Jacob's Odyssey (The Berne Project Book 1)

by Melrose, Russ

  When we were kids, Alex rescued me on many an occasion from neighborhood bullies. I was an easy target. The neighborhood kids used to refer to me as toothpick. Bullies were routinely relieving me of my lunch money. But I never made it too easy for them. I had a bit of a stubborn streak and more often than not I refused to comply with their demands. My refusal was usually followed by a beating after which they simply took the money. But by the time I was ten, the bullying had stopped, although it had nothing to do with my stubbornness. It was Alex. Even at a young age, no one wanted to have to deal with Alex. And while I may have been Alex's surrogate parent, he was the one who kept me out of harm's way.

  Alex and I used our individual strengths to take care of one another. We excelled in different areas. And our diverse strengths dovetailed nicely together. Brains and brawn to put it roughly. We complemented each other perfectly. But Alex was gone now, and I couldn't help but wonder how I'd managed to survive these past weeks without him. Maybe a part of Alex had rubbed off on me. How else could I have done some of the things I'd done these past few weeks? And I'd certainly done some unimaginable things. Most of them out of fear, some out of necessity. In less than a month's time, I had shot my brother, clubbed a little infected girl, burgled a locksmith shop, broken into several homes, and danced with the devil.

  I couldn't stop thinking about Alex. The pain I felt had dug itself deep into my being like a thorny burr. A constant, painful reminder. I tried rationalizing to help ease the pain, but it did little good. I told myself there was nothing I could have done to help him since he'd already been infected. I reasoned with myself that if I hadn't shot him, he certainly would have killed me and feasted upon my lifeless body. And I reminded myself that Alex had already chambered a round in the Glock with the intention I shoot him before he turned into one of "those things" as he called them. But no matter what I told myself, there was no getting off the hook.

  I grabbed my iPad to browse the internet. As usual, I was settled in downstairs. The Josephsons' expansive downstairs family room had been turned into a game room with two green felt pool tables, a foosball table and a couple dart boards. I assumed it was for all the kids in the family. Pinewood wainscoting on the walls gave the room a warm, casual feel. A lush coffee-brown carpet covered the basement floor. There was also a comfy couch and several armchairs scattered around on the perimeter of the room. And there were a few tables with colorful stained-glass lamps in between the armchairs. There were three windows in the family room, two adjacent to the backyard and one to the side yard. I had been camped out on the couch for the bulk of my visit. It was a long, beige microfiber affair with large tobacco-colored throw pillows. I found it quite comfortable.

  I headed to Julia Courtney's blog to try to find out if anyone had information on any infected out there like the Swimmer. Since I couldn't find anything amongst the posts, I broke my silence and posted a question. I asked if there were any reports of any infected who resembled the Swimmer. I left out the nickname I'd given him, but otherwise described him in detail: the ash-white skin, the light tracing of arteries and veins, eyes without the jaundiced appearance, his ability to run full out and climb fences, along with his calm, calculating demeanor. A few posters thought I was trolling.

  One poster gave me a link to a website and said there was a description of a gray that matched my description of the Swimmer. He said the gray was a female and they called her an alpha. According to the poster, the information was at the tail end of a recording on the home page of a conspiracy website. Turns out it was the same conspiracy site posters had been mentioning for nearly two weeks now. Readers cited it as proof of widespread government collusion in the attack. I had ignored the site up until now.

  The site domain was TheBerneProject.com. It was a one page website with no web design whatsoever. The title was also The Berne Project. Below it, there was a single paragraph followed by an embedded recording. And below that, a link to the mp3 file of the recording. The author of the site suggested people download a copy so there would always be a record of it.

  The person claimed to have had access to Homeland Security Department computers which is where he came across the information, though he never specified exactly how he had gained access. I suppose he could have been a hacker or a Homeland Security Department whistle blower. He said he found the file on the office computer of the Deputy Director, Francis Copeland. Copeland was well known as the architect for the CIA's various rendition and interrogation programs in the years following 911. He was eventually forced to resign from the CIA under pressure from congress. Later on, he landed the Deputy Director position with Homeland Security. His hiring was widely reported by the media, many of whom saw it as a concession to Copeland for dutifully serving as the CIA's scapegoat during the backlash period after the programs became public. Copeland had never been popular with the media. Back in the '90s, even before the rendition and interrogation hubbub, he had been skewered in the press for his unwavering championing of a preemptive war policy.

  Of course, Francis Copeland wouldn't be defending himself anytime soon. He died in a helicopter crash along with the Director of Homeland Security, Harold Mortenson, the first weekend after the attack.

  According to the whistle blower the idea for the project had been conceived at a secret meeting in Berne, Switzerland back in the early nineties.

  He said the main folder was encrypted and cleverly hidden deep within an obscure Windows operating system subfolder. He claimed the folder was four levels down from the Windows folder, though he never specified which subfolder The Berne Project folder was hidden in. He admitted he had run across the folder by accident and hadn't had the time to fully investigate its contents. But he saw enough to grasp what was going on. The main folder was titled The Berne Project. Inside the main folder were subfolders for Plan, Virus, Research, Background, Media, Projections, and Reorganization. He said he skimmed through the Plan, Virus, Research, and Projections folders and had a very cursory look at the Media folder but didn't have time to view the others.

