Jericho 3 (31 page)

Odette wept uncontrollably as Claude tried to comfort her. Nothing seemed to help or calm her down.

“Odette, one more question…are they planning to murder the rest of the monkeys, too?” Jason asked as Odette’s tears and anguish subsided.

“I don’t know. That’s why I called Claude.”

Claude’s face was filled with rage.

“Public pressure has worked well in the UK. Claude, it can work here, too,” Jason said.

“Screw public pressure,” Claude said with barely restrained anger. “Odette, who runs LyonBio?”

“Gaudin…Thierry Gaudin.”

“Odette…thank you for letting me know. You did the right thing. This insanity will stop, I assure you. Jason and I need to talk.”

Odette got the hint. Her mission was accomplished. She wiped her face and kissed Claude on the cheek and touched Jason’s hand as she stood.

“What are you thinking?” Jason asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Claude answered as he wiped a tear from Odette’s cheek.

“Listen, we’ll blog about these atrocities the rest of the week, no doubt about that. The people of France will not stand for this. This will be a fundraising
coup d’état,
” Jason said with great pleasure.

“We don’t have the rest of the week. These monkeys will be dead by then.” Claude got up and put 15 Euros down on the table. “That should cover my portion with a little bit left over for your fundraising
coup
,” Claude said as he stormed past Odette and out of the restaurant.

Odette offered a sad smile to Jason and walked out of the Rue Café and down the narrow cobblestone walkway that separated the facing buildings, shops and restaurants.

Sainte-Consorce Suburb

Lyon, France

R
ochelle Gaudin kissed each of her children good-bye as they marched out of the house to wait for the school bus. They were dressed in standard parochial uniforms for a traditional Catholic education. The Gaudins could have easily afforded prestigious private schools for Bernard, Marie and Philippe, but Rochelle wanted to keep the family well-grounded in the community. Thierry did whatever Rochelle wanted.

The bus pulled up on schedule, and the children got on for the 15-minute ride to Sainte-Luc’s Catholic Church and school, a sprawling campus on 12-acres that served K-12 families in Sainte-Consorce.

Rochelle waived from the front steps of the home as six-year-old Philippe waved back from a window seat toward the back of the bus. Rochelle turned back into the house and never noticed the Volkswagen van that pulled out and followed the bus from a distance.

The school day ended promptly at 3:30pm, and the children were marched out to the circle drive where the buses were lined up for the afternoon drive home.

The Volkswagen van waited as well, from across the street.

Philippe and Marie got on the bus and waved to Bernard who had just started walking with two friends, each carrying a backpack full of school books, folders and papers. The boys walked off Sainte-Luc’s campus, crossed the street and over to the center of town that was filled with small shops, cafes and restaurants.

Bernard never noticed the Volkswagen van that followed them for a short distance, stopped and let one passenger out, then drove past Bernard and his friends and parked in the back alley behind a bookstore.

Bernard stopped on the sidewalk in front of his favorite after-school café and called his mother. The man walking behind Bernard and his friends moved in closer and pretended to be looking at a sign in the café window as Bernard placed the call.

“Maman, je suis au café avec mes amis. Puvrez-vouse me chercher dans une heure?”

Smiling after gaining his mother’s permission and promised pick-up, Bernard closed his phone and walked into the café with his friends.

Bernard and his friends were ordering their cappuccinos as a man approached from behind and joined their conversation.

He told Bernard that he was an engineering student at the University of Lyon in Saint Etienne working on his PhD. He asked the boys if they attended Sainte-Luc’s and told them it was the same school he attended as a boy.

One of Bernard’s friends asked the man what type of engineering he was studying, and the man said he was designing fighter jets. The young boys were enthralled with his story as he pulled out 10 Euros and told the waitress that coffees and sweets were his treat.

The boys were delighted.

The man sat down at the table with Bernard and his two friends as they all shared some dreams and tall-tailed stories about teachers at Sainte-Luc’s until the back door of the café opened and a stranger ran in shouting.

“Does anyone in here know a six-year-old boy named Philippe? He’s outside crying. Says he got off the bus to follow his brother and got lost.”

Bernard and his friends swapped looks of disbelief.

