Genesis (Extinction Book 1) (11 page)

Staring at the computer screens, trying to get their brains to process this new information, no one spoke. Whirring and clicking gadgets filled the shocked silence until Adam cleared his throat. “Well, why don’t we?”

“Why don’t we what?” Cedric asked.

Adam turned to Ryan. “Why don’t we create a new forecast model? Get the real information out there, so people will start looking again?”

Ryan shook his head. “As much as you look like the evil villain in your tech-lair, you have no idea how much programming that will take. Besides, with all this false data being fed to everyone, we’d be the laughing stocks of the modern age. The kooks trying to pass off the healing properties of pigmy marmoset urine would get more credit than us.”

“Programming is what we do best,” Cedric said, puffing out his chest like the king rooster of the henhouse.

Adam grinned up at him and added, “I could flood the networks anonymously. Make it impossible for even the GN to trace it back to us. At the very least, it will get the scientific community to sit up and pay attention.”

“I love the way you think, kid.” Ryan put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. It was a great idea, but it took decades to build a good forecasting system for climate change. He didn’t think they had that kind of time. “No offense to your mad skills, but I think we’d get more wrong than right. There are too many intertwining variables.

“Particulate matter in the air, for instance. It’s increasing exponentially because of the droughts. Depending on whether it’s in the stratosphere or the troposphere, it acts differently when it comes to heating or cooling the atmosphere. It also has a huge impact on rainfall. It traps water molecules and doesn’t let them fall. When they do, it’s a torrential downpour.”

Both of the techies looked crestfallen as they thought about the data that would have to go into building a model. It seemed an impossible task, even to them. A slow grin spread across Adam’s face. “When is the last time you knew the system to be accurate?”

Ryan sat back down, driven down by the weight on his shoulders that just seemed to grow heavier the more they talked about the duplicity on the screens. It was a good question. How long had they been lying to the world?

“I don’t know,” he answered, rubbing his eyebrows. It was a nervous habit he thought he’d broken a long time ago. “The data pointed to serious problems in the future right up until 2018 or so. After that, there were only slight improvements until mid-2020. After that, the data started really turning around.”

Adam leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Jeesh, that’s a lot of data to rummage through.”

“What are you thinking?” Cedric asked.

“I’m thinking we could go back to the last few good years of data, then start searching for the intrusion code. That should give us a starting point and maybe help us figure out who’s behind this. But we could also strip out the intrusion code on annual data, find the last good forecast model and use that to enter the new, clean data.”

Ryan laughed. “If someone is going through all this trouble to hide the truth, do you think they’re really going to just open up their computers to you? Here, sure, play with our lies and see what turns up.”

“I don’t intend to ask for it,” Adam said. The grin from earlier was back and it had taken on a wicked light.

Nodding his head, Cedric began laughing.

“What?” Ryan asked. “What are you guys thinking?”

“Simple,” Adam turned and began working the keyboards like a fiend. “We’re going to steal it.”

Cedric moved to another work station, even more impressive than Adam’s, and began firing it up. Regardless of Ryan’s efforts, neither pupil nor master replied to his questions. Their eyes were locked on their screens, streaming through data like most men would watch football. Realizing he had somehow been dismissed and forgotten, he eased the door open and slipped into the hallway.

“In for a penny,” he mumbled. Sheer survival instinct told him to throw the door open again and put a stop to their snooping. No matter how good they thought they were, the powers that be behind the deception were out of their league. They had no chance of getting away with this.

Instead of throwing the door open, he put one foot in front of the other and headed for the stairs. This was bigger than they were. Much. To stop it before they could get enough evidence to let the world know what was going on, was cowardice. Worse, it would make him just as culpable for the extinction of their race as the men who had designed it.

Max navigated the narrow alleys of the Souks, heading away from Dubai Creek and toward the D85 where he would have a better chance of hailing a cab. If the man in Sonapor had anything relevant to share, he could be on a plane and headed back to the States in the morning.

Nothing would please him more.

Not only was he forced to wear a dress and flip flops, he had been unable to think of any way to sneak Betty through customs. Worse still, he had to be extremely careful of his drinking. Even the odor of alcohol on his breath was reason enough to land him in jail for the next six months. The six-month stint would turn into ten years after they searched him.

