Callsign: King ctm-1

by Sean Ellis

  No demands were made of her, but there was little question that she was a prisoner. Nevertheless, she took advantage of the chance to shower away the residue of her plunge into the Indian Ocean and the general grime of days spent in the field.

  As the hot water cascaded down on her shoulders, she pondered her next move. Things were so much clearer in Jack’s world. If you were captured, you would fight back, resist, try to escape or confound your enemy’s goals in any way possible. But it was different for her. Yes, she wanted to escape, but she could not afford to so easily dismiss what her captor was attempting. Even if she was being lied to, even if they were secretly trying to turn the discovery into a weapon, the opportunity to do research on the contagion and to find a way to counteract it, was not something she could easily pass up.

  It was the best way she had to fight back, resist, and confound her enemy’s goals.

  The door was locked from the outside, but as soon as she knocked, it popped open revealing an empty hallway. As she stepped into the hall, Graham appeared on the staircase landing, midway down the hall. “This way, Dr. Fogg. Lunch is already set.”

  The kitchen furnishings, like everything else in the house, were modern, giving the whole place the feel of being on a space station designed by a 1950’s science fiction writer. She found Fulbright seated at the oval-shaped glass dining table, pensively eating a sandwich.

  “I can only provide light fare right now,” Graham apologized. “But I promise dinner will be superb. I don’t get the chance to entertain here very often, so I will be pulling out all the stops.”

  “I’d hate for you to go to any trouble,” Sara replied, with undisguised sarcasm.

  Fulbright looked up at her, but said nothing.

  “No trouble at all.” Graham elected to ignore the venom. “There’s no reason your stay here has to be unpleasant.”

  “That sounds like something he might say.” Sara jerked a thumb at the rogue CIA officer. “As a threat,” she added.

  “Please understand, Dr. Fogg. You have important work to do here. Work that will benefit us all; the entire human race.”

  Sara settled into a chair and started assembling a sandwich from a plate of assorted cold-cuts and cheeses. “Fine,” she said at length. “I’ll play along, but I can’t have you telling me how to do my research. You need to give me whatever I ask for.”

  “Within reason, of course.”

  “First, I want you to stop sedating Felice Carter.”

  Fulbright looked up sharply. “Weren’t you paying attention back there? She can infect people, maybe without even thinking about it. If she feels the least bit threatened…” He snapped his fingers. “Poof, we’re mindless drones.”

  “That’s exactly why I need her awake and alert. Just because she’s unconscious doesn’t mean that her fear response is turned off. She needs to know that she isn’t in any danger. I can explain that to her. More importantly, I need to be able to talk to her in order to figure this thing out. The answers are all in her head.”

  Graham was about to say something, but was interrupted by a buzzing noise from his pocket. He took out a smart phone and looked at the display for a moment, then tapped a few keys and put it away. “I’m sorry. Unrelated business. With respect to your request, Dr. Fogg, I certainly think we can accommodate you if you feel it’s that important. I trust you will take all the necessary precautions.”

  Sara looked at the older man sidelong. She couldn’t quite figure out just what his role was in all of this.

  “You need to run this past Brainstorm,” Fulbright declared, clearly unhappy about what Sara was demanding.

  “And that’s the other thing I need,” Sara broke in, quickly. “I’m tired of dealing with lackeys…I’m tired of dealing with him.” She pointed an accusing finger at Fulbright. “If you want me to do this, I need direct access to Mr. Big himself. I need to be able to talk to Brainstorm.”

  Graham gave an odd smile. “Done.”

  # # #

  After the meal, she was taken to the laboratory facilities, which were she surmised, in a basement level beneath the villa. The lab was accessible only by elevator, and she was pretty sure that it had gone down, not up, but the spacious windowless area could have been almost anywhere.

  Graham showed her a computer workstation and logged her in. “This terminal is linked to a pair of Cray supercomputers which you can use for gene sequencing, and any other applications that will help you design a vaccine. And this icon here-” He clicked on a tab on the desktop display-“This allows you to send instant text messages to Brainstorm.”

  “I don’t want to text Brainstorm,” Sara countered. “I want to talk to him. Face to face.”

  “Good luck with that,” Fulbright remarked.

  “All communications from Brainstorm are via text messages,” Graham explained, “but I’ll activate the text-to-voice translator. I’m afraid that’s about as close as you can get to actually having a conversation with Brainstorm.”

  Sara stared back at him. “So it’s true. Brainstorm is just a big computer-artificial intelligence.”

  Graham spread his hands equivocally, and then stepped out from behind the workstation. “Dr. Carter is in the isolation room. It’s equipped with Level A hazmat protection, if you feel the need for such measures. On the other hand, if you feel that she poses no threat, I’ll arrange guest quarters for her later.”

  “Do that. I’ve got it from here. I’ll let you know if I need anything more.”

  The two men lingered in the lab a while after she dismissed them, but as far as Sara was concerned, they were already gone. She gave Felice an anti-narcotic injection then sat down and waited for her to stir.

