So now, here they were; The President of the United States; Jim Hornswell, his Chief of Staff; Sarah Maxwell, the Secretary of State; Joint Chiefs Commander, General Troy, and CIA Director, Robert Morely. All were huddled closely in the projection room staring at a live satellite view of Germany. The President, having missed lunch, had ordered bags of popcorn brought up from the White House kitchen. Morely, who was attempting to quit chewing tobacco, impulsively shoved fistfuls into his mouth.
"Excellent," said Sarah into her cellphone. She paused to listen, then replied, "Well, as we agreed, the allies need only understand that the weapon is real but that, thankfully, we have the means to stop Ali Madda from using it... Okay... Yes.... That's easy, just tell the ambassador that we would like to protect them, but we're just not sure we can protect everyone... Correct, that's when you mention the changes we want in the trade agreement... It's not a threat. It's a realistic analysis of a critical situation over which we don't have complete control and must exercise our natural inclination to offer protection first to those with mutually beneficial economic interests. He'll understand... Perfect... No need, I'll brief the President myself... Yes, briefly." With that Sarah hung up the phone and smiled, not at the President, who was lost in his own world, but at Jim. The Secretary of State and Chief of Staff had always had a rocky, competitive relationship. Somehow, however, since the crisis had begun, that relationship had pivoted. In an after-hours meeting in the Roosevelt Room, in the midst of an argument over the relative merits of chemical weapons research, their eyes had met and they truly saw each other for the first time. In that magical moment, they'd realized that they shared a special connection. Since the impending Armageddon, they had moved to consummate that connection several times in the West Wing, including once in the Oval Office, on the President's desk. It was hardly the first time that someone had sex on that particular piece of furniture, but that was usually a privilege reserved for the President himself. This President, however, for all of his flaws, was faithful and quite possibly sexless. The First Lady was not, having found comfort in the arms of her Secret Service detail. Sordid rumours aside, Sarah and Jim had found what they believed was true love—love of politics, love of power, and, quite possibly, love of one another.
Jim smiled back. He then turned to Morely and said, "So, Bob, are we good to go?"
The CIA Director, who had just crammed another handful of popcorn into his mouth, began to choke. Desperate, he grabbed a bottled water and gulped it back, The others waited. Finally able to talk, Morely spat soggy kernels as he spoke. "We're good to go. US Intelligence units are positioned around Mathias Boltzmann's estate along with the German police. Seeing as he is an arms dealer, we're ready for anything. By which I mean, guns."
"Alrighty then."
General Troy turned to wave at the AV operator, "Zoom in!"
On screen, the satellite image flew past clouds to offer a direct overhead view of Mathias Boltzmann's estate. Mathias owned a multitude of luxury properties around the globe. These included a Scottish castle, a private island in the Caribbean, an estate in Africa and a three bedroom apartment in New York City. His home in Munich, however, was his original home. As such, it was simply a large, well appointed mansion in an upscale neighbourhood. It was not without amenities, however, including a swimming pool, tennis courts and a private helipad. All of these were now in plain view on the Situation Room projection screen. Also in plain view were three figures sitting on deck chairs on the backyard patio. A fourth man, presumably a guard, stood against the wall of the house.
Morely explained, "Our on-the-ground recon tells us that Boltzmann is in the deck-chair on the left while his primary financial partner—"
"What the Hell is going on next door?" asked Jim.
"Language!" objected the President, demonstrating for the first time in several minutes that he was awake.
They all peered at the screen to better see what was happening on the other side of the wall separating Boltzman's yard from his neighbour's. The overhead perspective and distance made the details blurry, but there was no mistaking the bountiful flesh romping gleefully about the neighbour's garden.
"Are they naked?" asked General Troy incredulously.
Morely explained, "Intelligence indicates that Boltzmann's neighbours like to engage in, uh... free spirit social gatherings.'"
"There must be fifteen people there!" said the Secretary of State.
"Yes, well, it is Germany."
