The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

  Jax found the Glock in the holster at the small of the guy’s back and tossed it off the edge of the dock with a splash. “I’m the guy with the gun. Now move.” To October, he said, “Where’d you see the pathogen?”

  “The stateroom.”

  Jax prodded the security guard in the back with the Beretta. “Show us.”

  “Which stateroom? There’s four.”

  “Start with the master stateroom.”

  They followed the guard to a cherry-paneled room with a king-sized bed, his and her walk-in closets, a 26-inch HD TV, and en suite his and her heads that gleamed with polished marble and gold-plated faucets. An aluminum case lay open on the bed. Empty.

  “Sonofabitch,” said Jax. From the looks of the slot in the molded foam interior, the case had once cradled a cylinder just over a foot long and maybe six inches across.

  He rested the Beretta’s muzzle against the security guard’s temple and pulled back the hammer with a click that echoed in the sudden stillness. “Who owns this boat?”

  “Mr.—” The man’s voice broke. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Mr. Walker. James Nelson Walker.”

  The name meant nothing to Jax. “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know!” The man’s voice rose in near hysteria. “He left maybe twenty minutes ago.”

  “Jax,” said October softly.

  He glanced at her. “What?” His gaze fell to the sheaf of blueprints she was unrolling. “What are those?”

  “It says ‘Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning System.’”

  “Shit. It’s an HVAC plan. What building?”

  “The Intercontinental.”

  Jax swung back to the security guard. “Where’s that?” The man’s nose quivered. “Chopin Plaza. On the bay.

  Right next to Bayfront Park.”

  Jax shoved the guy into the nearest closet and turned the key. “Bring the plans,” Jax told October. “Let’s go.”

  By now the sun was only a rosy memory on a darkening horizon. October took the Speedboat’s helm while Jax spread the HVAC plans out on the floorboards.

  “Anything?” she asked as the Speedboat skimmed over the smooth black waters of the bay.

  “Someone’s circled the section of the system that serves the grand ballroom,” he said, straightening. “I’d say that’s their target.” He snapped his penlight closed and punched in a call to Matt. “Ever hear of some fat cat named James Nelson Walker?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” said Matt. “He’s the head of Walker Pharmaceuticals. I was just looking into him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because he studied biochemistry at MIT when Kline was there. From what I can discover, he’s quite a closet bigot. He keeps it quiet for the sake of business.”

  Jax squinted across the bay, to where the lights of the Manhattan-like skyscrapers twinkled out over the water. “Do me a favor, Matt: look on the Intercontinental website and see what function they’re holding in the grand ballroom tonight.”

  After a minute, Matt said, “Oh, man.”

  “What is it?”

  “The hotel’s hosting the People of the Book Conference.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a kind of religious peace conference. The idea is that all three of the big Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—respect the same holy book—what Christians call the Old Testament—and share many of the same beliefs. So they’ve brought together rabbis, priests, and imams from all over the world to try to find a way to work for interracial and interreligious peace. Their grand banquet is tonight. In the ballroom.”

  73

  Turning the wheel hard, October slammed the side of the Speedboat into the U-shaped wooden walkway that curved out into the bay at Chopin Plaza and cut the engine.

  “Hey,” shouted a dark, stocky bellboy, starting toward them. “You’re not allowed to tie up your boat there!”

  “Catch.” Jax tossed him the bow line and grabbed October’s hand to haul her up onto the boardwalk. “It’s yours.”

  They sprinted across the pavement and burst through the hotel’s massive glass entrance doors into a soaring space of tan marble turned to gold by the subtle gleam of light. A swashbuckling pirate in a black eye patch careened into them, said, “Excuse me,” and stepped back into an Arab in flowing bisht and a ghutra and igal. The Arab was real. The pirate wasn’t.

