The FBI then turned the investigation over to the Gloaming Crimes Unit, which chased various dead ends until the publicity about the New Mexico laboratory hit. The FBI—specifically Agent Calvin James—made the connection quickly, and verified that several companies had transacted sales to the laboratory for the following equipment: storage tanks, embryo freezers, inverted microscopes, incubators, fertilizer workstations, culture dishes, and embryo dishes.
Frustratingly, though we now had hard evidence about the secret use of Governor Claremont’s laboratories, and we had evidence that Dr. Maggie Fitzpatrick had been allegedly kidnapped by a Gloaming, we could only connect the two facts in theory. And the FBI’s Gloaming Crimes Unit had to bend over backward to avoid unimpeachable evidence—which might smack of conspiracy theory—or the unit would lose weeks, sometimes months, dealing with the ACLU’s Gloaming defense league.
So the FBI’s investigation stalled until Dr. Maggie Fitzpatrick escaped from the laboratory and confirmed that she and four other doctors had been kidnapped and forced to conduct research on accomplishing procreation for the Gloaming community. Their efforts had proved unsuccessful until a female Gloaming named Leslie Claremont became the first to naturally give birth to a Gloaming baby.
But by then other troubles had begun and the FBI didn’t have the resources to investigate the laboratory.
The first bombing on a Gloaming residence occurred in Portland, Oregon. Initially it was thought to be an explosion resulting from a gas leak or some other similar occurrence. But when it was determined to have been a bomb that made the explosion, the ATF and the FBI became involved. During the investigation, the FBI found radiation traces that indicated the house had been occupied by Gloamings for a significant period of time. And strangely enough, a check of the house ownership found that the house had been bought two years earlier from an LLC. Finding the actual buyer of this property would entail combing through a maze of paperwork and shell companies designed to hide the true ownership of the house.
At first the FBI thought it might be a recurrence of the ISIS terrorist attacks from the past summer, but those three attacks were centered on commercial or government buildings and none of the evidence recovered from the cell indicated that they ever considered residential targets. With the Gloaming community so closed off, we knew that any number of possible theories could account for someone wanting to hurt the Gloamings.
The second bombing occurred in Tempe, Arizona, at another residence in a quiet upper-class community close to the mountains. Device fragments found at this scene had identifiers inscribed in Italian, which the FBI and Interpol traced to a construction supplier in Naples. Interpol was already investigating two other bombings in Italy and Germany under similar circumstances—both Gloaming houses too.
No Gloamings or humans were harmed during the explosions, but the Gloaming residents vanished and refused to be interviewed. Therefore, any hope of finding a motive seemed very distant, until Agent Zumthor, the lead FBI investigator, found a damaged hard drive in the Tempe, Arizona, rubble. They recovered data showing different shipments of dextromethorphan to different locations in the United States. DXM is a psychoactive cough suppressant found in many over-the-counter and prescription medicines and can cause delusions and hallucinations, depending on the dosage. The Gloamings frequently acquired and ingested DXM, although this hard drive was the first evidence we had showing they were actively trafficking in the drug.
The other documents on the hard drive addressed certain members of the Catholic clergy in North and South America who were sympathetic to the Gloaming cause and open to re-creation. The Gloaming Council had never publicly addressed the Pope’s re-creation and the schism it had caused within the Catholic Church. But it seemed the Gloamings were far more interested in that situation than they let on.
The Order of Bruder Klaus and its leader, Bishop Lawrence Thomas, were out in front as the strongest opponents of the Gloaming interest in the Catholic Church. They were never positively confirmed to be involved in the murder of the cardinals at the Vatican or of the Pope—if he was indeed actually murdered—but most intelligence agencies in America and in Europe regarded the order as the organization behind the assassinations.
The United States government never took formal legal action against the order, but the FBI did keep a close eye on them with infrequent surveillance. And they did scrutinize the order on the few occasions when some of the monks went abroad for various activities. However, the FBI never found any evidence of wrongdoing as the monks and clergy were extremely careful to disguise any criminal activities or the true purpose of their trips.
The investigation into the bombings certainly helped lend our intelligence community further context regarding Gloaming goals and beliefs, but we were still no closer to finding a motive for the attacks. Agent Zumthor—who, it should be noted, was in the minority at the time—believed these attacks were more than a Gloaming family squabble, and that greater forces were at play that reached into the upper ranks of the Gloamings and the Catholic Church.
Those greater forces finally made their presence known with the appearance of a single fingerprint. Italian authorities, at the request of the FBI and Interpol to investigate a potential lead, found a strip of metal at their attack site—which they surmised to be from whatever box had housed the explosive device—with a single fingerprint.
Interpol and our own FBI databases both came up with the same match. I still remember the phone call from Agent Zumthor when he delivered the news about the fingerprint hit.
“Who the hell is Bernard Kieslowki?” I asked.
If it was possible to be both exhausted and excited at the same time, that’s how Zumthor sounded. He sighed. “The Order of Bruder Klaus, ma’am. Here we go again.”
