The Omega Covenant

by Richard Holcroft

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Of course, a lot depends on the situation here, but I’m optimistic that by the time I get back, things will be under control.”

  20

  Marchetti and Tom walked into Janine’s office at her request. She looked flushed and angry.

  “We had a problem this morning after you left,” Janine said. “Our telephone operators don’t give out room numbers, nor do we routinely put calls through to you two for safety reasons. They are instructed to ask for the caller’s name and number, take a message, and that’s it.”

  By her tone Marchetti guessed what had happened. “And the operator gave out one of our room numbers.”

  “Right... yours,” she answered, looking apologetic. “The caller gave her a sob story about your mother being ill, and she bought it.”

  Marchetti thought for a few moments. “Okay, no harm done. We’ll just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  She paused and gestured for them to take a seat. “There’s more. About two hours later, while the cleaning lady was doing your room, a man walked in and started looking around.” Marchetti and Tom looked at each other. “All our cleaning people are provided with silent panic alarms in case of emergency–finding a deceased guest, for example. She hit her alarm, and about five minutes later one of our security people showed up at the door.”

  “I have a feeling this story isn’t going to end well,” Tom said.

  She nodded. “When the security guard tried to detain him–find out who he was and why he was there–he bolted for the door. On his way out, he hit the guard with a metal object–a pipe, we think–and headed for the stairwell. He was gone before anyone could stop him.”

  “Is the security guy okay?”

  “I think so, except for a knot the size of a golf ball on his left temple and a broken nose. The hotel doctor looked him over and then had someone take him to the emergency clinic here in town. They did a CT scan and EEG… found a concussion but no fractured skull or brain abnormalities. The police came here also–took a report from the guard and maid and promised to follow up on it.”

  “Where is the guard now?” Marchetti asked.

  “At home. I told him to take a few days off and come back when he’s feeling better.” She again apologized and said, “We’ve re-briefed all operators and front desk personnel about how to handle questions concerning the two of you in the future–or anyone else, for that matter. It’d be best to change your rooms again, too.”

  Marchetti agreed. “A higher floor would be good.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyone get a description of this goon?” Tom asked.

  “Both our people gave detailed descriptions to the police officers: said he was stocky, muscular, with dark hair and complexion, six feet tall, wearing a multi-colored, red and gold Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans.”

  Tom looked over at Marchetti “Delfino?”

  Marchetti nodded. Our man hasn’t disappeared after all.

  21

  Kauai, July 8th

  The bedside phone woke Marchetti out of a deep sleep. His room was so dark he could barely make out the radio alarm clock on the nightstand. The digital clock read three in the morning. An unexpected call at that hour was never good.

  He turned on the nightstand light and fumbled for the telephone handset. “Marchetti,” he answered.

  “Sir, this is Nurse Anderson at Wilcox Memorial. Sorry to be calling at this hour.”

  He cleared the cobwebs from his head and forced himself to sit upright. “That’s okay. What’s wrong?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that Miss Nichols has experienced a great deal of pain the past few hours, so they’ve taken her back to ER.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Forty minutes later–thankful he hadn’t been stopped by a Kauai police officer on the narrow, two-lane road–he parked in the hospital lot and rode the elevator to the second-floor intensive care wing.

  He hurried down the hallway, breathing heavily, and approached the nurses’ station. “How is she?” he asked the now-familiar nurse.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information. But I’ll tell Dr. Hardy you’re here if you’d like to have a seat in the waiting room.” He and the same young nurse had had a conversation a few days earlier about him hovering too close to their place of work. So he assumed her emphasis on the waiting room was a pointed invitation to move his butt elsewhere.

  A short time later, a young surgeon in operating room scrubs walked up and led him to a small consultation room inside the nearby double doors.

