Project Aurora (Hope Novak Thrillers)

by Daniel Pelfrey

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Project Aurora by Daniel Pelfrey.

  Published by Palfreyman Publishing

  Medora, North Dakota

  www.danielpelfrey.com

  Copyright © 2021. Daniel Pelfrey.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Cover by Daniel Pelfrey using Cover Kit.

  PART I

  ONE

  Carla Anderson heard the wail of the police sirens. She knew how she ended up in the motel room. She received a phone call. A male voice had said a phrase that made no sense. Carla knew the phrase, though. When she heard it, she had to complete the task she was given.

  This happened two other times since her release from the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. Anderson volunteered for WestGate Behavioral Science’s Safe Communities Initiative and received clemency. She also underwent mental conditioning as a condition of her release.

  Anderson thought it was a fair trade. She had been a teacher before she was sentenced to five years’ prison time for having sexual relations with a minor. It happened once. The boy was only sixteen. Anderson had been mortified. Her husband divorced her and took their children out of state.

  Anderson knew this looked bad. She was in a motel room, only half-clothed with a married man. A dead, married man who was not her husband. She knew who he was, though. Steve Carter. A member of the Michigan Legislature and the leading opponent of the Safe Communities Initiative.

  The program that granted her clemency. It was a controversial issue. Release of prisoners serving sentences for rape, child molestation, and other crimes could walk free after having their based inclinations put in check via mental conditioning.

  Carla Anderson remembered what had happened the other times she received the phone calls. She had been instructed to meet Carter. She was to attempt seducing him. Someone wanted photos of the two of them together. To blackmail Carter, she thought. Anderson considered the man on the phone. The one that made her do these things. Was it him? She did not know.

  Her head was buzzing. That always happened when she thought of the things she was instructed to do.

  Anderson considered telling the police what happened. She knew they were coming. The fight that preceded the gunshot had been loud. The gunshot was even louder.

  The fight started after Carter received a text message with a photo attached. It was of the two of them in a comprising position. It was bad enough Carter was a married man. But to be found in bed with a person granted clemency through the same program he railed against?

  Anderson did not know how the Glock 43 got in her purse. She could not own firearms as a condition of her release.

  She dressed to leave as they argued. She did not know Carter had a violent temper. He threw her across the room. He stalked over to grab her again. She fell near her purse. The gun fell out as she pulled the bag closer.

  They both scrambled for it. He went to kick it away, but Anderson moved into the blow. Carter landed the kick in her abdomen, knocking the wind out of her. She came up with the Glock, though. She fired point-blank into his chest. Steve Carter was dead before he hit to the floor.

  Carla Anderson knew the police would not believe her story. She had told no one of the man on the phone. She could not. Anytime she thought of him, and what he ordered her to do, she would hear the buzzing. It was like a punishment that only went away when she forgot what she had been told.

  She remembered the last command as the police broke through the door. The buzzing was painful, but Anderson knew it would cease as long as she complied with all commands.

  She still had the Glock in her hand. The last command she received was to not get caught.

  Anderson put the gun to her chin and fired.

  PART II

  TWO

  WestGate Behavioral Science’s intentions appeared noble. It provided a mental conditioning program that would effectively cure rapists, child molesters, and others of their baser inclinations. The program, which promised clemency to those who volunteered, created sleeper agents to accomplish the extra-legal matters WestGate encountered.

  WestGate along with several companies were placed within shell companies based out of Delaware. Several layers of shell companies obscured the origins and intent of the various companies and projects the Cabal controlled.

  This was still only a rumor—a whisper.

  In some journalistic circles, they considered this to be conspiracy theory material. WestGate could play off the ‘failures’ in the Safe Communities Initiative. The so-called failures accounted for less than two percent of all participants. With close to three-thousand in the program nationwide, that percentage was deemed acceptable.

  WestGate wanted to change opinions in their favor. James Lewis was positive of that fact. But to what end, he thought. The Safe Communities Initiative, while successful, was also controversial. WestGate lobbied hard at the state and federal levels to bring about the SCI, but it looked like its detractors may have been right.

  In a career spanning three-and-a-half decades, Lewis figured he had seen just about everything. He even managed the transition from working for a traditional print outfit to an online news journal during that time. However, the research for his latest investigative exposé provided the most far-fetched scheme he had come across.

  Lewis thought that something did not seem right. Out of the fifty that committed crimes, the offenses were all similar. They were stalking or assaulting people, something the treatment regimen was to eliminate. But these are not the same type of criminal charges the people had before.

  The charges did not involve sexual assault. But prominent members of the business community or politicians, who opposed the SCI from the start, appeared to be the new targets. After being accosted, some changed their stance.

