Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

Fortunately, King had his Chess Team phone. Rescue, in the form of Crescent, traveling halfway around the world at Mach 2, had arrived a few hours later. Now, he was tracking the other helicopter, the one that had borne Sara and Felice Carter away.

“That’s where they landed in Addis Ababa,” Deep Blue observed from Chess Team headquarters in New Hampshire. His face was visible on the second computer screen and his voice was a tinny electronic reproduction in King’s headphones. “That compound belongs to Alpha Dog Solutions, a private security firm that’s doing counter-terrorism operations under contract for the CIA.”

“Sara told me that Fulbright might be a CIA officer.”

“I couldn’t verify that. If he really is with the Company, then he’s probably NOC, and information on that is too closely guarded for me to root out with just a discreet inquiry.” The acronym stood for “non-official cover” and was reserved for intelligence operatives working deep undercover espionage missions. “Or it could just be an alias,” Deep Blue added.

King rubbed his eyes. Despite his ability to thrive under the worst conditions, fatigue was finally starting to take its toll. “What else do we know about Alpha Dog? Do they have other clients?”

“In that region, they also do site security for a number of petroleum companies. Curiously enough, it looks like they received several payments, all from different clients and all in the last three days. If I had to guess, I’d say someone was trying to hide the actual size of a very large payoff by splitting it up… Oh.”

“What?”

“The men who attacked you on the road from the airport, when you first arrived, were Alpha Dog contractors, not Gen-Y.”

“I guess they knew I’d make trouble, and wanted me out of the way.” King glanced back at the satellite feed, where a group of tiny figures moved between the now stationary helicopter and a small private jet. A few frames later, the jet taxied for take-off. “Do we know who owns the jet?”

Deep Blue consulted his own computer screen. “A shell company. I’m starting to get the sense that someone is trying very hard to cover their tracks.”

“So what do we know for sure? This guy, Fulbright, was able to call out the CDC through official channels; let’s assume that means he really does work in some government agency, but he’s gone rogue. His real employer has almost unlimited resources, and the ability to channel money through a number of different corporations. And let’s not forget, somehow they were keeping an eye on what Manifold was up to. They knew what Felice Carter brought back from the elephant graveyard almost from the start.”

“That kind of reach takes a lot of money; more money than multinational corporations, more money than most governments.” Deep Blue’s eyebrows drew together in a perplexed frown. “When I was in office, there was chatter about a… I guess you could call it a ‘metacorporation’—an entity that was secretly insinuating itself into other corporations, the really big multinationals, using shell companies and phony proxies to take over, essentially creating a gigantic global monopoly.”

“How would you keep something like that off the radar?”

“Logistically, it would be almost impossible. One person couldn’t run something so complex, and if you had a board of directors…well, eventually someone would slip up, or get greedy and break away…or they would just make bad decisions and it would all come unglued. But that never seemed to happen. There were rumors that the whole thing might be controlled from cyberspace by a sentient computer network. Artificial intelligence would be one explanation for the level of control that’s been exhibited.”

King shook his head. Global conspiracies were the last thing on his mind right now. “What does any of this have to do with Sara? Or with what Felice discovered in that cave?”

“If it involves bioweapons research, then I can think of at least one nightmare scenario. Radical depopulation. Selective reduction of undesirable elements in the population as a way of increasing control and bringing about economic stability.”

King thought about what he had witnessed in the cavern. “So, give the ‘desirable’ people the vaccine, and then turn the rest into zombies. A drone workforce that never complains, never rises up in revolt, and will defend you without question.”

Deep Blue nodded. “That’s exactly how a computer would reason. The economically disadvantaged represent a constant source of social instability. From ancient times, kings and emperors controlled the masses with distractions—gladiatorial games, circuses, daytime talk shows—but now there’s the potential to simply switch off the part of the human brain that causes discontent.”

“They already have the way to throw the switch. They just don’t have a vaccine for the ‘desirables.’ That’s what they need Sara for.” King took a deep breath. “Do we know where they took her?”