The Demon Plagues

by David VanDyke

  Skull smiled humorlessly. “And get away with it. Done, my friend. Now I need a favor from you. I’m about out of money; I sure don’t have enough to travel. I either need a loan, or some intel on where a goodly chunk of cash will be that I can take from some deserving organization.”

  Vargas stroked his moustache thoughtfully “All right. As long as you’re leaving the country soon after, I think I know where a cartel bagman will be tomorrow night, or the next…” He gave Skull a place and a time. “That’s all I can do. You take care of yourself, Alan. Get your cash, get outta here. Don’t make me come kill you.”

  “Likewise.” Skull mimed shooting Denny with his finger and then slipped out into the drumbeat darkness.

  -9-

  The submarine’s background hum remained ever-present. Behind Doc, Alkina laid out the man’s medical kit, placed several more tools within reach, then silently glided away as he was concentrating on his patient. Taking a roundabout way, PW5 in one hand, trank in the other, she knocked out two more groggy crewmen before she found the compartment she was looking for. She stared at the executive officer’s safe for only a moment before going to work.

  Her protective earbud came out; another device went in, connected to a sonic amplifier specially made for this kind of work. Placing the conductive pickup of the sensor next to the combination lock, she spun the dial. Two minutes and fifty seconds later it came open. The key hanging on the chain inside went immediately around her neck. The nuclear launch binders, with their codes printed on tough plastic sheets, went into her tunic next to her heart.

  Closing the door and spinning the dial to lock it, she moved silently down to the next compartment. The Captain’s safe. She repeated the procedure, listening for the faintest of sounds that told her just where the dial should rest on each rotation. This time she was even faster; the door opened in less than two and a half minutes.

  She stared at an empty cavity.

  “Looking for this?”

  She froze, turning slowly to see Colonel Nguyen, the sub captain’s launch key swinging in one hand, his P90 in the other. Its muzzle pointed unwaveringly at Alkina’s chest.

  “What are you doing, Colonel?”

  “I’m wondering why you just tried to get control of both sets of launch keys.”

  “Merely securing them. In case one of the crew got by us.”

  “We have the captain and the exec. No one else on the boat knows the combinations. Or has our skills.”

  “Are you sure? What if they change procedures? All of our information is over a year old – since the last defection. What if they gave the combinations out to two officers each?”

  “You can give up the smoke and mirrors. There’s something you’re not telling me. I think there are many things you are not telling me.”

  The corners of Alkina’s mouth quirked upward. “The feeling is mutual. I’m just the liaison. You’re the team leader. You have me outnumbered seven to one.”

  “But we’re heading for your country. For Australia.”

  “Because we’re the most competent maritime nation in the FC. No one else could put this boat to use like we can.”

  “That’s the party line. And once we get to Garden Island sub base intact, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll be happy to turn over everything that’s left of this boat to the legitimate government of the Free Community of Australia. Who is certainly not you. You’re no more a naval commander than I am a kangaroo. You’re a field operative.”

  Alkina shrugged. “Certain skills were needed. It’s easier for someone like me to wear this uniform than for a naval officer to be trained the way I am.”

  “I’m glad you did not lie to me. We are on the same side, aren’t we? But let me be perfectly clear. If after this, even one thing goes wrong without a superb explanation – anything odd at all – I will lock you in a cabin and you can spend the next two weeks squatting in the corner eating dry breakfast cereal. And if that doesn’t work, I will cut off your hands and feet and have Doc strap you to your bunk with an IV in your arm.”

  Color drained from Alkina’s milk-chocolate face, leaving her a kind of pasty grey. She cocked her head, snakelike. “You can’t. You have been infected for ten years. You couldn’t do something so evil.” Her eyes narrowed. “Have you found a way around the virtue effect?”

  “No need. I’ll let you in on a little secret – which you probably know anyway. The virtue effect doesn’t stop someone from doing what he believes won’t cause permanent harm. You would eventually regrow your extremities.”

