The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Sunday, August 29, 4:39 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 79 hours, 21 minutes

  We gathered around a conference table you could have landed an F-18 on. Grace and I on one side, Dr. Hu across from us, Church at the head, and a dozen department heads and analysts filling out the other seats. We all had laptops and stacks of notes. As usual there were plates of cookies on the table as well as pitchers of water and pots of coffee.

  Church said, “We have a lot to cover, so let’s dig right in. Yesterday was a very bad day for us, and not just because of the acrimony of the Vice President and the unfortunate injuries sustained by Sergeant Faraday. Yesterday none of us were playing our A-game. We reacted to the NSA issue as if it was the only thing on our plate. Our operational efficiency was so low the numbers are not worth discussing.”

  Hu started to say something, but Church shook his head.

  “Let me finish. I think we’ve been played.” He studied how that hit each of us. “As you know, I’m not a big believer in coincidences. I am, however, a subscriber to the big-picture approach. When I say that I think we’ve been played, I mean that too many important things happened at the same time, and all of it was timed to coincide with our need to pull back virtually all of our resources. Imagine how things might have played if the NSA had succeeded in either obtaining MindReader or forcing us to shut it down. It would have been the same as being handcuffed and blindfolded.” He looked around the room. “Does anyone disagree?”

  We shook our heads. “Actually, boss, not to sound like a suckup, but this is what I’ve been thinking. It’s what I wanted to tell you before I left Denver.”

  He nodded as if he’d already guessed that. “Do you want to venture a guess as to what’s happening?”

  “No. Or at least not yet,” I said. “There are still some blanks that need filling in. You told me a little about the Cabal and some Cold War stuff. That has to be tied to this, so why don’t you bring us up to speed on that and then I’ll play a little what-if. That work for you?”

  “It does.” He poured himself some coffee and addressed the whole group. “Based on what Captain Ledger found in Deep Iron, I think we’re seeing one thing, one very large case. Because we’ve been out of the loop and off our game, we haven’t caught a good glimpse of it. It’s like the story of the three blind men describing an elephant. However, we don’t yet know if this is something that has years to go before it becomes a general public threat or if it’s about to blow up in our faces. My guess? There’s a fuse lit somewhere and we have to find it.”

  “How do we start?” asked Grace.

  He took a cookie from the plate, bit off an edge, and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. “To the general public the Cold War was about the struggle between democracy and socialism. That’s the kind of oversimplified propaganda that both sides found useful to perpetuate. What it was in fact was a struggle for power during a time of massive political and technological change. During the war there was a massive spike in all kinds of scientific research, from rockets to medicine. Those decades saw the development of everything from the microchip to the cell phone. Some of the most groundbreaking work for the development of many of today’s scientific marvels, however, predated the Cold War to the thirties and early forties in Germany.”

  “Absolutely,” interrupted Bug. “There was wild science-fiction stuff going on back then. Z1, the first binary computer, was developed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1936, and his Z3, developed in 1941, was the first computer controlled by software. People today seem to think computers started with the PC.”

  “Exactly,” said Church. “And there were similar landmark moments in medicine and other sciences. After the fall of Berlin there was a scramble to acquire German science and German scientists. Even people who should have been tried as war criminals were pardoned—or simply disappeared—by governments that wanted these scientists to continue their work. Openly or, more often, in secret. There are many—myself included—who believe that all of the information gathered by Nazi scientists should have been destroyed. Completely. However, governments often don’t care about the cost of information so long as the information itself has value.”

  Grace said, “So, you’re saying that we kept that stuff . . . and used it?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Hu. “Most of what we know about how the human body reacts to fatal or near-fatal freezing comes from research done in the camps. Virtually all of the biological warfare science of the fifties, sixties, and seventies has its roots in experiments done on prisoners at the camps and by Japan’s Unit Seven Thirty-one—their covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit.”

  “We pay the Ferryman with the Devil’s coin,” said Grace.

  “Indeed we do,” said Church.

  “You’d think we’d learn, but my optimism for that died a long time ago. Many of the doctors and scientists involved in these experiments were given pardons. Much of this research was intended for use by the military and intelligence communities, though some had more directly beneficial uses for the common good. Some became the property of corporations which exploited the beneficial aspects of these sciences in order to bring lucrative products to market.”

  “Big Pharma,” said Grace with asperity.

  “Among others,” Church agreed. “There were also groups within governments or formed by like-minded people from various countries, who desired to see less savory lines of science carried through to their conclusions, and that’s where our story begins.”

  Church pressed a button and a dozen photographs appeared on the big TV screen. The faces were all of white men and women, and some were clearly morgue photos. I recognized none of them.

  “There was a very powerful group active from the end of World War Two all the way to the last days of the Cold War. They called themselves the Cabal, and their individual biographies are in the red folders you each have. They belonged to no nation, though many of their members had strong ties to the Nazi Party. At least three of the Cabal members were themselves former Nazis, while others may have been sympathizers but were actually citizens of the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Argentina, and several other countries. These were all very powerful people who could draw on personal and corporate fortunes to fund their goals.”

