guards are going to be swarming out of it. We have to take out the lock.'
The brave turned to look at Hiamovi who nodded and the brave fired three shots into the wall.
Greaves jumped out of the way as chunks of plaster and dust flew. The third shot hit its target and sparks leapt out of the hole.
Cortez put a hand on Greaves' shoulder. 'We need to secure the entrance to the front office.'
Once in the office Greaves found the control console and activated the security shutters. Reinforced steel slammed down over the doors.
There were shots from the stairwell outside. When they got there they saw that Colt and his henchman, Simon Peter, were at the door. 'They tried to get in by the stairs,' Colt said. 'We put a stop to that.'
'Is there another exit out of here?' Cortez asked Greaves.
'Yes. There's another door on the opposite side that leads to a different stairwell, but they'll be trying that one as well now. We've got to barricade both doors.'
'No shit,' said Colt. 'But that won't hold 'em long. I thought you were the one that who had everything planned out. Least ways that's how you act. Now it's all falling apart, where's this brilliant plan of yours?'
Greaves didn't have an answer. He always had an answer. Something always came to him. But nothing came now. He felt himself start to buckle under the pressure. He was close to physical collapse from illness and infection. He hadn't eaten or slept properly in weeks. He was starting to get palpitations. It was just like his breakdown. He felt events spiralling out of his control. They were looming over and threatening to crush him. No, he was stronger than last time, older and wiser. He thought of Cortez who overcame everything that was put in his way. Be like that, Greaves told himself. Be like Cortez.
It was all Sinnot's fault that he was feeling this way. He was the one who had dragged up Greaves' past. There had been so much pressure on him from such an early age, so many expectations and so many great things he was supposed to have done by now. As Sinnot had said, so much wasted potential.
Greaves could have been anything but he ended up a lab assistant. And Sinnot had cheated him out of his last chance to be something worthwhile, to live up to all that incredible early potential. To redeem himself.
That's what he was in search of when he found Anna – redemption. To make up for all that lost promise he would rescue the remnants of humanity from their own stupidity.
Sinnot and his idiot colleagues had no idea what they actually had in the Doomsday Virus. They hadn't the foresight or the imagination to see. All they wanted was to hand it over to their paymasters so they could go on running the world in the same stupid and brutal way they always had.
Greaves was so close, but it was all getting too difficult. Too many things kept going wrong. He started to hyperventilate. He reached into one of his pockets for a paper bag to breath into. He could see the men around him smirk. They were no better than the jocks from high school who laughed at the prepubescent maths whiz who had to do gym with them along with his other lessons.
As they moved one of the shelves in front of the doorway, a box of night-vision goggles fell off it.
'I've got it,' Greaves said. 'We kill the lights and use these goggles. They won't see us but we'll be able to see them.'
'How are we going to do that?' Colt said.
'We'll take out the fuse box on this floor to begin with.'
'That's no good,' said Fitch. 'They'll just wait till we go up to the next floor where there is light.'
'That's just to buy us enough time to get out of here before the explosion,' Greaves said.
'What explosion?' Colt said.
'Here's the clever bit. In the far room is where they keep all the high explosive. This room and the main one are right over the generator in the sub-basement. If we set enough explosive in these two rooms, we'll take out the floors above and below. We'll also destroy the generator and kill the power to the whole complex, while taking out the guards in the barracks above us at the same time. Those that are left won't be able to see and they won't be able to re-arm themselves because we'll have totalled the armoury. What's more, once power is down all the freezing equipment that's keeping the biological weaponry safe won't work. We'll have just enough time to get out before the place becomes infected. Everyone else will be too busy evacuating to avoid infection, to stop us taking the Doomsday Virus.'
The looks on all the men's faces changed. They couldn't see a flaw in the plan. They stopped sneering at Greaves and in spite of themselves they all looked impressed.
'Now you see why I keep him around,' said Cortez.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Anna had given them every kind of bodily fluid. They'd taken her blood, urine, saliva and they'd even done something called a smear test. The man called Sinnot and his scientists buzzed around her with so much excitement they reminded her of the clients at the Pleasuredrome. Only they seemed more cowardly than those men and a lot more dangerous.
Now they were subjecting her to something they called a CAT scan. She was strapped to a padded metal table that moved in and out of a revolving tunnel. In the next room she heard them discussing the images of her brain that appeared on a computer screen.
'She's too old,' Anna heard Sinnot say. 'She's got too many defined neural pathways, we couldn't counteract them all. Besides the micro-circuitry is to small to fit an adult brain.'
'We can shut down any part of her brain that resists processing,' said the man called Bennet. 'Any vital functions that effects can be controlled by our CPU. We've already proven that.'
'Besides,' said another man who she thought was called Roth. 'We don't need to rebuild the micro-circuitry, just the bio-connector, which is the easiest part of the apparatus to replicate.'
'But we've never done this with a subject of her age,' said Sinnot. 'She's not pliable enough for our requirements.'
'She's the only hope we've got.' Bennet said. 'Our masters aren't taking our failure well, and we've got nothing else to bargain with.'
Anna could feel the Doomsday Virus elsewhere in the complex. It was writhing inside the super-cooled containers. It already felt like another part of her body. When she was back at the community Anna had once heard a woman who had lost two babies talking. She had said she could still feel both of them at her nipple a month after they'd gone.
And there was Old Eli, a farm worker who lost a hand in a shooting accident. He told Anna once that the back of his hand still itched from time to time even though he couldn't scratch it.
That's what the Doomsday Virus felt like to Anna. Like some kind of phantom limb that had been cut off at birth and kept in jar. Now she was here in the complex it had come to life. She could feel its excitement, its hunger to be joined with her again.
Anna heard the doors to the lab hiss open and she craned her neck to see four guards burst in. 'Sir,' Anna heard a guard say. 'You've to come with us straight away.'
'What the hell are you doing in here?' Sinnot said. 'You've absolutely no clearance. We're conducting important work.'
'Sir we have orders to get you and your team to safety.'
'Safety? What on earth are you talking about? You're about to place our whole work in jeopardy!'
'It's you and the other doctors who are in jeopardy. The prisoners have escaped and they're armed.'
'Armed?' said Bennet. 'How did that happen? '
'I can't tell you that now sir.'
'One minute,' said Sinnot. 'I'll get the girl and we'll leave. '
'Sir, our orders said nothing about the girl. Only you three doctors.'
'Don't be ridiculous man,' said Sinnot. 'Don't you know how important she is to our whole work here?'
'I am authorised to use force if necessary, sir.'
Off in the distance Anna heard gunfire. Elsewhere she felt the virus thrash with a wild longing.
Ahiga was on point when the lights went out. The little guy disabled the fuse box and everything went dark.