  Despite her confident demeanor, she was very worried about Felice’s transition from drug induced sleep to wakefulness. Indeed, as the sedative in her bloodstream was bound and rendered inert by the anti-narcotic, Felice came awake as if emerging from a night terror.

  “Felice, it’s okay.” Sara risked physical contact, gently holding Felice’s forearm. “You’re safe.”

  Felice’s eyes darted back and forth as she tried to take in the unfamiliar surroundings. “Where am I?”

  “I wish I knew. But we’re safe for now. You need to relax and stay calm. I’ll explain everything.”

  The roving gaze finally settled on Sara’s face. “I know you. You’re the CDC doctor.”

  “That’s right. I’m Sara. I feel like I know you well, but I guess we only got to meet for a few minutes. A lot has happened since then, and I’ll tell you when you’re ready to hear it.”

  “Where’s Jack?”

  The question caught Sara off guard, and emotion welled up in her throat. After a false start, she managed to croak: “That’s part of what I have to tell you.”

  “Tell me now.”

  Sara started with Fulbright’s act of treachery. She only gave the barest of details about what had happened to Sigler, and it was evident from Felice’s reaction that she understood why it was so painful; she had, after all, witnessed their affectionate reunion.

  Once Felice understood that they were both being held hostage, Sara turned her attention to the contagion-if a contagion it indeed was. Sara wasn’t convinced of that. “We need to understand exactly how this…effect…is being spread. I’m thinking that maybe it’s linked to a pheromone.”

  Felice shook her head. “Sara, I need to tell you a story; a story about elephants.”

  25.

  Somewhere over Africa

  A black wraith-like shape tore through the sky high above the dark continent. Anyone looking skyward would have immediately recognized the tiny speck as an aircraft by the long contrail-the product of water vapor in the jet exhaust instantly freezing into ice crystals high in the stratosphere-but such sights were common almost everywhere in the world. Anyone watching a radar display would have seen absolutely nothing. The stealth transport plane, code-named Crescent because of its unique, radar-scattering half-moon profile,
was for practical purposes, invisible.

  King sat in Crescent’s communication center, just aft of the cockpit, where two pilots from the USAF Nighthawks special operations wing, were waiting for their next destination. Unfortunately, King didn’t yet know what that would be.

  One of the two computer screens on the workstation showed photographic imagery from a satellite in a geostationary orbit above northern Africa. Deep Blue had accessed the feed from the National Reconnaissance Office and cued it up to approximately the moment where King’s helicopter had been shot down by a missile from one of the Ethiopian fighter jets. King wasn’t interested in the crash though; he already knew how that ended.

  With the realization that he would not be able to fool another missile attack, King did the only thing he could: he cut the engine and let the helicopter fall from the sky. The plunge was only about sixty feet, and the helicopter was engineered to withstand hard landings, but even so, the impact was like getting hit by a bus. Battered, bruised, but thankfully not broken, he had half-fallen out of the crumpled cockpit and taken off across the scrubland in search of cover. A few moments later, a second missile had homed in on the helicopter and blown it to smithereens. The concussion wave had sent him tumbling, adding a few more bruises, but the ploy had worked. The Sukhoi fighters had turned for home, satisfied that, even if he had survived, the elements would finish him off.

  Fortunately, King had his Chess Team phone. Rescue, in the form of Crescent, traveling halfway around the world at Mach 2, had arrived a few hours later. Now, he was tracking the other helicopter, the one that had borne Sara and Felice Carter away.

  “That’s where they landed in Addis Ababa,” Deep Blue observed from Chess Team headquarters in New Hampshire. His face was visible on the second computer screen and his voice was a tinny electronic reproduction in King’s headphones. “That compound belongs to Alpha Dog Solutions, a private security firm that’s doing counter-terrorism operations under contract for the CIA.”

  “Sara told me that Fulbright might be a CIA officer.”

  “I couldn’t verify that. If he really is with the Company, then he’s probably NOC, and information on that is too closely guarded for me to root out with just a discreet inquiry.” The acronym stood for “non-official cover” and was reserved for intelligence operatives working deep undercover espionage missions. “Or it could just be an alias,” Deep Blue added.

  King rubbed his eyes. Despite his ability to thrive under the worst conditions, fatigue was finally starting to take its toll. “What else do we know about Alpha Dog? Do they have other clients?”

  “In that region, they also do site security for a number of petroleum companies. Curiously enough, it looks like they received several payments, all from different clients and all in the last three days. If I had to guess, I’d say someone was trying to hide the actual size of a very large payoff by splitting it up… Oh.”

  “What?”

  “The men who attacked you on the road from the airport, when you first arrived, were Alpha Dog contractors, not Gen-Y.”

  “I guess they knew I’d make trouble, and wanted me out of the way.” King glanced back at the satellite feed, where a group of tiny figures moved between the now stationary helicopter and a small private jet. A few frames later, the jet taxied for take-off. “Do we know who owns the jet?”

  Deep Blue consulted his own computer screen. “A shell company. I’m starting to get the sense that someone is trying very hard to cover their tracks.”