  Others had been hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. They had murdered only one. Interestingly, the scene was a murder-suicide.

  This crime made Lewis inspect WestGate Behavioral Science and their Safe Communities Initiative closer. Most of what Lewis could piece together was a list of who had been enrolled in the program. Possible only because the granting of clemency was in public records. The full treatment regimen was proprietary knowledge.

  As they put more prison inmates through the program, WestGate would release updated procedure notices, as required. Their statements detailed as more behaviors could be included or excluded with more information in their database, the treatments would then become more effective.

  Lewis thought he could see a pattern, though.

  As a nationwide program, he looked at where the offenders had received treatment before release from the correctional system. With fifty facilities, one for each state, there appeared to be little correlation.

  Undeterred, Lewis followed the next path he could assume reasonably.

  When did the treatment take place? The results led to an interesting find. They had treated every single one after a change in the treatment protocols. Lewis only found out this because those who received clemency within the last six months were committing the new acts of violence.

  Finally, thought Lewis, here is something to go on. There is a story to be had, after all.

  He set out to write the first draft of his latest exposé. As he did all others, Lewis was meticulous in that aspect of his researc
h. He created a backup of everything he had to date and put it in his safe. Every time he found additional information, he would do the same.

  His research never stayed on his computer—Lewis knew how his work and research could disappear if left easily accessible.

  There was something else going on, Lewis thought. Just needed to dig a little deeper.

  Lewis wrote in a note to himself, maybe inspect the attacked individuals?

  What business sectors are they in?

  Are there more connections?

  Maybe look at the financials for WestGate. The string of questions was getting longer. His written notes also went into the safe. For now, I tell no one, Lewis thought to himself.

  Over the next week, Lewis had scoured every detail of WestGate he could find. Financial details showed a biotech consortium, the Pathways Consortium, had purchased the privately held company three months before the attacks started.

  Looking into the consortium led Lewis nowhere.

  Recently formed. Also privately held. There were no records of other holdings to be found.

  The politicians targeted their opposition to SCI, though Lewis found no information tying back to WestGate or Pathways. The business sector attacks were a different story altogether. Each of the businesses were privately held and sold not long after the attacks. None of them seemed to be related, though a few were in similar fields.

  Lewis tracked a few of the sales to NorthBay Conglomerated.

  Publicly traded.

  James found that calling the company a conglomerate was apt for what they did. Everything. NorthBay was into almost every sector of the economy. Hospitality, Services, Property Management, Defense, Medical Services.

  Formed ten years ago, with several name changes along the way.

  Seeing this information, Lewis was certain Pathways was a shell for some of NorthBay’s holdings.

  It made sense. Put the questionable acquisitions into a shell company to hide them from the stockholders until the time was right.

  Not necessarily illegal, but not ethical either, Lewis thought.

  One business sold to NorthBay caught Lewis’ eye more than the others.

  NextGen DNA Sciences. Had been privately held.

  They dealt with some groundbreaking DNA research into stem cells and DNA splicing. Lewis found this interesting. The company had been working towards cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s using some revolutionary ideas.

  But why was it lumped into the Defense division?

  Perhaps a mistake on the website, Lewis thought.

  THREE

  From his office overlooking San Jose, Robert Fritz could see all the tech giants’ headquarters. He loved the view.

  Fritz did not always have this view.

  His name was not even Robert Fritz. That was his legend. It was created shortly after 9/11. He had previously worked as a forensic accountant for the Central Intelligence Agency, also known as the Company. The man worked in a basement cubicle at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  He came to this new career as a venture capital investment manager because of those accounting skills. A man known by everyone at the Company as Monitor needed someone who could hide money trails.

  Robert Fritz would funnel CIA dark money, allocated via the Patriot Act, to technology companies. It could not be done publicly. Nor could it be accomplished by an employee of the Company.

  In his new role and persona, Fritz would be the cutout, an intermediary between parties. His additional function was to ensure the Company and by extension the United States government would never be linked to a CIA operation run on American soil.

  The scheme was simple enough. Intelligence gathering failed to detect a terrorist plot. An alternative method to gather intelligence was needed. Enter the fledgling social media outlets.

  The power players of the twenty-first century were no longer solely manufacturers making goods for purchase. No, money was now made on the internet with its social media, e-commerce, and occasionally some unsavory elements that shaped fortunes.

  And opinions.

  The twenty-four-hour news cycle could be manipulated easily via the internet. Public opinion swayed by a sentence or two.

  Twisted out of context.

  The truth could be fabricated or changed in an instant with a few keystrokes.

