The Messiah Choice

by Jack L. Chalker

  “I—I don’t know what to believe any more. When you consider my father, the way in which he died, what is impossible here? Don’t you see? If you see him, talk to him, it will disprove it!”

  “All right, all right. I have to go up to the helipad this evening and meet the chopper coming in anyway. Just don’t go spooky on me. That’s how these cults, these superstitions of fear, get you. If you start believing in it, they got you.”

  “And that is what this is? Some kind of devil cult?”

  “I didn’t say that, but now that you’ve asked, that is involved in all this.”

  “And if this Jureau is dead, what then?”

  “He’s not. If he were dead, or even missing for more than five minutes, there would be a hue and cry around here not seen since your father’s death. But even if he was, it wouldn’t mean anything. There are all sort of drugs and hallucinogens that can be slipped into food without anybody knowing and would have you believing the sky is pale yellow and horses rule the world. You’re particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing, remember, and your money and power are real tempting targets. I think it’s time you got away from here. I think maybe it’s time I did, too.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “There’s a little coastal fishing town on Bessel Island about forty miles due west of here. It’s still in the country, but pretty remote. An American friend of mine named Art Cadell has a place there. Not much, but it’s a little white stucco cottage facing the sea with a very nice beach. My hands have been tied here, and I’m thinking of moving over there to get a little breathing room. No bugs that aren’t alive and a little freedom to ask questions without Big Brother listening in. We could use that while we make arrangements for a more civilized move, maybe to your father’s place on Puget Sound, which I understand is pretty nice. I could arrange for security for you, and then see a few folks I have to see in person to ask a few more questions.”

  She stared at him. “Greg—do you know who killed my father?”

  “I think so. I’ve known for some time. The trouble is, I need confirmation of my suspicions and fragments of information to do anything, and even then it’ll be hell to prove or even act. In the meantime, I don’t want you falling under their control.”

  He stood up and gestured back at the mountain, partly shrouded in mist. “Come on,” he said as lightly as he could. “Let’s get you home for now.” But not home for long, he added to himself.

  * * *

  He couldn’t contact Jureau. In fact, the security boys were adamant that the Belgian had never returned from Brussels and was off on a new assignment somewhere. They didn’t know where, and didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t here.

  That bothered him more than any stalling or lame excuses. If Jureau had never returned, then Angelique could not ever have seen him. And if she’d never seen him, how could she describe him so correctly, down to a silly outfit MacDonald knew the Belgian favored?

  The hell with the renovations, he decided. No matter what did or did not come in on the chopper tonight, he was getting her out of here as soon as possible. He had the place for a getaway, and he had the means, the first time her crush on him would come in handy. He was going. If she wished, she could come with him. If not, she might be here alone and never see him again. He was pretty sure she’d move, only he wanted it to be as sudden as possible. No company helicopters, which were fast but which couldn’t be set up on short notice without tipping his hand. No, in two more days the ship was due back, and it would go from here to Port of Spain, from which transportation would be far more easily, and quietly, arranged.

  For now, he could do nothing but go down to the Institute’s helipad and wait for the executive chopper to come in and hope that what he was waiting for was on board.

  Greg MacDonald used company couriers checked out and approved by his bosses for much of his information-gathering work. His biggest frustration, and largest stumbling block, in the investigation was his inability to use the vast telecommunications power the island represented, nor any means that could be sensed by that network. No matter what else he knew or didn’t know, he was certain that anything done through computer or telecommunication lines at any point would, if traced to him, make its way to his quarry through SAINT.

  He was in the unique position of being the very real leader of a large investigative team and also the decoy and the bait. So long as he remained on Allenby, they felt reasonably safe and secure, for he was the enemy they knew.

  The helicopter was due in at 20:45 Atlantic time, and the fact that it was now very late worried him. He had seen Angelique safely to her quarters, and now all he could do was cross his fingers and wait.

  They told him that they’d had only spotty radio communications with the chopper almost since it had started out. The pilot reported something like a large electrical storm with buffeting winds and downdrafts all around, yet the weather report and their own weather radar indicated nothing at all. He had been unable to fly out of it or around it, and by 22:10 they were telling MacDonald that the helicopter had turned back for now. He was just about to give it up when he heard the Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! of rotor blades together with the whine of the turbine and saw the landing lights for the chopper just to the south.

  “Man must be a damn fool or damned crazy to try it with what he was reportin’,” a ground crewman, who was also about to pack it up and leave, noted.

  The helicopter seemed a bit wobbly, and as it landed, pretty hard and off the mark, they could see a trail of black smoke coming from the rear and could also see, in the spotlights, places where the aircraft’s paint seemed blistered or burnt.

  The pilot cut the engines and went back to get his passengers off as fast as possible, as technicians raced forward with special fire gear. It didn’t take long for the pilot and passengers, both of them, to get off and away, but all seemed more than a little shaky. One of them, a slender, small woman in a loose-fitting dress, looked around, spotted MacDonald, and made her way shakily to him. She was carrying a small briefcase handcuffed to her wrist.

  “Jesus!” she swore as she reached him, looking a little green and more than a little like she was about to throw up. “I don’t care what anybody’s payin’ me. I wait and take the boat back!”