For a moment they all stared at the screen, briefly forgetting why they were there.
"It looks like they're f-f-f..." Sarah caught the President's disapproving glare, "frolicking?"
"They're fornicating," snapped the President with disgust. "Truly these are the days of Saddam and Gomorrah!"
"I believe it's Sodom, not..." Jim also caught the Commander-in-Chief's withering gaze and fell silent. Sarah had been teaching him to know better when to shut-up.
"They have been particularly, um, frisky, since the whole end-of-the-world thing started, " Morely added. "Day and night really."
"Okay then," said Jim snapping back into focus, "we're about to give them a cold shower like no other. Right, Mr. President?"
The President nodded and gave the codeword as he remembered it. "Go Hotdog!"
Sarah relayed the order into her phone, "Commence Operation Frankfurt."
Instantly, an army of police appeared on screen. They leaped from cars, parked vans, and nearby houses. An army of officers scaled walls into the neighbour's yard en route to the primary target. Chaos erupted in the garden of earthly delights, as naked people ran shrieking in panic amid a militarized force that was, in fact, just passing through.
* * *
Mathias Boltzmann, Carl Weiss and Philippe Vandross sipped mojitos on the back patio. They squinted in the afternoon sun and savoured the sweetness of the icy cold drinks. Carl still squirmed inside when he thought of the events at the party three days prior. He had apologized profusely to his friend for his bizarre behaviour. Fortunately, Mathias had not heard everything. He'd missed the part where Carl had confessed to mixing up the canisters. If Mathias learned that, Carl knew, he'd never be welcome here again. He didn't put it beyond the realm of possibility that Mathias might even have him killed. He felt sick at the thought of it all. On the other side of Mathias, Philippe slurped loudly on his straw. He then accidentally inhaled a clump of muddled mint, and began to cough. Philippe was an effete aristocrat from Amsterdam with white-blond hair and translucent skin. He'd inherited "more money than God" and liked to dabble in the arms trade as "something to do". He didn't actually like to get his hands dirty, so he invested only indirectly in Boltzmann's string of shadow companies. Carl couldn't stand Philippe, but was hardly in a position to complain given his own recent behaviour. Still, he smirked at the thought that, even if Philippe did get his hands dirty, he could simply send them out to be cleaned. Both of the dutchman's hands were flesh-coloured plastic prosthetics. Philippe, a man of many affectations, was an 'uber foodie'. This meant he was no longer content with merely exotic or strange cuisine, but lived in the world of 'culinary relativism'. As such, he belonged to a unique group of fellow enthusiasts called the Ouroboros Club. Members of the elite and secretive club embraced the notion that eating human flesh was the ultimate taboo to be broken. Cannibalism, after all, had been widely accepted in many cultures and who were we to judge? Some argued that it should be counted as part of the 'paleo diet'. Ouroboros Club members carried this idea one step further, to eating themselves. Of course, even this wasn't entirely new. After all, placentophagy had been embraced by the celebrity set in Hollywood for years. This meant the group, in pursuit of true sophistication, had to go one step further and engage in the long term goal of eating themselves in their own entirety. Such self-indulgence presented a variety of challenges, however, even for the absurdly affluent. These culminated with the problem of literally dying of consumption. Club Members, therefore, strove for the next best thing
—they would all eat each other. The idea was that, if you are what you eat, then you could blur the notion of yourself and others through 'mutually assured digestion'. Since its inception, over a half-dozen members had been served. Others were in process, having lost their soles to soul food, their scalps to scaloppine or, as in Philippe's case, his fingers to finger food. It was only when an outbreak of spongiform encephalopathy struck several members that the diners' club was forcibly dissolved. Collective cannibalism may be avant-garde, but mad cow disease was not. As a result, Philippe had retreated to a more pedestrian diet of near extinct animals. It wasn't as exciting as eating oneself, but somewhat more sustainable.
"Do you hear thumsing?" said Philippe.
"No," said Carl.
