Catch and Kill

by J D Lasica

  He was not permitted into the Summit’s inner sanctum. On the one hand, Lucid understood each member of the Compact had their top lieutenants cooling their heels in the mansion’s main drawing room. On the other hand, he had strategized with Incognito about which underground leaders to invite into the fold.

  Why, I organized this gathering!

  He leaned over to Dražen Savić and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” They had a large security detail on the premises to keep Incognito safe.

  They strolled down the hill in the cooling night. A light dusting of snow began to fall as they reached old town with its lit-up buildings and cobblestone plazas. They paused at a fountain in front of Hotel Ochsen.

  “How do you know Kaden Baker is in Zug?” Lucid asked.

  “One of my men spotted her from two blocks away, coming out of a hotel bar. By the time he got there, he lost her in the crowd. We’ve spent the last three hours at every hotel in town looking through guest registries.”

  “She’s probably traveling under an alias.”

  “Agreed.”

  This was the longest conversation Lucid had had with Savić for weeks. He’s good at carrying out orders. Not so good at thinking out of the box.

  “What’s your plan?” Lucid asked.

  “My detail is spread thin.”

  “Go find her. No more excuses!”

  Savić shot him a glare that made Lucid’s spine shiver. Then he turned and disappeared into the night while Lucid returned to the mansion.

  Tosh stared at the monitor of his mobile console in his hotel room. An alert flashed across the screen. A keyword match! He looked at the notification. It was not a phrase he expected to see.

  Kaden Baker.

  He’d plastered old town with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment: smoke detectors, wall outlets with micro-cameras, pen cams, even a few paper clip transmitters. But it was one of the agency’s new micro-drones that scored a hit.

  He had considered activating the Return to Home function for the drones, now that a light snow was falling. A single big fat snowflake could down one of those expensive gems. Then came the hit, courtesy of one of the micro-drones with both video and audio.

  “Carlos! Get in here!”

  Carlos rushed in from the balcony. Tosh and Judy Matthews in the next hotel room were monitoring online intercepts as well as listening devices in 320 public and semi-public spaces: street corners, plazas, park benches, restaurants, cafes, hotel lobbies, bars, conference rooms. Carlos was in charge of navigating the drones, using his own electronic setup to make sure they were inconspicuous.

  “We have a hit,” Tosh said. “The plaza outside Hotel Ochsen.”

  Carlos swiped up on his tablet. “That’s drone unit 134. It’s the only one we have on that corner.”

  “Launch track mode. We need to follow these guys.”

  Carlos watched the live feed and positioned the drone to get a better look at both of their faces. “Running facial recognition now.” He waited to see if there was a database hit on either target. After a minute, two green lights popped up on his screen.

  “Target one is Lucid, maybe an alias. Right-hand man to a shady underworld figure who’s been eluding us for years. Target two is a black ops specialist. Dražen Savić.”

  “Savić?” The blood drained from Tosh’s face. “That’s the SOB who attacked Kaden and killed her boyfriend.”

  “Wait, they’re separating! What should I do?”

  Tosh wrinkled his forehead. He promised Kaden he’d do anything to bring Savić to justice. But protocol demanded they go after the high-value target. “We have no choice. Follow Lucid. I’ll notify Bo and ask him to tell Kaden.”

  Kaden spotted Bo again across the sea of faces in the ballroom of Theater Casino Zug and made her way to him. Before she could say anything, he nodded, leaned close, and said in a low voice, “I just heard. Tosh has a tracker on the suspect. He’s moving north, out of old town.”

  “Why would my name come up during our surveillance?” she said.

  “It means they know you’re here. And they’ll come for you again.” Bo scanned the crowd, looking for potential threats. Then his gaze met hers. “Think! You must have something they want.”

  The Ezekiel file—that must be it!

  “I hacked a file from Randolph Blackburn’s digital vault.”

  “And you’re just telling me now?” Bo looked ticked off. “That must be the reason they’re after you. They must want it bad. What’s in it?”

