The Lucifer Sanction

Chapter SIXTEEN

Gardner Hunter

Education

March 28, 2015



Hunter and Sam sat in the Tom Bradley Terminal with time to kill, time to enjoy people watching - time to study faces of travelers pulling wheeled luggage to checkin counters. As they boarded, Hunter went through his usual routine of analyzing the appearance of passengers, searched for nuns, a football team, a folk singer with a guitar slung over his shoulder – a priest – if he saw none, he relaxed.

The overnight flight would arrive in Zurich at six o’clock; Hunter would take in an in-flight movie, spend time reading a magazine or two, throw down several miniature bottles of Courvoisier and try to grab a few hours’ sleep. Sam on the other hand would sleep the entire flight,

A beeping noise sounded as the dimmed lights of the cabin came to life. One of the flight crew announced, “Good morning, we’re one hour out of Zurich. Your flight attendant will be by shortly with coffee and beverages.”

Sam opened one eye, tugged the blanket around his neck, readjusted his pillow, eyed the six empty cognac bottles stuffed into Hunter’s magazine slot and grumbled. “Did you get any sleep at all?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, I slept like a baby.”

There was a long pause as Sam went into brooding thought. “I emailed copies of the files to two of our physicists. They’re up on what’s going on with both CERNA and Libra.”

“That was quick. How’d you figure that?”

Sam gave a look of self-satisfaction. “I sent it ten minutes after you left the office.”

“Get anythin’ back?”

“Yeah, Charlie Towne looked it over.”

“And?”

“Said he was impressed.”

“I’ve heard of Charlie, heard he’s a genius. What about the other guy?”

Sam nodded. “Pete Steinberg, he specializes in particle physics, co-discovered the neutral pion and the muon neutrino.”

Hunter sniggered, “Yeah sure, I’ve read the thesis,”

“Sure you did.”

“Really, Sam - what news have you got from the two bagel boys?”

Hunter tagged anyone with an IQ above 150 as bagel boys, a reference to Einstein’s Bagels.

“The competition between Zurich and Geneva stepped up.”

“Stepped up?”

“They raised security levels. Pete and Charlie are working on some notes scrawled in the files.”

“Notes?”

“Something to do with nuclear waste storage.”

“You mean like uh - plutonium?”

Silence.

Sam reached below the seat, pulled the file from his attaché case and rifled through the pages. “In one of their earliest efforts, CERNA sent some guy back, a dangerous character. Don’t know his name.”

“What happened?”

“Miscalculated coordinates.”

“What the f*ck’s that mean, Sam?”

“They sent him back too far, that’s what we’ve found here in this file.”

“Too far?” Hunter asked. “Too far to where?”

“The Roman Empire,” Sam replied. “To the year 550.”

“Jesus, what could he do back then?”

“The guy came this close,” Sam said and held his index finger and thumb an inch apart. “He had the pandemic. CERNAwas initiating the very first depopulation sanction.”

Hunter asked, “Jesus Christ, who’s fundin’ these madmen?”

“We’ve a hunch - but that’s all it is, a hunch.”

“Are you sayin’ the guys in Geneva started a plague back in the days of Rome?”

“Bingo. The Justinian plague,” Sam replied. “History’s recorded the outbreak in Constantinople as having been carried to the city by infected rats on grain boats arriving from Egypt, but we know better. I’ve a few pages of history on the pandemic.”

Sam reached back to his attaché case and took out a note pad. He ran a finger down the first page. “You see here, it says it was the middle of the 6th century. Justinian had spread his Byzantine Empire around the rim of the Mediterranean and through Europe. Rats from Egypt spread the plague to Alexandria. From there it went by ship to Constantinople, Justinian’s capital. It eventually wiped out half the population of Europe. Everything stopped, trade, expansion - it marked the beginning of the Dark Ages.”

“That uh, plutonium - that’s really got me worried.”

“Yeah, and it has the bagel boys beat too. CERNA had two of its people attend a recent world conference in Rome. They’re setting up a kind of think-tank on the causes of the re occurrence of the pandemic, are trying to figure out the evolution of the plague bacillus, how it infects humans and what can be done to counteract its spread. These were questions they hoped would be answered.”

Hunter nodded slowly. “I thought CERNA was all about sanctionin’ the pandemic, they wanted to cull the population, right?”

Sam shook his head. “And how do you think CERNA would best stay ahead of the race?” Pause. Then, “What do you think they need to stay abreast of?”

“Jesus Christ, you sayin’ they attended the Rome conference just to...”

“You got it. They needed to keep the enemy close to their chest, to understand exactly what they needed to protect their research from. They needed to make certain their research couldn’t be neutralized by progress in other facilities. Physicists are like doting mothers, they like to parade their babies, and they like to brag. That’s why CERNA has a finger on the pulse.”

“Goddammit,” Hunter groaned. He turned and looked back toward the galley. “Gotta get another coffee

- need to clear my head.” He signaled the flight attendant who promptly brought coffee. Twenty minutes later as the landing gear lowered, Sam stared at the amber tinted clouds on the outskirts of Zurich.

“Sam, this guy, Moreau, just say he does somehow slip on by - is there some kind of serum if he makes it back to the States?”

“There is for the pandemic that’s here already, the earlier strain. It’s the third pandemic, the one introduced to China in the late 19th century that eventually spread here; we’ve already got ourselves a large dose of that one in animals in the southwest.”

“Anythin’ nearer to home?”

“Yeah, Los Angeles in 1924.”

“So what happened - is it still in LA?”

“That outbreak was contained. The Rome conference worked on man-made viruses. During the Cold War, Soviet physicists created organisms that if unleashed would’ve had a terminal effect on the planet. There’d be no burials. People would be dying at too rapid a rate. They’d be left to rot, further adding to disease. Mankind wouldn’t have survived had the Cold War exploded. A Third World War would mark the end of civilization.”

