The Lazarus Protocol: A Sci-Fi Corporate Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga Book 1)

by Pourteau, Chris

  “Today, I am announcing a world-changing project.” Teller’s voice echoed across the UN General Assembly chamber. “We use that term loosely some days, but not today. For the past century, we have struggled with our planet’s changing climate.”

  Anthony fretted when the president launched into a sidebar about climate change history and the bio-seeding results from Anthony’s failed project two decades prior.

  He blinked on his retinal display and tracked the president’s flash-polling. An impressive upswing. That should make Teller happy.

  “Here we go,” H said.

  Teller delivered a steely glare at the camera. “Today, I am introducing UN General Council Resolution 9875, a proposal to build a planetwide network of bio-seeding satellites. This effort, under the leadership of the United States, will solve our climate change problem once and for all.” A smattering of halting applause swelled into a wave of enthusiasm. A few of the delegates even raised their voices in approval. The president smiled as he waved his hand modestly for silence.

  Anthony switched back to his own retinal screen to watch Teller’s numbers soar higher. He stared in disbelief. The president’s flash-polling numbers weren’t rising. They were falling.

  “What the hell?” H was on her feet. “The Chinese just announced they won’t support it. Neither will Russia. How could they react so quickly, without even knowing the details?” She advanced on Anthony. “Who did you tell?”

  “No one.” But he immediately thought of Viktor and Ming. Was it just coincidence that the home nations of his two partners were rejecting Teller’s initiative? Could they have leaked the news? Doing so put everything at risk—as Teller’s falling polling numbers clearly demonstrated.

  H stormed back and forth across the room, her dark bob bouncing with each step.

  “The Russians claim they need more time to study the results of our pilot test. How the fuck do they even know we did one?” Fuming, H’s eyes flitted between Anthony, Teller’s image on the wall, and the readout on her data glasses. “China says the move is irresponsible. Damn it! The Brits are out, too?” She ripped the glasses off her face, threw them across the room. “The boss is gonna be pissed, Anthony. This is killing his poll numbers. And the election is only a few months away!”

  On the screen, Teller’s speech had begun to falter. He’d been fed flash-polling results through his implant, Anthony guessed. That explained his backpedaling. “The United States will introduce this resolution in the very near future. My purpose here today was to make the world aware that we have a solution to our ever-growing climate crisis. Thank you.”

  The applause in the chamber was real, but the political sniping outside the UN had already escalated into a full-scale verbal assault. Teller’s face as he exited the United Nations building was a grim, toothy mask of fury.

  • • •

  In person, President Teller made no attempt to smile away his anger. His dark eyes flashed as he entered the hotel suite. He dismissed his security team and ripped the red tie away from his neck. “How bad is it?”

  H cleared her throat. “You dropped, sir.” She shifted her feet, and Anthony realized this was the first time he’d seen this woman not in complete control of a situation. Her lack of attitude in this moment of crisis unnerved him.

  “‘You dropped, sir,’” Teller mimicked in a nasal, feminine voice. “How much?”

  “Six points.”

  “Shit! That hurts. What are the trend lines saying?”

  “Too soon to tell, sir,” H said in a careful tone. Anthony suspected it wasn’t too soon at all but that she’d thought it best to portion out the bad news.

  Another curse. Teller wheeled on Anthony. “You need to get me out of this hole, Taulke. I have less than three months until the election, and this UN resolution was supposed to be the crowning event of my first term. Now, it’s a shit sundae.”

  Anthony stared at him. The calm, visionary leader of the free world who’d recruited him in a cabin overlooking Los Alamos had been replaced by a craven politician willing to trade his planet for a reelection bid.

  “Taulke! I’m talking to you!” Teller’s skin took on an angry red undertone.

  “Anthony,” H intervened, “there’s one sure way out of his mess for the president. We have to deploy your bio-seeding nanites. No one argues with success, right? All we need to do is—”

  “Without a UN resolution?” Teller’s voice was incredulous.

