forest. There was a crash and then, seconds later, a ball of flame. It leapt up into the sky almost as if it was trying to escape from the devastation below. Two more explosions. Then silence.
For what seemed like an eternity, Alex stared towards the crash site. A fire still raged among the trees and he wondered if it would spread across the island. But even as he watched, the flames started to flicker and die down, to be replaced by a plume of smoke that rose up in the shape of a final exclamation mark. Drevin was dead. There could be no doubt about that.
Alex felt an immense weariness. It seemed to him that everything that had happened, from the moment he had met Nikolei Drevin at the Waterfront Hotel in London, had somehow been leading to this moment. He thought back to the luxury of Neverglade, the go-kart race, the football match that had ended in murder, the flight to America. Drevin had been a monster and he’d deserved to die. Washington was no longer in any danger. Gabriel 7 and the bomb it was carrying would be blown up long before it reached Ark Angel.
But Alex couldn’t feel any sense of victory. He looked back at Paul Drevin. The two agents were busy working on him, one of them wrapping pressure bandages around his wounds while the other fed an IV
needle into his arm. Paul’s eyes were closed. Mercifully he had slipped into unconsciousness and so hadn’t seen what had just happened.
Alex turned back and watched the smoke spread through the air, and suddenly he wanted to be far away from Flamingo Bay. He wanted to be with Jack. The two of them would take a plane home.
It was finally over.
He realized that Ed Shulsky and Tamara were staring at him.
“What is it?” he asked.
The two CIA agents exchanged a look. Then Shulsky spoke. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said. “We wanted to have a word with Mr Drevin.”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t think he was planning to hang around for a chat.”
“You may be right,” Shulsky agreed. “But we still needed to speak to him.” He paused. “You remember that red button I was telling you about?”
Alex nodded. “Yes.”
“Well, it seems I was wrong. There isn’t one. We can’t blow up Gabriel 7. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
“What?” Alex’s head spun. “But you just said that you’re in control of the island. There must be something you can do.”
Tamara shook her head. “After the launch, Drevin locked down all the computer systems,” she explained.
“He was the only one with the codes. It’s not your fault, Alex. By the time we’d caught up with him it probably would’ve been too late. But right now Gabriel 7 is on its way and we can’t communicate with it.
We can’t bring it back and we can’t divert it. It’s going to dock with Ark Angel in less than three hours from now. The bomb is on a timer. It’s all going to happen exactly as Drevin planned.”
“So what are you going to do?” Alex asked.
Tamara didn’t have the heart to say it. She glanced at Shulsky.
“Alex,” he said. “I’m afraid we need your help.”
ARK ANGEL
« ^ »
o,” Alex said. “No way. Forget it. The answer is no!”
“Let’s go over this again,” Ed Shulsky suggested.
They were sitting in the control centre on the western stretch of Flamingo Bay. Alex had been driven there from Drevin’s house and it was clear that Shulsky’s men were in command. Very little damage had been done. The guardhouse and the gate had been blown up—that was the explosion Alex had heard—but it seemed that Drevin’s men had surrendered quickly. None of them had known what Drevin was really planning. They had been paid to help launch a rocket into space: Drevin had never told them what the rocket actually contained.
At least Paul Drevin was out of it. He had been flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, on Barbados. Alex was relieved to hear that he was going to be all right. He had already been given blood and the doctors were waiting for his condition to stabilize before he was flown to America. His mother was apparently on her way to see him. Alex wondered if the two of them would ever meet again. Somehow he doubted it.
Now there were just four people in the room, surrounded by computers, video screens and the blinking lights of the electronic display board. A series of blueprints had been spread out on the large conference table. They showed the overall design of Ark Angel with the different modules—a dozen of them—
extending in every direction, up and down. It was like an enormously complicated toy.
Alex was slumped in a chair, his face grim, still dressed in the borrowed combat clothes. Ed Shulsky and Tamara Knight were sitting opposite him. Tamara looked exhausted, grey with pain and fatigue. She’d accepted a shot of morphine but nothing else. She wasn’t leaving Alex until a decision had been made.
The fourth person in the room was Professor Sing Joo-Chan, the man in charge of the Gabriel 7 launch. The flight director seemed a completely different person. He had lost his calm and self-possession and looked as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. His face was pale and he was sweating profusely, dabbing at his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Like everyone else, he claimed to know nothing about the bomb, nothing about Drevin’s real plans. He had promised to cooperate, to do anything the CIA required, and for the time being Shulsky was giving him the benefit of the doubt. But Alex wasn’t so sure. The professor had been recruited by Drevin; he had been in charge of the operation from the very start. Alex was certain he knew more than he was letting on.
“This is the situation,” Shulsky said. “Gabriel 7 will dock with Ark Angel at half past two this afternoon.
It’s carrying a bomb which will go off exactly two hours after that.” He glanced at Alex. “Drevin told you that himself.”
Alex nodded. “That’s right. Half past four. That’s what he said.”
“Now, as I understand it, there are three docking ports on Ark Angel.” Shulsky pointed to the diagram.
