lab table.
The onset of an attack.
“Doctor!” Her alarmed lab assistant approached her. “Do you require evacuation from the lab?”
“No. We’re nearly finished.”
She wanted to scream.
Not now. She couldn’t battle this now.
Her pills were in the outer chamber. She couldn’t leave now.
There was no time to lose. They were so close. She seated herself on her lab stool and took deep, measured breaths.
Slowly her agony subsided.
As she struggled to anchor herself, she focused on the reason she needed to complete her work.
It was her little brother, Will…reaching for her…pulling her back…
“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”
The memory replayed in her mind, bleeding into the horror to come.
Her motivation for why she had to do this went beyond vengeance against a world that saw her brother, mother and father trampled to death before her eyes in Vridekistan—although it was the life-shattering event that had forged her destiny to change the course of civilization.
Like Oppenheimer, Sutsoff knew that in order to save something, you had to destroy something. It was the underlying philosophy of her inner circle, Extremus Deus.
Humanity was doomed unless corrective action was taken.
By her tragedy and through the power of her intellect and will, fate had equipped her to be the architect of that action.
That was what was at play here, she realized as she resumed her work, filling novelty float pens with the new lethal agent. It was like loading a plane with bombs. The pens themselves were not dangerous. A few more steps had to be followed: the introduction of the agent into the delivery vessel, then remote activation.
When their work was finished in the containment lab, Sutsoff’s team followed the exit protocol, clean-up and decontamination procedures. Then they met on the lab’s outdoor patio.
Sutsoff looked upon the novelty pens in the plastic tub. She played with one, watched the sailboat float from one end to the other as her staff awaited instructions.
She gazed out to the seaplane tethered to the dock at the island’s leeward bay.
“Add the pens to the kits and alert the pilot that we have to get these to Nassau and expedited by courier to the seventy addresses.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“No mistakes can be made. We have no time left.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Once they’ve been delivered, we’ll embark on the final stages.”
54
Vancouver, Canada
Brakes creaked as the Zoom It Courier van stopped in front of the apartment house on East Pender.
The driver confirmed the address on his package, hustled to the door and pressed the buzzer. While waiting he took in the filthy porch, bordered with empty beer bottles and fly-covered takeout food containers. He wasn’t fond of deliveries on the east side.
“What is it?” a female voice crackled through the intercom.
“Zoom It Courier—package for Chenoweth in Unit B.”
“Just leave it at the door.”
“Need a signature.”
Minutes passed.
A woman emerged on the other side of the door’s wrought-iron security bars. Locks clicked before the door opened. The driver thought she was Asian, like the little boy at her side, who looked to be about three or four. The woman said something to the boy in Chinese, he stepped back and she signed for the delivery, Joy Lee Chenoweth.
The small package was from the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway at the resort in the Bahamas where she and her boyfriend, Wex, had stayed.
She had an idea what this was.
Joy Lee took it to the kitchen. Before she opened it, she got a cookie for the little boy. The kid loved sweet things.
The package contained a letter thanking them for their recent business. It included a float pen as a small gift and instructions to go to a Web site and enter the unique barcode on the side of the pen.
Oh, yeah, Joy Lee knew what this was about.
She immediately went to their laptop, found the site, entered the security barcode, then went to another secure page where she was stopped. In order to proceed, she had to provide the first part of a password assigned to her at the outset of her job.
Her laptop beeped its approval.
She was given access to another secure site, which required the second part of the password. As she waited, Joy Lee glanced at the boy sitting on his chair eating his cookie.
He was a sweet boy who cried in his sleep for his mother. Sure, it broke Joy Lee’s heart, but beyond that she didn’t care. She couldn’t care. Because watching over him was just a job.
A very lucrative one.
Less risky than her previous profession as a drug courier, at least that was the lie she’d been telling