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

to flee this place before it was too late. The harsh elements would make it difficult, but surely not impossible?

The laboratory would be under lock-down, if not now, then imminently. They would play the footage back to see what had happened, how their subjects - or experiments - had gotten free, and when they did, they would see that the USB was missing. She imagined the unit would record digitally as well, recording over its own memory at certain stages, maybe weeks or months later, the USBs changed regularly to create a permanent log. She even wondered whether the footage saved itself to a cloud storage facility, in which case, the recordings would be infinite and accessible.

She had planned to leave in the morning. That would tie in with her rendezvous. But she knew she had little choice but to move now. The shift would be back by now. They would see the chaos and they would start working on their protocols.

She packed her rucksack with spare clothes, what few possessions she could not contemplate leaving, and a few supplies she had been taking over the past few weeks. Chocolate, UHT milk, tinned ham, long-life bread rolls and canned beans. Enough food for a few days if the rendezvous did not go according to plan. She had no money. The company paid into her St. Petersburg bank account and she had a debit card for transactions. She had some money saved but had been told by her contact to destroy her card and make no more transactions. It was a sure-fire way of being traced. She would be taken care of financially in her new life.

Natalia grimaced as she zipped up her suit. The wound itched and there was a distinct feeling like that of pins and needles. A strange feeling to experience from a scratch. She tried to ignore it. She had been stupid. But it wasn’t over yet. She wasn’t just bringing what she had been asked for, but a whole lot more. Up-close footage of the results of what was being created here. A secret facility producing quantities of substances the nation had signed and agreed not to manufacture. Biological weapons - and that was what her contact had been adamant was being produced – were illegal to create and stockpile. The fact that Russia was doing so was an act of war. The deadly agent Novichok that had been used in Salisbury on an ex-KGB defector and his daughter was just the tip of the iceberg.

She would be missed soon, so now was the time. She swung the rucksack over her shoulder and checked that she had the compass and map in her pocket. She removed the sim card from her mobile phone and dropped it down the plughole in the sink. She would have no communication now, not if she got into trouble – and out here that was a risk in itself - but in doing so she could not be traced either. The phone held all the evidence, and along with the USB, would be her bargaining chip – her fee for safe passage and a new life in The West.

38

 

“The coach is optional, Sir,” the manager paused. “But I would advise you take it. The storm is imminent. Reports are showing a first wave later this morning.”

“So, being on the road will be riskier,” said King.

“The coach will leave at eight-AM. The driver assures us he will make it to Kittila in time, and the report is saying that the storm should break over the White Sea and head straight for Archangel, in Russia. Kittila has been declared a safe zone.”

“Should head for Archangel?” King asked. “That’s quite a gamble. And why now?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why is there a coach available now? This place was the last refuge to all and sundry earlier today. The Sami, for instance.”

“It’s been arranged, that is all I know,” said the manager tersely. “Shall I book you and your… lady friend, on it?”

“No.” King said sharply and turned around. He made way for a family, both parents looking concerned. It was evident they wanted to be on that coach at all costs. Fair enough, thought King. But he had other matters on his mind.

He found Caroline in a conservatory-style room on the east side of the building. The glass was triple-glazed, and the square, open fireplace burned fiercely in the centre of the room. It was a curious looking fire, with a rack resembling a train track running from floor to ceiling on both sides, at a forty-five-degree angle. Each track held a row of logs, which were gravity-fed and constantly feeding the fire. King imagined the tracks could be filled with logs in the morning and run for twenty-four hours, simply dropping a log into the fire after the last log burned enough to make room for the next.

Caroline stood at the window. She held a saucer in her left hand and was sipping from a cup of coffee in the other. She glanced at King as he walked in.

“Fancy a bathe in a hot tub later?” she smiled, and he could tell she wasn’t serious.

King stood at her shoulder and looked down on the arrangement of wooden hot tubs, each heated by its own log stove with a stainless-steel flue. Great clouds of steam drifted into the air, and the Northern Lights on the horizon danced across the sky, making the steam in the icy air take on a green hue. There were a few couples in the hot tubs, but they could see that the vacated tubs were being covered and the fires extinguished by maintenance men in bulky snowsuits. It seemed impersonal, but the remaining couples did not seem to hurry. It was clear that the maintenance staff were readying for the storm.

“I doubt we’ll get the chance,” King said. “They’re