Crocodile Tears (18 page)

“What’s a double red alert?”

“Any unauthorized person found wandering inside the Bio Center will be killed . . . no questions asked.”

“Don’t you have a bunch of schoolchildren here?”

“I haven’t forgotten that, Desmond. I’m not an idiot—whatever you may think. My staff have special instructions.” He turned off the computer. “I’m going to the control center. Are you coming?”

“Absolutely.” It struck Alex that McCain sounded more amused than alarmed. But that seemed to be his character. Whatever he might be up to, he didn’t believe that anyone could get in his way.

The two of them stood up. Alex heard the swish of cloth as Straik came out from behind his desk. They went over to the door. It opened, then closed. Alex was on his own.

Gratefully, he uncurled himself from behind the picture. For a moment he stood where he was, trying to collect his thoughts. He was probably safe while he was in Straik’s office, at least for the time being. Security would be searching for him—but this was the one place they wouldn’t look. Even so, he couldn’t stay here forever. With an intruder on the loose, the school visit might be cut short and the bus sent back to London. Alex had to be on it. He couldn’t be left behind.

It was worse than that. Alex realized that his only chance of survival was to get back to Mr. Gilbert and the others. There had been nothing accidental about the death of the whistle-blower, and no matter what Blunt might have said, there really was something seriously unpleasant going on at Greenfields. Why else would the director be so keen to see that any intruder was killed? Alex had to get back to his class. No guard was going to fire at him when there were witnesses. Once he was back with the others, he would be safe . . . just one bored student among many.

He headed for the door, about to leave, when he noticed a glass vial resting on Straik’s desk. It was a test tube, sealed at the top, with a muddy gray liquid inside. This must be the “sample” that he had heard the two men talking about. Alex had no idea what it contained, but another thousand gallons of it were on their way somewhere abroad. He still had the memory stick in his pocket, but on an impulse he went over and took the test tube too. Smithers would analyze it. And that would be the end of it. The liquid would surely reveal whatever was being planned.

He opened the door carefully, checked there was no one in sight, then stepped outside. He had decided to head back the way he had come. He had no idea where his friends were and he was furious that he had no way of communicating with them. Normally, he would have called Tom or James . . . but all their mobile phones had been left on the bus. What had the woman, Dr. Beckett, told them? The laboratories first. Then the greenhouses and storage centers. Finally, the lecture theater. Surely they couldn’t be too hard to find.

Alex closed the door behind him and sprinted back around the corner, his feet making no sound on the carpet. The glass bridge was ahead of him, but even as he approached it, he heard men running toward him and spun back, ducking into a storage cupboard a second before they appeared. There were three guards and they were all armed. Alex watched them run across the bridge and disappear down another passage. Above his head, he noticed a light flashing red. He gritted his teeth. This had turned into a cat-and-mouse game with only one mouse and an awful lot of cats.

The bridge was clear and he crossed it into what he had thought of as the administrative block. He went back down the stairs but immediately realized that he had forgotten which way he had originally come from—left or right. The trouble was that every direction looked the same. He tossed a mental coin and set off, knowing almost at once that he was lost. He still had the postcard with its guidance system in his back pocket but it couldn’t really help him now. All that mattered was to keep moving and not to be seen.

“Stop!”

The guard had stepped out of nowhere, blocking his way. He had a machine gun dangling around his neck and he was already fumbling with it, bringing it up and around. Alex turned and ran. He had taken no more than ten steps when a neon light fitting exploded with a shower of sparks and broken glass. At the same time, the walls and ceiling showered plaster on him. Alex hadn’t heard much more than a whisper, but the guard was clearly firing in his direction, the bullets streaming over his head. The gun must have some sort of silencer attached to it . . . and of course, that made sense. These were the “special instructions” that Straik had issued. They couldn’t risk the sound of gunfire, not when they had forty schoolkids on the site.