  “So what do we know for sure? This guy, Fulbright, was able to call out the CDC through official channels; let’s assume that means he really does work in some government agency, but he’s gone rogue. His real employer has almost unlimited resources, and the ability to channel money through a number of different corporations. And let’s not forget, somehow they were keeping an eye on what Manifold was up to. They knew what Felice Carter brought back from the elephant graveyard almost from the start.”

  “That kind of reach takes a lot of money; more money than multinational corporations, more money than most governments.” Deep Blue’s eyebrows drew together in a perplexed frown. “When I was in office, there was chatter about a… I guess you could call it a ‘metacorporation’-an entity that was secretly insinuating itself into other corporations, the really big multinationals, using shell companies and phony proxies to take over, essentially creating a gigantic global monopoly.”

  “How would you keep something like that off the radar?”

  “Logistically, it would be almost impossible. One person couldn’t run something so complex, and if you had a board of directors…well, eventually someone would slip up, or get greedy and break away…or they would just make bad decisions and it would all come unglued. But that never seemed to happen. There were rumors that the whole thing might be controlled from cyberspace by a sentient computer network. Artificial intelligence would be one explanation for the level of control that’s been exhibited.”

  King shook his head. Global conspiracies were the last thing on his mind right now. “What does any of this have to do with Sara? Or with what Felice discovered in that cave?”

  “If it involves bioweapons research, then I can think of at least one nightmare scenario. Radical depopulation. Selective reduction of undesirable elements in the population as a way of increasing control and bringing about economic stability.”

  King thought about what he had witnessed in the cavern. “So, give the ‘desirable’ people the vaccine, and then turn the rest into zombies. A drone workforce that never complains, never rises up in revolt, and will defend you without question.”

  Deep Blue nodded. “That’s exactly how a computer would reason. The economically disadvantaged represent a constant source of social instability. From ancient times, kings and emperors controlled the masses with distractions-gladiatorial games, circuses, daytime talk shows-but now there’s the potential to simply switch off the part of the human brain that causes discontent.”

  “They already have the way to throw the switch. They just don’t have a vaccine for the ‘desirables.’ That’s what they need Sara for.” King took a deep breath. “Do we know where they took her?”

  “I’ve tracked the plane ahead for six hours. It looks like they’re still in Africa-Algeria, to be precise.”

  King’s screen showed an overhead view of a plane sitting at the end of a runway, and a road that connected the airstrip to a large fenced compound nearby. There were no other roads or buildings anywhere in the featureless brown landscape.

  “I can’t find any records connected to that property,” Deep Blue continued. “In fact, according to the maps, it’s supposed to be a national park.”

  “Money and influence. Bribe the right official, and do as you please.” King clicked on a button to zoom in on the compound. “It doesn’t appear to be built-up.”

  “I’ll have the Crescent deploy our UAV and recon the area so we can determine how well defended it is. I’m afraid the rest of the team is unavailable and-”

  “And the rest of the U.S. military is off limits to us now that we’re black, I know,” King said. “Tell me again why we went underground?”

  But King knew why. The less people that knew about the…evils Chess Team faced, the better off the world would be. And it was just as likely that more military would get in his way, or turn this into an international incident, which wouldn’t be a good thing for a fledgling black op, especially one directed by a former U.S. President.

  “I could hire some mercenaries,” Deep Blue said.

  King laughed, but when Deep Blue didn’t join him, he asked, “You’re serious?”

  “We have a budget for it now.”

  King had some military friends that had become mercs. They were trustworthy, and a few extra guns would be nice, but ultimately, this had to be a solo mission for one very important reason. “This contagion, whatever it is, seems to be triggered specifically by a threat to Felice’s safety. If we raid the com
pound, it’ll probably scare the hell out of her, and believe me, you don’t want that to happen.”

  26.

  Brainstorm facility, Algeria

  “What is the status of your research?”

  Sara jumped at the sound of the electronically produced voice. After hours of conversing with Felice in a tone so low it was almost a whisper, the computerized speech was almost ear-splitting. “Is that you Brainstorm?”

  “Affirmative. What is the status of your research? You have not yet drawn blood or tissue samples for analysis. How do you intend to conduct research and develop a vaccine without collecting specimens for study?”

  Sara detected a very uncomputer-like note of sarcasm in the utterance. It was however the truth. She had not taken a single sample nor performed even one diagnostic test. She had simply listened as Felice recounted a bizarre tale of past lives and what sounded very much like spirit possession. Sara didn’t believe in reincarnation or ghostly hauntings, but she had come up with an alternative theory.

  She put her hands on her hips. She didn’t know if Brainstorm had eyes as well as ears in the room, but she wanted him…or maybe it…to know she was defiant. “If you’re such a genius, why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “Are you stating that you no longer wish to be involved in the research?”

  Sara sighed. So much for defiance. “Look Braniac, this is what I do and I’m very good at it. So give me some time and space. Nagging me won’t make things happen any faster.”