by M. K. Gilroy
As he started the engine of his Audi 7, he opted for a Rachmaninov concerto rather than the news. That would make it easier for him to keep rowing to the music of headline news. His commitment to Patmos had come at a physical cost. He was fifty pounds heavier than when he started—and he had already been fifty-pounds overweight at the time. If he was to be at the forefront of building a brave new world, he needed to take better care of his earthly temple in order to savor the fruits of his labors.
In the week or two that the world slowly became aware of the biomedical tragedy unfolding in Sana’a, investigators from a rainbow of countries and agencies would look for answers. Clues planted by Patmos counterintelligence operatives would point them to Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Saudis, the Americans, Kurds, Turks, Russians—always the Russians, such easy targets—the Israelis, the quiet and secretive Swiss, and tribesmen from Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen—all in equal measure. The investigators’ work would be an impossible slog through muck and mire as guns and accusations blazed. Guns and accusations their team was augmenting, sometimes paid for by the victims themselves. Brilliant.
Recruiting Dimitri Dolzhikov had been his greatest coup as head of Jonathan Alexander’s bioweapons team. Though in his seventies, Dolzhikov was still energetic and brilliant. His specialties in the Soviet Biological Warfare program were Ebola and Marburg. He earned a Ph.D. from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology—“the Russian MIT”—at the age of twenty-one, immediately becoming the youngest member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. While at MIPT he was sent to Petrograd State University for specialized study under Nikolay Semyonov, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1956. Semyonov invited Dolzhikov to teach at Petrograd, but the Soviet apparatchik had different plans for him. Back in Moscow, he was teaching doctoral students at Moscow State University at age twenty-two. Most of his brilliant students were four or five years older than him.
By age twenty-four he was immersed in the Soviet bioweapons program. He had seen and done it all, helping the Soviet Empire weaponize and stockpile thirteen different bio-agents, including anthrax, plague, botulism, smallpox, and Marburg.
Dozhikov preferred Marburg over Ebola—something Patton never revealed to Alexander. That ship had sailed. Patton had already spent too much time, money, and energy acquiring the building blocks of an Ebola pandemic—not just for a slice of West Africa that was easily contained and that made grand but safe theater for rock star benefit concerts—but a pandemic that showed the potential of reaching the only place people truly cared about; home. Marburg might be better but there wasn’t enough time to change course. Dozhikov agreed Ebola was adequate and nearly as deadly as what he considered to be the clear first choice. The millions of euros he was paid up front and annually certainly helped Dozhikov be flexible.
The world academic community expressed conflicting assessments of Dozhikov’s contributions to science when news of his death from a massive stroke hit the international news wires, a necessary red herring.
One of the reasons Patton recruited Claire Stevens was that Dozhikov was a horny old goat who flourished when pretty young women were around. And no question, Claire was a beauty. She was a prima donna that pouted when she didn’t get her way, but that made her even prettier. The fact that Stevens had shown true brilliance and initiative with the improved delivery and absorption properties to the Ebola-based chimera was a pleasant surprise and icing on the cake.
Little did she know how close she came to being rejected for the Patmos Lab. She put him in a tough spot by lying about her history of depression. He personally vouched for her, which sealed the appointment and spared her life. Smart people could be so naïve. If she’d been rejected, did she really think they would let her live, knowing as much about them as she did?
But so far her work with Dozhikov and the other lab team members was a stunning success.
Patton was personally heading up the second beta event, which was equally fascinating and potentially more deadly—at least in his mind. A rule of thumb in warfare is that it is usually more effective to disable an enemy population than to kill it. Why? It is far more expensive for your enemy to care for the sick and wounded than bury their dead. What better way to disable the enemy population than striking at the food supply? When the CIA introduced the African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, Castro himself had to give the order to slaughter five hundred thousand hogs to stop a nationwide animal epidemic. It was a bad year for Cuban sandwiches. The politically incorrect joke in the world espionage community was that “Fidel didn’t bring home the bacon.”
When Patton started developing Alexander’s bioweapons program he had wanted to work with several invasive plants that would destroy the permaculture of certain targets. But it was impossible to project the rate and extent of spread, which made it impossible to meet Alexander’s timetable requirements. Herbicidal cannibalism was still on the back burner for future use as plans unfolded.
Patton turned his research to toxic pesticides as diverse as DDT and Agent Orange. He and his assistants had focused on the worst of the worst from Agent Orange, 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, as the basis for their herbivore on steroids.
The next debate was determining the first target.
He personally wanted to hit China’s breadbasket, the Shandong Province. China met the criteria of being the most egregious reason the earth’s population growth was killing the planet for everyone else—and the government’s easing of the one-child law was going to make their role on Earth hitting the Malthusian tipping point even worse. With the number of mouths to feed there, the logistics of delivering the tonnage of unanticipated foreign grain needed if their crop production was cut by even twenty percent would be impossible to execute. Yes, China would be perfect, he thought.
“But delivering the Big Orange will be tough there,” one assistant said.
“We can recommend it and let the logistics team tell us it can’t be done,” Patton responded.
