Redoubled

by Warren Esby

  Once the retrovirus got into the circulating immune cells, they would circulate throughout the body and be stimulated to release the factors when they encountered the appropriate stimulus like a normal flu virus or another aerosol spray of virus or nasal vaccine. One could envision that the final product would be delivered by an airplane or drone that would circle above densely populated areas such as major Western cities like London or New York and release an aerosol spray that would contain the deadly virus. The aerosol spray would infect people and induce massive cell death just like the crop dusters do with pesticide, although these crop dusters would be releasing a peoplecide, unless you want to call people pests which a lot of them, too many actually, tend to be.

  How evil. How diabolical. How insidious. How despicable. How disgusting. How innovative. How absolutely brilliant. This just indicated how much talent a well-funded organization can attract to work for them. You have to admit that the United States is falling behind in this regard. We just don’t educate students the way we used to, and the rest of the world, especially the Indians and the Chinese, and yes, the Pakistanis, are producing better educated people on the whole than we are. They are much more numerate and literate than the average American student. I know because I had to compete against them in college.

  Perhaps they do better because they don’t have courses like football, basketball and soccer as possible majors. Over half the graduates of our science and math programs are foreign students. I know that from firsthand experience. And what do we do? We send them all home even though we don’t have enough of our own graduates to fill all the high tech positions that are available. And what do those Pakistanis do? They go back home and work for the best-funded organizations back home like the Taliban or Al Qaeda where they can also martyr themselves for the cause and get a whole bunch of virgins in the afterlife as a bonus. That’s because they can’t get the kind of jobs in Pakistan that will allow them to hook up with a local virgin because the females are so protected over there.

  Wouldn’t it be better to allow them to stay and work in the United States and contribute to our security than have them work against us? They could certainly end up making a lot of money here and be able to attract virgins in this country so they wouldn’t have to go back. And then they could go back later and martyr themselves to get the virgins in the afterlife that they are entitled to if they so desire. You know, they could double dip, so to speak as their reward for staying here. But a lot of people do that here. Look at Ashley-Cooper and most government workers for that matter. They are all double dippers. So the Pakistanis can be enticed to stay here by having virgins now and virgins later. I bet they wouldn’t go back though, since once they were here with the virgin of their choice and making a lot of money, they probably would just get soft and satisfied like all other Americans and not want to martyr themselves. Anyway I think we should change our immigration policy and incorporate a new program and call it our Virgin Now immigration program.

  Of course we do have a very low birthrate right now so there may not be enough virgins to go around. And we have a very permissive society compared to the Muslim world, so that our virgins do not remain virgins as long as they used to. The last I heard was that there were so few of them now that the new definition of a virgin is an ugly twelve year old. Of course we could further tweak our immigration policy to allow more virgins into the country to go along with the additional foreign graduates as part of the Virgin Now program.

  But then that would only encourage people from countries with a lot of virgins to come here to find what happened to their virgins when they began to run out back home, so maybe that wouldn’t work after all. And besides, who wants to have the United States filled up with ugly twelve year olds. And of course, you would have to allow male virgins in as well or else the program wouldn’t be gender neutral, it would be sexist and the political correctness police would stop it. Of course the male virgins might be a desirable addition for the gay Pakistanis, but I don’t believe the Koran allows that and then the gay Pakistanis wouldn’t be allowed in heaven and couldn’t double dip. And no one can guarantee that all the virgins we let in would remain virgins for very long, and all the work of the TSA would be wasted. So maybe that’s not such a good idea after all.

  I left the Fun guys and went back to the hotel to read up on the information they had given me and reached the conclusions I have already related. Anya came back later. She said that she and Edy and Ben had gone into a department store called Debenhams out of curiosity so that they could compare it to American department stores. She had noticed that they had some cute little animal figurines made of china and she had bought one as a souvenir. It was a little pig. I told her it looked like a genuine Beswick figurine that was no longer made. She was really impressed that I knew that since the store clerk told her the same story and that the little pig was left over from the time they made it and had been placed on sale when they found it in the storeroom with some other outdated goods. I congratulated her on getting a good bargain, but didn’t tell her how much I paid for a set of the same figurines to pay a debt I had incurred in graduate school. It was an embarrassing amount, but that is another story which you know about if you read my previous memoirs or will have to do so now if you haven’t and want to find out about this minor incident in my life.

  Dong was under surveillance by MI5 and they constantly reported his whereabouts to the two Fs. We had decided it would be a good idea to have him go and do his experiment so MI5 could determine if that place was under the control of Al Qaeda or if Dong was just using locals who were unaware of his affiliation. I thought it might be worthwhile to confront Dong, to put pressure on him to make his move sooner rather than later. Just as Ben, Edy, Anya and I were about to go out for dinner that evening, we were told that Dong had gone into a Chinese restaurant in Summertown. I decided to join him and see what he would do. Ben, Edy and Anya would join Fan and Fun and wait in a van parked on the side of the road nearby so they would be out of sight but would still be able to keep an eye on the restaurant which had dragon in its name. I went into the restaurant and sat down in the chair opposite Dong. He was alone, or so I thought. He looked like he was just finishing up and was doing something that really makes me sick to see anyone do at the end of a meal. He was drinking tea.

