“Tell them we are on schedule, and will be there in forty minutes. Then close up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Van Assen headed back down the stairs.
Emeric Klausmann turned back around as soon as that uppity van Asshole disappeared. The bastard was acting like he was in charge, but he was no more than an assistant. Which, someone should point out to him, put him a level below Klausmann.
He grabbed the bottle of whiskey he’d been drinking right before van Asshole showed up, and took a sip. Thank God for the metal staircase. He hadn’t heard the stairwell door open, but he had heard van Asshole clomping up the steps, giving him enough time to hide the bottle.
Who could blame Klausmann for drinking? Things had been screwed up since Implementation Day. Sure, he’d understood that a lot of people would need to die for the Project to reach its goals, but actually seeing it happen was something else entirely.
The tipping point for him had come when he was on search duty, tasked with conducting a sweep through the Intercontinental Hotel. Right there in the lobby he’d found an old couple sitting on a couch — European, by the looks of them — leaning against each other. He didn’t know how long they’d been dead, a week at least. The worst part was that they looked a lot like his grandparents, both of whom had died years ago.
That’s when he started drinking, and had pretty much not stopped since.
He took one more sip of the whiskey, capped the bottle, and set it on the floor next to his bag.
He reactivated the microphone. “Mumbai base to Mumbai Evac Three.”
“Evac Three, go ahead.”
“On schedule here, at your location in approximately forty minutes.”
“Copy, Mumbai base.”
“Signing off here. Will see you soon.”
“Stay safe.”
Klausmann had to put a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. Stay safe? Was that not the most hilarious thing someone could say these days?
He pulled off the headphones and stood up so he could start disabling the equipment. But before he was fully upright, the earth tilted under his feet. If he hadn’t thrown his hand out and grabbed the edge of the equipment rack, he would have fallen through the trapdoor.
He hugged the rack until enough of his balance returned so that he could stand on his own two feet. He took several deep breaths, knowing he needed to get himself under control and act sober when he went downstairs with the others. The Project did not look kindly on those not pulling their weight.
Through the windowless walls of the rooftop room, he heard the horns of the waiting trucks, blasting in unison three times.
The ten-minute warning.
Shit. I need to get moving.
Ten minutes to disable the communications room and get his stuff from the barracks was cutting it very close. He couldn’t miss the ride to the airport.
He took a tentative step toward the counter and felt his head spin again. Not enough to throw him to the ground, but more than enough to know that picking up the hammer he’d brought with him and using it to smash the equipment would be out of the question.
It’s okay, he told himself. The hammer was a fail-safe anyway. There was still the self-destruct.
The incendiary device had been installed in the room when it was set up. All Klausmann had to do was input the code into the activation box and enter the desired amount of delay — twenty minutes, per van Asshole — and voila, the place would go up in flames, eventually taking the entire building with it.
As he leaned down to pick up his bag, another wave of dizziness swept over him. Blindly, he grabbed the straps of his bag and straightened up, forgetting about his bottle of whiskey. After his head stopped spinning, he walked over to the self-destruct box.
Using all of his concentration, he punched in the code. The tiny screen flashed, and two underlined spaces appeared, waiting for him to input the number of minutes to delay. He typed 2 and 0, and smiled at the box.
Perfect.
He headed down the ladder, already feeling a bit more sober.
Nine minutes later, Klausmann hopped onto the back of his truck, taking a seat next to his buddy Gisler. As they started to pull away, Klausmann reached into his bag for the bottle of whiskey. That’s when he remembered he’d left it on the floor.
No big deal. He had two more full bottles in his bag. He pulled one out, cracked the seal, and, being the team player he was, passed it around, unaware he had forgotten the final self-destruct step. After inputting the time delay, the ENTER button needed to be pushed, something Klausmann had not done.
So, instead of commencing the self-destruct countdown, the system waited exactly one minute after Klausman entered the length of the delay and then reset itself.
“I think we have waited long enough, yes?” Darshana said.
Arjun studied the Pishon Chem compound. It had been four hours since the last group of trucks had driven away. Forty-five minutes after that, they had seen a third military cargo plane rise above the city and turn north.
Since then, all had been quiet.
He nodded. “We need to be careful, though.”
“They are all gone.”
“That may be, but think of what these people have done. Think of what they may have left there in case anyone shows up.”
“You think they may have contaminated everything?”
“It is possible. We will have to wash down afterward, and destroy any clothes we have on.”
They took with them only items they could afford to discard, and left the rest of their things in the building they’d been watching from.
It felt odd to enter the compound through the open front gates. The only other time either of them had come in that way had been in the back of one of the Project Eden vehicles after they were captured in the city. Arjun almost expected guards to rush out of the gatehouse, guns drawn, shouting at them to drop to the ground. But all they could hear were the birds calling to each other high above and the background buzz of insects that seemed to be growing louder.
They knew from what they’d seen in the city that the spray containing the Sage Flu virus left a sheen behind that lasted for several days. But as they passed several of the compound’s buildings and dozens of cars that had been left behind, they spotted no sheen.
They came next to the dual holding areas where the people who’d shown up at the survival station had been put — infected in one, uninfected in the other. Both pens were empty, their gates hanging open. And still no sheen.
They moved on to the buildings that had been used as barracks, first by the locals who had falsely thought they’d been hired to help eradicate malaria-spreading mosquitoes, and then by the fake UN soldiers brought in after the outbreak. Once again, no sheen.
“Should we check inside?” Darshana asked. “Make sure no one is here?”
Arjun looked at the building again. He didn’t like the idea, but she was right.
With a nod, he approached the door and cautiously opened it. On the other side was a hallway, lit only by the sunlight Arjun had just let in.
“Hold it open for a moment,” he said, letting Darshana take the door.
He stepped inside the hallway and searched the walls until he spotted the light switch. The fluorescent tubes flickered for a moment before staying on.
“Come on,” Arjun said. “I am not doing this alone.”
All they found were rooms that had been abandoned in a hurry. As they stepped outside again, they each sucked in deep breaths, cleansing their lungs of the imaginary bad air they’d been breathing.