  “And what were those goals?” I asked.

  “They had several. Ethnic cleansing was one of their primary goals. They waged an undeclared war on what they called the ‘mud people,’ which is a blanket phrase for anyone who isn’t descended from a very specific set of Caucasian bloodlines.”

  “Guess no one bloody well told them that we all evolved from a bunch of apes in Africa,” said Grace.

  Church smiled. “They would not be the first—or last—group to view evolution as a ‘theory.’ One of the key players in the Cabal, a brilliant geneticist known only by the code name ‘Merlin,’ apparently believed that humankind had been visited by aliens, angels, or gods—accounts of his beliefs vary—and that the purest human bloodlines are descended from those celestial beings.”

  “Oh brother,” I said, and even Hu gave me a smile and nod.

  “The Cabal made hundreds of millions by exploiting science stolen from Berlin after the fall, or from science that was begun in Germany during the war and continued uninterrupted by scientists who fled before the Allies won. Using a variety of false names and dummy corporations and relying on support from a few of the world’s less stable governments, they were able to amass great wealth and possess some of the most advanced technology of their time. When they came onto the radar of one country or another they would close up shop, change names, and vanish only to reemerge again somewhere else.”

  “You said that they had been taken down,” I said. “How and by whom?”

  “Each of the world’s major intelligence networks caught glimpses of the Cabal, but no one country saw enough of it to make an accurate guess as to its full size, stre
ngth, and purpose. It was only after a number of agents from different countries began tripping over each other that it became clear they were all working on aspects of a single massive case. Naturally when these agents individually brought their suspicions to their governments it was not well received. Partly because the sheer scope of the case, their story was doubted. The agents were forced to waste time and resources to bring in proof that their governments could not ignore.

  “These agents eventually formed a team of special operators working under joint U.S., Israeli, German, and British authority. This predates DMS and Barrier by quite a long way. Officially this group did not exist. The only code name ever used was the List. The List came into it much as we are now—catching glimpses of something already in motion—and like our current matter there were some losses before the List was able to make the transition from outsiders to active players.

  “Once the existence of the Cabal was proven, the threat it posed shook the foundations of the superpowers. There are some—a visionary few—who understood then, as now, that the end of World War Two did not mean the end of this enemy. All that changed was the nature of the war. Instead of tanks and troops and fleets of warships, the Cabal waged its war with germs, weapons of science, and enough money to destabilize governments. Instead of using armies to slaughter groups they considered to be racially inferior, the Cabal financed internal conflicts within troubled nations in ways that sparked ethnic genocide.”

  The room was totally silent as Church spoke. I was leaning forward, hanging on his words, and in my head I could feel the pieces tumble into place one by one. The picture forming in my mind was dreadful.

  “Over a period of several years the List managed to identify the key players in the Cabal, and one by one they were taken off the board. It was an undeclared war, but it was definitely a war.” He paused. “And we took our own losses. More than half of the members of the List were killed during the Cold War. Some new players joined the team, but the core membership dwindled through attrition. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the List mounted a major multinational offensive on the Cabal, and at that time we were convinced we had wiped them out. We acquired their assets, eliminated or imprisoned their members and staff, and appropriated their research records.”

  “Sir,” said Grace cautiously, “I’m no scholar, but I’m enough of a student of modern warfare to wonder why I haven’t heard any of this.”

  “None of this ever made it to history books, and the official records of this have long ago been sealed. Some have been expunged.”

  “Expunged? How?” she asked.

  “I’ll bet I know,” I said, and everyone turned to me. “I’ll bet a shiny nickel that one of the members of the List created a computer system specifically designed to search for and eliminate just those kinds of records.”

  Church said, “Close. A computer scientist named Bertolini developed a search-and-destroy software package for the Italian government, but before he could deliver it he was murdered and the system stolen. The program, known as Pangaea, was decades ahead of its time. The Cabal took Pangaea and used it to steal bulk research material from laboratories, corporations, and governments worldwide. That’s what allowed them to have access to so much cutting-edge science. They didn’t have to do the research: they stole the information, combined it to form a massive database, and then went straight into development.”

  “And Pangaea . . . ?” Grace prompted.

  “A member of the List retrieved it. It was being guarded by Gunnar Haeckel, one of a team of four assassins called the Brotherhood of the Scythe. The other members were Hans Brucker, Ernst Halgren, and Conrad Veder.”

  “Hold on a sec,” I said. “Brotherhood of the Scythe.” I drew a rough sketch of a scythe on my notepad. The blade was facing to the left of the page. I thought about it and erased the blade and drew it facing to the right. “Haeckel’s code name was ‘North,’ right? And the others were East, West, and South?”

  Church nodded toward my sketch. “Yes, and you’re on the right track. Finish it.”

