Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2)

by Saul Tanpepper

  His "office" was actually the extra room of his apartment in the bunker, one of three hundred and eighty units. Most were already furnished according to the owners' specifications. Per his own, the apartment came complete with a well stocked bar and pantry.

  The food stores, both his own and the general bunker stores downstairs, were all meant to be rotated on a monthly basis to ensure the longest expiration dates possible. When the day should come that they found themselves locked inside, the members wanted to be sure they had all they needed to survive in relative comfort, if not outright luxury, for their self-imposed isolation.

  It was a small reward for the hard responsibility they assumed resurrecting mankind.

  As he sat there contemplating a drink, he realized how utterly quiet the apartment was. He couldn't even hear the thrum of the geothermal turbines powering the facility eighty feet overhead.

  With a sigh, he began to sift through the papers by his side. He decided against the alcohol. Again. Ever since the day he'd flown back from Manhattan, the day he'd overindulged, he'd been unable to take another drink without gagging. He could still feel the burn of the whiskey in the back of his throat, could still taste the vomit and smell it on his skin. The memory alone was enough to churn his stomach.

  After thoroughly reviewing the next sheet, he turned it over and placed it onto the discard pile, then raised the next. It was a hospital discharge note for Angel's brother, Jacques, for injuries suffered during a fall at the family estate four years before. Listed on the report were the procedures performed, including a radical splenectomy and repair of several ruptures to his intestines. Also listed were a pharmacy's-worth of medications. Most were daily antibiotics meant to compensate for the missing organ.

  The next several sheets were a record of follow up visits, more surgeries, and more prescriptions. Cheong knew that the prognosis for the man would have been poor. The spleen assisted in the body's ability to fight off infection, so he would have been required to take daily antibiotics till the day he died. Indeed, it appeared that the physicians took an extremely aggressive approach to ensure that he didn't suffer any opportunistic infections.

  There were also pain pills, including some known to be highly addictive and others which might induce hallucinations. It seemed that Jacques had become increasingly dependent upon those drugs to help control the manic outbursts which plagued him after the accident.

  The treatment records continued on in this vein for about a year after the fall. Then they came to an abrupt end.

  Supposedly when he died.

  He searched the papers and quickly came upon a death certificate filled out in his name. The dates lined up.

  And yet, strangely enough, the bills for the prescriptions continued— not the antibiotics and other immune boosters, but the antipsychotic meds, lithium included. It was the same medication his men had found in Angel's Manhattan apartment.

  He stared at the record for several minutes, then set it down. After a moment, he dug out the death certificate again. A deep frown furrowed his brow. The coroner's block had not been signed.

  After a few minutes, he stood up and went over to his desk.

  "Emily?" he said, once the phone call connected. "I'm sorry to have to interrupt your evening."

  The phone was, by necessity, a desk model, since the cell signal didn't reach this far beneath the ground, and the cellular signal repeaters, though installed on each level, had not been turned on.

  "It's all right, sir," Emily replied. "Is everything okay?"

  Forgetting that the phone was wired, Cheong began to pace and he pulled the base off of the table. It clattered to the floor behind him.

  "No, everything's fine," he stammered awkwardly. "I just . . . ."

  What? What the hell are you thinking?

  "Would you mind going topside and calling the pilot? Tell him to prepare the jet for tomorrow morning."

  He bent over and plucked the telephone base off the floor and set it gently back onto the desk.

  "Have him file a flight plan for Saint-Exupéry Airport. Yes, France. I plan on doing another search of the property. No, Emily, I think I'll only need three men this time."

  One to watch the front drive, he thought. One to watch the back.

  He knew the house would be empty, as the l'Enfantine woman was still in Paris doing her charity work.

  He hung up, then went over to the liquor cabinet and studied the inventory once more. A half million dollars worth of the rarest alcohol on the planet stared him in the face; it was only a fraction of what the main storeroom held.

  Ever so carefully, he extracted a bottle of Stolichnaya Elit. The vodka was made from pure water out of underground reservoirs in the Himalayas. At three grand, it was one of the cheaper bottles in his collection. His mouth watered at the prospect of a drink, but his stomach clenched. He could only hope to regain his appetite for the stuff soon enough.

  In any case, the bottle wasn't for him. It was for the third man, the one who would be doing the digging. A little extra payment for such an unpleasant task.

  Chapter Eight

  Angel burst out laughing. She hadn't meant to, it just came out. The accusation that David was a terrorist was simply too preposterous to take seriously. Plus, there was relief in finally knowing what this was about, since it had absolutely nothing to do with China. And on the heels of that, knowing Jacques hadn't betrayed her.

  "Why are you laughing?"

  "It is just that . . . ." She shook her head, still giggling. "Well, it is ridiculous, of course. David had his issues with commitment and sometimes made poor decisions when it came to money, but he was not — he could never be — a terrorist. I just thought that with all of this secrecy and drama," she said, waving her hand about her, "that you were going to tell me the company was back to doing experiments. I actually believed you were going to make me call Cheong again."

