400 Minutes of Danger Page 13

  But his smile frightened her. It never left his face, as though there was a joke he found endlessly clever but was never willing to share. Also, he never blinked. Even when she was facing the other way, Kelsey could feel his silver-grey eyes focused on her.

  36:50 She told herself she wasn’t in any danger. List’s employees often tried to murder witnesses—a bus full of schoolkids on a class trip had been sabotaged after one of the children had spotted List’s people lurking in a forest—but there was no way he could know that Kelsey was a spy.

  At the end of the corridor was another set of steel doors. List punched in a code—by the movement of his fingers, Kelsey could tell it was 277363, the same as before.

  36:00 The doors slid open, revealing—

  An exit?

  They were outside, surrounded by trees, with bits of sky visible through the canopy.

  Kelsey looked back to the doors. She had been sure the corridor would lead to the dome. Where was it?

  35:50 ‘Notice anything unusual?’ List asked.

  Suddenly, she did. There was no wind. And the sky, which had been grey when she arrived, was now a cheery blue. It was warmer than it had been on the airstrip, too.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. A good spy often pretended to be a bit dim.

  ‘Look behind you,’ List said, his smile growing.

  Kelsey turned. The steel doors were surrounded by a blue wall, which stretched up to become the sky.

  35:15 ‘Ohhhhh,’ she said. ‘We’re still inside!’

  ‘Right.’ List gestured at the forest around them. ‘This is a state-of-the-art enclosed habitat, the largest of its kind in the world. The artificial sun helps the trees grow, the trees keep the air clean and drop fruit for the animals, the animals fertilise the trees, and so on. The dome is actually a sphere—it goes beneath the ground, as well.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ Kelsey asked.

  List’s smile slipped. Perhaps he had expected her to be more impressed.

  34:50 ‘There are more than a million species in here,’ he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘That’s just the animals—it doesn’t include plants and bacteria. We have at least two of every family. Some parts of the landscape get artificial rainfall, some don’t. There’s a freshwater lake and a saltwater lake, hot areas and cold areas so every animal has a suitable place to live. Look!’

  He pointed to a tree branch. Kelsey was trained to spot people, cameras, weapons—but it took her a while to see the snake hanging among the vines.

  ‘That was one of the first animals I acquired,’ List said wistfully. ‘It gave me no end of trouble.’

  A family—currently in witness protection—had claimed that List broke into their house looking for stolen snakes. Kelsey wondered if this was one of them.

  34:05 ‘How do you stop the animals from, you know, eating each other?’ she asked.

  ‘Aha. An excellent question. Let me show you.’

  33:10 He led her deeper into the forest. Kelsey was soon lost. Her sense of direction usually relied upon the position of the sun and the angle of the shadows. Neither was useful in here.

  ‘Some creatures breed so fast it’s no problem if a few get eaten,’ List was saying. ‘And others feed so rarely that they do no harm. But several creatures need to be segregated, to protect them or to protect the prey.’

  32:45 He stopped walking. The forest was eerily silent. There wasn’t even any insect noise.

  ‘What kind of—’ Kelsey began. But she was interrupted by movement in the forest. Something was coming towards them. Fast.

  List watched her, smiling.

  Kelsey glimpsed the creature between the trees, and guessed it might be a gorilla. The way it moved made it seem muscular, and she could hear it huffing. It came closer and she revised her guess to a giant bird—it ran upright, a long tail balanced behind it. Even sprinting, it placed its clawed feet gracefully on the dirt.

  Then it came into full view, running right at her, and she screamed.

  31:00 It was a dinosaur!

  Its forked tongue tasted the air. The slitted pupils widened in its yellow eyes. It reached out for Kelsey with its talons—

  And then it froze.

  30:45 ‘What …’ Kelsey began. ‘How …’ Her training hadn’t prepared her for anything like this.

  ‘It’s not as hard as you might think,’ List said. ‘Birds evolved from dinosaurs, and the reptile DNA is still there. We took an emu embryo, switched off a few of the newer genes, and the old ones showed themselves.’

