Callsign: Bishop (Erik Somers) (Chesspocalypse #5)

He stepped out of the plane and into the field just as the passenger door on the SUV opened. Eli Jacobs, a balding, pudgy man with black horn rim glasses, stepped out of the truck and waved. Jacobs wore his usual white coat over black pants. His breast pocket bulged with a wide assortment of pens, at least six of them. As he waddled over, Duncan was struck by the idea that Jacobs was the poster boy for the American nerd. Short, socially inept and brilliant.

“Mr. President,” Jacobs said, saluting. “I—”

“Please,” Duncan interrupted, “I’m not the President anymore. And stop saluting me, Eli.”

Eli’s hand dropped. “Perhaps, but people still call Bill Clinton ‘Mr. President,’ and he’s been out of office for years.”

“Different circumstances.”

“All right, Mr. Duncan. I need to show you something back at the lab.”

“I’m fine, Eli. How are you?” Duncan asked, trying not to smile.

Eli missed the subtle attempt at humor. “I’m not well, Mr. President. Not well at all. And you won’t be either. Not after I show you what we found.”

***

Duncan followed Jacobs into a sterile lab deep underground. Like most of Manifold’s bases, the Alpha facility lay almost completely buried inside a mountain, making it invisible to satellite photos using the visible spectrum. Fortunately, modern satellites were equipped with a wide array of cameras, including infrared, radar, x-ray, gamma, and a few others that only Duncan and a handful of others knew existed. These technologies made it possible to map at least the top levels of the facility from the safety of the Thermosphere.

Prior to leaving for Pinckney, Duncan spent some time going over the maps of Manifold Alpha produced by ground-penetrating radar. The illustrations revealed the facility was hundreds of feet deep—and that was not counting the natural cavern underneath it. But Duncan had a feeling they had yet to truly uncover the scope of the expansive base. How it was built on U.S. soil without being noticed was beyond him, but he suspected a good number of New Hampshire officials made large deposits to their bank accounts. While those officials would normally be investigated and prosecuted, this time secrecy demanded they be left alone. None of that bothered Duncan as much as the facility’s still-unexplored depths.

What was Ridley doing down here? As Jacobs motioned him over to a large, flat screen computer monitor, he realized he was about to find out.

“Look at this,” Jacobs said.

Duncan stepped around and looked at the computer screen. It showed a picture of a wheat stalk. Near the top of the stalk was a pair of dark, roughly triangular masses, which looked almost like a fungus. “What am I looking at?” Duncan asked.

“The sclerotial stage of ClavicepsPurpurea, otherwise known as ergot.”

“Sclerotial? What does that mean?”

“Not important. You should be focusing on the ergot.”

“I thought that was part of a horse’s hoof,” Duncan said, confused.

“Different ergot. This one is a fungus. A dangerous one.”

“Explain.”

Jacobs punched a button on the keypad and the screen shifted to an illustration. To Duncan it looked like a random grouping of hexagons and tiny circles.





It took him a moment to realize he was looking at a large and complex molecule.

“What is that?” Duncan asked.

“That is the molecule of ergotamine, a complex alkaloid found in ergot, and just one of the many such alkaloids contained in the fungus. The effects of ergotamine on the human system are wide and varied, but include vivid hallucinations, irrational behavior, convulsions and even death. Mankind has been using it as a poison for thousands of years. The ancient Assyrians used it to poison the wells of their enemies as far back as 2400 BC.”

“What was Ridley doing with it?”

Jacobs pulled up another screen. This one showed a molecule similar to the first, with one difference.





“What is M-Erg 2.6.3?” Duncan asked.

“An additive,” Jacobs replied. “Manifold altered the molecule.”

“What does it do?”

“We don’t know,” Jacobs said. “The lab is still analyzing it, but we’re having trouble separating it from the rest of the molecule.”

Duncan knew enough about molecules to know that even a tiny alteration could drastically change the characteristics of anything. Once you started fooling around with substances on a molecular level, anything was possible. Based on Manifold’s history, Duncan was pretty sure that whatever M-Erg 2.6.3 was, it didn’t help crops grow or fight off cancer cells. More likely, Ridley had intended to use it to further his own agenda.

“How about an educated guess?” Duncan asked.

“Well, obviously M-Erg stands for Manifold Ergotamine. The numbers probably refer to the version used, like in software. That means they’ve been working on this for a while, so its intended use was clearly defined somewhere in the database.”