Catch and Kill

by J D Lasica

  “Excellent,” Volkov said. Samana Cay was never intended to be a major revenue center but rather a biochemical staging area on sovereign territory close to the U.S. mainland.

  “Zaven Kasparian just contacted me. He wants to fly out for a follow-up with you and a Fantasy Live session. Is that all right?”

  “When?”

  “Now. His plane is fueled and ready to go.”

  “Yes, that’s fine.” He needed to make amends with the Armenian after that security fiasco. “What else?”

  “Your Fantasy Live simulation is set for tonight. But first we have our one o’clock with Bashir and Cazac.”

  “Yes, yes. Anything else?” Volkov’s Harley passed two shuttle buses with red and blue teams heading to War Games Valley on the north side of the island, far from the Lab on the southeast end.

  “One other matter, Chairman. A reporter for Axom gained access to Fantasy Live under false pretenses. We had our suspicions early on but decided to play it out. Our marketing department thought an unauthorized feature spotlighting our roll-your-own fantasy experiences would generate publicity for Fantasy Live among the chattering classes. There’s nothing more alluring to the super rich than being told they shouldn’t have something. ”

  “And?”

  “We didn’t count on Alex Wyatt and the performer breaking the rules, stepping out of the simulation. He knows one of the girls came from the Disappearance.”

  Damn it all! Volkov slipped the clutch into top gear and his Harley Softail screamed past 120 mph, tires smoking. He leaned his body forward atop the unrelenting power of the 1868cc motor as he considered this.

  “Has he filed an article yet?” Volkov asked.

  “He has not.”

  “Did you say he works for Axom? Isn’t that Paul Redman’s publication?”

  “It is.”

  “And this reporter—he’s in custody?”

  “We have him in a holding facility. Not quite sure what to do with him.”

  “Let me think about this.”

  “Understood, Chairman.”

  “Chairman out.” He disconnected the video chat, signaling he was displeased with how Lucid has been handling security matters. If this Alex Wyatt can connect Fantasy Live with the Disappearance, it could jeopardize Project Ezekiel at its most critical juncture—just before Phase Two.

  Alex Wyatt was a liability. What to do with him was another matter.

  Volkov parked his sports bike along the road and followed the brightly patterned stone walkway into the heart of Samana Village, the tourist stronghold on the northwest part of the island. It was lunchtime, and Volkov walked through the throng in his motorcycle helmet.

  He entered a sub sandwich eatery and stood in the short line. When it was his turn, he raised his visor just enough so the cashier could see his lips and hear his order. In other places, wearing a helmet covering your entire face inside a restaurant often drew a rebuke or a rude comment, but in the fanciful surroundings of Samana Village, it didn’t merit so much as a quizzical glance.

  He moved down the line and watched his “sandwich artist” go to work. Volkov could see through the reflection on her AR glasses that she received a visual prompt verifying the ingredients at each step so she’d get the order exactly right. Step one, step two, step three.

  Volkov liked what he was seeing. A high-tech sandwich assembly line with the added benefit of removing awkward human interaction from the equation.

  At the final step, just as the artist known as Sara was about to spray the top layer of the sandwich, he spoke up. “No special seasoning for me.” He’d already been vaccinated for both strains, but no sense in taking chances.

  “All right, sir. For here or to go?”

  “To go.”

  He planned to return later to explore more of the village. But for now he returned to his bike, tucked his sandwich into his jacket pocket, and rode to his executive suite in the corporate offices. He entered through the secure rear door with the passcode known only to him.

  He removed his jacket and helmet, shook his long hair, and placed his sandwich atop his desk next to the bottle of ice water his staff had placed there.

  Today’s four-way virtual meeting involved an additional layer of complexity. They’d be viewing live-action augmented reality street scenes via a hack his chief data scientist in Moldova had engineered.

