“True.”
Daniel and Karla had never identified godparents for their children, Ethan and Kevin, so custody fell upon his parents after Daniel died from a massive secondary pulmonary infection. Alex and Kate offered to adopt the kids, and a plan was hatched to deliver them once the pandemic situation cooled. His parents also hinted that they would use the trip to scope out the real estate situation in Maine. He wondered if they would ever drive back to Colorado.
Ed Walker stood in front of his garage. Catching Alex’s eye he held a beer above his head and nodded to Alex and Kate.
“Look. Great minds think alike,” he said, and they raised their beers to Ed.
“I could get used to this,” Kate sighed. “I can’t believe I agreed to head into work tomorrow.”
“You should hit them up for a raise.”
“I’m coming back as an equity partner, which will be a huge raise…if we can get the firm back on solid footing.”
“As long as there’s money, there’ll always be a need for accountants. Your firm will be up and running in no time. Statistically speaking, the firm only lost about twenty percent of its clients. The real problem is that most of your clients have probably lost all of their money. On paper at least.”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
“The money?” Alex asked.
“No. The twenty percent,” Kate said, taking a long drink from her bottle.
“Hey, look at the bright side,” he said, baiting her.
“I can’t wait to hear your interpretation of the bright side.”
“You’ll have a much more difficult time counting all of our money this year,” he laughed.
“I still can’t believe it.”
She was referring to Alex’s early November reallocation of the entire non-retirement portion of their Fidelity Account to gold-backed mutual funds. Their decision had been based on an economic study sponsored by the ISPAC, which painted a devastatingly bleak picture of a modern post-pandemic economy. A complete collapse of the international credit system, sparked by the default of nearly every major institutional and national loan, would change everything and force an international rewrite of economic rules, or worse.
ISPAC economists recommended a fifty percent reallocation to precious metal funds in the face of a serious pandemic threat, but Kate and Alex could only stomach thirty percent, even after Dr. Wright’s ominous midnight phone call. The non-401K portion of their portfolio was an easy target, since it equaled roughly one-third of their total assets.
“What was the last price?” Alex asked.
“Nearly $12,000 an ounce and rising.”
“Unbelievable. The only successful investment decision I have ever made,” he said.
“Well, if you had agreed to fifty percent, I wouldn’t have to go back to work.”
“Neither of us really has to go back to work,” Alex said and drained his beer.
“Biosphere is hiring. I saw four open positions in the paper.”
“In Portland?”
“Southern Maine,” she commented.
“I’d rather work for Al Qaeda.” He stood up to stretch.
“I don’t think Al Qaeda pays well.”
“Probably not, but the work environment might be a little friendlier. Take a look at that,” he said and nodded toward the top of the street.
A large, dark blue Ford F-150 pickup truck rounded the corner at the top of the loop and passed Todd and Jordan, who were standing in their driveway. Todd pulled his daughter in close as the truck continued past the Andersons’ and Walkers’. It slowed down in front of the Fletchers’. The powerful engine hummed as it passed. Alex saw two men in the front.
“I thought they got ’em all,” Kate whispered.
“No, Jim didn’t want them disturbed. Gave the town hell about it.”
By the end of the second week in December, an unsettling reality had descended on most of New England. The sheer number of deaths caused by the flu solidly overtook local efforts to handle the dead bodies, and the coroner’s office no longer responded to civilian requests. Temporary morgues located in any and all available refrigerated spaces, including refrigerated trailers, filled up within days, leaving most households with no real option for removing a dead body.
It didn’t take long for outdoor morgues to materialize, usually within a securely fenced industrial facility, or a local baseball park, and nearly everyone with deceased family members was directed to one of these sites by early December. The outdoor morgues became loosely monitored dumping grounds, quickly descending into disorder and plagued by nasty rumors. Many households opted to keep their own dead safe in a shed, or just inside their basement bulkhead doors, where they would remain refrigerated or frozen until spring.
James had dragged the bodies of his wife and seven-month-old child into the conservation woods in late March and buried them in shallow graves that took him nearly a week to dig in the solid ground. The bodies had to come out before the ground thawed and the wildlife returned. He’d probably made an arrangement to have them cremated.
All of the kids in front of the Walkers’ house fell silent and watched as the pickup truck pulled into the Thompsons’ driveway. Ed said something to the kids, and they all started walking toward Ed’s house. James Thompson appeared at the top of the driveway to meet the truck. The men from the truck hopped out shook James’ hand. The driver, a man dressed in faded jeans and a flannel shirt, patted him on the shoulder. The second man displayed a badge and tucked it back into his back pocket. James nodded to them and walked back into his garage.
The two men went to the back of the pickup truck and lowered the gate. The driver pulled two shovels out of the bed, and the deputy removed what Alex knew would be two dark green, military-issue body bags. They met James, who carried a shovel over his shoulder, at the top of the driveway, and James led them around the garage.
“I think we should go inside. Last thing he needs is for the whole neighborhood to watch as they load his wife and baby on the truck.”
“Should we tell the kids to come in?” Kate asked, reaching a hand up to Alex.
