The Storm Protocol

by Iain Cosgrove

  The rats were feverish; scrabbling at the bars of the cage like demons. They were deeply unsettled and snappy. Something about their behaviour was odd, or maybe at odds with normal, would have been a better way to state it.

  James couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, but after almost ten years of observing animals in lab conditions, he knew something was not quite right.

  He glanced up at the lights above the door. The lab currently occupied sign was illuminated a deep red; a signal to let any casual corridor walker know that they had better stay out. The testing in progress sign had yet to be lit; his finger was hovering over the button, he was just waiting on the single word to come through his headset.

  He studied his reflection in the mirror opposite. He looked like a character from Star Wars; the wrap around protective goggles, stiff white coat and protective hat gave him a feeling of anonymity that he knew was naive and foolhardy. He was in no doubt; all the individuals gathered in the conference room behind the one way glass knew exactly who he was and why he was there.

  Before he could ponder too much on that thought, he got the command that he had been waiting on expectantly for the past seven minutes.

  ‘Go!’

  The gloved finger that had been hovering over the button dropped and he heard the mechanical clunk as the contacts engaged. The lights came on, illuminating an extremely large maze constructed out of Perspex.

  The maze was his personal triumph; designed and built by James over a five year period to develop a testing suite for his rats. The company had wanted an apparatus that would be able to benchmark with certainty, how much effort a given rat would expend in response to certain sensory stimuli.

  However, his creation had been ambushed by the faceless men behind the mirror. He looked at his invention now with something hovering between distaste and full-on horror. All over the maze, terrifying other-worldly machines were starting to power up. It now more closely resembled a torture chamber than a scientific experiment. There were pools of acid, deep pits bottomed out with razor sharp spikes, all manner of spinning and whirling blades and even one area where pressure sensors would trigger hydraulic rams, turning it into a compactor.

  He shuddered; normally the rats would smell danger and avoid these types of hazards like the plague (a vague smile creased his lips at his unintended pun), but this was different; their behaviour was different, it was....frantic. The word came to him, as the second phase of the test sequence began.

  At the far end of the maze, beyond all the traps and devices, was an area of safety. In the centre of this space, a Petri dish was fixed to the floor. Above it, suspended vertically, was a stainless steel cylinder with a very small diameter.

  As he watched, there was a small metallic click and a tiny white disk dropped from the end of the cylinder and into the dish, with a rolling rattling sound. He knew it was a pill of some kind; part of the facility they were attached to did nothing else except the testing of new drugs.

  Almost before the tablet came to rest in the bottom of the dish, the squeals of the rats reached a crescendo. It was extraordinary; like gang mentality in miniature. The rats were rioters, baying for the blood of the establishment. An electric motor whirred into life, and the door separating their place of confinement slowly slid back.

  The passage from the holding area to the maze was designed to admit only one animal at a time. He had been expecting them to file through in an orderly fashion like they normally did. This time, he watched as their nostrils flared, and then all hell broke loose. The holding pen became a seething mass of writhing bodies. Blood drops started spattering the sides, as they used claws and teeth to try and create an advantage, and if anything, the smell of the blood seemed to raise them to ever more manic levels of behaviour.

  Eventually, the first battered and bloodied rat was ejected into the passageway. As James watched in horror, the creature didn’t stop at the first hazard. There was no shred of self preservation and as the creature hit the acid, the pungent smell of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils. The rat kept moving until the meat had been scorched from its bones and at one stage, James thought he could see the heart beating behind the exposed spine and rib cage, before it too melted away to nothing.

  Another rat had found a different way to go; it jumped into a pit and to a watching James, it seemed deeply annoyed, as it struggled to move forward, impaling itself ever more deeply on the sharply pointed spikes as it did so. Watching with ever increasing horror, James saw another rat use the skeletal remains of the first one to leap the acid pit. It ran into a set of whirling blades at full speed, the kind you would see in a food processor. The walls of the maze went instantly red, like tomatoes in a blender.

  One by one, the rats continued their headlong drive for the safety of the other side. The smell of death seemed to drive them on, their squeals getting more strident, almost panic stricken. In less than five minutes, it was all over.

  James knew he looked impassive to the watchers on the other side, but as he surveyed the battlefield, because that was what the maze had become, a tear formed at the corner of his left eye. Blood was dripping from almost every section of the maze and the stench of burnt flesh and death hung in the air.

  He blinked the tear furiously away. He did not want his employers to see him getting emotional, but the anguished cries of the rats had affected him deeply. And it wasn’t just their suffering that had affected him; their screams had seemed to have one thing in common. Maybe he was being paranoid, after what he had just witnessed. They were only rats after all, but to a creature, he could have sworn that their last tangible emotion was not despair, but a deep seated and overwhelming frustration.

  And then, as his finger hovered over the kill switch, to his amazement, a bloodied and broken rat started shuffling toward the entrance to the sanctuary. It had managed by some miracle to elude all of the doomsday devices.

  As it got further down the passageway, its nostrils started twitching and a new urgency energised its movements. The rat crawled toward the Petri dish and even as it was still moving, swallowed the pill whole.

