Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2)

by Saul Tanpepper

  "You took those innocent people's lives to make a point? Is there no price too high for you to protect your secrets?"

  "What price would you pay to save humanity? Would you give up your own life? I would gladly give mine."

  "Then do it!"

  "You may get your wish soon enough. But for now, my responsibility is to mitigate any further risk to the product and the company."

  The words startled her, echoing almost verbatim Norstrom's own job description.

  "You see," he said, "what happened yesterday was not the first time. It has happened before. It is only the latest in a string of incidents by a madman bent on destroying us."

  "I am trying to destroy you," she spat, losing her patience. "Am I mad?"

  "Your actions are predictable, even understandable, and are thus easily deflected."

  "Predictable?"

  "You have a strong moral and ethical compass. Even the more extreme attempts by Mister Norstrom and his colleagues to stop us follow a certain logical formula. But there is a madman out there who is not bound by the same constraints as you both. He cares not whether there is collateral damage. He is the real threat to us both."

  "And you aren't?"

  "Men died learning how to create a flying machine. How many more would have died if their attempts had been thwarted? Think of the lives saved because we can rapidly deliver medicine to—"

  "That is a false equivalence. You created something that can be easily misused, and now you expect me to sympathize with you when someone has abused it. I cannot! In fact, I will continue to fight you, because my mind will not be changed."

  "Then I have failed. But, as I've said, you are free to leave if you choose to do so. Simply walk out. Once you do, we will release Mister Norstrom as well. However, before you go, consider this. Walking out will not stop what you witnessed yesterday. In fact, you can count on it only getting worse until the madman responsible has been caught."

  "Then stop him!"

  "There is nothing we would like more. But we cannot do it alone. We need your help."

  "Moi?" Angel laughed out loud in surprise. "Tu fais fausse route! What is the English saying? You are barking at the wrong tree trunk if you expect me to help you find this man."

  "Look at your screen."

  She did, turning her eyes back. The image blurred for a moment as someone moved in front of the camera. It was a different man, the skin on his arms dark and densely covered with black hair. His elbows were bound together behind him with several plastic ties, and a heavy cloth was wound tight around his hands. He turned and sat down, and on his head was a thick leather mask, the straps secured on either side of his head with metal buckles. A cage covered his face.

  Angel gasped when she recognized the man from the photo on Mahdi's phone. "Farid?"

  "We rescued him. If we had not gotten to him first, he would have ended up like the others who died yesterday."

  A million questions popped into Angel's mind, not the least of which was why he was now here in Turkey. But the most pressing question at the moment was, "Why is he in that mask?"

  "It is for his own protection, as well as ours, a precaution to prevent the type of violence you witnessed. Unfortunately, we cannot eliminate the risk ourselves."

  "I don't understand."

  "The man responsible for yesterday's attack intended to kill all of the test subjects. His objective is to sabotage the experiment, and he cares not at all who must die to achieve it."

  "How?"

  "By uploading a malicious program into the product, causing it to shut down the inhibitory centers in the brain while stimulating certain predatory and hunger activities."

  "Mind control? And you still think I am deluded to think the way I do?"

  "You are not deluded, but you do lack sufficient information to make an accurate assessment of the situation. As I mentioned earlier, the final product will be fully secure. Any vulnerabilities in the current design will be eliminated, including the one this man used to gain access. It is a secret exploit we installed in the product's firmware, a backdoor which allows us to troubleshoot issues in case the product develops any problems during this beta phase of testing."

  "If this is true, then this man must know exactly how the nanites work."

  "Intimately. In fact, he was once an engineer on the project and the former test coordinator at Goh Li Xhia."

  "Aston?" she exclaimed. "He is dead! I saw him die. He burned up . . . ."

  She stopped herself short. Was she sure he died? She had been just as sure that Jamie had, but the girl had been there afterward, as impossible as it had seemed at the time, standing in the hallway.

  "Aston is dead, on that we agree. But he was not the original study coordinator. That man departed rather unexpectedly and under suspicious circumstances nearly a year before your arrival. Our team conducted an extensive search and found a set of badly decomposed remains a few miles from the site. Unfortunately, DNA was too degraded to definitively establish that it was him. Given the fact that his cell phone and other identifying items were located nearby, it was concluded that he had died while on an unadvised walkabout."

  "But now you think this man staged his death? Why?"

  "Clearly, in order to sabotage our work."

  "He could have done that anyway. From what you say, he already had access."

  "Perhaps, but his impact would have been limited, as we would have stopped him immediately. Now it is too late. He has figured out how to insulate himself from our security protocols."

  "The self-destruct program?"

  "That is what you call it, but yes."

  The image of Farid on the monitor disappeared and was replaced for a moment with static. Then a new image appeared, a view of a door on the side of some building somewhere. The lighting and contrast were poor.

  "This was recorded about a month after the train crash, at another of our test sites."