  “It was encrypted up until a few minutes ago. Haven’t checked it yet. Let’s get out of this crowd so we can figure out next steps.”

  They moved through the throng, past white-tux waiters and the well-dressed crypto-elite. She signaled to Nico to meet at the side entrance.

  Jacques Bouchard spotted her and threaded his way through the thinning cluster of guests to intercept her. “Jordan, the buses are starting to leave for the Full Moon Skiing Gala. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

  She was on the fence. “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, you must! They’ve already reserved a ski bib and jacket in your size. It’s a magical experience. The entire Zug Valley is lit up. It’s like skiing in a dream.”

  “Let me talk to my—” She almost said father, though that was still an open question. “Let me confer with my partners.”

  She turned back toward the exit. She and Bo emerged into the hallway. Nico was standing there next to the noisy entrance of the kitchen.

  “What’s the plan?” Nico asked.

  “I have an idea. If they’re looking for me, I can draw them out.”

  A look of alarm flashed across Bo’s face. “Not a chance. I’m not losing another daughter.”

  “We agree,” Kaden said.

  She considered their options. The party was winding down with guests heading to the slopes for the super-hyped Full Moon Skiing Gala. She could supply backup to Tosh and Carlos and head north. But she sensed Bo was holding something back.

  Bo grimaced. “Kaden, there’s something I need to tell you. But I don’t want it to jeopardize our mission.”

  There was something she needed to tell him, too. The paternity test results. But not now.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “We have a positive I.D. on one of the suspects on our watch list.”

  She waited and finally had to pull it out of him. “Who?”

  “Dražen Savić.”

  The whole world stopped. All the noise and chatter in the hallway fell away, replaced by a faint hum. She closed her eyes and pictured the scene. She saw Dražen Savić shift his gun’s aim to her lover’s forehead. She saw the look on Gabriel’s face. She heard the little gasp escape his throat—that little half-second gasp of surprise that just tore her heart out.

  29

  Zug, Switzerland

  Volkov looked at the faces around the conference table. Call them what you will. Oligarchs, plutocrats, magnates, tycoons, moguls, syndicate bosses, drug lords, enterprising businessmen. These were the faces of men who had always done things their own way. Collaboration was not in their vocabulary. But now he needed them.

  He knew what unleashing the pathogen would do to the target populations. Civil society would collapse. Markets would crumble. Chaos and mob rule would replace law and order. There would be a major power vacuum. Look at Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

  He needed authoritarian strongmen to fill the vacuum that chaos and lawlessness would bring. Men who would be indebted to him. And over time, he wanted a world he could perfectly control. Winner take all. He had already seen such a world of smoke, brimstone, and abject subjugation in his visions of the end times.

  This is what he wanted. Not a ten percent year-over-year return on investment. He wanted a reset of the existing world order. He wanted to impose a death choke on the West and the vapid set of values it stood for. He wanted to reboot civilization itself.

  A voice. Somebody was talking. “Incognito, are you li
stening? What do you mean, ‘personal doomsday clock’? You mean a cancer?” The voice of Zhang Lee.

  “Not quite. On screen.”

  The rudimentary personal assistant in the corner of the conference room lit up bright blue and turned on the large high-def wall monitor opposite the windows. Kasparian had synced the device to obey Volkov’s voice commands and gestures for the Summit.

  The screen filled with a short presentation Volkov and Lucid had pulled together. First, the science. Then the geopolitics. And finally the Compact’s role.

  The first slide showed two archaea side by side. “You’re looking at the transmission agent. Two strains of genetically modified archaea, a little-understood microbe that resides in nature and in the human gut.”

  “They look the same.” Abdullin tilted his head sideways with a skeptical expression.

  “Exactly right. They’ve been altered in several ways, but the changes take place at the molecular level, invisible even under a microscope.”

