by Sean Deville
“But if he’s immune…” Savage let the thought trail off. “Have you been able to get a blood sample?” Mackay looked at her, then turned his head around and looked at Snow.
“Show her the video,” Snow ordered. Mackay opened a file in the computer’s video viewer. She watched from start to finish. Everything was over in less than a minute.
“That’s not good,” said Croft.
The video was time stamped 11:32 AM. Croft and Savage watched as two men in hazmat suits entered the room, the secure door closing behind them. One man carried a taser, the other a revolver.
“Get on the ground with your hands behind your back,” the man with the taser said, pointing it at Fabrice. In the video, Fabrice was standing facing the far wall, and at first, he ignored both men. He rested his head to the side, and seemed to be talking to himself. Taser gave him the order again, and Fabrice shooed them away absently.
“Come back later, I’m busy,” Fabrice said. He sounded tired.
“Final warning,” Revolver said. Fabrice sighed and turned around.
“You shouldn’t have come in here,” the naked man said and he walked forward two steps. Taser fired, the twin prongs of his device shooting forwards. But they didn’t do as they were designed. Instead of embedding themselves into human flesh, they just bounced off and landed on the floor. Shocked, Taser threw his now useless weapon to the floor and pulled a revolver out of the holster on his waist. The two men backed up. “But now that you’re here,” Fabrice said, taking another stride forward. Revolver altered his aim and pointed at the man’s leg. There was a loud report as he fired, hitting Fabrice square in the leg.
“Fuck,” Fabrice said, staggering. He stopped to look down, but there was no blood, the skin dark grey where the bullet had struck. “That hurt.” Revolver fired again, this time at the man’s chest. Again, Fabrice staggered backwards by the impact, but it did no damage.
“Get out of there,” a voice said over the intercom. Croft recognised it to be Snow’s voice. The two hazmat-attired men backed up towards the door, and that was when Fabrice moved with almost lightning speed. He wasn’t a blur, but he definitely moved faster than a human should be able. Three more shots were fired, and Croft watched as both men were quickly disarmed and incapacitated. Fabrice let one fall to the floor, the other, Taser, he held by the neck, lifting him off the ground. Taser barely struggled, having received a blow that left him close to unconsciousness, and he dangled there as Fabrice slowly squeezed his neck. There was a crack, and the body fell limp, dangling like a discarded rag doll. He flung it away, the corpse smashing into the mirrored window before slumping to the floor. Fabrice bent down to the other man, pulling off the hazmat hood.
“I told you to leave me alone. I’m busy.” With that, he grabbed Revolver’s head with both hands and began to squeeze. Revolver, who had started to recover from the punch that had laid him flat, began to scream as the contents of his skull were compressed. There was a sickening sound as the bone of the skull broke, and then the man was still. Fabrice let go and walked over to the window, where he ran his blood-soaked hand over the glass. The dried blood was still visible there.
“And that,” a voice said behind Croft, “is why they call the good Doctor Durand Frankenstein.”
“Who the hell is this Durand anyway?” Croft asked.
“Some scientist I was ordered to bring here. He wasn’t important enough for Noah, but they wanted him all the same,” Snow said. “As soon as he arrived, he started organising things, setting up research on the infected. With no real hierarchy here, people just kind of went along with him because he seemed to know what he was doing. We never gave him operational control over the facility, but he just seemed to assume he was in charge of anything scientific. None of the other scientists seemed to want to say otherwise.”
“So who was in charge before I turned up?”
“Some guy you never heard of. Guy blew his brains out last night. Anyone with any kind of authority bugged out yesterday whilst they still could, leaving grunts like me to pick up the pieces.”
Durand sat in his makeshift office and seethed. How dare they…how fucking dare they. Nobody talked to him like that, absolutely nobody. He was a genius, Goddamnit. He demanded respect, he’d earnt that respect. He had been dragged here, away from his laboratory and been asked to help research the disease, and he had done so, without complaint. He had quickly realised that he was the only one here with the intelligence to get this research done, the only one with the will and the guts to make the hard decisions that needed to be taken. He thought he was in charge, thought he was the one calling the shots. And they had lied to him in that regard, obviously mocking him. And now that he thought about it, he could see that they were all pretty much laughing at him behind his back. That much was clear now.
Of course, what Durand didn’t realise was that he was delusional. He had come in and thought he had taken over in a power vacuum. There were a handful of scientists here at best, refugees from the surrounding city, and those who had turned up too late to be shipped abroad in Operation Noah. Most of those with a scientific grounding weren’t even in the right field for this kind of work, a collection of consultants and MI6 employees who had either been in the building or close enough to claim it as refuge. Durand had been the only one with the skills and the knowledge to study the virus. Until now.
