by Rene Fomby
“Excellent news. Excellent. Thank you, Duval. I will be staying up all night. Please keep me apprised of any new developments.”
“I will, Your Grace.”
80
Vatican City
As the hereditary head of the Military Order of Christ, the last official remnant of the famed Templar Knights, Joseph Pinotti had taken charge of the Vatican’s war room. Monitors were stationed everywhere, feeding the room live video of events around Rome and just outside of the Vatican walls. The pope had already been whisked away to a secure chamber deep underground, a chamber that also held the Vatican’s secret prison, but so far—miraculously it seemed—very little of the violence had been directed against the Vatican itself. With any luck they would get through this night in one piece.
Pinotti was no fool. He could connect the dots—the fact that this sudden outbreak of unmitigated violence was happening on the very heels of the pope’s speech earlier that day, and the patriarch’s surprising and almost immediate acceptance of the pope’s proposal, those couldn’t be simple coincidences. Just as he had feared, the pope’s speech had stirred up a very deep wellspring of anger in Europe, an anger that had been building for many years. Anger at the collapse of the Southern European economies, anger at Germany’s insistence on economic austerity, anger at the sudden influx of migrants from primarily Muslim countries. It all translated into a toxic soup that now threatened to poison all of Europe.
An aide passed him a new note, and his eyes widened as he read the details of the Catalan attack on Spain’s Congress of Deputies.
81
Adriatic Sea - Friday
Sam had slept poorly throughout the night, tossing and turning aboard the Italian Navy destroyer stationed just off the country’s northeastern coast. And she knew she wouldn’t sleep peacefully until she was finally reunited with Maddie, her daughter. Some things a mother just couldn’t let go of.
Carlo Rossi and the prime minister had joined her for breakfast in the captain’s mess, but other than a small glass of orange juice and several cups of thick navy coffee, she didn’t have much of an appetite. She did manage to snap off a few quick phone calls to the bank and the managers of her largest factories, and they assured her they had escaped the events of the evening without any serious harm. The very nature of Venice, with its narrow streets and its spiderweb of canals, made large-scale rioting almost impossible, and her proactive move to close down most of the company’s factories limited the damage to a few minor exterior fires and explosions. Nothing they couldn’t repair in a few weeks, assuming the government could somehow get a handle on all the violence. Which, of course, was the question of the day.
The prime minister leaned across the table. “Seriously, Carlo, what the hell happened last night?” Carlo Rossi had apparently taken charge of the government’s response to the crisis—and the prime minister now seemed increasingly shell-shocked and deferential to his finance minister’s decisions.
“We’re just now getting some information in on all that.” Rossi had a laptop open on the table in front of him and clicked his mouse a few times, reviewing the latest reports. “Okay, some of this could be attributable to the overall social and political environment in Southern Europe, especially in light of the Turkish attack on the Vatican and the pope’s subsequent reaction to all that. But it still doesn’t add up completely. Look here—” He spun the laptop around so Sam and the prime minister could read the report. It looked like something from a hospital lab. “They brought this guy into the hospital in Florence well after midnight, and pretty much had to hogtie him to get him there. He was completely out of control, thrashing around, heedless of whether he was injuring either himself or others. Apparently, this was a common situation last night. I’ve read at least five reports of individuals killing themselves, or even ripping off body parts, just to escape capture.”
Sam’s grip on her coffee cup tightened. “Wow. So what could have caused that? Were they on some kind of drugs?”
Rossi grimaced, pointing to several lines on the screen. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing before, people getting overdosed on hallucinogenics, but this is way off the chart, both in terms of the individual reactions and in terms of how wide spread it was. I mean, a bad batch of something might hit a few people in a limited geographic area, but this—this looks intentional. Like someone drugged a large group of people simultaneously all across Southern Europe with a combo LSD/methamphetamine super drug. But still the question is, why? And how?”
Sam knew the answer right away, flashing back to the scene in the Las Vegas hotel room after she had been drugged and raped. “I think I know at least the who. The name’s Boucher. Peter Boucher. William Tulley’s right-hand man. The last name means butcher in French.”
“Boucher?” Rossi keyed the name into his computer. “Ah! I remember now. The pharmaceutical guy. He’s got a world-wide warrant out on his head.”
“For the murder of several thousand people. That’s your man. He used to run a boutique pharma company out of San Diego, a company paid for with stolen money from my daughter’s trust. Among other things, he apparently likes to carry around a highly advanced form of Rohypnol, the date rape drug. One small dose and it turns you into a zombie, willing to do just about anything your master demands. Tell me, did any of these—people—show signs of massive cardio problems and vomiting?”
“The few examples we know about, they did,” Rossi answered. “Right before they died.”
“Okay, I’m going to give you the number of a contact I have at the FBI. His name is Larson, Special Agent in Charge Gavin Larson. He was given the assignment of tracking down Boucher and his boss, William Tulley.”
“Your father-in-law,” Rossi suggested.
Sam flinched. “Well, we can leave that part unsaid for now, shall we? The thing is, if Boucher’s behind this, there’s a good chance this is all tied in with the sudden appearance over the last few months of a bunch of little stickers, all across Southern Europe. Stickers containing an ancient Christian symbol, the Chi Rho.”