A bottle of Jim Beam and quality time with his Betty, her silky black-widow stock and the smell of gun oil would make all right with the world again.

Until then, the Souks at night gave him the heebie-jeebies. Hot wind sowed through the mats overhead but little moonlight penetrated the spaces between palm fibers. Oil lamps offered infrequent, flickering light, the spaces between them filled with deep shadows.

The sound of the flip flops was deafening as they slapped the concrete walk. Though he’d gotten used to walking in them, he hadn’t mastered the art of walking quietly. In the dark warrens of the Souks, it made him feel like a target.

Max stopped, silencing the relentless slap-slap-slapping of his flip flops, to listen to the alleys around him. Something in the darkness rustled and fell silent. He held still for another minute, waiting, barely breathing. The only sound that met his listening ears was the distant traffic on the D85.

His imagination was getting the better of him. Walking another few yards, he tried to turn the conversation with Mohammed over in his brain, examining it. The man had been frightened, but he had been glad to see Max leave. There would be no stalking, no retaliation from that sector.

The woman in the street, the prostitute, kept popping into his head unbidden. Something about her, something he couldn’t put his finger on, bothered him. Turning that golden maze of a necklace around in his mind, he tried to remember where he had seen it, what it stood for.

When it hit him, he stumbled and stopped. Behind him, in the darkness, the rustling could have been cloth on skin, or fingertips brushing the adobe walls of the Souks. It faded too fast for him to be sure.

The necklace had been the
Bismallah
, an Islamic pendant that stood for ‘In the name of Allah’. Why would a prostitute, especially in such a conservative religious environment, wear something like that while she worked the street?

She wouldn’t.

Slipping his flip flops off, he walked to the nearest patch of darkness and slipped into a recessed doorway. The minutes dragged by as he waited. Just as he was about to give up, believing it was good old fashioned paranoia following him in the Souks and nothing more, the sound came again. Tentative at first.

Slipping a hand inside his
Kandoora
, he pulled his knife free and held it to his chest. Closing his eyes, trusting himself to his ears, he waited. His first thought was the woman in the street, but the Souks were no stranger to muggings and robbery as the economy continued to plunge.

One way or another, he was about to find out. Whoever was out there was getting closer. Max, poised to strike, nearly dropped the knife as his cellphone began ringing.

Fighting the folds of cloth to get the phone shut down, a flash, seen out of the corner of his eye caused him to duck. Chips of gypsum and coral stone rained down on his head and shoulders as a blade sank into the side of the building.

Reaching out, he grabbed a handful of fabric and threw the assailant into the doorway, pinning them to the wall with both his own body and the blade of his knife as it slipped under the sternum. Even in the shadows, the gold of the
Bismallah
was radiant.

Immobilized by pain, unable to get more than a gasp of air around the blade in her sternum, she didn’t struggle or fight back while he used his free hand to rip the covering from her face.

“You have a choice to make,” he whispered against her skin. “I twitch to the right, you’re a dead woman. Do you understand that?”

“You are a coward,” she panted out on the small breaths she could manage.

Max pressed his face next to her smooth skin and laughed. It was a mirthless sound and he felt her shiver against him. “You’re a whore and a thief, so I guess that makes us even.”

Between clenched teeth, her eyes flashing pure hatred, she said, “I am no whore! No thief!”

“No? What were you planning to do with that knife? You were going to gut me like a dog and steal whatever you could find, weren’t you?”

“If you are no coward, then kill me,” she challenged.

“I said you had a choice,” he grinned. “Twitch to the right and you die. Twitch to the left and I will leave you laying, alive and paralyzed, in the street. What kind of repressed deviants do you have here in Dubai? What will they do to you if they find you while they’re roaming the streets tonight?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she flashed, but her eyes no longer looked certain.

He grabbed her by the chin and pressed his face close to hers. “Try me.”

A whimper escaped her lips. It was the only sign of weakness she had shown since the knife slipped into her chest. “What do you want from me?”

“Tell me the truth, and I’ll release you to your God.”

Her jaw clenched, and she squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, they were cool. Calm. “You are marked. Your death would have insured life for my family.”

Before he could question her riddle, she grabbed his hand and pulled hard to the right. Surprised, he pulled back and she slid down the wall, her eyes never leaving his. As her damaged heart fought to get blood where it needed to go, it was her turn to smile. The gentle pull of her lips held as her life ebbed away.

