Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) (7 page)

15

Devil’s Den Hiking Trail,
Ozark National Forest

THE SOUND OF RUSTLING AGAIN. Pauline looked up. Nothing. Her nerves had her imaging things.

Just finish and tell Burke to get you out. Tonight. Just be finished.

JULES HAD BEEN TRAINED TO stalk prey silently in all terrains and topography. Forest was the hardest. He left his shoes to the side of the trail a mile back. That helped his stealth. The problem was if she saw him coming and got a jump, it would be nearly impossible for him to run her down without shoes. He had watched her closely for the past six months. She ran like a deer. If she got a jump on him, he couldn’t catch her—with or without shoes—and would have to call for backup. They would have to bring in freelancers, never as reliable, to mount a search. There would be uncertainty. Not good.

He would just have to assess what course of action was best when he reached her—or she reached him doubling back. Alexander would want to talk to her. That thought almost made him smile. That would be one interesting and painful conversation.

But nothing would be worse than her escaping into the woods with Mr. Alexander’s property. Though he had warned Mr. Alexander that something wasn’t right with his new girl, the man hadn’t listened. If he had, Jules would not be treading silently through a lush forest in Northwest Arkansas in his bare feet.

That also meant Mr. Alexander was unprotected at the moment, something that made him equally nervous. Jules took pride in how well he did his job of protecting the man.

He needed to get a clean shot off.

CLAIRE’S STOMACH DID A SOMERSAULT and she thought she was going to vomit. Her hands were shaking.

I don’t know if I can do this. I thought I could but maybe I can’t.

This job was to be her exit from a life she had come to hate. There was a moment when she thought Burke would be the one to free her. That hadn’t quite panned out. Him sending her to another man’s bed was a pretty good clue that he wasn’t the man she hoped he was. Now all she wanted was for him to reach for her so she could rebuff him. Or not. Why had the man she thought she might be able to trust drop her into the lion’s den? Whatever she thought he might feel for her was all in her imagination.

Don’t dwell on it. It will only add one more hurt to your pain-filled life. Just concentrate. If you want a new life, you must do this. There is no one else you can count on. No one. Same as always. You should be used to that. Live with it.

She took a long slow breath. She willed her nerves to calm.

I can do this.

She shifted positions, turned the page, lowered her head, and aimed. Before she took the picture, Pauline heard a
phhhht
of air and felt an explosion of pain in her shoulder. She fell forward and heard
another deadly puff of air race by her head, followed by the sound of leaves and twigs crunching behind her. She looked up and saw Jules sprinting toward her, gun raised.

She rolled and scrabbled forward; desperate to do the only thing she knew might save her life.

Run.

16

New York City

BURKE KNEW THE DAY HE had become a new man—and not all for the better. June 25, 2003.

He spent a semester at the University of Missouri in Columbia. It was his first time away from the strict and protective world of his childhood in Nixa, Missouri, where there were two—and only two— approved activities: church and sports. Baseball in spring and summer, football in the fall, and wrestling in the winter. Church every Sunday morning and night, every Wednesday night if he didn’t have a game, and all week if there was a revival.

The first and only time he drank beer before college, the girl from his church youth group got a pang of conscience and told her parents everything that happened. Her dad, a fellow elder in the church with Burke’s dad, made a beeline to the small ranch house Burke grew up in. He didn’t mind the hell his dad gave him that included a nice left jab to the jaw when he dug in to fight it out. It was his mom sobbing for days over the thought of him spending an eternity in hell.

He almost smiled at the memory. It was a different time in his life. Harsh … but somehow sweet.

He wondered if his parents still thought of him. They would have to. Missing in action and presumed dead. There was a plaque for him in
the lobby of Nixa High School and a headstone in the Nixa Memorial Gardens. He visited the cemetery once. But he didn’t visit his parents. Would he ever see them again?

Unfortunately, his mother’s worse fears had come to fruition. He had gone to hell and never come back. His was not a sweet life.

After getting booted from the University Missouri, Burke pursued the only option he could envision. He joined the Army. Even patriotic folks like the fine people of Nixa were never quite clear on whether joining the United States Army was an honor or punishment for a kid who had got himself into some trouble, drinking and fighting his way to expulsion from college.

It didn’t take long for Burke to figure out that if you were going to do the military, you might as well do it right—if you’re going to be a bear, might as well be a grizzly. He got on track for Army Ranger Training Brigade the day he left boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood in St. Robert, Missouri.

Sixty percent ofArmy Ranger prospects that begin in Fort Benning failed the 61-day combat course and were reassigned. The physical hardship, including sleep and food deprivation, was something you couldn’t prepare for ahead of time. Heck, two-thirds of those who didn’t pass muster never made it through the first month. Burke graduated with the William O. Darby Award, signifying he was the best of the best. The 3
^rd
Battalion, 75
^th
Regiment was deployed for the War on Iraq, but as they liked to joke, they took a wrong turn and spent two years in Afghanistan where they fought a series of harrowing battles against the Taliban.