  I listened to him ramble away, but there was one thing that kept bothering me. I had difficulty reconciling how he was able to get by the encryption. It seemed to me that a Homeland Security Department encryption system would be as close to hacker proof as you could get. He could have been a Homeland Security employee who had access to the computer and had the requisite password to get into the folder. I didn't know. Whoever the whistle blower was, I had trouble buying into his story, so I stopped the recording and did some checking.

  I went to a WHOIS site to find out what I could. The registrant was hidden. No surprise there. But what really got my attention was the registration date of the domain. The domain had been registered back in mid-January, nearly six months before the virus was released. That meant whoever registered the domain had to have known about the attack six months in advance. But did that really make sense? If he had known about the virus attack in advance, why didn't he blow the whistle in advance of the attack? Any kind of previous notice would very likely have stopped the attack in its tracks. Why wait till after the virus had been released? I couldn't help but wonder what his agenda was. Whistle blowers always had some kind of motive for leaking information. And while I realized that some whistle blowers were trying to do the right thing, some of them were obviously looking for attention or celebrity, and some for revenge or payback. I had no idea what this whistle blower's story was.

  Despite my skepticism, I listened to the recording in its entirety. I wanted to hear about the alpha gray that was like the Swimmer. The whistle blower used a voice altering software program to disguise his voice. The program made his voice sound tinny with a shallow echo as if he were talking through a long metallic tube. He began the recording by claiming that the conspirators had hijacked an Al Qaeda plan that they'd intercepted. He said they decided to use the Al Qaeda plan for the delivery of the virus, though it was never made clear whether the conspirators were actually hijacking the pla
n for themselves or were working in conjunction with the terrorists in some way.

  The original terrorist plan targeted five airports in the United States and Europe with some kind of biological weapon. And while he didn't specify what the weapon was, he said it wasn't the actual virus used in the attack. The plan called for the release of the biological weapon through triggers in various luggage compartments. The conspirators shanghaied the luggage trigger idea and used it in their plans with two goals in mind. The first would be to implicate terrorist organizations in the attack by placing men of Middle Eastern descent in the airports with the virus-triggered luggage. It was never made clear whether the scapegoats would be actual terrorists or not. The second goal would be to divert attention from the real mechanism for the virus' release. According to the whistle blower, that mechanism was the air conditioning ducts in the airports. The plan called for the airport attacks to be facilitated by security personnel that had been put in place years in advance. The scheme sounded a bit elaborate to me.

  According to the information in the virus subfolder, the virus had been in the works off and on for more than three decades. Its initial development began during the Cold War when both the United States and the Soviet Union were working on biological weapons to temporarily debilitate military ground troops along with the local citizenry. Initial studies were focused on Parkinson's disease which impairs neurons in the brain and inhibits dopamine production, slows people down and over time compromises motor skills and muscles movements. The original goal was to develop a biological weapon that would mimic some of the effects of Parkinson's disease but on a limited-time basis. I suppose they were trying to make the weapon more humane. But somewhere along the way, the goals of the program morphed into something different. And as the emphasis of the program changed, Rabies and Alzheimer's were included in the studies. While the effects of Parkinson's Disease still served as a model for the prospective virus, a shift toward inhibiting memory and increasing aggressive behavior in subjects began to take root. Eventually, the virus took shape in the late '90s as a collaborative effort between scientists in various countries, though the countries and the respective scientists remained nameless. Then, sometime after the turn of the century, experiments with human subjects began.

  The experiments went on for ten years with 124 human test subjects. They began by assigning numbers to the test subjects. Subjects were infected in a variety of ways. Infections were facilitated through airborne contact, tactile transference, injections into the bloodstream, contaminated water, and also through bites from those already infected. The incubation period for those infected through airborne contact, tactile transference, and contaminated water were approximately the same, but for those bitten by the infected or injected directly into the bloodstream, the incubation period and second stage symptoms were greatly accelerated.

  As I listened to the recording, I couldn't help but notice the whistle blower's delivery of information seemed a little flat yet pedantic at the same time. Even with the altered tinny voice, he still came off like a teacher who had recited the same information a thousand times before. He came off as knowledgeable and unemotional. Almost scientific.

  Subjects were also tested for longevity, again, under a variety of conditions. The lifespan of test subjects seemed to be an important aspect of the project. The lifespan of those given no sustenance whatsoever was a fairly remarkable two to three months. Subjects also exhibited a decided preference for human meat over animal sustenance, but would eat either. Younger, healthier subjects tended to last longer than their older, more infirm counterparts. The longevity studies apparently served as the basis for computer models which projected survivor rates for the human race, each dependent on a specific set of variables. Worldwide survivor rates ranged from twenty percent to forty percent. Not exactly a rosy picture.

