The Armageddon Protocol

NINETEEN

Harry’s sharp eyes darted back to the Czech scientist as he studied the broken man who was now slumped down in his favorite leather wingback. “What’s the Ministry?” he asked.

Andrej looked up, startled for a moment at the blunt way the Englishman had asked the question. “I know very little about the Ministry, but one thing I know is that they wanted Gabriel and me dead. Now they have killed poor Gabriel. I am next.”

Harry frowned. “Not good enough.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this…” Liška said, and then began mumbling in Czech. “You saw what they did to poor Gabriel, and I will be next.”

“Then you’d better speak up because right now it looks like we’re the only people who can help you,” Harry said.

“I don’t know…”

“They murdered Pablo!” Lucia said. “If you know who did it then you owe it to him to help us find them and have them punished!”

Liška gave a scornful laugh. “You do not punish the Ministry.”

Harry paced up and down the room for a moment before sitting down opposite Liška and fixing his eyes on him once again. The firm eye contact was important when you were interrogating someone. They had to know your attention was on them and nowhere else. “If you don’t tell us what you know, then we can’t help you and you really are on your own. I’ll just get up and walk. Right now.” As he finished his sentence he pulled a cigarette from his packet and fired it up, blowing a cloud of smoke out into Liška’s room. “No bluffing.”

Liška took the words in and then gave a long, low sigh. “I’m a scientist. My whole life has been dedicated to science, to technology, and for the last few years I worked for the Ministry. Not that I knew it, of course — that’s not how they do business. They live and move in the shadows. If they’re pulling your strings you won’t even know it. It’s been this way for centuries.”

“Sounds like a hell of a puppet show,” Harry said.

Liška stared at him, hollow-eyed. “We are all their puppets. Every last one of us.”

“I’m no one’s puppet,” Harry said.

Liška gave a low, sad chuckle and shook his head. “Maybe… but you said you were in MI6 once. How do you know who was pulling your strings? You would no doubt tell me the British Government, but your life will change if I tell you the Ministry pulls their strings, no?”

“Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.”

“No! It is no theory! It is a fact — a real conspiracy and I know it! They’ve been ruling our society for a very long time.”

“If we’re all puppets,” Harry said coldly, “then tell me who is the puppet master?”

Liška took a quiet, deep breath and tried to steady his trembling hands. He poured more whisky sloppily in the glass, splashing some onto the varnished surface of the antique table beneath it. “You don’t understand. When I found out what the Ministry really was, I was nearly sick — and so was Gabriel — or Pablo as you knew him.”

“Pablo was a good man,” Lucia said.

“But he was misled — we both were… and not just us! Gabriel and I were only the two senior men at the top, but there were dozens of scientists and researchers working for us in our teams. They were all lied to by the Ministry.”

Harry sighed and dragged on his cigarette. “I’m still waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the name of the puppet master.”

“None of us ever knew information like that. It is strictly compartmentalized. There was a man called Hans Steiner who visited us from time to time, but he was merely a representative — just another puppet. I have no idea who was pulling his strings.”

Lucia sighed and sat forward in her chair, bringing her hands up to her face to rub her eyes. As she breathed out a long, stressed exhalation, the Czech professor looked at her and spoke again, more calmly this time. “I’m sorry — he was a good friend to me, but of course you were closer.”

“It feels like he betrayed me with his lies.”

“I understand.”

Liška and Harry listened intently as Lucia described how her life had turned to chaos in the last few hours. “I thought I knew Pablo — Gabriel… I don’t even know what to call him!” she said sadly. “Now I think everything we had together was a lie. I knew he was a physicist in his former life — we spoke about it all the time — but I really believed him when he told me he had turned his back on it and wanted to pursue his passion for art.”

“But you must understand why he had to conceal the truth from you,” Liška said quietly. “He knew if any part of his old existence was uncovered then his life would be at risk. We now know how right he was.”

Lucia nodded sadly and lowered her head. Wiping yet another tear from her eye, Harry moved closer and handed her a handkerchief from his pocket. She took it and glanced at him briefly as she dried her eyes. “Gracias,” she muttered. “I just can’t believe he’s really gone. His death was so violent. No one deserves that.”

“Now the fear is you’re next,” Harry said, turning to Liška. “So we need to move fast. Whoever found Pablo was fast and meant business. I worked in international intelligence for many years, and I know a pro when I see one.”

Liška let the words sink in and then replied with a sharp nod of his head. “So what is our next move?”

Harry walked to the window and gently pushed the voiles to one side as he glanced down the street. Except for a woman who was allowing her Finnish Spitz to relieve himself on the front wheel of a parked BMW, all was normal — pedestrians walking along with their iPhones, a young couple holding hands, a young man pumping up a flat bicycle tire. He closed the voiles and after helping himself to another of Liška’s malts he took a seat. “You can start by telling me about what we saw on this chip.”

Liška swallowed the last of his drink and winced as it burned its way down. “What do you want to know?”

“Why did the birds all just drop out of the sky like that?”

“The birds were exposed to a dust.”

“A dust?”

Liška nodded slowly and looked like he was about to cry. “Yes, a dust, of sorts… Oh God! What have I done?”

“We need to know more about this dust, Andrej.”

