by Tim Curran
Thus far, three prime targets had been removed.
By morning, there would be six. Once that was accomplished, the leadership of the country would fall, through chain-of-command, to the Secretary of the Treasury. The President himself was not a target per se, simply because he was far too high profile and just getting someone in close enough to him would be near impossible. Especially now. But that didn’t mean he’d be in any condition to run the country. Pershing would see to that. Who would allow an insane man to be Commander in Chief?
No one.
And that would leave the Secretary of the Treasury, Harlon Manning, and he would be no problem whatsoever because Pershing owned him. He just didn’t know it yet. For many years, Pershing had been compiling files on would-be enemies, adversaries, and competitors. His file on Manning was especially juicy. Manning, though apparently happily married for some twenty-odd years, had a certain taste for young muscular men and had been videoed in action with several. When command fell to Manning, Pershing would release the dirt to some sixteen key media outlets. Of course, under martial law, the Internet would be shut down, but Pershing had enough pull to keep it going long enough to completely disgrace and discredit the man. The conservative minority—always the first to start screaming about anything—would be incensed. The moderate majority would be offended. Even the liberal left would be shaken up. The waves this would create following the deaths of cabinet members would be devastating. An already shaky leadership would be further weakened, creating an immense vacuum that Pershing would step in and fill.
He did not see it going that far, though.
He would personally present the information to the Secretary and he, of course, would immediately cede power to Pershing and his confederates. By then, the President would be in no shape to run anything, his public image would be destroyed. After Manning, command fell to David Constantine, the Attorney General. But the AG needed kidney dialysis three times a week and he would not survive his next treatment. The command after that was weak and no match for Pershing, Mason and the JCS, and Paulus with the might of the Navy and Marines firmly in his pocket.
Turmoil was the key.
Turmoil created opportunity.
Turmoil created disillusionment amongst the ranks and a strong hand on the wheel would be a welcome one.
What was needed of course were scapegoats. Pershing already had several even though they were, of course, not aware of it. There were three people of power that would cause trouble: DNI VanderMissen, General Sleshing of the DIA, and Secretary of the DHS, Maddie Hughes. And these would be the very people that the blame would fall on. The trio that had attempted to overthrow the United States of America. Pershing already had enough plausible, well-planted evidence to have them arrested. It was manufactured, of course, but by the time a Select Committee or a Congressional Investigatory body sorted out the loose threads, dead ends, and red herrings, it would be weeks if not months.
And by then, the party would be over.
The unknown quantity here was Gordon Parks of the NSA. He was very powerful. Every time Pershing spoke with him, he had the worst feeling that Parks knew something he didn’t. That was unacceptable.
He would have to go.
Same went for Liza Toma of CBT. She knew too much and could name too many names.
Pershing could have seized the moment and presented the “evidence” to the President right now—it would be a great moment for that—but there was a problem there. Mainly, the President did not trust him. Pershing found it very easy to snow most of his cabinet, but the President was very shrewd. He did not trust Pershing. Nor did he trust General Mason. In time, the President would have forced Mason to step down as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No, the direct approach would not work. Once the prime targets were removed, the “evidence” would be disseminated.
His secure cell beeped. Incoming from Matt Connelly, his Deputy Director. “What is it, Matt?”
“I have a few pictures I’d like to send you.”
“Go ahead.” They came as attachments over the encrypted net. DCI Pershing opened them and found himself looking at grisly crime scene photos of women that had been hacked up and disemboweled.
He got back on the line. “What the hell is this about?”
“These are courtesy of the Chicago Metro Police. Two of them thus far,” Connelly explained. “I’ve gotten copies of the lab work through our field office. The DNA traces match that of Tommy Quillan.”
Pershing sighed as the DD/CIA went into gruesome detail.
“Okay, I get the picture. He’s at it again. He’s on his way to Detroit right now to find Sheikh Sa’ad.”
“Should I arrange a welcoming committee?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But sir…”
“No, let him get the Egyptian first. I want that sonofabitch.” He’ll be a wonderful propaganda tool for me. “Keep an eye on him. His chip still operating?”
“It is.”
“Good. Track him. Watch him. And when he bags our boy, shut him down. Get him to the clinic. He needs new programming for special targets.”
“Will do.”
Pershing broke the connection.
Yes, it was all going to work out just fine. Once they had Sheikh Sa’ad, it would only cement the evidence he had against VanderMissen, Sleshing, and Hughes into place. They were running an illegal black bag operation, trading bioweapons for information on Islamic militants that were attempting a nuclear strike against Israel. Unfortunately, extremists appropriated said bioweapons and used them against the United States. A tangled web from beginning to end.
“We were sold out by those we trusted with the security of our great nation,” Pershing whispered under his breath.
How opportune.
The secure line rang again. It was Admiral Paulus of the ONI. “Ursa Major has retired,” Paulus said and hung up.
Pershing grinned. Ursa Major was the code name for the Secretary of the Navy, an avid bear hunter. Now he was dead and Paulus would fill the vacancy.
