Origin by J.T. Brannan Read Free Book Online

fifteen long years.

4
    ‘S O HOW ARE we looking?’ asked David McNulty as he drove the ball three hundred yards across the fairway. Semi-professional in his younger days, McNulty still found time for eighteen holes on a weekend, even now he was the President of the United States.
    ‘Good,’ Tony Kern replied. ‘The trade delegation is due in Beijing tomorrow morning, and we think the Chinese are going to go for it. The—’
    Kern was cut off by the shrill ring of his cellphone. Staring at the screen, Kern answered it instantly, despite President McNulty standing right beside him, waiting for an answer to his question.
    ‘Yes,’ he answered simply, and then hung up. Ignoring the president, who still waited expectantly next to him, he then speed-dialled a number on his phone, turning away from McNulty.
    ‘News from the NSA,’ he whispered. ‘Santiago, Chile. Parque Metropolitano.’ He nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he finished, and hung up.
    McNulty stood there, hands on his hips, staring at his assistant. ‘Sorry, Tony, am I disturbing your business?’
    Kern couldn’t miss the acid tone in McNulty’s voice, but it was of no concern. Despite being President of the United States, McNulty was not one of the chosen. And it would not be long before their roles would be reversed, and McNulty – and all others like him – would be crushed to dirt under the feet of the world’s true elite.
    ‘It was horrific,’ Lynn explained when they were back in the twin room she had booked at the Hostal Americano. A cheap, basic hotel in the downtown area of Santiago, it was nevertheless good enough for their purposes.
    Adams sat on the bed opposite Lynn and listened. She had already explained how they had found a body in the ice, possibly as much as forty thousand years old but with clothing and equipment that posed a variety of extremely puzzling questions. He sipped a glass of water as she told him how the team of army engineers had descended on the glacier and extracted the body, before evacuating everyone by helicopter.
    He had questions building up – too numerous to count – but didn’t want to interrupt before Lynn had finished. She was clearly relieved to be getting it all out in the open, to have someone to speak to at last about her ordeal.
    ‘I saw the blinking lights, and just started screaming for everyone to get out of there,’ Lynn continued. ‘And then, I don’t know why, I just reacted, I yanked open the pilot side door and jumped.’ Her voice choked up with emotion. ‘It exploded while I was still in mid-air, the flames touching me before I hit the water.’
    Her face reddened as tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I couldn’t save any of them!’ she blurted, and Adams crossed to her bed, holding her in his arms as her body wracked with sobs. ‘Oh Matt, I should’ve tried to get them out! But I didn’t, I just jumped, and saved myself, and all the rest are dead! They’re all dead!’
    Adams just held her tight as she collapsed into him. He could tell her how she did the right thing, how she would be dead too now if she had stayed to help the others, how nobody would have survived anyway, but he knew that these were just empty platitudes. Lynn was an exceptionally gifted woman, the brightest he had ever known. There was nothing he could tell her that her logical brain would not have already convinced her of. The fact was, she had done the only thing she could have done, and he knew she would come to terms with that sooner or later, no matter what he said.
    And so he just held her, and let her cry.
    ‘It was a fishing trawler that found me,’ she continued later on, Adams still by her side on the bed, holding her hand. ‘They’d seen the explosion. I was bobbing around in the water like a tenpin, my backpack keeping me afloat. When the crew pulled me out, I was near hypothermic, unconscious, and in shock. They took me back to shore, off the coast of southern Chile, radioed in the crash, and got me