The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

She checked her watch. She had a clear hour in which to work. She did not know who the inside person was. She had left and collected the messages from three separate dead-drops throughout the plant. She knew the person would have to be senior, but not top-tier. That would point clearly to one of four individuals. It would be suicidal for one of those to be involved. In any event, she knew once she had defected, the top-tier would be left in a difficult position. But she had weighed the situation and knew that she had little hope of leaving this place alive. Not now she had seen what she shouldn’t have. The price would be worth it. Collateral damage, the agent had called it in one of her earlier messages. And in bringing her into the fold, they had already sealed her fate. From the moment she had returned the message and not gone straight to plant security, she had sacrificed the top-tier and undermined her own safety.

There was a row of steel lockers along the wall. Some were single full-length personal lockers and others were six-feet wide and labelled with the contents. Mainly tools and parts needed for the maintaining of the regenerator. Others were fuse cupboards and circuit boards.  Few people had business down here, and but for a chance encounter, she would have been none the wiser. But an errand for a friend had brought her down here and she had seen that not all the lockers were as they seemed.

Natalia made her way to the furthest wide locker and she checked behind her as she opened both doors to reveal the hidden door behind and security keypad. She had been given the code but had memorised it and burned the note. She couldn’t afford to be caught with such information. She punched in the eight-digit number, and the steel door opened inwards on a set of six thick hinges. She could see the rubber seals around both the door and the frame, shuddered at the thought of what secrets they would hold in here. Sealed in the airtight facility, the air capable of being sucked out under immense pressure and a total vacuum created within minutes of the alarm being sounded. Not just to kill what this facility made, but the living beings within. Personnel included. Certain death in little more than a minute.

Natalia checked her watch once more, knowing as she did so, that barely a minute had passed since she had last checked. She had been told it would be clear. Again, she wondered how this could be so without involving one of the top tier personnel. To recall security, to organise a shift pattern without an inter-lapping of personnel. But she cleared her head of such thoughts. It wasn’t her problem. An out. That was what she had been given. And through her predecessor’s contact, she had been given the chance of a fresh start. Clearly the man had failed to take all the information required of him. Or perhaps he had merely whetted their appetite? Whoever they were.

The walls were different down here. Thermal tiles lined the walls, floors and ceilings. They conducted either heat or cold and held the temperatures required for days. She was not aware, but they were the same tiles used by the Russian space program for the re-entry of their forthcoming reusable rocket. She was not aware that through what was basically a heat generating turbine that the entire facility could be heated to over one-thousand degrees Celsius, or using liquid nitrogen, could get as low as minus one-hundred and ninety-eight Celsius. Again, protocols were in place to lockdown and sanitise the facility without the evacuation of its personnel.

The next door was constructed of Perspex and was the entrance to the air-lock. She entered the eight-digit pin on the keypad and stepped inside. She took her phone out of her pocket and placed it on the bench seat, then unhooked one of the orange suits and stepped into it. She pulled it over her shoulders, zipped it up and fastened the plastic overlays over the zip. After she had put on the rubber gloves, she used the insulation tape as she had been instructed. She sealed the wrists, slipped on the over-boots and taped the trouser legs in place. Next, she pulled on the plastic helmet and mask, and allowed the attached, heavily weighted flaps to roll down around her back, shoulders and chest. She checked that the door was tightly closed behind her and pressed the button marked: Шлюз.

Air lock.

The rubber seals expanded and there was a faint whoosh, and she felt her ears pop as if she were taking off in a passenger airliner. The light above her turned from red to green, and she used the same eight-digit pin on the keypad. The second door opened, and she picked up her phone and stepped out into the laboratory.

She filmed the laboratory. The work stations, flow charts, television screens, computer terminals and monitors, and the row upon row of scientific equipment that she had no idea of its purpose. She recognised test-tubes and pipette’s, petri dishes and all manner of tools she would have associated with a medical theatre. She looked up at the bank of television screens. A vision of evolutionary terror. From tiny rhesus monkeys in cages, to chimpanzees in single Perspex units, to a lone and solitary gorilla, and to her horror – two Perspex units, each containing a man and a woman.

Her heart raced, and she felt herself go lightheaded. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screens. She recognised both people – former workers of the hydroelectric station. She had thought it odd that they had left without word, had no further presence on social media. But people moved on with their lives, and jobs like this, they were a means to an end.