  When I sat down, I said, “Sorry we didn’t connect the other night. I guess I went to the wrong Chinese restaurant. I hope we can continue our conversation now.”

  I’ll give Dong credit. He was a cool customer. He didn’t blink. He just looked at me and said, “Ah so.”

  “Have you thought any more about working with me?” I asked.

  “Who you work for now?”

  “I work for myself. I freelance.”

  “Why you want to work with me?”

  “Because you seem to be further ahead in this field than I am. I figure we can work together and make better progress. You can satisfy your customers and I can satisfy my customers.”

  “Who are your customers?”

  “I can’t tell you, but Kellogg isn’t my real name. It’s Federov.”

  I wanted to throw him off track and make him think I was working for the Russians which might be less threatening to him. I didn’t believe he was working for Al Qaeda for ideology, being Chinese, and thought that it was most likely for money. I wanted him to think I was as much a mercenary as he was. Of course there was a chance he was working with Al Qaeda for China’s benefit and wouldn’t be interested, but it was the best chance I had of getting his cooperation, letting him think I was also an enemy of the United States.

  He said, “I think about it some more. Give me your phone number and I’ll call when I decide, but I’m busy now. I need to go now.”

  With that, he got up, left some money for the bill that was in front of him, and walked rapidly out the door. I went outside and watched as he walked up the street. He was talking on his cell phone as he did. As he passed the van, Anya and Edy got out and s
tarted walking towards me. As I began to walk towards them, each of my arms were grabbed in steel-like grips by two very large bearded men in turbans who proceeded to march into the alley of the next building practically carrying me with them.

  Anya and Edy walked towards us chatting away at each other, apparently oblivious to what the three men in front of them were doing, but as I was hustled into the alley by the two giants, they followed us into the alley and shot each of the giants with a taser. The van pulled in behind us to block the view of what was happening from the street, and both men were quickly tied and gagged by Fun, Fan, Ben and the van driver, who I will call Van because I never did learn his name, and deposited in the back of the van.

  “What now?” I asked, “And what do we do with these two?”

  “What do you suggest?” asked Fun, or was it Fan?

  “Why don’t we dispose of them and then get rid of their bodies?”

  “With what? We don’t carry firearms like you people do, and we didn’t allow you to bring any into the United Kingdom either. We’re not allowed to do that anyway. We aren’t MI6 you know,” said Fan, or was it Fun?

  “Well, why don’t we solve the problem by letting these two dispose of themselves?”

  With that, I took out the two syringes and injected each of the giants with the contents of one of the syringes by intra-peritoneal injection which I had been told was the desired route of administration. Afterwards I did what everyone says you must do on occasions such as these. I broke off the needles from each syringe after use so that the syringes could not be re-used, which is a health hazard. I was just being a good citizen by behaving as I did.

  Then I said, “Now we’ll know just how long this will take and have a better idea of what the danger is. And if they have a good product, then these two will actually end up disposing of themselves without any further action on our part.”

  When I said that, Fun or Fan said, “I say old chap. Jolly good show.”

  Oh my. When he said that, I thought to myself that this can’t be real and if I actually write down in my narrative that he said that, people would assume it was all made up because that expression is only found nowadays in works of fiction and no one uses that expression in real life anymore. And in this story, I have a Chinaman saying “Ah so” and an Englishman saying “I say old chap. Jolly good show.” I mean who writes that kind of stuff for real anymore. It sounds phony. But he did say it, even if you think it sounds fictitious. Of course, if you do believe this is a work of fiction, then the CIA would be happy because they certainly would rather you didn’t believe anything I am writing because they don’t want you to know about any of this and the way they really operate. But I’m retired again, and I can feel free to write anything I want, and believe me, I can assure you that what I’ve been writing in this narrative is a real story.

  Chapter 26

  Dong, in the meantime, was followed by another member of the MI5 surveillance team to the station where he bought a ticket to York. We decided to follow on the morning train while Van drove Fun and Fan up in the van with our experiments percolating in the back. We all went to a nearby Italian restaurant in Summertown to complete the usual ethnic trifecta. Thus far, we had successfully avoided eating at any English restaurants. The next morning, we all left for York on the train and got in the following afternoon. Unlike the United States, Britain has a very reliable train service.

  I was really interested in going to York. I wanted to see the big city that New York was named after. Well York is really rather like a big town and not at all like a big city with tall buildings and all. And it isn’t on the ocean and it doesn’t have a statue in the harbor because it doesn’t have a harbor, but it does have a huge cathedral, which they don’t want to call a cathedral for some reason, and they call it a minster instead. Maybe York was once called Mincester and the minster was all that remained after the cess was removed. York is a very strange place and once again, the British managed to surprise me with the way they name things.

