Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) (11 page)

25

Los Angeles, California

ZORAIZ, DRESSED IN BLACK ATHLETIC garb from head to toe, stepped from the Navigator with his three companions. Some in his position would resent having to execute the task at hand. It was a job for younger men—men like Fahad at Wonder World— expendable men. But this was a particular mission he savored for himself. He would not miss it for all the fleeting pleasures of the world. If he fell in service to Allah, he would enter Eternity as a martyr. His director would be unhappy that he had to find someone to take his place to handle their West Coast operations—but he would ensure that holy duty was accomplished successfully. The other operations would not be jeopardized if he were dead. He had carefully trained and vetted his young lions and panthers for their assignments. They would not falter.

He cut down a side street, his three lieutenants in tow, to the secluded location he had selected to observe the Islamic Center of West Los Angeles.

His instructions were simple. Let Southern California know the face of true Islam. He had meticulously planned a week of events that could not be ignored. Wonder World was the climax and would strike terror in the general population. What he was about to do would kindle
the embers of fear into a blazing flame in the Muslim population— the barely-Muslim population, he snorted. So many men and women who presumptuously claimed the name Muslim—
slave of God
—had wandered from the faith. This act would announce that comfort and compromise were no longer acceptable. Turn to Allah in true devotion and obedience—or die.

Imam Tashbeed Nasif, a professor in the sociology department at UCLA and a leading moderate voice for peace in the Muslim community—a
kafir
—a dog who would burn in the deepest pits of hell—a man who met with Christians and Jews as equals—had been invited to deliver a speech on bringing peace in a pluralistic culture.

Dog! Whore! Enemy! Kafir! You are no true Muslim.

The main meeting room held 300 seats and was expected to be filled with Muslims, Christians, Jews, godless atheists, and other enemies of Allah. How could Nasif even be called an Imam?

A handsome movie star would be present to introduce the Imam. He was married to a political activist who claimed to be Muslim but was nothing more than a tool of the West, a follower of Satan.

He nodded and the three others moved to their pre-assigned places. Timing was everything.

The crowd outside the center was beginning to thin as the time for Nasif to speak ticked down. He would wait for one particular limo— the one carrying the handsome movie star and his beautiful wife— before he gave the signal to move.

Each of the four men carried an Uzi that could discharge 600 rounds in a minute. He didn’t like to use anything made in Israel, but it was the best weapon available for the assault. The men carried enough magazines to discharge 9mm Parabellum ammo continuously for three minutes. No one would be left alive. If a few miraculously survived, that would be fine. They would be shattered witnesses of what happens to those who betray the Prophet.

The gleaming black Escalade pulled up even with the door. Just a driver. No personal security—they trusted the rent-a-cop agency hired by the Islamic Center. Big mistake on the couple’s part. The men in ill-fitting blazers with shield-shaped patches sewn on the chest would pose no problem. One of the men, the supervisor for the evening, in fact, worked for Zoraiz. His job was to know where the other security men were and shoot them if they posed a threat to the assault.

A couple of news stringers shot photos as the actor took his wife’s arm to escort her up the steps and into the building.

Now was the time to wait for everyone to be seated.

Zoraiz reached for a cigarette and reminded himself that no matter how anxious and excited he became, he couldn’t do anything to reveal his presence. He stuck a piece of gum in his mouth.

After five minutes of shifting from foot to foot and chewing every last trace of flavor from the gum, he saw two flashes of light, the signal from his man inside the conference room. The people were seated. It was show time.

“Move,” he hissed into the mouthpiece.

He didn’t even look to see if his instructions were being followed. He and one of his men would go through the front door, the other two men through side doors. All were to be unlocked.

Zoraiz began firing in the entrance hall, taking down stragglers who had to make a trip to the bathroom or finish a drink—what had the world come to with an open bar in a supposed center dedicated to Allah? He could hear shots and screams as he entered the back doors of the auditorium.

Two rear exit doors and two side exit doors, each was blocked by an Uzi-wielding attacker. There was nowhere for the crush of people to run, even though the sheep being slaughtered tried vainly to escape, creating a riot of writhing and collapsing humanity. The four men calmly and methodically moved up and down the aisles, blasting bodies in striped motions to make sure no one escaped judgment.

The actor, his wife, and the event organizers were already dead. Only Nasif stood alive on the stage. He stared with hatred at Zoraiz.

“Kafir!” Zoraiz shouted at him.

“Fool!” Nasif bellowed back. “You are so foolish you don’t even know what you have done. You bring shame on your faith. You kill your own people and friends of your people. Countless more will die because of your depraved anger. You dishonor the Prophet.”

“All I do is for the Prophet. All you do is based on your own honor, your own comfort, your own twisting of the Koran.”

