The Armageddon Protocol

THIRTY-FOUR

Zalan Szabo rose from his desk with the courtly grandeur of a medieval king and moved across to the window. They were standing in the penthouse suite at the top of the Hotel Ciel. The Hungarian watched the snow fall for a few moments, nodding his head at some unspoken thought and then sighed before turning back to face Harry.

“Such beauty, the snow…” As he spoke, a blonde woman entered the room and moved gracefully toward him. They conversed in hushed French for a few moments and then she walked past Harry to the drinks cabinet. She was very tall — almost as tall as Harry, and had a swimmer’s build and long blonde hair and bronzed skin. He found it hard to ignore the cobalt blue eyes.

“I am Zalan Szabo, Mr Bane. I doubt you’ve heard of me.”

Harry spied a thin man sitting in a chair in an adjoining room, but then Aleksi Karhu shut the door. “I seem to have avoided the pleasure,” Harry said, returning his attention to Szabo.

“Allow me to introduce Elsa,” the Hungarian said. “She’s my personal protection officer. She trained as a bodyguard for many years in her homeland of Sweden and as you can see, she makes most athletes look like common slobs.”

“Where is Lucia?” Harry asked, ignoring Szabo completely.

“Ah — the Spanish girl, yes… she was very hot-blooded. By the time we arrived back at the house her temper had grown considerably worse. I sent her somewhere to cool off.”

The blonde woman laughed and took another drink of Absolut before returning the empty glass to the silver tray.

“What have you done with her?” Harry asked. “And what about the others?”

“If you mean the smart-mouth American and the rotund Zürcher, they were picked up by one of my people at their hotel. Now they are enjoying our own economy package — with Serrano, in fact.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Harry said.

“You will know soon enough.”

“And where’s Professor Liška?”

“The traitor is elsewhere.”

“You better not have harmed any of them, Szabo.”

“You coward!” Baupin said, blood still trickling from the wound on his shoulder.

Szabo suppressed a chuckle and moved closer to Elsa. “You are hardly in a position to make threats, Mr Bane, or you Monsieur Baupin. Allow me to extend the same hospitality to you both right away.” He turned to Steiner and Aleksi. “See to it that our new guests are offered some of my caviar at once.”

The Austrian nodded curtly and raised his gun. “Move.”

With Baupin’s shoulder wound, Harry knew it was down to him, so he seized the moment and swung his fist around, smashing Steiner in the jaw and knocking him back for a second. His next target was Szabo himself, but before he could turn Aleksi lunged forward. The last thing Harry saw was the Finn’s enormous shadow as he raised a chair and brought it crashing down on the back of his head.

When Harry regained consciousness it was courtesy of a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in his face by Hans Steiner. He looked around and saw they were in some kind of basement — presumably still inside the Hotel Ciel. It was a large, empty space with gray breeze block walls covered in insulated heating pipes and fans. On the far side of the room he saw an industrial freezer filled with food for the hotel kitchens. He was horrified to see Lucia also trapped inside it. She was shivering and trying to warm herself by rubbing her arms.

Then his analysis of the room was ended by a hard punch in the face delivered courtesy of Steiner’s right hand.

He knew how to take the hard stuff, but that didn’t mean he wanted any more of it, and now his attention was focussed on survival as the Austrian bodyguard threw the bucket at him, hard and heavy, and turned his attention to Zoey and Niko.

“Leave them alone, you bastard!” Harry yelled.

Steiner’s response was a high-velocity backhand slap that nearly knocked Harry out of the chair. “Shut your mouth.”

Harry spat a wad of blood onto the concrete floor and tried to slow his breathing as his head swam with the violence of the blow.

Steiner stepped over to Zoey and gently stroked her face with his hand. She struggled in her chair and spat at him. It was all she could do, but all it did was enrage him and she was the next victim of another of his heavy slaps. Her face glowed red and her head lolled backwards. Harry thought Steiner had knocked her out but then her eyes rolled back down and she came back to earth, dribbling a mouthful of blood down her top.

Niko saw what had happened to his old friend and unleashed a long tirade in German to the thug, but Steiner was unmoved. He punched Niko hard in the face — no slap this time — and put him out like a light.

“Who would think a handful of mismatched, undisciplined scumbags like you could bring so much chaos to the Ministry’s good works,” he said.

“You murdered Pablo!” Lucia screamed from inside the freezer.