“Fuck,” he screamed. Sat at his desk, he swept everything off it with his right arm, papers and assorted stationary flying halfway across the room. He was about to be replaced, replaced by someone in authority who knew her shit. After she had left the room to go on her inspection, he had searched the online database on his laptop, had search for Doctor Savage’s name in PubMed and the more secretive government research database, and had found over twenty-five research articles. She had been busy, and some of her research, mostly in biological weapons research, was ground-breaking stuff. What was even worse was the majority of those articles weren’t how to create the weapons of war, but how to defeat them. Great Britain no longer researched the production of biological weapons, but it excelled at trying to counter their effects. She was going to come in here, she was going to take over, and he would be reduced to nothing but a lackey. He hadn’t spent the last thirty years stepping over people and worming his way up the scientific hierarchy for him to have his greatest opportunity taken from him by a fucking woman. He wasn’t willing to accept this. No, not at all. Something had to be done, and it had to be done quickly.
13.57PM GMT, 17th September 2015, FBI headquarters, Washington DC, USA
“Surely, you’re kidding me.” Special Supervisory Agent Fiona Carter had been sat in the briefing for less than 10 minutes before she had to speak out. She couldn’t contain her growing dismay any longer. She had to do something, had to say something. This wasn’t right.
“I’m sorry, Agent…” the man talking looked at her with an exasperated expression.
“Special Supervisory Agent, actually. Carter. And I say again, you can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I’m very serious, Agent Carter,” said Brian Hannigan. The infamous Brian Hannigan, Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate. A big cheese at the Department of Homeland Security for short. Carter had seen him when he had entered, knew the kind of man he was almost instantly. A bully, probably a sociopath, rising through the ranks by stepping on the backs and the hands of others, never being the one to blame for anything, but always being there to take the credit. The fact he took obvious delight in treating her like an underling spoke volumes, and although it wasn’t blatant, there was just a hint of derision in his voice to let her know he felt he shouldn’t be having to speak to her. “This order has come from the president himself, and has been passed to Homeland Security and FEMA by executive order.”
“But you are talking about the indefinite detention of thousands of people,” Carter said. “People, who as far as we know, aren’t guilty of anything.” That grew a murmur o
f support from the other assembled agents.
“Aren’t guilty?” Hannigan said, almost incredulous at what he was hearing. “Let me remind you, most of these individuals are on the TSA no-fly list. Even more are on NSA watch lists, their entire lives an open book of disloyalty and radicalisation. In this state of emergency, we can’t let such people roam free; they have to be contained. And for your knowledge, it’s not thousands, it’s hundreds of thousands. As I’ve already said, this is a coordinated action across the whole country.”
“Christ,” someone said at the back of the room.
“But what you are asking us to do is unconstitutional,” Carter countered. She was getting exasperated now, but she kept that hidden under a professional demeanour. Don’t let him get to you, don’t let him rile you. That’s what he wants, that’s what half the men in this room want. They want you, the Ice Maiden, to lose your cool, to let the mask slip. That’s what she knew some of them called her, behind her back of course, never to her face. The Ice Maiden, because she was strong, blonde, attractive, and not averse to busting balls when her fellow agents’ performances were below par. And she also knew that, despite this being an age of equality and diversity, the fact that she was also of Jewish descent meant a great deal to the fevered imaginings of the minority of agents who still lived in a world of bigotry and prejudice. And she wasn’t just talking about the men.
“The US Attorney General doesn’t agree with you, Agent Carter. Neither do the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president. And nobody’s asking you to do anything. Ordering, yes, but not asking. I’m merely here to tell you what part FEMA will be playing in the whole scheme of things. So if you have a problem, you need to take it up with the president. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to take your phone call.” He stared her down, waiting for more objections. She shook her head and indicated for him to continue. “Thank you. Now as I was saying, each of your teams will be allocated a detention list. You will be working in coordination with State Police, FEMA, and the National Guard. During the round ups, normal policing will be maintained by the various sheriffs’ departments. We want these people detained within twenty-four hours. The hope is that we can get the bulk of them before we get any runners. This will be a coordinated response across the nation.”
Carter held back as the room emptied, Hannigan being the first to leave with his entourage. She watched the people filing out, saw the unease in some of their faces, the obvious delight in others. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down; this wasn’t why she entered law enforcement. She was here to put away the bad guys, not to help fill up FEMA camps with people whose only crime was being guilty of being critical of the present administration on their blogs. Still seated, she noticed that someone else was lingering in the room, and when said individual was the second to last person present, she closed the door to the conference room and closed the blinds.
“Is there anything we can do to stop this?” Carter asked her superior.
“No,” came the response.
“Shit, I can’t believe it’s come to this.”
“The threat is too great for the politicians not to use it for their own ends. We’ve been heading towards this for decades. I just never thought it would play out so soon.” Carter’s superior, Wynona Cooke—the Assistant Director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division—pulled up a chair in front of Carter and sat down. Where Carter was tall with shoulder length blonde hair, Cooke was a short, overweight African American, who possessed a presence and formidable mind that made her physical characteristics unimportant. Thirty years ago, it would have been almost unheard of for two women to hold such ranks in the FBI, but here they were, witnessing the possible destruction of everything they believed in.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Carter said, shaking her head in disgust.