Alex hurtled down another corridor, past a series of open doors. He passed a laboratory, surprisingly cluttered and old-fashioned, with plant specimens on the work desks and bottles of different chemicals on the shelves. A woman in a white coat, holding a petri dish in the palm of her hand, looked up and momentarily caught his eye. Behind her, a man was taking a tray of flowers out of what looked like an industrial fridge. Alex wondered if his class had been here, perhaps a few minutes before. He was tempted to stop and ask. He could still pretend to be lost. He decided against it.

Double red alert. He had so far been spotted by one guard, and the fact that he was a boy in a school uniform hadn’t made any difference at all. These people wanted him dead.

He heard shouting behind him. There was another light flashing in the corner of his eye. Alex hadn’t even slowed down. He saw a glass door ahead of him and sprinted toward it, palms outstretched, praying that it wasn’t locked. He pushed. It opened. He almost fell through as another blast of bullets fanned silently through the air, punching dotted lines across the wall beside him. But now he was outside and running. He saw the sleek white exterior of the lecture theater on the other side of the lawn, but he couldn’t reach it. More guards in electric vehicles were racing toward him, moving fast. Alex felt a surge of despair. How could he have allowed Alan Blunt and MI6 to talk him into this? He’d promised Jack he wouldn’t get into trouble again. He’d promised Sabina. More than that, he’d promised himself.

Anger spurred him on. He reached one of the greenhouses and plunged in through two sets of doors. It had been cold outside, but here the climate was subtropical. Hundreds of plants were arranged on shelves, some just a few inches tall, some bending against the roof high above. The greenhouses were actually more like glass factories, divided into dozens of different rooms, each one joined to the other by a maze of interlinking corridors. Huge silver pipes and watering systems snaked across the ceiling. There were banks of machinery controlling the lights, the temperature, and the humidity in all the different areas, ensuring perfect conditions for all this artificial life. Alex had to be safe here. The guards might have followed him in, but there were plenty of hiding places. Provided he kept moving, there was no way they would be able to find him.

The next attack took him completely by surprise. A cascade of bullets that seemed never-ending. They came from all sides, determined to kill the intruder even if it meant destroying the entire complex. Alex didn’t hear a single shot, but inside the greenhouse the noise of bullets smashing glass was deafening. Windows shattered all around him. Alex threw himself to the ground as shards of glass, thousands and thousands of them, showered in all directions. Inches above his head, the plants were shredded, the very air turning green as it was filled with tiny cuttings of stalk and leaf. Terracotta pots exploded, earth showering out. Brightly colored flowers tore themselves apart. And still the bullets kept coming, hammering into the machinery, ricocheting off the metal pipes. Alex could just make out the dark shapes of the guards surrounding the building, destroying it. He wondered if they had all gone mad. Or was it that the work at Greenfields was finished and nothing mattered anymore, so long as nobody was able to escape with its secrets?

He scurried forward on his hands and knees, trying to lose himself farther inside the complex. He came to a brick wall with another bank of machinery and crawled behind it, putting a solid barrier between himself and the gunfire. Nobody could see him here. He patted his fingers against his forehead. When he examined them, they were stained with blood. None of the bullets had hit him. It must have been the falling glass. He brushed it out of his hair and off his shoulders. What must he look like? What would Mr. Gilbert say if he ever turned up?

He had to find the school tour! Surely they must have heard all the racket, even if the guards were using silencers. Another corridor led into the distance, this one with mirrored tiles instead of glass. He set off, still keeping low. Suddenly he was surrounded by brickwork. He had entered some sort of equipment room with spades and wheelbarrows. He could have been in an ordinary garden center rather than a top-secret research institute. There were even bags of fertilizer . . . as if he needed reminding of the sort of trouble he was in.

Somehow he had to find a way back outside. Then he would cut back to the lecture theater and hope to join the rest of Brookland there. At least he seemed to have lost the guards with their machine guns. Perhaps they were scouring through the wreckage, looking for a body. Alex checked the test tube that he had stolen from Straik’s office. He had been carrying it in his top jacket pocket, and fortunately it was still in one piece. He slipped it back in and set off again, heading for a set of solid-looking doors and a sign: STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The doors were locked and hermetically sealed, but there was another reader set in the frame. Alex still had the library card. He had reprogrammed it to open Straik’s door, and presumably Straik had access to every zone in the Bio Center. So . . .