“
Il ma suivi? Il va avoir des ennuis avec ma mere,
” Bernard complained to his friends about the trouble Philippe would be in when they got home. Bernard followed the man out the back door as he prepared the words of scolding he was about to deliver to his little brother.

Bernard’s friends kept talking with the engineering student.

As Bernard walked through the back door, the stranger pointed inside the Volkswagen van. Bernard looked inside then felt a huge shove on his back that pushed him into the rolling van as the driver took off and the sliding door slid shut behind him. Bernard’s mouth was quickly taped, and his hands were bound.

The engineering student checked his watch, apologized to the boys for his quick departure and wished them well in their studies.

“
Dites a votre ami bonne chance a l’ecole,
” he said as he walked out the café and down the street to the waiting van.

LyonBio

Lyon, France

U
S Navy Captain “Camp” Campbell, comfortably dressed in civilian attire and retired FBI agent Billy Finn were both bored stiff by the end of their first day “monitoring” the progress of tularemia vaccine development at LyonBio. They popped into Leslie Raines’ office to voice their boredom.

“Watching paint dry,” Camp started.

“Grass growing,” Finn added. “Either has a million times more energy and action than biomedical research, Raines. How do you do it?”

“And this is
accelerated
work, gentlemen. How would you like to babysit this process for 15 years as a conventional drug or vaccine moves down the pipeline?” Raines answered not looking up from her computer screen.

Camp walked over to the TV in Raines’ small office, turned it on and flipped through channels until he found some English. It was CNN world news.

“A nuclear scientist was killed in a blast in Tehran this morning, the Iranian news agency reported, in the latest in a string of attacks that Iran has blamed on Israel. A motorcyclist placed a magnetic bomb under the scientist’s Peugeot 405, the state-run IRNA news agency said. The blast also wounded two others. State television channel Press TV reported later that the scientist’s driver had died in a hospital from his injuries. The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations condemned what he called ‘cruel, inhumane and criminal acts of terrorism against the Iranian scientists.
’”

Camp and Finn were jolted out of their fixated television news focus by a loud commotion outside and a stream of people running down the hallway past Raines’ door.

“What the heck?” Raines said as she stood and leaned into the hallway.

“What’s going on?” Camp asked nonchalantly.

“Beats me, but everyone looks pretty riled up,” Raines said. “Wanna go take a look?”

Camp and Finn followed Raines out and down the hallway to the main lobby of LyonBio. A sizeable crowd or more than 200 people had gathered outside the CEO’s executive offices as more streamed in.

Two police officers from the Bureau de Police, dressed in white shirts with light blue berets, stood outside the executive office. Two more agents with Interpol and the Deputy Chief of Police for Lyon spoke with a distraught Thierry Gaudin on the other side of the glass walls.

Raines scanned the growing crowd and spotted Pipi Chandre, the client manager who served as her “go to” problem-solver and who spoke fluent English. Camp and Finn followed Raines as she made her way through the throng.

“Pipi, what’s going on?”

Pipi was almost hysterical.

“Mr. Gaudin’s executive secretary came out a moment ago and told some of the workers that Mr. Gaudin’s oldest son, Bernard, was kidnapped after school today.”

“Kidnapped?” Finn asked.

“Yes. Terrorists have taken him.”

“For ransom? Money?” Finn asked.

“We don’t know.”

The investigators from Interpol led Thierry out of his office and out the front door into a waiting vehicle and away from the legion of his beloved employees as rumors and speculation flew wildly.

Tel Aviv, Israel

M
ossad agents Reuven and Yitzhak poured through their daily intelligence reports. Nuclear inspectors were, once again, denied access to several of the Iranian nuclear sites.

 Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, were back in Iran doing the one-step, two-step dance. The steps seemed to be the same each time the dance music was played. Iranian officials always looked forward to IAEA inspections, and they welcomed inspectors to the airport each time. But when it came time for special requests and surprise locations, the Iranians always had an excuse. IAEA inspectors were in Iran every three months, and sites that were inexplicably “unavailable” one month would be put on the list to see three months later.

Yitzhak picked up the phone and called a junior officer in Austria.