  “Maybe we could do a limited deployment?” said H. Her voice was tremulous, and again Anthony felt a surge of prickling fear at her timidity. The more she talked, the less sure of anything he felt.

  Anthony closed his eyes and held up a hand. Turning to face the president, he said, “Sir, I—we—need satellites to do the bio-seeding deployment properly.”

  “You didn’t need satellites for your demonstration,” the president said. In that moment, Anthony realized Teller hadn’t read any of his briefing notes.

  “We used a plane. But that was tens of square miles. There’s not enough high-altitude aircraft in the world to make that happen.”

  “What about doing just the United States? What Helena suggested.”

  Anthony shook his head. “Sir, our biosphere doesn’t stop at the border. With geoengineering at this level, we could cause catastrophic consequences. There’s no modeling for— ”

  “Get your people here,” the president shouted at him, flecks of spittle dusting Anthony’s face. “Right now.”

  “Sir, I don’t—”

  H stepped between them. “Do it,” she whispered. “There has to be another way, Anthony.”

  • • •

  Ming and Viktor entered the president’s suite together, as unlikely a pair as Anthony could have imagined. Ming wore an elegant crimson business suit, her hair swept back into a bun, while Viktor, as usual, looked as if he’d slept in his clothes.

  Anthony was relieved to find the president had used their transit time to calm himself. Teller greeted Ming and Viktor with his usual polished grace and broad smile. He offered them coffee and poured himself a cup. Anthony declined.

  “I’d like to thank all of you for your fine work so far,” Teller said when they were seated around the coffee table. He offered a self-deprecating smile. “No doubt you’ve had a chance to hear how my UN proposal went this morning. Someone is trying to undermine me—us, I mean. I’ll get to the bottom of that on my own, but we can’t let this temporary setback slow our real progress.” He paused to sample his coffee and made a face. Teller turned to H. “This coffee is atrocious, Helena. Get us something better immediately.”

  H nodded and sub-vocalized instructions to absent staff.

  Teller leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We need a new strategy. It’s not good enough to ask permission from the international community, I need to show them success so that they rally behind me—us, I mean. And I don’t just mean lines on a graph. I need to show real results in the real world. But to do that we need to manufacture and deliver this bio-seed into our atmosphere on a planetary scale.” He slapped his knees. “I need solutions.”

  It sounded like H had been talking to him, Anthony decided. Maybe Teller was willing to take the chance of global deployment, sans global endorsement, after all.

  “Satellites are the best way to do it, sir,” he said.

  “I’m not looking for the best way, Taulke.” The president’s earlier anger shown through but was quickly replaced by contriteness. “Apologies, folks. It’s been a long day.”

  Erkennen blew out a breath that was half a laugh. Ming remained impassive, but her expression was open.

  “We need to move quickly,” H said. “If we take too long to ramp this thing up, there are forces that will shut us down.”

  “Forces?” Ming said.

  Teller nodded. “Ask Anthony. He’s been through this before. There are profits to be made as long as the climate war rages. It’s a sad truth, but it’s a truth all the same. We saw a flas
h of that power today. Someone…” The president flashed a look at H, who shrugged. “Someone leaked the speech. Hell, maybe even the specs for the bio-seeding project. The Chinese and the Russians were announcing a no vote before I even announced what the project was.”

  “What are you suggesting, Mr. President?” Viktor Erkennen’s tone had lost its easy humor. He drew up, and even in a dumpy suit, the Russian scientist looked ready to defend his honor.

  “The president meant no disrespect, Doctor,” H said, placing fingertips on the old man’s knee. “Even the British chimed in.”

  “Right! Even the British!” Teller was becoming animated again. “And H is right. Dr. Erkennen, Miss Qinlao—pardon me, Doctor Qinlao. I meant no disrespect. But someone let the cat out of the bag!”

  Silence reigned around the table. Anthony suspected they were each considering who might have betrayed the Vatican Project. Viktor’s face was still flushed, but Ming looked pensive.