Max knelt in the recess, stunned. When he was sure she was dead, he pulled his knife free and wiped the blade clean on her
abaya
.

Twenty years ago, he’d seen his share of Islamic extremists. This was…different. This didn’t feel like it was for God or country, but for her family. “How would my death have insured life for your family?”

The dead can’t answer, but there was still one name that might be able to shed some light on what was happening. Grabbing his flip flops, he chose to run barefoot through the rest of the Souks, putting them on only after the D85 was in sight.

A cab waited at the curb. Considering the woman’s declaration that he was marked, it was a little too convenient. Max waited until a new cab rounded the corner before he stepped out of the shadows and waved it down.

There would be no returning to the hotel. Nor would he be able to leave through the Dubai International Airport in the morning without a change of identity. He’d have to find another way, and soon. But first things first, “Sheikh Zayed Road at al Qusais.”

From this point forward, he had to assume he was being followed, hunted. He left the cab at al Qusais and hiked the rest of the way to Sonapor. Ripe with human despair and sewage, he smelled the camp long before the high walls and floodlights that surrounded it filled the horizon. Ironic since the Ministry of Health was only a mile away.

Though he had memorized maps of Dubai’s suburbs during his time in the golden city, he’d had no time to scout the area before coming. On the trip over, he had envisioned guarded turrets and Constantine wire. As he waited in the shadows, not a single guard walked the wall.

Outside, the camp had been as well maintained as the inside smelled. Chunks of wall were missing in places, the gates sprung from their hinges. Regular maintenance was not in evidence as many of the floodlights had burned out over time and had been left, dark eyes looking out over a dismal world. Fear and hopelessness were the only guards that stood between the population of the camp and the outside world.

Another half hour passed without anyone stepping out of the shadows. Stripping out of his clothes to change into the darker, less Emirati
Kandoora
, Max’s fingers brushed a hard patch in his sleeve the size of a penny. Held under the stars, he could make nothing out of the thin, stiff fabric. Rubbing his fingers over embedded filaments, adhesive on one side clung to his skin.

“Clever witch,” he whispered, tossing the tracking device to the ground.

Time had just become a precious commodity. How much did he have left?

Max chose an entryway shrouded by darkness. The stench on the outside had been nothing compared to what he found on the inside. The narrow streets ran with sewage, stepping stones had been placed in strategic points, islands in a foul sea, to allow passage without wading in it.

The note given to him by al Qassimi had listed a number. Max walked around several small houses before he found one whose number was still intact, which allowed him to get his bearings. Few windows allowed a glimpse into the hell that was the lives of these men. Those rare few that were open to the night, spoke of a desperate attempt at ventilating the cramped quarters within.

Men slept three deep on metal bunk beds that filled the small spaces. In the wane light offered by the tiny windows, Max could see a small refrigerator and table occupied the scant space left by the twelve sleeping men. If his target slept in a hut this full, he would have to move fast, killing all of them before they could get in his way or allow his quarry to escape.

Max glanced at the scribbled name once more. There was only one, Yousef. No son of this or grandson of that, just Yousef. Still, he didn’t think it would be too hard to find one Emirati in an ocean of Indians, Pakistanis, and Philippinos.

He was wrong. Though the sun had still not made an appearance over the horizon, it took two hours to find the hut he was looking for, bringing sunrise dangerously close. When he looked into a window on the other side of the camp, he knew he’d found the right one. Cast out, but still Emirati, Yousef had been given the rare pleasure of living alone.

The old man, lying naked on the bed, except for a pair of boxers, to endure the hot night air, looked desiccated. Even from where Max stood looking through the night window, he could count the man’s ribs, follow the lines of his collarbones. He was nothing but a dried out husk.

Max drew his blade and tested the latch on the door. Its rusted machinations protested, but it swung open. The old man was no longer lying down, but sitting on the edge of the bed. “I have been waiting for you.”

“If it’s death you’ve been waiting for, old man, I’ll bring it swiftly. But I have questions first.”

The old man’s laughter filled the room, a booming sound that seemed far too large and full of life for the frail body holding it. When the laughter passed, a deep sadness filled the old man’s eyes and he shook his head. He slouched as if the weight of the air had become too much to carry. “My friend, I am already dead. As are you.”