The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8)

by Michael John Grist

  James While, rock star of the SEAL, globe-hopper, logistical genius, pattern-spotter extraordinaire, and the man with the highest score on a very specific section of the Standard IQ test. He was like them, but he was winning in the 'World of Men'. He had leveraged his inherent skills and fought his way to the top of the social chimneystack that was the largest organization on the Earth.

  To them he was a hero. They wanted to be him. His attention and blessing was like manna from heaven, as he elevated them as no one else had. He changed their jobs to match their abilities. He made systems that worked around them, that afforded them success unparalleled anywhere else, built on raw ability. They were a team of thousands with loyalty expressly to him, as he came to represent the grand vision of the SEAL.

  For them, that vision lay not in keeping Olan Harrison alive a few years longer, but in actually improving the world. Reducing human suffering, ending famine and disease, stopping war, strife and cruelty. He offered idealistic, unashamed goals just as he was an idealistic, unashamed man, and in doing so earned a cadre of utterly dependable mid-to-high-level managers.

  Those amongst his most trusted who weren't autistic all fell upon a spectrum of underachievement. They were men and women who had been overlooked all their lives, quietly brilliant people who'd been run roughshod over by the louder, taller, prettier, more confident cliques. James While picked them out like under-ripe berries, sent them on leadership training courses, found them mentors, and set them up with structures to promote ability over social grace, building a powerful meritocracy in a virtuous, self-improving cycle.

  They knew who their guardian angel was. They were grateful to be noticed, and happier than they'd ever been, and came to rely upon him like followers in a cult. To them he was infallible, a machine who was more capable than any manager they'd had, so when the order came down direct from him to take over their departments in his name, they acted as one.

  The revolution went smoothly, with little blood shed.

  In the Apotheo Net boardroom, situated high in a downtown Kuala Lumpur skyscraper, Head Abe Strick sent two security guards into a shootout that ended with three dead and Strick himself hit in the thigh, but still the Apotheo Net was taken.

  In a secret Disarmament nuclear weapons repository in the Kenyan desert there was a brief upset over launch codes, a countdown was instituted, but hammered down with at least a minute left to spare and all the African nuclear caches under While's oversight.

  Farthas Gurgen of Vision locked himself into the panic room in the basement of his Mayfair London office, sending out a wild spray of documents and calls for help that James' people intercepted and corralled, before cutting all his hard lines and locking him down.

  Everywhere across the SEAL similar stories played out. Rachel Heron was just the first. One after another Heads rolled around the world as James While assumed control. Olan Harrison could no longer be trusted. There was a shadow SEAL running beneath the real one, and shutting it down and tracking it back to its source was his highest priority.

  Hours passed in the air as the globe tilted, and by the hour more reports came in claiming Olan Harrison could not be found. While's teams struck all of Olan's standard haunts but turfed out only secretaries and low-level functionaries. None of them confessed to knowing where he was. None admitted to even seeing him in the flesh for months, if not longer.

  So James went deeper. He set teams and computer algorithms digging into an exhaustive search of Harrison's digital history, working outward from the last recorded time he was seen in person; five months ago at a gala event in Cambodia raising money for clearing landmines from the Khmer regime. James remembered there'd been a SEAL Heads meeting three days after that, at which Olan had lodged requests for additional funding.

  He dived into that.

  The Cambodia charity had shifted some fifty thousand dollars between accounts, and he looked for the evidence of it being spent across the group, in landmine disposal robots or schools for amputee children, but found no physical record of such purchases, only a paper trail asserting it had been usefully spent.

  Fifty thousand dollars was not much, but there was no explaining its absence. Its connection to a project overseen directly by Olan Harrison made it even more suspicious. Direct charitable giving had always been Harrison's remit, and afforded him a dossier of activity that spread across all sixteen branches of the SEAL.

