The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  “Okay,” Em murmured thoughtfully. He looked up to catch Victor’s gaze. “So, what then?”

  “What then, if you’re a Themis bad guy, is that you get one of your pharmaceutical companies to manufacture a very special batch of vaccine, which they then offer to world governments at a fraction of the cost any other producer could manage. This vaccine claims to protect children, who are supposed to be most seriously at risk from Death Flu. Except that what it actually does is kill them.”

  “Kill them?” Charlotte echoed. “Like . . . poisons them?”

  But Victor shook his head. “Hardly. If kids dropped dead after they had their shot, the vaccination program wouldn’t go very far. The Knights are nothing if not subtle. My guess would be bioengineering.”

  Em looked at him blankly. “What has bioengineering got to do with it?”

  “Do you know how a vaccine is made?” Victor asked him.

  “Some sort of antibiotic injection, isn’t it?”

  Victor shook his head again. “Not even close. To make a vaccine, you take the disease virus or bacterium or whatever—and you weaken it. Then you introduce it into your patient.”

  “You give people the disease?” Em asked, appalled. He’d been vaccinated when he was little—against measles, mumps, and German measles. He’d been vaccinated again—against cholera—when he was a lot older prior to a trip abroad. He was only in his teens now, and he’d already been exposed to all those diseases! Cholera was supposed to be deadly.

  “You give people a weakened version of the disease. Their immune system recognizes it for what it is and attacks it vigorously. And because the disease is weak to begin with, your immune system kills it off easily. But by then your immune system is stronger precisely because of the fight, and it has in place all the strategies it needs to defeat the same disease if it appears again. So when the normal version of the disease comes along, even though the disease hasn’t been weakened, your body beats it off before it gets a grip. You’ve developed an immunity because of the vaccine.”

  “What’s that got to do with bioengineering?”

  “Well, weakening the disease is sort of bioengineering,” Victor said. “But that’s not what I was getting at. Suppose instead of a weakened version of Death Flu, you make the vaccine from a bioengineered strain of some other completely different disease . . . and you don’t weaken it. Now, remember two things, Em. The first is that no vaccine is a hundred percent effective. You expect a few failures, so some patients who’ve had the vaccine will still get the original disease. The second is that your vaccination program is designed to stop the spread of Death Flu. If it does that, or seems to do that, it’s successful.”

  It was horrible, but some really nasty ideas were beginning to creep into Em’s head. Suddenly he thought he knew exactly where Victor was going with all this. But before he could comment or ask another question, Victor went on: “So you pump the world’s children full of something you claim to be a vaccine against Death Flu. A few of them still go down with the disease, but everybody expects that anyway. But not very many people actually get it, because it’s not a vigorous strain to begin with—you’ve only convinced people that it would be. And almost nobody dies from Death Flu, which allows you to announce that the vaccination program has been a complete success: it reduced fatalities, reduced infections, and prevented the spread of a deadly disease. Except that it was never deadly to begin with—the whole thing was just one big con game.”

  Em was getting confused. “But if Death Flu doesn’t kill anybody, or hardly anybody, how does it reduce the population?”

  “You haven’t been listening,” Victor told him. “Death Flu was never meant to reduce the population. Death Flu was just an excuse to introduce your vaccine. And your vaccine is bioengineered to work like a time bomb. It incubates very slowly in the body for months—your father says six months—long enough for people to have forgotten all about Death Flu and the vaccination program. Then suddenly, young people start dropping dead from a whole new disease. This one really is a pandemic; this one really is a killer. And worst of all, there’s no way you can vaccinate against it because the Knights have already introduced the disease to a whole generation of children, and it’s now erupting fully formed. No time to develop a vaccine, no time to find a useful treatment.”

  “Oh God,” Charlotte murmured.

  “Think of it. Can you imagine a more effective way of population reduction? You don’t just kill off millions and millions of people, although that’s a nice start; you specifically target the millions and millions of people who are most likely to have families in the not-too-distant future. You not only wipe them out, you wipe out their descendants as well. Take the long view, and you suddenly have a huge gap in population growth.” He paused. “Plus the possibility of introducing another bioengineered disease targeting a different generation, which is why I think your father may have known about the Knights. His message talks about a so-called solution to the population problem.”

  Em said soberly, “We have to do something about this.”

  “We most certainly do,” Victor agreed.

  Em held his gaze. “What?”

  Victor tapped Charlotte’s notebook. “I think your father’s told us that, don’t you? ‘Documented proof from Bederbeck Foundation.’ God knows how he got hold of that.” He looked at Em admiringly. “Your old man must have been some sort of Indiana Jones.”

  It was difficult to think of his father as any sort of Indiana Jones, but that wasn’t what concerned Em at the moment. “What’s the Bederbeck Foundation?” he asked. “Do you know?”

  “Yes,” Victor told him soberly. “It’s one of the largest and most secretive bioresearch companies in the world. Section 7 has been keeping tabs on it for years. The actual ownership is hidden behind a maze of shell companies, but we’ve been able to establish that it’s funded exclusively by the Knights. It all ties together. That’s what makes me think your father’s message is genuine.”

