by JC Ryan
When he was finished at last, Daniel dared risk a glance at Harper. The president’s eyes were wide and staring, and he’d grabbed a fistful of his iconic white hair in either hand, giving him the look of a child who’d seen a ghost.
Daniel had rightly suspected that drawing out the story would only make it harder for Harper to respond. By dumping it on him in a few short sentences, he saved time. Harper would ask for the details that he needed.
“How can this be possible?” Harper asked after a long silence during which his eyes darted everywhere in the room, proving Daniel correct. The question had several potential answers, all of which would have been correct. Daniel chose to interpret it to mean that the president wanted the science behind the existence of the pictures.
“I don’t fully understand it. Probably there is no one in the world who does,” Daniel said. “Our resident nanotechnology expert thinks that quantum physicists might understand some of it. But understanding it will make no difference to the fact that we are about to be destroyed in thirty-eight days. These are pictures of one possible timeline of many, and we seem to be on that timeline that leads to disaster. Our nanotechnologist believes that we can jump off it, to an alternate reality that doesn’t include this outcome, if we act quickly enough to find whoever plans to do this and stop them. But that is only a theory; for now we have not discovered anything that says that alternate reality exists. It isn’t magic, or science fiction. It’s an investigative challenge, but we need to get on it right away. It’s going to require the manpower of the US government, and possibly our allies as well.”
Harper made a visible effort to pull himself together. “Mind if I have some of our experts take a look at this?”
“Not at all. Just don’t let them take too long. We don’t have much time,” Daniel said. Luke hadn’t yet said a word. Now he had a suggestion.
“I brought some references for Roy James, our nanotech guy. We borrowed him from Cal-tech when we started seeing some nanotechnology stuff coming out of the past. He’s at work on a device that the 10th Cyclers left a plan for, one of these remote-viewing things. I’ve also brought those plans. You might want to get some people from MIT or some of the national laboratories to look it over. Roy’s the one who’s telling us we can stop this.”
Harper looked at Luke for the first time. He liked what he saw. Luke was standing tall, no hint of deception or craft in his expression or his body language. He’d heard good things about this man from Sam Lewis, his head of the CIA. The suggestion was a good one, he’d put it in motion. One other thing crossed his mind.
“Let’s assume for a moment that this is real, and it’s happening, or going to happen. What guarantee do we have that you’ve discovered all of the targets?” Harper asked.
“We don’t,” Daniel answered. “We need National Security advisors to help us refine our searches. The library isn’t like Google; we have to ask very specific questions. Your people would know far more about potential targets than we would.
Harper nodded slowly in assent. “Can you two stick around for a day or two?” he asked. Both nodded, and Daniel answered.
“Yes. But Nigel - there are only thirty-eight left. There aren’t any to waste.”
“I get that. But going off half-cocked won’t do us any good. I’d like you to stay handy. I’m going to have my Chief of Staff stash you in an office and send in some refreshments. Anything else you need?”
“If you’re going to hang onto the laptop, we could both use access to a computer with an internet connection,” Luke answered for both of them.
“You’ll have it. I need that laptop to convince some of the skeptics on my advisory council. I’ll see you soon.”
By executive order
Harper was a shaken man and he fully intended to have all this checked out and verified. But, he was convinced enough to call Sam Lewis back in as soon as Daniel and Luke left.
“You heard?” he asked. Lewis had been listening to the meeting between the president, his old friend Luke Clarke, and Luke’s nephew by marriage, the famous Daniel Rossler, via a live feed from a listening device the president was wearing in his lapel. It looked like a small depiction of the American theme of white stars and stripes on a red and blue background, a symbol of his patriotism, perhaps. No one would suspect that it could transmit the drop of a pin anywhere in the room to the listeners at the other end of the signal.
Lewis nodded.
“What do you think?” Harper asked.
“I’ve never had a reason to doubt Luke or the Rosslers I’m convinced and also scared,” Lewis responded. “Unless they’ve been duped, this is for real.” It scared him to say it. He knew that it was going to be on him to find the conspirators and stop this madness. He didn’t have enough time.
“I agree. I’m going to issue an executive order putting every investigative resource at our disposal under your command. Find these bastards and take them out. I don’t care what it takes.” Harper may have just signed his own impeachment, if Congress believed he’d overstepped his bounds. It didn’t matter. He was tired, and this was the last straw. If his last act as president were to be saving the world from certain destruction that was fine with him. The US had a long-standing policy of not striking first. That was about to end, if only Lewis could give him a certain target. And damn the consequences.
Executive order in hand, Lewis wasted no time in assembling the heads of the agencies over which he’d just been given authority. He wanted them to hear it from Harper, and Harper agreed. There was no time for resentment or rivalry between the agencies. When he addressed them, he spoke as if the information had already been confirmed, and swept away all expressions of doubt.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe this or not. As your commanding officer, I’m ordering you to put yourselves and every resource of your agencies in the hands of Sam Lewis to direct the search for the bastards who are planning to nuke us into oblivion. I don’t want to hear any excuses about why your agencies didn’t pick this up, or any doubt that it’s real. The only priority now is to stop it. You have one hour to put your networks on alert, then reassemble here for a briefing by Rossler and Clarke.”