“But why shoot a horse that’s already dead?” asked his longtime friend, colleague, and project manager, Bob Jenkins, a brilliant agricultural scientist that hid his killer mind behind a good old Nebraska farm boy persona.
“What do you mean?” Patton had asked him as the other members of the group looked at Bob.
“Our populous neighbors from the Far East have 337 million acres of arable land. Their kind and benevolent government has finally admitted that two percent of that acreage is too polluted to grow crops. And be aware, they aren’t acres of land like we have in Nebraska. That’s mighty big of them to finally fess up they got a problem. But not big enough. The UN’s numbers don’t agree with the Chinese numbers and suggest that eight million acres, more than twenty percent of the land, are so filled with carcinogenic metals that any crops grown there will make going hungry feel like a picnic in the park. Heck there’s enough cadmium in the soil to put half the population on dialysis.
“Now I love the fine folks at the UN,” Jenkins continued, “but everyone in this room knows that some of the UN’s official commission reports might fudge things a little this way or that, depending on whom they want to pick on or whom they want to keep happy. If my French amie, the esteemed Dr. Genevieve Mitterand, isn’t familiar with the American use of the word ‘fudge’ in the context of my statement, just think of that feller Pierre who gave you a box of chocolates to prove his love for you, when all along you knew that what he really wanted was to get you in the sack.”
Jenkins would have explained the idiomatic background of “in the sack” to the unsmiling Mitterand had Patton not given him an impatient nod and roll of his hand to keep moving.
Nonplussed, Jenkins forged on: “The good folks at the UN get ignored by the Chinese so much they toned the report down so that maybe they’ll get along a little better. I guarantee it. And I would know. I think I’ve personally worn out three pairs of my mighty fine Timberland hiking boots tromping over half them 337 million acres taking samples.”
“What are you saying Bob?” Patton had said, interrupting Jenkins’ cogent but meandering stream of thought. “What’s your point? You’re convincing me Shandong is ideal.”
“Plenty of time to turn up the heat there, Rodger. As part of the second or third phases of our operations. Unless they do our job for us all by themselves, we can make a bad situation worse. But right now, there are so many variables in what makes the Chinese agricultural system run, and this is my real point, I’m not sure what I’d claim or not claim as our doing when things go bad. We can’t control test conditions. We won’t be able to project future results when we amp up scalability.”
Impossible to argue, Patton thought then and now. Discussion moved from China and the majority of scientists at the table wanted the team to look hard at Central Africa. Jenkins again derailed the train of thought, reminding his colleagues that ironically, famine was such a widespread and perennial condition of the region that the compassionate aid infrastructure was too developed to let their coming disaster kill the number of people they wanted dead. Sure, half the grain intended for famine victims rotted in ports because of the region’s brutal politics. But a lot of food would get through. Too much. Too many NGOs and ministries stood ready to defy the warlords and deliver it.
“We’ve already seen enough prolonging of misery by blocking nature’s own plan,” Patton said. “I don’t think I could stand the disappointment. Where else?”
Jenkins’ alternative made immediate sense to everyone at the table. Patton smiled as he thought of Jenkins’ surprising proposal.
The Ukraine. Russia’s breadbasket. The region was already filled with suspicion and gunfire. It was a powder keg ready to ignite. If not immediately, then as soon as the store shelves in Moscow were empty of bread. Brilliant.
Claire Stevens would have sulked at not getting her way even if she knew an alternative choice was right. Not Patton. Aces in their places. Dr. Robert Jenkins was right. Why hire brilliant people and not listen to them?
Patton broke from his reflections as he steered the Audi onto his block. He was disappointed he had not given Rachmaninov any attention.
I have to give myself some breathing room.
He pulled the sleek automobile into the narrow single car garage. The latest reports he had read earlier that evening—why read again? He nearly had them memorized—gnawed at and twisted his guts. When had he ever experienced such eviscerating impatience? Yes, I need to row. And wait patiently. He thought of their final choice for the mass defoliation of grain beta again.
Patton loosened his belt with a sigh. He tugged down his trousers and threw them on top of his suit coat and shirt. It was too hard to bend over and pull off his socks, so he put his right foot on the heel of his left sock, almost falling when he pried the sock off by lifting his left leg.
I have to lose 100pounds. I must row. Every day.
The Ukraine it was. What was one more unidentified airplane flying over rolling farmland?
27
New York City
BURKE CONTINUED TO NURSE TONIC water in a highball glass in the Oak Room located in the Plaza Hotel, a wood paneled bar half a flight down on 57th Street, just south of Central Park. He had been there an hour already. This was no time to have a drink and a drink would have to wait until the operation was complete. He would need one. But now he needed a place to wait for Intel without looking like he was loitering. No one knew he was only sipping tonic but the bartender. He needed to fit in. No one knew his exact location except his men on the street, but you could never be too careful.
It didn’t help that a middle-aged blonde in a little black dress that revealed long tanned legs below and an ample décolletage above the scoop neck was hitting on him. Again. At least she kept trying to strike up a conversation. He would put her out of her misery and tell her directly that nothing was going to happen between them, but that wouldn’t be fitting in. So he laughed and gave quick responses to her incessant banter.
