Ghost of the Gods - 02 (22 page)

On the main wall screen appeared a medieval looking stone building. The caption on the video had the date and time along with the name
Montreal Bioethics Institute
. A man and woman were walking from the compound when an incredible explosion temporarily blinded the camera. The man and woman were thrown to the ground and likely killed as the entire center of the compound was surgically incinerated, leaving a surprising amount of the outer wall intact. McKafferty was extremely impressed. That was very fine explosives work. The best Special Forces teams could not have done better. The scene began to loop with a close-up of the two people leaving the building displayed on a second screen next the main screen. McKafferty almost choked on the coffee he was drinking.

“I know them!” he bellowed.

“Mark Freedman and Sarah Mayfair,” said Alexi Zuris. “Hybrid fugitives wanted because they know our propaganda is a lie. The real question is, Why are they doing our job for us by destroying communes?”

“If they survived that blast, I want them!” growled McKafferty. “Screw your
propaganda is a lie
bullshit. They’re dangerous!”

“We want them too,” interrupted Richard Zuris. “They are alive and we want them to stay alive and unharmed for testing. Can you do that for me, General?”

“My pleasure,” said McKafferty. “I need a copy of that tape.”

“Done,” said Alexi.

“I assume you’ve issued some kind of trumped-up warrant for them in Canada,” said McKafferty.

“You assume right,” said Alexi. “They’re now wanted terrorists in Canada and in the States. It is only a matter of time before we pick them up.”

“You’re wrong about that, junior. They’ve been evading capture for years,” said McKafferty. “I want to run this manhunt personally. I need to assume command now.”

“I expected nothing less,” said Richard Zuris. “A car is waiting outside to take you to your hotel and then to the airfield, where your jet is already fueled and ready.”

Richard Zuris – Dallas, Texas – February 13, 0002 A.P.

Only Alexi and Zuris, along with their bodyguards, remained in the situation room. Zuris finished his phone call. By god, he felt like a king. This must have been how the old monarchs enjoyed their reigns. It was such a pleasure to openly wield the immense power his family had held in secret for too long. No more surrogates. No more holding companies. No more puppet governments. The power of great wealth accumulated for generations had an authority all its own.

“The general is easily motivated,” said Alexi.

“That is one of the qualities I treasure in him,” said Zuris. “So, what do you think of our general?”

“I think he is a very useful tool. It was a thing of beauty the way you manipulated him using that top-secret report you made sure his superiors delivered to him. You provoked his suspicions and then dialed him back just enough.
Shock doctrine
—hah! I may have to read that book again. McKafferty will spend all his spare time sniffing around the distractions you fed him.”

“It is always good to keep a curious lion busy with harmless prey until you need him,” said Zuris. “Where is our general now?”

Alexi tapped out a rhythm on a keyboard. A video feed of General McKafferty packing flashed up on a secondary screen. Zuris smiled to himself, thinking the general would never know what he had missed. If he’d been a little harder to convince, he would have had a far more interesting night in that hotel suite. Sexual blackmail was another excellent tool of state.

“I have some fresh TAP signal intelligence that’s very interesting,” said Alexi.

His son used the same keyboard to bring up a signal intelligence display on the main screen. The display showed the usual map of North America with icons for captured voice-recognition traces that matched entered search criteria. Alexi clicked on an icon. A transcript of the selected signal intelligence appeared on Zuris’s tablet as well as the big screen. TAP was an NSA surveillance project begun half a decade ago and operated by a conglomerate owned by Zuris. As with all projects developed by his companies, clandestine backdoors had been added for his own use. TAP enabled cell phones contained a covert listening mode. For years, the NSA had been recording every conversation within earshot of all TAP enabled cell phones and logging the location. It was a gluttonous feast of data that could never be fully digested. At this point only 10 percent of the phones were TAP enabled, but that would soon change. TAP was the true reason behind nationalization of wireless telecom companies and free cell phone service. Just this month a new promotion had begun, free phone upgrades, and every upgrade would of course be TAP enabled.

“We have identified the voices of Mark Freedman and Sarah Mayfair speaking to a Catholic priest,” said Alexi. “Father Enrique, a known member of the
Antinostrum—
”

“I despise those fanatics,” spat Zuris, interrupting his son. “I’m sorry, Alexi, go on.”

