Burning Angels

Brice was a hopeless lover of animals. He still lived with his parents, and they had all kinds of pets at home. He felt strangely ambivalent about the nature of his work here. He liked being close to the monkeys, that was for sure, but he didn’t much like the fact that they were here for medical testing.

He sloped off to the storeroom and grabbed the kit required for moving a sick animal. It consisted of a long pole with a syringe attached to one end. He charged the syringe, returned to the cage, poked the stick inside and, as gently as he could, stuck the monkey with the needle.

It was too sick even to react much. He pushed the lever at his end, and the shot of drugs was injected into the animal. A minute or so later, Brice was able to unlatch the cage — which had the exporter’s name, Katavi Reserve Primates, stamped across it — and reach inside to retrieve the unconscious animal.

He carried it to the isolation unit. He’d pulled on a pair of surgical gloves in order to move the primate, but he wasn’t using any extra protection, and certainly not the suits and masks piled in one corner of the storeroom. No sickness had yet been reported in the monkey house, so there was no reason to do so.

He laid the comatose animal in an isolation cage and was about to close the door when he remembered something one of the friendlier workers had told him. If an animal was sick, you could usually smell it on its breath.

He wondered if he should give it a try. Maybe he could earn some brownie points with his boss that way. Remembering how his colleague had said to do it, he leant into the cage and used his hand to waft the monkey’s breath across his nostrils, inhaling deeply a couple of times. But there was nothing distinctive that he could detect, above the faint smell of stale urine and food in the cage.

Shrugging, he shut and bolted the door, and glanced at his watch. He was a few minutes overdue his shift changeover. And in truth, Brice was in a hurry. Today was Saturday — the big day at the Awesome Con comic convention in downtown. He’d forked out some serious money for tickets to the ‘Geekend’, and to get access to the Power Rangers 4-Pack VIP event.

He had to hurry.

An hour later, he’d made it to the Walter E. Washington Convention Centre, having done a quick stopover at home to change out of his work clothes and grab his costume. His parents had objected that he had to be tired after his night shift, but he’d promised them he’d get some proper rest that evening.

He parked up and headed inside, the roar of the massive air-conditioning units adding a reassuring baseline hum to the chatter and laughter that filled the cavernous convention centre’s interior. Already it was buzzing.

He made a beeline for the breakfast hall. He was starving. Once fed and watered, he headed into a changing booth, emerging minutes later as a… superhero.

Kids flocked to the Hulk. They pressed close, wanting to have their photo taken with their all-powerful comic idol — especially as the Hulk seemed to be far more smiley and fun in the flesh than he ever appeared in the movies.

Donal Brice — aka the Hulk — would spend the weekend doing what he loved most: laughing his booming, heroic laugh in a place where everyone seemed to like it, and no one ever held it against him. He’d spend the day laughing and breathing, and breathing and laughing, as the vast air-conditioning system recycled his exhalations…

Mixing them with those of ten thousand other unsuspecting human souls.

81

‘We maybe got something,’ Harry Peterson, the director of the CIA’s Division of Asymmetric Threat Analysis — DATA — announced via the IntelCom link.

‘Tell me,’ Kammler commanded.

His voice sounded oddly echoing. He was sitting in a room carved out of one of the many caves situated close to the BV222 — his beloved warplane. The surroundings were spartan, but remarkably well equipped for somewhere positioned within immense rock walls deep beneath Burning Angels mountain.

It was both an impregnable fortress and a technologically sophisticated nerve centre. The perfect kind of place to sit out what was coming.

‘Okay, so a guy named Chucks Bello sent an email,’ Peterson explained. ‘DATA picked it up using keywords based on name-check combinations. There’s more than one Chucks Bello active on the internet, but this one grabbed our attention. There are several districts in the Nairobi slums. One — Mathare — lit up with this Chucks Bello’s comms.’

‘Which means?’ Kammler demanded impatiently.

‘We’re ninety-nine per cent certain this is your guy. Chucks Bello sent an email to one Julius Mburu, who runs something called the Mburu Foundation. It’s a social-action kind of charity that works in the Mathare slum. With kids. A lot of them are orphans. I’ll forward you the email. We’re sure this is your guy.’

‘So d’you have a fix? A location?’