1 The Seattle-Tacoma International Airport incident highlighted the damage that these hackers could inflict on United States civil aviation and the economy as a whole. The hackers were able to change the computer-generated flight progress strip for all flights in the control tower. The plane’s transponder broadcasts an encoded radio signal that provides the controller with the aircraft’s flight number, altitude, airspeed, and destination. An electronic figure representing the airplane appears on the controller’s radar screen with all relevant flight information next to it.
US Airways flight 1231 and Aer Lingus flight 277 were both entering the airspace for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport when their respective flight patterns were altered by the hackers. US Airways flight 1231 flew over the airport’s traffic pattern traveling south-southeastward. At the same time, Aer Lingus flight 277 was climbing through the traffic pattern at twenty-five thousand feet and collided with the US Airways aircraft, killing all passengers on board both planes.
Other planes were forced to divert to other airports, and other aircraft were left circling while awaiting permission to land after the controllers ordered visual flight rules. The result was the worst domestic aviation premeditated crime in U.S. history.
2 Hackers based in Brazil but working on the orders of various countries engaged in state-sponsored terrorism, attacking the servers of Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital, a private hospital established in 1922 and generally accepted as one of the best hospitals in Asia. The group entered the hospital computer network through an SQL injection exploit. Once inside the network, the group modified several active medical devices, including insulin pumps, heart defibrillators, and CT scan machines. The heart defibrillators were modified to deliver an excess amount of electricity, which killed the relevant patients. The insulin pumps were made to deliver an inordinate amount of insulin to the patients, resulting in five deaths and three patients in comas.
The hackers modified various medical charts and courses of treatments thereby assigning the incorrect medication to various patients, resulting in numerous deaths and significant bodily harm. They interrupted several remote access surgeries done by computer, causing several deaths. The hackers also altered work order
s on all patients within the hospital system. The work of the hackers ultimately resulted in the deaths of seventy-five patients and significant medical harm to three hundred others.
3 Relevant portions of the report concluded, “While we had no means to test for actual ‘egg quality,’ with our proprietary anti-Mullerian hormone testing of the ovaries we were somewhat able to ensure the viability of the eggs used in our processes. Most of the women in our test group were between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, given that as women age past thirty-five years, the probability of embryo transfers and pregnancy with live birth drops more than 70 percent. Unfortunately, the percentage of Gloaming assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles that resulted in a pregnancy were zero, although the percentage of eggs successfully fertilized was 10 percent. More specifically, regarding fertilization, the results were:
—Gloaming Man to Human Woman = 2
—Human Man to Gloaming Woman = 3
—Gloaming Man to Gloaming Woman = 5
“Given our relative success in fertilization with one party having Gloaming traits, we believe that future advancements will lead to a probable and successful pregnancy resulting in a live birth of a baby that shares at least 50 percent Gloaming DNA.”
4 Cranston’s research further indicated that the hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone were secreted naturally and did not seem to have an impact on the female Gloaming’s inability to engage in reproduction. The main point the study considered was that female Gloamings lost the ability to have a defined menstrual cycle after they were re-created. However, the female Gloaming did have certain physical characteristics that seemed to mirror a menstrual cycle, such as the follicular phase.
Chapter 15
In-Between Days
The Seeker
I miss my mother and father. I miss my sister. But I can’t go back. I’m not even certain we share the same blood.
Instead I seek out the sounds and sights of the night skies, shadowed horizons, darkened homes. On some nights when my mind empties, I can hear the silence, apart from others, maybe in the desert or a forest. All of my preceding lives leaking from my mind. The daughter, the student, the sister, the friend—all of them walking into the trees or the scrubland. Their faces turned against me as they drift away.
These days it is my senses that have replaced them, no me, no others, each feeling a new chorus of the world. Those drugs I used to do—alcohol or cocaine, H or Molly—are ghosts compared to this. Instead, the sound and light—I feel my nerves move up and down my body floating above it all. I seek out music in a roadside bar, people at the pool tables, lonesome bartenders, the lights and noise. I could have stayed out all night—for weeks if my body didn’t crave the cold dirt in the ground. Or more friends, if I didn’t view them as the bird sees the worm before it’s plucked from the leaf. The hawk, the hare. The panther. The—
People look different now. I see their faces and their facial cues of emotion: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt, surrender. Even before they show it. A muscle twitch that maybe even they didn’t know happened. A stride, a limp—every step taken tells me something about what they are thinking in that moment.
I can smell their fear and happiness. Everything about them fascinates me. Was I ever so easy to unlock…
It’s clear I am not myself anymore. That even these memories, these words, these stories, are a kind of liability. But desire pulls me back just as it pulls me forward, and all of these thoughts that must have been forgotten come back now and again when I’m listening to an old cowboy strum a tune, or Vivaldi on a car stereo, or just a tune of the wind in the trees. I’ll just have to search for the joy in experiences and love…the joy of this place—raising the dead when it suits us…
What remains is the slow, pulsing experience of tomorrow, the next night, the one after that. The song of the sad musician dying in my mouth, or the deer I follow through the field, or the evening owl who, like me, feels both defined and released by his prey. Someone once told me that if you see the sun rise once, a child being born, a deer taking its last breath, you’ll always want to see it again. What more can they do to me? There’s no question or questioning of this world—just what is next.
