The Zul Enigma

by J M Leitch

  ‘Yes sir, but there’s something else…’

  ‘There’s nothing more to say. You just tell him we want them to hand that man back to us immediately.’

  ‘Mr President, sir, there is something else…’

  ‘I don’t wanna talk about it further until Dr Maiz is back in our custody, do you understand?’ and he slammed down the phone before Barbara could answer. ‘I knew I never should’ve agreed to him going to Vienna,’ he muttered as he strode into the bathroom, leaving his wife to bury her head even further under the covers.

  ***

  Head down at his desk, Greg was putting the finishing touches to the opening address he was to deliver at the meeting with the European heads of state the following day. He’d instructed that all his calls be held and was so absorbed that when the phone did ring he felt a flush of surprise followed by a wave of irritation.

  ‘Greg, I know you don’t want to be disturbed,’ it was Faith, his Executive Assistant, who had worked for him ever since he’d accepted the post as Secretary-General and who accompanied him on all his travels, ‘but will you accept this call from a Dr Joseph Fisher at Israel Aerospace Industries? He says he has urgent information for you about a friend. I tried to stall him, but he’s most insistent.’

  Greg sighed. ‘Put him through. Dr Fisher? Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘You’re calling about…’

  ‘Our mutual friend. I have some urgent news that I don’t want to tell you on the phone.’

  ‘When do you want to meet?’

  ‘Can I see you now? I’m in the lobby downstairs.’

  Greg was startled seeing Joseph for the first time. The commanding manner the man had displayed during their telephone conversations had led Greg to think they were of a similar age, but looking at the person standing in front of him, it was hard to believe he’d yet reached fifty. Greg extended his hand in greeting and it disappeared in Joseph’s fist as he grasped it and gave it a brusque shake.

  ‘Please,’ said Greg, ‘sit down.’

  At roughly six feet, the same height as Greg, Joseph was a couple of suit sizes smaller. However, the cut of his jacket couldn’t disguise a breadth to his shoulders and a bulk to his chest that was due to gym-work rather than diet. This was not a man to be trifled with, Greg thought.

  ‘Sir,’ Faith said, ‘it’s nearly midday. What shall I do about the call you’re expecting?’

  ‘Hm,’ Greg muttered, remembering Barbara would be phoning any minute. ‘Offer my apologies… say something urgent came up and tell her to call back in an hour.’

  ‘Can I get you any tea or coffee?’

  Greg glanced at Joseph, who shook his head.

  ‘I appreciate you must be busy,’ Joseph said, ‘and so am I,’ Greg nodded his big head. ‘So,’ Joseph continued, ‘I’ll be brief. Over the past weeks I’ve been having discussions with the United States Department of Defense. I had a meeting at the Pentagon last week…’

  ‘… and what exactly does this have to do with Carlos?’ Greg interrupted.

  Joseph raised a hand. ‘I got a call an hour ago, informing me a crisis group’s been formed to handle a highly classified homeland security issue. They’ve been working day and night since Saturday, but since they’re not getting anywhere, they need my help. They want me back in DC. Urgently. To meet the Department of Defense and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Centre. They’re trying to trace, and I quote, “an unusual communication”, which for some reason I’m not yet party to, became a top priority problem over the weekend. Normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but my contact mentioned the order for this investigation originated from the Director of National Intelligence in connection with a meeting the President had with you last week. Of course, considering Anderson’s intention to cut NASA’s budget, the Dryden boys are having a good laugh right now…’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Greg said, raising both bristly eyebrows.

  ‘Anyhow, since I know Carlos was at the meeting with you, I thought I’d let you know. I have no idea what form the “unusual communication” took or where it originated, but right now the Americans are pulling in all their top guns.’

  ‘I see,’ Greg said, as he leaned back in his chair. So NASA hadn’t wrapped up their investigation after all. Or perhaps new information had come to light. ‘And that’s all you know?’

  ‘So far, yes.’

  ‘It’s news to me – I understood they’d finalised their inquiries.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Carlos today?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘No. Not yet. I’ll visit him this afternoon.’

  ‘I’d like to see him too before I leave. Which hospital is he in?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t disclose that information to anyone, Dr Fisher.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’ve known Carlos for over fifteen years.’

  Greg smiled. ‘And I’ll be happy to pass on your very best wishes.’

  ‘At least tell me how he is.’

  Greg made a snap decision to tell Joseph a little more than he’d planned. ‘I’ll need your word that this information stays between us,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When Carlos collapsed, he hit his head. His PA found him on the floor in his office with a big lump on his forehead. The doctors don’t know if the fall knocked him unconscious or whether he collapsed due to the mixture of amphetamines and Rohypnol they found in his system.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Yes. We think he used amphetamines on business trips and the Rohypnol to help him sleep. It’s likely he carried a supply of both when he travelled.’

  ‘I heard through my contacts at Dryden, the President had NI investigate him. If that’s true, they would have found the drugs and taken them off him or substituted something harmless. But… why would he take both at once?’