  For his appearance, he decided Revelation 13:1 would be fitting. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard. At one p.m., he began the virtual chat by selecting a pre-programmed avatar on his control module. With this selection, he assumed the form of a snarling leopard with glowing red eyes and a serpent’s tongue. On his wall monitor he saw video feeds for Lucid, Lab chief Bashir, and Andrei Cazac, the head of his team of data scrapers and black hat hackers in Tiraspol, Moldova.

  “Chairman Incognito, I presume?” Bashir was sitting alone inside the Lab’s secure Blackout Room.

  “It is I.” He knew his choice of biblical creatures and historical figures made his executive team somewhat uneasy. So be it. They should be on edge.

  Lucid appeared on the second screen. On the third screen Cazac adjusted his video cam and tested his audio. “At your service, Chairman. You’ll be pleased to know the credentials still work. We still have root access.”

  Good news, indeed. Months ago Randolph Blackburn had given his team access to the content feed for his media empire’s channel on all the new AR headsets from Google, Apple, Facebook. It appeared word had not yet filtered back to Blackburn that he was on the outs at the Compact, so the operating system backdoor still worked. Either that or he was too addled with his incurable genetic disease and forgot all about it.

  “Let me show you what we’ve been doing,” Cazac said. “I’ll put up three live feeds. One from Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Miami.”

  On Volkov’s wall of flat-screen HDTV monitors, below the video chat with Bashir and Cazac, he now saw three street scenes. This was not much different than watching Lucid’s Eyecam when he was out and about. The four men were able to see the world as these three targets were viewing the world as they walked down the street wearing augmented reality glasses.

  “Now normally this would not be all that interesting,” Cazac went on. “People wear AR glasses for all sorts of mundane reasons. To check the weather. Call their spouse. Check their messages. Scan headlines. To play a game or get block-by-block walking directions.”

  “What are those numbers at the bottom?” Volkov asked.

  Cazac nodded. “Very perceptive. I’ve added a small data window that’s outside the field of vision of the subjects. You’re looking at numbers for heart rate and cortisol levels being detected from the connected wearable devices they have on their wrists.”

  “Chairman, I’m not clear on what’s going on here,” Lucid broke in, looking puzzled. “Why cortisol levels?” And it was true. He hadn’t had time to brief Lucid on the specifics of the activation method they were using. The Switch, as he called it.

  Volkov moved his eyes left and right and watched his leopard avatar do the same, courtesy of eye tracking. The four of them were the only ones who knew the operational details of Project Ezekiel. With Lucid’s background in evolutionary biology, he should grasp how this would work.

  Volkov said, “Bashir, why don’t you tell Lucid about The Switch without getting into the nitty-gritty.”

  Bashir nodded. “As you know, the new generation of wearables provide data on your heart rate via pulse points on the wrist as well as ‘stress levels’ based on the amount of cortisol detected in sweat drawn from the skin beneath the device. This all happens in a matter of seconds.”

  Cazac broke in, “My team increases the stress levels of the targets, starting with anyone wearing these AR glasses in Phase One of the project. Today’s demo is proof of concept.”

  To Volkov’s mind, the beauty of Project Ezekiel was how it blended modern technologies with ancient biology. Normal archaea die of exposure to ox
ygen, making it much more difficult to transmit from one person to another. The variety retrieved by Lucid and Bashir from the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the arctic, however, was far hardier. Once Bashir’s Lab succeeded in genetically altering new strains to survive exposure to oxygen or UV rays, the modified archaea could go to work inside the human host.

  Bashir had hacked the gut-brain axis—the signaling pathways between the brain and microbes in the gut.

  No one outside of Volkov and the lab coats, however, knew the specifics of the archaea experiments. Even Lucid and Cazac had been kept in the dark. So Volkov listened closely to make sure Bashir didn’t say too much or utter the word archaea.

