by Frank Tayell
On the desk was a list of emergency numbers, and a radio-set with instructions on how to operate it. There were no personal numbers of friends Corrie might call. Now he was looking for them, he couldn’t see any homely touches at all. Certainly no computer, and if he had one abiding memory of his sister, it was of her sitting behind a screen.
The bathroom was a double cubicle with a single sink, solitary shower cubicle with a fine-wire mesh over the drain, and sloping floor. On the wall was another hand-carved message on a wooden plank Rule Two: Remember Rule One. Deciding it was an Australian expression for washing ones hands, he did so, then continued his exploration.
The bunkroom had six pairs of adult bunk beds with uncovered foam mattresses but no sheets or pillows. Perhaps they were kept in one of the twelve narrow lockers. Or perhaps visitors were expected to bring their own. He revised his opinion when he saw the kitchen. Visitors weren’t expected.
Of the three fridges, one was disconnected. The second was marked as containing anti-venom. The third contained more silver-foil packages, a handful of plastic boxes, and a carton of unopened soya-milk. The rack by the sink was empty. The cupboard above it was full of crockery, none of it matching. Two kettles, two hobs, three microwaves. There had to be a generator, presumably in the other building. He wondered if there was air conditioning, too, but he couldn’t see any controls for it.
He didn’t open the door leading from the kitchen into Corrie’s room. Growing up, in one foster home after another, they’d both learned to prize what scraps of privacy they’d been able to scrounge. Instead, he returned to the sofa, drank some more water, and unwrapped the foil package
Inside were small squares of chocolate cake dipped in coconut. He ate one, then another, then a third, hunger creeping up on him with each bite. At the Packsaddle Roadhouse, after they’d filled his tank, he’d been given a steak sandwich the length of his arm, but covered in far too many onions to be edible. There’d been two microwaved steaks on the plane, and more nuts than was surely healthy, but otherwise, his last meal had been lunchtime in Indiana, a mustard-cheese salad that Olivia had made for him because she hated how he always had cereal for lunch.
The door opened. Corrie came back inside.
“Did you call Ms Kempton?” Pete asked.
“I did,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what she said. I’ll tell you everything, but there’s something I have to do first.”
She strode across the room, into the kitchen. A moment later there was the sound of a door opening, a clatter as if she was searching for something. She came back out ripping the plastic from a still-boxed laptop. She tore the box open, tossing the polystyrene onto the floor as she searched for the power cable.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s bad,” she said. “Worse than bad.” She plugged in the air-gapped computer and stared at the screen. “And now I’ve got to wait for it to start.” She dashed back into kitchen and her room beyond, returning a moment later with a paperback. “Here. Have you read it?”
“On the Beach? No,” he said, taking it.
“Read it. I’ll be an hour or so. It’s a good book. I’ve read it a lot.”
She plugged the sat-phone into the laptop. Frowned, unplugged the computer, took it, phone, and cable to the table covered in books, and swept them aside. She set the computer up again, this time with the sat-phone close to the window. Sitting behind the screen, she was finally recognisable as the sister he’d not seen in so long. And he knew that, for now at least, she wouldn’t answer any more questions.
According to the synopsis, the book she’d given him was about life in Australia after a nuclear war had devastated the northern hemisphere. On balance, it wasn’t what he considered light reading. He put it down, leaned back in the chair, and closed his eyes.
Chapter 4 - A Conspiracy to Destroy the World
The Outback, New South Wales
“Pete?”
He opened his eyes.
“I brought more Lamington cake,” Corrie said. She unwrapped another tin-foil package revealing more of the coconut-dipped chocolate squares, though these were a little larger than the previous batch.
“Do you make these yourself?” he asked.
“No. Doctor Dodson brought them. He comes up here quite often. More since his daughter went to Canberra. These are his ancestral lands. He likes to check up on them. Or me. Or he likes the excuse to get away from Broken Hill. The cake is from his daughter. She’s an MP.”
“He told me.”
“Her constituents baked the cake. During the election campaign, there was a mini-debate where her opponent, the incumbent, tried to paint her as being out of touch. Did a whole thing about her being like Marie-Antoinette, and how the only advice she’d ever be able to give was to tell people to eat cake. Then he asked whether she’d spent enough time in the kitchen to even know how to bake. She was a teacher before she ran, and responded with an impromptu lesson on the French Revolution. She won in a landslide, and since then, her constituents bring her cake. She gives it to her dad, and he brings it up here. It’s not birthday cake, and I missed quite a lot of those, but it’s close enough.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“About an hour.”
“And did you… did you do what you had to?” He glanced over to where the laptop sat on the desk, the screen dark.
“I did what I could,” she said.
“And what was that?” he asked. “Seriously, Corrie, what’s going on?”
“Do you remember when we were young, how I hacked the DMV?”
“Sure. You got a place at college. Then you hacked NORAD. That got you a job but you’d never tell me with who. I thought you were working for the government, but you weren’t, were you? You were working for Lisa Kempton.”