Zoraiz was ready to say more, but a single shot exploded from behind him. A red, white, and gray crater erupted in the center of the Imam’s forehead. He stayed erect for another two heartbeats, and then crumpled, his head bouncing off the podium as he careened back on top of the handsome movie star.

Zoraiz whirled to see which of his men robbed him of his thunderous honor. It was his man with the security company.

“You must go now. Police are on the way. Go now!” shouted his inside man.

Zoraiz’s muscles tensed. His face was a mask of rage. He lifted the Uzi and loosed a staccato barrage of bullets into the man, obliterating his features. Killing him was already a potentiality in order to sever connections to him. But when the man stole his glory and dared order him to move, it was inevitability. Zoraiz prayed that Allah would not look kindly on the man’s insubordination.

Paradise is not for such as him.

The three men looked at Zoraiz warily. He nodded and they moved to the back exit quickly.

They were back on the street where the car was parked in three minutes, leaving the bloody, mangled carnage behind them. Sirens wailed as police responded, but they had pulled away from the curb of the scruffy suburban street before the first responder arrived.

That was almost too easy, Zoraiz thought, his eyes gleaming with the last traces of the adrenaline rush.

As Zoraiz pulled to a stop sign, he looked down quickly and hit send on a text that had already been composed:
Job done. Allah be praised.

Zoraiz drove through a couple of intersections and made two quick turns. He then pulled the Navigator to the curb of the side street he had turned on. He climbed out and dropped the cheap prepaid Nokia cell phone to the ground and used the butt of his Uzi to smash it into a thousand pieces. He kicked the pieces through the grill of the drainage opening to the sanitary sewer. He got back into the SUV and drove away.

He dropped each of the men at his home in silence, thinking about Wonder World and other fireworks he had planned for the sprawling, godless City of Angels.

He hoped his young protégé, Fahad, the Panther, was ready for his assignment.

Zoraiz had big plans for Fahad.

Chicago, Illinois

ALAN JOHNSON WAS AT DINNER with his wife and kids in a crowded restaurant. Feeling the vibration, he glanced down at his phone, read the screen, and smiled. He apologized profusely for using the phone during family dinner and reminded his children that this was bad manners. He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a white napkin and picked up his fork to finish the mouthwatering piece of carrot cake he ordered for dessert.

If Zoraiz Tariq knew who he was really working for his head would explode. Johnson frowned.

Do I know who I am working for?

26

Boston, Massachusetts

WAITING HAD ALWAYS BEEN ONE of Dr. Rodger Patton’s main strengths. You don’t become a research scientist if you are impatient. His scientists were still still busy at work, but his job at the moment was to watch and learn from what was about to unfold.

Patton decided to leave the office early—it was only a twelve-hour day—and return to his home on Beacon Hill, where he would go to the basement and release tension on his rowing machine while watching CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera on the three TV monitors set up to kill the mind-numbing boredom of exercise.

Dr. Rodger Patton, a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Harvard University, could barely contain his elevated heart rate.

I must exercise.

The first two major beta tests from his laboratory were underway. One was designed to test kill efficacy. The second was designed to disable and distract. Both were designed to create conflict.

He didn’t know details of the Patmos military initiatives, but they were designed for the same purposes. From the standpoint of an observer, he was curious if biological or traditional warfare would hold the key to achieving the Patmos goals. With what they hoped—and
needed—to accomplish, he didn’t care. But still, he couldn’t help but cheer for the triumph of applied molecular science.

Disruption of the food supply would be devastating, but would take longer to work. That’s what intrigued him so much about the flesh-eating plague led by Dr. Dolzhikov, which was being delivered in the enhanced form created by the work of Dr. Claire Stevens.

The beauty of the Sana’a Ebola test was not the number of evil people it would kill—they were releasing only a whisper of Mariana—Claire Steven’s quaint name for the chimera was first scoffed at and then adopted for its charm. It was the number of moderate people it would kill that mattered, moderate being a relative concept in the Middle East. If you bombed a terrorist camp, the entire Islamic world would publically react with anger and calls for revenge. But the vast majority of Muslims would secretly be relieved that radicals were dead. Radicals were as dangerous to them as they were to the West. Of course, terrorists would be replaced by new recruits, but a more immediate danger would be eliminated.

But kill men that minded their own business and caused little to no trouble and the outcry would be widespread and come straight from the heart. It would provoke true emotion and action. Even if the kill ratios in Sana’a were below expectations, he was certain the beta would be a success.

Stevens’ enthusiasm for the immediate success of the virus was contagious—no pun intended—and despite misgivings about her petulant temperament, he hoped she was right.