“We captured this conversation from the priest’s phone,” said Alexi. “Freedman and Mayfair are interrogating the priest about an object that was stolen from the Chicago commune before it was bombed. The priest mistakenly thinks Freedman and Mayfair work for a Family, so he tries to bluff them until he realizes he’s been duped. Prior to this recording, Mayfair executed a known burglar in front of the priest. The burglar was apparently working for the priest and had knifed Freedman a few days prior. Because of this intercept we spooled up and searched a prior month’s worth of Chicago video surveillance and TAP intercepts. In an earlier TAP intercept we have the priest speaking with the dead burglar about a relic he stole, acting under orders from the priest. We also have partial video of a break-in at the Chicago commune and we have Freedman delivered by ambulance to a nearby hospital with what should have been a fatal knife wound. All of this is obviously connected.”

“What are Freedman and Mayfair up to?” asked Zuris. “We don’t want McKafferty capturing them just yet, but soon. We need them for Prometheus. In all the years we’ve been watching communes these two just don’t fit. They’re different than other hybrids. They act like chemical free-radicals, causing the stable elements to combust. They could become a threat to us. It’s a pity we’ve never gotten TAP intercepts from their phones. I need you to fix that. I want to give them a little more room to play and see what we learn. It’s always best to study your subjects in the wild in their natural environment before you cage them in a zoo.”

“Yes, Father!” Alexi’s voice was like a salute.

“I want you to personally oversee every TAP intercept we get from McKafferty’s cell phone. I can’t entrust it to anyone except you. Make sure your people miss nothing and make sure McKafferty does not get too close to Freedman until we are ready to capture him.”

“Yes, Father. What about the hybrid who’s going around destroying communes? McKafferty believes Freedman and Mayfair are the bombers.”

“Convenient, isn’t it… That murderous hybrid is one very complex mystery. We still have nothing on him?”

“Nothing, Father.”

“I don’t like mysteries and I don’t like these communes. Maybe they’ll destroy each other for us? Are your plans to lay traps for our hybrid mad bomber proceeding on schedule?”

“We will capture him, Father.”

Zuris was silent for a while as he scanned the TAP transcript. He often did this on important matters to make sure the context of the intercepted discussion was not lost in the verbal reporting and vice versa. Satisfied, he looked up at his son.

“What time did you arrange for the board to convene?” asked Zuris.

“They’re waiting for us now, Father.”

“Good.”

Zuris put his arm around his son as they exited the situation room. He was proud of his son. He exceeded his father in every measure. It was a short walk down the hall to the board of directors meeting room.

One of their bodyguards opened the door to the meeting room. Everyone stood when Zuris entered and did not sit until he did. He looked around the table at the directors of Capital Investments. The privately owned holding company was the capstone of the family corporate pyramid. Everyone at the table held a healthy stake in Capital Investments. Everyone at the table was related by blood. This was his family, just as it had been his father’s family, and his grandfather’s family, and so on back through the generations. Their blood was not blue but they were as much royalty as those families that had remained in Europe and sat on thrones. The combined wealth of the twelve great families was a significant percentage of the known treasure of the world and, in some cases, included government coffers. These dynastic families had been accumulating and passing down wealth for centuries. The Zuris family, known in very private circles as the Atlantic House, was at present the most powerful family in this exclusive hereditary club of deadly financial combatants. Over the centuries, while the governments and peoples of the world occupied themselves in bloody battles, the families profited off the chaos. It was what they did best.

As the meeting went on, Zuris subconsciously ran his fingers over the small electronics package on his belt. The medical-jammer that kept him alive was one of the more stunning results of their reverse-engineering projects. It had literally saved his life from a deadly cancer. Zuris thought of the dark irony that Alexi’s successes at recovering ancient-tech might ensure he would never ascend to lead the Family. With the medical tech they were developing, Zuris might live a very long time, a lifetime measured in centuries.