  He flicked his hand to the right and the new slide showed two Petri dishes: a normal archaea culture next to a culture with out-of-control growth. “This brings us to the first step of Project Ezekiel. Propagation. Our strains reproduce at a much faster rate than ordinary archaea. Even more important, they can be passed from person to person through casual contact.”

  He held up two fingers and an aerial view of Samana Cay filled the screen. “Step two. Penetration. How to get these microbes out of the laboratory and into the population centers of the U.S. and western Europe? You’ve no doubt heard about the popularity of the VR and AR theme parks at Samana Cay, plus the new Fantasy Live camp. Visitors who dine on the island have a little something extra added to their diet. Tasteless and harmless—at first.”

  “Ah! I was wondering why you’d poured all that money into your island paradise. It can’t be just for the young girls.” Kasparian, who’d loaned a submarine and superyacht to Project Ezekiel, grabbed a wine glass and opened an $8,000 bottle of Grand Cru from the Côte d'Or region of Burgundy. A token of Volkov’s appreciation for hosting the Compact.

  Volkov flashed his teeth, trying to approximate what a smile might look like. “There are many reasons for what we’re doing on Samana Cay.” No need to spell them out here. And no reason to tip my hand to the Compact about the full scope of my plans.

  Kasparian was on board. Volkov took the measure of the others. Intrigued, but not yet sold. This next bit of news would show that this was more than blue-sky talk and conjecture.

  He swiped right again and the screen filled with a map of reservoirs and water sources targeted in the United States and Europe.

  “While many thousands of visitors pass through Samana Cay each day, we’re not waiting for visitors to come to us. We’ve gone straight to the water sources. With a highly virulent agent such as ours, a few liters can be diluted into millions of gallons of water and still reach their hosts and replicate.”

  The billionaires studied the screen with its video images of the Washington Aqueduct, Los Angeles Aqueduct, Miami's Biscayne Aquifer, Bleiloch reservoir in Germany, dozens of others. Operations were being completed as fast as the Plant next to Bashir’s Lab could produce the treated supplies of water.

  Volkov held up three fingers. “Step three. Execution. We turn New York, Washington, LA, Miami, London, Berlin into living laboratories. We trigger different biochemical reactions in different populations.”

  Broz, the severe-looking Serb, held up his palm. “You’re losing me. Triggers? How does this work?”

  “You’ll forgive me for not disclosing more of the specifics. But let me paint the picture in broad strokes for you.”

  He advanced the presentation to show a busy city sidewalk in Washington, D.C. Red arrows pointed to the types of individuals with specific genetic markers who would be targeted.

  “Once the archaea reside in our target, you need something to trigger the expression of the altered genes. This brings us back to Zhang’s question about a personal doomsday clock. We’re quite proud of the technique our Lab has developed. Gentlemen, I present the world’s first genetically designed sleeper pathogen.”

  “Sleeper pathogen?” Broz said. Some of them still didn’t get it.

  “We’ve built a trigger into the process. A trigger with a time delay. That allows the contagion to spread to tens of millions of targets without detection. No one will show any symptoms until a specific signal triggers the pathogen. By the time officials realize what’s happening, it will be too late. Half the population will be infected and there’s no vaccine on earth that can stop it.”

  Phase One would begin five days from now. Phase Two would deliver the crippling blow.

  “And the pathogen would mean death to the person infected?” Zhang tapped his fingers together.

  “Not at first.” He swiped right, showing the last two Lab slides. “The new frontier of synthetic biology allows scientists to create individualized viral therapies for patients, using ‘magic bullets’ to micro-target cancer cells with extreme precision. Now, what if we could control the behavior of healthy cells instead? Target the cells of the retina and the result is blindness. Target the limbic system and a memory wipe is possible. Target the liver and death comes quickly.”

  Silence in the room as the members weighed this breakthrough.

  The advent of personalized germ warfare.