Patton switched off the lights in his office, locked the door, and punched in the security code across from the receptionist’s desk before exiting the suite. He took the elevator down to the garage level, mulling over the pluses and minuses of the brilliant and temperamental Claire Stevens.

As he started the engine of his Audi 7, he opted for a Rachmaninov concerto rather than the news. That would make it easier for him
to keep rowing to the music of headline news. His commitment to Patmos had come at a physical cost. He was fifty pounds heavier than when he started—and he had already been fifty-pounds overweight at the time. If he was to be at the forefront of building a brave new world, he needed to take better care of his earthly temple in order to savor the fruits of his labors.

In the week or two that the world slowly became aware of the biomedical tragedy unfolding in Sana’a, investigators from a rainbow of countries and agencies would look for answers. Clues planted by Patmos counterintelligence operatives would point them to Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Saudis, the Americans, Kurds, Turks, Russians—always the Russians, such easy targets—the Israelis, the quiet and secretive Swiss, and tribesmen from Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen—all in equal measure. The investigators’ work would be an impossible slog through muck and mire as guns and accusations blazed. Guns and accusations their team was augmenting, sometimes paid for by the victims themselves. Brilliant.

Recruiting Dimitri Dolzhikov had been his greatest coup as head of Jonathan Alexander’s bioweapons team. Though in his seventies, Dolzhikov was still energetic and brilliant. His specialties in the Soviet Biological Warfare program were Ebola and Marburg. He earned a Ph.D. from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology—“the Russian MIT”—at the age of twenty-one, immediately becoming the youngest member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. While at MIPT he was sent to Petrograd State University for specialized study under Nikolay Semyonov, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1956. Semyonov invited Dolzhikov to teach at Petrograd, but the Soviet apparatchik had different plans for him. Back in Moscow, he was teaching doctoral students at Moscow State University at age twenty-two. Most of his brilliant students were four or five years older than him.

By age twenty-four he was immersed in the Soviet bioweapons program. He had seen and done it all, helping the Soviet Empire weaponize and stockpile thirteen different bio-agents, including anthrax, plague, botulism, smallpox, and Marburg.

Dozhikov preferred Marburg over Ebola—something Patton never revealed to Alexander. That ship had sailed. Patton had already spent too much time, money, and energy acquiring the building blocks of an Ebola pandemic—not just for a slice of West Africa that was easily contained and that made grand but safe theater for rock star benefit concerts—but a pandemic that showed the potential of reaching the only place people truly cared about; home. Marburg might be better but there wasn’t enough time to change course. Dozhikov agreed Ebola was adequate and nearly as deadly as what he considered to be the clear first choice. The millions of euros he was paid up front and annually certainly helped Dozhikov be flexible.

The world academic community expressed conflicting assessments of Dozhikov’s contributions to science when news of his death from a massive stroke hit the international news wires, a necessary red herring.

One of the reasons Patton recruited Claire Stevens was that Dozhikov was a horny old goat who flourished when pretty young women were around. And no question, Claire was a beauty. She was a prima donna that pouted when she didn’t get her way, but that made her even prettier. The fact that Stevens had shown true brilliance and initiative with the improved delivery and absorption properties to the Ebola-based chimera was a pleasant surprise and icing on the cake.

Little did she know how close she came to being rejected for the Patmos Lab. She put him in a tough spot by lying about her history of depression. He personally vouched for her, which sealed the appointment and spared her life. Smart people could be so naïve. If she’d been rejected, did she really think they would let her live, knowing as much about them as she did?

But so far her work with Dozhikov and the other lab team members was a stunning success.

Patton was personally heading up the second beta event, which was equally fascinating and potentially more deadly—at least in his mind. A rule of thumb in warfare is that it is usually more effective to disable an enemy population than to kill it. Why? It is far more expensive for your enemy to care for the sick and wounded than bury their dead. What better way to disable the enemy population than striking at the food supply? When the CIA introduced the African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, Castro himself had to give the order to slaughter five hundred thousand hogs to stop a nationwide animal epidemic. It was a bad year for Cuban sandwiches. The politically incorrect joke in the world espionage community was that “Fidel didn’t bring home the bacon.”

When Patton started developing Alexander’s bioweapons program he had wanted to work with several invasive plants that would destroy the permaculture of certain targets. But it was impossible to project the rate and extent of spread, which made it impossible to meet Alexander’s timetable requirements. Herbicidal cannibalism was still on the back burner for future use as plans unfolded.

Patton turned his research to toxic pesticides as diverse as DDT and Agent Orange. He and his assistants had focused on the worst of the worst from Agent Orange, 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, as the basis for their herbivore on steroids.

The next debate was determining the first target.

