Stormworld (3 page)

CHAPTER 7

Benitar Calls for Discipline

In his office afterward, Benitar Jackson wore a virtual-reality headset, which projected computer images in front of his eyes, e-mail messages from Conelrad and the news services to which he subscribed. For two days he had been operating in a news vacuum, since the messages weren’t getting through. Finally, probably due to a break in the weather, the data was flowing again.

The news ranged from very bad to catastrophic, over much of the planet. A super typhoon with 310 mile per hour winds leveled half of the buildings in Hong Kong. A 90-foot tidal surge from a powerful storm wiped out Venice. Tornadoes had raged through New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. Nearly a million additional people were dead or missing and presumed dead, in a matter of hours. An unconfirmed report was just coming in of a record-breaking hurricane hitting New Orleans, of dikes failing and half of the city underwater.

After absorbing the disturbing information, Benitar dictated a weekly staff bulletin summarizing the events, including his own updated orders. Then, sending a mental command through the VR headset, he transmitted the notice to four electronic bulletin boards around the seed repository.

Remaining in his office, he watched from a surveillance camera as four lunchtime diners in the cafeteria went over to the wall-mounted board and read it. Abe, Belinda, and Peggy were among them.

Suddenly, Peggy pointed at the screen and exclaimed, “Look! The words are changing!”

Using the camera, Director Jackson zoomed in on the screen, and to his horror he saw that a number of words were not what he had transmitted. Another electronic glitch, he thought at first. But he began to think otherwise, when Abe laughed, and said, “This is great. Can you believe what it says now?” The others laughed with him.

Then someone said, “Director Jackson doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

A murmur of concurrence went through the small group, and Belinda Amar glanced back at the surveillance camera, nervously.

In a mounting rage, Benitar focused on the perverted, blasphemous damage that a saboteur had done to the last three sentences of his message. In the original version, which he had on hard copy, it read:

We must all take the utmost care to safeguard the seeds, for they represent the future of humanity, the resurrection of the human species. I shall permit no dereliction of duty on my watch. If anyone violates my rules, there will be severe repercussions.

The perverted sentences were quite different, and he felt his blood pressure rise as he read them:

Don’t bother to safeguard the seeds, for they represent nothing more than the demise of the human species. I shall permit no attention to duty on my watch. If anyone violates my rules, there will be no repercussions whatsoever, not even a spanking.
 

Even worse, the perpetrator had added a postscript:

Blow it out your alimentary canal, Director. And stop snooping on people.

Quickly, Benitar hit an override code, and darkened the bulletin boards entirely. Other than himself, there were five people in the facility, and three of them had been in the lunchroom at the time the changes appeared. He considered it unlikely, but not impossible, for any of them to have committed the atrocity. Of the two others who had not been in the lunchroom, he studied surveillance screens in his office to determine their whereabouts. Static filled one of the screens, providing no images, but the other screens showed the remaining employees at work.

All except Jimmy Hansik, whose record had been spotty at best. When he paid attention to his duties, he did passable, even good, work, but there had been noticeable lapses, and Jackson had come down hard on him. Could this be Hansik’s way of getting even? He did have strong computer skills, but so did some of the other staffers. He wondered where Hansik was now, and why one surveillance screen had been filled with static. Had Hansik sabotaged that screen, as well as the bulletin?

For several moments, Director Jackson sat back in his chair and considered what to do next. He didn’t feel especially close to any of his workers, and would just as soon wipe all of them out now. He had more than enough bullets to accomplish the task, and to his knowledge none of them had their own guns. But before doing that, he would like to know the identity of the traitor.

I must be discreet
, he thought,
and not do the expected. I won’t raise my voice to anyone about this, not at all. In fact, I’ll act like it never happened. Maybe I’ll even laugh about it. That will throw them off.

Even so, I hate to do it. Maybe there’s another way.