  A knock at the door broke the tension. H received the service cart, then poured them all fresh cups of coffee without asking. Anthony took a tentative sip. Much better than the dreck he’d drunk earlier.

  “I have an idea,” Viktor said finally.

  Teller smiled. “Well, let’s hear it.”

  “Missiles,” Viktor said. “We use missiles to disperse the bacteria.”

  “You mean surface-to-air missiles?” Teller asked.

  “No.” Viktor’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. “I mean intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

  H choked on her coffee. Viktor seemed not to notice.

  “Take off the nuclear warheads,” he continued, “and put on a bio-seeding warhead with shaped charges to aid dispersal.”

  “Mr. President,” H said, coughing, “I don’t think—”

  “Is it possible?” Teller asked. His gaze swung around the room.

  Anthony looked at Ming, who gave him a tiny, reluctant nod. “It’s possible, sir, but could you really launch a bunch of missiles? I mean, wouldn’t it cause some kind of international incident?”

  “That’s what the speech is for,” Teller said, smiling broadly. He was in his element now .

  “Speech, sir?” H’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Yes, speech! I’ll make sure the world knows what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We’ll leak stories between now and zero hour. The nuclear powers’ intelligence services will pick them up. We’ll have them primed for the fireworks show before we ever light them off.”

  “Those fireworks could destroy the planet, Mr. President,” Anthony said. “Or cause an international incident at the very least.”

  Teller leaped to his feet and began pacing. “That’s exactly what I want, Taulke. An international incident.” He shot a gleeful look at H. “I like it. We turn swords into plowshares to save the planet. The ad copy practically writes itself.” He projected his arms into the air as if holding a vidscreen between them. “Teller Tills the New Earth.”

  H didn’t look convinced. She reached out and took the carafe of coffee. It tittered against the lip of her cup as she poured.

  Her boss, on the other hand, was on a roll. “Taulke, we’ll give you and your team access to one of our submarines—the latest and greatest. I want to be able to move this platform and hide it if I need to. Put the Army disaster colonel in charge—YourVoice’s ratings go through the roof whenever his housewife-sexy stubble’s in front of the camera. He’ll be the face of this. What’s his name again?”

  H cleared her throat. “Graves, sir.”

  “Yeah, put Graves in charge.”

  Anthony grimaced. If only the man’s name was anything other than Graves.

  Chapter 21

  William Graves • Bangor, Washington

  Graves had been a soldier all his life. Duty, honor, country—the principles drilled into his head from his earliest days at West Point—had formed the foundation of his character. A marriage that hadn’t panned out. No kids—that he knew of, as the old joke went. The only constant in his life had been the Army.

  But somewhere along the way, the rules of the game changed. And no one bothered to tell him.

  From his office perched above the massive covered drydock, Graves surveyed the five-hundred-foot, sleek shape of the ballistic missile submarine and wondered what in the holy hell had happened to his life. All thirty-six missile hatches, each as wide as a hot tub, were open. From this perspective, the massive war machine looked like a giant’s toy.

  We will turn our swords of war into plowshares for peace . That’s what President Teller had said when he called Graves personally to offer him this job. It was a great political line, but was it even possible? Forget the risk of starting a nuclear war, were the logistics of what he’d been read in on even possible?

  Another modified ICBM, suspended by a crane, hovered over the submarine, then slowly lowered into the launch tube. Workers—some in Navy uniforms, some in the red jumpsuits of Qinlao Manufacturing, and a few yellow-suited Taulke employees—swarmed the sub. It had been like this for the last six weeks, day and night. Around-the-clock crews brewing the bacteria, as he’d come to think of the process. Repurposing the missiles. Prepping the sub. Never a wasted moment.

  Communicated by the ever-present, elfin-eared woman called H, President Teller’s sense of urgency permeated the project. From the moment Graves had stepped aboard as the officer in charge, she had slashed red tape and torpedoed bureaucracy. The ICBMs had been stripped of their nuclear warheads and delivered to a Qinlao building adjacent to the drydock where the Chinese company mated them with pre-manufactured bio-seeding warheads—correction: dispersal units. Graves had been reprimanded more than once by H to ensure he used “science-sensitive language,” when he spoke about the project, even if all communication was still private. The USS Independence was no longer a war machine, she said. It was a vessel of global salvation.