“Yes. There’s this guy, Tom Clemens. He used his connections to get me out of trouble, and to get me that job. He wanted me to spy for him.”
“You mean spy on Lisa Kempton? Why?”
“He didn’t say. Not really. And when I found out, when I found out what was really going on, I quit.”
“You went to farm alpacas,” he said.
“Yeah, I never actually got any livestock.”
“You sent me pictures of a herd.”
“Pictures I faked,” she said. “I never finished prepping the ground. I liked being outdoors, but farming was too much effort. After that, I tried keeping a low profile, thinking if I stayed away from them, they’d stay away from me. But I couldn’t ignore what was really going on, not when I knew what I’d done and what they were doing. Except, when I tried to tell someone, they killed the journalist.”
“What journalist? Who are they?”
She didn’t seem to hear. “That was six years and two months ago. Just before Christmas. You know, when we were meant to meet.”
“For our not-Christmas dinner. I sat in that diner for five hours waiting for you.”
“I know. I was outside, watching. But so was Loretta Keynes.”
“Who? Wait, Keynes? Like the chauffeur?”
“Tamika isn’t a chauffeur, but yes. Loretta is her sister. And she works in the FBI, but she works for Lisa Kempton. That’s when I vanished. They were watching you because they wanted to catch me. I thought you’d be safe as long as they never found me. I went to Europe, had plastic surgery. I tried to disappear, but I was never very good at languages, except computing ones. That’s part of the reason I came here. I created a new identity with the qualifications needed to get this job. It’s remote. I know everyone who lives within two hundred kilometres. If anyone asks questions about an American called Corrie, they’d warn me.”
“Like Doctor Dodson did?”
“But this is the first time someone has found me,” she said. “And it was Lisa Kempton, so it could be worse, but only in that it means we’re both, currently, still alive.”
“Why? What’s going on? What did she ask you to do?”
“I’ll tel
l you. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to call Doctor Dodson. He’ll fly out here, and then take you to meet his daughter, Anna. You’ll tell her because she’s in the government. I trust her. And as much as I trust law enforcement in any country, I trust them here. They’re not involved, or they weren’t. I don’t know if they’ve been infiltrated in the last few years. I’ve stayed offline as much as I can. When I do go online, it’s down in the big city, and then only to check out your social media feed. I like to know that one of us is living a life out there in the real world.”
He waved that away. “What am I supposed to tell Ms Dodson?”
“There’s a conspiracy,” she said. “And it’s been going on for years. Decades. It began in England as the Cold War was heating up. Their government was worried about biological attack from the Soviet Union, so they opened a black-ops lab to develop a super-vaccine. A wide-spectrum preventative to any major disease that could be spread as a biological weapon. The vaccine didn’t come to anything. The project was mothballed, but the funding didn’t dry up, not exactly. The people involved, they teamed up with politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere, finding common cause in their twisted idea of what a new world order should be. The project was restarted, and now they’re ready to demonstrate it.” She twisted her head to peer at a clock on the wall. “In a few hours. In Manhattan.”
“A vaccine? That doesn’t sound bad,” he said.
“Because that’s not the bad part,” she said. “These politicians don’t care about people. They have no vision, no policies. They don’t want to make the world a better place for the next generation, or even to stop it from sinking further into despair. They want power for power’s sake. To get it, they teamed up with a cartel.”
“You mean like drugs?”
“Heroin from Afghanistan, cocaine from Colombia, amphetamines from southeast Asia. They formed a collective, with the intention of controlling supply, and demand, across the world.”
“How does that tie into the politicians?”
“Because the cabal have been accruing power for decades. They have people in the CIA, the FBI, Interpol, MI5, and every other unimaginative acronym. The cabal tip off the agents, leading to the discovery of a shipping container with ten million dollars worth of cocaine. The agent gets promoted to a place where they can direct task forces away from the cartel’s activities and towards their competitors. And so the cartel gains territory, the cabal gains power. Corrupt politicians being bought by the mob is an old story, but this is on a completely different scale to anything the world has seen before. It’s why I ran. I couldn’t go to the authorities, because they were the authorities.”
“How is Lisa Kempton involved?” Pete asked.
“The politicians provided access to intelligence and a route to power. The cartel provided the muscle, killing anyone who learned too much. Kempton provided the money, transport, and logistics. I don’t know how much of the cash was laundered from the cartel, how much was from her own pockets, but there’s a limit to how much you can syphon, even from a black-ops budget, without being discovered.”
“I still don’t follow,” Pete said, rubbing his temples. “If Kempton is involved with a cartel, and these politicians, then why am I here? I mean, she knows where you are, so why hasn’t she killed you?”
“Because Kempton said she wants to destroy the cabal and the cartel,” Corrie said. “When I was working for her, when I discovered what she was doing, I confronted her. She said she wanted to stop them, but that she was just a billionaire. Just? Ha! But she had a point. She is just a person. The FBI could have arrested her at any time, shut down her operations on any number of inflated charges. She was in too deep to walk away. So I walked instead. It’s been years, and surely she’s had a chance to end the cartel. She hasn’t, so what does that tell you?”
