The Extinction Code by Dean Crawford

and waiting for the perfect moment. One had come the previous day, but the tremendous heat rising up from the desert floor had prevented him from taking the shot that he so desperately desired, the thermals sufficient at such range to affect the flight of the bullet and render what otherwise would have been a confirmed kill a miss.
    Now, he had received good enough intelligence to make the shot and even better he knew the precise location from which his target would appear because he had once made the same walk himself. All had been planned, all had been carefully organized, and soon would come the time to strike.
    *
    ‘Wilms, Victor!’
    The bellicose shout of the guard jerked Wilms like an electric shock and his guts plunged within him as he realized that Warner and his team had carried through with their threat.
    Outside his cell door, through a narrow slot at eye–height, he could see a guard glaring in at him, two more faces behind his, could hear the jangling of the chains and manacles into which he would be forced. Suddenly, despite the Spartan cell in which he lived and the radical collapse of his world, he felt as though he were leaving home for something even worse. Which, he knew, he was.
    He dragged himself up off the thin mattress and shuffled to the cell door, then turned and placed his hands behind his back. A second shutter opened, and strong hands cuffed him before the cell door was opened and the guards barged their way in and began manacling his ankles, and linking them with the heavy chains to his wrists. Within moments, he was weighed down by the steel and turned forcefully to march out of the cell.
    ‘Where am I going?’ he asked the nearest guard, hoping against hope that he was not being moved from the security max to a general prison.
    ‘Where we tell you. Move!’
    The guards hustled him down the sterile corridor outside; plain walls, no windows, other cells locked and their shutters closed. The doors were sufficiently thick to deaden all sound, and all of the inmates spent twenty three hours per day locked behind them.
    Wilms cried out inside for the power that he had once wielded; the ability to end the careers of all three of the guards escorting him with a simple command; the financial power to sway government with a single gesture; the fear and respect that had enabled him to strike terror into the hearts of men far stronger than he. One of the guards shoved him from behind and he realized that his power, his strength had been a mere illusion, Wilms the same thin and fragile man he had always been. He had been abandoned, his assets stolen, his fortune ripped from his hands like candy from a child, no trial, no media coverage, nothing. Victor Wilms had been cast into a pit of despair that he knew he would never escape from, but worst of all was the fact that he had been abandoned by his peers – Majestic Twelve and the Bilderberg Group had watched him fall and laughed as they had done so.
    Tears pinched at his eyes and he realized that he was thinking of his parents, of the quiet Ohio town in which he had been raised. Crying for his momma. That’s what the jocks had sneered at him back in high school, the geeky, bespectacled Wilms no match for their strength and courage. In later years, he had revelled in destroying their careers one by one from afar, and watching them succumb to suicide, prison, drink or drugs. Now he realized he would perhaps encounter them again, in the general population, angry, embittered, aggressive men with nothing left to lose…
    His betrayal by Majestic Twelve suddenly burned bright in his mind and he knew that he no longer had a choice. If he was truly to fall, then he would damned well take them with him.
    ‘I want to talk to Douglas Jarvis of the Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he announced.
    The guards did not respond to him. Wilms, cultivating some of his recently lost superior–air, glared at the man to his left.
    ‘Did you hear what I said?!’
    The