by Lee Bradford
The two men looked at one another.
“Well, I’ll be,” Buck said, moving to the switch. “Hey, pass me a screwdriver or something.”
Paul laughed. “Sorry, I don’t have my toolbelt on me. You’re gonna need to use your fingernail.”
“I was worried you were gonna say that.” Buck slid his thumbnail into the groove on the screw head, his face twisting in pain as he began rotating his wrist.
“There you go,” Paul encouraged him. “You’re getting it.”
“Keep quiet or you’re gonna get it. This hurts like hell.”
Several agonizing rotations and a bloody thumbnail later, Buck was done. He removed the faceplate and plucked out a circular device attached to a tiny circuit board. He squeezed the bug between his fingers, crushing it, then turned to Paul. “Now what?”
Not sure, Paul hit the enter key. The screen changed once again, this time displaying the external drive along with a series of folders.
Paul read each folder name loud. “‘Sugarloaf Mountain,’ ‘Bilderberg,’ ‘9/11,’ ‘MKUltra,’ ‘Project Genesis.’”
“What the heck is all this?” Buck asked, wiping his bloody thumbnail with a piece of toilet paper.
“I’m not sure,” Paul replied, feeling suddenly very nervous. “But whoever gave it to us knew exactly where the listening device was located.”
“Click on ‘9/11,’” Buck said, as he came in for a closer look.
Inside the file were a number of emails from Van Buren to various men they’d never heard of. In one of the subject lines were the words: ‘Lessons from the 9/11 test run.’
“We already anticipated the impact the attacks would have on the fabric of society,” Van Buren wrote. “What we underestimated was how quickly the country would come together and recover from the trauma. One encouraging sign was the passage of the Patriot Act, which helped to prove how easily a nation could be controlled and manipulated into adopting totalitarian rule.”
Other documents showed how the plan had been laid out months in advance.
“The trick,” one of the reports sent to Van Buren wrote, “will be to make the hijackers believe they aren’t being aided and abided by the Western interests.”
“What is all this?” Paul wondered.
“It’s a blueprint,” Buck shot back without a moment’s hesitation.
As they continued reading, a number of disturbing facts became increasingly clear. The Bilderberg Group and others like it were simply underlings in a shadow organization which went back hundreds of years. Over the centuries they’d been known by many names, but none had ever captured the totality of the secret cabal that controlled them. Victor Van Buren wasn’t only a rich industrialist. He was the figurehead for this group, a group without name and without parallel, a group behind countless overthrown governments, bloody wars, assassinations and even 9/11. But it was the next few items on their resume that really left Paul and Buck speechless. The Spanish Flu of 1918, Ebola, SARS, H1NI had all been engineered by these people. But the purpose wasn’t to cause death and disorder. The purpose was to prune the population and to invoke fear and thereby to control.
“Do you think these guys had anything to do with the terrorist attacks that landed us here?” Paul asked, already worried about the answer.
“Haven’t I been telling you that all along?” Buck shot back.
“Not really. You said this place was run by the Illuminati.”
“Exactly.”
“But this says those guys are only footmen in a larger shadow organization.”
“Now you’re mincing words.” Buck looked past him at the screen. “Get out of there and click on ‘Project Genesis.’”
No sooner had Paul done so than someone pounded on the door. The two men exchanged a frightened glance.
“Autumn?” Paul asked, in a squeaky voice.
“It’s Ark security,” a man barked from the other side. “Open up before we kick the door down.”
Chapter 32
Over at the infirmary, Susan was returning with a trolley stacked with blue coolers, each displaying a sticker which read ‘handle with care’. Stored inside was the vaccine they would be giving people tomorrow morning.
Down on biohazard level one, the lack of frantic activity had surprised her. Presumably this was where the vaccine was manufactured and yet only a handful of the scientists were present. The rumor going around the infirmary was that biohazard level four employees had been up all night working on something important. Susan didn’t want to believe those two things might be connected, but it was difficult not to.
She was hardly ten feet from the infirmary when she heard a group of nurses discussing Wendy’s arrest.
“Have you heard from her?” one asked.
“No,” said another. “I was told she and Dr. Dresselhaus had packed up and left the compound.”
Only Susan knew different. Wendy and the doctor hadn’t left any more than Earl Mullins and his family had. They were somewhere in the basement of Ark Two, at least what was left of them. The thought sickened her and weighed so heavily on her, Susan’s legs began to buckle.
“Are you all right?” one of the nurses asked, reaching for her.
Susan straightened. “Yes, I’m fine. I just lost my footing.” The nurses were all watching her with concern. “Have any of you seen Autumn?”
“Not since yesterday,” replied the one who’d caught Susan. “We got a memo from the director saying we’re gonna need all hands on deck for this final immunization.”
Susan drew in a deep breath. You didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to see that something was off about this next batch. But were the others completely oblivious? Two of the women standing before her were senior nurses. Could they be part of the Ark staff and still be in the dark about what was going on? The disturbing answer seemed to be yes.