She crowded in a little closer and began to run a finger on top of his hand.
He didn’t want this right now. His agent—heck, she was nothing more than an amateur thief and hooker—had shot and uploaded six pictures to him. And just as suddenly she went silent.
Burke spoke three languages fluently and could butcher two more, including Greek. He just wasn’t sufficiently versed on the alphabet and grammatical structure Alexander used to trust his immediate translation. Alexander had no formal education, but had come up with what seemed to be a pigeon of modern and Koine Greek in meticulous Cyrillic lettering. What he skimmed over couldn’t be what his client expected to glean from Jonathan Alexander’s journal. It had nothing to do with business.
He kept coming back to what he could make out. The blood red horse of the apocalypse. The beast. Napoleon. Hitler. Alexander the Great. Western Civilization against the rest of the world. The will to rule. Put it all together and it was a fantasy that conspiracy theorists and theological nuts dreamed of in their arcane contemplations.
It was the stuff of mass genocide. No way. Not even a megalomaniac like Alexander would consider such thoughts. Or would he?
Burke needed to stay focused on what was right in front of him— except the blonde’s cleavage and wandering hands that had worked down to the top of his thigh. He had more pressing issues now. Primarily a missing operative. He would confirm a better translation of the opening pages of the journal later.
That’s all Pauline transmitted. Then she just stopped. That was more than ten hours ago. No word from her since. A lack of communication would be fine and expected had she not started sending pictures in the first place. He had embedded a number in her smartphone to call if she had questions, needed to share information or was in trouble. The line was picked up by someone who identified himself as a worker at La Bon Bouche patisserie in Luxemburg. Henri was reliable and could handle information and most problems. If it was an emergency situation, Pauline’s call would be immediately routed directly into Burke’s permanent cell, never used but carefully guarded for one call only, hers, which was always on and always at his side. He switched phones often, but the randomized satellite path from his number would always find where he was and what he was using once he added a program through an app he dubbed Martian Invasion into the new unit. Pauline’s instructions had been to make contact only if absolutely necessary. Alexander was a formidable man and knew what was going on around him. She had called only once in the past six months. That was three days ago to let him know she was going to make the move to lift Alexander’s journal on their trip to Bentonville.
Bentonville? What the heck was Alexander doing in Bentonville? Was he planning to take control of Walmart, the largest company in the world? Retail didn’t seem like his style. But who knows?
Until he got Pauline in Alexander’s camp, it had been nearly impossible to follow the man. It was his second month on the assignment when it dawned on him that Alexander had a double. It wasn’t hard to figure out after that when Alexander wanted to keep his whereabouts a secret. His double would show up at his estate on the French Riviera or his ranch in Argentina.
His mind traveled back to Pauline. What had happened? Burke hoped it was a simple matter that she had heard someone coming—probably the human killing machine named Jules—and had aborted before being exposed. She would return the journal where she found it and wait for a better time to finish. But he knew that was wishful thinking. Alexander’s Gulfstream left Bentonville and landed at the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey two hours ago. His watcher confirmed what he already knew in his heart. Pauline didn’t get off the plane. Neither did Jules. What more evidence did he need that her cover was blown and she was somewhere being questioned or already dead? For the first time in a violent career spent among the worst the world had to offer, he had failed. He had not delivered Alexander’s journal to his client.
Burke had lost operatives before. Two to be exact. But both men were professional dogs of war that ful
ly understood the risk-reward nature of the business. Pauline wasn’t professional. He first saw her in the lobby bar of the Hostel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome. She was the escort on the arm of an Italian businessman. So technically, she was a professional. Burke had just finished a job for the Director General of the Gendarmerie Corps of the Vatican City State. The Catholic Church was being blackmailed by a con artist from Boston, Massachusetts. Burke delivered a report—an expensive report—that capped the Vatican’s liability to his fees and an already hefty legal bill. But not the multi-million-dollar settlement the man Burke exposed was seeking.
The Italian businessman drank heavily and began to get loud and aggressive. When Pauline didn’t respond the way he wanted to one of his crude jokes he slapped her on the face. Burke was old school Middle America. A man doesn’t hit a woman—unless she pulls a gun on him first, which had happened to Burke on more than one occasion. He still had never struck a woman.
Burke acted quickly. He walked over to the man and using only his forefinger gave a quick, sharp tap to the notch above the man’s sternum, just below the throat. A level three pressure point, it was not intended to cause pain or permanent damage. But the love tap created an immediate and powerful gag reflex—it’s tough to be a tough guy when you feel like you are about to vomit—followed by queasiness, and then what felt like an involuntary step—or flop—backward, which was his desired effect. This trick always worked for Burke. Even the most belligerent combatant backed off. The other reason it was one of his favorite nonlethal moves was that it usually went completely unnoticed. If someone did see his finger dart forward, it would appear to be nothing more than some angry finger wagging, with maybe a little poke to the chest. Nothing to get too concerned about. Mind your own business.
The man sat down with a stunned but docile expression. He probably didn’t realize how lucky he was. Burke wanted to punch him in the nose with the base of his palm to hear cartilage and bone crunch. But he restrained himself.