Chapter 16
Spring
Thirty-Four Months After the NOBI Discovery
Hugo Zumthor
Special Agent in Charge of Gloaming Crimes Unit, FBI
Washington, DC, is my town and it’s beautiful on the outside—where it counts, I thought to myself as I looked out my office window. I tend to idle with my thoughts sometimes, which I was doing the afternoon Interpol reached out to the Gloaming Crimes Unit as the revelation of Bernard Kieslowki, radical and terrorist, came across my radar with a series of pings in my inbox, one after another, before I could even open the first.
The intra-agency sharing of intel was still somewhat new, so it came as a shock to hear that the Drug Enforcement Administration and Interpol were closely tracking Miguel Velazquez Trevino, head of the Gulf Coast cartel, the largest and most profitable drug cartel in the world. Trevino was known as El Gusano—the worm—for smuggling wares into the United States via sophisticated, hard-to-trace tunnels constructed of reinforced steel beams and wired with electricity, proprietary tunnel ventilation, and even a primitive rail system. A crime king like Trevino re-creating? This was one of our greatest governmental fears come true.
I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into it—in a manner of speaking.1
I was sent to Naples to coordinate efforts with Interpol. We had received information that Trevino was attempting to enter Europe, where he would be re-created by an elusive Sicilian crime lord named Abramo Moretti.2 This all happened rapidly, though once I got to Rome it took me a while to get used to their languid pace of investigation: so much sitting around, talking, waiting for things to “pop up.” Case in point: the afternoon I sat at an outdoor table in a Rome coffee bar with Interpol’s Agent Emanuela Baresi, watching the crowds make their way along the busy streets.
“How can you live here?” I asked. “I’ve had my damn pocket almost picked twice.”
Emanuela shook her shiny black hair and smiled. “I used to live in New York City,” she said, as if that alone answered my question.
I tapped the table with my espresso cup. “What’s good about living in Rome?”
“It’s not New York.”
I had to grin. “Funny. What’s bad about Rome?”
“It’s not New York.” Emanuela threw her head back and laughed.
We were watching a four-story eighteenth-century apartment building, about half a block from our table. Trevino was reported to be hiding inside, a suspicion that was confirmed when—as I lifted my hand to order another espresso—an explosion threw me from my seat.
An hour later, Emanuela and I and her tactical team stood in the burned-out cavern of a third-floor apartment. Money of all different denominations and countries was scattered along the floor. We found the partly charred body of Miguel Velazquez Trevino, who it seemed had not re-created after all. “Better call Mexico,” Emanuela muttered.
And, as if on cue, one of Emanuela’s officers handed her a composite picture of two faces. “Who are they?” I asked.
“Two men seen leaving the adjacent apartment before the explosion,” she said.
I studied the photo. “Do you know who they are?”
“Oh, without a doubt,” she said. “They would be Bernard Kieslowki and Kamel Paquet. The Order of Bruder Klaus.”
A French citizen, the son of a Polish émigré and a French mother, Bernard Kieslowki was raised in various towns in France due to his father’s tuberculosis, which led Kristof Kieslowki to a number of doctors around the country. Bernard’s mother, Juliette, was an engineer by training and, to her agnostic husband’s dismay, homeschooled their son and only child, Bernard, to ensure his strict Catholic education.
Young Bernard fell gravely ill at age sixteen. His mother found
him incoherent one morning, in the throes of a high-grade fever. In the evening, Bernard suddenly screamed out, “Do not fear my condition for I bear on my body the marks of our Lord,” then fell back into a coma. When Juliette rushed in, Bernard’s hands displayed the wounds of Jesus Christ on the cross: the stigmata.
The coma and stigmata lasted for days. Juliette insisted, once again to the dismay of her husband, Kristof, that Bernard did not need to be transported to the hospital. He would recover with prayer. So she prayed, next to his bed, day and night. On the seventh day, as Kristof was almost to the point of forcibly removing his son and taking him to the hospital—his wife be damned—Bernard displayed wounds on his forehead similar to those caused by the crown of thorns. This is the story, at least, and at the end of the seventh day, late in the night, Bernard woke up from his coma with a loud cry.
The doctors had no answer for his recovery. This drove Juliette into an even stricter religious life, and she moved into a separate bedroom from her husband to spend more time in prayer, reciting the rosary for hours a day.
Later that year, Bernard entered Bellebranche Abbey, to Juliette’s delight. Even Kristof was supportive—he could see his son truly wanted a religious life. At the seminary, Bernard befriended a fellow seminarian, Kamel Paquet. Kamel was born in a mountain village in Algeria, near an ancient French-Algerian monastery named the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Orphaned when a band of extremists slaughtered most of the villagers, Kamel was left at the monastery gates and then transported to Bellebranche Abbey, where he and Bernard met and, being of identical age, quickly became friends. After their ordination they spent a few years working the farm on the abbey grounds, tending to the blueberry plants, avocado trees, and apple orchard.
A People's History of the Vampire Uprising Page 24