Due to the use of ancient-tech in each jammer, every unit was handmade and required a great deal of tuning trial and error. The product had fantastic sales potential; and not just medical, but also security and military markets. Zuris sighed. Such a valuable product, yet it might never go into mass production for strategic political reasons. Zero-G scientists had spent thousands of man-hours trying to learn how the ancient-tech generated its null jamming signal. The ancient-tech transmitted in the same stealthy way as seeds, using something called
random frequency hopping
and
encryption hopping
spread-spectrum signals
. Regardless of the technical details, the true genius of it all was that n-web transmissions had been mistaken for over a century as the natural background noise of the atmosphere and planet. All that was known and theorized about the jamming signal was that the ancient-tech was generating a complex, ever changing encrypted command that ordered seeds to stop and proceed no further—
Thou shall not pass
. If the jammer’s antenna and signal strength was great enough to create a null zone, the seeds were blocked. They did not attempt to tunnel through or around the null zone. The jammer application was really little more than an advancement on a discovery made two years ago. Before the major outbreaks, COBIC was observed by the NSA reacting to a top-secret submarine communications antenna buried under Lake Superior. A large plume of microbes had been observed being drawn toward the antenna and then repelled when they got too close. It was like moths flying at a bare electric bulb and then being driven off by the heat. Zuris moved his fingers away from the electronics package on his belt. This ancient-tech jammer was a remarkable feat, and yet the very best and brightest still had no idea how it worked.

Zuris focused back on the board meeting. His son was wrapping up a report on clandestine operations to consolidate control over the food supply in North America. Progress was excellent thanks to monocultures having been forced onto farmers for decades by nonaligned corporations. The last topic on the agenda was Prometheus, and as far as Zuris was concerned, the only purpose for this Kabuki theater called a board meeting. Alexi stood to give the report.

“Several of the hybrid experimental subjects are now beginning to process rudimentary interface data. I do not need to remind everyone present what success of this project will mean. We are using CIT to keep track of hybrids that we want as subjects. We have also decided that the Nobel laureate Mark Freedman is the best candidate to lead research into the next phase of the Prometheus project. We are moving to acquire him and add him to our scientific pool when the time is right.”

“He’s a goddamn hybrid!” exclaimed one of the board members. Others grumbled.

“Exactly,” said Zuris as he entered the fray. “Who better to work on Prometheus than a genius scientist who already has hard-wired into his brain what we are trying to build? Two years ago a plague tipped over the Monopoly board and scattered all the pieces onto the floor. It was total picture-perfect chaos. This plague has given us great opportunities that we all agree we must not squander. This is our best chance to ensure Atlantic House remains a dominant force forever. Prometheus has the potential to technologically advance us hundreds, if not thousands, of years in a single leap. We need the very best working on Prometheus. I don’t care if the best is a hybrid, a Martian, or a goddamn monkey!”

Richard Zuris – Dallas, Texas – February 14, 0002 A.P.

Zuris was on edge, sitting in the situation room alone, staring at the screens. Alexi and a team of his Peacekeeper commandos were close to apprehending a new hybrid for use as an interface node inside Prometheus. Each commando was wired with the same video and audio gear as Enforcers. The tiny high-resolution video cameras on their helmets sent back remarkably good images. The microphones captured every sound. Aerial reconnaissance from drones provided a chessboard-like view of the field of action. Zuris could see and hear almost as well as if he were in the field.

This hybrid subject was remarkable in many ways and just might turn out to be a major breakthrough for Prometheus. The hybrid did not know he was a hybrid and was clearly mentally unbalanced. Also, he was not a member of a commune, which made him very rare and simplified extraction because they could transport him by air without risk of disconnection killing him. His ability to heal others was remarkable, which indicated his brain might be far along in the nanotech conversion process. Alexi and his team had followed their subject for several blocks after insertion from a rooftop landing of their helicopter. New Orleans was a mess. One of the commandos nicknamed Cuda had been forced to take out a civilian who had actually tried to mug him while he was kneeling behind cover. The civilian had used a baseball bat on the commando’s helmet with disastrous results for the civilian.

Zuris had on a Bluetooth earpiece and could talk with anyone on the team, though he limited himself to Alexi’s private channel. The subject had apparently drawn an
ichthys
on his forehead in his own blood. Zuris watched as the oddity walked into a church. Based on prior surveillance taken in New Orleans weeks ago, the subject would announce himself as the Messiah and begin healing. Alexi’s team moved in to surround the church. The subject was boxed in with no escape route. They would wait for him to leave and then take him by surprise. Alexi’s team was wearing night camouflaged zone-jammer suits with shielded military helmets. They were taking no chances in case this Messiah also had a very deadly sting in the form of micro kill-zones. They had run into that before with disastrous results for the commando team and later some lab personnel. They would take down the subject by hitting him with multi-shot Tasers, then inject him with enough drugs to knock out a bear.