  James While stopped mid-investigation and started redirecting his teams, turning them toward Olan's charitable activities across every department. It didn't take long for the immense scale of the monies involved to become clear.

  It was billions of dollars a year. Money disappeared down the charity holes Olan had set up; coming out of the SEAL itself, coming from un-named donors who might be SEAL affiliates or might be anyone seeking to buy influence, coming from governments and corporations who wanted Olan's ear. In South Africa a system of shelters for battered women existed only in name, with the coordinates given for their five centers showing only shacks and slums in the satellite feed. In the Inuit communities of northern Alaska an investment in GM Arctic cod and char that would reproduce three times faster than normal, ensuring rich bounties of food, showed no impact at all on the coastal ecosystems, which was impossible.

  The examples flooded in; not just hundreds but thousands of examples of funds reported spent but gone missing. While ordered more arrests. Every member of each charitable section of each department was put into a room and interrogated. The scale of the theft was immense and staggering, exclusively occurring in the areas James While had long considered automated.

  Nobody had been checking for the rot creeping in at the root.

  Olan hadn't touched any of the new projects. While shiny new investments in the Multicameral Array, Logchain, Apotheo Net hadn't been affected in quite the same way, While began to see the outlines of the false bottom beneath every one. Olan had hidden his network in plain sight, in places While was either not privileged to look into, or in areas he would never think to check.

  He'd trusted Olan Harrison, and that had been his flaw. Harrison's roaming responsibility had seemed like another check and balance in the system, not a corrupting influence. In the end it amounted to the simple laundering of money.

  Out of the chaos, patterns began to emerge. Some investments were genuine, though seemingly for purposes other than those they'd been reported for. A research facility in the Alps well known for cruelty to animals had been bought out and turned into a seed preservation vault, but there was no physical evidence of seeds ever being shipped there. An investment in water wells across Kenya had been completed, but no villagers went to them and gathered water. Work on mosquito harvesting to denature their reproductive capacity and spread impotence through the population had plainly been carried out; the massive fields full of nets were there, but malaria rates were no lower even in the surrounding area.

  It was all bullshit, and James While steamed through it with a growing and unfamiliar sense of anger. He didn't get angry, rarely felt emotions as other people did, but when he did they built up and steamrollered everything else, often taking days to subside. The intense focus he'd for so long prided himself on now seemed to be foolishness. Olan Harrison had used him like a cog in a machine, relying upon that foolishness which he'd pridefully considered outstanding competence.

  He was standing atop an empire of lies.

  He raised a hierarchy of potential targets and fired them out to strike teams around the world. The wells. The mosquito facilities. Last of all the research facility in the Alps. There was something about its data trail, about the frequency of vehicles making deliveries, about its power usage. There was a runway nearby, and an internet optic fiber running through a strong trunk line, buried in the rock. While spun back what satellite coverage he could find of the area, but there were large gaps in the footage dating back seven years.

  It wasn't unusual that imagery might be unavailable; satellites constantly overlapped
as their routes shifted course, leaving blind slivers between them, but this many gaps across that specific period was statistically highly unlikely. That it coincided almost precisely with the date that he had joined the SEAL was a giveaway.

  He gave the order to his pilot, and seconds later the plane banked sharply to the left. James While paced, while the turn completed and the pilot came on the line to announce a new flight time, making a tight arc over Kazakhstan to touch down in the Alps in five hours and change.

  James paced.

  He planned. He tried to think of more areas he might have overlooked during his time as COO. He threw himself into uprooting all of Olan Harrison's entrenched corruption. He reset the stage, opened multiple screens in the jet's cabin and plowed on with stamping order back onto the world.

  * * *

  The plane landed on ice and skidded. James While drank an energy drink of his own design, unbranded and packed with caffeine and a range of cutting-edge stimulants. He hadn't slept now for forty-eight hours and was starting to feel the drain. He had perhaps twelve more hours before he'd have to hand off temporary control and rest. New systems had to be as ironclad as possible by then.