  Norstrom's eyelid twitched. "Cheong? No. In fact, I think it's best if you put all of that — 6X, China and the nanites, him — behind you."

  "Funny, since the last time we spoke you wanted me to spy on him."

  "Not spy, just . . . . Yeah, okay, that's a fair characterization. But that was six months ago. I've moved on, and so should you."

  "That is too bad," she teased. "I was just thinking I might call him."

  He gave her a strange look, not sure if she was joking or not. "We know all about him and his group now, so that won't be necessary. Believe me, they're all strictly amateur hour— rich amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless. Just a bunch of fatalistic billionaires building concrete silos and fantasizing about eventualities that will never ever come to pass. You don't need that kind of negative shit in your life. Not after China. Believe me, you want to put all that behind you."

  Now it was her turn to stare. He seemed overly bitter about the whole ordeal. But then again, he'd been shot, multiple times, by one of the company's employees, and left for dead.

  "Until you showed up the other day," she said, "I had put it all behind me."

  He chuffed.

  "What?"

  She could tell he already regretted bringing the subject up by the way he wouldn't meet her eyes.

  "Obviously, you do not think so."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Tell me!"

  "No!"

  "You pig!"

  "Okay, fine! How about this? You search the internet daily, sometimes multiple times a day, looking for anything that suggests they're still out there, still doing experiments, still using innocent people as test subjects. Your search terms — nanites, nanobots, biomolecular machines, tissue regeneration, miracle cures — they give you away. I know you think you've moved on, but your actions say otherwise. It's not healthy."

  She could feel the heat rising on her face. How dare he? How in the actual hell dare he?

  Okay, she knew he was monitoring her internet activity. He had told her five months ago that he would do as much. But still? It stung to know he was st
ill recording her every keystroke, making sure she behaved. She hadn't asked for this. She didn't deserve it! She had promised to keep her mouth shut. She had more than earned his trust. And he repaid it by continuing to invade her privacy?

  "You deny it?" he asked.

  She sputtered for a moment. Of course she conducted those searches. But it wasn't because she was obsessed with China or wished for the past. She just wanted to be sure the company and their evil technology never rose from the ashes of the factory at Wenbai.

  "You snooped on me! You snooped on Cheong!"

  "For months after," he said, "we had people working to track down those responsible for creating the nanite technology. Thousands upon thousands of man-hours looking for employees of the company. It was still an ongoing investigation. We ran into a lot of brick walls."

  "I thought you were recovering in the hospital?" It was all she could manage to say, she was so livid.

  "I was, of course, like you were doing in Marseille."

  "And yet you somehow managed to keep on spying on me."

  "I'm not a spy," he protested. "Anyway, the investigation continued without me. When I was fit to return to full duty, I took on a new project." He let out a deep breath and shook his head. "I can tell you that the people behind the nanite work were properly spooked by what happened. They scattered, disappeared. They are gone, Angel. We don't have to worry about them anymore, so it's best if you just put that whole incident out of your life and move on."

  "Maybe," she whispered.

  She could see the impatience on his face, and she almost blurted out what she had come to learn these past few days. Instead, she held her tongue. She had no proof of her suspicions, that the company wasn't just active but were now operating right here in Paris, injecting refugees with their magic black medicine.

  But now that she finally admitted it, even if only to herself, she realized how ludicrous it would sound.

  He would ask her for proof, of course. And what did she have to give him? Just a few hints— Mahdi's description of the medicine he and his brother had received, thick and dark, just like the nanite solution, and the odd route of delivery directly into the bloodstream. Plus some woman from an illegal pharmacy describing some mysterious man in the same way that Jamie had described her so-called savior, a generic man dressed in black.

  Norstrom operated in the physical world, where things made sense and connections were real, not imagined. He would laugh at her just as she had laughed at him for accusing David.

  Which sobered her up. If he required proof, then so should she. "Tell me why you think my husband is a terrorist."

  He leaned forward, peering intently into her eyes. He seemed immensely relieved at the shift in subject. "What do you know about the Panama Papers?"

  She frowned at him, startled by yet another abrupt redirection. "The leaked financial and business documents out of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca?"

  He nodded.

  "I know what everyone else knows from reading what's been reported by Süddeutsche Zeitgung. Millions of digital files were leaked to the IAFJ, many of them encrypted. They appear to show that some clients of the firm may have engaged in tax evasion. The leak includes documents from several decades. I was asked to be part of the investigative team analyzing the papers as they became available. Many had to be translated, others decoded. But I turned them down."

  "Too bad. Your participation would have added an extra level of credence to the process."

  "I was very busy. The request was one of several dozen made to me after my Israel cloning article was published. Besides, the Panama Papers do not need credence. Nobody is denying the authenticity of the documents. In fact, just the threat of their release has prompted lawsuits for privacy and admissions of guilt. Last month, the Pakistani prime minister was accused of illegal financial dealings. This month it was a Spanish government official."

