by M. K. Gilroy
The new man pulled out a document that was at least fifteen pages long and slid it across the table to Wheeler.
“Read it, please,” was all he said.
“Is this a job offer?”
“Read it.”
Greene and Rasmussen watched him expressionlessly.
Patrick looked at the stoic agents. He would find no clues to what was on the paper from these two.
What a strange turn of events. Who would have ever guessed that Jason Anderson was the son of a billionaire?
He started reading. If the document in front of him could be believed, he was going to be paid a lot of money as an independent contractor to attempt to reconnect with him—and spy on the son of one of the richest men in the world.
Could that be true?
He started over at the first page and read every word carefully a second time.
Washington, D.C.
Gwen Hampton twirled a strand of hair with her forefinger. She pulled the tress into a straight line and examined the black and white streaks. To color or not to color? Once you started down that road, it was a commitment to one more task on the to-do list.
She was disappointed in Markham’s report. If she was to go to the president to let him know that Jonathan Alexander was a threat to national and global security, she needed more than the the bits and pieces Markham overheard and brought to her.
She knew she shouldn’t, but after watching five TV monitors with alarming events for the past few hours, she couldn’t resist. She pulled the emergency pack of Kools from her bottom left desk drawer. She popped a cigarette from the pack, lit it with a cheap Bic lighter with Betty Boop on it, and inhaled deeply. How far behind was the vodka she kept hidden behind the ice cube trays in the kitchenette of her office suite?
Los Angeles. Turin. London. Moscow. Berlin. Paris.
Why did she suspect that these were just preliminaries and the real carnage was to follow?
Then there was the question of Emanuel Heller. He was on to something and up to something. He was involved with Jonathan Alexander in some way. Hopefully on the side of the angels, she thought.
Markham confirmed as much, but added no details or insights.
Hampton had near-unfettered access to the president, but it wouldn’t stay that way if she bugged him with rumors that may lead to nothing more than rabbit trails. He was a hunter and had made it clear, he didn’t want to shoot rabbits; he was only interested in the big game.
Bring her suspicions on Alexander organizing mass chaos or sit and listen while others speculated?
Time to go home. She might not get any sleep, but at least she could catch a shower.
Thirty minutes later Gwen Hampton’s neighborhood was rocked when four pounds of c4 exploded as she opened her back entry door.
Her husband was on business in Kansas City. He was rushed to the Richards-Gebaur Air Reserve Station and flown to D.C. in the co-pilot’s seat of a Convair F-106 at a speed of more than 1,500 miles-per-hour.
He was not brought to the morgue to identify his wife’s body. There was nothing left of her to identify.
38
The Isle of Patmos
CLAIRE STEVENS SAT ON THE balcony of her apartment overlooking the Aegean Sea. She nibbled from a small plate of fruit and cheese. She took another sip of Chardonnay. She had expected to be with Nicky. He sent her a cryptic message that he was treading water and it would be awhile before he saw her again. Nothing else. No “I miss you” or explanation.
She didn’t know if that made her angry or hurt her feelings. Cynically, it just confirmed that men were often inconsiderate brutes. Except her father. He was definitely the exception. The problem was she didn’t think she could be attracted to a man like her father. It was men like Nicky that stirred her passions.
Or could it be that it was Nicky, the crown prince and heir of Patmos, who singularly awakened desire in her?
All she could do now was wait for the Sana’a results. When she told the scientific team the name she had given to the Chimera, they were curious as to the meaning behind Mariama. Patton and Dolzhikov laughed at her sentimentality. Starnes started to make a joke out of it, saw her expression, and said in his folksy Middle America vernacular: “Hot damn, Dr. Claire, I think you picked a winner. Mariama has a sweet ring to my ears.”
That was it. Mariama it was. That pleased her, but she couldn’t show it. One thing Claire could not stand was not being taken seriously in the first place.
Claire felt restless. She stood up and leaned over the rail. Had she done the right thing? What would her parents think if she explained why she had done it? Would they even let her explain?
She looked at the distant waters. Patmos was the ark. Soon the waters that teemed with death would rise and begin to flood the earth. Not all of it. Just the parts that needed to be cleansed. According to Nicky, speaking with too much wine in him, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were targeted for the brunt of the mass executions. Asia because of its uncontrollable population growth; Africa because of its brutality and to give unfettered access to its abundant resources; the Middle East because of its religiously motivated designs on world domination—a rigid world where progress and enlightenment went to die.
Central and South America would be hit more strategically. Drug fields and centers of drug traffic would be eviscerated—the everyday people would stand up and call what they did to these predators blessed. Massive slums from Mexico City to Buenos Aires would be decimated by bombs, disease, and famine. Borders to the West would be barred shut with walls and armies. Progressive countries of culture would be preserved as much as possible.
What of Israel? Could it be quarantined from the holocaust around it?
“My uncle has made a deal,” Nicky had told her. “If terms of the deal are maintained, the country will be protected. If not; all bets are off.”