CHICAGO, CERMAK AVENUE:
CHINATOWN, 6:58 A.M.
Kathy Ling sat in the darkness, burning with fever.
She had been nauseous for days, but she never made a connection between what was in her belly and what was going on in her skull. Not until it was too late.
It had been a long night of pain and confusion. She’d watched through the window of Fong’s Gourmet Noodle House many hours before as martial law became a reality and military vehicles and police cars patrolled the streets. It reminded her of her childhood in Hong Kong, the workers’ riots of 1967 protesting British colonial rule. There was that same sense of danger in the air.
But here in this country. It was something she never thought she would live to see.
She was alone as she had been much of her life and it was funny how she got to thinking about that. How alone I am and how alone I have always been. But that’s the way it was when you were a fixer like she was. You orchestrated and manipulated people, events, and outcomes, always tweaking things in a direction that was beneficial to yourself or your friends and business associates. When you worked the lives of others like a puppeteer, there was no time for your own.
She slid into a red leather booth, breathing fast, her heart rate rising and falling. She cried out as convulsions in her abdomen made her jerk and jump. Sweat that was thick, warm, and oily like petroleum jelly clung to her face. Her eyesight blurred and thoughts flashed through her head like chain lightning.
She gasped with dry heaves, then threw up a quantity of blood and bile. Her entire body was shaking.
What the heck is this?
What the hell is wrong with me?
It was a question that the majority of Americans had been asking themselves for days and weeks.
Something moved in her stomach. It was not simple muscular contraction, but the independent movement of something sliding through her guts. Thoughts passed through her mind but she
could no longer make sense of them as she was manipulated from within.
She began to writhe wildly, falling from the booth and striking the floor where her body moved with an obscene boneless locomotion much like that which had parasitized her.
Pain blossomed in her head and for one moment as her eyes filled with blood, she knew what was happening to her. “Oh, God,” she said and then said no more.
CHICAGO, N. MICHIGAN AVE:
8:26 A.M.
When Harry finally, truly came out of it, when the blood stopped rushing in his head like a pumping jet, he sat up and gasped for breath.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
He was in the back of a van. The man sitting next to him was a stranger… yet, he thought he’d seen him before somewhere. That hard mouth and crewcut. The memory was misty and obscure. Another guy behind the wheel, dragging slowly off a cigarette, merged into a line of traffic.
“Where are we?” Harry managed. “Where are we going?”
The driver said, “We’re here in this van.”
Crewcut nodded. “It’s okay. Just try and take it easy. You’ve been out for like four hours.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Jerry and this is Frank. We got you out. We’re your saviors. You remember any of that?”
“No… I can’t seem to remember anything…”
And it was true. His memory was blank. He tried and tried to remember, but there was nothing. He began to panic right away. Shaking his head back and forth, trembling.
“Relax,” Jerry said. “You were doped up. It’ll take time to come out of it.”
He was right because when he relaxed with some deep breathing, it began to come back in bits and pieces. Gradually, memories crowded his head. Shawna. The mall. The DHS goons. The Warehouse. The Old Man. S5. Project BioGenesis. The injections. Then these two getting him out of there.
But for what?
Harry breathed in and out slowly to calm himself. There were too many things to remember and too many things to do. He needed to get away. Yes, that had to be the first thing.
“Well, I appreciate your valiant efforts on my behalf, but—”
“Sit still,” Jerry said.
“Ah, I see. I’m prisoner. And which agency of our beloved country do you represent?”
“The only one that matters,” Jerry said.
Frank laughed at that.
“Which is?”
“Which is something you don’t need to know,” Frank told him. “Let’s just say we represent a friendly corporate entity.”
“You have to trust us,” Jerry said. “Trust is very important between friends and we are your friends. You should thank us for getting you away from the Old Man. He can be a real sick SOB.”
“Yes, I can just imagine.”
“No, you can’t. Trust me: you can’t.”
Harry sat there silently for a time. He hoped Shawna was okay. Right now, he was powerless to help her. The way things were looking, he was going to have his hands full just trying to help himself.
“Can you at least tell me where I’m being taken?”
Jerry sighed. “No. You’ll be brought to a certain destination to meet a certain individual. And if that sounds spooky, sorry, but that’s all I know. Somebody is very anxious to meet you. Someone important. Again, that’s all I know. We’re not gangsters. We’re not hired guns. We’re not feds. We’re just escorts. So relax and enjoy the ride.”
“Sure,” Frank said. “We’re like tour guides. We’ll be at our destination soon. Just sit back and leave the driving to us. Clear your head.”
Jerry smiled. “You’ll need it.”
CHICAGO, RIVER NORTH:
THE WAREHOUSE, 8:44 A.M.
The Old Man was beginning to feel something that he had not known in a long time: fear. Real terror, in fact. For so many decades now as an employee of CBT who contracted with S5, he had been on the cusp of every covert scientific operation and dirty black budget deal. And now he had the worst feeling that he was being marginalized. That there were games being played that he had no knowledge of, agendas he could not conceive of. And worse, that there were forces aligned against him and his usefulness was coming to an end.