  It had never occurred to Em to think his father’s message was anything other than genuine; but for all Victor’s explanation, there was about half of it that he still didn’t understand. “Who’s the blind man?” he asked.

  Victor shook his head. “No idea. I’ve no idea what a lot of his message means.” He caught Em’s expression and added, “Yet.”

  Chapter 34

  They were still wrestling with the message over a snack when a sudden burst of pop music stopped Victor in his tracks. “What the hell’s that?” he gasped, looking around in panic.

  “Sorry,” Charlotte murmured, fishing out her cell phone. She thumbed a button and the music stopped. “It’s Dad,” she whispered, looking at Victor.

  Victor nodded, “Take it. He’s probably wondering where you are. Say you’re with friends. Keep it vague.”

  Charlotte spoke softly into her phone for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and looked up. “He wants me to come home.”

  Victor, who seemed to have changed his mind about the value of having Charlotte with them, said quickly, “Get back now—he’ll just be worried about you staying out overnight. We can get together again here tomorrow morning and do some more work on the message.”

  “Okay,” Charlotte said.

  “Tell him nothing,” Victor snapped fiercely.

  “No, of course not,” Charlotte said, a little impatiently. She uncovered the mouthpiece. “On my way, Daddy.”

  The following morning, before Charlotte reappeared, Victor’s secure phone rang. He stared at it for a moment, frowning. “It’s the office,” he said.

  By “office” he obviously meant Section 7. Em waited a moment, then asked, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “This is too soon,” Victor muttered. “We’re not supposed to communicate until they’ve investigated how our last safe house was compromised. Like I told you, that usually takes weeks. Something’s happened.” He thumbed the ANSWER icon on the touchpad. “Yes?”

  Em
had a bad feeling too, although he didn’t know why. He watched Victor’s face carefully, but it showed nothing.

  “Yes,” Victor said again, in agreement this time rather than as a question. “And the apartment? . . . Mmmm . . . Okay . . . Okay . . . Okay, understood.” He thumbed the DISCONNECT, slammed the phone down on the table, and spat, “Damn!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “They’ve taken Charlotte.”

  For a moment the words made no sense to Em. Taken? Taken where? Who’d taken Charlotte somewhere? Then the implications crashed in on him, and panic swept across him like a wave. “The Knights? They’ve kidnapped her?”

  “That’d be my guess. Section thinks so too.”

  “They can’t have,” Em protested. “She was with us yesterday.” Victor gave him a hard look and said nothing. “Okay, okay, that was stupid. Tell me what Section said.”

  “Charlotte’s father reported her missing to his local police station early this morning when she didn’t come home last night.”

  “But she left to go home. After her father called.”

  “Try to wake up, Em. Section 7’s linked into the central police computer system. Everything’s monitored. She didn’t get home.”

  “What are the police doing about it?”

  “Nothing. They have calls from anxious parents all the time. Teenager staying out all night isn’t exactly headline news. Drunken party . . . new boyfriend . . . you name it. They filed a report, told her father to contact them again if she was still missing in forty-eight hours, and probably forgot about it. I should have followed my instinct, not let her get involved in this mess.”

  “You think the Knights have taken her?”

  “Who else?”

  “I didn’t think they’d be especially interested in her,” Em said defensively. “I’m still not sure why they would take her . . . if that’s really what’s happened.”

  “Look at it from their point of view. She was with you in France. Her father was a friend of your father. She brought you the iPod. She followed us to the safe house. She was part of our discussion about the code and the camera. If you were a Knight of Themis and you even knew half of that, wouldn’t you think she might be worth talking to?”

  “Okay, but where did they snatch her? I mean, they can’t have known she was here with us.”

  “I don’t know,” Victor said. “But logically it had to be somewhere between here and her home. My guess would be the taxi stand I sent her to last night. Maybe there were no cabs. Maybe she had to wait. Maybe the Knights were looking for her and just got lucky. How should I know? But that’s where we start to investigate.”

  Em watched Victor in action with unspoken admiration. Victor had changed into a neatly tailored suit and adopted an easy, confident style that positively commanded respect. The drivers at the taxi stand were practically tripping over themselves to help him, but unfortunately none seemed to have seen anything of a young girl the night before. Until, that was, the fifth one Victor talked to.

  “Nice-looking kid in a red sweater?”

  “That’s her,” Victor said, suddenly alert.

  “Saw her all right, Governor. She was walking from the direction of Railway Street. I was next in line for a fare, so I was watching out. You get a feel for people who are looking for a taxi, even before they come up to you.”

  “Where did you take her?” Victor asked.

  “Didn’t take her anywhere, Gov; that’s the point. She was picked up before she got to the stand.”

  “By another cab?”

  The driver shook his head. “Naw, the boys here are decent skins, wouldn’t try to steal your fare. What happened was, this car pulled up—black Merc—and the driver calls out something to her and she bends down to talk to him and I thought, ‘There goes my fare; somebody she knows is giving her a lift.’ Next thing, this big bloke was helping her into the back—”

  “The driver?” Victor interrupted him.