  “Rough trip, huh?”

  “Rough ain’t the word! Lightning and swaying and everything horrible that anybody can imagine in a helicopter and then some! Only reason we made it was that lightning struck the interior electrical system knocking out most of his instruments and all his navigation. Somehow he managed to spot a landmark and made for here, since he knew how to get here blind easier than gettin’ back to someplace else. I tell ya, it was awful. Weird, too. Soon as we got close to the island here it cleared up like it wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at all. Stars, clear air, everything. Pilot managed to jury rig the landing lights. Only reason I ain’t throwin’ up on you is ’cause there ain’t nothin’ left!”

  He reached over to the handcuffs, brought up her arm, and placed a thumb on a small metal plate in back of the cuff that was attached to her wrist. The cuff snapped open and he took the case. “I think maybe they wanted to stop this from getting to me,” he told her grimly. “As usual, they used a cannon to swat a fly and muffed it.”

  She stared at him. “You mean somebody caused all that?”

  He nodded. “I expected something of the sort when I found that Martinez hadn’t reboarded the ship when it left St. George’s.”

  “He’s dead,” she told him. “They found his body in the hills. Carved up like a ripe melon from all reports. Ugly.” The idea, however, seemed far less unpleasant to her than the storm she’d just gone through. “Cops said it looked almost like a ritual murder.”

  He nodded. “Well, I think you’ll be safe now. You were just brought in for this one trip and don’t know enough to make you a target. The ship’s just left, so you’re either here for three more days or you can take the trip back to Trinidad by chopper tomorrow. I know wh
at your feelings are now, but I think you’ll find it much smoother going the other way.”

  She looked dubiously back at the helicopter, its rear panel off, the technicians having stopped the fire now looking at the mess. “Well, maybe. Can’t give me a hint as to what this is about?”

  “Sorry. You want to be safe—or dead?”

  “Safe every time. But—what about you? Aren’t you a sitting duck now?”

  “I doubt it. If they haven’t tried for me by this point, I doubt if they’ll do it now. There’s the tram for the Lodge. Take it with the pilot and the other passenger.’’

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “No, I’ll catch one going downhill from here to the village. Say—what’s your name?”

  She grinned, seeming to have fully recovered now. “Kristy. I’m from San Diego.”

  “O.K., Kristy of San Diego, you just go up and relax. The doc up there will give you something for the stomach if you need it.”

  “Thanks. You take care, now.”

  “I will,” he called to her, then watched the tram leave. He knew that there would be a routine late tram from the Lodge in about half an hour, and he decided to wait for it. He didn’t want to go up to the Lodge with the contents of the briefcase unread and unstudied, and he didn’t feel like making his way back down the hill in the dark, even though it was an easy walk. If they could whip up that kind of reception for the chopper, how hard would it be to have somebody waiting for him with a good, stiff blackjack?

  There were bright lights on at the helipad, four techs still working on the chopper, and there seemed no reason not to sit down at the edge of the pad and take a look now at what he had. He took his keyring out of his pocket, found one out of the perhaps twenty or so keys, stuck it in the lock, then opened the clasps. If you didn’t open them just so, a fairly loud alarm and a canister of tear gas went off, though he didn’t really think that was much of a deterrent.

  Some of the files inside, though, were dynamite. He didn’t worry that they were mostly computer printouts; he knew that this had not been run through any computer connected up to a master system.

  Old Reggie, for example, had quite an interesting background. Second son of the Earl of Halsey, who went broke during the sixties when Labour was attacking the old ancestral seats of wealth. Eaton, Oxford, all the best—but that was before. Older brother hanged himself in a London flat in ’76, attributed to depression and heavy drug use, particularly hallucinogens. Reggie theoretically inherited, but there hadn’t been much to inherit. In fact, by then he’d been a big wheel in mainframe computers and apparently he and his brother hadn’t been close. Reggie could have easily bailed out the family financially and covered his brother’s debts—indeed, he could have bought back the ancestral home from the American who had purchased it from the bank—but he hadn’t.

  Reggie’s passion was computers—his knighthood, the only title he didn’t refuse or surrender—was for his work in helping set up the British intelligence computer network.

  All this, of course, was known and easily available in SAINT’s own files. Also not new was the revelation that his brother had gotten rather strongly involved with a London-based cult, and that this cult seemed to be a bunch of devil worshippers. They did the drugs and the Black Mass and the ceremonies and were considered quite round the bend. They were also suspected in a number of grisly murders that had made the tabloids’ day off and on for a couple of years, but their link was never proven and they were never brought to trial. The identities of most of the members, however, were known to Scotland Yard and they were always under close watch, which seemed to have stopped the murder spree for the past few years.

  What was new, however, was the discovery of some old records and the writings of some now dead cult members that indicated that Reggie was just as deep in it as his brother, and might, in fact, have gotten his brother involved as a public shill, masking Reggie’s own involvement and acting as his surrogate. The security boys at Cheltenham had thought Reggie might be involved in some sort of cult stuff, but because it was entirely British and seemed apolitical, and because he never attended any rites or got directly involved with them, and, also, because he knew they knew of his interests, and therefore was unlikely to be blackmailed over it, they let it pass.