  As he watched, the creature’s blown heart gave out, and within a couple of seconds it was dead. But the funny thing was, and he knew this would sound strange to anyone else. He knew that the rat had died happy.

  He stabbed down on the button, killing the lights, and all sounds and motion ceased; turning maze into mausoleum.

  #

  The agent tapped a button in the middle of the table and the one way mirror instantly went opaque. He tapped another button and the main central lights came on, making the other occupants blink suddenly. There were four people in the room including him.

  He looked at their expressions; now maybe someone would take him seriously, he thought to himself smugly.

  ‘What the fuck is this? Some two-bit circus trick?’ asked Winston Nickelson.

  The CIA director was a huge man, six feet five, with a shock of curly brown hair which made him look like a teddy bear (according to his wife anyway.) He was the most laid back director the CIA had ever had; an affable man who was completely at his ease in most situations, you just had to make sure you never pissed him off. His steel grey eyes burned a hole into the agent, as he waited for a response.

  The experiment had seriously rattled him.

  ‘I’m sorry sir,’ said the agent blankly. ‘This is about as far removed from the circus as it is possible to get.’

  The director exploded.

  ‘Just what the fuck was that all about? You’ve got about a minute to tell your story, before I personally throw you out of that window!’

  The director was shouting now, but it seemed to have little effect on the agent.

  Carl Grant, the deputy director, put his hand on the director’s arm. The antithesis of the director in every way, Carl was small, bald and immaculately groomed. His brown eyes radiated concern, as he addressed the director directly.

  ‘I think we are all in a little
bit of shock, sir, after what we have just seen,’ he said, in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘But….’

  He slipped his steel rimmed glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes, before focussing directly on the agent.

  ‘I do think we need to get a thorough history of this....’

  He searched for a suitable word.

  ‘....project, before we decide what to do.’

  The agent nodded once, comprehension smoothing the lines of concentration on his face.

  ‘I understand now, sir,’ he said. ‘Apologies for my thoughtlessness; I forget the effect it has on people when they first see the level of its efficacy. I do agree; a thorough background description would level set for everyone, I think.’

  He fixed the deputy director with an unblinking stare.

  ‘And thank you sir, for allowing me to present my project. It has been a bit of a personal crusade for me and I would love to further develop it into the effective weapon I know it can become.’

  The deputy director nodded, to show he understood. The director also nodded, and grunted his uneasy assent, as he sat back in his chair.

  ‘So, how’s your history?’ asked the agent.

  ‘How long is this going to take?’ asked the director, with a hint of impatience.

  ‘How long have you got?’ asked the agent with a smile.

  He noticed the flashed look of warning from the deputy director and was immediately conciliatory.

  ‘Sorry for being flippant, sir, but it’s not often you are in a meeting with such hallowed company. Anyway, where best to start....’

  He glanced up at the ceiling for a minute and clacked his tongue, before launching fully into the story.

  ‘In the early to late thirties, before, but especially because of the Second World War, the government was always looking for what we would call a game changer today. For instance, Oppenheimer gave them the Manhattan project and ultimately, fat man and little boy scorched the earth and ended the hostilities. But alongside the big ones, the well known ones; there were a huge number of projects that never saw the light of day.’

  He paused and noticed with vague amusement that he had their full attention now.

  ‘It may interest you to know that one of these side projects was resurrected during the Reagan era. It was ultimately a failure; the neutron bomb was more of a flight of fancy than rude science, but it does show that some of the modern ideas came from humble pre-war beginnings.’

  He paused again and this time noticed that the director was leaning ever so slightly towards him. His interest had been piqued for sure.

  ‘In rural England, a man named Nigel Stafford-Bowles was working on his creation. He was an interesting character, our Nigel. He was born into a titled family near a village called Orlestone in Kent. His family home was a Jacobean manor house, which boasted a moat among other features. Nigel was a bright lad and got a first in biology at Oxford. He simultaneously maintained a childhood interest in chemistry, and took his PHD in industrial chemical applications, planning to combine the two disciplines for any future career.’

  He stopped and drained his glass of water before continuing.

  ‘But it was at Oxford that he reached a defining moment in his life. He started reading the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao among others. He devoured the works of the leading socialist writers, leaders and thinkers of the times. No book or pamphlet was too extreme or off limits, no left leaning idea or scheme was too far to the left. It became his creed, his mantra, his dogma; in short, it became a religion for him.’

  ‘Nothing unusual about that in the early thirties,’ said the director.

  ‘No, you’re right; on the surface, another spoilt rich kid from a wealthy background, assuming someone else’s doctrine to assuage the accumulated guilt of a privileged upbringing. But for Nigel, it was more than a doctrine. He was easily led by all accounts. Given his ruthless scientific brain, the type that refuses to believe anything without irrefutable proof, it seems bizarre in the extreme that he would adopt a half baked creed like socialism, without a shred of corroboration. But he cloaked himself in his new religion like a new set of clothes; a tight fitting skin. Given his upper class childhood, or maybe because of it, he became more convinced than ever that all men could and should be equal. And the more he got into the notion of men as equals, the more he became convinced that it was possible to biologically create equality.’