  The jet's engines reversed and slowed despite the icy runway. While waited at the exit hatch, and as soon as the deceleration finished he swung the door lever up and pulled the cord on the emergency slide, which deployed with a yellow blast. He was on it and sliding down before it had even finished deploying, hitting the snow at a fast walk.

  It was freezing outside, but he wouldn't be out in it for long. It was the middle of the night in the mountains of Switzerland, with dark clouds hanging low overhead. The descent had been pitch black and dangerous, with the runway only lit by gas flares dropped down its length.

  "Sir!"

  It was John Rubega, leader of one of his most trusted assault teams, who'd already taken out Quiescence in Rome a few hours back. Now they were spread across this mountain; five soldiers and three black Jeeps sat a few yards away, engines smoking in the cold.

  "Has anyone gone in?" While asked.

  "No further than the entranceway, as you ordered."

  While strode past him and opened the door to the nearest Jeep. Rubega gave a motion and the driver hopped out, allowing him to replace him. The engine fired up and the vehicle pulled away, followed sharply by the others.

  Rubega gave him the sit-rep as they revved up the mountain. Gray rock rushed by to the right, lit harshly by the headlights. Everything was a risk. He had his team. In ten minutes they were there; at a shallow parking lot tucked along the roadside, framing a simple door leading into the rock.

  "Sir," said Rubega, "recommend-"

  "We'll do this as I ordered, Commander," While said clearly, already pushing open the Jeep's door. "A tight squad, you can lead, no hair trigger."

  "Yes, sir!" Rubega said and shot out of the vehicle. His team was waiting, and picked up position around James While as he advanced swiftly on the entrance dug into the cliff-face.

  "Is it locked?"

  "No, sir, nor trapped. Sir, let me."

  While gestured ahead of him. A security light flashed on over the entrance; molded into the mountain with clean gray cement. Rubega darted in, opened the door, and barreled through into the darkness beyond.

  "SEAL Security forces, put any weapons down!"

  While followed tightly on his heels, into pitch black. He'd already seen the layout of the laboratory in maps, hidden up here away from sight so that animal rights campaigners would never learn of its existence, along with photographs, and had a feeling for what he was looking for. There were numerous rooms spread off the sides of a long corridor leading in, but none of them were grand enough for a man intending to live forever. At the end of the corridor lay a large open laboratory. That's where Harrison would be.

  "Lights," While said, striding ahead into the darkness. Rubega rushed to stay ahead, bringing up the light array at the front of his suit, revealing a nondescript white hallway with doors leading off to the sides. There was an odd smell in the air which defied classification.

  Clack clack.

  James While's shoes rang sharply off the tiled floor, accompanied by the muffled shush of the rubber-soled assault team deploying around him; each spraying light from their chest arrays. Doors broke open to either side but While kept striding on, forcing his team to work at double-team to keep up.

  Olan Harrison. He ran the man's name around in his head with every step. A great man, such potential, fallen to this like a cheap terrorist. It was a great dismay. It was also beyond unlikely he would still be here. More likely than anything, there would be a colossal explosion waiting on the other side of the laboratory door.

  Rubega reached it seconds before While, gave a signal to his team who raised metal blast shields, then launched himself through.

  No explosion greeted them. The lights beyond were already switched on, revealing a hall that was shallow but long, a T crossbar capping the corridor. It looked like a hospital ward, lined with medical machinery, computer screens and server banks, and at the center there was a bed upon which lay a person who was plainly, painfully dead.

  While took it all in.

  The body was spread-eagled on a mattress soaked red; the ribcage cracked and flexed wide open so the heart and lungs were exposed, the belly flesh peeled back so the internal viscera had spread out in their gossamer white bandage of connective tissues, making a gory butcher's puddle in the dead figure's lap.

  It stank. It explained the strange smell in the air.