"Hmm..." said Philippe, as he did when he felt he knew better. He then lifted his glass to drink, only to have it flip and spill in his lap. His cutting edge prosthetic hands had cost upwards of a million dollars. They were agile enough to play piano and could transmit synthesized tactile senses to his brain. Despite this, a design flaw in the wrist pins caused the hands to spin freely at the most inconvenient moments. "Oh dwat!" shouted Philippe, brushing crushed ice and mint leaves from his pants. "Dwat! Dwat! Dwat!"
"Philippe is right," said Mathias, "I hear something too..."
"It's just the neighbours," chuckled Carl. "They've been at it all morning!"
"No," said Mathias with a look of genuine alarm, "it's not."
Shouts and screams sounded from behind the neighbour's hedge. All at once, police officers and german shepherd dogs were clambering over the garden walls. A black police helicopter loomed overhead, creating a maelstrom of leaves, cocktail napkins, and detritus. Instantly, dozens of red laser-sight dots danced on the chests of the three men. The guard standing against the wall behind them, in an admirable act of fealty coupled with a woeful lack of risk assessment, drew his weapon. He was shot fifteen times before hitting the ground.
Philippe leapt from his seat in panic. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" he yelled. At that moment, the pin in his other plastic wrist gave out and both of his hands began to spin in the turbulence of the hovering helicopter like twin propellers on a plane.
"This is the police!" shouted a voice in German over a megaphone. "Get down on your knees with your hands behind your heads!"
In his eagerness to comply, Philippe threw his hands up into the air. Unfortunately, this turned out literally to be the case, as one of his hands flew off, then fell back down and punched him in the head. He collapsed unconscious to the ground. The sight was so startling, so unexpected that, for a moment, nobody did anything at all.
"This is the police!" the megaphone repeated, "Get down on your knees with your hands behind your heads!"
"I'm an American!" shouted Carl.
For several seconds, the helicopter simply hovered. The only sound was the whup! whup! whup! of the propeller blades. Finally, a voice came over the megaphone once more, this time in English. "This is the police. Get down on your knees with your hands behind your heads!"
Carl, realizing it was time to bring in the lawyers, knelt on the ground.
Mathias abruptly turned and ran into the house. In that moment, in the whirling chaos, he'd surmised that the police would have orders not to kill him. He was right.
Mathias stormed into the main hallway of the house to find Colonel Rynard Gruber rallying his men. The large house contained a garrison of a dozen mercenaries as well as the Colonel, who alone counted as a dozen more. Gruber buttoned his kevlar vest and shouted at his men, "They are the weak—the puppets of the state! We kill them or die trying!" With several spare belts of ammunition slung over his muscular shoulders, the mercenary heaved up an enormous Dillon M134 Gatling gun. Colonel Rynard Gruber then paused to light a cigarillo with a skull head lighter, licked his lips and whispered "Endlich." He did so with a smile, as if he'd been waiting for this moment his whole life—which, in fact, he had.
Chapter 24
"Nacht, nacht. Who's there?" – S. Freud
Sankt Herman Catholic School, East Berlin, Germany, 1977
"Sit up straight!" the nun snapped, cracking a metre stick across Rynard Gruber's fingers as they lay upon his school desk. The edge of the ruler split the skin across his knuckles. His instinct was to put them to his mouth, but he would not give Sister Ophelia the satisfaction. It was not the first time the twelve year-old boy had had his knuckles rapped, nor would it be the last. The nun glared at him with rapier eyes, expecting him to cry. Rynard stared blankly ahead. He could feel her eyes burning into his skull. He would not goad her, but he would not grovel either. After a long moment of silence, Sister Ophelia moved on. The other boys in the classroom smirked and snickered, but Rynard would not acknowledge them either. They called him 'freak', but for the most part they left him alone. If the latter required the former, than Rynard was fine with it.