“And your theory is that these stickers are connected to the drugged-out zombies how?” Rossi looked skeptical.
“I’m not sure about the how or why, but it’s all way too convenient to be just a coincidence. What is it that prosecutors always say? Nothing’s just a coincidence? Anyway, we’ve been carefully monitoring these little Chi Rho symbols over the last few months, watching them creep slowly across the southernmost portion of the continent, until just a week or so ago, when they finally hit the Atlantic Ocean in the south of Spain. We knew then that something was about to happen, we just didn’t know what. But then the pope dies, the Turks pull a surprise attack on the Vatican for no explainable reason, a new pope emerges under miraculous circumstances, and almost immediately everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Coincidence? I think not.”
Rossi nodded, following along. “And there’s also a brand new patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Istanbul, who didn’t hesitate for one second agreeing to the pope’s proposed merger of their churches. You’re right, it does all seem to be a bit too convenient.”
“Give Gavin a call,” she suggested. “And I’ll bet he can link the epicenter of every one of these zombie attacks to the locations of those stickers. If that’s true, we have a clue. Plus we can keep an eye on those locations in case we have another outbreak like the one last night.”
“Luckily for us, in almost every case, whatever they slipped those zombies turned out to be fatal long before the night was over. So after all the rampages we saw last night, things have finally quieted down somewhat this morning.” Rossi sat back in his chair, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Oh, by the way, it was a good thing we extracted you last night from your office. My guys had to blast through a large cluster of those—things—on their way in. And they all seemed to be headed your way. Another coincidence?”
Sam thought about her father-in-law’s poorly disguised enmity for both her and her daught
er. “No, I think someone specifically sent them my way. That would be the fourth time, in fact, that I’ve been targeted like that. So, I guess that means we need to make damn sure Maddie and her grandmother are locked away someplace safe where no one can get to them.”
Rossi stopped and typed into his laptop for a little over a minute. “Done. I’m having them transferred to a flattop the U.S. has cruising the Mediterranean, sent in originally to let the Turks know that NATO was dead serious about what happened at the conclave. That boat isn’t planning on docking anywhere for months, and if anyone could figure out how to sneak their way onto an aircraft carrier sitting out in the middle of the Mediterranean, then we’re all doomed.”
“Thanks, Carlo. I’ll sleep easier now, just knowing she’s safe. Now, about that phone call to Agent Larson …”
82
Madrid
Gavin had ridden out the night of violence from the rooftop of his office complex. That gave him an unparalleled vantage point on developments throughout the night, plus an ideal sniper’s nest to pick off particularly wayward revelers down below, the ones that seemed more like monsters than men. His number was up well over twenty by the time he quit counting. What really amazed him was the way some of the people wandering the streets seemed to be almost unfazed by his 9mm rounds, shots that would have taken down any ordinary man.
By the time the sun finally rose over the sea of carnage laid out below, Gavin’s energy levels had begun to flag. He returned to his office and breakfasted on a protein bar and what seemed like half a gallon of freshly brewed black coffee. He was still sipping on a mug of coffee and catching up on reports from the FBI’s back channels when his phone rang.
“Sam? That you? Thank God! I’ve been worried sick about you. How did you make out last night?”
“I got rescued by Carlo Rossi, the Italian finance minister who helped me a few months back when the bank almost went belly up. And he’s here with me right now. I’ve got a little theory I wanted to roll past you about what happened last night, see if you can give us any insights into any of it.”
Sam gave him the shorthand version of her theory, knowing that he could easily figure out the rest.
“Right. It makes perfect sense. Hold on, let me pull up the mapping tool I was using on the Chi Rho’s.” Gavin deftly worked his way through the VPN connecting him with the files he had stored in the embassy servers back in Rabat, data no one had yet gotten around to deleting. “Okay, I got it. But what I’m missing is the zombie data.”
“I think I can get you some of that right away,” Rossi promised. “At least for Italy. If we can connect the dots there, it’ll be a no-brainer that the rest of Europe will show the same pattern. What’s your email address?”
“I got it.” Sam leaned over and typed the address into Rossi’s laptop. In a little over a minute the data packet was whisking its way to Gavin’s computer in Madrid.
“Hmph,” Gavin grunted. “Looks like your coordinate grammar is a little different from mine. Tell you what, give me an hour to play with this and I’ll call you right back.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Sam agreed, ending the call and finally turning her attention to the croissant that had been parked in front of her for over an hour. Things were starting to look up for a change, if only just a little. And now maybe they could finally get some answers as to what Tulley was doing with all those damned stickers.
※
Gavin was almost finished with his analysis when his phone rang again. Sanders.
“Hey, boss man, what you got for me?”
“To start with, Agent Larson, a great big heart-felt apology. Looks like I put you in harm’s way not once, but twice, all in the span of one week. I don’t know what went wrong with the guy. He seemed to check out just fine, aces all around, and then this. No excuses, though. I’ve got to do better next time around, is all. But, all that aside, I do have some new info for you on Mendez.”