With a nod, Susan pushed past them, continuing into the refrigeration room. As she opened the first cooler, Susan couldn’t help hoping that she was wrong, that the tiny vials would also read ‘placebo’ just like the others had. Reaching inside, she plucked one out and studied the label and that was when her heart dropped.
Simian hemorrhagic fever.
Like Ebola or H1N1, whatever this was sounded painful and frightening. A second nurse with another trolley of coolers entered the refrigeration room and Susan tried to hide her concern. The real question was, why would those in charge want to infect civilians seeking shelter in the Ark with a deadly virus?
Chapter 33
The security team didn’t need to knock twice before Paul sprang up and opened the door. Buck had told him to wait, but it wasn’t like they had any other option. No sooner had he flipped the lock and turned the knob than they pushed their way inside, knocking Paul back against the first two bunk beds. He hit them shoulder first and yelped as the wind was knocked from his lungs. Two men in dark blue uniforms came in, followed by Ava Monroe. She glanced around the room. Buck was blocking the computer screen. She raised one black-gloved hand and motioned him to the side. Buck moved a few inches. She did it again. Buck moved another few inches.
“You can stop this pathetic charade,” she told him. “We know what you’ve been up to. The minute you disabled the bug a silent alarm went off in our security offices. That’s my role here, in case you haven’t already figured that out. Head of security.”
Shoulders slumped, Buck finally stepped aside, revealing the secret documents they’d been going over.
“Should we take them into custody?” the second security officer asked as he removed a pair of handcuffs and stepped forward.
“That won’t be necessary,” Ava told him, reaching behind her back to produce a four-and-a-half-inch black suppressor which she screwed onto the barrel of the pistol in her other hand.
Paul and Buck looked on with dread.
“That’s a SIG Mosquito,” Buck said with a hint of admiration.
She grinned and aimed the suppressed pistol at his face. “Yo
u know your weapons.”
He stepped back. “Well enough to know I don’t like ’em being pointed in my direction.”
Paul’s guts tied into tiny knots.
“Please don’t do this,” Paul begged, falling to his knees.
“Get on your feet and take it like a man,” Buck ordered him.
Both security guards stood between them and Ava. They were surely in a tough spot since any attempt at lunging for her weapon was bound to fail. Paul stopped whining and searched for something he could throw. He was sure Buck was cursing the moment they’d come here.
“Give my regards to the Mullins family,” she said and pulled the trigger once, shifted her aim a few feet to the right and pulled it again.
Paul closed his eyes and shuddered. He’d never been shot before and the pain was going to be excruciating.
When he looked up, both guards lay on the floor dead. A trail of smoke rose from the barrel of Ava’s pistol.
“Hurry up and hide these bodies,” she told Paul and Buck. “We don’t have much time.”
Chapter 34
Still in shock, Paul followed Ava’s instructions. He and Buck stashed the guards’ bodies in the bathroom and closed the door.
As they hurried down the corridor, Paul noticed chunks of brain matter in Buck’s hair.
“Oh, that’s gross,” he said, using the sleeve of his tunic to flick them away.
The old man spun. “You better get used to it. I gotta feeling we’re about to see a lot more of that.”
“Not if I can help it,” Ava told them as she led the trio to the elevators and hit the button. An agonizing moment later, it arrived with a ping and they all got on. Ava pulled a keychain from around her neck and inserted a silver key into an opening beneath the digital readout.
“What are you doing?” Paul asked.
“Disabling the cameras and bringing us into the basement.”
Buck glanced down and saw that G for ‘ground’ was the lowest floor. “I don’t see any basement.”
She grinned. “There’s a lot about the Ark you don’t know.”
A moment later the doors swished open to reveal a concrete tunnel. The space overhead was crammed with pipes and cables.
“This is the guts of the living quarters,” she explained. “Temperature control, plumbing. But more importantly, it’s where we keep the monitoring equipment for each residence.”
“There are cameras too?” Paul asked, doing a quick mental inventory of everything he’d done in the room over the last few days.
Their rubber shoes whisked along the concrete floor as they came up to a nondescript door. Ava flicked through her keys, inserted one and turned. A click sounded and she pushed her way inside. The room was empty of people, but jammed with equipment. A desk ran the length of three walls. Above it was a control panel with bright blinking lights and dozens of monitors.
Paul’s jaw dropped open. He approached the screen closest to him for a closer look. A half-naked man was doing pushups and then admiring himself in front of the mirror. In another slice of screen nearby an older woman was sitting on a toilet.
He jerked his eyes away, rubbing them to erase the mental image. “Spying on people in their most private moments. You people are sick, you know that?”
At the other end of the room, Ava was busy typing something into a keyboard.
“What are we doing here?” Buck asked, bewildered by the technological contents of the room.
“Erasing evidence.”
Both men understood immediately she was referring to the murder of the two guards.
“I wanted to approach both of you alone, but Van Buren insisted I be accompanied.”
“He sent you to get us?” Paul asked.
“To get Buck,” she amended, glancing briefly in their direction before her fingers returned to their dance. “They still needed Paul for the concert.” She paused and punched the enter key. “There, done. At least now they’ll have to check the backup servers to see anything incriminating. Hopefully that’ll buy us some time.”