“So wha’dya find so overwhelmin’ in that file?”

“This file? Well, it’s only a matter of time before the world experiences another outbreak like the 1918 influenza according to the information in this file. Not only is it inevitable, it’s imminent.” Pause. “Got your interest yet?”

“Keep goin’.”

“Based on historical patterns, influenza pandemics can be expected to occur three to four times each century when new virus subtypes emerge and are spread from person to person. If the source of the pandemic is a new virulent pathogen, or a new form of an old virulent pathogen, very few people, if any, may be resistant to the disease. The reduction in world population will be high, unless effective prevention strategies are rapidly developed and implemented.”

Hunter asked, “But there’s no preventative strategy for the stuff the guys have taken back, right?”

“Right . . . none. The most recent pandemic scares occurred in ‘97 and ‘99. In ‘97 at least six hundred people became infected with the avian A/H5N1 flu virus in Hong Kong. Eighteen people were hospitalized, six died.”

“Yeah,” Hunter nodded. “I remember that one. I had a shot for it.”

“This virus was different,” Sam said. “It moved directly from chickens to people, rather than having been altered by infecting pigs as an intermediate host.”

“Intermediate host?”

“The intermediate host, the swine. They could incubate and carry the pandemic in a kind of dormant state that could be released at some future date, a swine pandemic eliminating a huge number of the planet’s population.” He took a break, sipped the remnants of his coffee.

Hunter showed anxiety. “That anti-virus injection I had...”

“You’re fine. You can’t contact the earlier virus. CERNA’s following a British team from Cambridge’s Sanger Center actively studying the plague organism. They’ve achieved an amazing feat until recently believed to be impossible; they’ve decoded the complete DNA sequence of Yersinia pestis.” He glanced about, hoping his voice wasn’t heard by nearby passengers. “They’ve reproduced a genome sequence containing every possible vaccine necessary to eliminate the pandemic organism.”

“That other plague, Ebola - the one they’re fussin’ over,” Hunter said. “What’s the difference between the two?”

“Ebola spreads by human to human contact. No fleas required.” Sam pulled a file and carefully fingered his way through an alphabetical set of tabs. When he came to E, he paused. “Ah yeah, here it is - two British historians, a guy named Christopher Duncan and a woman, Susan Scott. It says here they published “Biology of Plagues.” They argued that death spread way too quickly through Europe in the 14th century for the cause to have been Yersinia pestis. Scott and Duncan believe the Black Death spread through human-to-human contact. An anthropologist from Pennsylvania State University, James Wood, made a similar case at a meeting in Buffalo. He said the disease spread too rapidly among humans to have originated in the rat population as the bubonic plague had.

“The research has obviously shaken the boys at CERNAand Libra. Libra sped up the transfer of Moreau and Campion with their ampoules.” He flipped to a dog-eared page. “It says right here that Ebola was not in contention. It says those ampoules could only affect rats and the fleas living on their blood. If Ebola was a contributing culprit, it was purely coincidental according to these notes.” He put on a solemn face and repeated, “Purely coincidental.”

Sam took another pull on his coffee, read further into the CERNAfile and gulped as he came across a yellow hi-lighted paragraph. “Well, well - look here. This’ll put a dent in the Ebola argument. It says here that two molecular biologists; Drancourt and Dutour from the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles did some research in ‘98. These guys identified Yersinia pestis in human remains from 1590 and 1722.” He studied the file more closely, moving it nearer his bifocals. “Hmm, interesting, says that two years later they reported a similar finding in remains dating back to 1348.”

Hunter was intrigued. “That’s impressive evidence that Yersinia pestis played a major role in the Black Death, right Sam?”

“Impressive enough, it says archeologists are now intensively searching for plague cemeteries from the time of Justinian. The theory that Ebola was the sole cause of deaths is under scrutiny.”

Sam’s eyes were stinging from the strain of reading small print. He reached for a paper napkin, folded it, dipped one corner into a glass of untouched ice water, compressed it into a ball and pressed it into each of his eyes. It was a premeditated pause, time to soften the blow he was about to deliver to Gardner Hunter.

Sam said, “I don’t understand these references to plutonium and uh, see here.” He pointed at one partially scratched out line. “It mentions Mexico and right here - they’ve scribbled over what looks like Lucifer Pecillius. I think that’s what it said, can’t quite make out the rest.”

Hunter looked closely at the scribbled notes. “Don’t know. Looks like it could be New Mexico. Like that.”

There was a break in the conversation that continued until the plane touched down and taxied to the gate.

“There’s one important name you need to familiarize yourself with,” Sam suggested. “An organization whose interest is, uh, well . . . their interest is world dominance, the beneficial needs of mankind - according to their members of course. These guys - they uh - they appoint world leaders. They’re known as the Bilderbergers, power mongers who determine through their so-called scientific and economic resources what, ‘in their opinion’, is best for the planet, and what might affect what is truly good for the planet. You see, they’re two different objectives, Gard. You understand where I’m coming from with this?”

“Yeah Sam, I’ve heard about those guys. The Bilderbergers . . . sure.”

“They finance movers and shakers,” Sam added. “They contribute funds to political campaigns. They get their people into power.”

“Anyone you can name?”

“U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner immediately comes to mind. There’s hardly a world leader who doesn’t owe favors to the Bilderbergers.”

Sam faked an exaggerated shudder. He placed a finger in his water, touched his cheek and made a hissing sound. He slid his eyes sideways, did a little role playing and whispered, “Motherf*ckers of the highest caliber.”

The monotone voice said, “Please remain in your seats until we’ve come to a complete stop. Also please check on your overhead carry-on luggage as it may have shifted . . .”