by Graham Brown
Despite a massive effort Cassel had nothing in the pipeline to replace them. And cutting the R and D budget meant there would be little likelihood of coming up with anything anytime soon.
That was one problem. As he switched on the light in his sprawling office, a second, derivative problem stared him in the face.
“Hello, Barton,” a voice said.
Cassel looked up. On a couch near the small kitchen and wet bar that were part of his office, he saw a man with a shaven head and a dark, rectangular tattoo wrapping halfway around his neck like a collar.
Cassel knew the voice, the tattoo, the ugly gaze.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to bring you news,” the tattooed man said.
Cassel looked toward the door, a bit too obviously.
“Don’t bother,” the tattooed man warned. Then as if it weren’t a threat: “You’re going to want to hear what I have to say.”
Cassel fumed. He had the best security service in the country, multiple layers of protection from the street on up; he had cameras and scanners and even a key-coded lock on his own door that he’d just opened. All designed to keep him from dealing with “stuff.”
The man across from him definitely qualified as stuff.
“How the hell did you get in here?”
The tattooed man laughed. “Did you really think your store-bought security would keep me out? I spent half my life figuring out how to get through systems like yours. Most of them a hell of a lot better than your pathetic little show.”
Cassel shifted in his seat. He knew all this, of course; it was the danger of dealing with a man from such a background.
“I paid a heavy price for relying on my own security once,” the tattooed man said. “A heavy price. I suggest you avoid making the same mistake. You’re not out of reach. No one is.”
The man across from him had once been respected and powerful, Cassel knew that. It was the only reason Cassel had listened to him when he’d first come in, the only reason he’d agreed to work with him. Not the only reason perhaps — desperation played a part — but what Cassel hadn’t realized was that far more than the man’s appearance had changed.
The man called himself “Draco” now and he seemed to think of himself in bizarre, vainglorious tones. Apparently suits and ties being replaced by tattoos and Goth-like clothing were more than a cosmetic change. Madness had come and settled in. Draco had gone from being merely ruthless to vicious, sadistic, and erratic in his behavior.
Perhaps a fall from such high places did that to a man. Cassel had no desire to find out personally.
“What kind of news do you have?” he asked.
“I need more money,” Draco said.
“That’s not news.”
“Put another million dollars into the account,” Draco said, as if Cassel worked for him.
“Another million? And what do I have to show for the millions I’ve already spent? Do you have my sample? Do you have the proteins you promised, or the coding?”
“I have a sample, but it’s not the sample you want.”
Cassel squinted. Draco held up a small vial the size of a thimble, sealed but unlabeled.
“What the hell are you talking about? Our deal was for the drug Milan was working on. What’s this?”
“Partial delivery,” the man said. “Some of Milan’s latest work is contained in that vial. Enough for you to see where it’s going.”
“I’m not paying you millions of dollars to see where things are going,” Cassel said, anger overriding fear and concern. “I want the fucking drug you promised, the one you said would change everything.”
Draco tilted his head, the tattoo-covered scar around his neck stretching oddly. “Give me my money and let me continue the search.”
Cassel’s mind spun. Continue the search. The man spoke the words like he was looking for a lost dog. If Cassel counted right, he’d killed nearly a dozen people on this search already, including Ranga Milan, the man who was supposed to give them what they were after.
“I’m done with you,” Cassel said.
Across from him Draco sat taller. “Are you now?”
“Think you’re going to kill me and walk out of here?” Cassel asked. “No way.”
Draco stood and stepped forward. Cassel reached his hand toward a red button on the desk.
“I touch this button and they lock this place down, and I don’t care how store-bought they are, you’ll never get past them if I’m not with you.”
Draco walked ominously toward Cassel, putting the vial down on the desk in front of Cassel.
“Inside is the virus sent to the UN a week ago,” Draco said. “Ranga’s prototype. They’re still trying to figure out what it is. I would hate for them to know it was designed with equipment you gave us.”
“They’ll never trace it.”
“I’ll prove it to them if you make me.”
Cassel drew his hand back.
“While you’ve been dutifully hiding, burning and destroying any evidence of our partnership, I’ve been taping, recording, and tracking every one of our transactions. I have enough to prove where my money came from and what we agreed to do. It makes no difference to me. I’m a wanted man anyway. But you …”
Cassel stared at him. “I have people who will hunt you down,” he insisted.
“Yes, I’m sure you do,” Draco replied. “And you’re willing to take risks. That’s why I came to you. But now you have exposure and, as someone once told me, It’s a terrible thing to live with exposure.” He pushed the vial across the table. “Put two million in the account.”
“You said one.”
“For my troubles.”
“And then what?”
Draco smiled a sinister grin. “I know someone who can finish the synthesis for you. I just have to reel her in.”
“Who?” Cassel asked, curious despite all that had gone on.
“The one who led us to Ranga in the first place.”
“His daughter.”
Draco nodded.
