Breakout (Alex Knight Book 1)

by C. G. Cooper

  This report asserted that vaccines were being deployed by the government in order to sterilize the human race. According to the research, which amounted to little more than anecdotal evidence from worried parents that had been conducted and compiled by the report’s author, the government was hiding ingredients in the childhood vaccines. These components were designed to lie dormant in the child until adolescence when the chemical would render the child sterile. The criminal chemical, known as Titan X, was discovered in 1947 within the wreckage of the UFO crash at Roswell.

  The report had been given to him, and now he had to do something with it. He was prepared to dash off a quick paragraph—regarding David Hume’s maxim about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence— that he had nearly memorized word for word when the notion struck him that he should compile just a bit more about Titan X, the brand name for a very real chemical developed by Zystra Pharmaceuticals and not spacemen from Alpha Centauri.

  The NIH library had extensive files on many commonly-used chemical compounds. Originally, Titan X had been used in pesticides, remaining inactive in the soil until a particular pest ingested it, at which point the chemical would become active in response to hemolymph, a fluid exclusive to insect physiology, releasing a combination of toxins that would render the insect sterile. Titan X was simply a molecular glue used to bind several of these sterilization chemicals together and hold them in an inert state until it was activated. The Titan X molecule would be destroyed in the process.

  Titan X had been genetically modified to respond in a similar fashion to hemoglobin in humans. In this way, it could be used to bind vaccines in a multi-vaccine treatment. The vaccines were injected into a child, and only then would the various vaccines be released.

  Its job complete, the Titan X molecule was then absorbed as a dead component.

  He could see how someone who wasn’t thinking from a medical point of view could conflate the two uses of Titan X into a sterilization conspiracy theory. It seemed ripe for that.

  It struck him then that if he was to go through every report by some crackpot and chase down every last molecule used in every vaccine, he was going to be sitting in this chair until the end of time. It would be so much easier if he could simply test these vaccines in a well-equipped laboratory. That was, after all, what he was best at. He was a scientist. He would have a report for the president and the final word on vaccines.

  He dashed to the office door again and flung it open. This time Blunt and Jeffries were ready for him, and both appeared to be working hard.

  “Mrs. Blunt,” he said, “I’ll be out of the office for the rest of the day. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” she said.

  Knight looked around the office, then looked at his watch. “No sign of Sarah?”

  Mrs. Blunt looked up at him for a moment, then went back to her computer screen. “No, and she knows she’s supposed to report to me directly when she’s taking a personal day.”

  He realized his blunder too late. He should have asked, “Where is Sarah?” or better yet, “Where is Ms. Hansen?” The very phrase “No sign of Sarah” implied that he knew she was going to be late. And Mrs. Blunt would only need to speculate how he knew. Her tone implied that she was in the process of doing so.

  “Right then,” said Knight. “Could you do me a favor and try to contact her? Find out why she hasn’t come in today and let me know.”

  19

  The city traffic seemed lighter. Knight usually found himself battling rush hour traffic at his time of day. He let his bike roar from one red light to the next, enjoying the extra space on the streets. He cut through the traffic and pulled up at the National Institutes of Health building in a relatively short time.

  He was going to walk straight into Stone’s office and tell the professor that the Vaccine Verification Program was a waste of his time, talent, and a waste of government money.

  The elevator opened on the floor dominated by Stone’s office. A neat receptionist sat behind the large desk next to the set of double doors. She looked up, smiling as Knight strode out of the elevator.

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone at this time,” she said in a diplomatic yet forceful manner. Knight heard the message hidden in the words. He understood clearly that the receptionist was telling him: he was not welcome.

  Knight had no intention of leaving. He walked straight up to the double door and barged into Stone’s office without breaking his stride, hearing the receptionist shouting something about calling security. A quiet yet incessant alarm began to sound.

  Stone was standing at a wet bar on one side of the huge office next to two small leather sofas and a small, reclaimed wood table. He turned, a large scotch in his hand, and looked at Knight.

  “Dr. Knight,” Stone said, turning back toward the liquor cabinet. “Drink?”

  “My talent is being wasted in that office,” Knight said, removing his jacket and tossing it onto one of the sofas.

  “Have a seat, please,” Stone said calmly, as he lowered himself into one of the opposing chairs.

  At that moment two burly guards charged in, batons drawn. Stone held up a hand. “Thank you, gentlemen. It’s all right. False alarm. Dr. Knight is my guest.” His voice was oily. “We have some things to discuss. And switch that alarm off, would you?” He waited until the guards were gone then sipped his drink slowly. “So, what brings you here, Alex? Please, sit.” He swirled the ice cubes in his glass, making them chink and clatter against the sides.

  “I prefer to stand, thank you very much,” Knight responded before barreling head on. “I need a lab. I’m achieving nothing in that office. I could disprove this nonsense about vaccines and show that they are safe with just a few months back in my lab. What is the point of me trawling through all those old reports?”

  Stone relaxed into the comfortable sofa. “I’m not funding a lab for you, Alex. Keep doing what you are doing. Keep digging.”

