Pat said, “Figured you’d want something to drink that wasn’t water.”
“Got that right.” He toasted Pat with the bourbon. “Skal.” His throat was still raw but the bourbon’s burn was welcome.
Pat toasted back with his joint, took a drag. “So how you doin’? Really?”
Daniel thought about it, sipped some more bourbon. “I’m okay. Or I will be, anyway. You ever been waterboarded?”
“Yup,” said Pat. “Sucks, don’t it?”
“That it does.” Daniel topped up his drink. “What’d I miss?”
“You mean other than almost every Foundation resource and asset being diverted to find your sorry ass?”
“Yeah, other than that.”
“Lots. Gerald ran down the charter flights out of Monrovia for the time frame you gave him—and got a hit. Twenty-three passengers, destination London, left here a little less than a day before we landed. Twenty of them mercs working for the PMC connected to Dillman.” Pat checked his watch. “About ten hours ago, they flew from London to Atlanta. There they split up, but thirteen of them are booked on the same commercial flight from Atlanta to Columbia, South Carolina.”
“Thirteen of them. Jesus, they’re getting ready to release this shit in the United States.”
“Looks that way. And there’s more: Gerald figured they didn’t pick up three tourists, so he drilled down on the other names on that charter flight. You ever hear of Chickamauga?”
“Civil War battle in Georgia, wasn’t it?”
Pat nodded. “One of the bloodiest, about thirty-five thousand dead. Huge Confederate victory. But the Confederates messed up. After the Blue retreated to Chattanooga, the Gray should’ve pressed their advantage. The winning Confederate generals in Chickamauga were Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet, but only Bragg was sent to Chattanooga. Longstreet was ordered to take his men and attack Knoxville, which gave Lincoln time to send Ulysses Grant down with reinforcements.”
“Okay . . .”
“Well, Gerald’s geeks have been digging through everything they can find on Michael Dillman, before he went dark. Turns out Dillman wrote his masters thesis on the Battle of Chickamauga. The focus of his paper was the post-victory tactical error of splitting up Bragg and Longstreet.”
Daniel sipped his bourbon. “And the too-clever name on that passenger manifest was . . . ?”
“Bingo. James Bragg. Once Gerald knew Dillman’s nom de guerre, he found a credit check for James Bragg, run six weeks ago by a bank in downtown Columbia. Seems Dillman rented an apartment there.” Pat grinned, a predator knowing he had the drop on his prey. “Dude, we know where Dillman’s hanging his hat. We can get him.”
Daniel said, “We have an address?”
“Not yet, but knowing Gerald, we’ll have it by the time we get there.” Pat took one last hit off the spliff and pinched the cherry off, saving the rest for later. He pushed himself off the railing, put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder as he passed. “We’re wheels up at noon. Don’t drink the whole bottle. Try to get some sleep.”
41: THE RICHEST MAN IN BABYLON
Nine miles outside Columbia, South Carolina
Complete destruction in Liberia,” said Conrad Winter. “Perfect implosion. But the satellite was out of range when the hut came down, so that’s all we know.” He paused to take in the empty warehouse around them, only a few tables and folding chairs in the place. “How soon will we be ready to go, Colonel?”
“Trucks will arrive within the hour, we can be set up here by midafternoon tomorrow. The Atlanta and Charlotte teams are scheduled to arrive late morning, airport and train station can be off-line by noon. If you give the order, we can go tomorrow.”
Dillman’s tone said both that he thought it was the wrong call and that he would follow Conrad’s orders regardless.
Conrad said, “In a perfect world we’d have more time, but we’re awash in unknown unknowns, and even the known unknowns are daunting. We don’t know if it was Daniel Byrne who triggered the implosion, and even if he did, we don’t know if it killed him. We don’t know what his little AIT harlot might’ve told him, or how much of that information he communicated back to Carter Ames. That prick has been either incredibly good or incredibly lucky . . .” Thinking: Should’ve killed him in New Orleans when you had the chance . . . “Bottom line: Our window may be closing. The bloody Foundation is breathing right down our necks. If we can do this now, we should do it.”
After a moment, Michael Dillman said, “Permission to speak freely?”
“Of course.” Conrad forced out a reassuring smile. It must’ve been a little awkward for Dillman to take orders from the son after serving the father so many years. He was handling the transition well.
“Allowing Daniel Byrne or Carter Ames to dictate our timing seems unwise. The plan was to pause and monitor world events after phase one, choose the timing that was to our best advantage. And right now the timing is not to our advantage. Russia is on the march again, China is pressing its influence wider, the Middle East is a disaster, and now we’ve got Ebola spreading out of control in West Africa . . . I would think we’d want to wait at least until the disease outbreak is contained. This operation is noisy and messy, even at the best of times . . .”
Conrad knew the level of Michael Dillman’s security clearance. But he’d already decided to promote the man when he took the director’s chair in the coming months. Might as well start reading him in to the larger game now.
Claim it and own it . . .
“Mike, the Middle East is not a disaster—the Middle East is exactly what we need it to be. We’ve passed the point where maintaining regional instability is enough. Influence and wealth are shifting faster than we’ve anticipated. Other players—including Nightingale—are pushing the pace of change, and we’ve been unable to convince them that our chosen pace is preferable for all of us.”