“I’ve no idea,” Pete said. “I really don’t. But all of this, it’s been building to a demonstration in Manhattan in a couple of hours? That means the vaccine works, right?”
“Kempton says it does. And that’s why she sent you here,” Corrie said. “The vaccine is the carrot. It will change the world. But first, they have to make the world sick. They need something to cure, something to prove the vaccine works. Otherwise, who’d want to buy it? The price won’t be money, but acquiescing to the leadership of this new world order. The cabal will be the emperors, and the world will have to bow down or face the consequences.”
“What do you mean they’ll need something to cure?”
“Have you heard of the Marburg virus? No. You’re lucky. Ebola? Right. Start there, and think worse. Not every nation will submit, of course. To deal with those countries, they’re planning a nuclear first-strike.”
“A nuclear war?”
“Not a war.” She sighed. “These aren’t the best and the brightest. They’re not the people with a dream. They’re not even the also-rans, or the leaders of the opposition. They’re the candidates using Iowa as a stop in a book tour. The parliamentarians in gerrymandered seats who, despite money and murder, still can’t make it to the podium. They’re going to fail. And in that failure, they will destroy the world.”
“We have to stop them,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And we will. Do you have that book?” She picked up the copy of On the Beach. “In the spine is a memory card. It contains enough evidence, enough proof, to convince the Australian government. Give it to Anna Dodson. We can trust her.”
“What did Kempton ask you to do?”
“I won’t say. Not yet,” she said. “Anything I tell you, you’ll have to repeat. I’m sorry, Pete, this might get uncomfortable for you.”
“You mean they’ll torture me?”
“No, but they’ll question you hard,” she said. “In a few hours, after the demonstration, Kempton is planning to steal the research notes. Or her agents are. She’s going to release them to the world.”
He stood. “Then we should go, now. If we’re going to do this, then let’s get it done, before anyone else is sent here. If you’ve done what Kempton asked, there’s no reason to let you live.”
“And if Kempton wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” Corrie said. “But she sent you instead. And if she does release that information as she promises, then maybe there’s a chance you get to live a normal life after this.”
“But you don’t trust her,” he said, sitting down.
“No. Not a bit, but we should wait. Give her this one last chance. I’m sorry, Pete. I really am. I should have known I couldn’t keep you out of this.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not. Come on, it’s dusk. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“There’s someone else here?”
“Not exactly.” She led him outside. The shadows were growing longer, though the temperature had barely dropped. “Sit here,” she said, pointing to a rickety wooden bench beneath the shade of the roof’s overhang.
“Is it always this hot?” he asked.
“Shh. There she is. Do you see?”
He turned to look, and couldn’t help but see her. On the other side of the fence was a kangaroo.
“She’s Matilda,” Corrie said. “Matilda, this is my brother, Pete. Say hello, Pete.”
“Um… hello?”
Corrie laughed. “I was kidding. You don’t really need to talk to her, though I do. A lot.” Her smile faded. “She started coming around about a year ago. I think, after she raised her kids, she decided to spend her retirement seeing a bit of the world. When she got here, she decided to stay.”
“Really? Kangaroos retire?”
“No. The real reason she’s out here alone has to be a sad one, so I prefer my version. She comes for water, though, so I need to fill her trough. It’s the price I pay for company. Sit. She can get a bit antsy around strangers.”
Corrie walked over to the smaller of the two buildings and came out with a sealed jug of water. She opened the gate and walked along the exterior of the fence. Matilda too
k a cautious step back, then tilted her head back to look at Pete. Despite the up-jutting ears, protruding mouth, and the patchy red fur criss-crossed with scars, the piercing black eyes were oddly human. He wished he had his phone. It was something he’d love to show Olivia. And in a flash, the exhilaration of the near-encounter evaporated. It was going to be a long time before he’d see Olivia again. Assuming he ever did.
Corrie finished filling the trough, walked backward a few paces before turning and coming back through the gate. “And that’s Matilda,” she said.
“I’m not going back to America, am I?” Pete asked.
“Hopefully not, no,” Corrie said.
“I met someone.”
“The girl in the New Year’s photo? I’m not sure what you were dressed as, but she was dressed as a vampire.”
“How do you know?”
“It was on your social media feed. I went down to Adelaide last month, bought a new computer, masked the IP, bounced the connection across three continents, looked, but didn’t post. I wanted to. But I was worried someone was keeping tabs on you. I worried that, if they thought we were in contact, they would have taken you.”
“Tortured me, you mean?”
“Yes. They’ve done it before,” she said.
“But here I am,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Earlier, what were you doing on that laptop?” he asked.
“Hopefully I stopped things from getting as bad as they might.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not yet. Not until I know this is truly over.”
“Then what did you do for Kempton all those years ago?”