  Marchetti took a seat at a table and chairs, while Dr. Hardy slid two x-ray films onto a wall-mounted viewing screen. He flicked on the screen’s lights. “Ms. Nichols had a serious setback this evening we felt needed immediate action.” He studied the images for a few more moments and continued, “I spent four years at the busiest Level 1 Trauma Center in Chicago and have seen more than my share of gunshot wounds. We always use minimally invasive procedures whenever possible, and for the vast majority of gunshot wounds to the chest, we don’t have to do that much–simple tube drainage and a course of antibiotics usually do the trick.”

  Marchetti had seen his share of gunshot wounds himself as assistant district attorney, usually in a morgue. Some of the most benign looking wounds proved fatal. But all he remembered about Vicki’s condition the night she was shot was a great deal of blood and a blank look on her face, suggesting she wasn’t totally aware of what’d happened.

  “In her case, however,” the surgeon said, “it was from a rifle, and she was perilously close to dying, so it wasn’t a question of whether or not to perform surgery. We had no choice; she was in hypotension. A long time had elapsed from the time she’d been shot until they wheeled her into ER. She had a sucking chest wound and in severe shock.”

  Marchetti nodded, although Dr. Hardy wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. “Yeah, it was grim.”

  “The problem she had tonight is not uncommon where there’s been serious chest injury or surgery. She woke up complaining of severe chest pains and difficulty breathing. We did a CT scan but saw no pneumothorax.” He pointed to one of the scanned images. “No air in the pleural space, so the repair job on her lung was okay, and the chest tube was doing its job. But with the pain she was experiencing, along with a fever and swelling around the entry wound, we ordered additional blood work.”

  Marchetti appreciated Dr. Hardy’s thoroughness but wished he would get to the crux of it.

  “The result being, she has a severe infection, as evidenced by her fever and abnormal blood count. We’ve got her on a course of stiff antibiotics and will monitor that and her respiratory therapy closely the next week or so to make sure the infection clears up. Once she’s strong enough, we also want to be certain she gets whatever exercise she can do a couple of times a day. Deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms are concerns in cases like this–blood clots that break away from the leg or area of surgery and travel to the lungs–so we’ll keep her on blood thinners for a while, also. I’m optimistic she’ll survive her injuries okay, but if necessary we’ll medevac her to Oahu, where they have specialists in such infections.”

  The surgeon then escorted Marchetti to Vicki’s room, where she was asleep. He remained there the rest of the night, dozing off and on and waking at the slightest movement or groan. Every hour almost like clockwork a nurse would enter, take Vicki’s vitals, and type the readings into a computer terminal mounted on the wall near the door.

  It was after seven in the morning when activity on the floor began to pick up again. Nurses, dieticians, lab techs, and doctors started coming to and leaving Vicki’s room with increased frequency. Vicki woke up, rubbed her ribs lightly, and asked Marchetti to raise the backrest.

  “Thanks for looking after me, but you need to get some decent sleep,” she said, aware he’d been in the roo
m for several hours. “Four hours sprawled in a chair doesn’t cut it.”

  “I slept.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” she said, as she examined the IV drip in her left arm. “In a real bed, I mean.” She winced and rubbed her forehead. “I’ll be fine. Go back to the hotel and crash for a while.”

  Marchetti refused at first, but she didn’t look like she was up to talking anyway. He’d check with her again that evening. In the meantime, he’d catch a few hours’ sleep back at the St. Francis and then meet with Tom for lunch.

  He managed a smile. “Don’t forget, we’ve got dinner reservations at ‘Luau Louie’s’ tomorrow night.”

  She returned the smile and gave him a dismissive wave. “Say hi to Tom.”

  Three hours’ sleep wasn’t nearly enough after being up half the night, but Marchetti and Tom each grabbed an everything bagel and coffee and adjourned to the hotel office.

  Tom took a sip of coffee and laid a yellow tablet on the table. “The circumstances are uncanny,” he said, tapping his notes for emphasis.

  “Circumstances of what?” Marchetti asked.

  “The other car crash I mentioned, involving the journalist Michael Hastings.” Marchetti nodded that he remembered. “The similarities are startling.”