  Bashir continued. “You’ve heard of ‘fight-or-flight,’ yes? It’s a survival mechanism dating back millions of years in mammals. When someone perceives a danger, the eyes or ears send the information to the amygdala, the reptile part of the brain that processes emotions. The amygdala then sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, unleashing a near-instantaneous sequence of hormonal changes and physiological responses that lead one to fight off the threat or flee to safety. Muscles tense. Breathing quickens. Blood pressure spikes. Beads of sweat appear. More oxygen is pumped to the brain.”

  “I see the cortisol levels rising in one of the subjects,” Lucid observed.

  Volkov saw it, too. The numbers began to spike for the woman in Manhattan—one of the women he had personally targeted with the first strain. He was sending a message with this infection.

  Bashir went on. “Fight-or-flight provides the body with a burst of energy so it can respond to perceived dangers. Bumping up your cortisol levels is like pressing down the gas pedal on a car. It continues to speed up until the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, calming the body down after the danger has passed.”

  Which brings us to The Switch, Volkov thought.

  “But what if we managed to suppress the parasympathetic nervous system?” Bashir said with a knowing smile. “What if the brake is removed?”

  Volkov improved on the metaphor. “What if we switched out the brakes as the car careened down a steep hill?”

  This was the beauty of Phase One. He had asked Bashir to come up with easily memorable nicknames for the two strains his lab had genetically engineered. Both were catchy. The Paranoia Strain for Phase One.

  Phase One held the potential to disrupt every aspect of life in the West. Through the introduction of genetically altered archaea in their systems, subjects would see a build-up of stress levels, leading to a cascade of paranoid behavior and a loss of memory, culminating in a crescendo of civil unrest and ultimately the collapse of the American health care system.

  Once people realized how easily the infection was transmitted, chaos would break out. People would no longer leave their homes. Entire economies would collapse. Socializing, going out to dinner, shaking hands—all of it would be a thing of the past. America would be in turmoil in a matter of weeks, if not days. Until America fell, none of his vast plans for the Reset could be realized.

  Lucid said, “So you’re saying—”

  Volkov’s panther cut him off. “We will keep the Americans and western Europeans in a constant state of fear. We will scare them to death.”

  36

  Miami

  Alice Wong stood atop her chair in the conference room at Axom’s headquarters in Miami, grappling with the one-eyed smiley face piñata that dangled overhead. It was a reminder for the staff not to get too self-serious or puffed up. But today the subject was dead serious.

  Victorious over the vanquished piñata at last, she stepped down and looked around the large cherry-wood conference table at the war room she’d assembled. Axom was that rare combo of national politics, entertainment, and opinion that actually worked as an online publication. Having a billionaire owner didn’t hurt, either. She’d been elevated to Editor-in-Chief just a month ago. This was her first crisis, and she knew it was a test of her character.

  “Is everyone here?”

  “Everyone except Alex,” offered Charlie Adams, the super-connected roving correspondent and Alex’s best friend.

  Not helpful.

  She shut the glass door to the conference room. “Here’s the situation. As you know, Alex Wyatt left a voicemail for me last night. Here it is.” She put her phone on speaker and played the short recording talking about a kidnapping victim.

  The ten reporters, editors, and Paul Redman, the billionaire owner of Axom, looked glum at the sound of Alex’s voice being cut off.

  “We’ve been trying to reach him all day. Voice messages. Texts. We had a check-in scheduled for noon today. He didn’t call.”

  “Okay, let’s begin with the setting. What do we know about Samana Cay?”

  She looked around the table and stopped at Paula Hayes, her talented executive assistant. She considered Paula a peer rather than an underling. Axom was famous for being a “flat” organization with few hierarchies and a collaborative structure—the exact opposite of most newsrooms. Which is why her in-box was overflowing with journalists’ resumes.

  “About 18,000 residents live on the island.” Paula read from the research she’d pulled together on her Macbook this morning. “Ninety-six percent of the labor force works in tourism. The thing is, there’s not a bright line between the government and the private sector. You live in a government-subsidized corporate village and work at a government-run theme park.”

