by Blake Banner
KILL: ONE
Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner
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One 5
Two 13
Three 22
Four 31
Five 41
Six 50
Seven 59
Eight 68
Nine 76
Ten 85
Eleven 94
Twelve 102
Thirteen 110
Fourteen 119
Fifteen 127
SIXTEEN 135
SEVENTEEN 145
EIGHTEEN 154
ALSO BY BLAKE BANNER 164
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“How much management do we need
To keep us from being ourselves?”
George Stevens, Hollywood film director, on seeing the German concentration camps
One
Pitch black. The painful rasp of breath searing in my throat and my lungs. The crashing and stumbling of my feet running blindly over uneven ground. Twigs like claws tearing at my face and hands. Invisible branches whipping and lashing at me. Behind me, to left and right, the baying and howling of the pack, closing in on my scent. Running blind, it had to happen and I knew it would. My foot hit a rock. My ankle twisted. Shafts of pain stabbed through my leg and I hit the hard ground. Sharp stones bit into my hands.
And then they were all around me. I could not see them in the blackness, but I could hear them and smell them. And feel them. Their presence grew in intensity until they were almost like shapes made of black light: six before me, six behind me, six on my right and six on my left, sniffing the air, tasting my fear, closing in for the kill. My skin crawled, my body arched away, sensing the long, hard steel blades, knowing the terrible killing was about to start.
And then in the darkness I saw the eyes.
I sat up with a gasp.
It was dark, but not impenetrable. I could see the pale oblong on the window on my right. Moonlight was leaning in, soft turquoise beams that lay across the foot of the bed. A cool breeze touched my skin and I realized I was sweating, my heart was pounding and I was breathing hard, as though I’d been running. An owl called out, lonely in the woods, and I half expected to hear the baying and howling from my dreams echoing across the night in response.
I swung my legs out of bed and crossed the wooden floor to the window. The moonlight hung almost like a mist over the lawns. Tall narrow shadows seemed to look back at me from among the trees in the woodland. Invisible, undefined beings, half dream, half premonition, seemed to linger in the air, waiting for their moment to become real. I listened to the house. It was silent.
And in that silence there was knowledge: a kind of truth. I knew with absolute certainty that they would come, and there was only one thing I could do to stop them. I had to kill them first, every single one of them.
I turned from the window and looked back at the bed. Abi was sitting up, with her arms on her knees. The moonlight lay across the foot of the bed, but her face and her eyes were in darkness. Her voice, when she spoke, seemed disembodied.
“You OK?”
I nodded, realized she probably couldn’t see it and said, “Yeah.”
“That’s why you’re standing staring out of the window at four in the morning.”
I smiled. “I do that every morning at four, didn’t you know that?”
“Talk to me.”
I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her, all the things I would have told Marni without hesitation. But it was somehow different with Abi. I wanted more than anything else to protect her—not just keep her physically safe, but protect her from the darkness. It was an imperative need in me to protect her innocence, hers and her children’s, from the ugliness, the ruthlessness and the killing that had been my life for the past twelve years. I had to end it. I had to kill the pack, but I had to do it far away from her.
“I may have to go away for a while, on business.”
She was quiet for a while. “How long?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s not over, is it? You said it was over.”
“I don’t want you to think about it, Abi. It doesn’t affect you. I’m a businessman, going away on business…”
“Don’t lie to me, Lacklan. Don’t patronize me.”
I sighed. “You, Sean, Primrose. You are the only good, wholesome things in my life. You are untouched by…” I hesitated. “Untouched by my past, by my father. I want it to stay that way. These people—this pack—they sully everything they touch. I don’t want you to know about them.”
“I already know about them.”
I smiled and shook my head. “No, you don’t.” After a moment I added, “I have to finish it, Abi. If I don’t finish it, it will never end. If you…” I struggled to say it, but forced myself. “If you feel this isn’t what you signed up for, if you feel you want to leave…”
“What I signed up for is standing by your side, for better for worse. I’m not a quitter. I’m not going anywhere. What do you need from me?”
I went and sat beside her on the bed and took her hands. Now I could see the pale luminescence of her face, and her eyes watching me. “I need you to stay wholesome and sane. I need you to be something I can hold on to, and come back to. You can’t know about it.”
She was quiet for a long while, staring at me. Finally she smiled and said, “About what?” I kissed her and she whispered, “Come back to bed, I have a going away present for you…”
* * *
Abi and Rosario had set themselves a project to create an orchard and a herb garden at the back of the house, outside the kitchen. A local gardener had been recruited from Weston and, after breakfast, the three of them had gathered on the large stretch of lawn that separated the house from the forest at the back and started pacing up and down, standing around gazing with their hands on their hips and pointing at where they visualized plum trees and apple trees in neat, shaded rows, and nearer to hand, rosemary, sage and thyme, ready in good time for Christmas.