  “We begin not with mass deaths, but with fear.” Volkov advanced to the next slide showing file footage of police in riot gear being attacked by an angry mob. “We will pit American against American, Brit versus Brit, German versus German. It will begin in small pockets, followed by race wars in urban centers. Life or death might depend on your genetic inheritance. We may even see a Second Civil War come out of this for the Americans.”

  “That I would like to see.” Kruger lifted his second glass of whisky in a toast, then polished it off.

  For Volkov, it was less a personal vendetta against the West and more an acknowledgment that the western powers were the only obstacles to his vision of a new world order. A grand Reset.

  “If we want to change the world order, we can’t go up against the superpowers’ strength. We cannot win on a military battlefield. We will win by outflanking them in broad daylight. We will wage a stealth war, gentlemen. One front is biological. A second front is psychological. Our assets in social media and mass media are in place, prepared to spread a disinformation campaign. We will cultivate psy-ops on a massive scale. The battlefield is each target’s mind. The target will question what is real and what is not, who can be trusted and who cannot, to the point of madness. We will keep the Americans and the western Europeans in a constant state of fear.”

  “And our own people—our wives, children, mistresses.” Kruger shot a sly look at Kasparian. “They will not be affected?”

  “Your people, your citizens, will be safe,” Volkov assured them. He had provided a Q&A in the executive summary, anticipating all the questions and possible objections that the attendees would raise, but he skirted the issue of targeting populations by ethnicity and ancestry. Some members of the Compact might be squeamish about so-called ethnic cleansing.

  “All your people will be safe.” He leaned forward, wanting to drive home the point. “Stockpiles of vaccines and antidotes are being rolled off the assembly line at the Plant on Samana Cay at this very moment. We can add the vaccine surreptitiously to the food supplies of our allies so as not to panic the local populace.”

  He sized up the men around the table. The looks of skepticism were turning into somber looks of intrigue. At bottom, these men all wanted the same thing. More money, more wealth, more power. There was also the undeniable hidden subtext: Don’t go along and your people will pay the price.

  “That brings us to our final slide. The spoils. The United States and Europe have had their turns at ruling the world. Now it’s our turn.”

  He flicked his hand to show a map of the world coded in different colors. Instead of
displaying the usual map of countries with defined geographic borders, it showed a topological map with a rainbow of colors.

  “Gentlemen, behold the Seven Spheres. We can work out the details in the months ahead. But let’s start thinking about the new world we’re about to usher in.”

  Volkov had divided the world into spheres of influence based on each billionaire’s underground operations. These were the world’s supreme traffickers in drugs, weapons, sex slaves, and illegal goods. Ecuador’s Alcivar would get Central and South America, a piece of southern Mexico, and the Southern Caribbean. Africa and parts of the Middle East would go to South Africa’s Kruger. All of China and Taiwan would go to Zhang.

  The exact manner in which they carved up the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia would be a bone of contention, but this was not the meeting to settle such matters. They would all get a slice of the pie.

  Zhang leaned back in his office chair and began to rock, arms folded. “With the fall of the West, what is to stop China from claiming territory as the world’s preeminent superpower?”

  “And Russia,” Abdullin interjected. “She is eager to reassert a dominant role on the world stage.”

  “That is precisely the reason I invited you to join the Compact.” Volkov gave a nod of encouragement to two of his most ruthless colleagues. “You both have met with the top leadership in Beijing and the Kremlin. At the proper time, they need to be convinced that the West’s fall does not create a power vacuum. The Compact is the new superpower. We don’t own a useless nuclear arsenal. We own something better. The ability to surgically remove any world leader, any family, any ethnic group or populace. Personalized germ warfare is the game changer. More effective than nuclear arms, because we have no hesitation in using it.”

  Zhang stroked his analytical chin while Abdullin arched his eyebrows.

  Volkov painted the big picture for them. “This is our time, gentlemen. For years, we have asked the question, how can the arrogant Americans be dealt a punishing blow? Would it be a dirty bomb in New York? A cyber-attack, bringing down the entire energy grid? No. The answer is a personal doomsday clock.”