  I added the three other scythes, each at a right angle to the preceding one. North, East, South, and West. Church reached over and gave the sketch a forty-five-degree turn.

  I looked down at the drawing. The four scythes looked like they were churning in a circle. The image they formed was a swastika.

  I heard a few gasps, a grunt, and a short laugh from Dr. Hu.

  “Oh, that’s clever,” he sneered.

  “It wasn’t subtle then, either,” Church said. “Probably one of those inner-circle ideas that sound good in a candlelit enclave.”

  “Jeez,” I said.

  “During the raid on the Pangaea lab,” Church said, picking up his narrative, “Haeckel was shot repeatedly, including two head shots. He was definitely dead at the scene, which makes his presence in the video so disturbing. However, Pangaea was recovered and the List put it to better use: searching down and destroying all of the information the Cabal had amassed.”

  “Which member of the List retrieved that computer system?” I asked.

  I didn’t expect Church to answer, but he surprised me. “I did,” he said.

  He waited out the ensuing buzz of chatter.

  “And I suppose you’ve given it a few upgrades over the years,” mused Grace dryly. “And a name change?”

  “Yes. The modern version, MindReader, bears little resemblance to Pangaea except in overall design theory. Both computers were designed to intrude into any hard drive and, using a special series of conversion codes, learn the language of the target system in a way that allows them to act as if they are the target system. And both systems will exit without leaving a trace. The similarities end there. MindReader is many thousands of times faster, it has a different pattern recognition system, it clones passwords, and it rewrites the security code of the target system to leave no trace at all of having been there, and that includes tweaking time codes, logs of download time, the works. Pangaea’s footprint, though very light, can be detected by a few of the world’s top military-grade systems, but even then it often looks like computer error rather than computer invasion.”

  “Mr. Church,” Grace asked, “you said that the information taken from the Cabal was destroyed. I’m as cynical as the next lass, but I find it hard to accept that the governments for whom the List worked would allow all of that research to be eradicated.”

  “We all thought that way, Major. We met in secret to discuss the matter and we took a vote about whether to destroy the material without ever turning it over or to turn it over equally to all of the governments so that no one nation could prosper from it. The vote hung on the fact that there was real cutting-edge science hidden among the grotesqueries the Cabal had collected. Much of it would certainly have benefited mankind; of that we had no doubt.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The seven surviving members of the List took our vote, Major,” Church said. “The vote was seven to zero, and so we incinerated it all. Lab records, tons of research documentation, test samples, computer files . . . all of it. We left nothing. Naturally our governments were furious with us. Some of the members of the List were forced into retirement; others were reassigned to new duties that amounted to punishment.”

  “You survived,” I said, “so I’m guessing that you found yet another use for MindReader.”

  He ate a cookie but said nothing.

  “Okay,” said Hu, “so I can see how this Cabal was the Big Bad Wolf for the Cold War, but that was then. How does it relate to the mess we’re in now?”

  “Because we’re receiving information in a way that parallels the way the List first discovered the Cabal thirty years ago and several of the key players are caught up in things.” He tapped some keys and a different set of faces appeared on the screen behind him. Twenty-two in all, most of them young men and women in their thirties. Five images were of people in their sixties or older. The last two image squares were blacked out.<
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  Church said, “Most of these people died during the Cold War. The others retired from the intelligence services.”

  “What about the last two?” Grace asked, nodding toward the blacked-out boxes.

  “Aunt Sallie and me.” He smiled. “You already know what we look like.”

  Actually, I’d never seen Aunt Sallie or even visited the Brooklyn headquarters of the DMS, but I let it go.

  Church pressed keys that removed all but the five middle-aged faces.

  “These were the other surviving members of the List. Lawson Navarro and Clive Monroe of MI6, Mischa Gundarov of Russia’s GRU, Serena Gallagher of the CIA, Lev Tarnim from Mossad, and Jerome Freund, who was a senior field agent with Germany’s GSG Nine.”

  He paused.

  “In the last six weeks all six have been murdered.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The Dragon Factory

  Sunday, August 29, 5:03 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 78 hours, 57 minutes E.S.T.

  Pinter sat on a hard wooden chair, his hands cuffed behind him, the chain fed through the oak slats of the backrest. He was naked and they had doused him with bucket after bucket of icy water. The air-conditioning was turned to full, and the temperature of the room was a skin-biting forty degrees. Pinter shivered uncontrollably, but he kept his jaws clamped shut to stifle the screams that clawed at the inside of his throat.

  There were four people in the room with him. Three of them were alive. The fourth was a red ruin of twisted limbs and torn flesh that no longer resembled anything human. It was meat and bone. Two hours ago the meat had been Pinter’s partner. But then the Jakoby Twins and their assistant had gone to work on him. They never even asked Homler any questions. They just began a program of systematic beatings that reduced the man to red inhumanity. Before they began, Hecate switched on video and audio recorders, and now that the actual screams had ceased and the body was inert the whole thing played out again on four big LCD screens mounted on each wall.