"Fractions and percentiles," said the nun as she approached the front of the class. "If seventy-five percent of the people in this class are dummkopfs, then how many dummkopfs are there in this class?" She spun about and glared at the room, as if daring someone to answer. There were no volunteers. "Perhaps Herr Gruber would like to redeem himself in the eyes of The Lord?"
Rynard considered this coldly. He knew there was no redemption. He wasn't even sure if answering correctly was better or worse than getting it wrong. "That depends..." he said.
"On what exactly?"
"On whether or not 'this class' includes you, Sister."
* * *
Rynard walked home along The Wall, still smarting from the belt marks on his back. He smiled. This sort of pain pleased him. Not in a strange, creepy way like his Uncle Rudolph, but in the sense of satisfaction that it gave him. He hated the nuns at his school, and he revelled in every small frustration they felt, even when it cost him in terms of bruises or blood. The school was allowed to function only by the grace of STASI officials who were, themselves, closet Catholics. As he walked, Rynard gazed up at the soldiers patrolling the crumbling barrier that divided east from west. Graffiti covered almost every inch except where the surface concrete had fallen away. The wall would stand forever, they said, but it was hard to believe the structure could last another ten years. Rynard's eyes were for the soldiers themselves atop the grey barricade. He had to squint to see them silhouetted against the setting sun. To him, their uniforms and glinting weapons represented the infinite army. "There will always be war," his father had told him, "and therefore there will always be soldiers, no matter what the side, no matter what the country. Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev? Leaders come and go, and causes are just fictions they create to get their men marching in the same direction." The boys in school had cast doubt on whether Herr Gruber was Rynard's real father. The boy was already tall and ruggedly handsome, while his father had been described as "nasty, brutish and short." They began a rumour that Rynard's mother had slept with Satan and that Rynard was the devil's bastard. Before Rynard could ask him about this, Herr Gruber was squashed flat by a reversing tank during manoeuvres along the river Elbe. His last words were, "What are those idiots shouting and waving their arms for?" As per his instructions, his ashes were flushed down the toilet.
Young Rynard arrived home and ran inside. He ignored his mother's shouts from the kitchen and headed straight upstairs. Ostensibly the family subsisted off his father's military pension and his mother's job as a music teacher. His mother, however, had found a magical way to earn extra income and address her chronic nymphomania at the same time. It consisted of bringing strange men back to the house each night and waking up the next day a hundred marks richer. Rynard found it disconcerting that so many of her clients were soldiers like his father. When he complained about her nightly activities, or "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" as she liked to call it, she told him "don't believe the communists, darling, even in East Berlin, money makes the world go 'round." She insisted that her moonlighting paid for his education and put extra food on the table. Rynard loathed her all the more for t
his pretence of virtue. In his eyes, she was a whore who deserved to burn in Hell, assuming Hell was real and somehow worse than East Berlin.
Upstairs, by contrast, was Heaven. Rynard's older sister, Anna, was an angel. She was deeply pious, yet abhorrent to judge others. In this way, she seemed the direct opposite of the nuns at his school. In his eyes, it made her beautiful both inside and out. She refused even to judge their mother, which Rynard struggled to understand. Anna sat on her bed, her long blond hair in meticulous braids. She sat, as she always did, cross-legged to conceal the club foot she'd been born with. "Did you have a good day at school, Bärli?" she asked him. Bärli was Anna's nickname for Rynard since, when was very young, he used to growl like a 'little bear'.
"What do you think?" he said, sitting cross legged on the oval rug at the foot of her bed. He fought the urge to light up a cigarette knowing Anna didn't like it. "Children shouldn't smoke," she'd say.
Anna looked up from her needlepoint and embraced him with that bathwater warm smile she had. "You know they just want to teach you."
"They just want to beat me, you mean," he said, "and they do." With that he lifted his shirt enough for her to see the purple welts across his ribs.
Anna winced. "Did you do something to make them mad?"
"Sure, I refused to crawl in the dirt and kiss their feet."
Chaos Theory: A Feel Good Story About the End of the World Page 20