  ‘How did he hope to accomplish that?’ asked the deputy director with interest.

  ‘In 1912, Henry Dale isolated a substance called Acetylcholine, and identified it as an agent for the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. This discovery was further expanded by Otto Loewi in 1921, when he showed the importance of the substance in the central nervous system. Incidentally, the two men were collectively awarded the Nobel prize in physiology / medicine in 1936.’

  ‘How is this relevant?’ asked a female voice, from the shadows at the far end of the room. ‘All you’re doing at the moment is quoting techno-babble at us. When are you going to cut to the chase?’

  The voice moved forward out of the shadows and into the harsh direct lighting.

  Christine Browne had joined the agency straight out of college. She was now well into her fifties, but was still a striking woman. She had ignored the beauty treatments and cosmetic enhancements espoused by her peers, and at fifty three, she looked her age. But she had a grace and charm about her that men instantly found attractive. Her hair was long and contained no colour, but didn’t have the harsh steel wool look that a lot of grey hair did. Her skin was pale and unblemished and her eyes burned a cruel icy blue; an unfortunate physical trait that belied the cheery side of her personality. She was the director of communications; possibly more important even than the deputy director and arguably the most powerful woman in the world.

  ‘Bear with me, please,’ said the agent. ‘It will start to make sense soon, I promise.’

  The communications director smiled; the agent noticed a distinct coolness in the response. He marshalled his thoughts again.

  ‘Scientists had long been trying to identify the areas of the brain that controlled freewill; or more specifically, how to artificially or chemically mimic or inhibit personal choice. Nigel, given his background in both biology and chemistry, was a voracious reader of medical periodicals. I have been to his house; it is pretty much unchanged from the way it was when he died in the mid forties. You can barely move between the piles of magazines. Anyway, whatever it was about the specific research that Dale and Loewi conducted, Nigel seized on their joint discovery as the basis of his direction forward. Given what we know now about Acetylcholine, the way he managed to join the dots was truly remarkable. Whatever it was that prompted his interest in that set of discoveries, he zeroed in on Acetylcholine specifically.’

  He glanced around the room, and noticed with vague amusement that he had their complete attention now. Even the communications director was starting to look interested.

  ‘At this stage, in the late thirties, Nigel had inherited the family home and a modest income from a number of large rented small-holdings in the vicinity. He also had a minority stake in the old family brewery in nearby Tenterden. As an only child who’d never married, he could indulge his passion to the full. He converted the stable block into a full industrial specification lab and set about turning his socialist utopian dream into a physical reality.’

  ‘The first results were not convincing, but he never gave up, and as he approached the middle of 1939, it seemed that his reasoned methodology, along with a couple of intuitive leaps of faith, might be about to pay dividends. And that is when the story takes a slightly sinister twist.’

  ‘In what way?’ asked the deputy director.

  ‘Toward the end of 1939, the British war office set up a unit with the grand title of Military Intelligence Research or MIR for short, which eventually became known as MD1 or more colloquially Churchill’s Toy Shop. Now, all scholars, stu
dents and historians believe that the work done by MD1 was on weapons and hardware; for instance did you know that they developed the limpet mine? No, neither did I, but what all the scholars and historians don’t know was that in late 1939, an Oxford graduate called Major Geoffrey Walker joined the staff of MD1. He was a direct appointee of Churchill himself, who didn’t bother to record the information anywhere. Our Major Walker was your original and definitive shadow operative.’

  The agent stopped for a second to pour himself another glass of water from the crystal decanter in the middle of the table. Even the formerly belligerent director was waiting patiently for him to continue. But he had to admit, even though he was telling it, the story was a good one.

  ‘Major Walker was recruited specifically for one purpose; chemical and biological weapons.’

  There was a collective drawing in of breath around the room. The agent held his hand up.

  ‘Yes, I know the public think it is a new thing, but we know better. We only have to think back to the first Great War; to the chlorine, phosgene and mustard gases that were used. But Major Walker was not looking for mere gases; he was looking for a magic bullet. And he found it in the most unlikely of places.’

  He took another sip of water.

  ‘Even though they were only vaguely aware of it themselves, both Nigel and Major Walker were alumni of the same alma mater in Oxford; Christ Church college to be precise. At this stage, Nigel had become a lonely, virtual recluse. His experiments were not as successful as he’d first anticipated, and he didn’t seem to be able to make the longed for breakthrough discovery. He seized on the invitation to the reunion; a chance to interact with fellow intellectuals. Major Walker just happened to be billeted close by and thought it would be worth a few pints of free ale.’

  He drained the last of the water.

  ‘By the end of the evening, by his own account, Major Walker was pretty the worse for wear and feeling no pain. The only person in the room feeling less pain than him was our Nigel. The two of them ended up together and one of them (Major Walker doesn’t divulge who in his accounts) managed to snag a two thirds full bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. By the time the bottle was half empty, Major Walker had just about had enough of the pinko-leftie bullshit. By the time the bottle was a quarter empty, he had miraculously sobered up, and by the time the bottle was empty, Nigel was passed out on the floor, snoring like a trooper, and Major Walker was making lots of phone calls.’