“You have to.” Cooke put a reassuring hand on her subordinate’s knee and gave it a motherly squeeze. “You have to because you have to make sure it’s done right. Your agents in the field are going to be faced with resistance and violence. The wrong person in charge gets people killed.”
“I could resign. You know I’ve been considering it for a while now.”
“You won’t resign. You’ll suck it up like you always do and do your job. You’ll see to it that the doors are knocked on rather than kicked in. You’ll see to it that the people are taken away in handcuffs, not body bags.” Cooke sat back and her face almost sparkled. “Besides, if you walked out, I’d have to give your job to Henderson.”
“The guy’s a jerk,” Carter said. She could tell when she was being played, but she couldn’t hold it against this woman. She had too much respect for her.
“You weren’t saying that a year ago.” Cooke winked. Carter smiled, probably the first smile all day.
“Oh, that’s low.” Her relationship with Henderson had been brief and a complete disaster. No doubt much of the office gossip about her still came from his once-seductive lips. Carter had almost transferred out, but Cooke had expressly forbidden it, had pointed out that if she did that, the creep won. Thank God they hadn’t slept together. That would have been a nightmare.
14.12PM GMT, 17th September 2015, Wall Street, New York City, USA
“Sir, I’ve just been told the FBI are in the lobby. They are on their way up.”
“The FBI?” Harold Winchester looked at his secretary. “What are the FBI doing here?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Get my lawyer on the phone.” The secretary nodded and left his office, closing the door behind her. What the hell was this? Why would the FBI be here? He was the owner of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund; he had protection. He didn’t partake in insider trading, did everything by the book. Hell, he didn’t even have any unpaid parking tickets. His landline rang, and he picked it up.
“Putting you through now, sir.” There was a brief pause.
“This is Eric Wolfowitz,” a voice said at the other end of the phone.
“Eric, it’s Harold Winchester.”
“Great to hear from you, Eric. How’s the wife?”
“Oh you know, the usual. Always complaining.” The voice at the other end laughed briefly. “Listen Eric, I might have a problem here. The FBI are here.”
“Any idea what for?”
“No, but they will be here any minute.”
“Okay, well so long as you haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t see it being a problem for you.” There was a noise outside, and Harold could hear his secretary talking to someone.
“Hold on, Eric.” He put his hand over the phone to try and hear what was being said. The door to his office opened.
“Please stay seated, miss,” he heard said from outside, and then two men walked in. They were dressed in suits. So this is what the FBI looked like.
“They are here now…” Harold started to say.
“Put the phone down please, sir,” one of the agents said.
“It’s my lawyer,” Harold said almost defensively. The second agent, the one who had yet to speak, stepped into the room and up to his desk. Forcefully, he ripped the phone from Harold’s grasp and put the receiver back in its cradle. That done, he withdrew identification from his inside pocket. Thrusting his FBI credentials into Harold’s face, he looked the man up and down.
“Harold Winchester?” the agent asked.
“Yes,” Harold said hesitantly.
“Harold Winchester, under orders handed down from the President, I hereby detain you for the protection of the Homeland. Please come with me.”
“What is all this about?” Harold said, starting to stand. He reached behind him for his jacket, the first Agent quickly drawing his pistol.
“HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!” the agent screamed. Harold froze, never before having experienced anything like this. He was worth over a billion dollars, people didn’t treat him like this. He had powerful connections. The second agent moved around the desk, grabbed his arms, and roughly yanked them behind his back. There was a
pause and then he felt metal being slapped onto his wrists.
“But what have I done? You can’t do this!” He saw the first agent re-holster his weapon. The second agent pushed him slightly, manoeuvring him away from behind the desk. He didn’t resist, he didn’t know how to resist. Even if he did, he was in his fifties, overweight, and had a heart condition. He was no match for two armed and trained FBI agents.
“All your questions will be answered shortly.”
“But where are you taking me?”
“That’s none of your concern” said agent one. Harold didn’t know it, but he was being detained for one very specific reason. His name had appeared at the top of a political shit list, someone who had donated heavily to the other party at the last election. The president, it seemed, was making the most of the situation. He was using this as an opportunity to start cleaning house.
14.23PM GMT, 17th September 2015, Bird Rock, San Diego, USA
He had woken early to the sound of a house sleeping. His wife and kids were off visiting her parents, and he was due to fly out to join them in a day or two. But first, he had business to conduct, a story to break. And what a story it was, full of political intrigue and Washington corruption. It might even make him a household name, but if he was honest, he wasn’t really bothered about that.
Climbing out of bed, he stepped naked onto the balcony that overlooked the Pacific Ocean and sat down on one of the sun loungers. He had no worries about being seen; the balcony was not overlooked, and he had complete privacy except for God and the few dozen seagulls that soared above him. The day wasn’t too hot, perfect for him, and he lay down and let the growing warmth of the sun leach into his skin.