The Demon Plagues (11 page)

He waved the rest of his people forward, four
men and three women. He had trained them all himself, forged them
into a perfect team.

On the one hand he would have liked an
all-male group; there was just something about the camaraderie of
the old US Marine Corps he had grown up in that was comforting.

On the other hand his girls – that’s how he
still thought of them in his secret heart – his girls were the best
they could be, sharp and nasty and tough as he could make them. One
glorious thing about the Plague was how it allowed them to train
more realistically than they ever could before. Barring death or
brain damage, they could break each other’s bones in hand-to-hand,
shoot each other’s limbs with live Needleshock, and generally train
to destruction, coming back in a few days completely recovered.

His girls were also very, very useful for
other missions – missions where only women could go, or where they
would blend in, or distract with their feminine wiles or even
seduce, kidnap, infect, neutralize. His whole team would do
whatever it took, short of murdering their opponents. As long as
they focused on the good they would do and the benefits of the
Plague they would spread, tricking the conscience was easy.

Of course, he didn’t tell the Chairman about
most of these little escapades. He reported directly to Markis’
lady spymaster, who was more realistic about things. Despite this –
or perhaps because of it – Karl had a deep affection for the
Chairman. He had no problem reconciling this cognitive dissonance;
he understood his role as the attack dog for his benevolent master.
Karl did things, necessary things, that the Chairman couldn’t or
wouldn’t. It had been that way for millennia; rough men standing
ready to do violence so their liege lords could sleep safe in their
beds.

Besides, he owed the Chairman his life. He’d
been barely conscious but he did remember that day ten years ago
when he’d been shot, stabbed and bludgeoned into submission by DJ
Markis himself. It was Markis who had stood between Karl and those
who had wanted to finish him off; it was Markis who had spared
Karl’s life; it was Markis who had infected him with the Plague,
making him young again and it was to Markis that he had transferred
his loyalty after the Unionists had turned the US into a fascist
police state.

His team spread out around the airplane,
their weapons holstered but their eyes missing nothing. It would
insult their Swiss hosts to be pointing guns here and there but
they couldn’t complain much about them checking everything out.
They peered inside the waiting armored limousine, ran mirrors and
detectors under and over it, checking the trunk and under the hood.
The Swiss security personnel watched with stoic grace; it was a
condition of Markis’ coming that his people double-check
everything.

As soon as they were satisfied, they formed a
tight knot at the bottom of the rolling stairway. Karl ran up the
stairs to the top of the ramp, stepped inside the airplane’s hatch
and gave the Chairman the thumbs-up.

Quickly and without fanfare they scurried
down the ramp, faster than dignity allowed but with far more
safety, to be surrounded by the human shield, hustled into the
waiting limousine.

It would take even an expert an extremely
lucky shot to hit, much less kill a fast-moving Plague-infected
target at sniper distances; eight hundred meters per second sounded
fast for a bullet to travel, but a man could run five yards in that
time; it took only inches of movement to get out of the way of a
projectile. A sniper needed a stationary target, or at least one
that moved steadily in a straight line, to strike something at
range.

Karl grunted with satisfaction as his
principal was put safely under armor. Bettina Loosher, inevitably
nicknamed either ‘Luscious’ or ‘Loosie’ by the team, was inside
with the Chairman and Millicent; the rest of the team joined the
Swiss security people in their armored Mercedes SUVs, behind and in
front.

Transit went smoothly, depositing everyone in
the underground garage of one of the high-end hotels on the
outskirts of Geneva. The team doubled as staff for the Chairman;
unlike most other modern potentates, he normally traveled with just
one personal assistant, and the PSD.