  “Such as?”

  “They’d both worked on stories involving women in compromising situations with their superiors who also happened to be high-ranking military officials. Hastings’ Rolling Stone cover story cast General Stanley McChrystal in an unfavorable light after he’d made critical comments about the president; Brad’s articles were about General O’Neil and a similar relationship he had with a junior staffer, which got him fired. Hastings had contacted a lawyer with Wikileaks a few hours before he died to tell him about the FBI following him; Brad mentioned his concerns about being followed to both Janine and Commander Kendall.”

  “Go on.”

  “Both journalists supposedly lost control of their cars in a similar manner. Hastings hit a palm tree in the median of a road near Melrose Avenue in LA about four in the morning; Vaughn hit a telephone pole off the side of a lightly traveled highway in the middle of the afternoon. Police departments in both jurisdictions were quick to conclude there was no evidence of foul play, that the cause of the crash was nothing other than high speed.”

  Marchetti nodded. “Too many coincidences to suit me.”

  Tom continued, “Friends of Hastings and Vaughn questioned the official findings and claimed speeding was completely out of character for each of them. Both were working on stories critical of a government agency. In Hastings’ case, the NSA; in Vaughn’s, the CIA.”

  “And you’ve confirmed these details of the Hastings story?”

  “Yes, talked at length with the reporter at the LA Times who covered the Hastings crash. He had gotten background info on the ‘Boston brakes’ technique from a former CIA agent he knew.”

  “Remotely hacking into and controlling a car,” he reminded himself. “So it’s something with which he’s familiar.”

  “Right. In fact, ‘accidental’ car deaths have been the preferred assassination technique for the CIA for years, he said, because of their plausible deniability. Those who want someone dead can hack into the car from a hundred yards away, control whatever component they want–brakes, steering, door locks, whatever–cause the car to crash at high speed, and erase any evidence of code manipulation after the fact. Slick as owl shit.”

  Marchetti shook his head. “Way too easy.”

  “Afterward, the police department conducts an investigation and finds the driver had been speeding. Toxicology report comes back clean, so what else would the cops conclude?”

  Marchetti nodded. “Exactly what happened to Vaughn.”

  22

  One by one, throughout the late afternoon, eight high-end rental cars passed through the wrought iron gates guarding the old sugar plantation on Kauai’s southeast side. Seven men and one woman arriving individually drove onto the circular gravel drive in front of the ornate entrance to the main house. There they were greeted by an armed attendant and ushered inside.

  The visitors had met before and were becoming close associates. Two were former administration cabinet officials. Three were executives with Fortune 500 companies, including the president of an energy company and the CEO of a major aerospace firm. One was former secretary of the navy, another a little-known but wealthy New York-based hedge fund manager. The eighth, a former FBI supervisor, was head of security for one of the country’s largest airfreight companies.

  The property owner and host was a fifty-year-old California biochemist and entrepreneur named Kent Hollingsworth who had purchased the plantation and home a few years prior with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of his biotech company in Silicon Valley.

  The residence–a sixty-year-old, two-story mansion, which he’d totally renovated and expanded–served as his second home. His primary residence remained a six-bedroom home in Palo Alto a half-mile from the Stanford University campus. Frequently, he’d use his part ownership in a Gulfstream IV and jet to Lihue for a month or two at the comfortable, though hardly luxurious, home on Kauai, which was the case this trip.

  Once one of the island’s largest plantations, the six acres of sugar cane remaining on the Hollingsworth property were open to the public largely by request of the Kauai Tourist Bureau as a modest reminder of the island’s past. Gone, however, were the laborers’ shanties, the plantation manager’s modest dwelling, and the forty additional acres when Kauai sugar cane was king.

  The sweet, tall grass had already been growing on Kauai when Captain Cook arrived on the islands in the late 1700s, likely planted centuries earlier by Polynesian explorers. The islands’ warm, sunny conditions and plentiful rain made Hawaii an ideal climate, and by the mid-1800s, sugar cane was a thriving industry. Now, hotels and condominiums sit where sugar cane grew before mass production became unprofitable, and traffic jams have become common during typical work hours.