He tried it. It worked. The doors opened. Alex went in, smiling as they clicked shut behind him. It might well be that the guards were unable to follow him in here. How many of them, after all, would have been authorized?

He only realized where he was when it was too late. The shape of the building, the intense heat, the moisture running down the glass panes . . . all these should have warned him. But the door had already locked itself, and looking back, he saw that there was no reader on this side, no way back out. He stood where he was, feeling the heavy air on his cheeks and forehead. His clothes were already sticking to him. Something was buzzing loudly over his head. Alex closed his eyes and swore.

He had walked into the Poison Dome.

12

HELL ON EARTH

ALEX LOOKED AROUND HIM. He had once visited the greenhouses at Kew Gardens in London—and in some ways this was similar. The building itself was very elegant, the great dome supported by a delicate framework of metal supports. The whole area was about the size of a circular soccer field, if such a thing could exist. But unlike Kew Gardens, there was nothing beautiful or inviting about the plants that grew here. Alex examined the tangle of green in front of him, the trunks and branches crisscrossing each other, struggling for space. They all looked evil, the leaves either razor sharp or covered in millions of hairs. He remembered what Beckett had said. These were mutant organisms. Touching just one of them would bring pain and death. Fruits in the shape of half-sized apples hung over his head, and rich, fat berries clung to the bushes. But they were all hideous colors, somehow unnatural, warning him to stay away. He could hear droning. There were insects in here and they were big ones, from the sound of them. Bees, perhaps something worse.

Alex’s skin was already crawling, but he forced himself not to move. The information that the Beckett woman had given him when he arrived might even now save his life. He mustn’t brush against any of the plants here. They had been altered so that they were a hundred times more deadly than nature intended. And there weren’t just plants. She had talked about the interaction of poisons. And so there were spiders and snails and . . . of course, the bees. Why had Straik created this place? Hell on earth. What was he trying to prove?

Alex couldn’t go back. He remembered the shape of the dome, with the corridors branching out like points of the compass. He had come in as if from the south. Now he had to reach the other side and one of the other three exits. Two in and two out . . . that must be how it worked. From what he could remember, the lecture theater must be directly in front of him. So all he had to do was walk straight. And at least there was a path, a boardwalk made of wooden planks, stretched out ahead. And nobody would be looking for him in here. Nobody would be stupid enough to follow him in. He might be stung, bitten, poisoned, or scared to death, but at least he wouldn’t be shot.

So . . .

There was no other way.

Alex moved forward, very slowly. Touching nothing. Not making a sound. If he was going to get out of here alive, he would have to take it literally one step at a time. Beckett had mentioned snakes . . . the taipan. Alex knew it to be the most venomous land snake in the world, fifty times more toxic than the cobra. But it was also nervous. Like most animals, it wouldn’t attack a human unless it was threatened. So provided he didn’t brush against anything, touch anything, step on anything, or alarm anything, he might come out of this all right.

One step at a time.

He followed the wooden boardwalk. The plants were horribly close to him. The nearest of them was an oversized thistle that seemed to be straining to break free and attack him, like an angry dog. Then came a squat, ugly tree corkscrewing out of the earth with green scalpel blades instead of leaves. The smell of sulfur rose in his nostrils. The path was crossing a volcanic pool. A creeper hung in front of him. He resisted the urge to brush it aside and bent low, contorting himself to avoid coming into contact with it. If he made one miscalculation, even so much as an inch, he might dislodge something, and he knew that a single touch could finish him. Everything here was his enemy. Something buzzed close to his head and he jerked around, unable to control himself. His sleeve brushed against a jagged-edged nettle, but fortunately, the material protected him from the bristling hairs—or neurotransmitters, as Beckett had called them. Alex shrunk into his jacket, pulling it around him. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on the way ahead.