“I thought Israel was where the Battle of Armageddon was to take place in End Times prophecy,” she pointed out to Nicky. “If your uncle is to be the Beast, doesn’t that mean Israel becomes a battlefield.”
“He doesn’t believe in all that stuff literally,” Nicky responded. “He just likes the the poetry of the concept. He does intend to build heaven on earth. The plans he has to move resources to the survivors are genius.”
“So why all the attacks in Europe and the United States?”
“He knows he must show the West in small measure what would be done to them if the barbarians had the means to do so. He is assuaging their collective conscience on the part they must play to facilitate the removal of those who bring nothing but misery to the world—and getting their own homes in order.”
Claire slid the balcony door back and walked to the small bathroom. She opened the cabinet behind the mirror and selected the unmarked brown bottle that contained 90 Pristiq pills she had not used since joining The Aristotle Research Company, the shell that provided cover for Patmos.
Nicky’s terse note had worked itself inside the whorls and valleys of her brain. Did she need one now? She hesitated. Taking 50mg of the square brown Pristiq tablet would undoubtedly take the edge off the angry rumbling that was welling inside her, but even if Pfizer promised otherwise, it also took the edge off her best thinking. Her choice since grad school at University of Chicago, at least in her mind, had always come down a simple question: Do you want to be brilliant or happy?
She put the bottle back on the shelf. Patmos was the most effective drug she had ever taken and she wanted to keep it that way. Brilliance was what mattered in the grand scheme of saving the planet.
The first phase had begun. The rise of the Beast. This was a moment to savor fully.
She stepped back outside. Somewhere in the darkness Claire sensed a presence. Her mind went back to Mariama and all the other prepubescent girls she wanted to avenge. She was doing it for their future—even if many would not be alive to experience it personally. Like Mariama they would be dead, but no longer victims of paternalistic societies tha
t brutalized the weak—especially the female weak.
When Claire called a colleague to find out how Mariama, the girl, not the Chimera, was doing she was given the news that her father had killed her shortly after the family visited the GlobalHope mobile clinic.
Only a few short weeks before hearing the news, Claire’s heart would be broken. She would cry herself to sleep at night for months. But that wasn’t the case with Mariama’s death. There would be no grieving. Claire had no time for tears. Her heart was already set on the direction her life must go. She would make sure that Mariama never truly died.
Are you watching me now, Mariama? Do you know I am doing this for you?
Claire felt a little better. As she watched distant wave caps, some of the melancholy she was feeling lifted. She was doing the right thing. She was sure. It was for a little girl in a remote village of Guinea, Africa, who was floating in and out of the lungs of worshipers in Sana’a, and who would soon be introduced to others through the sharing of human fluids and other contact—and applications to population centers that were more than a whisper.
How many? How far would Mariama travel? Would she cling to life as she took it?
Stay alive, Mariama, Claire murmured. Do your work. Help me create a new world.
39
New York City
BURKE FORCED HIS EYES FROM the gruesome death of Henri on the small screen of his iPad and brought his mind back to the present.
“Why are we exiting here?” Burke asked his cabby.
Middle Easterner? Hispanic? Russian? The man hadn’t said a word during the drive so it was hard to tell.
“Dispatch said bad traffic on the Van Wyck closer to airport. I know a back way to get you there early with no trouble.”
Traffic didn’t look bad as they exited a couple miles before JFK. But road conditions changed fast in a metropolitan with twenty million residents and another three million visitors.
The driver had been relatively cautious on the highway, but now that he was on Jamaica Avenue, he started accelerating, weaving through light evening traffic, and braking hard at traffic signals like you would expect an old school New York City taxi driver to do.
What the heck? Burke wondered, his antennae suddenly up and alert to danger.
As they approached the intersection of Jamaica and Merrick, the driver powered around the corner, throwing Burke to the side. He raced past two side streets and suddenly slammed on the brakes. Burke’s head hit the Plexiglas divider between front and back seats.
The left and right doors were thrown open before the car came to a complete stop and two crew cut men were on top of him by the time he was leaning back in his seat and reaching to feel if his forehead was bleeding.
Lightly dazed, Burke still had his fighter’s wits and threw an elbow at the windpipe of the man on his left while he cranked a head butt at the man to his right. Both blows landed but the quarters were so tight the blows lacked incapacitating effect.
Both men were methodically trying to control Burke’s hands—a good sign or a bad sign flashed through Burke’s mind, realizing that if they had come to kill him he would already be dead—as he fought frantically to keep his hands free. He heard a sliding sound. Risking a glance forward, he saw the cab driver leaning through the window with a hypodermic needle. They didn’t come to kill him. They came to do to him what was done to Henri. Last chance he thought.
He seemed to relax as the needle was brought toward his shoulder. Then Burked exploded forward catching the driver on the bridge of his nose with the crown of his head in a nasty head snap. He wrenched left on top of one of his assailants, with the man on his right still gripping his wrist and being yanked along with the move. The driver tried one last stab with the needle, but Burke’s maneuver made him miss, and the cabbie stuck the point in the middle of the man on his right’s back. The attacker immediately slumped forward, almost instantly becoming dead weight on Burke’s back. One down, two to go.