His battalion was finally moved to the Iraq theater of operations two years later on April 25, 2003, but then George W. Bush ordered a cessation of major operations on May 1, just as they were landing.

Burke didn’t need to have worry about job security.

On June 15, he was assigned to Operation Dessert Scorpion, still under the command of Colonel Arnold Grayson—“just call me
Arnie”—their job was to defeat remaining “non-compliant” forces in the “post-hostilities” phase of the invasion. One day they would deliver humanitarian aid to a village, the next day they would rain fire on forces still loyal to Saddam Hussein. Even a college dropout like Burke could understand the three simple principles of waging war against guerillas: identify, isolate, and destroy. Isolating enemy combatants was not always possible—using civilians as human shields was the enemy’s best defense—but they were making lightning fast progress on destroying the Iraqi resistance.

The moment that changed his world came ten days into the operation. Burke got back early from a reconnaissance mission to the city of Najaf. The neighborhood where they were to find bad guys was already a rubble heap from internecine fighting the night before. No one complained about a day off from painstakingly slow movement from house to house and room to room, always wondering if you would be looking down the barrel of an automatic weapon.

His buddies wanted to stop for a very illegal beer at a very illegal bar—the black market was coming to life, a sure sign their efforts were not in vain, before returning to base. Burke hadn’t had even a sip of beer since his college expulsion and wanted to head back anyway. He said he’d cover for the team and get back to HQ solo. Still a stronghold of former Republican Guards posing as bankers and bakers who transformed into cold-blooded killers at night, Burke made his usual wary and stealthy approach to a back entrance of their camp within a city. He still didn’t know why he did it—it wasn’t his job and others were doing a fine job of minding the perimeter—but he decided to take a circuit around the wire to make sure no hostiles were looking for a hole in their defenses. Maybe he was simply delaying his return to the boring routine of living in a confined space.

At one of the remote barricades he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Colonel Arnie Grayson and two other commanding officers were loading two crates of M4s in the back of a truck. It
didn’t look right—he’d never seen an officer loading crates—but he wouldn’t have thought anything of it had he not got a good look at the man standing by the passenger door of the truck who stared straight ahead, puffing on a cigarette. Burke stepped back in the shadows and studied the face. He was sure of it. The man was a prime target to be identified, isolated, and destroyed by Operation Desert Scorpion.

Burke was smart enough to know that allegiances of individual Iraqis changed constantly and that he was a grunt who didn’t know much of anything happening above his pay grade. So he kept what he saw to himself and made his way back to his platoon. He downed a Budweiser—his first in nine months—and trudged to the front gate with the others when they were expected.

But his antennae were up and Burke started watching what was happening inside the command center with the same intensity he watched what was happening outside the fence. When he overheard the extent of the shrinkage of M4s and other tactical gear from the battalion’s armory, he knew he had to report the incident.

On a routine escort assignment to Baghdad, he filed his report to the MP ADCON unit. Little did he know that the colonel who received his statement was a fellow classmate of Colonel Grayson at West Point—and part of Grayson’s scam to pocket a boatload of money in service to Uncle Sam. Two days later he and five other team members were dropped near the town of Tikrit. Their job was to destroy a way station for guerilla forces who rarely slept in one place more than a night or two.

17

The Isle of Patmos

D-DAY, CLAIRE THOUGHT. ARE YOU ready to do this? Are you comfortable forsaking the dreams you had when you joined GlobalHope? Think of all you did, think of what you were trying to accomplish when you worked the field for them. You were going to save the world.

The problem was the field. She got her hands dirty in the Zimbabwean cholera outbreak in 2008; then the West African meningitis outbreak in Burkina Faso in 2009; another cholera outbreak, this time in Haiti, in 2010; three trips to South Africa in 2011 through 2013 for a first-hand experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—the last great global biological catastrophe with a death toll of 30 million— and then to the Guinea Ebola outbreak in 2014. Trips to India were interspersed and too many to count.

It wasn’t the horrors of disease that eroded her sense of compassion for the plight of the suffering over time. It was the hopelessness of the people themselves. What was an occasional smattering of death in the face of such everyday crushing ignorance, poverty, violence, and every other human dysfunction imaginable? When a society was already self-cannibalistic, what was a little disease or plague? Did it really make things much worse than they already were? It paved a faster way for
some people to escape the pain of existence and enter the blessed sleep called death.

Claire Stevens had gone out to make the world a beautiful place only to discover how brutal and ugly it was. But worse yet, the status quo for most people was simply hopeless.