“Yeah? Figure out where he ran off to?” Gavin asked.
“No, unfortunately not, but it turns out his entire family emptied out of Cairo several days before your trip to Toledo. Left not so much as a bobby pin behind.”
“Is that so? And I suppose next you’ll tell me that nobody has any idea where they went.”
“Hey, I knew you were a smart one when I signed you on.”
“Yeah, fat lot of good that does me. Okay, that looks like another dead end, but I think I did stumble on to something else today, something that at least solves one of the mysteries we’ve been chasing down over the last two months.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Sam Tulley came up with this theory that part of the impetus for last night’s crazy attacks might tie back to Tulley. And I think she’s right. You know about the zombie supermen?”
Sanders chuckled. “Is that what you’re calling them these days? You young ’uns watch way too much television for your own good. But yeah, I’ve read the reports. What about ’em?”
Is there anything Bob Sanders doesn’t have a hand in these days? Gavin wondered. “Turns out they show a high correlation with the location of the Chi Rho stickers. Wherever there’s a sticker, you get a zombie. No sticker? No zombie.”
“Makes sense. And that all ties right back into Boucher and his pharma company.”
“Exactly. So now we know who, and we know what. That only leaves the big questions. For example, why?”
“And even more important, where? As in, where do they have Andy holed up?”
“I assume the Toledo cops didn’t have any leads on our shooters.”
“Nope, not a thing. You know, son, I’m getting the distinct impression that whoever’s running this operation for the other side is a pretty smart cookie. Even if his guys do seem to have a problem finishing the job. And staying alive in the process.”
“And no complaints from me on that level, by the way. But you’re right, they don’t seem to leave even the smallest little morsel behind to trace them back to Tulley’s evil lair.”
“Everyone makes a mistake sometime, Agent Larson. We just gotta make sure we’re there when they do.”
“Well, yeah, and it had better happen sooner rather than later. I’m really starting to get worried that time is running out for Andy. If we don’t get there soon—”
“I’m with you on that, son. Look, I gotta run. We picked up some kind of encrypted, back-channel signal last night, just before all the inmates took over the asylum, so I got to go put a little heat in my computer boys’ britches to see if they can find out whether it was related. But remember to let me know if any of this Chi Rho business pans out, will ya? There are a bunch of people sitting in fancy offices all across Europe who would pay good money to get a line on that. Last night was an expensive little lesson for a whole lot of folks.”
“Will do, boss man.” Gavin saw that his analysis on the zombie appearances had finally wrapped up, so he dropped the call with Sanders and dialed Sam Tulley instead.
※
Sam had spent the past two hours coordinating the recovery efforts with Carlo Rossi, all the while consumed with the thought of grabbing a flight out to meet up with her daughter and mother-in-law on the USS Carl Vinson, currently holding station somewhere off of Cyprus. When Gavin called back, she signaled to Rossi to rejoin her at the table and put her phone on speaker.
“Did you figure out anything, Gav?”
“Surprisingly, yes. I mean, we don’t have a whole lot of data to work with here, particularly given the preliminary nature of our field reports, but it does look like all of the zombie activity emanated from the Chi Rho sites. The problem is, that still leaves us with the bigger question of why, what was all of this about in the first place?”
“Well, it’s a start,” Sam suggested, looking over at Rossi, who simply shrugged. “Is there anything we can do out here that would help you make better sense of the data?”
“No. Well. Maybe …”
“What is it, Gavin? Did you s
ee something else in the data?”
“No, it was more a question of what I didn’t see.” Gavin paused to pull up his overlay map showing the Chi Rho sticker sites and the outbreaks of violence. “Look, I checked with all the reports I have access to, the stuff pouring in from our government as well as yours, and something just doesn’t make sense. But maybe you have better intel on all this.”
Rossi leaned forward to get closer to the phone. “What doesn’t make sense, Agent Larson?”
“It’s just that—with almost no exception, every single place we’ve found that was marked with a Chi Rho sticker, all hell broke loose last night. All across Southern Europe. Actually, though, there was one notable exception.” He leaned forward and put a finger on the right side of his computer screen. “Istanbul.”
83
Cappadocia
“Dammit to hell, Duval! This is exactly why we needed Boucher running this whole operation. It’s always the little details that’ll trip you up!”
Constantine was livid at the fact that several of the acolytes had apparently been captured in Italy and Spain, and their decomposing bodies were being carefully examined by some of the best toxicologists on the planet.
Duval bowed her head, afraid to make eye contact with the emperor. “I’m sorry, Sire. But that is why we gave them all such a heavy dose, to make sure they wouldn’t survive long enough to be questioned.”
“No, no, you’re right.” Constantine pulled in a deep breath in an effort to calm himself down. “That was smart of you. And Boucher assured me personally that the drug is untraceable, so long as you don’t know what to look for. So we don’t really have any reason to worry.”
“Worrying is my job, Your Grace.”
“Yes it is, yes it is.” Constantine studied Duval carefully. “But worrying about what’s in our past is a useless exercise. How are we doing on the move? Still on schedule?”