe twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? She couldn’t remember, and now it didn’t matter because the man would never see thirty.
“My God… Colding. I… I swear… I didn’t mean it.”
Colding nodded. He wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t angry. He looked sad, like someone who’d just seen a disaster and knew it was real but didn’t want to accept it.
“Listen, Doctor Hoel, I need to keep everyone else alive. Tell me what’s coming.”
She started to shrug, but that hurt even more than talking. “Don’t know… Fischer… will be here soon.”
Colding nodded again, as if she had just confirmed his suspicions. “Why is Fischer coming now? We’ve been here for two years.”
She shook her head. “Don’t know. Just wanted… wanted to ruin Claus. I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
“Okay,” Colding said. He reached out a hand and gently caressed her hair. It felt comforting. “Just stay still. I’ll come back as soon as I can with something for the pain.”
P. J. Colding stood up and ran out of the room, leaving Erika Hoel crying from shame, shock and sheer agony.
NOVEMBER 8: HITCHIN’ A RIDE
COLDING RAN TO a hallway bathroom and tore open a wall-mounted first-aid kit. He grabbed gauze, steripads and a bottle of Advil. Would the Advil help with Erika’s pain? He didn’t know, but he had to do something. He’d lost it, gone into some kind of rage and kicked that woman’s ribs as hard as he could. Like he was some kind of fucking animal. Like he’d been when he attacked Paul Fischer.
Don’t forget the axe, big guy. Erika’s axe almost killed you.
No, no excuses, he was in charge and that meant everything—Erika’s injury, Brady’s death, the explosion—was all his fault.
He pulled his parka open and looked in the bathroom mirror. Blood soaked the gray shirt underneath. He gently pulled at the cut fabric to see the gash in his skin. It was still bleeding in spots, but more of a deep scratch than a life-threatening injury. Bad enough to merit kicking a woman’s ribs? No, but he tried to check that thought—it was ridiculous to feel guilty for defending himself against that kind of attack.
He started to tear open the gauze pack when the sound of jet engines caught his attention. Erika’s pain, his own cut, those would have to wait. He shrugged the bloody jacket back on, puffing up a small cloud of downy white feathers. He ran to the front airlock. Seconds later, Colding stepped into the winter night. The hangar flames had died down considerably. A light wind drove falling snow at an angle, making the exterior lamps look like shimmering cones of light. The approaching jet engines screamed louder than he thought possible.
Fischer was almost here.
Fischer, the man who organized investigations of transgenic companies, who coordinated elements of the CDC, WHO, CIA and USAMRIID. Fischer, who apparently had the ability to reach out and manipulate brokenhearted, bitter women into saboteurs and inadvertent murderers.
Fischer—the man once in charge of the project that had killed Colding’s wife.
All of it made Colding long desperately for another round with him, to do far more than just fuck up the man’s knee. Colding’s rage had no place being directed against a forty-five-year-old woman, but against Colonel Paul Fischer? That was a different matter.
Out by the ruined satellite dish, Gunther and Andy stood with Rhumkorrf, Jian and Tim Feely. Gunther, God bless him, had his gun holstered. Colding walked up and joined them, Beretta in his right hand but down at his side. He kept Andy in sight. Tim looked so drunk he might fall over at any moment. Jian shook with huge sobs.
Twenty feet from the group, a green tarp covered an unrecognizable, smoldering lump. A lump about the size of Brady Giovanni. The night wind made the tarp’s edges snap loudly and carried away most of the oppressive stench. Most of it. The odors of burning flesh and burning fuel still hung in the air.
None of them looked at the body. Instead, they looked up into the night sky. The bogey Gunther had warned about was coming in for a landing, but it wasn’t a chopper—they saw a massive silhouette, running lightless, flat-black paint soaking up the firelight from the warehouse’s flickering flames.
“Mein gott,” Rhumkorrf said. “That thing is gigundous.”
Colding couldn’t believe his eyes. The plane’s headlamps flipped on, casting long cones of light onto the snow-covered landing strip. The plane was so big it looked as if it were barely moving. There was only one vehicle that had those massive dimensions…
A C-5 Galaxy.
“Sara,” Colding said quietly. But it couldn’t be. Erika’s attack had just happened. How could Danté have responded this quickly?
The C-5 had been Colding’s idea. A flying lab to keep the ancestor project mobile in case of something… well, in case of something exactly like what had just gone down. One of the world’s largest planes, the 247-foot C-5 ran almost from goal line to goal line on a football field. Its wings spread out like the arms of a giant, 222 feet from tip to tip, and the top of the tail towered six stories high. The cockpit looked like a small black Cyclops eye notched into the elongated, rounded triangle of a fuselage. A 450,000-pound monstrosity large enough to move an entire biotech lab—cows and all—to anywhere in the world.