He personally wanted to hit China’s breadbasket, the Shandong Province. China met the criteria of being the most egregious reason the earth’s population growth was killing the planet for everyone else—and the government’s easing of the one-child law was going to make their role on Earth hitting the Malthusian tipping point even worse. With the number of mouths to feed there, the logistics of delivering the
tonnage of unanticipated foreign grain needed if their crop production was cut by even twenty percent would be impossible to execute. Yes, China would be perfect, he thought.

“But delivering the Big Orange will be tough there,” one assistant said.

“We can recommend it and let the logistics team tell us it can’t be done,” Patton responded.

“But why shoot a horse that’s already dead?” asked his longtime friend, colleague, and project manager, Bob Jenkins, a brilliant agricultural scientist that hid his killer mind behind a good old Nebraska farm boy persona.

“What do you mean?” Patton had asked him as the other members of the group looked at Bob.

“Our populous neighbors from the Far East have 337 million acres of arable land. Their kind and benevolent government has finally admitted that two percent of that acreage is too polluted to grow crops. And be aware, they aren’t acres of land like we have in Nebraska. That’s mighty big of them to finally fess up they got a problem. But not big enough. The UN’s numbers don’t agree with the Chinese numbers and suggest that eight million acres, more than twenty percent of the land, are so filled with carcinogenic metals that any crops grown there will make going hungry feel like a picnic in the park. Heck there’s enough cadmium in the soil to put half the population on dialysis.

“Now I love the fine folks at the UN,” Jenkins continued, “but everyone in this room knows that some of the UN’s official commission reports might fudge things a little this way or that, depending on
whom
they want to pick on or
whom
they want to keep happy. If my French
amie,
the esteemed Dr. Genevieve Mitterand, isn’t familiar with the American use of the word ‘fudge’ in the context of my statement, just think of that feller Pierre who gave you a box of chocolates to prove his love for you, when all along you knew that what he really wanted was to get you in the sack.”

Jenkins would have explained the idiomatic background of “in the sack” to the unsmiling Mitterand had Patton not given him an impatient nod and roll of his hand to keep moving.

Nonplussed, Jenkins forged on: “The good folks at the UN get ignored by the Chinese so much they toned the report down so that maybe they’ll get along a little better. I guarantee it. And I would know. I think I’ve personally worn out three pairs of my mighty fine Timberland hiking boots tromping over half them 337 million acres taking samples.”

“What are you saying Bob?” Patton had said, interrupting Jenkins’ cogent but meandering stream of thought. “What’s your point? You’re convincing me Shandong is ideal.”

“Plenty of time to turn up the heat there, Rodger. As part of the second or third phases of our operations. Unless they do our job for us all by themselves, we can make a bad situation worse. But right now, there are so many variables in what makes the Chinese agricultural system run, and this is my real point, I’m not sure what I’d claim or not claim as our doing when things go bad. We can’t control test conditions. We won’t be able to project future results when we amp up scalability.”

Impossible to argue, Patton thought then and now. Discussion moved from China and the majority of scientists at the table wanted the team to look hard at Central Africa. Jenkins again derailed the train of thought, reminding his colleagues that ironically, famine was such a widespread and perennial condition of the region that the compassionate aid infrastructure was too developed to let their coming disaster kill the number of people they wanted dead. Sure, half the grain intended for famine victims rotted in ports because of the region’s brutal politics. But a lot of food would get through. Too much. Too many NGOs and ministries stood ready to defy the warlords and deliver it.

“We’ve already seen enough prolonging of misery by blocking nature’s own plan,” Patton said. “I don’t think I could stand the disappointment. Where else?”

Jenkins’ alternative made immediate sense to everyone at the table. Patton smiled as he thought of Jenkins’ surprising proposal.

The Ukraine. Russia’s breadbasket. The region was already filled with suspicion and gunfire. It was a powder keg ready to ignite. If not immediately, then as soon as the store shelves in Moscow were empty of bread. Brilliant.

Claire Stevens would have sulked at not getting her way even if she knew an alternative choice was right. Not Patton. Aces in their places. Dr. Robert Jenkins was right. Why hire brilliant people and not listen to them?

Patton broke from his reflections as he steered the Audi onto his block. He was disappointed he had not given Rachmaninov any attention.

I have to give myself some breathing room.

He pulled the sleek automobile into the narrow single car garage. The latest reports he had read earlier that evening—why read again? He nearly had them memorized—gnawed at and twisted his guts. When had he ever experienced such eviscerating impatience? Yes, I need to row. And wait patiently. He thought of their final choice for the mass defoliation of grain beta again.

Patton loosened his belt with a sigh. He tugged down his trousers and threw them on top of his suit coat and shirt. It was too hard to bend over and pull off his socks, so he put his right foot on the heel of his left sock, almost falling when he pried the sock off by lifting his left leg.