They escorted him up the stairs to the fourth
floor – termed the Third Floor here in Europe, where they counted
Ground, First, Second and so on – on the inside of the structure,
windowless. This was high enough to be difficult to approach from
the ground, low enough to be hard to reach from the roof, and not
too high that physically fit Plague carriers couldn’t jump from a
balcony in extremis. The team took the rooms across the hall, on
each side and behind, so that Markis’ every wall was covered by
security. They also rented the rooms above and below and checked
them regularly, and all of the other rooms nearby were discreetly
empty.

Well secured, Markis finally fell asleep,
gathering strength and sharpening his wits for the confrontation to
come. Sleeping all through the afternoon and into the night, he
woke up around three AM, his body clock confused. With noting
better to do he reviewed his notes and did a no-equipment workout
of inverted and fingertip push-ups, sit-ups and crunches, squats
and other callisthenic exercises. It was easy to run to fat as a
politician, though the term ‘fat’ was relative. To a Plague
carrier, fat was just a bit flabby and soft; obesity was a thing of
the past.

After breakfast, the transport to the Swiss
Foreign Ministry went like clockwork, appropriate for the world’s
premier purveyors of timepieces. Markis appreciated the locals’
efficiency and their Tyrolian ruggedness; something about high
mountains bred hardy, self-reliant people no matter where in the
world they were.

The Ministry conference room was carefully
prepared, precisely balanced; it was a room designed for this type
of delicate negotiations. Soundproofed and swept for surveillance
devices, it came equipped with two sets of double doors so that any
two parties could enter at the exact same time; its table was set
slightly low, to avoid the psychological impression of a barrier;
its colors were muted, earth-tone, soothing. Rows of sparkling
clean water glasses and carafes sat on small turntables set within
easy reach of both parties, eliminating any suspicion of specially
prepared beverages or glassware for one side or the other. These
and many more touches had eased innumerable agreements, enhancing
the reputation of the Swiss as the world’s best-respected neutrals
and behind-the-scenes facilitators.

In the anteroom, Markis rubbed his hands,
wiping them on the trousers of his expensive suit. He thought of
the irony of the clothes so reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers
outfit of the man he had killed that fateful day a decade ago,
Jervis Andrew Jenkins IV. He’d called him a ‘suit’ as a term of
insult that day; now Markis was one. He shook his head.

Alan Denham filled out his customs form in
the business-class seat of the A320 nonstop from Managua, Costa
Rica to Palermo, Italy.
Christopher Dunham
, he wrote, then
checked
Nothing to Declare.
Ticking more boxes, he signed
the bottom, looking carefully at his falsified passport for
reference. It wouldn’t do to misspell his own fake name. The only
danger now was the small chance a search would find the quarter of
a million dollars he had packed in his checked bag, but paper did
not trigger the automated scanning algorithms on the X-ray
machines, and it was sandwiched between some books and magazines to
fool a human.

Sitting back, he glanced out the window and
reveled in the feeling of freedom and adventure that he always felt
when traveling. It was nonsensical, really; as many places as he
had been in the world, one would think the novelty would have been
burned out of him; but then again, he had never been to
Switzerland. He figured it would be like Germany with more
yodeling.

He'd been to Sicily, though, and appreciated
that its ancient traditions of secrecy and independence had
survived, even prospered under the transition to a mixed society of
Edens and normals. Infected or not, Sicilian values predominated
and persevered. If the new Edens were a bit more straightforward, a
bit less corrupt, they were still easygoing and willing to tolerate
and forgive their unenlightened neighbors and friends, and
vice-versa.

Italy as a whole had benefitted from its
Neutral State status and laissez-faire incorporation of the Plague;
those who wanted it gained youth and freedom from sickness,
dramatically reducing their burden on society while becoming
productive again. Those who did not want it…well, it was only a
matter of time, for who, when faced with cancer or old age, would
not give up their objections and be rejuvenated?

Final assimilation was a half-century or more
off, though, just judging by the ages of its youth. Leery of the
rumors and believing the misinformation, afraid of possibly giving
up their fun and freedom, most of the young people avoided the Eden
Plague like they had avoided STDs before Infection Day:
haphazardly.