GlobalHope? What hope was there? There was simply no way to counteract the enormity of the malaise that trapped humans in organizational systems and patterns of thought that guaranteed every stinking day of their life span would be filled with misery. If nature wasn’t attacking them, then they attacked themselves.

She had been to Calcutta and visited Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. It was after the iconic saint’s death, but her words and pictures adorned the walls and the sense of her purpose and presence was palpable. She wondered if the saintly woman ever stopped to evaluate the efficacy of her efforts. If not, didn’t that make her a narcissist who acted on her own behalf? It was definitely not PC to speak against Mother Teresa, but really, how could she come to the conclusion that prolonging such a pathetic existence was an act of charity? What good had she and her sisters done? If the well-intentioned sisters weren’t keeping score, Claire was. There were more orphans, sick, and poor than when the legendary nun started the international enterprise.

Claire was sure Mother Teresa was a great woman and meant well. But everyone meant well. Claire was results based. Show me how life is improved and I will crawl across broken glass to help.

What she was doing now would help. And nothing would stop her. The Patmos plans were not subject to the fickle whims of imperfect people. The key decisions had been taken out of the hands of the predators who despoiled existence. It was unfortunate that millions upon millions of victims would die as collateral damage, but for many that would be an improvement from their hellish existence.

Her parents were as proud to be atheists as was she. But she had attended church for exactly one week as a third grader. A neighborhood
friend in Aurora, Illinois, birthplace of Ronald Reagan and not much else, invited her to Vacation Bible School at her church. It wasn’t Baptist or Methodist or Catholic or any of the other more common church names and she wished she could remember what the church was called. It was a seminal event in her life. She was shocked— as were the neighbors who invited her—when her parents agreed to let her attend. As an adult, she laughed at how much they would have debated granting her their permission. But they finally determined it would show their openness and be a cultural experience for Claire. How right they were.

The theme of the week was Noah’s Ark. Most of the activities and songs, crafts, and skits focused on cute cuddly animals. Claire remembered winning a gold fish for reciting a Bible memory verse: “Then God said to Noah, ‘Yes, this rainbow is the sign of the covenant I am confirming with all the creatures on earth.’”

All these years later she still remembered it.

Noah sawed and hammered away. Frolicking animals marched to the big boat in pairs. The Flood didn’t get mentioned until the last morning. It was almost an afterthought. Jolly Noah and his cute fuzzy animals were saved and got to see the first rainbow—with a giraffe as lookout, of course—as they landed their happy and adventure-filled boat on a lush green mountainside. Was she the only one that noted everyone else in the story was drowned? The image of crashing waves, bolts of lightning, and people frantically treading water, scrabbling for a handhold on the sides of the wooden boat, and gasping for air scared her as a little girl. What about the people? Though her parents never said it, she was sure what felt to her like trauma made them very happy. Especially since she never asked to attend church again.

It was in Guinea that the weight ofhuman misery she had witnessed hit its critical mass and altered her outlook forever. But it wasn’t just chronic pathogenic disease. It was the people themselves.

While treating a twelve-year-old girl, Mariama, for a nasty, weeping genital rash, Claire saw, not for the first time, all the evidence of sexual abuse. She looked up at the mother. The woman lowered her head and refused to meet her eyes. She looked over at the father, standing protectively in front of three more daughters. He had no problem making eye contact with Claire. The smoldering hatred in his eyes dared her to say something, do something. He was in a protective stance all right; he was protecting a psychotic pattern of behavior he saw as his right. And indeed, it was his right since no one lifted a hand to stop him.

It wasn’t that event only, but it was in that singular moment that Claire’s heart changed forever. She began thinking of Noah’s Ark again. But not with horror but with … was it possible? Could it be? Hope? Maybe God—at least the concept of God found in an ancient legend— was right to wipe out the evil that man had become. She hadn’t thought of those God drowned as evil. Words like stupid, foolish, incompetent, and chronically violent entered her mind. But looking at Mariama’s father, proud, defiant, violent, she suspected evil might be the exactly right choice of words.

She had been conditioned in her upbringing and education to attribute colonialism and corporate exploitation as the causes for poverty, sickness, high infant mortality, nutritional deficiencies, unchecked violence, and other signs of a sick society. But her own eyes and heart told her that this was the way it had been, was, and ever would be for some people, whether touched by civilization or not.

Her mind turned from saving lives to eugenics. Not the kind of eugenics practiced by that crank Dr. Kevorkian, administering a lethal injection to one old cancer or Alzheimer’s patient at a time. But mass eugenics. A good death applied generously. Claire began to dream of a new flood. In her dream she would ask God if she could help bring the waters.