  ‘You made a raptor out of an emu?’

  ‘Of course not—velociraptors evolved in America. We made an australovenator out of an emu.’ He looked fondly at the creature. ‘This one’s quite young.’

  30:20 Kelsey boggled at the dinosaur. It glared back. She could feel how much it wanted to eat her.

  A few years ago a cruise ship had been sunk near here. Witnesses said they saw the attackers flee to this island, but they were never caught. List’s private navy had helped rescue the survivors from the wreckage and towed the lifeboats to safety. No-one could prove he had anything to do with the attack itself. But the secret cargo—frozen embryos of genetically modified creatures—was never recovered.

  Now, staring at the dinosaur, Kelsey thought she knew where that cargo had gone.

  29:50 ‘It’s quite safe,’ List said. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’

  He pointed upwards. Kelsey could faintly see a row of black dots on the underside of the dome.

  ‘Those are modified diode-pumped solid-state lasers,’ he said. ‘Very hot, extremely painful.’

  Kelsey looked for any sign of the lasers between her and the beast, but they were invisible.

  29:25 ‘Doesn’t that use a lot of power?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the best part,’ List said. He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped out a code.

  A faint humming was silenced. Kelsey hadn’t even noticed it was there until it had stopped.

  ‘The lasers are now switched off,’ List said. ‘There’s nothing between us and the venator.’

  Kelsey gasped. She turned to face the beast—

  But it didn’t attack.

  28:55 ‘Crossing the line is unbearably painful,’ List said, ‘so the venator has learned not to do it. The animals even train their offspring to avoid the lasers. I don’t need to keep them switched on all the time.’

  His phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and walked into the forest to take the call—leaving Kelsey and the dinosaur face to face, with no lasers between them.

  She backed away.

  The creature snorted. With a final glare, it turned and walked away into the trees.

  This could be the proof Kelsey needed. The dinosaur connected List to the missing embryos, and therefore to the attack on the cruise ship. It might be enough to get a warrant to search the island.

  But she still didn’t know why List was doing this. He had collected millions of different species and put them in this giant bubble. Was he starting his own zoo?

  Kelsey followed List’s path. She could hear him talking on the phone. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘The plane arrived an hour ago.’

  28:15 Kelsey’s plane had landed at about that time. Was that the one he was talking about?

  ‘Text me a picture,’ List said, suddenly angry. ‘Now.’

  He took the phone away from his ear and glared down at the screen for a while.

  ‘OΚ,’ he said finally, back into the phone. ‘We’ll have to bring everything forward. Arm the explosives and start the countdown.’

  A shiver ran down Kelsey’s spine. She could hear faint protests at the other end of the line.

  ‘Just do it!’ List snarled, and ended the call.

  27:20 Kelsey needed to know what he had been looking at, but she couldn’t see it from here. She edged around, trying to get behind him.

  Too late. He turned and spotted her. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘Shall we get
you back to your parents?’

  He dropped his phone into his pocket.

  ‘Yeah, definitely,’ Kelsey said. ‘Shouldn’t you turn the lasers back on first though?’ It made her nervous, knowing that the dinosaur was loose.

  List smiled. ‘Like I said, the animals have learned to avoid them. This way.’

  26:35 Kelsey followed him towards a rocky area.

  ‘In 1815,’ List said, ‘a volcano erupted in Indonesia. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history. Dust and ash suffocated the crops. Sulphur dioxide blocked out the sun. This led to three years of global cooling—a miniature ice age.’

  ‘Don’t tell me there’s a volcano in here, too,’ Kelsey said uneasily.

  List laughed. ‘No. The volcano is outside the sphere.’

  25:40 Kelsey turned, but of course the horizon was fake. The mountain wasn’t visible.

  List kept walking. Kelsey jogged to catch up.

  ‘There’s a huge amount of magma trapped in the crust beneath our feet,’ List continued. ‘It erupts under the ocean floor every hundred years or so, which doesn’t do any harm. But if it were to erupt above sea level, it could poison the air and freeze the water. All life on Earth would be extinguished within a decade, except for the contents of this self-contained sphere.’