  But Graves was a warrior, and old habits die hard. In his mind, a war on climate change was still a war—and one he was still willing to fight. As the project progressed, he’d come to believe in Taulke’s crazy idea. At some point, Graves decided it might just work.

  Maybe this was mankind’s best shot. He’d seen enough Phoenixes. Enough Miamis. One too many Vicksburgs. Mother Nature was winning, and it was time to change the game.

  That day in Kansas, seeing the results of Taulke’s bio-seeding test, had planted the seed in Graves’s mind. When he was honest with himself, a part of him needed this solution to work if only to avoid his going mad from the hopelessness of fighting a never-ending, losing war.

  Those stakes were the very reason he felt rushed by political expediency. Graves turned to face H, who lounged in an office chair, eyes glued to her data glasses.

  “We won’t be ready,” Graves said. “I need at least another ten days.”

  The data glasses came off, revealing dark circles under the woman’s eyes. “We don’t have ten days, Colonel. We have three days. And you will be finished in the next three days.”

  Graves shook his head. “We’ll have all the modified missiles on board, but we won’t have the targeting system finished and we don’t have launch protocols worked out with Washington yet.” He sat down behind his desk. His leg muscles ached, and he could use a quick nap to stay focused.

  “You can take care of all those details at sea,” she replied.

  “We need more time. I’ll call the president myself if I have to.”

  H hauled herself upright and put both hands on his desk. “Colonel, the wolves are at the door in Washington. Congress is starting investigations and talking about a bill to stop the project. Our only advantage is speed. If we can get the sub to sea, we can hide behind military operational security—the military is with us. Being on the front line, they want to see us do something about this problem, as you well know. We need to be ready to go in three days.” She sat down again, clearly exhausted. “After that … who knows?”

  • • •

 
Ming Qinlao • Shanghai, China

  Ming sat on the sofa in her home office, mesmerized by the newsfeeds, her knees pulled up under her chin. Every channel had a different take on the same headline: US Submarine Puts to Sea Amid Worldwide Resistance, Protests, Hope .

  She turned off her YourVoice feed. The WorldNet was melting down with clashing cyber arguments about the End of the World.

  Ming shivered in her thin nightdress. Whatever happened next, they’d done it: she, Anthony, and Viktor. The submarine Independence , armed with thirty-six bio-seeding warheads manufactured by Qinlao, was operational. Anthony had told her that once the Independence submerged in the open ocean, it would be almost impossible to find. If she could just get to sea…

  Teller had been true to his word. He’d worked the back channels to all the nuclear-capable powers and had received assurances—after sharing results from the Kansas test—that the powers of the world would not see the United States’ launching missiles from the Independence as provocative. Though loud protests were lodged through the UN, it seemed no one was willing to go to war over what many hoped to be the genuine solution to their shared, worldwide problem.

  The waters around the ship were gun-metal gray and topped with whitecaps driven by a fitful wind. From a distance, the submarine was a small, dark shape in the water, hardly threatening at all. Most of the vessel lay hidden below the waterline. It churned a broad, white wake, stark against the dark sea and the darker hull.

  Only when the Coast Guard cutters came into view could she get a better sense of perspective on the size of the massive vessel. There were three smaller boats around the sub now. Two on the near side, one partially hidden behind the submarine’s sail that jutted out of the water like a metal cliff.

  When the ships approached, she watched the tiny people on the flying bridge descend into the safety of the submarine’s interior. It was safer that way, she figured. With all the hatches shut and the sub at speed, the Coast Guard seemed to hesitate, at a loss for what to do next. They couldn’t board the Independence , and short of blocking the sub’s path with another vessel the size of a cargo ship, there was nothing to slow her passage to sea.