  Greg shook his head. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question. All I know is the doctor couldn’t get any sense out of Carlos yesterday. Once his physical condition is stable, they’ll move him into a psychiatric ward. But… well… because you’ve been a friend of his for so long, I wondered if you could shed some light on it, especially since you were the last person to talk to him.’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ Joseph asked.

  Greg sighed. ‘I suppose it’s possible he took some amphetamines to rev himself up and then got confused and…’ he shrugged.

  ‘… and then decided he was tired and wanted to have a sleep?’ Joseph said, finishing the sentence for him.

  ‘You’re right,’ Greg stared at the desk in front of him, ‘that makes no sense at all. So he must have wanted to end it all. He was in a shocking state yesterday – you spoke to him – you know. But could it be possible he was confused and didn’t realise what he was…’

  ‘Or perhaps he wasn’t as confused as you think,’ Joseph interrupted.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He leaned forward. ‘There could be another reason he took the drugs. One that makes a lot more sense.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That he took them to make his collapse look realistic. Now that wouldn’t be the act of a crazy man, would it?’

  Greg pondered Joseph’s words. Perhaps he was right and Carlos was more with it than Greg had given him credit.

  Earlier that morning the doctor had called asking Greg to check Carlos’s office for signs of the drugs he’d taken, but the cleaners said they’d found nothing.

  Since learning about them, Greg had assumed Carlos was carrying them with him but of course, Joseph was right, and had they been in his luggage, the Americans would have confiscated them or substituted them. Therefore Carlos must have got the drugs from somewhere else.

  ***

  ‘Mr Secretary-General! Come in, sir,’ Corrinne said, surprised.

  ‘Corrinne, I think the drugs Carlos took yesterday came from a supply he keeps here. Do you know anything about it?’ Greg walked past Corrinne’s room an
d straight into Carlos’s office.

  ‘He keeps a set of clean clothes and a toilet bag in his cupboard. In case he’s called away at short notice.’

  She bustled after Greg and opened a cupboard door. Sure enough a travel wash bag was tucked at the back. She took it out and unzipped it. In one section there was toothpaste, a toothbrush, a razor, deodorant, a miniature can of shaving foam and a small bottle of cologne. In the other there was an unused strip of Panadol, a small unlabelled dark glass bottle and two strips of bubble-pack, one of which had four tablets missing and both of which were printed with the word “Rohypnol”.

  Greg opened the bottle and poured half a dozen brown capsules into his hand. ‘Bingo!’, he said, and was flooded with a sense of relief knowing that had Carlos intended committing suicide there would be nothing left, other than the bottle and two empty strips of foil.

  They heard the phone ring in Corrinne’s office and she ran out to answer it.

  ‘For you, sir,’ she called to Greg, who had pocketed the drugs.

  It was Faith telling him Barbara was on the line again.

  ‘Okay. I’m on my way up now. Tell her I’ll call her back in ten minutes.’

  ***

  Greg banged the phone down. The nerve of the woman! How dare she demand that he hand Carlos back? The arrogance of the Americans sometimes made him want to scream out loud and although he’d controlled his emotions on the phone and not let a hint of his annoyance show, the effort had made his heart pound.

  Still, he’d learned one thing from the conversation. They had no idea where Carlos was.

  ‘Come on in,’ Greg said to Hans as Faith showed him into the office for the second time that morning.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he said, beating the air with his glasses.

  ‘Sit down. Tell me.’

  Hans adjusted the wire arms of his multifocals over his ears and gripped the armrests of the chair. ‘I was rechecking the logs when one of my guys told me he was using a sniffer on the network yesterday…’

  ‘What in God’s name’s that?’ Greg asked.

  ‘It’s a device we use to gather bandwidth usage statistics and capture specific types of traffic like video calls to help us diagnose faults or problems with network performance or its components like hubs, routers, repeaters, switches, gateways…’

  ‘I don’t need to know chapter and verse, Hans.’

  ‘Sorry. Anyhow, on Saturday the night shift identified we were having trouble with the router and yesterday Erik set up a sniffer laptop for a couple of hours to isolate the problem. It was “sniffing” network packets streaming in from the sender, which are broadcast out from the receiver…’

  ‘and…’

  ‘… Erik disconnected it just after 15:15. When I found out it was running at the time of one of those calls I looked at it, and guess what? It had captured part of a holovideo session. One that doesn’t show in the logs.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘We have no idea. But it proves that holovideo call you queried came in. It was initiated at 15:11…’

  ‘…the exact time Joseph Fisher’s call ended.’

  Hans nodded.

  ‘Well now,’ Greg said, drumming his fingers on the desk, ‘this is a turn up for the books. Well done, Hans. But how’s it possible… I mean… that there’s no other record?’

  ‘As I said before, we have no idea.’

  Greg shook his head. ‘Who was the call from?’

  ‘A stunning looking woman in a long green dress. She was talking to Carlos.’

  Greg cocked his head remembering what Corrinne had told him the night before. So Carlos wasn’t delirious after all. And if a hologram of a woman could come in without trace, then why not one of a baby? And one of Zul too?

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘You’re late getting back to me,’ Bob bellowed down the line. It was almost eight thirty DC time and he’d just finished breakfast.