  "Sir, we should get you out of here," said Rubega, as his men spread rapidly up and down the hall. "It's-"

  "It's Olan Harrison," said While.

  The realization hit and left him numb. A dozen plates fell and crashed on the floor of his mind.

  He strode over to his side. The old man's face was pulled wide in pain; his eyes bugging, his lips snarled back against perfect white teeth. He looked older than his recent appearances in SEAL meetings.

  "He's been dead for hours," one of Rubega's team said, taking a blood sample. "Less than twelve."

  The world spun and twisted, and While opened himself to it. There were details everywhere. In Olan's skin, in the old divot scars on his scalp, in the apparatus hanging on the walls nearby; intra-cranial electrodes, neural nets like Helkegarde's Arrays, large quantum server banks from the Apotheo Net.

  He touched Olan's face; the skin was papery and cold, not the rubbery synthetic feel of a mock-up. He slipped a penknife from his pocket and slit the blade deep into Olan's cheek, revealing tissue and muscle within. A few drops of blood leaked out.

  It was a real body, not an elaborate fake. Harrison was dead.

  He turned to Rubega. "Get everyone out. Sweep this place at the atomic level. Highest level of containment, right now."

  Rubega gave a signal and his team sped back the way they'd come. James While followed hard on their heels, trying to spin the plate up on this issue and failing. It didn't make sense.

  Olan Harrison had set this up, bringing on the impending end of the world, and now he was dead. It looked like a crime of hatred, reveling in the old man's pain, but if Olan had been ingenious enough to rig the whole world in such a way that even James While couldn't see it, how could he not see an assassin in his closest ranks?

  It didn't make sense.

  The corridor passed in the blink of an eye, then he was outside the facility, walking back to the Jeep in a chill and brisk mountain wind, with messages and missed calls beeping in through the satellite phone at his hip as the signal returned. He didn't check it, but Rubega did.

  "Sir," he said, and the tone of his voice made While look over, and unholster his phone.

  He saw the first few messages and stopped walking, scrolling through dozens more with mounting horror.

  The SEAL was under attack.

  Simultaneous raids had just taken place around the world, each waged with irresistible force. The Logchain had been invaded, wit
h Rachel Heron and key members of her team torn from his custody. The head of Multicameral Array Epsilon had been taken with many of his team from the temporary lab they were housed in. The Apotheo Net had been struck, Free Radical, and specialists taken.

  As he read fresh messages kept flashing in; in every corner of the SEAL key personnel were being kidnapped by black-clad soldiers, in many cases broken out of armed guard with substantial bloodshed and material damage. Every raid was successful. So far there was no record of who was doing it, where they had come from or where they were going.

  Rubega raced the Jeep at unsafe speeds down to the runway. En route James While ordered up a stream of repeated mid-air refuels and a rolling escort of F1 jets, then turned his gaze to emergency response.

  Whoever had killed Olan had been waiting. They were watching. Now the danger was everywhere, and the world could turn on a dime in a moment.

  His plane took off and didn't land again for two weeks.

  13. MONTCLIFFE

  Anna woke angry.

  She'd been in and out of consciousness for hours, drifting while voices talked over her, glimpsing brief sightings of poor Jake, swaddled in white foam bandaging like the man in the Alps who'd put a dead baby in her belly, and Lucas hovering close, unable to help but longing to, and…

  She rocked in again, opening her eyes to see Peters standing above her, gazing down from two black eyes with one hand on her shoulder.

  Jake was sitting in his wheelchair with only a blotchy part of his face showing. Lucas stood beside him with one eye deeply bloodshot and a sling on his left arm.

  "Anna," Peters said urgently, "wake up, something is happening."

  She sat up. Her body was in a lot of pain, her muscles felt dry and drained, but she could feel the anger inside like a jet engine, waiting to burn. There was no shortage of fuel in the air; she could feel it in her friends, in herself, in the people moving cautiously outside their room, like the air before a storm.