Diamond Rain: Adventure Science Fiction Mossad Thriller (The Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series Book 2)

by Michael James Gallagher

  Chou noticed the tear and grinned. So easy to manipulate this type. Weak fool almost burst into tears. Wait ’til he finds out what I have planned for his reporter.

  Lau fawned.

  “Thank you general. I will serve you with even more dedication as a result.”

  Chou clapped his hands once more. This time, for Lau to leave. The statue of Mao lit up again. Just like an 80s remote control system. Lau left the room in a slightly bowed position. Chou stared at the screen, watching the Chinese ‘walkers’ taking possession of Moscow. After Lau left the general’s quarters, his own suit reactivated itself. So, the general had someone develop a safety zone for him. The carbon suits don’t work in his proximity. I’m pleased he freed my mother, but it just makes escape harder for me. All that work finding her and planning her escape for nothing. Will I ever get out of his grasp?

  The general licked his lips and rubbed his hands together as he watched the screen in front of him. Awakened and revitalized by the stronger, longer lasting replenishments engineered by General Lau, the Chinese covered the distance to Moscow at lightning speed. Resistance was futile. The Russians had seen the lack of impact of atomic weapons on the invaders at Armageddon Valley and they surrendered without a fight to the immense gray wall, a sandstorm of nanofog, encroaching on Moscow’s city limits. Pandemonium ensued. In the Far Eastern Republics, the call to arms was ‘women’. The shortage of women in their Chinese homelands and republics enlivened the cohort’s desire to possess the women of Moscow and the Far East. Female slavery became a tool of war.

  Chou zoomed the drone’s nose camera in on a group of people standing paralyzed with fear in front of an apartment block built in Stalin's time. The ‘walkers’ approached and a line of nanofog, specially color-coded: red in one direction, blue in the other, surrounded them. After it encircled the Russians and the men grabbed their heads and fell to the ground, blood pouring from their ears. The women sashayed towards the Chinese and took their places on one of thousands of commandeered transport vehicles that followed the advance. They would be brought to buildings where they would await their returning heroes. All according to plan. To think I toyed with giving the Russians the secret of the nanofog and joining forces with them. For a time, ransacked Russian resources would stabilize the Renminbi, but any further mismanagement or any military setbacks would unsettle it again. Chou changed screens and watched the same process on Armageddon Valley.

  ****

  Meanwhile in Israel on Yona Street at the clandestine Mossad headquarters of Ekaterina’s special section, the real Thomas, Yatsick, Jean Pierre, Macaulay, Ekaterina and Yochana got ready to make the final run through on an attack on Chou’s ‘walkers’. The Denial of Service attack was in an advanced stage or preparation. If totally successful, their unprecedentedly enormous attack would give them the power to cripple any of Chou’s advances at will. Even a less complete result would still give them some breathing room. Jean Pierre paced back and forth, shaking his head.

  “The math doesn’t hold up. We need more time to test.”

  “Look at this, Jean Pierre,” Yochana said suddenly.

  A plasma screen popped on to their left. Yochana was answering a call by touching her ear and pointing to the screen. Thousands upon thousands of previously dormant or at least lethargic Chinese ‘walkers’ on Armageddon Valley were springing to life.

  “They’ve obviously fixed their problems with their Quantum computers. Agreeing to peace was a sham to give them time to prime an upgrade. I think things have just moved up a notch. Although it may seem dramatic, I believe we may have a very short space of time before all the men in Israel die and the women are enslaved,” Ekaterina said.

  “Jean Pierre, stop worrying about overloading our systems,” Thomas said. “We’ll only attack the ‘walkers’ in Israel. It’ll tax our computers less. After all, there’s no love lost between us and the Russians,” he continued.

  Yochana looked at the screen.

  “Yatsick,” she commanded. “Send our retaliatory drones in now. Their fog’s prepped to overpower Chou’s servers and stop the recycling of their fog.”

  Jean Pierre looked at Yatsick before typing a command and pressing the enter button on his laptop. Israeli drones dove towards Chou’s drones, catching them in the process of seeding the ‘walkers’. On another plasma screen to their right, the four could see the dramatic results of Jean Pierre’s actions.

