The Extinction Code by Dean Crawford Page B

compromised, and ultimately he had been required to make the choice between killing for employment and killing for a reason. Mitchell, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had long since lost any real sense of sympathy for or empathy with the human race. Dedicated it seemed to destroying itself, mankind was to Mitchell an uncaring, selfish, blind and irresponsible creature for whom the future was somebody else’s problem. But the orders to murder a man who had developed a device which provided electrical power virtually for free, simply because his device would remove power from Majestic Twelve and the Bilderberg Group, had been too much for Mitchell. Worse than that, the assassination target had not even intended to make any money from his “fusion cage”, as it had been named, despite knowing that he could have made billions of dollars overnight. To Mitchell’s astonishment he had intended to give the device away to mankind, for nothing other than the sheer joy of altruism.
    The death of Stanley Meyer had affected Mitchell greatly, and when he had then been ordered to murder a former President of the United States he had gone rogue. No longer would he answer to men who were powerful only because of their money and the offices they held. Mitchell would himself do something out of sheer altruism, and destroy for once and for all the incomparable greed that grew outward from MJ–12 like a cancer spreading across the globe.
    A door opened from one of the cell blocks, almost a mile and a half away, and Mitchell’s train of thought slammed to a halt as he saw four guards exit the block, between them a small, white–haired man in orange prison overalls and weighed down by steel chains that glinted in the sunlight. Mitchell leaned down and pressed his eye to the military–grade optics. The scope did not have any zoom function, designed instead to provide the clearest image of a distant target possible. Mitchell had positioned the scope based on previous prisoners he had seen escorted from the block, and in the meantime he had watched birds of prey wheeling in the sky above to judge the thermals and the light winds between his lonely mountain hideout and the prison before him. Conditions were perfect, light winds, few thermals, clear visibility. Even at such extreme range, Mitchell knew that he could not miss, and with the gentle breeze in his face he knew that not only would his target be dead before anybody heard the shot, they would likely barely hear the shot at all. Mitchell would be long gone before the security guards would be able to pinpoint where the shot had come from.
    His gloved finger rested on the trigger as his left thumb turned the rifle’s safety switch to off as he prepared to fire.
    ***

VIII
    Ethan hadn’t been sure what he had expected to feel when he saw Victor Wilms being dragged out of the sally port of Florence ADX, but sympathy hadn’t been high on his list. Yet despite himself, the sight of an elderly man on his knees was still something that compelled him to reach out, to assist, to help in some way. It was only his knowledge of what a cruel man Victor Wilms had become that forced him to stand firm.
    ‘Doesn’t feel so great, does it?’
    Lopez’s voice was calm but cold on the morning air as they stood alongside four armed guards, who were themselves arrayed before an armored truck. The security around a figure like Victor Wilms was in fact staged by Doug Jarvis back at the DIA: had they really wanted to move Wilms and not have him iced by Majestic Twelve, they would have slipped him out quietly under cover of darkness in a goods truck or similar, the security hidden out of sight. Jarvis had felt that highly visible security would make it easy for MJ–12 to spot and track Wilms to whatever hellish gaol he was destined for, and that Wilms would know it.
    ‘You think he’ll fold?’ he asked Lopez.
    ‘He’ll fold,’ she replied, for once in agreement with Doug Jarvis. ‘He doesn’t have the