The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2)

by Sean Chercover

  “What did you tell Stotter?” asked Daniel.

  “The truth, after a fashion. That I’ve never heard of Dr. Astor but doctors around the world red-flag blood work to us all the time. And that I replied to Astor’s e-mail, asking if he had a live sample of the bug, but he hasn’t yet replied to my reply.” Her eyes locked onto Daniel’s. “Please tell me we do have a live culture.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Then we’d better get one, because we’ve definitely got a new strain of the plague on our hands and, if you’ll forgive the medical jargon, it’s a scary little bugger.”

  “But Astor told me it’s susceptible to antibiotics.”

  Descia made no effort to hide her frustration at Daniel’s ignorance. “Okay then, allow me to back up a bit. Each strain of Y. pestis is a different iteration, or version, of the plague bacterium. Each strain a separate population of little bugs, but all with the same goal. Their goal is simply to consume as much as possible and reproduce as fast as possible. That’s it—mindless consumption and reproduction. Unchecked, they just keep at it until they become top predator and take over the world. Then after taking out the human population, they’d work their way through the rest of the mammals and so on down the food chain until there was nothing left to eat, at which time the little buggers would starve en masse, having consumed all the earth’s resources available to them.” Her smile was grim. “Remind you of any other predator species we know and allegedly love?”

  “Sadly, it does,” said Daniel.

  “The human race is quite literally fighting for its existence against Y. pestis and Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus anthracis and dozens of other deadly pathogens. That’s just bacteria, I haven’t even mentioned the viruses. And you know what? We’re going to lose. That’s not hyperbole. In the end, we are going to lose. The microscopic little bastards shall inherit the earth.”

  “We survived the Black Death in the Middle Ages,” said Daniel.

  “We didn’t travel the world as far or as quickly as we do now, didn’t have the population density we do now. Look, there’s no debate among microbiologists—a pandemic is coming. Sooner or later one of these bugs is going to be stronger and faster than we are, and the way we continue to misuse antibiotics, it’ll be sooner. Whenever it happens, my more optimistic colleagues estimate a global depopulation of between 20 and 30 percent. That’s between 1.5 and 2.2 billion dead at today’s population level. But the optimists are wrong, as are the pessimists who predict the total extinction scenario I painted for you earlier. We won’t all die, probably. The realists—and it will not surprise you to learn that I count myself in this category—estimate a die-off of 50 to 65 percent, globally. Between 3.6 and 4.7 billion dead. Try to imagine what that will do to the world. The whole house of cards we call civilization will come crashing down, and life for those who survive will be abject misery for quite some time.”

  “Not the best news I’ve heard today,” said Daniel.

  “I imagine not,” said Descia. “And truthfully, when microbiologists talk amongst ourselves, off the record after a few glasses of wine, the optimists admit their optimism is more wishful thinking than science.”

  “What do the pessimists do?”

  “The pessimists just keep drinking until they pass out.”

  “And did you tell all this to Stotter?”

  “Stotter already knows all this. I told him what I’m telling you—I need live bacteria to study. Look, there are three major categories of Y. pestis. Bubonic plague is by far the most common. Between one and two thousand cases a year are reported to the World Health Organization, and that’s probably about a third of the total. Without intervention, it kills about 60 percent of those infected, but antibiotics knock it out. On the other end of the scale is septicemic plague, which is always fatal and kills within a day, so unless you’re already hopped up on massive doses of antibiotics when you contract it, you’re a goner. Thankfully, septicemic plague is very rare.”

  “Thankfully,” agreed Daniel.

  “Without a live culture to study, I can’t be definitive, but I strongly suspect our new strain falls between these two extremes, in the third category known as pneumonic plague. As the name implies, it is not just insect-borne, but can pass directly from human to human. It takes up residence in the lungs, and as the sick cough up blood, it gets aerosolized and breathed into the lungs of those nearby, so it can spread very quickly indeed. In the case of a pandemic, quickly enough to infect more people than we have antibiotics to treat. In fact, it could exhaust the world’s supply of antibiotics in a matter of months. And without antibiotic intervention, pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of about 95 percent.” She rapped on the arm of her chair with a knuckle. “Are you hearing me, Daniel?”