  Three generations of test subjects were rigorously tested under various conditions. Each generation had perfectly parroted the previous generation with one glaring exception. This is where the subject who resembled the Swimmer came in. She was a third-generation subject markedly different than the other subjects. She had managed to retain a semblance of rudimentary cognitive abilities along with some memory—more functional than personal. And rather than deteriorating, her motor skills—running, jumping, etc.—had actually shown improvement, as did her sensory abilities. While the other test subjects showed enhanced sensory abilities, her sensory aptitude was off the charts. She quickly became the darling of the project. The scientists broke protocol and gave her a name—Eve. And Eve wowed them with a display of guile and cunningness. She even exhibited some organizational skills where the other test subjects were concerned. They classified Eve as an alpha, the only one of her kind. It was clear to the scientists that the virus' effect on Eve had been altered in a very significant way. But the scientists were never able to determine why or how. They wondered if the virus had mutated, but there was no evidence the virus had mutated in any of the other third-generation subjects. They explored the possibility that Eve had a partial immunity which might have altered the virus' effect on her. But in the end, they never knew for sure.

  They constructed a predictor model for the occurrence of alphas within a projected population of infected. And while they knew the accuracy of the predictor model would be wildly speculative at best, they included it in some of the computer models for human survival. And when alphas were included in the computer survival models, the survival rates dropped dramatically.

  As far as the Media folder went, the only thing the whistle blower mentioned was the planners' need to secure internet communications for the purpose of controlling the flow of information during and after the apocalypse period. They secured internet infrastructure in several underground bunkers located in remote areas around the country. The conspirators had discretely purchased several web hosting companies over the years to help form their own series of interconnected networks.

  The whistle blower concluded with an impassioned plea for human beings to finally put aside their differences and come together as one family in order for the human race to survive. He claimed it was our only chance to survive the apocalyptic nightmare we'd found ourselves in. And for the first time, his metallic voice had an edge of emotion in it. Then he quoted from the bible, Romans 12:5: "so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." And he followed that up with a final, emotional plea, "We're all human beings, we all share this planet, and it's time for us to come together as one family, one people."

  I wasn't sure what to think. Registering the domain six months prior to the attack had to lend some credence to the whistle blower having foreknowledge of the attack. But why wouldn't he have released the information before the attack? Was he afraid? And why release it now? Wouldn't he risk the same kind of blowback from the conspirators as he would have if he'd released the information before the attack? And just who were these "conspirators" anyway? He never went into any detail about any of them. His only mention of a possible conspirator was Francis Copeland. And he never exactly named Copeland as a conspirator. He merely said that he had found the information about the attack on Francis Copeland's computer at Homeland. Copeland was the only person mentioned in relationship to the project, and he was dead now. But did Francis Copeland actually have the connections to direct a global conspiracy? Could he have developed those connections in his years with the CIA? And was Homeland Security, or some secret black ops department within it, actually involved in the attack? The scope and breadth of the conspiracy described in the recording was difficult to imagine. And I wondered if it was even possible.

  There were too many questions. And as usual, my analytical self wanted to fit the square pegs and the round pegs into their corresponding holes in order to make sense of it all. But in the end, what difference would any of it make? While the information might qualify as grist for conspiracy theorists, even if they were right, it wouldn't save a single life. It wouldn't ch
ange anything. What I needed to focus on were the details regarding the alpha. The information on Eve helped me understand the Swimmer's potential abilities a little better. And it confirmed to me that the Swimmer wasn't the only alpha in existence. There could be others out there.

  Listening to the whistle blower describe Eve's cunning and guile along with her exceptional sensory abilities and motor skills, I couldn't help but marvel at how incredibly lucky I'd been. I needed to avoid a second encounter with the Swimmer at all costs.

  Then a disturbing thought crossed my mind. With his enhanced sensory skills, could the Swimmer track me? I had no idea. But I began to second guess my decision to stay an extra day at the Josephsons' home. I realized I should have been putting as much distance between myself and the Swimmer as was humanly possible.

  I spent the afternoon plotting my itinerary for the following day. I wanted to get as close to the 39th South underpass as I could. It was just ten blocks away now. Surprisingly close. And though I didn't like the idea of traveling that far in a single day, I felt an overwhelming need to get as far away from the Swimmer as was possible. Ever since I'd listened to the recording, I'd felt a lingering uneasiness. I knew I needed to lighten up. Planning the itinerary and reminding myself how close I was to the underpass helped me relax. I checked Google Maps to find the most direct route. I decided to parallel Lisa Drive, about a block to the west of the Josephsons', which would take me to 39th South after a final short jog on Olympic Way. The route would take me to within two blocks of the underpass. The thought of possibly being at the underpass sometime tomorrow excited me and helped me to calm down.

  I noted to myself that the Swimmer hadn't found me in the two days I'd been staying at the Josephsons' home, and he might not even be looking for me. The idea of him pursuing me was likely nothing more than the fruit of my own paranoia. I knew there were times I was prone to fearful thinking. But the idea that the Swimmer might be tracking me had no real basis in reality.