“Make the calls, Sasha, and get a few major media outlets to carry this one line:
‘the IAEA does not look at today’s setback in a negative light. Iran continues to be cooperative and we look forward to our visit in three months.’
 Do you copy, Sasha?”

“Yes.”

“I need it three places.”

“Got it.”

Reuven looked through a variety of intel reports coming out of Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. One headline in particular grabbed his attention: SON OF BIOTECH EXECUTIVE KIDNAPPED IN LYON, FRANCE.

Reuven read deeper.
“Bernard Gaudin (15), son of LyonBio President and CEO, Thierry Gaudin, abducted in broad day light – ransom demands posted on Internet.”
 Reuven leaned over and clicked on the video link pasted in the classified digital report.

The video was homemade, anything but professional, which made the experience all that more real. The camera pulled back from an image of a black flag with red blood letters that spelled SPEAK. The mask-like face of a small non-human primate seemed to gaze at the letters.

Three adults were standing, two on the left side and one on the far right. They were wearing wool ski masks with cut-outs for eyes, nose and mouth. They were dressed completely in black. In the center of the table was a 15-year-old boy whose mouth was taped shut, and his hands were bound behind his back. Bernard was stripped naked and crammed on one side of an Allentown two-cage metabolic non-human primate cage, 32-inches wide, 29-inches deep and 32-inches high. Feeders and watering units were affixed to the cage. A sliding socialization door separated Bernard from the empty companion cage next to him.

One of the masked men spoke into the camera.

“LyonBio murdered 24 monkeys this week with poisonous gases and mists.”

The video cut to a clip of amateur video allegedly taken on someone’s iPhone from inside LyonBio’s pilot house. Reuven watched four monkeys gasp for their last breaths and die.

“There are 172 more rhesus monkeys that are on death row waiting to be executed later this week. The president and chief executive officer of LyonBio is a Frenchman by the name of Thierry Gaudin. He and his wife Rochelle have three beautiful children. This is their 15-year-old son, Bernard. Their daughter Marie is just 13 years old, and she has a beautiful voice. We know, because we heard her sing in her choir at Sainte-Luc’s. The cage next to Bernard is reserved for Thierry Gaudin’s six-year-old son, Philippe. Don’t worry, Philippe. When we pick you up, we’ll make sure you have a football in your cage because we know you want to win the World Cup for France one day.”

Reuven rubbed his eyes in pain. This was not good.

“If LyonBio does not…DOES NOT…stop all animal testing within 24 hours…then we will continue
their
animal tests right here on
Bernard
who has volunteered for duty.”

The masked man next to the spokesman pulled out a scalpel and a set of jumper cables and a car battery. He held one end of the jumper cables near the wire Allentown cage while the other was attached to the car battery.

“In the first 24 hours of human experimentation, we will begin with shock therapy to see how electrical charges affect the human brain of a 15 year old.”

The loose end of the jumper cables was attached to the metal cage. Sparks flew and Bernard screamed through the tape on his mouth.

“After 48 hours, little Philippe will join his brother as we inject the boys with cleaning chemicals to see if their bodies want to reject those chemicals. Logical, right?”

Reuven closed his eyes in disgust.

“But after 72 hours….well, that’s where we get to the good stuff. We will hold a ‘live’ lab on the Internet where aspiring young biomedical researchers can watch us perform a necropsy on these two brothers. You will be able to see first-hand how bad these tests were on humans. Unlike animals, I’m sure that both Bernard and Philippe will want to tell all of you that these experiments hurt. The animals say the same things, but no one at LyonBio appears to be listening. So SPEAK, A Voice for the Animals, will.”

Reuven covered his clenched fist with the relaxed fingers on his left hand.

“If, within 24 hours…Thierry Gaudin announces on television that LyonBio is stopping all…ALL…animal testing…and if we see the GEFCO trucks pull into LyonBio and load all remaining 172 monkeys, then we will not ask little brother Philippe to join his big brother Bernard in the first round of shock testing. If within the first 48 hours, we verify that LyonBio has turned from its evil ways and animal testing has ended at LyonBio, then we will make sure Bernard finds his way back to the café so he can finish his cappuccino. If not, we plan to release our research data in the form of more videos within two days.”