by Blake Banner
“Wake up?”
“Become conscious. The evolutionary step we took, as humans, is unique. It is…” he shrugged and shook his head, unable to find a better word to describe it. “How many billions, trillions of light-years would you have to go through space to find another self-aware species? We are a jewel in the cosmos. And brutal, fumbling and cruel as we are, we have used that consciousness to do great things. Mozart’s concertos, Van Gogh’s paintings, Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays…”
“I get the idea. Don’t patronize me.”
He ignored me, stressing his point. “Democracy, the declaration of Human Rights…”
“Stop, you’re going to make me vomit.”
“The point is, Lacklan, that these things need to be preserved.”
“And you are the guys to do it?”
It was Rho who answered. “Do you know of anybody else?”
I nodded. “Yeah, as it happens I do. What about the United Nations? Isn’t that the kind of thing they are there for? What about getting all the heads of state in the world around the table and making a plan…?”
Ben was laughing out loud before I had finished. His amusement seemed real. Rho had sat back in his chair, sighing and looking away at the wall. He wasn’t amused. I felt a rush of hot anger to my head.
“What, that’s funny? Seven and a half billion people dying of disease and starvation is funny to you?”
“No.” It was Rho. He looked back at me. “No, it’s not funny, Lacklan. What’s funny is that you—a bitter, twisted cynic like you—should be naïve enough to believe that the world’s political leaders would actually get around a table together for such a noble purpose. Shall I tell you why we are a government within the government? Shall I tell you why we operate in secret, and use blackmail and the threat of death and torture to control political leaders? Do I need to explain?”
My anger drained away as fast as it had surged. I felt suddenly empty inside, because I knew what he was going to say, and I knew that in his position, I would do the same. “Go ahead, tell me.”
“Because politicians are a breed. They are parasites who feed off sheep. They are greedy, predatory, and infinitely stupid! They look at this holocaust that is hurtling toward us and they think one thing, and one thing only. How can we use it to gain more power? What can we do to make sure we will come out top dog?”
He was right and I knew it.
“And how is what you’re planning any different?”
It was Ben who replied. “Because what we plan to do is to preserve all the best that humanity has created, and we plan to create an equitable, balanced, sustainable society that will not feed off the planet as a parasite. We plan to use clean, fusion energy and keep the human population down in the low millions, so that the Earth can regenerate itself. Our ultimate aim is for the good of humanity as part of the planet. And frankly, our plan is the only one on the table.”
“What do you want from me?”
Rho answered. “I already told you. We want you to do precisely what you are doing. Find Marni—or allow her to find you. Persuade her to work with us. We know we are not perfect.” He gave a small, unamused laugh. “We are pretty much making it up as we go along, adapting to a volatile situation, and even though we have got off to a bad start, we could use people like you and Marni.” He shook his head again. “We are not the enemy, Lacklan.”
Ben spoke again. “You need time to think this through, and we are going to give you time to do that. But before you go, Lacklan, I want you to consider something. Where we are now, where humanity stands right now, there is no way of fixing this without going through some kind of holocaust. Whichever way we go now, there will be pain, horror and death. Every path leads through hell. So the question becomes, what is the shortest route to a place where we can heal?”
I looked into his eyes. They didn’t waver. I said, “And how do Montilla and the Sinaloa drugs cartel fit into this glorious vision?”
He didn’t bat an eyelid. “We take whatever support we can get. We are not squeamish. But we decide on the final outcome of all this. Maybe you should focus less on where the money comes from, and more on what it was being used for.”
“Sun beetles and mind control?”
“Preservation of the Earth, and human culture.” Suddenly and unexpectedly, he stood. The interview was over. “Take the time you need, a day, two, stay at the hotel, relax. It’s on us. Think about what we have said. Join us, in whatever capacity you like. Your father’s position is still vacant. Help us to find Marni. Help us to bring her in. Let us, please, make this right.”