  "Those are just the tip of the iceberg," he said, shaking his head. "Before this is finished, it will touch individuals in every endeavor— sports organizations, government officials, celebrities, CEOs. We're talking about a global conspiracy to institutionalize fraud by making the problem so endemic that it will be easier for tainted officials to legislate it into legitimacy rather than face their crimes. Money laundering, tax evasion, off-shoring," he said, ticking the charges off on his fingers. His face grew redder with each one. "Activities which are, if not downright illegal, certainly unethical and against the founding principles of a free market. Harmful to all but a few privileged individuals."

  "Yes, but how does this relate to David? He is no billionaire, not by a long shot. And how did you become involved in all this?"

  He leaned away from her, the color slowly draining away from his face and leaving it splotchy. "I was part of an ad hoc group assembled by the government to investigate American citizens identified within those documents soon after their release."

  "You told me you weren't a spy."

  "Technically I'm not. I'm actually . . . ." He chuckled and shook his head. "Let's just say I work for the insurance industry."

  She raised an eyebrow at him in surprise. "You are a— Qu'est que c'est . . . ? I do not know the word. Assureur? Actuaire assurance? Souscripteur?"

  "I deal with financial risk— its assessment, management, and mitigation. With China, I was following a trail of unusually large life insurance payouts made through the same account to groups of people all over the world. It's a common method of laundering money. Once we were able to identify the source of the claims, it was a matter of working my way through the layers of shell corporations until I was able to insert myself into the chain as a subcontractor. That's how I ended up involved in the coverup."

  "But you just said this has nothing to do with China."

  He frowned impatiently at her. "In my new role, I've been tracking similar flows of money, including into the hands of radicalized groups based in the Middle East. One such trail led me to an Israel-based NGO known as Charité des Étrangers— or, translated, the Kindness of Strangers." He chuffed, as if he found it distasteful to utter the words in such context. "CdÉ was founded six months ago with a stated mission to provide material assistance to displaced individuals throughout Europe— tents, pre-paid cell phones, clothes, diapers . . . . They've pulled in hundreds of millions in charitable donations and grants."

  She shrugged. "Non-governmental organizations often get donations from corporations as a means of reducing their tax liability. There is nothing unusual about that. It doesn't mean they are helping terrorists."

  "Of course not. But the more information we glean from those documents, the more it points to CdÉ as being a front for al Tadmir, as a money launderer and as an access point for their activities. We're coordinating with the NSA and Interpol, who both think the terrorists use the charity to infiltrate various religious and social organizations so that they can strike them when and where they are most vulnerable. It's still early days in our investigation. The attacks we're looking at are vicious, personal, intimate, and, until recently, seemingly disconnected. With limited casualties and localized impact, they have not warranted much attention. But the NSA now believes, based on recent chatter and the collapse of the other major players in the Middle East, that al Tadmir are growing bolder and are intending to hit larger targets, most likely by leveraging the chaos created by the movement of so many refugees across Eastern and Central Europe."

  "I still do not see the connection. Why David? If anything, I might be more connected to the charities than he is because of my recent work with the refugees these past couple of weeks. But neither one of us has any association with CdÉ."

  "That's not true."

  He let that sink in for a moment before continuing, once more shifting gears and throwing her off balance. "Tell me," he said, "who was your source for the Newsweek article?"

  She didn't answer. Her mind was too busy trying to figure out the links between these seemingly disparate things. If she co
uld see how it all fit together, then she'd be able to pick apart his theory. But he was moving too quickly, making too many jumps. She couldn't follow them.

  "I'll tell you," he said, not waiting for her to answer. "It was a scientist named Haim Sharansky."

  Her mouth fell open. "I'm bound by my journalistic oath not to reveal my confidential sources."

  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "I know. But let's assume I'm right— No, you don't have to answer, just hear me out. We know that, soon after your article was published, Sharansky disappeared."

  "Disappeared?" Angel echoed with surprise. She knew that Norstrom would immediately take her reaction as confirmation that he was on the right track, but she didn't care. The mere mention of his name meant he already knew.

  "He went into hiding," Norstrom said.

  Her relief was immediate. "There was a lot of pressure on me to reveal my source. The Israelis tried to compel the French government to get me to say who it was. These people came to my house in the middle of the day. They did not say who they were, but I suspect they were Mossad. Israel always officially denied the story. They argued that I was trying to destabilize the government, which is ridiculous. I had proof it was all true. I showed it to them. They left me alone after that."

  "Not because they were convinced. It was because they figured out who your source was."

  "Is he—"

  "Two months ago, Interpol's facial recognition system picked up a man on their terror watch list entering France. They knew him as Hajim al-Salah, although his passport gave a different name: Yael Josef Sharanski, with an i. Also known as Haim Yael Sharansky. He was ostensibly here on a humanitarian mission on behalf of Charité des Étrangers. "

  Angel's heart was starting to race. She felt dizzy.

  "He was detained for questioning. Thankfully, we got to him before Mossad, as he's now missing again. Turns out Hajim al-Salah is his given Muslim name. His uncle is a man named Adbullah Raed al-Salah, a general of al Tadmir in Iran. Based on an increase in chatter on known terrorist networks, intelligence agencies believe the family is planning a massive operation to attack Europe while utilizing the chaos of the refugee crisis as cover."