Liška sank into his chair and his shoulders slumped down low. He looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and stay there forever. “The dust is not natural, you understand, but artificial — entirely manmade. Smart dust. They call it Perses after the Titan god of destruction. It’s a new kind of nanoparticle which Gabriel and I developed while working together in Sweden. We thought we were working for the Swedish Government with a view to advancing medical science, but the truth is somewhat darker.”

“The truth being, you were making a weopon for this Ministry?”

He nodded glumly. “Indeed.”

As a former MI6 man, Harry Bane knew all about the Deep State, and what Andrej had told him about the Ministry sounded too similar to ignore. A state within a state, the Deep State was something that happened to a country when things were really falling apart. It was when the institutions of the state like the armed forces or other authorities like intelligence agencies went rogue and stopped obeying the elected leadership of the country.

Working silently from within the darkest recesses of the corridors of power, warring factions of anonymous, unelected men and women worked to further their own agendas irrespective of the wishes of the government that was supposed to be leading them. It was as if a coup d’état had happened, only without there ever having been a single shot fired, and without the public having the vaguest idea that it had happened.

The ultimate takeover.

The ultimate betrayal, and what Andrej Liška had described seemed terrifyingly close to a Deep State situation. Maybe, it was even worse — maybe it went beyond the national level and was a state within the international system itself. A shadow power running multiple countries from behind the scenes. A global puppet show. He doubted a man like Andrej Liška, who had devoted his life to scientific research for the benefit of mankind, could even conceive of such a grim state of affairs.

The former spy sighed and rubbed his eyes. “What does this dust do, Andrej?”

“You must remember I thought I was working to help people, not harm them.”

“Please — we don’t have much time,” Lucia said. “I am a physicist too — I understand nanotechnology. You can tell me.”

“As you know then,” he continued, “the dust is so fine it is invisible — this is the first thing you must understand. It is also without flavor and smells of nothing. There is no way for a person to know if they have breathed it in.” He began sobbing.

Lucia put her arm on his shoulder. “Please, you must tell us more if you want us to help.”

He straightened himself up and took a deep breath. “As you will also know, the future of science is nanotechnology — whether that is research, medical or even warfare. The advances made in the field in the last few years have been staggering. They would terrify most people but they simply have no idea what we’re now capable of. The main purpose of the nanodust is to deliver a weaponized agent into a population without their even knowing it, and once it’s delivered they can… do things.”

“Do what?”

“You must remember this is a kind of smart-dust, it has a very basic artificial intelligence. Once a person has breathed it in and it enters their bloodstream then it goes straight to the brain. After that, whoever controls the dust controls the infected body.”

“And this is what happened to the birds?”

“Yes. Once the nanodust was delivered we activated it. In the case of the birds it was programmed to shut down their cerebral cortex completely. We took over their intelligence functions and hacked them. This is why they fell from the sky. We were trying to find a way to reverse it, but we failed.”

Lucia gasped. “Oh my God! That’s terrible.”

Liška nodded glumly and poured himself more whisky. “When science meets warfare, it’s always terrible,”

Harry shot him a glance. “And the scientists I saw at the end of the film?”

“There was a problem at the lab… the dust escaped.”

“It escaped?” Harry said. “You make it sound like it’s alive.”

“It is and it isn’t — it has a kind of basic artificial intelligence, but it’s reliant on a remote controller. The only way to kill it was to activate its function while inside the bloodstreams of the scientists… Gabriel and I were there that day. After that we both knew we could never be part of what they were doing and that is when we decided to leave but not before taking some of the smart dust with us. That was a decision that came at a heavy price.”

“They’re hunting you?”

He nodded. “The events you see on that film were several months ago, and this place is the second I’ve rented in three months. If they find me they will kill me.”

“And you say you failed to find a way to reverse the dust’s effects?”

He frowned. “After we discovered what they were doing we knew we had to work on something to stop it — anything! If they release the dust they can control it like any other remote control vehicle — a plane, a drone — you name it — only in this case, the infected person becomes the vehicle.”

“So if they can kill those who breathe it in,” Lucia said, “the dust’s presence will enable this Ministry to hack entire populations.”

“You are a clever woman,” Andrej said. “I can see why Pablo admired and loved you so much.”

“Hack people?” Harry said. “This is getting out of control. We’re going to need to know a lot more about this Ministry and why they’re manipulating governments into allowing them to make weapons like this.”

“As I said, we were trying to work on a way to disable the dust when inside the subject. We failed totally, as you saw from the film. That is why we stole the research notes, and also on the chip is the activation code for the dust.”

“The long line of numbers we saw!” Lucia said.

Harry frowned. “What are their plans with this weapon — genocide, or this hacking thing?”

“Both. They claim the world has become ungovernable again — too many people. They plan on testing the weapon somewhere big to see if they can control the dust particles, and if they can, then they’re going to put it all over the world and take out ninety per cent of the population. They say this is the only way humanity can ascend to a higher level.”

“And those who survive?”

“They will be hacked and controlled by the Ministry.”

“Turned into zombies, you mean?” Harry said.

“This is hopeless!” said Lucia.

“No — it’s not,” Liška said. “There is one hope… there is something I haven’t told you yet that will change everything.”