| |
Twelve hours later Chairman Markis and a small group of hard-faced men and women boarded a twin-engine executive charter jet out of Caracas, Venezuela bound for Bamako, Mali. Transferring planes, they flew on to Fes, Morocco, only to transfer again and fly across at Gibraltar and up the coast of Spain, well inside Neutral States airspace.
All this was merely to disguise his movements; flying the same jet across the Atlantic to Africa and then on to Switzerland direct would have risked the United Governments figuring out that he was on board and possibly shooting down the jet over international waters. Japanese Admiral Yamamoto had been killed that way by the US in World War Two, his aircraft intercepted and downed by Army fighters acting on Navy intelligence. Markis had no desire to follow in his footsteps.
It made for a long and tiring journey, though their rejuvenated bodies gave them the energy of youth. They landed at Geneva Airport after almost twenty-four hours of continuous travel.
First out was the leader of the Chairman’s personal security detachment, his PSD. Karl Rogett was an iron-jawed, chisel-faced man with old, old eyes set in his rejuvenated face. Those eyes roamed the tarmac, looking for threats out to the limits of his perfect vision. He took in the buildings in the distance, marking places where a sniper could hide. He examined the nearer threat zones, looking for anomalies in the airport’s routine. He noted the position of Swiss military and security forces with qualified approval. These people know their jobs. But they seem a little complacent.
He waved the rest of his people forward, four men and three women. He had trained them all himself, forged them into a perfect team.
On the one hand he would have liked an all-male group; there was just something about the camaraderie of the old US Marine Corps he had grown up in that was comforting.
On the other hand his girls – that’s how he still thought of them in his secret heart – his girls were the best they could be, sharp and nasty and tough as he could make them. One glorious thing about the Plague was how it allowed them to train more realistically than they ever could before. Barring death or brain damage, they could break each other’s bones in hand-to-hand, shoot each other’s limbs with live Needleshock, and generally train to destruction, coming back in a few days completely recovered.
His girls were also very, very useful for other missions – missions where only women could go, or where they would blend in, or distract with their feminine wiles or even seduce, kidnap, infect, neutralize. His whole team would do whatever it took, short of murdering their opponents. As long as they focused on the good they would do and the benefits of the Plague they would spread, tricking the conscience was easy.
Of course, he didn’t tell the Chairman about most of these little escapades. He reported directly to Markis’ lady spymaster, who was more realistic about things. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Karl had a deep affection for the Chairman. He had no problem reconciling this cognitive dissonance; he understood his role as the attack dog for his benevolent master. Karl did things, necessary things, that the Chairman couldn’t or wouldn’t. It had been that way for millennia; rough men standing ready to do violence so their liege lords could sleep safe in their beds.
Besides, he owed the Chairman his life. He’d been barely conscious but he did remember that day ten years ago when he’d been shot, stabbed and bludgeoned into submission by Daniel Markis himself. It was Markis who had stood between Karl and those who had wanted to finish him off; it was Markis who had spared Karl’s life; it was Markis who had infected him with the Plague, making him young again, and it was to Markis that he had transferred his loyalty after the Unionists had turned the US into a fascist police state.
His team spread out around the airplane, their weapons holstered but their eyes missing nothing. It would insult their Swiss hosts to be pointing guns here and there but they couldn’t complain much about them checking everything out. They peered inside the waiting armored limousine, ran mirrors and detectors under and over it, checking the trunk and under the hood. The Swiss security personnel watched with stoic grace; it was a condition of Markis’ coming that his people double-check everything.
As soon as they were satisfied, they formed a tight knot at the bottom of the rolling stairway. Karl ran up the stairs to the top of the ramp, stepped inside the airplane’s hatch and gave the Chairman the thumbs-up.
Quickly and without fanfare they scurried down the ramp, faster than dignity allowed but with far more safety, to be surrounded by the human shield, hustled into the waiting limousine.
It would take even an expert an extremely lucky shot to hit, much less kill a fast-moving Plague-infected target at sniper distances; eight hundred meters per second sounded fast for a bullet to travel, but a man could run five yards in that time; it took only inches of movement to get out of the way of a projectile. A sniper needed a stationary target, or at least one that moved steadily in a straight line, to strike something at range.
Karl grunted with satisfaction as his principal was put safely under armor. Bettina Loosher, inevitably nicknamed either “Luscious” or “Loosie” by the team, was inside with the Chairman and Millicent; the rest of the team joined the Swiss security people in their armored Mercedes SUVs, behind and in front.
Transit went smoothly, depositing everyone in the underground garage of one of the high-end hotels on the outskirts of Geneva. The team doubled as staff for the Chairman; unlike most other modern potentates, he normally traveled with just one personal assistant, and the PSD.
They escorted him up the stairs to the fourth floor – termed the Third Floor here in Europe, where they counted Ground, First, Second and so on – on the inside of the structure, windowless. This was high enough to be difficult to approach from the ground, low enough to be hard to reach from the roof, and not too high that physically fit Plague carriers couldn’t jump from a balcony in extremis. The team took the rooms across the hall, on each side and behind, so that Markis’ every wall was covered by security. They also rented the rooms above and below and checked them regularly, and all of the other rooms nearby were discreetly empty.
Well secured, Markis finally fell asleep, gathering strength and sharpening his wits for the confrontation to come. Sleeping all through the afternoon and into the night, he woke up around three a.m., his body clock confused. With nothing better to do he reviewed his notes and did a no-equipment workout of inverted and fingertip push-ups, sit-ups and crunches, squats and other callisthenic exercises. It was easy to run to fat as a politician, though the term “fat” was relative. To a Plague carrier, fat was just a bit flabby and soft; obesity was a thing of the past.
After breakfast, the transport to the Swiss Foreign Ministry went like clockwork, appropriate for the world’s premier purveyors of timepieces. Markis appreciated the locals’ efficiency and their Tyrolian ruggedness; something about high mountains bred hardy, self-reliant people no matter where in the world they were.
The Ministry conference room was carefully prepared, precisely balanced; it was a room designed for this type of delicate negotiations. Soundproofed and swept for surveillance devices, it came equipped with two sets of double doors so that any two parties could enter at the exact same time; its table was set slightly low, to avoid the psychological impression of a barrier; its colors were muted, earth-tone, soothing. Rows of sparkling clean water glasses and carafes sat on small turntables set within easy reach of both parties, eliminating any suspicion of specially prepared beverages or glassware for one side or the other. These and many more touches had eased innumerable agreements, enhancing the reputation of the Swiss as the world’s best-respected neutrals and behind-the-scenes facilitators.
In the anteroom, Markis rubbed his hands, wiping them on the trousers of his expensive suit. He thought of the irony of the clothes so reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers outfit of the man he had killed that fateful day a decade ago, Jervis Andrew Jenkins IV. He’d called him a “suit” as a term of insult that day; now Markis was one. He shook his head.