I stood and Rho stood, too. Ben held out his hand to me. I hesitated a moment.
“So you don’t know who Marni met with when she came to DC?” They didn’t answer. Their faces were expressionless, like they had somehow been switched off. “And what about Engels? I had assumed he was one of yours. So why’d you kill him? Why did you torture him?”
Ben took a deep breath. “We were using him. He didn’t know that he was working for us. We tortured him to find out where Marni had gone. He didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t you take them when they were in DC?”
He shook his head. “We didn’t know where they were.”
So Engels hadn’t lied, and his friend in Congress was for real. I took Ben’s hand and we shook. They showed me to the door.
Ben asked, “Do you need a car?”
“No, I’ll take a walk.”
He handed me a card. It had a personal contact number on it. “Anything you need, anything at all, contact me.”
I made my way down, back along the route we had followed, from Ring B back through C, D and E, and out into the autumn sunshine. I walked about a mile to the Arlington Memorial Bridge and stood looking down at the Potomac. I lit a cigarette and stood smoking and thinking. They didn’t have Marni. They didn’t know where she was. But they thought she would come to me, and then they would reel us both in.
I turned and started walking across the bridge, toward DC. It was maybe four miles to the Hilton, an hour’s walk. And as I walked, my mind went back to Tucson, to Marni’s house. I had been exhausted and in pain, and all I could think of was that I was about to find Marni’s body. That had been my whole focus. But I had been over the scene again several times, and each time I was more certain. Her rucksack and her boots were not there. They had gone.
Marni and Engels had returned together, but he had stayed when she had left. Had he given his life for her? Had they sold him the same line they had just tried to sell me, and then she had opened his eyes? It was impossible to tell. But he had stayed there and been killed, while she had got away.
My tracker was somewhere between the Hawk’s Nest, San Patricio and Sheriff Caleb’s house. Maybe it was shot full of holes. But I was pretty sure that Phil might have some idea of what to do.
By the time I had reached the Lincoln Memorial and started up 23rd Street toward Foggy Bottom, I had started to smile. Marni had not gone over to them, I was going to find her, and they were going to let me. Now they were playing my game.
At Washington Circle Park, I heard the ping of an email arriving on my cell. I stopped, pulled it out and thumbed the screen. My stomach lurched at a hot pellet of adrenaline. It was from Sarah Connors. I opened it. It said, simply:
What the hell have you done? Why didn’t you follow to DC?
BOOK 3
THE STORM
One
Hurricane Sarah was heading for New Orleans. It was the only interesting thing the news had told me since early October; since my meeting with Omega in Washington, since that last cryptic message from Marni, asking why the hell I hadn’t followed her from Tucson to Washington[]. Since then, for almost two months, she’d fallen off the radar. There had been no clue, no message, no contact at all about where she was or what she was doing. I’d promised my father on his deathbed that I would look after her and protect her from Omega, but so far she had made that almost impos
sible.
And then there was the hurricane.
It was the largest and most violent in recorded history—almost a thousand miles in diameter—with winds reaching 230 MPH, surging in off the Atlantic and headed for New Orleans. And it was out of season, striking in late November, which was practically unheard of. Hurricane season was August and September.
Omega’s purpose was to exploit climate change and overpopulation, in order to consolidate their global, political power. Marni’s self-imposed mission was to expose Omega and bring them down. That was why she had murdered my father, that was why the Biosphere Projects had drawn her to Tucson. So maybe, just maybe, hurricane Sarah might draw her to New Orleans. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had right then.
So I’d called Kenny, the butler I had inherited from my father, and had him send the Zombie 222, my converted ’68 Mustang, down from Weston to DC, with a kit bag in the trunk. It was sixteen hours to the Big Easy, following the I-81 and then the I-59 from Chattanooga. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there. I had a few ideas—contact the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), check out the university’s Climatology and Earth Sciences departments, see if she had been in touch with them or any of their professors. That was the sort of direction my mind was taking. But that was before I reached Laurel, Mississipi. At Laurel, everything changed.