I withdrew to my study which, since I had rearranged all the furniture, I was now beginning to think of as my study, and withdrew from my safe the documents I had taken from the Richard John Erickson Institute, including the list of the Omega cabal, and sat at my desk to study them.
It began to dawn on me as I worked through the papers
that, though I probably knew more than anyone alive, outside the cabal, about Omega, I actually knew very little about them, about their structure and workings. All I knew was their purpose and their objectives—and even that I knew only in the most general terms.
I took the list of members that Michael Donnelly, Senator Cyndi McFarlane’s husband, had printed for me before I killed him and studied it with care for the first time. There were twenty-four members of the cabal, each designated with a letter from the Greek alphabet. This much I knew. My father, before he was killed, had been Gamma. They had offered his seat to me, and when I had refused and declared war on them, they had given that place to Donnelly. That place was now, as far as I knew, vacant.
What I hadn’t known till now was that the cabal was divided into six groups, and each group had a geographical jurisdiction and what they called a competence. The first group was designated Omega Alpha. It appeared to be different from the others. Its geographical jurisdiction was the United Kingdom, New England, New York, the District of Columbia and Virginia, California and Belize. I sat for a while thinking about this, then had a look at its ‘competence’. It said ‘Oversight and general administration’. Its members were only three, Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Beside their titles in the cabal were their actual names. Gamma, as I said, was deceased, Alpha I knew well and Beta was a household name within the IT industry.
The other five groups were numerical: Omega 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Omega 1 covered Canada, USA, Greenland, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand. I had a look at its competence: free market capital, mass production and mass distribution, technological R&D in non-biological fields, IT, social cohesion, tension and conflict. Its members were the same as Omega Alpha, with the addition of Delta (Saul Cohen) and Epsilon (Aaron Fenninger).
Omega 2 covered the European Union plus Turkey, Norway and Iceland, Omega 3 covered Latin America, Omega 4 covered Africa and the Middle East and Omega 5 covered Russia, the Far East and the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia. Their competences seemed to cover everything from the movement of capital—free market, central planning and black market—as well as research and development in all areas of technology, but especially what they listed as ‘behavior and motivation management’ and ‘unregulated biological and genetic IT interface’.
It was beyond science fiction. But as I read through it I was haunted by the images that George Stevens had filmed on entering Dachau, and Hitchcock and his British team’s record of Belsen. That was not science fiction. It had happened, seventy years earlier. It was a reality: a program to exterminate an entire race of human beings. And it had been organized by a small cabal of people who, for no good reason, considered themselves somehow superior, and reinforced their fantasy with classical and pseudo-occult trappings. The parallels with Omega were striking.
But where the Third Reich’s agenda had focused on Jews, homosexuals and ‘short-legged Mediterraneans’, Omega did not discriminate on the basis of race. They were more politically correct than that. They were happy to exterminate everybody who wasn’t in the cabal, or serving the cabal as a happy slave.
That right there, I told myself, was the reason for the second amendment. I didn’t want to preserve the second amendment. I wanted to abolish a world that made it necessary. Until then, I would keep my right to bear arms.
And use them.
Twenty-four men and women who believed themselves somehow superior to the rest of humanity, whose objective was… I paused in my thinking and realized that I did not really know, precisely, what Omega’s objective was. My father had begun to explain it to me, though at the time I had hardly listened. It was based on Malthus’ proposition: population grows exponentially, resources grow arithmetically.
Basically, population grows more, and faster than energy and food production. Of course, the Industrial Revolution meant that we were able to produce food on a scale that Malthus had never dreamed possible, and capitalists crowed that Malthus had been proven wrong, that production could keep pace with population.
But the very scientific revolution that was generating food on such a vast scale was also doing two other things: it was providing medical advances that were wiping out disease, increasing longevity by almost fifty percent, and simultaneously creating the greenhouses gases that would change the climate and bring drought and famine where before there was super-production.
The bitter twist was that by the time the droughts struck, the population would have grown from seven hundred million when Malthus was writing, to over seven billion, six hundred million today—and growing exponentially. Edward Wilson, one of Marni’s most powerful influences at Harvard, had said that, “the constraints of the biosphere are limited,” and that the Earth could sustain no more than nine or ten billion, and that was without factoring in climate change.
Omega had factored in climate change and decided that seven billion people needed to die, and the remaining six hundred million had to have their minds and their behavior controlled. That was, in essence, the Omega Protocol: the final protocol.