  “But it’s a bottomless pit of nonsense. Endless reams of half-baked and ill-conceived crap. I could waste the rest of my career wading through all that junk. Set me up with a lab and I will have irrefutable evidence to show once and for all that these vaccines are safe.”

  Stone took a sip from his glass, a devious twinkle in his eye. “No.”

  “I could just walk away. I could get a job in a medical practice. I don’t need to work for you.”

  Stone leaned forward and carefully placed his glass on the small table. “Alex,” he said calmly, “you haven’t forgotten about our little deal, have you? I understand the FBI has been sniffing around. They don’t have any evidence that they could use against you... not yet. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t appreciate you lording my research over me like that, in case you haven’t noticed. On that memory stick is everything we need to consign every disease to the history books. I was on the brink of a huge breakthrough.” Knight felt his frustration rising as he considered how close he had come. He heard his voice rising as frustration threatened to boil over into anger. “And instead, you choose to hoard it like a miser and use it to blackmail me into doing some shit job that any intern can accomplish.”

  Stone picked up his glass and relaxed back into his seat. “Yes, you’ve achieved something quite remarkable. You could give the world something that has only ever been dreamed of. You would still go to jail. All I’d have to do is let a few files slip onto one or two desks here at the NIH, or let your records land on a desk at the FBI…” Stone sipped the bright amber whiskey. He jangled the ice and fixed Knight with a mocking stare.

  The man’s eyes were bright and cold. Stone was not just a scientist but a shrewd politician. No one got to the top of a government organization as large as the NIH without being a devious, determined, and dedicated political operator.

  Stone returned the glass to the table and stood up. He stepped over to Knight. “Alex, I realize it’s a difficult job, especially for someone of your talent and ability, but pl
ease, complete the work, present your findings, and then we can get you back where you belong. Show me you can be a team player and we’ll get you back in the lab,” he promised. “And, who knows, once you have completed the Vaccination Verification Program, there may be fewer restrictions on the stem cell work. You may be able to complete your work in that field. I’ll even go so far as to say that if I can’t get you the very best laboratory after you have completed this job, I will resign in protest.”

  Stone held out his hand. Knight reluctantly accepted it.

  “Get it done, Alex,” Stone said, brushing off one sleeve with the back of his hand. “And, please, the next time you wish to have a meeting, arrange it with my secretary first? Hm?”

  Knight rode back to his office, doing his best not to give into to road rage. He parked and stormed into the office. Mrs. Blunt and Jeffries were sitting at their desks when Knight entered, both trying to look busy. Sarah’s workspace looked undisturbed.

  “Any word from Ms. Hansen?” Knight asked.

  Mrs. Blunt took a moment to realize she was being spoken to. She shifted in her chair. “I haven’t been able to get a reply.”

  “Try again,” Knight snapped, almost cutting her off. He turned to Jeffries, “Show me your work from the last three weeks.”

  Jeffries looked up at Knight from his desk, a mixture of surprise and disdain on his face. “I am in the middle of that report on the FDA’s use of Titan X you asked me to compile.”

  Knight leaned heavily on Jeffries’s desk and fixed the kid with a withering look. “I asked for that two days ago.”

  The kid avoided his gaze. “Well, it’s taking longer than that, hotshot.”

  Knight stood up. He couldn’t believe his ears. “Listen, punk,” he said with all the acid he could muster in his voice, “just because your uncle is a senator doesn’t mean you have free reign to be a colossal ignoramus. Now clean out the fuzz in that wasteland between your ears or start looking for a job in a shoe store.”

  Jeffries rose from his desk and strutted out of the office, full of arrogance and false pride. Knight walked over to Mrs. Blunt, who was still looking busy. “Have you tried Ms. Hansen again?”

  Mrs. Blunt picked up the phone and dialed. “Trying for you now, Dr. Knight.”

  20

  Knight sat at his desk trawling through search engine results. He had read so many versions of the same claim--that vaccines were tied to autism--that he was past caring.

  A message box popped up at the bottom of the screen, a welcome distraction from the endless reports of well-meaning but poorly informed parents about the dangers of vaccines.

  The message had come from an address in the National Institutes of Health central offices. He clicked it open. It was a web link, nothing more. No greeting. No introduction. No hint of what the website was all about. He closed the message.

  He clicked on the next link in his search engine list and began to scroll down, scanning all the poorly set out arguments in this latest tirade against vaccination. Halfway down, an embedded video began playing. A young lady in a poorly-lit room leaned in close to the camera, waving with both hands as if to attract attention. And as Knight scrolled passed the video he saw the young lady throw her hands up in frustration.

  He skimmed the article and went on to read the next. He felt he was becoming stupider by reading all this poorly-educated ranting.

  The next link led to a blog by a teacher who had witnessed an entire class of high school students become withdrawn and sullen in a matter of days. Their class test results dropped dramatically. Their behavior became sluggish and lethargic. Their parents complained about the behavior, thinking some element of their schooling had induced their lackluster manner. It all appeared to Knight to be extremely unlikely that an entire class, over thirty kids, could have suffered from the same rare disorder.