  Hollingsworth’s grounds were generally open to visitors by prior reservation, but for these two days, the plantation grounds were closed to the public until Hollingsworth’s houseguests departed.

  An imposing wrought iron fence and gate separated the sugar cane field from the residence. No one was permitted on the residence side of the fence without Hollingsworth’s permission. Most locals were well aware of the menacing-looking security personnel who patrolled the grounds, and few dared test their dedication. The fact they were armed and accompanied by a fierce-looking Belgian Malinois was evidence enough that strangers weren’t welcome.

  Once inside the home, each of the seven guests was shown to the great room off the ornate lobby. There they were offered a choice of drinks, from champagne and fine wine to Kiawe Honey Porter local craft beer. At five o’clock, Kent Hollingsworth dismissed the employee who’d busily replenished their food and refreshments and closed the large, oaken doors.

  “If you’ll refill your glasses and take seats, lady and gentlemen, we’ll get started,” Hollingsworth instructed them. When they’d settled in at the large conference table, Hollingsworth continued. “Step one of Operation Omega is now underway. Our partner successfully planted the smallpox atomizer in the workout area of the cruise ship once it left Honolulu. Every indication is it dispersed throughout the ventilation ducts as planned. He disembarked here at Nawiliwili and never got back onboard. A perfect operation–better even than planned.”

  “Excellent,” Russell Wilkerson, the aerospace exec, said with a slight smile.

  “We’ve got smallpox cases now showing up in New York, Atlanta, Boston, Memphis, and other cities–twenty we know of so far. All were passengers on the Tropic Star liner, and we expect the number of cases to rise exponentially as those patients pass the contagious virus on to others.”

  “Our bio expert deserves praise, too,” Wilkerson said. “He obviously knows what he’s doing.”

  Hollingsworth nodded. “We had two with us at one
time, as you know, but one changed his mind about taking part in the operation. A short time later, he met a most unfortunate accident.” Agent Terry Engel, the former FBI supervisor, smiled briefly and stared back down at the table. “I hated to lose him, but this other gentleman, Viktor Brusilov, has filled in superbly. He has an impressive resume: Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology in Moscow, three years with the Russian Ministry of Science and Education, and three years in Iraq. He doesn’t ask questions and has proved most reliable. Needless to say, I’m pleased with his work.”

  “How many dead so far?” Bengal Energy CEO Roger Coggins asked.

  “Four that we know of, but more sure to come.”

  “I have to say, I am uncomfortable with the fatality aspect of the operation,” Ronald Melick, the hedge fund manager, admitted. “Isn’t there some other way to do this and get the same result?”

  Hollingsworth glared and pounded his fist on the table. “I’m sorry about that part of it, too, but history shows innocent people have to die in order for things to change.” He looked around the room to make sure everyone understood. “We are patriots, not murderers... with enough power to make a difference. What we are doing is necessary for the good of our country. Despite the unfortunate deaths of a few, the end result will be to gain a whole lot more than we lose.”

  “I agree we did the right thing,” Wilkerson said. “Drastic changes require drastic measures. Everything worth fighting for has collateral damage. If we’re going to change administrations, keep Iran in check, and accomplish whatever else we need–including curtailing civil liberties and instituting marshal law–citizens have to realize we are faced with an unpalatable situation with this administration and have little choice.”

  Hollingsworth thanked Wilkerson and said, “Take Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An invasion of Japan would have cost us thousands of lives. The atomic bomb, as devastating as it was, saved many times that number. If McHugh were allowed to remain in office, the defense cuts proposed in his next budget, his dawdling in the Middle East and passiveness with Premier Sokolov, his blatant softness on Iran and poorly defined mission for our armed forces in general would result in not a hundred, but hundreds of thousands of deaths if we didn’t intervene.”