I had stopped at the Exxon service station at exit thirty-five, just south of the town. It was eight AM and I’d sat by the window with a large coffee and a couple of donuts. The sun had been up for an hour and a half, but outside, the sky was heavy with dark gray clouds, and the tall pines across the road were bowing and tossing in a wind that wanted to get rough.
Whoever had been at that table before me had come from Louisiana. There was a copy of the Baton Rouge Advocate on the table. So after I’d got bored of watching the bowing pines and the random drops of desultory rain splat on the window, I pulled over the paper and turned to the front page. And that was when everything changed.
It changed because I was staring at the face of my friend and comrade in arms, Bat Hays.
I was nineteen when my parents divorced and, to get away from my father, whom I hated with a passion, I had joined the British SAS. For ten years, that had been my life. I had left, a couple of years back, aged thirty, with the rank of captain and a handful of friends who were more than brothers; men who would give their lives for me, and I for them. Bat Hays was one. Now he was staring at me from the front page of the Advocate with his hands cuffed behind his back.
His black, obstinate, proud face stared at the crowd as he was led by cops to a patrol car. Nobody would see the fear he felt. Nobody but me. This guy who had faced death a hundred times and laughed at it with his Cockney humor, would be completely lost and helpless in the jaws of the relentless system of the law.
The headline said:
MAN ARRESTED IN SARAH CARMICHAEL MURDER
I read on. “Bartholomew Hays, 30, originally from London, England, was arrested yesterday and charged with the murder of Sarah Carmichael, of Burgundy, in the parish of West Feliciana. Mrs. Carmichael was found shot to death in her bed by her husband, real estate magnate Charles Carmichael, on the night of Friday, 3rd November, shortly before midnight.
“The Killer fled after he was disturbed by Carmichael on his return from dining at a restaurant. Shots were exchanged but the killer escaped through a window into the woods…”
I stepped out into the drizzle, under the lowering sky, and climbed into the Zombie. I hit the ignition and the powerful, dual electric engines kicked in. There was no roar, no thunder, no sound at all. This machine delivers eight hundred bhp, one thousand eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque straight to the back wheels, and will go 0-60 in just over one and a half seconds. But she is totally silent.
I lit a Camel, pulled quietly out of the lot, and took the 84 west as far as Natchez. It was one hundred and thirty miles, and I did it in just over an hour. At Natchez, I took Route 61 south, through Burgundy and Hardwood, to St Francisville, where the Parish Jail was. All the way, the sky loomed, darkening and lead-heavy over the green woodlands, and the wind tossed and twisted the trees.
I found the Clerk of Court, an elegant 18th century red brick building with a pretty dome, on Prosperity Street. I was directed to the bail office, paid Hayes’ three thousand five-hundred bail in cash, and headed back up Myrtle Hill Drive to the parish jail. It wasn’t hard to find, though it didn’t look much like a jail. It looked more like a golf club, set among green lawns and attractive, modern buildings. I figured it was part of the enlightened movement to ensure that criminals did not feel like social outcasts. I could think of several cheaper ways of achieving the same end, but then, I’m a social outcast.
I left the Zombie out front. The tropical, humid heat made it feel like late August or September, and in the time it took to cross the parking lot, I already had damp patches on my shirt. I pushed through the big glass doors into what looked like a hotel reception and told the guy on the desk who I was and why I was there. He made the call and twenty minutes later Bat, six foot two of solid muscle with an army kit bag over his shoulder, was brought out. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me.
“What the fuck…?”
“Hello Bat, what have you been up to?”
“What the fuck…? How the fuckin’…? Where the… Fuck…!”
I smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. If he’d been a fellow American, we would have embraced, but Brits don’t do that. We grinned and shook hands and that was enough. It was good to see a friend.