But like STDs, the virus could not be stamped
out, only dodged for a time. Barring some medical breakthrough by
the scientists of the Big Three, or something like the Tiny
Fortress nanite project, it was just a matter of time before every
nation became a
de facto
Free Community.

Fortunately for Skull, there were still
plenty of remnants of the old ways on the island. Fortified
consciences were no match for centuries of loyalty to
La
Famiglia
; participation in the corrupt Sicilian system might
slowly erode, but real cooperation with the mainland government was
unlikely to take hold for at least another generation, so he was
certain, almost stoic – perhaps even complacent – about being able
to obtain certain tools that he needed to do the job he
planned.

He passed through customs without difficulty;
his papers were superb forgeries, even to being entered into the
Italian computer systems. Money could buy just about anything if
you knew who to talk to. He picked up his suitcase and rented an
innocuous Fiat, and then drove out of the city.

An hour later he was knocking on the back
door of a small automobile repair shop in a tiny village in the
countryside. “Si?”

“I need to speak to
mi fratello
.”

The man nodded, let him in. A few moments
later Skull walked out with a phone number in Switzerland and a
hundred rounds of untraceable match-grade 7.62x54mm ammunition that
would fit most available European military rifles.

It was hard for a foreigner to buy ammunition
in Switzerland, and anything legitimate was all microstamped now.
On the other hand it was fairly easy to obtain a rifle if you had
the right contacts. Switzerland had one of the highest per capita
rates of ownership of fully automatic weapons in the world, and one
of the lowest rates of violent crime, an irony still lost on the
world’s misguided gun-control advocates.

It was amazing to Skull that with a
neo-fascist government in control of the UGNA, in a nation on a war
footing, there were still lefties hollering to disarm the ordinary
law-abiding citizen, as if there lay the threat, while voting more
and more money for the Security Service. The Unionist fascists
loved it, encouraged it, stoked their fear.
Give the henhouse
keys to the fox. Your government is the threat, not the veteran up
the block.

It took him two days to get up to
Switzerland, first taking the ferry across the Straits of Messina
and then driving up the superb autostrada freeways – posted speed
limit 130KPH but in reality unlimited. The rules were seldom
enforced.

Bypassing Naples and Rome, he stopped at a
tiny inn in a tinier town for the night. Early the next morning he
drove through Florence, then cut over to Pisa and along the
Ligurian seacoast to Genoa, turning inland again toward the Swiss
border for Geneva. Crossing checks in the European Neutral States
were routine and crime remained low. He had no drugs on him and the
bomb dogs would not alert on cordite – the propellant in ammunition
– otherwise the Swiss police would never be able to operate with
their own canines.

Late in the evening he rolled into the
outskirts of Geneva, pulling into the first European chain hotel he
saw and checking in without difficulty. It had been a long day and
he needed a good night’s sleep. The official address to the Neutral
States assembly was scheduled for the day after tomorrow; he had
that long to do recon, gather intel and equipment, and implement a
plan.

In a way he had surprised himself with his
instant decision to get involved. Skull liked to think of himself
as a cold, logical thinker, but in moments of self-reflection he
accepted his own impulses. Logically he should stay away; if Markis
died, so be it; but something inside him didn’t want that to
happen. As much as he disliked what Markis had done and what he
stood for, he hated the Unionists and their employment of Psychos
far more. All Markis had done was act in accordance with his
nature, openly and honestly; the Unionists had seized power
illegally and had betrayed the true America, and that he could not
forgive.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend
.
There was nothing quite as satisfying as killing an enemy you could
feel really good about hating. That thought put a smile on his face
as he fell asleep.

Colonel Nguyen ordered everything useful
taken off the still-attached mini-submersible, then set it to dive
to the bottom and stay there on bare maintenance power. They marked
its position for possible recovery. Now the hijacked
Nebraska
was clean and silent once again.