  Barbara sighed to herself. ‘We just spoke.’ At nearly half past one in the afternoon in Vienna, she was calling from the safe house where they’d taken Carlos the previous day.

  ‘But first there’s something I must tell you. And you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘They moved him out of Vienna?’

  ‘No.’ It’s far, far worse, she thought. ‘On Saturday afternoon I got a call from the safe house in DC where we were keeping Maiz. One and a half hours before he was scheduled to leave, he got a holovideo call from his PA in Vienna. Seconds after it finished “Zul” appeared.’

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  ‘No. He spoke to Maiz for over an hour.’

  ‘Why’s this the first I’m hearing about it?’

  ‘You were at Camp David and I didn’t want to bother you until we knew more. I tried to tell you earlier this morning, but…’

  ‘And what have you found out?’

  ‘Very little. Of course, the whole conversation was recorded and our experts examined everything. They magnified every frame but found no clue where it originated. The sound technicians tried to analyse background noise but there was none. No other voices, no drone of equipment, no bird song… nothing. It’s completely sterile. As with the videos, the voice analysts think the man playing “Zul” may at some time have lived in the States, but although they don’t believe he’s a native American they can’t pinpoint his origin.’

  ‘Shit! Where did the call came from?’

  ‘That’s another problem, sir. There’s no record in the logs of the call coming in. Nothing. If we hadn’t been monitoring all Maiz’s communications, we would never have known anything about it.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘I know, sir. NASA sent a copy of the holovideo to Dryden and they’re checking it out, but so far they have nothing. They’re flying in another expert today.’

  ‘I don’t buy this. I don’t buy it at all. There must be something – some way to find out who’s behind it.’

  ‘After I left Maiz at the house on Saturday I was on my way to Baltimore when the guys called and told me about the hologram. At first I couldn’t believe our luck. I thought if a communication was coming in while we were watching, we’d be able to trace it more easily. I raced back to the house but “Zul” terminated the call just as I got there. I had a quick talk to the techie boys and decided the best thing I could do was stay close to Maiz. I didn’t want to delay getting him out of DC, so I flew with him to Vienna.’

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Barbara heard Bob blow out a long breath at the other end of the line.

  ‘When did you see the recording?’

  ‘The boys relayed it over the encrypted WiFi link to the jet.’

  ‘And what did they talk about, this “Zul” and Dr Maiz?’

  Barbara paused before answering. ‘”Zul” explains how Maiz must help as many humans on the planet as possible raise their level of vibration through meditation to prepare ourselves for the next, what he calls, evolutionary leap. He says the Galactic Federation will make sure all the people vibrating at a sufficiently high rate will evolve to the fourth density on 21st December.’

  ‘And what’ll happen to the rest?’ Bob sneered.

  ‘Their descendents will get another chance to make the leap some time in the future. He warns Maiz that if he fails the planet will be destroyed, which will destabilise the whole galaxy.’

  ‘More sci-fi bullshit! And it’s a mystery? I mean how the call got in?’

  ‘The logs show nothing.’

  ‘Could Maiz have sent it? Like the e-mails?’

  ‘No. The CCTV covers every angle of the room. It shows him walking back to the armchair after talking to his office. Then he turns round and sees “Zul’s” face on the screen. From his expression he was as surprised as we were.’

  ‘How about his iTab? Could he have used that like he did before in the john?’

  ‘No. He’s on video putting it on the table by the
armchair before he accepted the call from his PA – that’s a good four metres away from the desk where the screen is. The only way he could have sent it was if he’d programmed some delayed delivery system or programmed the call to come in at a pre-set time. But we know he didn’t do that, because we were watching his every move.’

  ‘Could one of our own people be in on it?’

  ‘I wondered that too, but I don’t think so. And it doesn’t explain why the call didn’t register in the logs. The logs can’t be interfered with – not at all.’

  ‘And you didn’t pick up any clues from the recording?’

  ‘No, sir. Like the videos there was nothing in the background – no wall hangings, no ornaments. He wore no jewellery. There were no background sounds. Nothing unusual to zero in on.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘And Dr Maiz? Did he mention it?’

  ‘No. But he was surprised when I got in the car to go with him to Vienna.’

  ‘So why didn’t he mention it?’

  ‘Probably scared I’d deny it, making it look like he’d imagined it and him seem even crazier.’

  ‘This recording – does it prove he’s innocent?’

  ‘If he’s guilty, it would take his planning and execution skills to an improbable level.’

  ‘But he could’ve pre-recorded “Zul’s” half of the holovideo conversation, couldn’t he? And filmed himself acting it out?’

  ‘That might just be feasible, but how did he get the call in?’

  ‘The techie lads’ll work that out.’

  ‘Well, they haven’t yet.’

  ‘What did Greg say? About giving Dr Maiz back?’

  ‘He refuses to hand him over.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘This latest info makes me more sure than ever Maiz is innocent. I always had a problem believing he sent the e-mails. The way he behaved the whole time he was at the safe house? To me he didn’t act guilty or crazy.’