  “What the hell?” said Jax, turning in a circle. The lobby teemed with curvaceous Little Bo Peeps and Naughty Nurses, Orthodox Jews with black slouch hats and curly ringlets, Klingons and Vulcans, caped vampires and hairy werewolves and Catholic priests in white collars and befuddled expressions.

  October touched his arm and pointed to a discreet black sign with white letters that read, HIGHGATE HALLOWEEN CHARITY BALL, RM B12; PEOPLE OF THE BOOK BANQUET, GRAND BALLROOM. “Where’s the ballroom?” she shouted over the roar of voices and the splash of the fountain.

  “We don’t want the ballroom,” he said, pushing though a coven of witches. “We want the floor above it. That’s where the HVAC unit is. According to the plans, the building’s entire system runs next to the service-elevator shaft. This way.”

  They found the service elevator in a quiet hallway to their right. The indicator was stuck on the third floor, and it wasn’t moving.

  “They’re probably holding it there,” said Jax, punching open the door to the nearby stairwell. “Come on.”

  They raced up the bare concrete steps, the only sounds the clatter of their footfalls and the echoing rasp of their breath. At first, she kept pace with him. But as they were turning toward the second flight, he heard her let out a gasp as she hunched over to brace one hand against her knee. He slowed. “You okay?”

  “Don’t wait for me! Keep going.”

  He was maybe five seconds ahead of her when he slapped open the heavy firedoors on the third floor, his Beretta in his hand.

  Rigged out in a Crusader costume with fake chain mail and a white surcoat marked by a giant red cross, General Gerald T. Boyd stood in the center of the hall, his hands on his hips, his attention focused on a closed gray door marked MAINTENANCE. A second man—younger, leaner, with a military buzzcut that clashed badly with his medieval squire’s costume—had one foot wedged in the partially open doors of the service elevator.

  At Jax’s catapulted entrance, both men jerked around. The squire had a 9mm Glock half out of the holster hidden beneath his hauberk when Jax pumped two bullets into his chest.

  The force of the impact knocked the squire back into the elevator. The doors slammed shut and the elevator whirled away with a ding.

  “You bastard,” roared Boyd. Arms spread, he plowed into Jax and enveloped him in a deadly bear hug, just as October burst through the firedoor from the stairs.

  With the General’s beefy arms squeezing the air out of his lungs, Jax wheezed, “The HVAC room. Quick.”

  Arms pinned to his sides, lungs bursting, Jax pointed the Beretta’s muzzle vaguely in the direction of Boyd’s foot and pulled the trigger. He heard the bullet ricochet off the floor and smelled burned leather, cloth, and flesh. Boyd roared again and squeezed harder.

  Jax pulled the trigger again and missed. The pressure on his lungs tightened. He could hear his ears ringing. His vision dimmed. He looked up into the General’s furious red face and knew a moment of disbelief. He was being crushed to death by a giant crazy general just feet away from where a mad scientist was unleashing a plague that could wipe out a good quarter of the world’s population.

  Bending one knee, he braced his foot against the wall behind him and pushed. The General staggered back just enough to enable Jax to shift the angle of the Beretta’s barrel and fire again.

  This time, the bullet found a more sensitive portion of the General’s anatomy. The steely gray eyes widened in shock and pain and disbelief. The pressure on Jax’s chest eased and he slammed the top of his head into the General’s face.

  Boyd staggered ba
ck. Jax brought up the Beretta and fired point-blank into the red Crusader’s cross.

  74

  Tobie thrust open the gray door and fell into a hot musty room with exposed I-beams and pipes and a massive rectangular steel box that filled the dusty space with a loud roar. The HVAC unit stood on a concrete pad that raised it some ten to twelve inches off the floor. Crouched beside it, a lean man with short curly hair and wire-framed glasses was working a pry bar beneath one edge of the heavy sheet metal that formed the unit’s locked hatch. In honor of Halloween, he was dressed in a black wetsuit. A small fluorescent-yellow SCUBA tank known as a pony bottle rested on the edge of the concrete pad beside him.