After calming himself with a sedative, Benitar checked the personal escape capsule that could only be accessed from his own room, via a private elevator. Sealed in a rooftop chamber over the bunker entrance, a chamber that he could enter by using keypad codes, the white, bullet-shaped capsule was just large enough for one person, and contained emergency food and water supplies, along with storage compartments holding a small quantity of the most important seeds in the world—enough to give plant life a new start somewhere.

It was his fallback plan, the one he didn’t want to use, because it would mean abandoning the seed repository and giving up his life’s work there, in favor of something smaller and more focused, of far less consequence. Of an ingenious design, the capsule would pierce the seemingly ever-present cloud cover and convert into a jet plane high in the air, an aircraft that anyone could operate, since it could be programmed to fly to any number of destinations and land safely. Once above the cloud cover, Benitar had the fuel range to reach the farthest points in the world, wherever he needed to go for the best chance of saving a sampling of the on-board seeds, and ultimately forming a new agricultural planting program.

After satisfying himself that the capsule was intact and in proper working order, he went down and made his normal rounds of the bunker, checking on the humidity, inspecting the seeds, tubers, roots, and bulbs, monitoring graphs and readouts … all the while feeling a sense of grim pride. He even smiled at two of the workers, and relished in the surprise that registered on their faces.

Yes, Benitar would save the precious stores, even if he had to deal with a slovenly crew of employees who didn’t understand his methods. Entering Section D, he struggled to control his anger. His prime suspect, the bearded Jimmy Hansik was tending to the machines, intently making slight adjustments to the temperature and humidity settings. Five months ago, Hansik had been careless about this, causing some of the precious seeds to dry out. Now Benitar thought back and remembered the angry exchange between the two of them, with him yelling and Hansik standing there, looking defiant and defensive. At one point, the insolent employee had even said, “Benitar, don’t blow a circuit over this. We have backup seeds for all of the ones we lost. It’s not the end of the world.”

Fuming and red faced, with his fists balled, Jackson had retorted: “It’s exactly that if we don’t protect the seeds, you fool, if you don’t pay attention to our duties! Can’t you comprehend what’s happening to the weather, all the cities and towns that are being destroyed, the people that are being killed?”

To this, Hansik had just shrugged, asserting that the Director paid too much attention to the weather news. The employee’s attitude had been so enraging that Jackson would have shot him on the spot, if he’d only had a gun with him at the time.

Now Benitar was ready for another confrontation with the man, more than ready for it, despite the sedative he had taken. “Did you hear about the tornado that destroyed Los Angeles?” he asked, and added, pointedly, “including your precious Hollywood? I guess you’ll never get your big break in the movies now, so you won’t get a chance to flex your overdeveloped muscles on the screen.”

“I gave up on that long ago,” Hansik said.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes,
really
.” Hansik continued working as he spoke, went to his small desk and retrieved an electronic clipboard.

Smiling to himself, Jackson knew from eavesdropping with surveillance camera audios that this former body-builder had never given up the foolish hope that he would become an action hero one day. In one long, recorded conversation with Belinda, he had poured his heart out to her, over a bottle of wine.

“That’s pretty funny what happened to my bulletin today,” Jackson said.

“What’s that?” Hansik looked up from the clipboard.

“Surely you heard. Someone changed my words around, making fun of me.”

“A practical joke?”

“More like sabotage.” Benitar studied Hansik’s expression, didn’t see anything there to assure him that this was the culprit. Whoever the fox was, Hansik or someone else, it would take some effort to bring it out of its hole.

Benitar touched the handgun hidden deep in his pocket, felt its cold, metallic smoothness, its potential for raw destruction. His forefinger caressed the trigger, and in his mind he saw himself opening fire on Hansik without warning, dropping him to the floor in a bloody heap. If he aimed carefully, Hansik wouldn’t die right away, and he might be able to elicit a confession from him. But that was risky. Out of spite, the fool might not talk. Or he might be innocent.

Taking a deep breath, Jackson moved his finger away from the trigger, then whirled and stomped out into the corridor.