The room as a whole stood stunned for all of five seconds. Then Lewis barked, “MOVE!” and they scattered like cockroaches. Lewis had already briefed his own team. Every operative the CIA had was already putting out feelers to see if they could pluck a string and hit a true note. Someone, somewhere, knew about this. They’d find them and roll their networks up, or leave a bloody trail trying.
After the briefing with the other agencies, Lewis locked himself in his office and drew up a counterintelligence plan to most efficiently use his resources. First, he secured space for a command center that would accommodate all of them as necessary. He didn’t want to waste time communicating among the agencies; everyone would use his Joint Operations Command Center as a hub, and all intelligence would be entered into a database there. After consulting with his IT specialists, he made a quick call to Luke’s cell phone.
“Are you guys still here?” he asked.
“Yes, for now. What can we do for you?”
“I want to borrow the Foundation’s whiz kid IT guy. Raj, is it? Can you spare him?”
“I’m sure we can. You don’t have your own?”
“We do, but my guys tell me Raj can set this network up to work with all the agency’s proprietary software quicker than anyone else. We need a central database.”
“Done. I’ll tell Daniel what you need. Does Raj need to get here?”
“Doubt it. Why don’t you ask him? He’d know best.”
A few minutes later, Daniel was on the phone to Raj, explaining what Lewis wanted.
“No, I can do it from here,” Raj said. “They’ll have to live with that. I’m not putting myself in their custody.” Daniel had a moment’s amusement of Raj still worrying about the CIA and FBI finding out about him, when the whole world was about to blow up. Not to mention the fa
ct that everyone did know about him, and he hadn’t been arrested yet. No doubt it was a bitter disappointment to him.
“What do you need?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing at the moment. I’ll let you know if I run into a problem.” Raj used a throwaway cell to contact his hacker network and explain what he’d been asked to set up. Within an hour, he had a dozen assistants hacking into the agencies’ networks and reporting back on the protocols. By the end of the day, the JOCC computers all lit up with a large new icon on their screens, depicting the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, complete with truncated pyramid, occult Eye of Providence and the two mottoes: Annuit Coeptis and Novus Ordo Seclorum, which Raj insisted roughly translated as “May the Almighty favor our bold undertaking.”
Daniel knew it to be Raj’s joke, an allusion to his conspiracy theories and the theories surrounding ‘secret societies’ that controlled the US government as well as world finances. However, the motto was apt, and no one could object to the icon referencing the Great Seal. He kept his opinion of it to himself. It didn’t matter, what mattered was that Raj had succeeded in tying together the software that each of the agencies used, to create a super-database for the urgent investigation at hand.
Daniel also suspected that Raj had called in help. This, too, he kept to himself. They needed all the help they could get, and if Raj’s network had eluded discovery for this many years, they must be very good. He sent Raj a text saying, “check email”. In a Gmail account that had lain dormant ever since the pyramid code days, he suggested that Raj use his hackers to locate communications the previous task force might have missed. He was particularly interested in Reza Mokri’s communications. The only Middle Easterner to have committed suicide while in custody, Reza must be a key player, Daniel reasoned. Raj didn’t mention that his hackers had already been through all of that.
While Raj was setting up the IT side of things, Lewis was directing the NSA to again interrogate the spies that were already in custody. “You’ll have to transport them offshore,” he explained. “What you may have to do would be illegal within our borders.” His counterpart in the NSA nodded. He knew exactly what Lewis alluded to. Methods that fell outside the Geneva Convention, and that the president couldn’t know about in the name of plausible deniability. Such methods were inhuman, but then the future of humanity was at stake. If it took waterboarding or a bamboo manicure to get anything out of them, then that’s what would happen.
In a stroke of brilliance, he also spoke to the head of the FBI to assess whether it would be worthwhile to employ their profilers to develop an idea of who or what the leader of the conspiracy might be. As a result, FBI Agent Salome Lane was assigned to go to Boulder and interview key members of the Rossler Foundation leadership and staff, as well as to sit in on the interviews of the spies who were still being held, for the moment, in Denver. For the latter task, she would have to hurry. Plans were to take the spies elsewhere for harsher questioning as soon as possible.
Harper was busy as well. It fell to him to inform the heads of state in the countries where the photos showed devastation. He chose to inform only those whose cities were depicted in the images of destruction. There was no sense in robbing the others of potentially their last few weeks of peaceful ignorance, nor in giving many of them any ammunition to say that he had lost his mind. He called Israel first.
“David, I trust I didn’t wake you?” Harper said, when he was connected. It was disingenuous, for he knew it was nearly midnight in Tel Aviv. Surprisingly, Yedidiyah denied being asleep.
“I fear I don’t sleep as well as I used to, my friend. To what do I owe the pleasure of speaking with you?”
“Ah, David, you have such an elegant way of saying ‘what the hell do you want at this time of night’,” Harper remarked. Yedidiyah chuckled.