  When the heavy door slammed shut behind her, the man—Walker?—swung around, the pry bar still gripped in his fist. “Who the hell are—”

  She kicked the pry bar out of his hand, the iron rod spinning across the room to hit an exposed pipe with a clatter.

  Walker might be small and wiry, but a lifetime of racquetball and sailing had made him lithe and strong. Surging up, he snatched the metal pony bottle from the concrete plinth and swung it at her head.

  She ducked, but the momentum of his swing carried Walker on around. Before he could catch his balance, he smacked the pony bottle into one of the exposed I-beams. The impact sheared off the bottle’s valve and knocked the container from his hands. It hit the concrete pad under the HVAC unit with a sudden release of deadly contaminated air that sounded like an explosion.

  With a whoosh, the bottle took off like a rocket, a missile driven by six cubic feet of weaponized DP3 under 3,000 pounds of pressure. It clattered against a pipe, ricocheted off another I-beam. Walker hit the floor, his arms coming up to protect his head. Tobie dove behind the HVAC and dug frantically in her shoulder bag for the Beretta.

  The empty pony bottle whacked against the far wall with a hollow clang and tumbled to the floor beside the pry bar. Walker scrambled toward it, fingers groping toward the iron rod. Tobie’s fist closed around the pistol’s barrel. Yanking the gun from her bag, she slammed the handle into Walker’s temple.

  He went down and stayed down.

  She was breathing hard, hideously conscious that with every breath she drew a noxious cloud of death into her lungs. A thump jerked her gaze to the door. The handle was turning.

  “Shit.” Stumbling over Walker’s prostrate body, she leaped for the door and threw her weight against it.

  From the far side of the panel came Jax’s shout, “October?”

  “Don’t come in here!” she screamed, sliding down to her haunches with her back pressed against the door. Half sobbing, she dug her cell phone out of her pocket and punched in 911 with shaking fingers.

  “Hello? This is Ensign October Guinness. I have an emergency situation involving a biological hazard at the Miami Intercontinental.”

  75

  Jax stared through the wavy plastic barrier at the young woman in a hospital gown on the inside of the isolation bubble.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  Beside him, the young Latino doctor in green scrubs glanced down at his chart. “She’s doing great. It’s basically like a bad cold. But she’ll need to stay in there until they’re sure she’s no longer contagious.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  The doctor tapped the microphone beside him. “Through the intercom system.”

  Jax cleared his throat. “Hey, October. You look like shit.”

  “Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They haven’t told me anything. What’s going on?”

  “You did it, Tobie; you stopped Walker before he’d managed to break the seal on the HVAC system. They’re monitoring everyone who was in the hotel, just to be safe, but so far the only two people showing any signs of exposure to the pathogen are you and Walker. Not that anyone knows what really happened. The official line is they’re worried about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “So how’s Walker?”

  “Not good, actually. The arrogant SOB obviously never thought to check his own DNA. They’ve had him on life support for the past twelve hours, but they’re about ready to pull the plug. How’s that for poetic justice?”

  She sniffed. “What about Boyd?”

  “Well, according to the press, the General died a hero, saving a young Naval ensign from an unknown assailant. That’s you, by the way. The ensign, I mean—not the assailant.”

  She stared at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. “That’s not poetic justice.”

  “No. That’s the government covering its ass.”

  “And the guy in the elevator?”

  “Boyd’s aide, Captain Syd Phillips. He’s downstairs in the ICU, too, but he’s expected to make it. Says he thought the entire operation was a legitimate, authorized black op.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Actually, yes. That’s one of the problems with black ops. They’re all dirty, and they’re all secret. So how was he supposed to know this one wasn’t actually authorized?”

  “What’ll happen to him?”

  “He can kiss his military career—and his pension—good-bye.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  Jax rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckles. “He was up to his captain’s bars in a plan to kill millions—including you and me. And his defense is, ‘I was just following orders’? Excuse me while I don’t feel sorry for him.”