The man beneath him had Burke’s wrist in a death grip and was twisting. The driver was not a trained fighter and his attempts to punch Burke were either absorbed by the man slumped on his back or were too weak to matter.
Burke sank his teeth into the left cheek of the man beneath him, his immediate threat, opening and closing his mouth to get closer to the eye orbit. He didn’t like the rusty taste of human blood any more than the average man on the street, but he was willing to do anything to survive—and avenge Pauline and Henri. The man broke off his viselike grip on Burke’s wrist to defend his face. That gave Burke the break he needed to arch back and using a combination of weight and power plant his right palm into the man’s solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs. Both of Burke’s hands shot up to the outside of the man’s neck where he expertly found the pressure points for the carotid artery and clamped onto a sleeper hold as hard as he dared. He didn’t want to kill the man by crushing his larynx, just get him to fall asleep so he could take him somewhere to interview him. The man’s face was a mess, blood flowing into his mouth and down his neck as his eyes bulged from lack of oxygen to the brain.
Where was the cab driver? He might have another needle.
Burke let go of the man, bucked the man behind him off his back, opened the left door, and stumbled out of the cab to find the driver and assess his next move.
The barrel of a silencer mounted on a Sig Sauer was pointed at his forehead.
Two familiar intense dark blue eyes stared at him, giving a simple command without a word spoken: Don’t move or you’re dead.
Behind those eyes was the man who had changed the course of Burke’s life. Colonel Arnold—just call me Arnie—Grayson.
Burke remembered words his grandma had spoken to him on many occasions: “No matter how far away from God you’ve run … you’re never too far away to pray.”
Grayson was joined by three more armed men. Nope. Grayson wasn’t there to kill him. At least not immediately. That was bad news. Burke’s pain tolerance was off the charts. But Grayson already knew that. That was even worse news.
I am indeed far away from God, Burke thought. But I think it’s time to pray.
40
Alexandria, Virginia
THE ORDERS WERE CLEAR. No more live meetings until Alexander declared otherwise.
But could Alexander be trusted? Was he capable of command? Perhaps it was time for new leadership.
Walter Wannegrin hesitated another moment, staring blankly at the flashing cursor on the black screen.
Yes, change was needed.
He typed three sentences giving the place and time for the next gathering of the chosen few. He paused again. Would they rally to him? If not, his life was finished. What of his dreams for his country? At the end of the day that was the only reason he had thrown in his lot with Alexander.
He sighed and hit send
I’m sorry Emanuel. You would never understand what I am doing. But the world has changed. All we’ve worked for to bring peace and prosperity is on the brink of collapse. New measures are needed. Even if Alexander is wrong on many things, he is right on a few things that must happen if civilization is to survive.
41
New York City
BURKE WOKE WITH A PAINFUL start. He couldn’t move. He took quick inventory. His arms and legs were strapped to a forged iron chair. He rocked his body weight back and forth and tried to move it. It was bolted to the floor. He was naked and cold. He was sitting in absolute darkness. His eyelids were taped wide open.
He rotated his neck left and right. He clinched his hands into fists and felt a mixture of pain and tingling as blood tried to find its way back into areas that were nearly numb from lack of circulation. He tested his restraints. No movement. There was little wiggle room, literally or metaphorically.
Suddenly he was blinded by a floodlight shown directly on his face. Tears flooded from the corners of his eyes as he futilely tried to clench them shut against the blinding pain.
He heard footsteps ap
proach him.
“I hope you slept well,” Colonel Grayson said quietly. “It may be awhile before you sleep again.”
“I should have killed you,” Burke spat out.
“But you didn’t so here we are. Together again.”
“What do you want with me?”
“You know what I want from you and you know what I’m willing to do to you to help you speak. But why bore you with details, most of which you can guess, based on your position. I’ll just offer you one preview of coming attractions. I need to know where the upload you were supposed to send only me is, and how many total hosts there are.”
“I should have known you were involved. This operation stunk from day one.”
“But, again, you didn’t know and so here we are together to have an intimate little chat.”
“I’ll talk if you talk.”
“No doubt, you’ll talk. Maybe I’ll talk. But that depends on my mood, not your threats. Really Burke. When did you become so melodramatic? This seems beneath one of the finest natural born killers I ever commanded.”
“You apparently didn’t train me well enough.”
“That’s obvious. Or I would be dead. I would ask why you didn’t do the smart thing and off me, but we’re short on time.”
“So what did you do with the girl?”
“By girl, do you mean Pauline? Or perhaps you are remembering Breshna.”
Burke let out a guttural snarl and struggled against his restraints with every ounce of strength he possessed. He pitched his weight forward and backward, and side to side, but the chair was anchored securely and he was merely wasting precious energy. He suddenly felt a jolt of electricity course through his body. His muscles cramped painfully against the restraints.