Despite his revulsion for Draco, Cassel warmed instantly to this thought. Ranga had almost completed work on something magnificent. If CPC could get it and tweak it, move it away from what Ranga wanted and toward something more commercial, Cassel could turn it into the single greatest drug of all time. He would measure sales in the billions per month. And that was just the beginning.
The problem lay with the complexity of what Ranga had done. Even with a sample, it would take years for his people to deconstruct the changes and coding. His daughter, Sonia, was known to have worked with Ranga for years before the two had a falling-out. If anyone could finish the serum he’d been working on quickly, it was probably her.
Perhaps Draco’s skills in the criminal arts remained useful. If he could get into Cassel’s office unannounced, what was to stop him from finding and abducting Ranga’s daughter?
“You can bring her in?” Cassel asked.
“We won’t have to bring her in,” Draco insisted. “With the right offer, she’ll beg us to let her on board.”
CHAPTER 16
Hawker crossed the tarmac of Paris — Charles de Gaulle Airport beneath a dark and threatening sky. Danielle walked ahead of him as they approached the NRI Citation that had brought them in forty-eight hours before.
The plan was to get to Beirut, find out what Ranga and Bashir were looking for down there, and see if they could develop a lead as to who’d kidnapped them and why. It was thin as hell but it was all they had.
As she looked up, a figure stood by the aircraft waiting for them, a sturdy gray-haired man in a green overcoat: Arnold Moore.
Great, Hawker thought. He looked like an angry parent come to collect his wayward children.
“Done remodeling Paris, you two?”
“For now,” he heard Danielle say. “Come to chaperone us?”
“As if it would help,” Moore replied.
A short time later, the three of them
were airborne and headed to the southeast, toward Beirut.
Danielle explained their misadventures to Moore. Hawker noticed that she left out any mention of the deal with Lavril. It was a kindness he hadn’t expected and didn’t really deserve. It made him realize how some of the things he’d said must have sounded to her; hurtful and selfish, and yet she protected him. It reminded him of the argument with Keegan and the fact that he seemed to have better friends than maybe he warranted at times.
As Danielle finished, Moore spoke his own piece. His voice was grave.
“The French shared the letter with us,” he said. “We ran everything we have on these people through the database. Using the letter of responsibility, the manner of Ranga’s death, and the religious branding, we’ve come up with a profile.”
He handed them a pair of matching dossiers.
Hawker scanned the front sheet: a Mossad report on a group that called itself the Cult of Men.
“They’re an extremely obscure group. Responsible for several killings over the last year or so, but nothing before that.”
“Whose side are they on?” Hawker asked.
“Their own, it would seem.”
Danielle was reading further. “They’ve claimed responsibility for the deaths of Israeli settlers, Hamas militants, and even Christian pilgrims trying to bring about the onset of revelation. The first attack claimed and attributed to them was the bombing of a building in Belfast.
“Consistent with the letter,” Danielle said. “A lunatic fringe, even to the lunatics.”
“The thing is,” Moore added, “Mossad doesn’t believe they were responsible for any of those things.”
“Then why claim them?” Danielle asked.
“Cobra’s hood,” Moore said. “It makes them look bigger than they really are.”
“So why do we think they’re involved in this, then?” Hawker asked.
“One of their few known members was photographed with Ranga six months ago.”
Hawker suddenly wished he hadn’t asked.
“Mossad has them pegged as antireligionists. Blaming God for the state of the world.”
“Whose God?”
“Any God.”
“Any God?”
“Yes,” Moore said. “Their position is that God or the concept of God is the enemy of man. Religion causes war, death, subjugation, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Great,” Hawker said. “Everyone’s killing in the name of God. Now we have a group killing in the name of no god at all.”
“How does this connect with the attack on the UN?” Danielle asked. “They’re not a religious organization.”
“We haven’t figured that out yet,” Moore said. “But no one says these people have to be rational or consistent.”
She nodded.
“Truth is, this group has been extremely secretive,” Moore added. “We’re trying to back-trace them but it’s almost like they came into existence out of the blue. We know where Al Qaeda trains and where they’re based and who they recruit. We know the same information for the IRA and the KKK and Hamas, but no one seems to have any idea who these people are, how they’re funded, or even how many members they might have. It’s like they have no history.”
“Even that tells us something,” Hawker said.
“What’s their goal?” Danielle asked.
“It’s a little murky,” Moore said, “but the theme is simple: Religion is bad. In their propaganda it’s always religion that has corrupted men, not saved us. One threat announcement concluded with the words: You have listened to the lies and gone forth and multiplied — and you are now a plague upon the face of the earth. Too many, too fast — you starve your brother or kill him for food. Greedily you engorge without restraint, and know not that you are eating death.”
Hawker listened to Moore. The words sounded familiar to him. As if he’d heard them before.
“Is that a quote? Tennyson or something?”
“It’s a corruption of Milton,” Moore said. “From Paradise Lost.”