  October blew her nose again. “How’d those two ever get together in the first place?”

  “You mean Boyd and Walker?” Jax shrugged. “Who knows? They probably met at some political fund-raiser for the neofascistly inclined. I suspect Boyd said something like—” Jax pitched his voice into a gravelly Texas drawl. “‘You know what we need? Some new plague that’ll wipe out all these damned A-rabs, and maybe take out the Jews, too.’ And Walker probably said”—Jax switched to a Boston twang—“‘Funny you should mention that. I had this old professor at MIT who told me once about a nasty little pathogen he used to play with back when he was a Nazi…’”

  She laughed softly, then shook her head, her smile fading. “It’s terrifying to realize how close a handful of men can come to killing tens of millions of people.”

  “That’s exactly what makes bioweapons so scary. All it takes is one nut case with a mission—or even a careless mistake—and half the people on this planet could die. Look at the anthrax scare of 2001. And anthrax is actually pretty hard to weaponize. There are plenty of nasties in the world’s laboratories that would be a lot easier to disperse. And a hell of a lot more deadly.”

  She stared at him through the wavy plastic, her face pale.

  He said, “You doing okay in there, October?”“

  She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. The isolation is just starting to get to me, that’s all.”

  “How about if I send you some books? What would you like?”

  She thought about it a minute, then smiled. “Got anything on the French Revolution?”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Wondering what’s real and what isn’t? Here’s a quick rundown, along with some sources for those interested in doing further research.

  The bioweapon “Sword of Solomon” is a figment of our imagination.

  Operation Caesar, Germany’s last-ditch effort near the end of the Second World War to supply its ally, Japan, with war material and weapons technology, was real.

  The Type XB submarine described here did exist and was used as part of Operation Caesar. One of these massive submarines, U-234, surrendered at the end of the war and was found to be carrying uranium and a variety of other war material to Japan. Another Type XB, loaded with a cargo of mercury, sank off the coast of Norway at the end of the war and is indeed causing serious problems. Four keels for an even larger U-boat, the XI-B, were indeed laid down in the shipyards of Bremen. There are no records of these giant subs ever having been completed, although rumors persist that one was built and launched on a secret mission at the end of the war. The Deutsches U-Bo
ot Museum-Archiv in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, Germany, is real, and is an invaluable source of documents on German submarines and their crews. For more detailed information on the U-boats of World War II, see the excellent publications of Rainer Busch and Hans Joachim Röll. The book Jax is reading, Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II, by Herbert Warner, is real, and is a fascinating memoir written by one of the few German submarine commanders to survive the war.

  At the end of World War II, over one hundred U-boats surrendered to the Allies and were scuttled off the coast of Britain in what was known as Operation Deadlight. These submarines are now being salvaged for their pre-1945 steel.

  The demolition of ships, or shipbreaking, has now moved almost exclusively to third-world countries and entails serious health and environmental concerns. For more information, see End of the Line, a photo essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh by Brendan Cor at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ship_breaking, and Greenpeace’s Platform on Shipbreaking, www.shipbreakingplatform.com.

  The history of the United States government involvement in remote viewing is much as described by McClintock in Chapter 4. For more information, we suggest Jon Ronson’s Men Who Stare at Goats (2005), and Joseph McMoneagle’s Mind Trek (1997).

  The history of Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly part of the German province of East Prussia, is essentially as described here. Because Western access to Kaliningrad was, until recently, prohibited, little has been written about the modern oblast. By far the best easily available study of Kaliningrad today is “Between East and West: a study of the Kaliningrad Region as a Russian exclave in the EU,” a masters thesis by Fred Balvert at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2007.

  On the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Germans after World War II, little has been written in English. Probably the best look is still Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe, volumes I–III, translated into English and published by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims, Bonn, in the 1950s. Be warned, it makes haunting reading.