  He closed the blog and searched sites for any other news regarding that school, that class, and that teacher. One report issued one week after the blog post by the teacher leaped out at Knight. The teacher had been arrested for possession of over a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, including substantial amounts of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines. and heroin. All this was found together with a large quantity of cash.

  A report from the local paper, dated a few days later, said that the teacher had been released on bail. The local judge was quoted as having told the defendant to expect a significant custodial sentence to be passed on him and that he should prepare himself for the eventuality.

  The same local paper ran a small update to the story a few days later. The defendant had been found dead in his small apartment, apparently having succumbed to a massive overdose of heroin.

  Knight wondered how on earth this teacher had been released on bail. Surely a person placed in a position of trust over vulnerable young people who had abused that trust by presumably selling them various mind and mood-altering drugs should never have been allowed to walk free, not even while awaiting trial. Knight needed to check the law on this. He opened a tab and searched for sentencing guidelines for various drug offenses.

  The first link was an informational guide from the federal judiciary. It was a long document written in almost impenetrable legal jargon. Knight was able to make sense of it, but he wondered what layperson could. It was almost as if it was designed to be unintelligible.

  As he scrolled down, he came across an embedded video. He thought he recognized the young woman in the video. It was the same person he had seen in the video earlier. He began to scroll past when he noticed she was waving a handwritten sign and she was leaning closer to the camera and waving wildly at Knight.

  He stopped scrolling past. He paused and looked at the girl. She mouthed the words “thank you” and then held up the handwritten sign. It said, “Click the link.”

  At that moment, the embedded video disappeared from the federal judiciary website and a small message popped up at the bottom of his screen. He hovered his cursor over it. It was just a link. He hesitated. How could the girl in the video have anything to do with this? He clicked the link.

  The link led to a basic-looking web page, like an old bulletin board from the early days of the internet. It was text and nothing more. Knight began reading.

  The text outlined a conspiracy amongst various government agencies to create a generation of uber-intelligent individuals, covering many fields, from science and engineering to arts and politics. According to the site, their creation was to be clandestine and would be achieved by randomly including hybrid genetic material in vaccines destined for use on the general public. The subject would obviously be monitored.

  Knight read this with disbelief. Why would the government agree to arbitrarily increase the intelligence and ability of a few random individuals? Knight searched through the text several times. This all sounded like some fantasy concocted by some hippie on a long-lasting LSD trip who had somehow gotten it posted on the early internet, and there it had lingered in cyberspace.

  He closed the report. There was no way he was going to include any of that nonsense in his report for the president.

  Then another line of text popped up at the bottom of the screen. This time it was a message: answer the call.

  Then his cell phone rang.

  “Who is this?” Knight asked. He was interested, if a bit alarmed.

  “Hello, Doctor. I’m Mina.”

  “You don’t sound like a Mina. Are you the girl in the videos?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you do that?” Knight asked, both mystified and impressed.

  “You aren’t the only genius around, Alex. But how I did it should not be your first question. Do you want to know why I did it?”

  Knight found himself smiling. She reminded him of himself when he was a teen. “Yes, tell me, Mina. Why did you do it?”

  “You’ve been searching for vaccines. Tainted vaccines. Autism and vaccines. We keep tabs on searches like this in case anyone finds out what we already know.”
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  Knight found this a little hard to believe. This Mina was clearly clever, and she sounded earnest, too, but it was all nonsense. Surely it was all nonsense.

  “What is it you think you know?”

  “What we know is how the human race will end.”

  “The four horsemen or the beast?”

  “You and I, Alex. You and I will be the end of the human race. You and I, and all the people like us.”

  Knight laughed. “What do you mean like us? I’ve spent my professional life doing everything I can to save life, to preserve mankind. I’m not going to be the end of it.”

  “You still have a lot to learn. There are things you have only just begun to discover. You have come this far. Take the next step, Alex. We need you. We need you to believe. We need you to understand. We need you to know. Click the link.”

  And with that the call ended and a new message popped up on his computer. A new link. Knight looked at his cell phone.

  “How did you get my number?” he asked aloud.

  Then he slid the cell phone back into his pocket and clicked the link in the message. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to get his attention. He thought he might as well have a look at what they were selling. He was a man who knew his own mind, the power of which could unravel the truth from a pack of lies. He wasn’t going to have his judgment clouded by a few computer party tricks, but it wouldn’t hurt to read more.

  His computer screen went blank, and the computer seemed to restart. When Knight’s monitor came back on the young lady, Mina, appeared in a video on a small window in one corner of the screen. She began holding up a series of handwritten signs.

  Click these links.

  Speak soon.

  The computer hacker who called herself Mina had sent a list of web links direct to Knight’s computer. The first link that Knight clicked was an article that repeated in more detail the idea that all vaunted intellectuals, from fields as varied as neuroscience and politics, were the products of a special vaccine. The report went on to say the end goal was to establish a hybrid race designed to someday dominate society.