  “It would cause me permanent psychological harm.”

  “You? Are you certain?” Spooky just smiled, teeth bared. “I suppose I’d just have to steel myself against that possibility. Perhaps you should not test me.”

  Nostrils flaring, she slowly lifted the key on its chain toward the colonel.

  “No, you keep it. That way we both know nobody will be launching missiles unexpectedly.”

  -10-

  Twelve hours later Chairman Markis and a small group of hard-faced men and women boarded a twin-engine executive charter jet out of Caracas, Venezuela bound for Bamako, Mali. Transferring planes, they flew on to Fes, Morocco, only to transfer again and fly across at Gibraltar and up the coast of Spain, well inside Neutral States airspace.

  All this was merely to disguise his movements; flying the same jet across the Atlantic to Africa and then on to Switzerland direct would have risked the United Governments figuring out that he was on board and possibly shooting down the jet over international waters. Japanese Admiral Yamamoto had been killed that way by the US in World War Two, his aircraft intercepted and downed by Army fighters acting on Navy intelligence. Markis had no desire to follow in his footsteps.

  It made for a long and tiring journey, though their rejuvenated bodies gave them the energy of youth. They landed at Geneva Airport after almost twenty-four hours of continuous travel.

  First out was the leader of the Chairman’s personal security detachment, his PSD. Karl Rogett was an iron-jawed, chisel-faced man with old, old eyes set in his rejuvenated face. Those eyes roamed the tarmac, looking for threats out to the limits of his perfect vision. He took in the buildings in the distance, marking places where a sniper could hide. He examined the nearer threat zones, looking for anomalies in the airport’s routine. He noted the position of Swiss military and security forces with qualified approval. These people know their jobs. But they seem a little complacent.

  He waved the rest of his people forward, four men and three women. He had trained them all himself, forged them into a perfect team.

  On the one hand he would have liked an all-male group; there was just something about the camaraderie of the old US Marine Corps he had grown up in that was comforting.

  On the other hand his girls – that’s how he still thought of them in his secret heart – his girls were the best they could be, sharp and nasty and tough as he could make them. One glorious thing about the Plague was how it allowed them to train more realistically than they ever could before. Barring death or brain damage, they could break each other’s bones in hand-to-hand, shoot each other’s limbs with live Needleshock, and generally train to destruction, coming back in a few days completely recovered.

  His girls were also very, very useful for other missions – missions where only women could go, or where they would blend in, or distract with their feminine wiles or even seduce, kidnap, infect, neutralize. His whole team would do whatever it took, short of murdering their opponents. As long as they focused on the good they would do and the benefits of the Plague they would spread, tricking the conscience was easy.

  Of course, he didn’t tell the Chairman about most of these little escapades. He reported directly to Markis’ lady spymaster, who was more realistic about things. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Karl had a deep affection for the Chairman. He had no problem reconciling this cognitive dissonance; he understood his role as the attack dog for his benevolen
t master. Karl did things, necessary things, that the Chairman couldn’t or wouldn’t. It had been that way for millennia; rough men standing ready to do violence so their liege lords could sleep safe in their beds.

  Besides, he owed the Chairman his life. He’d been barely conscious but he did remember that day ten years ago when he’d been shot, stabbed and bludgeoned into submission by DJ Markis himself. It was Markis who had stood between Karl and those who had wanted to finish him off; it was Markis who had spared Karl’s life; it was Markis who had infected him with the Plague, making him young again and it was to Markis that he had transferred his loyalty after the Unionists had turned the US into a fascist police state.

  His team spread out around the airplane, their weapons holstered but their eyes missing nothing. It would insult their Swiss hosts to be pointing guns here and there but they couldn’t complain much about them checking everything out. They peered inside the waiting armored limousine, ran mirrors and detectors under and over it, checking the trunk and under the hood. The Swiss security personnel watched with stoic grace; it was a condition of Markis’ coming that his people double-check everything.