Were they wrong? Humanity was well on its way to becoming a plague of parasites—if it hadn’t already become one—you couldn’t argue with that. But if their assessment of the problem was correct, it didn’t mean their solution was.
I checked the clock on the wall. It was five past twelve. The sun was over the yardarm. I stood and poured myself a Bushmills, pulled a Camel from my pack and lit up, standing by the window, looking out at the lawn and the trees beyond. I had no solution for the world. I had no solution for humanity. But I did know two things: if human beings had anything of worth it was the freedom of their minds; a freedom that gave them the potential to be more than the sum of their parts. To convert human beings into slaves, into biological machines as Omega intended, was nothing short of an obscenity. And beyond that, whether Omega were right or wrong, I knew that sooner or later they would come after me and my family. And that meant simply that I had to go after them first.
I sat at my desk and looked at the list. It was clear it had to be one of the five members of Omega 1, in North America. I smiled: correction, four members in North America. Gamma was dead. Alpha and Beta could not be reached yet. They were too well protected. That left Delta, Samuel Cohen, and Epsilon, Aaron Fenninger.
I smoked and considered the names. I knew practically nothing about Samuel Cohen except that he was a financier from a very powerful family of bankers. But Fenninger I knew more about. Most people did. He was a writer, a director and TV and film producer. He’d started out twenty years earlier with a teen fantasy series that had not only made him fantastically rich, but had had a profound effect on teens and pre-teens. Thinking about it I began to see why Omega had opened their doors to him: Silicon Valley had created the delivery system, a man Fenninger’s talent and skill could create a culture be delivered to an entire generation.
Wasn’t that exactly what Goebbels had done in Germany, without the benefit of IT? Wasn’t it what the U.S. and U.K. governments had tried to do using the cinema? How much more powerfully and effectively could Omega do it using the vast, global IT network?
I put my finger on his name and said, “Aaron Fenninger: Kill One.”
A couple of calls found me his address in Malibu, and his office on Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. At first glance the Malibu mansion seemed to offer the best options, but I’d need a couple of days to scout around and make a plan.
I went to the gun room and thought about what weapons I would need. The essence of this operation would be silence, stealth. I smiled to myself. I wouldn’t be blowing anything up this time. Just move in the shadows, I told myself, find his rhythm and his routine, take him out and leave. Then move on to Delta, Beta and, finally, Alpha.
I selected the Maxim 9. It’s a damn ugly gun, but it has an integrated suppressor so it’s nicely balanced, it fits in a holster and will take any kind of 9mm rounds, sonic and sub-sonic in a 17+1 magazine. I also selected my two Sig Sauer p226s, and m
y fighting knife, the Fairbairn & Sykes, the best fighting knife ever made. As an afterthought I added my night vision goggles and my orange osage take down bow, with twelve aluminum arrows.
I then chose a selection of bugs, a couple of which had been sent to me by Philip Gantrie, the IT genius nerd my father had recommended to me before he died. I didn’t know his story, I doubted that anybody did, but he seemed to hate Omega as much as I did, and he had helped me several times in the past. They were micro-bugs, almost invisible to the naked eye, and used advanced cell phone technology to communicate with a cell you could install in your laptop, tablet, pad or phone. Something told me I might need one of them.
Then I sat and thought for a while about the different ways the job might play out and decided to take along a new addition to my arsenal: an especially adapted drone I affectionately called the Emperor.
When I had assembled my kit I went up to my room and packed some clothes, including the jeans and sweatshirts I used for working on my cars. I thought about renting some anonymous vehicle for the trip, but I decided in the end that anonymity was not as important as not being traced, so I decided to take the Zombie 222. It had the chassis of a 1968 Mustang Fastback, in matte black. But under the hood it had two electric engines delivering eight hundred bhp, one thousand eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque direct to the back wheels, instantly, driving it from 0-60 in just over one and a half seconds, with a top speed of 200 MPH in total silence. And that was what this operation was all about, I reminded myself. The silent kill.
Finally I went downstairs and stashed everything in the trunk of the Zombie, along with a set of fake, magnetic plates, and went to find Abi at the back of the house. She was standing in the kitchen doorway watching the gardener making a start on the orchard. Rosalia was chopping stewing steak with a large knife and there was a smell of warm olive oil, thyme and frying onions on the air. She had a small TV playing and she glanced at it as she worked. It was the news. There had been a bombing in New York, a new terrorist group calling itself the FMW. The reporter was talking into the camera and behind her I could see the offices of the Union Broadcasting Corporation with thick smoke billowing from its windows. She was saying, “…believe it or not, the group claiming responsibility are calling themselves the Free Mind Warriors, and claim that…”