  “Every word.”

  “But they didn’t send you here to help with my silly little war to save the human race, they sent you to find out why the Council for Puppies and Rainbows is interested in this pathogen. They sent you because they suspect it may be a trigger that turns a few people into Tim Trinitys. Lord knows that’s more important than saving humanity. Right? Please, correct me if I’m mistaken.”

  Stay charming . . .

  “Honestly, Descia, I think the two goals are connected,” Daniel caught her gaze, held it. “I think you’re an incredible woman and I’m grateful for your service to humanity, just as I’m sure you’re grateful for the hundred-million-dollar trust we set up to help fund your work. Right?”

  Descia acknowledged it with a nod. “Very grateful indeed,” she said. “But it should’ve been a billion. You people really need to pull your heads out of the sand.”

  “Your objections have not fallen on deaf ears, believe me,” said Daniel. “If I come across a live sample of this little monster, I promise I will get it to you.”

  “It would be much appreciated.” Descia Milinkovic glanced at her watch, pushed back her chair, and stood up. “Here’s the second part of my message to Carter Ames: I have no way of knowing if this new plague bacteria could trigger AIT, and frankly, I don’t care. I think the Foundation has lost its way, chasing after soothsayers and hocus-pocus, while the government boys are busy warring against members of our own species. Meanwhile, we’re losing the real war, and we need to fight a hell of a lot harder.” She arched an eyebrow at Daniel. “Do pass that message along to Carter, won’t you, dear?”

  13: MIND CONTROL

  Hey stranger.” Julia Rothman spread her arms for a big hug, and gave Daniel’s bicep a playful squeeze through his suit. “Someone’s been workin’ out.”

  “You know I do my best thinking while beatin’ the crap out of the heavy bag,” said Daniel. “You look great.” He gestured toward the red-velvet booth.

  Julia laughed as she sat. “No, I don’t, but thanks for saying so. I look like a weary traveler and I smell like an airport. Got your e-mail after landing in Glasgow just after noon, turned right ’round and flew back.”

  “I thought you were in London. You didn’t have to come back.”

  Julia winked at him. She did look great. “I had my own selfish reasons. Need to pick your brain.”

  The waitress delivered two Sazeracs to the table. He’d ordered them when Julia had texted to announce her imminent arrival at Claridge’s. Daniel and Julia had a long history with the cocktail and he’d been unsure about the choice, didn’t want her to read too much into it. This whole transitioning into friendship with an ex-girlfriend thing was new to him, after all.

  It was Julia who’d broken the Tim Trinity story, writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and contributing to CNN’s coverage. It made her a star, turned her from respected investigative reporter into celebrity journalist. She was pretty, but not like the plastic pretty people who increasingly play the role of journalists on our television and computer screens. She was real. And people loved that sexy New Orleans acc
ent. As television news executives would (and did) say: The camera loved her.

  Naturally, television came a-courtin’. But Julia wasn’t in it for the celebrity, her heart was in digging up and reporting stories that mattered. Instead of jumping to television, she engaged a New York literary agent and landed a seven-figure book deal. Her publisher promptly promised that hers would be the definitive investigation of the Trinity Phenomenon.

  Daniel and Julia stayed in touch mostly by e-mail, mostly chatting about Julia’s research adventures, always promising to meet for lunch next time they found themselves in the same city at the same time. But she’d been jetting around the globe on a mission to solve the Trinity Phenomenon, and Daniel had been ensconced at the Foundation, and lunch hadn’t happened.