And you know what that means, don’t you?
Yes, he did. He very much did. Guys like him just didn’t retire, they didn’t step back, not with everything they knew and all the careers they could potentially destroy. No, they did not retire, they were retired.
He had felt it coming for some time, of course. The signs were all there. But now with the blowback from Project BioGenesis and the chaos it had created, he knew it was all coming to an end. The political puppet masters wanted to erase the entire operation, and anyone involved with it.
If he needed evidence of that, the fact that Harry Niles had been taken from the Warehouse by high-ranking operatives of CBT (presumably Third Eye heavies) and he had not even been consulted was very telling. As was the fact that S5 had the girl, Shawna Geddes, and he had not been called in. If he needed more, Elizabeth Toma was no longer answering his calls and Bob Pershing was treating him like a non-entity.
Yes, it was coming.
As the country trembled on its death bed, the Old Man knew his time was up. It was only a matter of time now before they came for him.
LOCATION UNKNOWN: THE BIRD NEST,
S5 BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES FACILITY
9:07 A.M.
Shawna could still hear the funneling voices, but they seemed to be coming from some distant place, some shadowy and ghostly plane. They bounced around her, echoing in her head, moving within and without her. Sometimes she could see them—the reverberating sound waves moving like ripples around her. When she reached out her fingers, she could disturb them, send them oscillating in a dozen different directions.
Can’t be sound waves, must be a current. You must be underwater. Drowning in the deep dark blackness.
But she didn’t feel like she was drowning, there was no panic, just a sense of helplessness because she was floating in some thick, syrupy medium, drifting along, being pulled down and down like a soap bubble being sucked down a drain.
You must fight now, a voice that was not them told her. It was an inner voice and she had heard it before during times of great stress and mounting tension. They have you just where they want you. You have something and they want it. They will take it by force, they will tear it from your head, pull it out by the bloody roots. That something is your mind. They are searching for it and you must not let them find it or it—and you—will never be the same again. They will change it, subvert it, reengineer it, and pervert it. They will make you into something awful, something that they can easily manipulate.
DON’T LET THEM!
Yes, yes, yes, as she floated in that fluid medium—warm, comforting, the womb, I must be in my mother’s womb again—she knew she must not let them, but that took willpower and hers seemed to be stripped away. She couldn’t even remember what resistance really was. Her mind changed like the weather, her thoughts were fluffy white clouds that blew across an endless blue sky.
She could see herself.
That was the perfectly insane thing that scraped along the inside of her skull like claws and turned her thoughts to confetti. She was naked, floating along like a corpse in a river, limbs dangling, body shrunken. She looked somehow deflated like a cast-aside rubber love doll. Her head lolled, her mouth was agape, her eyes wide but glassy. Her hair floated around her face like deep-sea kelp. But she did have a voice and it was saying, my name is Shawna Katherine Geddes and my mother is Eileen and my father is/was Rupert. I was a Girl Scout and I was in Key Club and my favorite book was Green Eggs and Ham and I had a dog named Sherbet and my best friend was Angela Meter and I was on the honor roll four years in high school and I went to Columbia and I had an affair with my Ethics professor who was twenty years older than me and I worked for one shitty newspaper after another where I was judged on my looks rather than my
intellect and that was my card so I played it and became either a high-class whore, a rich man’s toy, or a gold-digger and and and—
She screamed because she was telling everything, letting them know her entire life story from kindergarten to losing her virginity to the men she slept with and the lives she had inadvertently ruined in the process. No, no, no! She reached out and clamped a hand over her mouth and her flesh was like cool muslin and her eyes were spinning glass balls. Her mouth continued to move, spilling all the dirty secrets of her life and she could not make it stop.
And then she was no longer floating. She landed with a terrible, jarring thud on a metal table and people with white lab coats were holding her down, fitting her arms and legs into restraints. Her head thrashed from side to side, but a rubber harness was fitted over it that held her mouth open in a wide, screaming O. A tube was shoved down her throat and needles inserted in her arms and some kind of viscous cold jelly was splashed over her, gluing her in place. And the entire time voices were speaking and telling her things that were not true and made no sense at all and, yet, made all the sense in the world. And she felt a pressure at her temple as they cut into her, opening her enough so that something could be inserted under her skin that would make it all so much easier.
And through it all, a terrible monotone voice kept speaking: “You will not remember this place or what happened here. To recall any of it will cause great pain and greater anxiety. Your name is Shawna Geddes and you have a special place in this world and a very special purpose…”
DETROIT: EAST DEARBORN
9:19 A.M.
Like a rat crawling on its belly through the filth.
This was the life of the man once known as Sheikh Sa’ad al Khalafari. He crawled through the sewers on his belly as the rats skittered about him and foul water seeped through his ragged clothing. Where once he had been a potent force in the jihadi and he commanded an army of militants and extremists whose mantra was the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Allah’s people from the enslavement of the West, now he was vermin, filthy and stinking, scratching at insect bites and listening for the approach of the great white worm. His home was the tunnels that carried away the waste of the Motor City.