Buck’s hands were in the air. “Wait just a minute, missy. I’m sure lots of men may be fooled by your good looks, but not me. What do you mean you were coming to get me?”
“I mean sometimes you don’t know when to keep your mouth shut and toe the line.”
Buck’s forearms bunched up with tight cords of muscle.
“She’s got a point, Buck,” Paul chimed in.
“But how do we know we can trust you?” Buck asked, ignoring Paul’s comment.
A nearly imperceptible smile appeared on Ava’s lips. “I’ve been protecting the two of you from the first moment you started causing trouble.”
“That was mostly him,” Paul said, pointing his finger.
Buck slapped it away. “What do you mean, protecting us?”
“Look, it isn’t just you. I’ve worked hard to make sure no one in the Ark was harmed,” Ava told them, her face darkening. “There were many I wasn’t able to help, but Paul’s history as a famous musician worked in your favor. I was able to convince Van Buren that he could be useful. The note you found under the door…”
“… was you,” Buck cut in, putting the pieces together.
“Yes. It was a test.”
“A test?” Paul said with exasperation. “It nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“You asked how you knew you could trust me, but I needed to know I could trust you.”
Paul crossed his arms. “By threatening us?”
“No, I needed to see that you wouldn’t stop pushing the limits. I asked you early on if you liked cheesecake, do you remember?”
Paul thought for a moment. “Yeah, and I remember thinking what a strange question it was to ask.”
“It was a countersign,” Ava said, removing her glasses, “a phrase designed to verify someone’s identity. In my case, I ask, ‘Do you like cheesecake?’ and the other replies, ‘I only drive fast cars.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul said, laughing.
She grinned. “It has to be a non sequitur, otherwise the wrong person may say the words by accident. You see, two agents I’ve never met were supposed to enter the Ark, but they never made it. For a second, I wondered whether the two of you might be the ones I was supposed to make contact with. That was why I asked you the question. But it didn’t take long before I realized that neither of you were agent material.”
Buck and Paul exchanged wounded looks.
“If anyone here’s agent material, it’s me, honey,” Buck barked back.
“What sort of agency are you talking about anyway?” Paul inquired. “CIA? FBI?”
“Neither,” Ava replied. “It’s complicated. Let’s just say I work for a group that’s sworn to stop the Brotherhood’s plans for creating a New World Order.”
Buck crossed his arms with a satisfied grin. “What did I tell you?” he said, eyeing Paul.
The half-life of Buck gloating over being right was about the same as spent plutonium, which was to say the bragging and grandstanding had only just begun. Paul shook his head in despair.
“So President Perkins…” Buck began.
“Is little more than a lackey,” Ava told them. “Placed in the role of Speaker of the House so that once the nukes went off, he could step up and take the helm. All part of the first phase of Project Genesis.”
Paul raised an eyebrow. “Genesis. Yeah, we saw a folder on that in the USB you slid under the door.”
She nodded and pulled something up on the computer. “As far as ninety-five percent of the people in this installation are concerned, they work for the government. It speaks to the Brotherhood’s M.O. They control you without you even knowing it.”
“So you’re saying they ordered the terrorists to attack their own country?” Paul said with utter disbelief.
Ava shook her head. “No, of course not. These guys are far too slick for something that clumsy. Just like the people working and living in the Ark, the Islami
c Liberation Organization was nothing more than another tool. As far as they knew, the funding to pay for the nuclear weapons came from power players in Saudi Arabia. The bombs themselves were channeled to them via Soviet warheads stolen after the Cold War.” Ava raised an eyebrow. “Did you really think a group of desert-dwelling terrorists were sophisticated enough to carry out an attack on this scale without a colossal amount of help? You see, the trick was keeping the truth from them. If you hand a gun to a man who wants to kill you, the first thing he’ll wonder is whether it’s loaded with blanks.”
“It’s about trust,” Buck said.
“Exactly. The ILO doesn’t need any incentive to attack the United States. That was never the problem. What they needed was to believe they were acting of their own accord.”
Paul’s head was spinning. It was as though every one of Buck’s wacky ideas was coming true at once.
Buck crossed his arms. “Or you coulda saved us all a lot of heartache and put a bullet in Van Buren’s head.”
“Don’t you think I considered that? But if I’d tried to kill him, I would have risked exposing myself. Inevitably someone else would have taken his place and carried out the plan. That’s the difference between being brave and being stupid.”
“But if all that was phase one of Project Genesis,” Paul wondered, “then what’s phase two?”
“There’s more to tell you, believe me,” Ava told him. “You asked before how you knew you could trust me.” She swiveled her chair around and punched a key. “What I’m about to show you happened two days ago.” Up came a grainy black-and-white video showing a procession of black SUVs entering the bunker’s parking area. A dozen men in dark suits then exited and proceeded toward the steel doors.
“Hey, that’s President Perkins and his entourage and they aren’t wearing any radiation gear,” Paul shouted.
As they approached, the doors swung open and the men entered the Ark.
“We were stripped of our clothing,” Buck growled. “Put through one indignity after another, not to mention that first shot in my rear end that’s still hurting.”