He pulled her to her feet. “No, they’re fine with Ed.”
He looked over at Ed, who nodded toward them and turned to go about the business of moving the gaggle of kids over to the opposite side of his house.
“I don’t like them out of sight,” Kate said.
“They’ll be fine for a couple minutes,” he assured her, and they both stepped inside.
They walked back into the kitchen, where Alex placed his empty bottle down on the island and opened the refrigerator to get another beer.
“Someone called while we were out front,” Kate announced and picked up the phone.
“Probably Ed or Charlie.”
Alex fished around the refrigerator for a beer buried near the back.
“Actually, it was the police,” she said suddenly.
Alex lifted his head above the refrigerator. “Really?”
“Yep.”
He quickly pulled a beer from the back of the refrigerator and almost knocked a yellow ceramic bowl filled with bean salad onto the floor. He caught the bowl between his left forearm and thigh, burying his elbow in the beans. Kate came around to help him.
“Nice catch, huh?”
“Yeah, I love the taste of elbow in my food. I’m tempted to stand back and see how you’ll figure this one out, but I’m afraid to see what might go into the beans next.”
She reached for the salad bowl.
“Thank you, my love,” he said and backed out of the way of the refrigerator.
“I thought the cops were done with us.” She placed the bowl back on the bottom shelf and closed the door.
“I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more from them. Frankly, I was surprised they didn’t spend more time around here…once they finally got around to checking it out.”
During the third week in January, state police officers arrived to condu
ct a preliminary investigation into the reported murders and shootings. They walked a half mile in snowshoes, from High Rise Road, which was the nearest passable road in the area. Escorted by Charlie and Ed, they took a look at the Hayes’ and Coopers’ houses. Their response was underwhelming, but expected. They said that the bodies couldn’t be removed any time soon, and that nobody should disturb either crime scene.
Charlie and Ed also led them to the retention pond, to show the officers where they had dumped the three neighborhood shootout casualties. The troopers took a few notes and asked even fewer questions. Apparently, the shootout on Durham Road didn’t qualify as unusual to either of them. They took a cursory look through the Murrays’ house, which was once again empty, and took a few more notes before leaving the neighborhood.
Alex twisted off the top of his beer and took a long swig. “Well, let’s see what they want. I’ll be up in the office.”
“I’m gonna head over to Sam and Ed’s. Meet me there when you’re done.”
“Love you,” he said.
“Love you more.”
He walked upstairs and took in the neighborhood from his office window. It looked like nothing had happened. A warm breeze rolled gently in, lazily displacing a few sheets of loose paper on the desk.
The phone rang as he reached for it to return the call to the police. The orange LED screen flashed. “Murray, Gregory.” Alex picked up the phone, hopeful that their friends had finally made their way home.
****
CONTINUE READING RED DRAGON, the prologue to THE PERSEID COLLAPSE (ALEX FLETCHER BOOK 2)
Red Dragon
Prologue to The Perseid Collapse (Alex Fletcher Book 2)
By Steven Konkoly
Several years after
The Jakarta Pandemic…
Chapter 1
EVENT -04:56 Hours
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
Liang Zhen approached the shiny steel door and swiped his keycard, activating the biometric scanner. He pressed a shaky hand to the glass panel and waited for the system to verify his identity. He started to look over his shoulder, but stopped. They would read it on his face. The station’s endgame rapidly approached, and he had no intention of going down with his ship.
The pneumatic door opened, and he stepped into a new atmosphere—filtered of rank coffee breath and body odor. His sanctuary. The door hissed shut, and he doubled over, bracing his hands on his knees.
Breathe deeply. Get control.
He straightened up and cinched his tie. Loyalty be damned! His destiny did not include dying 450 feet underground, and he strongly suspected that Station Three would not survive the morning.
Station Three had served a single purpose since he arrived two years earlier: to prevent the world’s discovery of “ME8192019.” Working in shifts, the men and women of his station held a constant vigil over the vast digital fraud and network manipulation required for Operation Red Dragon to succeed.
Now that the operation had entered the terminal phase, his station remained the only loose end, and he wasn’t naïve enough to exclude the likelihood that Beijing would “close the loop” on Red Dragon.
He walked swiftly toward a stainless-steel door at the end of the hallway and entered the daily code into the keypad. Green light. Beijing suspected nothing. He opened the door to a brightly lit concrete stairwell, which rose several levels to a private elevator lobby. From there, Liang could summon one of Station Three’s elevators and escape the facility.
He felt like a traitor leaving everyone behind, but someone had to survive, and he was the only member of the crew authorized to leave the station. Any attempt at an unauthorized mass exodus would trigger an immediate response. He couldn’t wait to see the Directorate’s sour faces when he resurfaced. Shock would eventually yield to relief that the genius behind China’s recovery had survived.
Liang Zhen, then second director of the Cyber Warfare Recovery Directorate, had been the first to propose the Republic of China wage a more active, silent war against the West, with the ultimate goal of destabilizing European and North American economies. Liang oversaw the program from 2014 until 2017, when the Future Vulnerabilities Group discovered an “event” with the potential to do far more than temporarily destabilize the United States.
