by Eric M Hill
Director Beams limited his impatience with this man to an audible exhale. “No, we didn’t do it, and we don’t know who did. We don’t know that anyone did. It’s just a theory.”
“A theory?”
“Yes, a theory.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
Director Beams looked at Director Kellerman. Kellerman said, “We need you to find a cure.”
“You need me to find a cure to make people stop robbing and raping and murdering?” He scanned each face. “I’ll get right on it. I should have some tablets to you in a couple of days. Or would you like an ointment?”
“Dr. Anderson,” said Director Kellerman, “if anyone can find a cure—assuming the spike was scientifically created—it’s you. And if it was created in someone’s laboratory and you can’t get a cure…or if it wasn’t created…then Dr. Anderson, the nation’s gone. There is no Plan B.”
Dr. Anderson could hardly believe what he’d heard. The country was what…weeks…months…a year or two away from a total meltdown, and their answer was for him to come up with a wonder drug to cure all that was evil in human nature? He stood to his feet.
“Dr. Anderson, please.”
The IC heads were shocked at the voice.
“This is President Cuning.”
Chapter 11
“Mr. President,” said Anderson, surprised that the president had removed his deniability.
“What my staff has told you is true. We’re at an existential intersection in the life of our nation. Unfortunately, from what we see every direction we know to take appears to end in one apocalypse or another. We don’t have the resources to meet this challenge. I’m asking you as president of the United States, and on behalf of three hundred and eighty million Americans, please help us.”
Every faced turned to Dr. Anderson.
He sat.
Dr. Anderson’s contempt and sarcasm wilted, but not his suspicion. Minus FBI Director Fulcrum—and given time they may ruin even her—he was in a room full of intelligence heads who had already proven that either through an egregious lack of integrity or a shocking capacity for ignorance, their panic, and for some their ambition, made them capable of anything. Perhaps it was presumptuous to put the DIA chief in this category, but he didn’t know anything about him.
But he did know a lot about the president. He was a conniving, super ambitious, scoundrel who would ask his own wife to turn a trick for him if it could get him that one winning vote. He cared nothing for the Bill of Rights, human rights, or what was right. In fact, the only thing right was utility. If it worked, it was right.
Now this handsome, charming, demon of a politician who had used the powers of government to expand his executive powers, and had gained dangerous and unprecedented leverage over the judicial and legislative branches of government was asking his assistance—in his most fabricated humility.
“Dr. Anderson?” the president’s deep, smooth voice filled the room.”
“My apologies, Mr. President. I’m just pondering some things.”
“I understand,” the president lied.
The others in the room did not understand. The president of the United States had just made himself legally vulnerable by speaking, and had begged this man in front of his staff to help save the nation. And he was thinking it over?
Finally, Dr. Anderson stopped looking at the table and his hands and looked up. “Mr. President.”
“Yes, Dr. Anderson.”
“I deeply love my country. I deeply respect the office of the president. And my love and respect for the Constitution and its Bill of Rights is even deeper. That’s why I must respectfully preface my response by stating unequivocally that should I provide any assistance whatsoever to my nation in the fashion your representatives have stipulated, it will be in spite of your request and not because of it.
“You, sir, are the darkest of darks stains on the presidency we have endured since the Great Crime Spike. I find myself shaken…trembling and confused at the words of your directors. Brilliance does not insulate me from fear. So, yes, like the rest of you, sir, I am afraid. You ask me to do something that is akin to walking to the moon. And, yet, I wonder, knowing the kind of person you are, and the extra-Constitutional ambitions you have, were I to find that road to the moon and deliver the cure you desire, would you become an even more virulent disease than you presently are?
“What I am saying, Mr. President, is I truly do not know whether it would not be better to let the nation have its civil war. We’ve had one before—a horrible, bloody mess, and somehow by the grace of God we managed to turn it into something wonderful. The worst that can happen is we’ll get through war what you’re trying to do through peace.”
The only sound that could be heard in the room was that of blood boiling. Surprisingly, the president’s voice was calm, smooth, unruffled. “I understand and I appreciate your candor, Dr. Anderson. I have not always made the best decisions. Nor have I always lived up to the ideals of our once great nation. Unfortunately, and to my regret—I’m sure history will be brutally honest about my shortcomings—I’ve allowed my ambitions to come under the spell of the allure of power.
“Dr. Anderson, you do not trust me, and for good reason. I’ve done very little to earn it. But our nation stands on the edge of a precipice and the slightest wind can send it spiraling. We are in need of heroes. Perhaps it’s too late for me to be their hero, but it’s not too late for me to be their servant.” The president paused, his next words spoken in a slow cadence and filled with passion. “My only hope is that your love of country will prove greater than your well-deserving contempt and distrust of me.”
All eyes again went to Dr. Anderson.
Dr. Anderson had been caught off guard by the president’s apparent humility. It was something he’d never seen in the man. He didn’t even know he was capable of humility. And Cuning certainly wasn’t known for accepting blame. But now he was admitting to not living up to democratic ideals…letting his ambition get the best of him. He sounded chastened. Contrite. He’d asked for a chance to be a servant of the people.