  What Angel saw in that grainy video chilled her to the bone. It was a man, or the silhouette of a man, anyway. She leaned forward as close as she could, but his face was in shadow and she could not make out his features. He passed slowly across the frame and partially into the light, and when he did the buttons on his long dark overcoat shone like silver stars. His face, however, remained unrevealed.

  It was only a recording, and yet Angel shied away from the screen, almost fearing that he would look up and see her.

  "The man in silver and black," she whispered. "It is him!"

  But if Kurtz heard her, she would never know, as the presentation was abruptly ended at that moment.

  The shaking beneath her feet began moments before as an almost imperceptible thing, the rumble so quiet that she wouldn't have noticed it had the monitor not started to tremble and the image blinked out.

  She stared at the static for a moment, then at the door, wondering if it was an earthquake. Already the low rumble was fading away, and the slight tremor was gone.

  "Allô?" she said. "Kurtz? What happened?"

  But the meeting was already over, as a second explosion hit and the walls collapsed in around her.

  Chapter Thirty Five

  ARLOSOROFF STREET CAFÉ

  HAIFA, ISRAEL

  Nope, thought the man sitting alone where the two sidewalks intersected. That's not him, either.

  The breakfast crowd had long since come and gone, though several of the tables were still occupied. The number of people leaving the hotel across the road had also tapered off considerably.

  He had his back against the cool stucco façade and his face shaded beneath a Panama hat. Dark sunglasses and a light-colored, loose-fitting shirt and slacks completed the outfit. Morning sunlight slanted through the dust from the top of the hill, baking his knees. It was the only part of him not protected by the building or the awning overhead. Just midmorning and already he was sweating.

  His eyes flicked to the glass teacup on the table, then zeroed in on the handle of the miniature golden spoon set bes
ide it. He plucked it up and dipped it into the small jar of honey the server had brought him. The tea was strongly bitter and only slightly less opaque than mud.

  The honey — supposedly from the olive groves in a moshav outside Kfar Sirkin, or so the old woman had said — was second rate at best. Not that he was any expert in the matter. It dripped noticeably faster off the spoon than when he'd first sat down at the break of dawn a few hours before, when the air was still fully infused with the night's chill.

  "Everything okay?" the woman asked, making the rounds of the tables. He guessed that she was the wife of the owner, Itzak, or maybe a sister. He didn't know her name.

  "Yes, thank you."

  She tilted her head and, much to his surprise, began to turn away without pressing the conversation. He had expected the usual chatter, as was customary by the matrons of such establishments. But he had noticed that her voice was scratchy and her movements somewhat stiffer than the previous day's.

  "Actually," he said, raising a hand, "if you have a moment."

  He thought he caught the hint of a smile as she turned.

  "I was here late yesterday and there was a big celebration inside." He gestured toward the café's interior. "If you don't mind saying, what was that all about?"

  "Ah, the simcha, yes," the woman said, nodding. The smile widened, softening her face. She had the gentlest brown eyes, almost coffee-colored, and long, dark lashes. A beauty once, many years before, though time and worry had long since blurred some features and chiseled others.

  "Celebration for young Aaron Alharizi," she said, and cleared the scratch from her throat. "He just returned home from Sierra Leone."

  "What was he doing there?"

  "Part of the United Nations aid mission. We are all very proud of him here. The family was very happy that he returned safe and unharmed, of course."

  The man nodded. He had noticed a momentary flutter of emotion on her face when she mentioned his work, and it confirmed the suspicions he'd harbored about the boy since briefly meeting him the night before. There had been a certain quality of darkness in his eyes, unmistakable if one knew to look for it.

  The kid had come out and stood at the railing with an unlit cigarette in his fingers, just leaning and staring at nothing.

  The music belting out at them was a strange blend of traditional and new, raucous to the man's ears and almost too heavy on the beat. The dances were frenzied, each one merging relentlessly into the next, giving the revelers no chance to rest unless they escaped outside, as he had done.

  The boy's cheeks were flushed from the exertion and sweat ran down his neck. He had smiled sociably when the man, who introduced himself as Joseph, offered a light, and mentioned his own name. Outwardly, Aaron seemed happy, but it took no time at all to detect that haunting desperation deep within him. Joseph sensed that Aaron had either seen or done terrible things, things that ate into his soul and left it porous and brittle.

  He was quite familiar with that look. He had seen it in the eyes of many people he had known over the years, men mostly, colleagues who had suffered some great tragedy in their lives, sometimes by their own will. The same look he had seen more recently in the eyes of the French journalist.

  He had pressed the boy as much as he felt comfortable doing, gently probing, partly out of habit and partly from professional interest. Not too hard, though, nor too urgently. He didn't want to frighten him away. Israelis tended to view strangers to their small country with wariness, and justifiably so. Only when he sensed the boy relax did he bring the picture out to show him.

  "My brother," he explained, offering the now-familiar story. "I haven't seen him in many years. Family troubles, you understand. But our parents are dead, and I had hoped to bring him the news. I was told he was staying here in town."

  The boy pulled the photograph close to his face, tilting it to capture some of the light from inside. He shook his head and said he didn't recognize the man, couldn't recall ever seeing him. "But her, yes. I have seen the woman. I remember her."