“No… the traitor Ramirez unfortunately had a heart attack during a conversation with Mr Karhu here.”

Aleksi gave a grin and nodded as if owning up to a good deed.

“I saw the body, Szabo,” Harry said. “His throat was cut.”

“A necessary response to his treachery,” Szabo said. “That was my order to Mr Karhu once he had extracted the information I needed. You see the man’s loyalty — he cut his throat even though the traitor was already dead.”

Before Harry could respond, the door opened and a beam of electric light from the hall outside shone down into his eyes. He squinted as a couple of figures walked into the room — a man and a woman. He blinked to get his focus back and saw a tall, thin man in a dark suit and beside him a younger woman… another blink revealed it was Zalan Szabo and his Swedish bodyguard Elsa.

“Let Lucia out of the freezer, Szabo. You’ll kill her in there!”

“Don’t exercise yourself,” Szabo said raising his chin to get a better view of Lucia in the freezer. He smiled coldly and returned his attention to Harry. “You need to start worrying about yourself, MI6.”

“What do you want with the dust, Szabo?” Harry said.

Szabo studied his prisoners for a moment. “I am charged with a terrible burden and you have made things very difficult for me. I have responsibilities so heavy you couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Try me.”

“A farmer must draft out sheep to be culled if he is to raise a healthy flock. It is the way of nature.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Our planet is no more than a farm, you fool, and someone must manage the livestock… the human livestock.”

“What the fuck?” Zoey said.

Szabo continued. “The Black Death was no accident… it was no natural disaster as the history books would have you believe, and neither was the Spanish Flu of 1918, or most of the plagues in between those two dates.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Among other important duties, the Ministry is charged with maintaining a healthy population for the planet. At various times in its long history it has been forced to discharge certain remedies in order to reduce that population.”

“This is insanity,” Baupin said.

Harry couldn’t hide his disgust. “You can’t cull people.”

Szabo ignored them, slipped his hands in his pockets and began to pace the floor in front of their chairs. “It’s relative to infrastructure and technology. The fact is Europe could not support the population it had before the plague, and neither could the world support its population before the Spanish Flu — just two examples. The Ministry has determined that a world with the current level of technology and infrastructure cannot support the current population and therefore a cull is required.”

“This is madness — people aren’t animals, Szabo — you can’t cull them!”

“Nonsense. We gave the governments a chance to do this and governments all over the world obeyed and have been trying to reduce their populations — look at the One Child Policy in China or the massive social and economic pressures authorities have brought to bear on Western populations to reduce their offspring. It has worked within a certain limit — no country in Europe now reproduces at the minimum replacement ratio, which means their populations are dwindling.”

“So why kill millions?”

“Because it is too little too late, and we will be culling billions, not millions. The world will be a utopia beyond your imagination after the cull. A world of seven billion ants crawling over each other reduced to a mere five hundred million.”

“You’re going to kill six and a half billion people?”

“More or less — in less than a year and with no long-lasting impact on the environment other than to improve it. Genius, don’t you think?”

“You don’t want to know what I think,” Harry said. Beside him, Niko began to regain his consciousness.

“I don’t care what you think,” Szabo said. He turned to Aleksi and gave him a series of muttered orders. The Finn padded out of the room.

“But over six billion dead…” Zoey said. “Christ on a pair of crutches!”

“I think that’s a lot of bodies to bury,” Niko said.

“Biodegradable,” Szabo said. “The governments will be given time to dispose of the dead before each new wave.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when the authorities get hold of you.”

Szabo laughed. “Do you even know who the ‘authorities’ — as you so quaintly put it — truly are? If you think they are the people you vote for then you are sadly mistaken. The politicians are merely puppets.”

“You’re saying the Deep State is behind this?” Harry said.

“Deep State… deep state,” Szabo said quietly, as if recalling a long-dead friend. “More puppets.”

“Whoever’s behind this, you can’t allow it to go on,” Harry said. “It’s nothing more than genocide.”

“It’s not genocide. It is science… a beautiful cull. Almost art.”

“You can’t control something like this, Szabo. You’ll wipe out humanity.”

“That is where you are quite wrong, as I shall explain.” As he spoke, Aleksi wandered back into the room. He was dragging Andrej Liška along behind him.

Szabo beamed at the sight of the bedraggled professor. “Ah — Professor! Just in time for our little demonstration.”