Had the national crisis truly changed this man?
There was something like the snapping of a finger deep in Dr. Anderson’s soul. It wasn’t loud, but loud enough.
Wait a minute, he thought. Have you gone mad? This is Cuning. Anderson could see in his mind the president sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. His feet propped up on the desk. That smug grin on his pride-filled face, holding his crotch, as he often did in private meetings, and waiting for one of his most vocal critics to fall into the orbit of his legendary charm.
“Mr. President—”
Everyone leaned forward. Not the president.
“—I gave a speech close to a week ago at the University of Georgia. During my speech, a couple of young people, two patriotic young men, they made public statements critical of the government. Three days later they both were found hung. One hanging from a football goal post. The other from his fourth-floor window.”
“That’s tragic,” said the president.
“Yes. Yes, it is. Recalling that ironic tragedy puts me in a no-win situation. Whatever I decide to do, I will have to live with the guilt of my decision.” He looked at each person in the room, then looked up. “Blood is better than slavery. I will not help you, Mr. President.” Dr. Anderson stood. “Director Kellerman, shall I see my way out?”
The smug grin left the president’s face. He took his hand from his crotch and dropped his feet from the desk onto the floor. He had the look of a demon denied.
Chapter 12
The meeting room was empty except for Jacob Kellerman and the camera lens. The president got right to it. “I want to hear right now from your mouth that this man will be enthusiastically working for us within a week.”
Kellerman blinked. Are you crazy? Did you not hear the man?
“The person who sits in your seat needs to have an answer to this man,” Cuning pressed. “
We don’t have a Plan B.”
Kellerman was spinning. Had the president just threatened his job?
“If you can’t do the job, I’ll find someone who can. Now, tell me how you’re going to get this man on the team.”
Kellerman was in full panic mode. He didn’t know what to do. If the president couldn’t convince Anderson to help, why was he dropping this crap onto his lap? “Mr. President,” he offered tentatively, not knowing what his next words were going to be.
“What?” the president snapped.
That was it! It came to him in a dangerous, brilliant flash. “His daughter. If something were to happen to her…” He let it hang in the air.
The president’s smug grin slowly returned. His feet went back atop his desk, and his hand landed on his crotch. The demon loved it. “Violent crime is out of control,” he said. “If it touched his little girl, he may be motivated to do something about it.”
“We could—”
“I don’t need the details. Just the results.”
Silence.
Concern replaced the president’s grin. “Super brain will connect the dots.”
Silence.
“Jacob!” he yelled, startling Kellerman, “he connects the dots and we’ll have to kill him. I want this man dead, just not yet. The time has to be right. We…can’t…kill…this…man. Are we communicating?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. He won’t know it’s us. I give you my word.”
***
Kellerman’s word wasn’t good enough. President Cuning used his encrypted phone to make a call.
***
“You could’ve used our parking,” Deputy Director Christian said to Dr. Anderson, with a trace of sarcasm as they readied to part.
“I value my privacy,” Anderson replied, and walked away.
The deputy cursed him under his breath. His phone vibrated. His second phone. The phone given him secretly by Jeffrey Dean, one of the president’s special assistants. The phone no one knew he had—even his immediate boss, Director Kellerman.
He pulled it out and looked at it in disbelief at first. He snapped out of his surprise at the code that came to the screen. He didn’t need the code to know who it was, but the code made it unmistakable. He punched his own code in halfway and stopped. He thought of what Anderson had said about privacy. He punched the rest of the code in and spoke. “Two minutes.” He shut off the call and put the phone into his pocket.
Christian knew he was packing—when was he not? But he was about to go outside the safety of the building. He touched the bulge of the left inside holster. He hurried out and crossed a street, went down a block, and disappeared into a large store. His phone vibrated again. He punched in the receiving code.
“Director Christian, this is President Cuning.”
Director? “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“I need you to make sure that a delicate operation does not go awry.”
Chapter 13
Kyle and Elizabeth Anderson had named their baby Summer as soon as they knew the gender of the baby. Her name changed the moment they saw her green eyes.
Emerald.
What else could her name be but Emerald? And so she had grown to become. Tough, yet not as hard as she appeared; beautiful, yet anything but flawless. One of her many flaws was she was quite ungifted in her selection of men. Or as she liked to rephrase it positively, she knew how to pick the wrong men.
Nice men. Accomplished men. Good men. Sexy men. Even kind men. But for a reason neither she nor even her brilliant father could figure out, she couldn’t keep any man. No children. No man. No prospects. Why didn’t men want her beyond her body?
But she was wrong. A man was watching her now, crouched in a van. And he wanted her body and her money.
Emerald walked across the parking lot without scanning it first, and with both arms loaded with bags. She was lost in thought about hitting thirty years of age and being yet single and childless. In her purse was the latest model safety perimeter device. One of many massively popular safety devices created by her father and distributed by one of his many companies, Anderson Digital & Electronics. An SPD-13P.