  “Great. A socialist paradise.” Stan Walters, the portly curmudgeon in residence, was known for his provocative conservative opinion columns. “Sounds like your people, Charlie.”

  “I hear the Reichstag is adding time shares—you’d be right at home,” Charlie shot back. He could be just as acerbic from his left-of-center perch.

  “Boys, boys, we’re here for Alex.” Alice shot a nervous glance at the owner. Have to keep a lid on my team. “Paula, go on.”

  “Samana Cay is approaching a half million visitors a year, mostly by cruise ship,” Paula read from her screen. “State-of-the-art VR and AR facilities. A single corporate entity owns everything. Get this. The guy in charge goes by the name ‘Chairman Incognito.’ Nobody knows his real name.”

  “You’re joking,” Charlie said.

  “I’m not.” Paula knew her stuff. “And since the United States doesn’t recognize Samana Cay as an independent country, we have no ambassador there. No embassy.”

  Alice tapped her pencil on the table. “Interpol doesn’t operate in Samana Cay. So the only way to report a missing person is to contact the local authorities?” An idea began to bubble up in her brain.

  “Apparently so,” Paula said.

  “What about this Bailey Finnerty he mentioned on the message?” Stan was finally getting down to business.

  Paula nodded. “Confirmed. The Disappearance database was crowdsourced, and you never know if some of these girls ran away or encountered a random act of foul play on that day. But Bailey Finnerty is Missing Person No. 416 on the list. Parents divorced. No reported sightings of her since the abduction.”

  “Until now,” Alice said. “This could be a big story. But our first priority has to be Alex.”

  “When did you last speak with him?” Charlie asked.

  “Yesterday morning at ten. He sounded good. He said the series was shaping up nicely.”

  “He say anything else?”

  “Just that he was getting a lot of color for the package and his first ‘simulation’ was scheduled for sunset yesterday. After the call, he sent in the photos he’s taken so far.”

  That got the attention of DeShawn Robinson, the photo editor. “Can we see them?”

  “Yeah, let me get them on screen.” She hooked up her phone to the main monitor and it displayed row after row of color photos. She switched to gallery mode and began a slide show.

  “Guests are not allowed to take their phones with them during a Fantasy Live session. Alex said he thinks it’s because what the phone sees and what you see through your E
yewear are two completely different things.”

  “Makes sense,” Alice said. “The physical world becomes recontextualized in any virtual or augmented reality experience.”

  They all watched the main screen against the wall as the photo gallery cycled through the first two days of Alex’s shots. The angle of some photos suggested they were taken on the sly. But other shots were group selfies taken with fellow guests.

  “The Fantasy Live people clearly knew some photos were being taken,” DeShawn observed.

  “Right,” Alice said. “Alex signed an agreement—as Andrew Bayless— that no photos taken during his time on the island would be used for commercial or editorial purposes or posted to social media under penalty of fines up to $10,000 per photo. But you were allowed to take a few casual shots to share with friends and family.”

  Lionel Harriman, the corporate counsel, cleared his throat and leaned forward from the seat next to Redman. “Needless to say, the plan was for us to review every photo for its news value if breaching that agreement was our only option.”

  “This isn’t a pitch meeting,” Brian said, using the term the top editors used for the daily session where they wrangle over story placement on Axom’s home page.

  “I know that,” Harriman snapped.

  “Go back, go back,” Redman spoke up.

  This was the first time Alice had ever seen their eccentric owner in the editorial conference room. On her first day as editor, he’d emphasized that he was a hands-off owner, even though he liked to be kept in the mix when an inside tip crossed her desk. She didn’t have to run special projects or in-depth series past him. But when Alex went missing, he was the first person she called.

  Alice swiped back three photos. “There!” Redman said, pointing at a selfie of Alex posing with two other guests. “Who’s that man and woman he’s with?”

  “I have no idea,” she admitted.

  “Is there a way to run facial rec on some of these guests?” Charlie asked, then glanced at Redman. “Without breaking any laws, I mean.”