  As soon as they were satisfied, they formed a tight knot at the bottom of the rolling stairway. Karl ran up the stairs to the top of the ramp, stepped inside the airplane’s hatch and gave the Chairman the thumbs-up.

  Quickly and without fanfare they scurried down the ramp, faster than dignity allowed but with far more safety, to be surrounded by the human shield, hustled into the waiting limousine.

  It would take even an expert an extremely lucky shot to hit, much less kill a fast-moving Plague-infected target at sniper distances; eight hundred meters per second sounded fast for a bullet to travel, but a man could run five yards in that time; it took only inches of movement to get out of the way of a projectile. A sniper needed a stationary target, or at least one that moved steadily in a straight line, to strike something at range.

  Karl grunted with satisfaction as his principal was put safely under armor. Bettina Loosher, inevitably nicknamed either ‘Luscious’ or ‘Loosie’ by the team, was inside with the Chairman and Millicent; the rest of the team joined the Swiss security people in their armored Mercedes SUVs, behind and in front.

  Transit went smoothly, depositing everyone in the underground garage of one of the high-end hotels on the outskirts of Geneva. The team doubled as staff for the Chairman; unlike most other modern potentates, he normally traveled with just one personal assistant, and the PSD.

  They escorted him up the stairs to the fourth floor – termed the Third Floor here in Europe, where they counted Ground, First, Second and so on – on the inside of the structure, windowless. This was high enough to be difficult to approach from the ground, low enough to be hard to reach from the roof, and not too high that physically fit Plague carriers couldn’t jump from a balcony in extremis. The team took the rooms across the hall, on each side and behind, so that Markis’ every wall was covered by security. They also rented the rooms above and below and checked them regularly, and all of the other rooms nearby were discreetly empty.

  Well secured, Markis finally fell asleep, gathering strength and sharpening his wits for the confrontation to come. Sleeping all through the afternoon and into the night, he woke up around three AM, his body clock confused. With noting better to do he reviewed his notes and did a no-equipment workout of inverted and fingertip push-ups, sit-ups and crunches, squats and other callisthenic exercises. It was easy to run to fat as a politician, though the term ‘fat’ was relative. To a Plague carrier, fat was just a bit flabby and soft; obesity was a thing of the past.

  After breakfast, the transport to the Swiss Foreign Ministry went like clockwork, appropriate for the world’s premier purveyors of timepieces. Markis appreciated the locals’ efficiency and their Tyrolian ruggedness; something about high mountains bred hardy, self-reliant people no matter where in the world they were.

  The Ministry conference room was carefully prepared, precisely balanced; it was a room designed for this type of delicate negotiations. Soundproofed and swept for surveillance devices, it came equipped with two sets of double doors so that any two parties could enter at the exact same time; its table was set slightly low, to avoid the psychological impression of a barrier; its colors were muted, earth-tone, soothing. Rows of sparkling clean water glasses and carafes sat on small turntables set within easy reach of both parties, eliminating any suspicion of specially prepared beverages or glassware for one side or the other. These and many more touches had eased innumerable agreements, enhancing the reputation of the Swiss as the world’s best-respected neutrals and behind-the-scenes facilitators.

  In the anteroom, Markis rubbed his hands, wiping them on the trousers of his expensive suit. He thought of the irony of the clothes so reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers outfit of the man he had killed that fateful day a decade ago, Jervis Andrew Jenkins IV. He’d called him a ‘suit’ as a term of insult that day; now Markis was one. He shook his head.

  -11-

  Alan Denham filled out his customs form in the business-class seat of the A320 nonstop from Managua, Costa Rica to Palermo, Italy. Christopher Dunham, he wrote, then checked Nothing to Declare. Ticking more boxes, he signed the bottom, looking carefully at his falsified passport for reference. It wouldn’t do to misspell his own fake name. The only danger now was the small chance a search would find the quarter of a million dollars he had packed in his checked bag, but paper did not trigger the automated scanning algorithms on the X-ray machines, and it was sandwiched between some books and magazines to fool a human.