“And you, my friend, have such a direct way of translating my eloquence. What the hell do you want at this time of night?” The mirth in his voice softened the words.
“I’m afraid I’m calling to make sure you don’t sleep tonight,” Harper said, his tone turning somber. “I have something to tell you that you won’t believe at first. Rest assured, I’ve had it examined, and it’s all too true.”
Yedidiyah matched Harper’s tone when he said, “Tell me, my brother, and let me judge for myself.”
Harper poured out the story, how Daniel had woken him in the wee hours of this morning, which seemed a lifetime away. What Daniel had told him, and the evidence he presented. How he’d set the investigation in motion and what had been done so far. Yedidiyah listened without interruption.
When Harper wound down, he asked the question that most interested him. “And Tel Aviv? Was it on this list?” His voice was quiet, belying the emotion behind it.
“Yes, David, I’m afraid it was. Also Jerusalem.”
“It can’t be the Arabs, then. The Dome of the Rock is sacred to them, too.”
“All evidence points to Iran at the moment. We haven’t determined for sure yet. We could use your help, the Mossad, and any other agencies you think may be able to help.”
“Of course. I’ll notify the appropriate men as soon as we’re done here. But, what would you have them do?”
“We’re going to give it everything we have, to stop it at its source,” Harper answered. “But, and you must do this, too. Some of our effort has to go into finding the couriers in the countries that will be destroyed, and getting the bombs out, disarming them if we can, or taking them where their destructive power will be less important. My experts tell me there’ll be no radiation. I’m thinking we sink them in the ocean, or bury them in a desert. We lose a few pilots, maybe, but we save millions of our citizens.”
It was only then that the true enormity of the situation hit Yedidiyah. “Of course, my friend. Detonate them where they’ll do the least harm. If you can.”
~~~
June 20, 2020; D-day minus 38, Washington
Harper had spoken individually to only one of the people whose images were arrayed in his monitor, David Yedidiyah. The other two were about to get the shock of their lives. Thank goodness some cool heads were with him to validate that they’d seen and accepted the evidence. Otherwise, this was going to come off like a monumental joke, and one in poor taste at that. Harper remembered hearing about the panic caused by Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds” during his grandfather’s lifetime. Unless it was handled properly, this news could have the same type of impact, but multiplied many times and worldwide if the wrong people got hold of it. Hence the short list of leaders who would hear it from him today.
At the appointed hour, he spoke into his microphone for the benefit of the people he’d gathered on the videoconference for that purpose.
“Gentlemen, thank you for taking time out of your busy days to gather with us today. What I have to say is of the utmost importance. Rest assured, I would not have presumed to call you together for less than earth-shaking information. You will at first believe that what I’m about to tell you is a hoax, if not a cruel joke on my part. In fact, I wish it were.
“Yesterday, news was brought to me concerning one of the greatest threats in recent times. I took the time to verify it, before setting an investigation in motion that is designed to flush out the perpetrators and prevent what we know without doubt will happen otherwise. At the end of this presentation, I will ask you to put your best assets under the direction of my Director of the CIA to be deployed against our common enemy. It will take all of us, ladies and gentlemen, to avert the coming disaster.”
By this time, the Prime Ministers of the UK and of Australia were squirming in their seats. What was this? Who did Harper think he was, to suggest such a monumental favor of trust? They were soon to learn. Harper nodded at Daniel, sitting at his side, to start the slide show.
“What you are looking at, my friends, are pictures of cities in each of your countries, devastated by a new type of nuclear weapon. These are not simulated. Through a t
echnology that is even now being examined and tested by experts at the Rossler Foundation, these pictures of the future were recorded by the historians of the 10th Cycle. Yes, you heard me correctly. The destruction you see here has not yet happened, but most surely will unless we are able to stop them.”
Gasps were heard through the speakers as each head of state caught sight of his or her own capital city, now captioned with its name, in rubble. There was no need to tell them how urgent the task ahead was. The date was also prominently captioned. July 29 of this year. It was already June 20. When the slide show ended, cacophony broke out on the videoconference. The UK and Australia, both pledged immediate and full cooperation.
Gradually, the noise died down as each individual grasped the enormity of the situation. David Yedidiyah was the first to break the ensuing silence.
“My friend, you already know that you have the full cooperation of the Mossad and others of our agencies. What would you have us do in addition?”
“We may need help to track these bastards down and we may need special forces to take them out when we find them. I’m leaving these details to our joint investigative team. I’ll have Sam Lewis, the head of the operation, brief you through your own agencies every eight hours, as I’ve asked him to brief me. More frequently if necessary, and as we get closer to the date. I don’t need to tell you that we have very little time to get this done. I’ll let you know personally if we need anything else from you. Other than your prayers for our world, that is all.”
When the call had ended, Harper slumped with exhaustion. He hadn’t slept since four a.m. the previous morning, and was running on pure adrenaline. Daniel knew how he felt.
“Nigel, can you get some rest? Neither one of us is going to make it to the end times if we don’t recharge,” he joked.