  “No, somebody else in the car. Only it was more like he was, you know, sort of pushing her, like maybe she didn’t want to go. But she didn’t shout or fight or anything, and he got in beside her, so I figured she must have known him. Anyway, the Merc took off and that was that.”

  “None of your colleagues mentioned anything like this,” Victor said, nodding back toward the other cabs.

  “Wasn’t on last night’s shift, was they? Plenty of people seen it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t suppose you got the car’s license plate number?” Victor asked him.

  The cabbie shook his head. “Naaw, why should I? Didn’t do anything wrong, did he? Not like they carried her off kicking and screaming.” He hesitated, with a sudden look of concern. “Isn’t something wrong, is there?”

  Listening to him, Em had a picture in his mind of the black Mercedes that had turned up at his father’s funeral. And in his mind too was the absolute certainty that the big man who had bundled Charlotte into the back was the same man who’d carried the gun.

  “Nothing wrong,” Victor reassured him. He extracted a ten-pound note from his wallet and slid it in the man’s direction. “Thank you. You’ve been a great help.”

  “Thank you, Gov!”The cabbie smiled as he pocketed the note.

  “That had to be the Knights of Themis,” Em told Victor as they walked away.

  “No doubt,” Victor grunted sourly. He had an absent look on his face.

  “So what do we do?”

  Victor shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe we just wait.”

  Em stopped dead to stare at him. “Wait?”

  “What else can we do?” Victor said patiently, “We know she’s been taken off in a black car, but we don’t know where. We don’t know the plate number. We can question cabbies from the night shift and any other witnesses we might find, but frankly, that’s the longest of long shots. Would you note down a number in those circumstances? Waiting for developments may be our only option.”

  “But they might kill her!” Em protested wildly.

  “They won’t kill her,” Victor said. “Worst they’ll do is interrogate her.”

  “About us?”

  “Yes, indeed. Not that they’ll get anything very useful. We still haven’t figured out all of your father’s message.”

  “But they might . . .” Em hesitated. “Suppose they . . .” He trailed off, unwilling to say it.

  “Torture her?” Victor finished for him. “That what you’re worrying about? We’re not dealing with a bunch of half-witted muggers here, Em. The Knights have access to the most sophisticated interrogation techniques on the planet, and torture certainly isn’t one of them. The intelligence you get from torture is rubbish. People tell you what they think you want to hear just to stop the pain. They might drug her, but that’s the most harm she’ll come to.”

  It made sense, but Em still couldn’t believe where it led to. “She’ll be frightened. We can’t let her go through all that and just hope they’ll turn her loose afterward.”

  “I’m not sure it isn’t the best course,” Victor said.

  But he changed his mind later that afternoon when Section 7 called with the news that Charlotte had been taken out of the country.

  Chapter 35

  “One of our agents spotted her at Heathrow,” Victor told him. “Lunchtime flight; but he was slow reporting in, and they’ve only just got around to telling me.”

  “How did he know it was her?” Em asked, a little desperately.

  “He didn’t. I suppose we don’t for sure. But the girl matched Charlotte’s description, and she was with two Themis personnel. Not actual members, but known employees of the organization. I’m fairly sure one of them is your famous man with the gun. His name is Stefan Kardos. Trained killer, good at his job, and likes it. I had my suspicions that it might be him following you, but I couldn’t be sure until now. I don’t think there’s any doubt it was Charlotte.”

  “My God,” Em gasped. “That’s the man who vis
ited my father just before he died! Where did they take her?”

  “They boarded British Airways Flight 177. Eight-hour transatlantic, landing JFK in New York.”

  “They’ve taken her to America?”

  “Looks like it,” Victor said.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Go after her, of course,” Victor told him. “This is the first time the Knights have come out in the open with a direct move against you. I know they locked up your mother, but that was covert—and completely legal. This is kidnapping. It means they’re beginning to panic, and that means we’re getting close to something. If we can get Charlotte back, we can find clues to what’s worrying them in the questions they’ve asked her. I don’t suppose you have your passport?”

  “Yes, I do,” Em said, surprising himself. For some reason he felt the need to explain. “Mum insisted I take it to France even though you’re not supposed to need it for EU borders; and then when we came back, I never took it out of my wallet.” He hesitated. “It needs to be renewed soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Can’t remember exactly.” Victor looked worried for some reason.

  “Less than ninety days?”

  “Oh yes,” Em said. “More like a month or six weeks.” He began to scrabble for his passport in order to check the exact expiration date.

  “Could be a problem.” Victor frowned.

  “Why?”

  “The Americans waive entry visa requirements for British citizens, but only if your passport is valid for ninety days from the time you arrive in the United States. Which means you have to renew your passport or get a visa, and we don’t have time for either,” Victor murmured. “I’ll have to organize fakes.”

  “Fake what?”

  “Papers,” Victor told him calmly.

  Em stared at him appalled. “You want me to travel to America on fake papers?” Since 9/11, the Americans had gone security mad at airports. They probably shot you if they found you with fake papers.

  “Don’t worry,” Victor said. “Our forger is really excellent. Have you been to America before?”