  Sitting back, he glanced out the window and reveled in the feeling of freedom and adventure that he always felt when traveling. It was nonsensical, really; as many places as he had been in the world, one would think the novelty would have been burned out of him; but then again, he had never been to Switzerland. He figured it would be like Germany with more yodeling.

  He'd been to Sicily, though, and appreciated that its ancient traditions of secrecy and independence had survived, even prospered under the transition to a mixed society of Edens and normals. Infected or not, Sicilian values predominated and persevered. If the new Edens were a bit more straightforward, a bit less corrupt, they were still easygoing and willing to tolerate and forgive their unenlightened neighbors and friends, and vice-versa.

  Italy as a whole had benefitted from its Neutral State status and laissez-faire incorporation of the Plague; those who wanted it gained youth and freedom from sickness, dramatically reducing their burden on society while becoming productive again. Those who did not want it…well, it was only a matter of time, for who, when faced with cancer or old age, would not give up their objections and be rejuvenated?

  Final assimilation was a half-century or more off, though, just judging by the ages of its youth. Leery of the rumors and believing the misinformation, afraid of possibly giving up their fun and freedom, most of the young people avoided the Eden Plague like they had avoided STDs before Infection Day: haphazardly.

  But like STDs, the virus could not be stamped out, only dodged for a time. Barring some medical breakthrough by the scientists of the Big Three, or something like the Tiny Fortress nanite project, it was just a matter of time before every nation became a de facto Free Community.

  Fortunately for Skull, there were still plenty of remnants of the old ways on the island. Fortified consciences were no match for centuries of loyalty to La Famiglia; participation in the corrupt Sicilian system might slowly erode, but real cooperation with the mainland government was unlikely to take hold for at least another generation, so he was certain, almost stoic – perhaps even complacent – about being able to obtain certain tools that he needed to do the job he planned.

  He passed through customs without difficulty; his papers were superb forgeries, even to being entered into the Italian computer systems. Money could buy just about anything if you knew who to talk to. He picked up his suitcase and rented an innocuous Fiat, and th
en drove out of the city.

  An hour later he was knocking on the back door of a small automobile repair shop in a tiny village in the countryside. “Si?”

  “I need to speak to mi fratello.”

  The man nodded, let him in. A few moments later Skull walked out with a phone number in Switzerland and a hundred rounds of untraceable match-grade 7.62x54mm ammunition that would fit most available European military rifles.

  It was hard for a foreigner to buy ammunition in Switzerland, and anything legitimate was all microstamped now. On the other hand it was fairly easy to obtain a rifle if you had the right contacts. Switzerland had one of the highest per capita rates of ownership of fully automatic weapons in the world, and one of the lowest rates of violent crime, an irony still lost on the world’s misguided gun-control advocates.

  It was amazing to Skull that with a neo-fascist government in control of the UGNA, in a nation on a war footing, there were still lefties hollering to disarm the ordinary law-abiding citizen, as if there lay the threat, while voting more and more money for the Security Service. The Unionist fascists loved it, encouraged it, stoked their fear. Give the henhouse keys to the fox. Your government is the threat, not the veteran up the block.

  It took him two days to get up to Switzerland, first taking the ferry across the Straits of Messina and then driving up the superb autostrada freeways – posted speed limit 130KPH but in reality unlimited. The rules were seldom enforced.

  Bypassing Naples and Rome, he stopped at a tiny inn in a tinier town for the night. Early the next morning he drove through Florence, then cut over to Pisa and along the Ligurian seacoast to Genoa, turning inland again toward the Swiss border for Geneva. Crossing checks in the European Neutral States were routine and crime remained low. He had no drugs on him and the bomb dogs would not alert on cordite – the propellant in ammunition – otherwise the Swiss police would never be able to operate with their own canines.