  Julia clinked her glass against his, and they sipped their drinks. “Nice,” she said. “Tastes like home.” He was pleased she’d taken it as intended. She put her drink down, patted Daniel’s hand. “Now before we get to me, I want to hear all about your new job.”

  He’d already decided not to lie to her. She knew him too well, she’d see right through it. He suspected that telling the truth would make him sound like a bit of a dick, but it was the right thing to do.

  “I really can’t discuss my job without violating the confidentiality clause in my employment contract,” he said. Thinking: Yep, you sound like a dick.

  Julia let out a reflexive laugh. “Wait, what?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You didn’t join up with that mercenary friend of yours, did you?”

  Daniel sipped his drink, said nothing.

  “You’re serious . . . you’re really not going to tell me.”

  “I’m really not going to tell you.” He made an apologetic face. “That’s just the way it has to be right now.” Right now implying maybe later.

  Julia shook her head. “Okay, Danny. Fine. Weird, but fine. You tell me when you’re ready, I guess.”

  “Thanks.” Glad to clear that hurdle, however awkwardly. “You can still pick my brain about your job, so how goes the search for”—he was careful not to say AIT—“the Trinity Phenomenon? What’ve you found?”

  Julia stopped just shy of rolling her eyes. “What I’ve found is a world full of crazy people. Whatever the hell happened to Tim, every crackpot on the planet feels legitimized by it. I tell you, I’m living on Cloud Cuckooland these days.” She pulled a notebook from her messenger bag. “I mean, it’s God, it’s Satan, it’s the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, the Masons . . . and here’s my favorite: It’s telepathic communication from aliens in preparation for earth colonization.”

  “Ooh, I like that one,” said Daniel.

  “I know, right? I’m telling you, when it comes to the Trinity Phenomenon, no matter how crazy the conspiracy, there’s a lunatic fringe out there promoting it.”

  Daniel shrugged. “Understandable though. Everybody’s concept of reality took a hit because of Tim. Until we know what the phenomenon was, we can’t know what it means—and people hate existential uncertainty. They’re gonna freak out a bit.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Julia, “unless whatever happened to Tim happens again, we’ll never know what the phenomenon was. Tim’s death leaves nothing for science to study, and that void leaves room for the con artists and crazies to set up shop. People are freaking out a lot more than a bit.”

  She was right. The world had changed since Tim Trinity. Daniel found it unnerving that so many people now incorporated his dead uncle into their religious convictions, some in such a significant role as to alter their metaphysics. To some he was a saint or a prophet, to others he was the very messiah returned.

  Differences of degree notwithstanding, well over three hundred million humans believed that Tim Trinity was some kind of supernaturally powered manifestation of the divine, and that number was continuing to grow. There were Tim Trinity cults within virtually every sect of Christianity, and most major non-Christian religions as well. There was even a breakaway splinter group of Jews for Jesus called Jews for Tim Trinity’s Jesus (Tim would’ve found it hilarious). And then there were the myriad New Agers, occultists, druids, hippies, Discordians, and potheads with no other stated affiliation. The media had dubbed all these people “Trinity Pilgrims,” after the multitudes who’d flocked to see Tim in Atlanta and followed him to New Orleans, and the term stuck.

  Americans in particular were drawn to Tim Trinity worship. It seemed many felt it entirely appropriate that Jesus would return as an American. After all, to them God was American. There were Tim Trinity churches in urban storefronts and country chapels from sea to shining sea. There was even a Tim Trinity edition of the Bible, complete with royal-blue cover and pages edged in silver, just like the Bible Trinity had brandished on television.

  The mainstream churches were hemorrhaging customers, church leaders stunned, caught flat-footed, unable to shift with the rapidly changing world. Some tried to incorporate Trinity as a saved sinner gifted by God with a message, but Trinity believers judged it an insufficient status for their new idol, and mainstream collection plates got lighter every month as flocks continued to disperse.