  Fritz and his company were not a part of that scene publicly. Key people in tech companies were all working to shape this future. It was not strictly legal. Should the United States government find out, the Department of Justice, specifically, many would be in jail.

  Not that various politicians did not know about the Cabal, a group to make the world better. Or at least that is the premise given to those politicians, along with stacks of money to keep them quiet.

  Fritz’s current headache was on his computer screen, a report from Charles Smith. Officially, Smith was a cybersecurity analyst working from home.

  In fact, Smith was a hacker.

  The Cabal caught him trying to get past the electronic firewalls that maintained the Cabal’s deepest secrets. Smith was not smart about it, though. He dared to try the hack from the coffee shop in the lobby of Fritz’s building.

  Recognizing the talent, Fritz hired Smith to root out others’ attempts. The current situation was the worst possible. James Lewis, an investigative reporter from Midwest Today, an online independent news site, had pieced together crucial elements of the Cabal and the Safe Communities Initiative (SCI). Luckily for the Cabal, Lewis was still collecting facts before submitting a story.

  Like many of the Cabal’s seedier assets, the world thought Charles Smith dead. The only thing keeping him alive, he cooperated.

  Smith disappeared from police custody while awaiting his bail hearing.

  The Cabal put him on the Ranch to assist Dr. Calvin Stein with a project involving programming nanorobotics used in mental conditioning.

  The Ranch was a secret facility outside Groom Lake, Nevada that used to belong to the federal government. The Cabal conducted certain experiments that needed to remain out of the watchful eye of the public and in some cases the government in this remote location. Most of the staff had been abducted or made to disappear. This ensured their silence on the work they did.

  Keeping Smith on a short leash also gave the Cabal someone who would ferret out other cybersecurity risks.

  Fritz had little time, maybe a week at most, to act. To the world at large, Fritz ran a multi-billion dollar venture capital investment firm. His role in the Cabal, though, was to manage emerging threats to its secrecy.

  The Cabal was a loose association of companies started with the dark money from the Company. In the open, these companies were separate entities, many publicly traded. In reality, it had become a sprawling criminal enterprise sanctioned by the United States government, at the minimum the CIA.

  Smith did well with the lower-level problems. He knew what the alternative for him would involve. A message to a source within the social media sphere could douse a story in minutes. But this would require more effort, and Fritz knew how to handle the situation thanks to Smith’s meticulous research.

  The ‘source’ was typically an algorithm set up in the applications. No person actually did censoring or fact-checking.

  Too mundane.

  Once an alert is triggered, censor algorithms enacted on the various social media outlets. The executives would then cite being protected under Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act.

  The notes provided showed Fritz the story had to be killed. Lewis had dug too deep and was close to finding the truth. Smith hacked Lewis’s computer, planting a worm virus and a keystroke monitor.

  It impressed Fritz with the thoroughness employed. He saw Lewis had told no one what he was up to. Lewis alluded to his editor about his next project but offered no specifics.

  Midwest Today’s financials provided Fritz his way to stop this story and keep James Lewis from poking around any longer. They were barely operating
in the black.

  Smith suggested planting a virus to cause a server crash. He would also trash Midwest Today’s credit rating. They could not fix the problems caused by the server crash without in influx of cash.

  Fritz sent an encrypted message to Smith. A simple two words, “do it.” In a week, Fritz could swoop in to save Midwest Today.

  Mr. Lewis would be retired.

  Anyone else who knew of the story would meet a similar fate.

  News organizations were not the typical investment Fritz dealt with. He made exceptions from time to time.

  A prime example, a longtime troublesome conservative news aggregator suddenly changed the stories it posted to be more in line with news the Cabal preferred disseminated.

  With peace of mind, this situation would be resolved soon, Fritz looked to his next item on the itinerary, reports from the Ranch. The experiment involved DNA re-sequencing, gene splicing, and advanced mental reconditioning showed promise to create long-term, deep cover sleeper agents.

  The researchers in charge of the project had tried to develop fully grown bodies, then embed training and a personality without success. They compared it to trying to run a computer update without having the corresponding program.

  Perhaps their newest idea would prove more fruitful. Using the mental conditioning regimens from Safe Communities Initiative to overwrite an individual.

  It had been explained in computer terms, and Fritz knew little about how it related, but it sounded promising.

  FOUR

  The video conference had barely ended, and security entered Daphne Meyer’s office. That was fast, she thought. These new owners really do not play when it is your time to leave. They hustled Daphne from her office on the seventh floor to the human resources office on the fourth and then unceremoniously walked her out the door.

  “Can I go back to my office for my belongings?” she asked the burly security guard.