  Streams of light, made up of diamond molecules refracting ambient illumination, entered the Chinese drones. Ekaterina took in a deep breath and held it. Thomas focused his belief that the plan would work. Yatsick marvelled at Jean Pierre’s abilities as the Chinese on the ground came to a halt. The Mossad support staff outside the glassed command enclosure jumped to their feet and embraced one another. Calls of ‘Mazel Tov’ could be heard everywhere, echoing in Israeli command centers as coffee cups smashed on the floor. Ekaterina let out her breath.

  CNN broadcasting live showed streaming satellite images of Russian women walking passively towards transport vehicles while Russian men lay on the ground or ran in circles with blood pouring from their ears as the ‘walkers’ advanced, always smiling. The news program suddenly switched to Armageddon Valley and showed ‘walkers’ milling about aimlessly, some sitting down, some appearing to sleep, none on the move. Ekaterina picked up her phone. On the other end a grateful Prime Minister thanked her profusely.

  “We never doubted you,” he lied. “Well done.”

  His cabinet shouted their support as they appeared on a special screen established for them to communicate directly with Ekaterina’s office. Sacrificing the Russians to save our skins, thought Thomas. Why didn’t I have the courage to help the Russians too? We may have had enough power after all. Are they less valuable as human beings? We’ve all become a little less human today.

  ****

  General Chou pressed repeatedly on the button on his desk, the one he used to summons Lau, but Lau did not appear. The General got up and made his way to the underground bunker containing the command central for his ‘Second Long March’. A fast elevator took him down and it opened on a normally quiet room filled with the sound of a hundred technicians tapping furiously on keyboards in an attempt to counter the attack on their system. As he watched, the Quantum computer’s power light flashed an unstable signal. Chou felt sure that the Russian advance would also halt now. Damn you Lau. He walked up behind Lau and slapped his head.

  “If I didn’t need you, I’d hang you up by the balls and skin you alive,” Chou said as he returned to the elevator. He can have his mother. Now I must get that woman. The elevator swooshed upwards to the surface. Chou left the bunker and made for his helicopter. This setback obliged him to report in person to the Central Committee in Beijing. After the meeting, I’ll return and play the Kefira card. I have to make her talk about the suit I saw her wearing on the overlook.

  A guard, his face shadowed by the brim of his spotless dress uniform cap, ushered Chou silently into a large room often used for small high-level banquets. Chou remarked the vacant look in the guard's eyes that resulted from the Chairman's use of the incomplete nanosuit Chou had given him. Red banners, interspersed by large portraits of the members of the committee, decorated the walls of the room. A celebration had been the scheduled event, but Chou’s partial defeat at Armageddon Valley dampened the Central Committee’s enthusiasm for the general’s adventurism.

  Thomas’ lack of nerve inadvertently played into Chou’s hand. As he approached the elevated part of the room with a large table at it, a man in military uniform appeared at his side. The officer motioned towards a small carpet on the lower level. Chou noticed that there was a space without a chair at the banquet table. When he stepped onto the rug, the members of the committee moved around the other side of the table to be able to face him. A flurry of uniformed men moved the committee members’ chairs into place on the opposite side of the table. Once seated, they all looked down at Chou. Unfazed, Chou began spea
king before the Chairman addressed him. A pregnant silence filled the room.

  “Mister Chairman, Committee Members. I am pleased to be here today to announce our dramatic success in the Russian Republics and in Moscow. Our ‘walkers’ today made those traitorous Russian swine pay for their rebelliousness. Our coffers will soon reflect the electronic transfers of Russia’s financial resources.”

  The Chairman cleared his throat, but let Chou’s brazen lapse of etiquette pass. He alone possessed one of Chou’s nanosuits and had used it to secretly manipulate his colleagues and solidify his power base over the last few months. Chou knew that the Chairman needed him so that any problems would be a matter of saving ‘face’, always so important in China.