“I see your vocabulary hasn’t improved.”
He laughed. “Am I glad to see you, sir! Everyone ’round here’s gone stark fucking bonkers. How did you know…?”
“Come on, I’ll explain in the car.”
We stepped outside. The humidity had turned into a warm drizzle that dried as soon as it landed. We crossed to the car, climbed in, and slammed the doors, closing out the ominous presence of the weather. I fired up the engines and, as we pulled away, I asked him, “You got a pad?”
“Yeah, mate. I got a nice little place on Congress Street. Up in Burgundy. Nice fuckin’ ride! Why don’t it make no noise, though?”
I raised an eyebrow at him as we slipped silently onto Route 61 and headed north toward the small town of Burgundy. I tossed him my pack of Camels and handed him my Zippo. He took them both gratefully and as he lit up, I said, “You have some explaining to do, pal.”
He inhaled deep and blew smoke at the ceiling, then lay back and closed his eyes.
“You ain’t fuckin’ joking, Captain. But I need somebody to explain it to me first.”
“I know the answer, Bat, but I have to ask, you understand that, right?”
He nodded.
“Did you kill her?”
“You know me, Cap. I couldn’t. Not a woman. Besides, I’m done with all that.”
“All what?”
“Violence, killin’. Done it. Done it with the best. Got the fuckin’ T-shirt. Don’t want it no more. I want to do something else with me life. Know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean. Why didn’t you call me?”
He looked reproachful. “Where? You fuckin’ disappeared, didn’t you?—sir! Nobody knew where you’d gone. Sarge said you’d gone to Wyoming, but nobody was sure. He didn’t know where in fuckin’ Wyoming. Wyoming’s a big fuckin’ place. It’s like a country!”
“Bradley? The Kiwi?”
He grinned. “Yeah, old fucker. He’s still with the Regiment. He’ll never quit. They won’t let him.” He was quiet for a bit, thinking. “How’d you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I was headed for New Orleans. I saw your picture in the paper. You’re famous.”
“Infamous, more like.”
“Who was Sarah Carmichael?”
“Wife of the local big wig. Got a reputation for being some kind of angel, concerned about the environment, helped the
poor, good works. You know the kind of thing. Hubby’s a land developer. Got a big mansion in the woods outside Burgundy.”
“You knew her?”
He shrugged and I knew he was going to lie to me. “She came into the club a few times.”
“Club?”
“I work as a bouncer at a local club, sir…”
“We’re not in the Regiment anymore, Bat. Call me Lacklan.”
“I’ll try. Anyway, I work as a bouncer at the Blue Lagoon, in Burgundy. They have live jazz. I play the trumpet sometimes…”
“Yeah, I remember. You were good. So…?”
“She’d come in some nights, have a drink, listen to the music.”
“With her husband?”
“Sometimes.”
“But not always?”
He sighed, noisily. “Yeah. Not always.”
“So you talk to her?”
“Look, Cap, I know what you’re drivin’ at. But she was just an independent woman, who liked jazz, and would go out sometimes of an evening, sometimes in company, sometimes alone. People talk. Especially in a small, religious community like this. But she was sophisticated, intelligent. She liked the music and sometimes she’d come alone. And she’d always leave alone. No big deal.”
I nodded. “OK, Bat. I’m going to get you an attorney. We’ll get you off these charges.”
“I can’t afford it, sir.”
“I can. We’ll think of a way for you to pay me back. The money isn’t a problem. Saving your ass is.”
He nodded. “Thanks.”
I gave it a moment, and as we approached Burgundy, I said, “You don’t have to tell me everything, at least not yet. But when your attorney gets here, you’ll have to tell him everything, in detail, warts and all. You understand me? Because if you don’t, whatever lies you tell, will trip you up and bite you in the ass down the line. And after that, I’ll beat seven bails of shit out of you.” I looked him in the eye. His eyes were hard and stubborn. “They still have the death penalty here, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”