The P stood for premium, but since Emerald hadn’t bothered to look at its screen for threats, that was a moot point. It was also a moot point that she had a gun in her purse and not in her hand hidden under one of the many bags she was carrying.
Emerald walked straight, crossed several rows and turned left. One of the tall parking lot lights was her marker. The car was parked farther away than she had liked, and as unsafety conscious as she was, she would never have parked this far away from the entrance were it not for the police sniper towers, of which there were two.
Most shopping districts didn’t have police sniper towers, but the more plush ones went out of their way to assure their high-dollar clientele that it was safe to spend their money at their exclusive stores. But the tower that had given Emerald the confidence to park so far away was now blocked on the west by a high-top white service van.
She was wearing her car ring. So she was able to unlock the door by pressing her thumb against the middle part of her middle finger once. She walked between the van and her car on the driver side and opened the back door. She placed her bags inside and closed it. The van’s door behind her quickly slid open and a man jumped out.
Chapter 14
Chief of Police Barry King was Dr. Anderson’s friend. So were many other members of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, of which Anderson was an honorary member. But since King was the police chief of Austin, his was the sad responsibility of informing Dr. Anderson what had happened to his daughter.
***
Dr. Anderson knew that when he died, his brilliant mind died with him. It wasn’t arrogance to acknowledge the world’s loss would be incalculable. So every second had to contribute to the betterment of the world. There were diseases to conquer. Medical equipment to design. Engineering feats to achieve. Wealth to share. Wars to prevent. And nations to save. America being at the top of the list.
All of this left absolutely no time for such non-earth-changing things as leisure or love. Not one second. And, sadly, that was why two wonderful women were now his ex-wives, and why he knew there’d never be a third. It was also why his daughter, Emerald, whom he loved dearly, was bitter toward him.
It was a cruel irony that a man known as the smartest person to ever live, and one who had achieved the impossible in so many areas, could not duplicate the feat of tens of millions of non-brilliant husbands who had managed to get and keep healthy relationships with their wives and children.
That he was incapable of doing this was a fact. He was hardwired by his gift of brilliance to fail at love. Against his will, science had firmly planted a white flag of surrender into his heart. And each attempt to pull it out had produced such a hemorrhaging of the blood vessels of his soul that he became impossible to live with. The god of science had given him a gift, but not without cost.
He’d been thinking lately—and bleeding in his soul again. He’d missed her birthday once more. How does a man with a mind like mine forget his daughter’s birthday? he wondered. Maybe he could spend some time with her. It had been a long time. Actually, it had been over three years.
Immediately, the battle of his compulsion began.
Cancer was a hideous, biological terrorist that had tormented the human race forever. As early as 3000 B.C., an Egyptian trauma surgery textbook had spoken of the condition of cancer and said of it, “There is no treatment.”
Dr. Anderson focused in a simmer. Five thousand years later things hadn’t changed much. Oh, there were treatments for some cancers if you caught them soon enough. All you had to do was chop off a body part or blast the cancer (and the person) with radiation or prescribe poisonous chemicals worthy of a horror film, and the person would be hopefully cured—if the definition of cured was expanded to include made worse by the treatment, especially chemotherapy. He knew he was being melodramatic. But the ugly
truth was that cancer had grown ever more brazen and untouchable and intelligent.
Anderson had never shared with anyone that he had long known that his brain seemed to have gears, like a car. He operated normally in first, often in second, and third…third gear was where some of his most remarkable discoveries and inventions occurred.
It was where his mind got off the track of hyper-conventional thinking to hyper-unconventional thinking. Thought processes and contemplations that would be considered science fiction by those trying to be kind, and fantasy by those with no such compunction to spare his feelings.
As he thought about how intelligent and cunning cancer cells were, he felt his mind shifting into third gear.
The problem of cancer cells was relatively simple in layman’s terms. The human body was comprised of trillions of cells. Each cell had a definite purpose, an area of responsibility, and a life span. As long as each cell did what it was supposed to do, was naturally repaired if it became damaged, and died if the damage could not be repaired or if any cell was no longer needed, there was no cancer.
But if something genetic or external to the body, some behavioral or environmental factor, caused a gene mutation, there could be a trickle-down effect that disrupted the equilibrium among cells, causing some of them to behave aberrantly. Uncontrollable growth of unneeded cells, tumors formed and comprised of unneeded cells (cancerous cells), and cannibalistic eating of needed cells,
Yet despite this knowledge of the enemy, the cancer terrorist had been relatively unbothered by the medical community’s five-thousand-year-old Kill Upon Sight poster because of its sinister intelligence, camouflage, and resilience. The war against cancer was a guerilla war. It couldn’t be fought conventionally.
Anderson considered the wily monster. Perhaps conventional thinking and efforts would make significant inroads against some kinds of cancers…within twenty or thirty or fifty years. But he didn’t have that long. Something had to be done now!