“Referring to Eve eating the apple,” Danielle said.
Moore nodded. “It’s not the only reference they’ve made. In the first letter they borrowed another phrase of his. He who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.”
“Sounds like they’re trying to tell us something,” Hawker suggested.
“They seem to be choosing the role of Satan,” Moore said. “Defeated by God, now trying to destroy his creation: mankind. And yet from the letter to the UN and this reference they seem to imply we’ll do it to ourselves.”
Hawker considered what was being said. There was something else to it. The bitterness in the words, the choice of verses. The choice of referencing Milton in the first place. It seemed almost … He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he was certain there was more to what was being said than met the eye.
“Great,” Danielle said. “So what do these people want? Are they against God or are they against man?”
“Religious influence on man,” Moore said. “That’s the best we can distill it down to. All classic religions seem to want their people to reproduce as rapidly as possible, perhaps because failure to do so makes you weaker in numbers than your enemy. But synthesizing the UN letter and these other letters together it seems they blame the world’s problems on this and on the overpopulation resulting from it and Western introduction of medicines and other technologies that have reduced infant mortality and the death rate, while not reducing the birthrate equally.”
“So the plague is for culling the herd,” Danielle said.
“The logical response in livestock.”
“Humans are not livestock,” she said.
“Perhaps to this cult we are,” Moore said.
Hawker remained silent. He’d seen too much of man treating his fellow man worse than livestock to doubt it.
“Ranga’s notes suggested he was working on something that would drastically reduce life span,” Danielle said. “It appeared as if he was getting close. Could that be culling the herd?”
“Perhaps,” Moore said.
As Hawker listened, it became clear they were facing a group with dangerously warped minds. His deal with Lavril likely didn’t matter. These were not the kind of people who came in from the cold or allowed themselves to be arrested. He was all but certain they’d have to kill these men to defeat them. So be it.
“Ranga got caught up with these people somehow,” Hawker said. “If we could retrace that avenue, maybe we find out where they hide. Hit them before they hit us. Act instead of react.”
Moore looked at him thoughtfully. “I think we know what avenue Ranga connected with them on,” he said. Without elaborating he cued something up on the screen on the bulkhead of the aircraft.
Hawker turned to watch. At first he couldn’t tell what he was looking at. The video was poor and the room shown was badly lit. It turned out to be an auditorium of some kind. And then, as the camera zoomed in on a group of people sitting onstage, he recognized Ranga. He was younger, slimmer, wearing a white shirt and a thin black tie.
The moderator was talking, saying something about the challenge of feeding growing populations through the use of genetically modified crops.
The question was posed to Ranga as to what progress could be expected in the next twenty years.
“Drought resistance is important,” Ranga insisted, “for lost crops mean no harvest at all, which is the worst-case scenario. But you must understand that all things in nature are compromises. Drought resistance comes with a price: It can result in smaller yields under normal circumstances. Just the same, designing crops that yield more food per acre brings a risk: They require more water and more fertilizer and are often at the highest risks of failure under stressed conditions.”
A question from the audience prompted him.
“So what’s the answer, Dr. Milan?” someone asked. “Is there hope?”
Ranga cleared his throat. “In some sense we are searchi
ng for the impossible,” he said. “The best answer would be a crop that resists stressed growing conditions, produces more food per acre, and does not drain the soil or water table excessively. We are looking for ways to do this,” he said proudly, then continued less energetically. “But it’s a bit like trying to make an elephant fly without asking him to lose any weight.”
Laughter spread through the crowd.
“It’s problematic,” Ranga continued. “We do what we can. But if you must know, we are really attacking the issue from the wrong direction. It is often said that the world produces too little food. But rarely is it stated that we consume too much.”
Hawker sensed the pause. Ranga had always paused before stating his most important point.
“There will soon be seven billion people on this earth. In twenty years that number will near ten billion. And despite slowing growth rates, some projections go as high as twelve to fifteen billion by 2075. The earth cannot sustain such numbers. Especially if we all wish to live like Americans.”
A grumble went through the crowd.
“Make no mistake,” Ranga continued. “In every corner of the world people dream of living like an American. But that means each person consumes six times as much food, water, and fuel as the worldwide average. That would be the equivalent of a planet with fifty billion people on it.”
A collective gasp escaped from the audience.
“Like any population growing out of control, be it animals, insects, or bacteria, such growth ends in a crash. Our species will eventually crash as we destroy the host and starve.”
“The host?” It was one of the other panelists.
“The earth is our host,” Ranga replied, then turned back to the crowd. “The real solution lies not in growing more food but in reducing the population. The sooner we take action the less radical it will need to be, but based on religions that demand we all go forth and multiply and on both cultural and secular morality of reproductive rights, we will likely only act when it is far too late. At that point the action will have to be drastic. Beyond voluntary birth control, beyond individual decisions, beyond the Chinese one-child rule.”