“I didn’t realize it was past the tipping point.”
Conrad pulled up a chair and sat. He nodded to another chair, and Dillman sat facing him.
Conrad said, “Next year when I become director, I’ll be taking you with me to Singapore as my tactical adviser, and you’ll be fully read in on the larger game. But you already know the west is bankrupt, the tipping point was a while back. The American era is over, all but for the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hell, anybody with a calculator and a functioning mind knows it, and the smoke and mirrors aren’t working any more. All we’ve got left to offer them is war. War will prop up the fading empire for another decade or two, and there’s still value we can draw out in the time remaining.”
Michael Dillman nodded as the bigger picture came into focus. “But the people are tired of war, so . . .”
“Exactly. The chaos and disorder we unleash here will provide cover for our AIT operation, and that’s essential but it’s not the only game we’re playing. It also forces Washington’s hand in other ways that help us. Within six months, there’ll be an additional hundred thousand troops in the Middle East—a whole new offensive. And when the capital city of South Carolina looks like a third-world refugee camp, spoiled Americans will stop bitching and be glad their police departments are becoming standing armies, and they’ll welcome the ascendancy of the surveillance state. They’ll decide it’s a fair trade for keeping them safe and delaying the collapse of their empire. And they’ll be right. So noisy and messy is exactly what we want.”
Claim it and own it . . .
Conrad put a hand on Dillman’s shoulder. “Welcome to the larger game, Mike. We launch phase two tomorrow.”
42: HIGHER THAN THE WORLD
Fifty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean
First order of business was getting the injections done.
As Kara prepared the syringes, she said, “Under normal circumstances, giving antibiotics to people who don’t have a bacterial infection would be medical
malpractice.”
She injected herself first.
Pat said, “Doctors do it all the time.”
“And it’s killing us.” Kara put the syringe down. “Probably responsible for the explosion of disease over the last thirty-five years.” She put a Band-Aid on her arm. “People talk about the ‘friendly’ bacteria that live on us, but they’re more than friendly. These little guys quite literally keep us alive. There are trillions—with a t—of bacteria living in and on our bodies. In fact, we carry around more living non-human cells than we do human cells. This bacterial ecosystem makes up our own personal microbiome. And we’re killing it by overusing antibiotics. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion of everything from obesity to diabetes to colitis to asthma, immune deficiency, even cancer.”
She picked up the second syringe and injected Pat. “The greatest medical discovery in human history, the biggest boon to human existence, and in a few short generations we’ve turned it into the biggest threat to human existence.” She stuck a Band-Aid over the injection site on Pat’s muscular arm. “For such a smart species, we’re incredibly stupid.”
Daniel said, “But the bug we’re chasing ain’t even close to friendly. It’ll kill us if we catch it.”
“Agreed.” Kara picked up a third syringe. “But don’t get the idea that this sort of thing is a good idea in general, understand it comes at a cost. We are hurting ourselves.”
Pat rolled down his sleeve and grinned. “I’m gonna head up to where the action is, sit in the cockpit and see if I can get the pilot to give me a turn at the stick.”
After Pat left, Kara injected Daniel, then reached for another syringe. “Lucky boy, you get two.”
“What’s the second?”
“Bunch of stuff. We have no idea what creepy-crawlies were living in that water they forced into you.”
“I think it was treated,” said Daniel. “Tasted like chlorine anyway. Like pool water.”
“Not a chance we should take.” Kara stuck him with the other needle, depressed the plunger.
“Thanks.”
Daniel found a bottle of red wine in the galley, poured a couple of glasses, and settled in beside Kara on the big leather sofa.
Kara sipped her wine. “You really think this strain of the plague causes AIT?”
“Not necessarily causes, but triggers. In a small percentage of people. There’s evidence that an early form of plague triggered it as well. Back then there was no science to speak of, but historical records are strongly suggestive.”
“How so?”
“The first records of the connection go back to just before the fall of the Roman Empire, when a plague wiped out entire cities in the Roman colonies of North Africa. Of course, plague victims babble a lot of gibberish as the fever damages their brains, but church leaders noted that a small percentage of these people were saying things about what was going on back in Rome—things they couldn’t have possibly known about. Others spoke in foreign tongues they didn’t know. The pre-scientific conclusion was that these people were demon possessed. Some scholars at the time concluded that it was a signal of the beginning of the apocalypse, really believed the world was about to end. And in a way, it was. Not the world, but the world as they knew it—the Roman Empire collapsed shortly thereafter.” Daniel sipped some wine. “The records were locked away, kept secret, but the church knew about them and when the Black Death hit in the fourteenth century, they saw the same phenomenon and recognized it. That was part of the rationale for the pogroms across Europe. Some in the church thought if they killed the Jews, God would call off what they called the Great Mortality. They thought they were postponing the end of the world.”
“Why is it always the Jews?” said Kara.
Daniel shrugged. “Anyway, it wasn’t only the Jews in this case. The church’s roving thugs also wiped out entire towns, whether or not Jews were present, if they detected the symptoms of AIT—which of course they still considered demonic possession.”