  Most of York’s old city wall remains and you enter the city by coming through various medieval gates in the wall. But they don’t call the gates you come in gates. Streets are called gates and gates are called bars even though bars are sometimes called bars as well as pubs. They have street names like Coppergate, which doesn’t have a copper gate, and Stonegate, which doesn’t have a stone gate and Monkgate, which has a Monkbar and not a monk gate. So you would come into the city through Monkbar and walk down Monkgate if you wanted to go to a bar or find a playground to play on a monkey bar. In other words you would have to go through a bar and down a gate to get to a bar.

  How strange. But what is really neat is that you can go up on the old walls and walk on them practically all around the city which is not very big. And you can see where the knights were stationed as they looked over the walls out into the countryside to see if any of the opposing nightie knights were trying to sneak in. They could also amuse themselves by looking into the city from the walls where they could see into the windows of the city dwellers and keep a look out for naughty nightie Knights helping out hot damsels in distress or undress as the case may be. We stayed in a hotel with a bar on a gate outside a bar and kept the blinds drawn the whole time.

  I know you now expect me to say that we went to bed after an “after” because I have been using “after” as a euphemism for sex, but I’ve decided to call a spade a spade from now on and use the word euphemism as the euphemism for sex because that’s what it was. So after we got back to the hotel room, Anya and I engaged in euphemism. And you know that those Peeping Tom Knights on the city walls that were peeking into those windows were probably getting aroused and touching their own euphemisms as they were watching the naughty nightie knights pull up the damsel’s nightie or remove it entirely so they had a damsel in undress and under stress until after euphemism when the damsel was not only undressed but now unstressed, hopefully. Now using the word euphemism does take all the eroticism out of this description, doesn’t it? I think that’s why they call a euphemism a euphemism in the first place because using a euphemism when talking about euphemisms takes all the fun out of describing euphemisms. Maybe I’ll just go back to referring to having sex as having sex and be done with it.

  As you may have suspected by now, I never did do that well in English history and being in England just reminded me why. All those different names and places and different way of pronouncing things are just so complicated. Anya and I are both of Russian descent and Russian history is just so much simpler. For most of its history, Russia was ruled by a czar and once by a very evil ruler called a Rasputin. And then they had a revolution that didn’t work out that well, and the leader named Lenin ended up in a tomb in Red Square for a while. I’m sure they had jokes in Russia like “Who is buried in Lenin’s tomb?” just like they joke about who is buried in Grant’s tomb in the United States. Wouldn’t it be fun if some fraternity pulled a prank and switched the bodies and the answer to who was buried in Grant’s tomb was Lenin?

  Anyway, getting back to Russia’s simple history, after the revolution failed, they went back to having an evil ruler in charge again, and they shortened his title from Rasputin to just plain Putin. I don’t really understand why they did that unless Putin is just the modern version of Rasputin, or if a Putin is just not as evil as a Rasputin, and if the current Putin manages to become even more evil than he already is, he will be elevated to the Rasputin level. I don’t know the Russian language so I don’t really know what the translation of Ras is or of Putin for that matter.

  The agents following Dong reported to the Fs the next morning that Dong had rented a car and driven up into the Yorkshire Moors. They had managed to place a transmitter on his car and we could follow him to the place he was doing his experiment. By this time, we had another vehicle, a large Range Rover driven by one of the Fs, to transport Ben, Edy, Anya and me and to be followed by the other F with Van in the van with what remained of our experiments. Van had pi
cked up another driver to help him on the trip up. She was a female I will call Lorry since in Britain, lorry is another name for truck or van and, like Van, I was not told her real name. So now we were all set to go to a moor to find a Chinaman and not a Moor. At least we hoped there wouldn’t be any more Moors on the moor than we had already had to deal with in Oxford, except of course for the Moors we were taking with us to the moor. But the Moors we were taking to the moor were alive no more and would be left in the moor where they would be seen no more.

  Chapter 27

  We followed Dong’s transmissions until we ended up at a small pig farm named Smithfield’s later that morning. A man who appeared to be the pig farmer was there and he seemed to be helping Dong by herding the pigs down a squeeze chute into a pen where they were held while Dong injected them. We could tell that there were four pigs in the pen beyond the chute and one coming into the pen chute, driven by a young man who we presumed must be the farmer’s son or a helper. Another pig was waiting its turn. Dong had a syringe in his hand and looked at the Range Rover and van as we drove in. The farmer seemed surprised to see us as we all got out and started walking towards the little rustic scene. I could tell that Anya was in her element as she reached into her jacket pocket for the gun that wasn’t there, and then a look of disappointment came over her face.

  “Good morning, Mr. Smithfield,” Fun said to the farmer showing him his identification. I finally had learned to distinguish them so I knew it was Fun talking. “Unfortunately we have come to arrest Dr. Dong, here. He seems to be practicing veterinary medicine without a license. I hope you will cooperate with us, or else we will have to bring you along and charge you as an accessory.”

  “But he told me he was a world renowned pig surgeon,” said Smithfield. “He said he used to work for James Herriot who is a legend in this part of Yorkshire. He said he was writing a book and would include me in it, just like my father was included in Dr. Herriot’s book.”