  “You are right to focus on the positive, General Chou. Won’t you join us at the table?” the Chairman asked. He coughed. He was annoyed to discover that his voice was being controlled by Chou’s interference with the suit he was wearing.

  The Committee Members made space for the general. Waiters dressed in spotless white uniforms delivered a bottle of French Champagne to each man. The waiters then opened each bottle at the same time producing a simulated gun salute; Chou stood and nodded his approval as he made a toast.

  “New beginnings.”

  “New beginnings,” repeated all of the committee members.

  The Chairman dropped back into his chair. He looked pale as Chou tightened the muscles around the Chairman’s heart by influencing the Chairman’s nanosuit, a clone, though a lesser version of his own. Thank you for all the hard work solidifying the power base of the Office of the Chairman Chou communicated to the Chairman using mind speak. But now your usefulness has passed. The Chairman frowned while Chou toasted everyone in the room. None of the men paid attention to the Chairman even when he slumped onto the table. Chou managed all of their reactions. Two guards appeared with a stretcher. A doctor took the Chairman’s pulse then pressed his finger deep into the man’s neck to feel for his carotid artery. He shook his head and lowered his eyes. The three of them left. Chou stood.

  “Gentlemen, first, arrange to have the minutes of this extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee reflect the nation’s period of mourning. Second, let it be approved that General Chou assumes the role of Chairman of the Central Committee until such a time as a Party Congress can be called and a proper election process can be followed. Now, if all of you will excuse me, I have a war to wage. Good day.”

  All of the Central Committee members rose in unison.

  “Long live General Chou, the new Chairman of the Central Committee.” Chou left the room and returned to a limousine waiting to take him to the Party helipad. Now that he was Chairman, several limousines trailed behind his filled with security people and other parasites attached to power. When he boarded, Chou dismissed all of them except one man, a guard he recognized from an earlier time in his career. The officer bowed his head to the right, not daring to look the Chairman in the eyes.

  “Hand me your pistol, Colonel.”

  The Colonel complied and Chou shot the man in the head, dropped the pistol and turned to climb into his helicopter. Several officers mounted the helipad after the helicopter silently disappeared. They looked at their colleague and wondered what this murder meant for all of them. No one spoke as they descended to the elevator, carrying the Colonel.

  Chou had remembered an earlier defeat at the hands of the now dead Chairman orchestrated by that Colonel’s information collection about Chou’s money-laundering activities. Lau’s suit helps me all the time. I never would’ve recollected that man’s acts all those years ago, but Lau’s suit probed his mind and found that useful bit of info. Wonders never cease. Have to control my anger around Lau. He really is useful. Damn him. The helicopter made its way back to Chou’s headquarters.

  Macaulay’s Seeds

  Macaulay opened up a neglected channel of communication with General Lau. He chose the Syrian Colonel who bought arms from China and built a network of clandestine money laundering fronts using thousands of compromised computers. The Colonel pinged Lau’s workstation. The ping took the form of a message that only Lau would remember. The words, Friends meet at the Venetian Macao, sliding across his screen in a picture of Central China, signalled to Lau that his old friend had urgent news.

  Lau initiated an encrypted protocol with a short macro. A message bounced around all of the computers in Macaulay’s network and Macaulay’s computer automatically fed it into his Quantum system. The result was an untraceable one-time connection working on the tradecraft of the most basic and effective coded messages, the one-time pad, or cipher. Macaulay’s response to Lau’s question, ‘Where?’ passed by a unique undetectable route back to Lau. ‘Not where but who? Arrange a story for Sue Ann Lee. She’ll convey my message inside an unbreakable molecule visible only to you. She should remain safe because she won’t be aware of delivering the information - just a precaution because of Chou’s sly ways.

  Lau’s face shone with happiness. When one door closes, another opens. I’ll find a way to protect her here and arrange an escape for both Sue Ann and my mother. I’ll tell her my feelings this time. In the back of his mind he knew Macaulay would exact a price in the future, but the prize was too precious not take the bait. Maybe Macaulay’ll be useful again. Lau’s virus scanner didn’t have a chance against the worm containing a search and locate script designed in a diamond molecule by Thomas that hid inside the pixels of the jpeg picture of Macaulay’s message to Lau. Even without Lau clicking on the message, Thomas’ sophisticated worm unleashed the beginning of a search and rescue mission.