“You think that’s what happened to the village in Mandal?”
Daniel nodded. “AIT waxes and wanes through history, like ribbons in time, sometimes thicker, other times so thin it practically disappears. To those church leaders, demonic possession was a pre-scientific attempt to understand what was happening. And after the plague passed, AIT went dormant again. The magic went away. They decided they’d killed enough Jews, or flagellated themselves enough, that God took mercy and gave them protection from the demons.”
Kara shook her head, clearly frustrated. “Doesn’t get us any closer to understanding the cause of AIT.”
“The cause may be something beyond our ability to understand, Kara.”
“Oh great. Now we’re back to the God question.”
Daniel said, “Think of it this way: A dog doesn’t understand mathematics, but that doesn’t mean mathematics doesn’t exist. We don’t understand the cause of AIT, but we can observe it phenomenologically, so we know it exists, and there is a cause.”
“I can accept it phenomenologically,” said Kara, “but even if you could explain the cause by some sort of quantum information leakage through one of the collapsed dimensions like you were talking about, that doesn’t begin to address the fact that the whole thing feels . . .”
“Feels what?”
“Intentional. The voices, the dreams, the whole thing. It feels like there’s an intention behind it.”
Daniel said, “Like the universe is trying to tell us something.”
“Yes. And you can’t have that level of intention without some kind of intelligence behind it. But I just find the whole concept of God ridiculous.”
Daniel laughed. “You won’t get any answers from me on that front.” He drank some wine. “I was raised by a phony faith healer who neglected to tell me it was all a con, so as a kid I believed in everything. Why wouldn’t I? My guardian was a messenger from God, far as I knew. Hell, I saw real live miracles taking place all the time. And when I got a little older and finally saw through the grift, when that house of cards came crashing down, I ran to the church. Eventually I joined the priesthood and spent a decade searching for a real miracle. But in the end, I found something much stranger than what I was looking for.”
“But you do believe in God.”
“I no longer believe in the God I learned about in the Bible, but I’m humble enough to acknowledge that I don’t know the secrets of the universe. I’m no longer chasing faith. I’m chasing truth—and that means accepting uncertainty, accepting that the universe is bigger and stranger than we can even know. Is it possible that the universe acts with intention, with intelligence? Science is learning that it’s not only possible, it’s likely. But that doesn’t mean I believe in an old guy with a white beard in the sky. What I believe is we’re able to push the boundaries of our knowledge only so long as we keep our focus on phenomena itself, rejecting metaphysical conclusions and false certainty, however comforting they may be.”
“Sounds a little flimsy.”
“Existence is flimsy,” said Daniel. “Ninety-six percent of the universe is made of dark energy and dark matter. We don’t even know what the universe is. How can we state definitively that it is or is not intelligent?”
“Wow. You do embrace uncertainty. I don’t know how many people could be comfortable with that worldview.”
“Way I see it, hard-core materialists and hard-core spiritualists are two sides of the same coin, both claiming certainty about the fundamental nature of existence itself, which they can’t possibly know. Which in both cases requires a hubris I can no longer muster.”
“So if I’m a hard-core materialist, you’re a . . . phenomenological existentialist?”
“That’s a mouthful.” Daniel smiled. “And I guess it’s as close as you’re gonna get. But the truth is, I’m not an anything-ist. I think embracing a label hinders clear-eyed study. I a
lso study Buddhism, but I’m not a Buddhist. I’m just a person trying to find the truth. As are we all. But as soon as you embrace isms and schisms, you’re no longer looking out at the world, you’re just looking at yourself.”
Kara sipped her wine and smiled at him. “You do have an interesting mind, Daniel Byrne.”
After a second glass of wine, Kara visited the lavatory at the back of the plane. She returned, her eyes a little wide. “Did you know there’s an entire bedroom in the back?”
“Yup.”
“The outfit you guys work for must have money to burn. It’s like a flying apartment.”
She sat back down next to Daniel, leaning against his shoulder, then kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the sofa. Daniel put his arm around her, adjusting to a comfortable position.
He said, “Ridiculous for moving three people, I know. I think they’re laying on the extra comfort to try and calm our minds, given all the excitement yesterday.”
Kara said, “Do you really think your employers will tell the world about AIT, or are they just trying to monopolize it for their own use like the other guys? I keep thinking about what Jacob said when we arrived in Monrovia.”
Daniel had been thinking about it, too. “I’ve only been in the game a few months, I don’t know for sure. But I do know they’re trying to stop Conrad Winter’s group from releasing this plague, and right now that’s enough for me.”
“Conrad Winter is that priest you told me about?”
Daniel fished in his pocket and pulled out his smartphone, scrolled through some files, found a photo of Conrad. He showed it to her. “This is him. Memorize his face. If you see him, even if you think just maybe some face in the crowd might be him, you let me know right away, y’hear?”
Kara took the phone and looked at the photo for a minute, then passed it back. “So he’s the bad guy.”
“He and his group.”
“But Jacob said the people you work for were just the less bad bad guys.”
The Devil's Game (The Game Trilogy Book 2) Page 20