  The televangelists were smart—they simply wrote off the Trinity Pilgrims and got busy scaring the hell out of people, declaring Trinity a tool of the devil, either demon or antichrist, embracing an apocalyptic Christianity and preaching the arrival of the End Times and the coming rapture. Their business thrived.

  Julia opened her notebook. “The group I want to talk to you about, they’re convinced the government is beaming voices into their heads using microwaves, what they call voice-to-skull technology, or V2K. But these people have been around for years—they’re not a response to Trinity. And thanks to the Internet, they’ve found one another. Turns out there are millions of them. Over 380,000 in the US, 100,000 in the UK, significant numbers all across Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, Australia . . . pretty much every developed country. They’ve got online forums where they share their experiences, organize petitions and protests. There’s a chapter in DC that meets on the mall, handing out pamphlets and collecting signatures—they want Congress to pass a law making it illegal for anyone, including the government, to beam voices into people’s heads. They’re actually registered as a non-profit political action committee. Other chapters are lobbying for similar laws in over a dozen countries.”

  “Sounds like a lot of paranoid schizophrenics uniting under a shared delusion, trying to wrestle the mental chaos into some kind of order.” Daniel’s mind went back to the schizophrenia page of the AIT Physiological Trigger report. He remembered the chill he felt when he read Ayo’s handwritten note in the margin.

  Was schizophrenia the trigger for AIT, or did the voices brought on by AIT simply drive these people mad?

  Maybe some of the people who most cross the street to avoid—the gap-toothed old woman wearing garbage bags and a football helmet, pushing a squeaky-wheeled shopping cart full of jetsam, yelling at passersby . . . the yellow-bearded man with wild, greasy hair, mumbling gibberish at a brick wall—maybe some of these people aren’t schizophrenic at all but simply unable to cope with the flood of real information invading their minds from the outside.

  Julia was saying, “ . . . and I’ve spent a lot of time with these people. It’s obvious that a great number of them are mentally ill, but there’s a minority—I don’t know, maybe 5 percent?—anyway, a minority who don’t present any symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia or any other mental illness.”

  “They think the government is beaming voices into their heads, Julia. That’s a symptom right there.”

  “But for this minority, it’s the only one. They’re not generally paranoid. They don’t distrust their coworkers or spouses, they don’t think their neighbors are spying on them, they don’t think bad guys are hiding in restaurant kitchens to poison their food. They do their jobs well, and u
ntil they started insisting the government was beaming voices into their heads, they enjoyed perfectly normal relationships with the people in their lives. The ones I’ve met are incredibly rational, aside from that one thing. They just don’t seem ill at all.”

  “So, what do they seem?”

  “They seem like people who are under great stress because someone is beaming voices into their heads.”

  Daniel couldn’t hold back a snicker. “Nice one. But—”

  “Wait, I buried the lede,” said Julia with a mischievous grin. “Here’s the kicker: Their American lobbying group, Sovereign Minds, filed a Freedom of Information request with the federal government. You’ll never guess what came back.” She plucked a file folder from her bag, put it on the table. “The Pentagon actually has a weapon that beams voices into people’s heads.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Incredible, right?” She pushed the folder across to Daniel. “Check it out.”

  Daniel flipped through the pages. It was a copy of a copy of a typed report, readable but somewhat blurry. And heavily redacted, over 80 percent blacked out by military censors.

  Julia said, “It was developed for the Pentagon by Air Force Intelligence as an offshoot of their advanced microwave R & D. In those days, the military was into all kinds of exotic shit. Psychic warfare, remote viewing, all that Men Who Stare at Goats stuff—those programs were real. Of course most of it never worked. At the time, the Soviets and the Americans were constantly feeding each other disinformation about exotic weapons programs. We heard the Russians had developed what they called Directed Auditory Hallucination Technology, so we had to give it a try as well. Turns out the Russian program was pure fiction, a disinformation op designed to make us waste military manpower and money, but the US Air Force actually figured out how to do it.”