  Soon Thomas, without Macaulay’s knowledge, would know Kefira’s exact location in Chou’s underground headquarters. An invisible, untraceable diamond light crashed through all of Lau’s carbon-based protection system until it found communications between Chou and Lau concerning Kefira. From those discussions came important information about her holding cell hidden deep on the fifth level.

  In the meantime Thomas proceeded to spy on Macaulay on two fronts. First he lodged a furtive surveillance worm inside the ex-Fenian’s communications with Lau, protecting himself against possible treachery by the slippery terrorist. Second, he motivated his clone travelling with Sue Ann to open and have power over the memory implant Chou had placed in the reporter when they met in Qatar. Feeling less and less that he was slipping into manipulative behavior, Thomas subtly instructed Chou’s implant to make Sue Ann susceptible to Lau’s advances. I’m only nurturing the seed of an existing feeling. I’m not making her feel for him.

  Now that Thomas had an electronic passageway to Kefira, he prepared himself for an interactive holographic visit. He couldn’t take the chance of exiting the virtual form because he needed more detail about Chou’s electronic firewall. Possessing the only diamond-based nanosuit tied his hands at this point. I can’t afford to lose the suit to a technological improvement on Chou’s part. The worst that can happen right now is that he’ll know she’s communicated with the outside world.

  Thomas’ molecule, enhanced by Jean Pierre’s bent triple helix, easily stored enough information to be capable of spawning a holograph of Thomas in Kefira’s cell. The glimmer travelled into Lau’s system using the backdoor left by the worm in the photo that Lau unsuspectingly clicked on and returned using a keystroke macro, unleashing Thomas’ search and rescue tool. When the spy tool found Kefira, Thomas could get to her location in virtual form.

  ****

  Kefira lay on a simple straw mat placed over a rubberized corner of her cell. She had not seen the light of day since her capture and the lights in the room never changed, so she slept on an imposed routine, trying to keep her sanity by sleeping regularly. Her problem was that she never knew how long she slept. Always when she awoke, food lay on the floor near the silent hydraulic opening at floor level. She trusted her judgement less and less and caught herself arguing with herself more and more often.

  Thomas’ diamond refraction caught her attention as it la
y on the floor. Its brightness had awoken her. Kefira unconsciously scratched at the itchy spots on her knees and elbows and the ones she could reach on her back. "Scratching, no scratching," she said aloud and bounced to her feet and then onto her hands to do push ups. Exercise was her savior. The diamond light grew and she paused in her morning routine. She sat and watched the light growing in lines as a pair of shoes appeared on the ground. Her breathing increased and she scurried on all fours to her bed and covered herself with her blanket. She had no clothes and needed to keep moving all day long to stay warm in the cool cell. Usually she wore her blanket except for strenuous exercise as she had discovered that it became wet with sweat and less helpful in keeping her warm.

  Thomas cursed to himself. Chou’s protection slowed down his appearance dramatically. Their technology’s better than I imagined. Have to talk to Jean Pierre about the slowness of the holograph.

  Kefira got a hold of herself and used the breathing techniques she had learned in her ‘sleeper’ training to slow down her heart rate. The holograph taking shape before her remained foggy. Then it spoke. Despite herself, she dropped her blanket exposing her nakedness. Thomas’ virtual eyes drank her in. His heart pinched to see her looking so confused. She’s more beautiful than I remembered. If only I could take her in my arms. One step at a time. It’s not long from here to a rescue.

  “Kefira,” said the blurry image in front of her.

  “Thomas?”

  Thomas wished he could use mind speak because Chou certainly recorded everything in this room. As a precaution he chose to protect further communication by using an electromagnetic pulse to neutralize any recording mechanisms in the room. Seeing Kefira like this had made him careless initially, and now Chou had his name to use as leverage in his control game with Kefira. No time to worry about that now.