They immediately sent Liang Zhen to Cyber Warfare Station Three to oversee Operation Red Dragon and fulfill China’s destiny. He was simply taking measures to ensure that the chief architect of that destiny still had a seat at the table when the dust settled. Thick dust.
Liang reached the ground lobby and scurried up three stories of metal stairs to the surface. The wide stairs ended at a thick iron door, which opened into the center of a vast, empty warehouse. Gusts of wind buffeted the building’s thin metal walls as he walked rapidly through the roasting heat toward the door.
The driver better be there.
The station was located in one of the most isolated sections of the former Lop Nur Nuclear Test Range, over sixty kilometers from the nearest inhabited post. He had little chance of surviving an escape on foot, and he had brought nothing to the surface with him, aside from his wallet and identification card.
The door swung open, propelled by a burst of stifling hot wind. Squinting through his fingers, he spotted the SUV. Perfect timing.
He struggled against the gale, pausing once to look behind him at the lone warehouse situated between two windswept ridges. One hundred and eleven Chinese citizens had worked on Red Dragon for twenty months, buried deep below the surface. Dead and buried from the start. They just hadn’t known it. None of them had—until recently.
Would they cut the power and let it die slowly? Poison the air supply? Did the station already have some kind of self-destruct failsafe installed? Whatever happened, he planned to be as far away as possible.
Halfway to the vehicle, he shook his head. The damn driver was asleep! He had better be resting for the marathon drive ahead. He found the front passenger door locked and knocked on the dust-caked window. The driver didn’t move. He banged on the side of the door. Just his shitty luck. The executive service sent an incompetent fool! He wiped the thick layer of dust off the passenger window and stumbled backward, falling to the hardened clay surface.
How could they know?
He turned on his stomach and scanned the horizon. Several figures sprinted toward him from the left side of the warehouse. He was a dead man. How long had they waited for him? The lead figure penetrated the sandstorm. Chinese Special Forces. Death would be a luxury.
“Director, I need you to return to your post immediately,” stated the soldier, extending his hand.
He nodded eagerly. It made sense to him now. If killing everyone had been the plan, they wouldn’t send him back down alive. He kept his eyes focused on the soldier’s feet. What a fool he had been. He’d flushed away everything. The Special Forces team would report his escape attempt, and the career he had cultivated for the past forty years would be finished. Acceptable in light of his irrational behavior. How could he face Tin and the rest of his deputies below? He would have to come up with an excuse.
An emergency meeting at the surface!
“Please, there is little time,” said the soldier, helping Director Zhen to his feet.
Chapter 2
EVENT -04:48 Hours
Jewell Island, Maine
The wind rose gently, nudging the campfire’s spectral plume toward Alex. He squirmed in the collapsible aluminum chair and turned his head as heated exhaust from the dying fire washed over him. The gust intensified, focusing the column of sparks and gases in his direction for a sudden, uncomfortable moment. Just as suddenly, the smoke drifted skyward on the confused breeze.
The mosquitos returned within seconds, causing Kate to mumble a few obscenities and wave a futile hand above her head to disperse the pests. He took her other hand and squeezed, finally catching her gaze. The soft firelight illuminated her gentle face and
exposed the first genuine smile he’d seen since they left Boston yesterday.
“He’s really not that far away. We can visit him any time we want,” Alex said comfortingly, kissing her hand.
“I know. He’s just really on his own now,” said Kate, returning her eyes to the fire.
They had dropped Ryan at Boston University in the middle of the afternoon, after dining al fresco in Winthrop Square, a late-summer tradition they had enjoyed since Ryan and Emily were in grade school. The definition of al fresco dining had changed over the years, as the children matured. Lounging as a family, on blankets spread over the trampled grass, had inevitably yielded to scarfing down pizza and subs on the outskirts of the park. Still, they never failed to take time out of their annual Boston pilgrimage to visit the iconic Harvard Square gathering place and its eclectic assortment of musicians and vendors.
This year’s visit had been slightly awkward, if not tense for the family. Ryan had been anxious to be ferried across the Charles River, but Kate was in no hurry to surrender her firstborn. She prolonged the stroll through Cambridge, pushing Ryan’s barely tested patience to dangerous levels. Alex could sense the strain, and had spent most of the day implementing one subtle intervention after another to keep them from exploding before the inevitable outburst at the foot of Ryan’s dormitory building.
Kate remained silent for most of the drive back, punctuated by Alex’s occasional failed attempt to distract her from the significance of the afternoon’s farewell. Ryan was truly on his own, free to follow the path of his choosing. Every phone call that flashed his name would flood them with a mix of joy, apprehension and ultimately relief. Any conversation from this point forward could instantly morph into a defining moment for Ryan. Anything was possible. He had taken the first steps toward escaping his parents’ gravitational pull this afternoon. Ryan couldn’t understand this yet, but Kate and Alex had effectively released him, which is why Kate’s somber mood was nearly impenetrable.
THE ALEX FLETCHER BOXSET: Books 1-5 Page 37