  24:10 He said this casually, as though the near-extinction of everything on the planet was no big deal.

  Kelsey stumbled on a tree root and crashed into him. He whirled around.

  23:55 ‘I’m sorry!’ she said, trying to look embarrassed. ‘I tripped on something. Are you OK?’

  List smoothed down his shirt. ‘Fine. Come on.’ He didn’t ask if Kelsey was hurt.

  Kelsey kept his phone hidden behind her hand. It was a trick she had excelled at in school. She would bump into a victim with enough force that they didn’t feel her hand dipping into their pocket, and then keep her hand facing away so they didn’t notice the stolen object cupped in her palm.

  She waited for him to turn before she started fiddling with his phone. It wasn’t locked. List was overconfident about his security. Kelsey scrolled past radio and note-taking apps before she found his messages.

  ‘But it’s not likely to erupt like that, right?’ she asked.

  22:30 ‘Not on its own,’ List told her. ‘The crust is quite stable. But if there were some kind of disruption beneath the surface—an explosion, say—then yes, an eruption is likely. The effects of human-made climate change would be reversed, and prevented from happening again.’

  ‘Prevented?’

  ‘Because humans would be dead. Just think—there will be no more plastic poisoning the Pacific Ocean. The glaciers will stop melting.’

  Kelsey thought of Noah, collecting two of every animal on his ark because he knew Armageddon was coming. She thought of List’s voice: Start the countdown. Just do it.

  He wasn’t just preparing for the end of the world. He was going to cause it. He had a volcano to eject magma into the atmosphere and a bomb to trigger it.

  21:40 There—the most recent message List had received. Kelsey opened the attached picture.

  It was a school photo of a girl, slightly younger than Kelsey. She had red hair and freckles. She was smiling. The caption read: NIKA JESSEN.

  Kelsey realised her cover had been blown, but it was too late. List was looking at her, his evil smile becoming ever wider—

  21:10 Until he saw the phone in her hand.

  ‘Give that to me!’ he screamed.

  He tried to snatch it from her grip, but Kelsey reacted quickly. She feinted in one direction and then ran in the other, leaving List swiping at empty air.

  19:35 Kelsey sprinted back into the forest. She was fast. All students at SPII were required to be able to run a hundred metres in less than fifteen seconds.

  But List was fit, and he knew the land. He probably planned to live in this bubble, hunting and killing his own food while the world ended outside. He was catching up to her.

  Kelsey needed to call headquarters. They needed to send a team to find and disarm the bomb before it triggered the volcano. There might not be much time.

  19:05 ‘Give me that phone!’ List screamed. He may not have sounded crazy before, but he certainly did now.

  He was right behind her. She couldn’t hide from him. He knew this forest intimately.

  But she could go where he was afraid to follow.

  She ran and ran, praying she had remembered the route correctly. The trees all looked different from this side. The phone was slippery with her sweat.

  18:00 There. Faint marks on the ground, where the laser beams had scorched the dirt.

  She sprinted towards the row of burns, hoping that the laser beams hadn’t been switched back on—

  They hadn’t. She crossed the threshold without feeling a thing. Then she ran into the trees beyond.

  17:20 List didn’t follow her, scared to go into the dinosaur’s territory. Kelsey kept running through the trees. As soon as she thought she was out of sight, she stopped running and ducked down behind some bushes.

  ‘Nika!’ List’s voice echoed through the jungle. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just want my phone.’

  16:40 Kelsey didn’t respond. She was already dialling the SPII rapid response team.

  ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ List called. ‘Bring the phone back, and you can stay in the sphere, with me.’

  Kelsey shuddered. Why would she want that?

  ‘In sixteen minutes the mountain will erupt,’ List continued. ‘There’s nothing you, or I, or anyone else can do to stop it. Anybody within a thousand kilometres will be killed instantly. Everyone else on Earth will be poisoned, or will slowly starve to death. Except whoever is in this sphere.’