  There had also, in fact, been an inheritance from his brother. Tons, it seemed, of ancient and modern books and pamphlets on Satanism, devil cults, anthropological studies of worldwide religious beliefs and ceremonies, and all the rest. Where his brother, who’d made his living at the end as a London tour guide, got the money to accumulate such a massive library was unknown, but Reggie had accepted it and had himself seemed rather taken aback by the sheer volume of material. He had, however, had it moved up to his house and had reviewed and meticulously cataloged it. After three years, he’d turned it over to an auction house to be broken up and sold, the money going to various charities, and that had seemed the end of it.

  Reggie, however, had been a co-developer of the fax system of input storage, the parent of the machines now in the library at the Lodge. One just used it like a copier, only instead of giving a print-out, it read data, changed it into digital form, and sent it to computer storage files. He’d had no less than six of them at the house during those three years, and all were connected to large mainframe computers. He had also, during that period, employed no less than a dozen people privately, almost all young men and women who passed security muster, some as gardeners and handymen, others as apprentice technicians.

  It had taken weeks to get those names and vital statistics out of British work records, and to track down those people today. All had at one time or another either been connected with some typically British nut cult or another or had at least been patrons of occult bookstops and paraphernalia stores.

  Then the shocker. All of them—to a one—now worked for Magellan, either directly or through a subsidiary. And five of them were now on Reggie’s staff at the Institute.

  Where were the others? Seattle, Montreal, Kingston, Port au Prince, Caracas, Port of Spain… None were really high up, but all worked with computers and all had access to the corporate telecommunications network.

  Old Reggie had been both patient and busy. He was the spider, sitting at the center of it all, removed and relaxed here on Allenby, Middle of Nowhere, Caribbean, but with today’s computers and satellites he was as good as in the center of London. Better, for he was insulated from outside pressures and prying eyes, and privy to whatever secrets were developed here on “his” computer. How large his network might be was unknown, but it was possible, suggested the report. that it could be in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands, by now. The man who taught you how to play championship poker never told you quite everything he knew. The man who more than any other individual designed and created the latest two generations of super computers might not have told his bosses everything about his creations. Who would know? Who could tell?

  Only, perhaps, the Japanese geniuses with whom Reggie had studied and upon whose pioneering, Nobel-winning work Reggie based his own creations. Even they might take years to discover the tricks their British protege had added to their creations, and both of his mentors were old men unlikely to either make the trip or undertake the effort—or survive the undertaking.

  Reggie had never gotten the Nobel, mostly because he was quite deliberately anonymous to the world and his work almost entirely with national security systems, but there was no sign he ever resented the fact, partly because there was no question of his receiving one when sufficient time passed to make his work public enough to be recognized by his peers.

  It was beginning to fit together very well indeed. Sir Robert’s interest in Satanism and the occult shortly before his death was only the final nail in the coffin.

  All they lacked was any shred of proof that Reggie was doing anything at all improper. The problem was, he was quite obviously doing it through SAINT, and only through demonstrating that fact could a
nything be brought out. The classic catch twenty-two, as the Americans liked to say.

  The only one who could nail Reggie with hard evidence was Reggie.

  Just what could Reggie tap from his personal interface with SAINT? The answer was, almost anything. Virtually all of the sophisticated computer network maintained by the United States, Britain, Canada, and even NATO in Brussels was at least supervised by him or based upon his ideas and designs. He could not tap the nuclear fail-safe codes. That, thank God, was on a proprietary system isolated from anyone not directly in the chain. Outside of that, though, his power at the center was almost unlimited. World economics was at his mercy.

  International banking and trade were too, no matter what codes of their own they used. Smaller, weaker nations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia were potentially his pawns. He could probably start wars, and stop them. And there were a million subtler things.

  MacDonald recalled that someone once suggested that one could do in New York as effectively as dropping a nuclear device on it by simply turning all the traffic lights in the city green in all directions at the same time and cutting the power to the subways. The wrong weapons could be diverted to the wrong nations. Banks might cancel vital credits to companies while giving them to the wrong ones. Nations dependent on foreign shipments of grain or even pesticide might starve and be driven to desperate measures.

  The possibilities for doing mischief were limitless, and the incredible thing was that, simply because of his manner and his background and breeding, no one before had put this all together and discovered how much of an omnipresent figure in today’s modern world Reggie had become.

  Until, that is, Sir Robert McKenzie had somehow stumbled upon it. What had alerted him at the start would probably never be known. Reggie, perhaps, did something that Sir Robert discovered and traced back to him, perhaps. Whatever happened, Sir Robert had come to the same point that he, MacDonald, was at now. He had the facts but did not yet have anything concrete to act upon. Sacking Reggie wouldn’t have done much good. It was a sure bet that, no matter what they did with SAINT after he left, anyplace Reggie was with a telephone and a terminal and modem he could access the special files and special commands that were certainly buried there. At this stage, SAINT couldn’t be shut down without bringing Magellan and perhaps a lot more down with it, at least not right away. Sir Robert had sacrificed everything, even his daughter, to Magellan.