Destiny

ONE-HUNDRED-EIGHTEEN

It was almost 9:00 p.m. when Bill Gray stood from his desk in the NSA complex and walked three doors down the hall to the media room. Half a dozen analysts sat behind computer monitors and read data. Seven wide-screen television monitors were at the far end of one wall. Network and cable newscasts were recorded and archived. Gray watched a live feed from CNN. “Could you turn it up, Ben?” he asked one man.

“Sure.”

The CNN newscaster said, “Authorities in Sicily say they’ve called off the rescue and search for the bodies of a man and a woman believed to have been Paul Marcus and Alicia Quincy who apparently died in a helicopter crash into the Mediterranean Sea. Paul Marcus, as you probably know, became a global household name in the last few days after he accepted the Nobel Prize for medicine and issued a warning to the world. Marcus’s website has words he says he photographed directly from prophecies that where sealed by the prophet Daniel more than four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Mysteriously, the information seems to make connections to many of today’s largest companies and the people who run them. Federal indictments have been handed down against six of the wealthiest people on earth. The last person known to have seen Marcus and Quincy is John Gravina, a thirty-five year old Sicilian who was shot by an unknown assailant and left for dead. From his hospital room, Gravina told police he drove Marcus and Quincy to the Adventure Flight Helicopter Service where the couple had made plans to fly over Mount Etna. A pilot from the flight service is missing and presumed dead as well. The helicopter was pulled from thirty feet of water. Its doors had been ripped off in the crash. There were no human remains found in the helicopter, and officials believe the bodies of the pilot, Paul Marcus and Alicia Quincy are lost at sea.”

Jonathon Carlson sat by himself in the dark. One small lamp was on near the overstuffed leather chair in his library. A few yellow flames licked at the split oak logs in the fireplace. Carlson’s cell phone buzzed softly. He looked at it on the lamp table next to his chair, ignoring the call from Russia for the third time in the last hour. Carlson lifted a bottle of sixty-year-old Macallan Scotch and poured the remaining portion into a crystal glass, the ice partially melted.

He raised the glass in a toast to a framed photograph on the wall of his grandfather taken inside the I. G. Farben building in Germany. His grandfather was frozen in time, shaking hands with two other men, an American and a German. Dozens of workers, mostly women wearing smocks, were out of focus, blurred images in the background. The German in the picture wore a fedora hat and trench coat, his face turned in profile, looking directly at Andrew Chaloner. A close observer could make out the dark of a small moustache above the German’s top lip.

Jonathon Carlson stared at the photograph, softly lit by a single low-wattage bulb above it. “I raise my glass to you Grandfather, and to your circle of friends. My circle is broken…as is this inheritance I’ve tried to build upon. I personally may have been defeated, but our cause will never die.” Carlson lifted an antique Colt .45 pistol. Without hesitation, he placed the end of the barrel next to his temple and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter splattered on the screen of his cell phone, which buzzed for the fourth time within the hour.

The former president of Russia cursed Jonathon Carlson. He threw his phone against the wall in his office directly under a photograph of Joseph Stalin, who was dressed in uniform at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. In the picture, Stalin sat next to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Harry Truman. The purpose of the meeting was to decide how to administer punishment to defeated Nazi Germany.

In the background, almost out of focus, a keen observer could make out the image of a man staring at the back of Stalin’s head. The man was David Marcus.