  The man frowned in surprise. The wife? This wasn't what he had expected.

  "Oh yes, she stayed in the Hotel Bialik there across the street for a couple weeks. Alone, as I recall. But this was last year, before I left on my mission. She would eat breakfast here, at the table there just inside the door, working on her laptop. I believe she was French. She often met with another man, not him. I think they must have been business partners."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "They were always talking over papers."

  "And you're sure it wasn't this man?" he asked, showing him the photo again.

  "No, no. This other man she was with had darker skin and hair."

  Joseph had wanted to ask more questions, but their conversation was cut short by a pretty young girl, all dark glistening skin and hair and lush, pouty lips. A thin floral dress clung suggestively to her heaving chest and ample hips. He looked away as she tried to convince the boy to join her inside and dance some more, but then stole a glance as they passed through the open French doors, their fingers twined.

  A vague sort of longing came over him then, a reminder of some of the decisions he had made in his life. But the feeling was fleeting.

  "Such a tragedy," the woman said, and the memory of the boy and his suitor vaporized. "All the things happening in that part of the world."

  "Terrible," he agreed. She still hadn't offered her name, and he didn't want to be impolite and ask for it. "I can understand the joy his family must feel, their relief in seeing him safely home again."

  That part of the world had descended toward chaos in recent years, destabilized by war and poverty, afflicted by human rights abuses perpetrated by despotic leaders, wracked with terrible zoonotic diseases emerging into a new, warmer world.

  And now that part of the world was a haven for radical militants. So prevalent were the warring factions that the recent Ebola outbreak the boy had attended to as part of the UN attachment to WHO received very little press, far less than the other epidemic taking place there— homegrown terrorism.

  ISIS had once ruled the region. The caliphate had, paradoxically, provided a stabilizing influence through its iron grip. But after the group's financial backing collapsed and its followers became disillusioned by its strict procedures, other factions quickly rose to fill the power vacuum, warring parties striving to wrest a barbaric form of control out of the chaos while simultaneously feeding its growth.

  Significant swaths of North and West Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Pakistan were now being governed by those brutal enterprises, and their impact was quickly being felt in many other parts of the world. Overnight, in fact, explosions had rocked cities on three continents, claiming the lives of thousands of people. Dozens of smaller attacks had been reported elsewhere. Countries worldwide upped their terror threat levels. And out of the dust, the emerging giant, al Tadmir, stepped forward to claim responsibility for the acts.

  The man had asked his boss to look into the terror group months ago, reiterating his warning that West Africa was quickly becoming a nursery for the types of activities he was particularly worried about.

  But it was more than that. Troubling rumors had reached his ears, peculiar tales about people disappearing by the dozens, whole villages just vanishing, leaving few clues as to what had taken place there, nor any indication where the missing people had gone. It was presumed they had been recruited by the militants, or else murdered, but this was only speculation.

  Those crazy enough to travel there and lucky enough to get back out again unscathed reported finding little more than a few brittle bones and strange, thick, dried deposits of some unidentifiable organic substance, leading one to speculate that a new form of chemical warfare had been developed and was now in use by the jihadists.

  But Cheong dismissed his concerns, apparently too focused on his pet project, the French journalist, whose husband Joseph had been tasked to track down for the past five months. But after staking
out apartments and restaurants in Washington, DC, New York, and Paris without so much as a confirmed sighting, he was convinced the man did not want to be found.

  It was why he had been sent here, to Israel, because of some nebulous idea that David Eitan had returned to his family's homeland. The theory was supported by a set of payments made from the wife's accounts.

  Joseph had asked Cheong for a copy of the documents, but had yet to receive them.

  For months he had suspected his boss of sending him on wild goose chases. Now he was almost certain of it. The question was why. Was it punishment for some of the decisions he had made in the course of his work? Cheong still hadn't forgiven him for faking his death in Shanghai.

  Or was it something more . . . personal? He'd always been discrete, but in this business of paranoia, not even the deepest, darkest secrets left buried and forgotten inside one's soul could reliably remain safely hidden away.

  "He doesn't know," he mumbled aloud, before realizing the woman was still standing there, eying him curiously. "Sorry," he offered, along with a crooked smile.

  "Are you sure I can't get you anything more?" she asked. "Something to eat? Something cold perhaps?" She drew out the last word suggestively, inviting him to share his name.

  "Joseph," he automatically replied. His voice sounded more brusque than he had intended, and he gave her an apologetic smile to show he hadn't meant to be rude. "Joseph Meyer."

  Two good Hebrew names, both common enough and forgettable, and neither of them his own, of course. Not that his own true name felt any more real to him at this point in his life. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had used it.

  A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek. He felt it soak into the collar of his shirt. "What would you suggest, Miss . . . ?"

  "Raisa," she answered, returning the courtesy. "I will bring a bottle of Mitz Paz, Mister Meyer. Ice cold. You will need something sweet and cool for such a hot day."