She was still an atheist but felt her prayer had been answered when she met Dr. Rodger Patton at a conference in Boston later that year. As they swapped war stories about the various pandemic hot spots they visited, they sensed they might have met a kindred spirit in each other. So they verbally probed and danced and sparred around the topic of societies and people that would be better off dead than alive, both for their own sake and that of others on the planet. It was only when they wandered into a discussion of the 19
^th
Century writings of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus that the dam broke and let loose the roiling waters in their hearts to one another.

In addition to being a preacher, Malthus was an economist and demographer. He posited that the increase of population is necessarily limited by means of subsistence; that population does invariably increase when subsistence is increased; and that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice. It was a quaint way of saying when too many people compete for resources all hell breaks loose.

What Claire and Rodger had set out to do in compassionate service to humankind, they concluded, was make everyone happy and fruitful by relieving them in some measure from their culturally-induced misery. Even if neither totally agreed with Dr. Thomas Malthus and later Malthusians on a set population number of nine, ten, or twelve billion inhabitants that the earth could sustain, both agreed the earth’s population was already well extended beyond a number that would allow more than a small fraction of its inhabitants to flourish.

But Malthus didn’t see the bigger picture. Even if Planet Earth could sustain another five, ten, fifteen, twenty billion people—what was the point? Did everyone deserve to live? Wasn’t it obvious some cultures had been measured and found lacking? Shouldn’t Mariama’s father and his like be made extinct for the betterment of the world?

They continued the dance and laughed when they talked about the premise of a popular novel called
Dante’s Inferno.
Why would
someone so smart as the mad scientist villain in the book introduce a population-killing plague indiscriminately? That was so stupid. It was obvious, some cultures knew how to live. Others didn’t. Simple math wasn’t the answer. The Reverend Malthus was wrong on that. Kill half the population but keep the same percentage of dysfunctional people groups, and you were simply kicking the proverbial can down the road for your children or grandchildren.

A week later Rodger called her when she was driving home from work in her Toyota Prius. He was back in Boston. They needed to talk, he let her know. He invited her to dinner at Menton on Congress Street downtown. Over an eleven course meal, he told her that he had come into contact with an organization committed to doing something to make the world a better place for the living—more specifically those who were able to fashion a reasonably successful living. She asked the organization’s name. He said there was no name. But she was being invited to become both a member and an employee of this cutting edge research organization.

A day later, she called in sick to GlobalHope, a first, and flew first class to Frankfurt, Germany. From there she bordered a private plane that was luxurious beyond anything she could have imagined. When she asked the pilot what their destination was he put a forefinger to his lips and made the shushing sound. They landed close to water and from there she was ferried in a luxurious speedboat to an undisclosed island. She was welcomed at the dock by Patton and another scientist with a thick Russian accent. She was given a tour of the most remarkable laboratory facilities she had ever laid eyes on. She was then interviewed for twelve straight hours by a woman who was the head of Human Resources for a company with no name. Patton simply advised her to be forthright. There would be no record of this meeting and no personal or professional repercussions if she wasn’t hired or elected not to accept an offer of employment. Sometimes formal, sometimes casual; sometimes hostile, sometimes warm and encouraging; sometimes general and
sometimes focused on specifics from her life; she was asked to account for every inch, every nook and cranny of her entire life story—and her feelings about the state of the planet.

She wasn’t sure how she did when the interview abruptly ended. She suspected she had failed, something new for her, which made her nervous. But when she landed in Boston, Patton was already there, waiting for her with a limo driver. They were driven to a brick home that had been converted to law offices on Boylston Street. It was there she was officially offered a job with Aristotle Research Partners— the company did have a name, even if it was a front and no one actually used it. Her official assignment would be on the company’s only active project: Patmos. When the attorney told her what her salary and living arrangements would be, she was shocked at how little she was being paid by GlobalHope. She immediately accepted and signed reams of paperwork dealing with trade secrets and confidentiality; non-compete issues, patent ownerships, and too many other legal terms to remember. Details of the actual project were vague but she knew where Patmos was going and what it was about. Her talks with Dr. Patton had been specific. At least five billion non-progressive people must be strategically targeted for death.

She moved from confusion to certainty that this was the right course for a viable future humanity. She would have signed for less than she made at GlobalHope. Money was never her motivation.

A week later she called her parents to let them know she would be off the grid for a while and would call when she could, but that she was more determined than ever to save the world.

Listening to them babble with childlike wonder and joy at what a wonderful daughter she was created a memory she cherished, but ridiculed at the same time. She had talked to them once a month for two years and missed them terribly. But it was a small price to pay for changing the course of world history.

The director of GlobalHope let her know how sad he and the rest of the small team of scientists would be to see her go after she marched in his office and turned in her resignation. But he knew with her intelligence, talent, and drive, she would make a huge difference in the world. She did her best to look sad and grateful.

He was right.

Yes I will make a huge difference in the world. I will dedicate my work to Mariama.