  Sixteen minutes? Kelsey’s mind was racing. That was barely enough time for the SPII team to get onto the island, let alone locate the bomb.

  15:20 ‘I was going to make sure you were outside when it happened,’ List said. ‘But you can survive with me and my chosen team—if you give me the phone.’

  ‘Charnwood video rental,’ a voice said on the phone.

  ‘Do you have a copy of The Human Flytrap on Blu-ray?’ Kelsey whispered.

  ‘Stand by.’

  ‘I’m saving the world,’ List bellowed. ‘Don’t you get that? Climate change caused by humans could leave the planet uninhabitable for a million years. My ice age will be over in half a century. My robots will clean the world outside, ready for our glorious return.’

  Kelsey’s SPII handler came on the line. ‘Agent Mercer speaking,’ he said.

  ‘This is Kelsey. My cover’s blown.’

  14:10 Mercer swore. ‘I’ll send an extraction team. Where are you?’

  ‘Forget about me. The mountain is a volcano, and List has placed a bomb inside it. He thinks it’ll bring about the end of the world. Your team needs to find it and disarm it, or at least get it out of the volcano.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Mercer didn’t sound scared. Frightened people rarely do good work, he had often told her.

  Kelsey was terrified. She hadn’t learned to shut the fear out like Mercer.

  ‘Are you somewhere safe?’ Mercer asked.

  ‘Possibly the safest place on Earth,’ Kelsey said. ‘Call me back on this number when the team has disarmed the bomb.’

  13:30 ‘Copy that. You just stay safe, OK?’

  Kelsey hung up, and listened to the forest for a moment. She couldn’t hear List any more. Hopefully he was looking for her somewhere else.

  She dialled Dr Jessen.

  There was no answer.

  12:40 She dialled Dr Lenova, telling herself that there were thousands of possible reasons for Jessen’s silence.

  ‘Please, please, please,’ Kelsey breathed.

  Lenova finally picked up. ‘Mr List,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  11:55 Kelsey exhaled in relief. ‘Mum, it’s Nika,’ she said. ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Dr Jessen is with me,’ Le
nova said. ‘No-one else.’

  If anyone else had been within earshot, she would have said ‘your father’, so Kelsey dropped the act. Lenova’s phone might be tapped, but it was too late to worry about that.

  ‘Dr Lenova, you and your husband are in danger,’ she said. ‘List knows I’m not your daughter. His people are probably coming for you right now.’

  Lenova had none of Mercer’s calm. ‘Oh, no!’ she cried. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  10:45 ‘In our living quarters.’

  ‘OK,’ Kelsey said, picturing the doctors’ room she had briefly visited when she first arrived. ‘Lock the front door and drag the bed in front of it. Take your dresser into the bathroom and use it to barricade the bathroom door. Then climb out the bathroom window and run into the forest. By the time the guards break through both doors and realise you’ve already gone, you should be well ahead of them.’

  She heard a knock on the other end of the line.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re already here,’ Lenova hissed.

  The line went dead.

  10:05 Kelsey stared at the phone. If she had called Lenova before calling Mercer, the doctors might have escaped.

  There was no time to dwell on this thought. A prickling on the back of Kelsey’s neck told her she was being watched.

  She looked around for List, and couldn’t see him. The leaves swayed in the breeze—

  09:20 But this was an enclosed sphere. There shouldn’t be a breeze.

  Then she saw the eyes. The reptilian eyes of the venator crouched between the trees.

  Every instinct screamed at her to flee. But she had seen the venator move. It was a hyper-agile predator, and it knew this jungle. There was no way she could escape before it ran her down and ripped her to shreds.

  No fear, she told herself. Be like Mercer.

  The venator burst out and sprinted towards her.

  Kelsey charged right at it.

  08:45 She had hoped the creature would hesitate when she attacked. But no. It dashed faster and faster, clawed feet kicking up clods of dirt, spiked jaws open wide.

  Gritting her teeth, Kelsey advanced on the creature. She was about ten metres away. Seven. Four.