Reflexive Fire - 01 (33 page)

   In a strange way he had been provided with a way out.  Untapped offshore bank accounts were hidden all over the world, bulging with narco-dollars.  He'd spend his final days in Mauritius or someplace drinking whiskey and taking a different woman to bed every night.

   Kicking the trap door shut, he smiled as he walked towards the Chinese border.

   A quick swim across the river and he would link up with some of his customers.  If they wanted access to his cash reserves, and they would, his people would be more than happy to issue him a brand new passport and a one way plane ticket.

   Smiling, he never heard the shot that thundered across the terraced paddies.

   “Target down,” Nikita said, racking the bolt on his sniper rifle.

Twenty Five

   “We are entering an entirely unique period of history, one unlike any era of the past.  In the near future, power will be drawn from new centers of gravity, the very idea of the state quickly becoming obsolete.  Old mechanisms, old systems of vertical integration, will give way to non-state actors.  This will be a complete paradigm shift, not just in the political and economic arenas, but a shift in social dynamics as well.  This will be a change in energy itself.  Complete deinstitutionalization will take place in the coming decades.  As the state bleeds credibility and legitimacy, new centers of population will turn towards the multinational corporate conglomeration, the guerrilla organization, the terrorist group, the privatized army, or other free agents.  Crime and war will blur.  Citizen and soldier alike will be thrown into direct competition with every single human being on the planet.

   “While the old paradigm will persist deeper into this century, it will become increasingly irrelevant.  The old powers still attempt to shape the geopolitical landscape, but this new energy will outpace any monopoly on state violence.  While the Global South continues to construct federations to stand against Western influence, a new type of undeclared global insurgency will rise in the place of these old powers.”

   Jarogniew looked up from the podium.  The participants seated around the stage were hanging on his every word, large eyes searching for insight from the world's mapmaker.

   “Thank you,” he finished, taking a sip of water as the audience politely applauded, not sure how to respond to the world's subject matter expert on international strategy telling them that their life's work would be crashing down around them in the coming years.

   His words had been frank and candid. 

   The former presidential advisor had made his career with brutal honesty.  Some ignored his words, to their detriment.  Others just stared in disbelief, convincing themselves that he had not, in fact, meant what he had just said, that somehow they had confused his message.

   Shaking themselves back to reality, Council on Foreign Relations members lined up to ask questions.  Jarogniew set down his glass of water, nodding at the little worm of a man at the front of the line.

   “My question,” he said, clearing his throat, “is that as we find our way forward, what are the main challenges we face in creating this new style of global governance?”

   “Yes, the main challenge we face in achieving this goal is the global political awakening that is now taking place.  While in the past only the elites were permitted into certain intellectual circles and given a say in society, we are now in a time of advanced communications technology that allows individuals to attain a level of connectivity like we have never seen before.

   “Only the elites participated in the first Renaissance, knowledge such as philosophy and mathematics was a carefully guarded secret, restricted to Pythagorean cults and the like in more ancient times.  Today nearly everyone has access to every single word ever written, and ideas propagate much faster today, whereas a mental reshuffling would require a hundred years during the Middle Ages.

   “This leads to human beings the world over casting aside their previous status of political inertness, now becoming awakened, activated, and joining in a struggle for a new type of personal freedom or an older kind of ethnic self-determination.  This awakening triggers social turbulence that transcends sovereign borders and is the most significant threat to the construction of global governance.”

   “Uh,” the suited man stammered, “thank you.” 

   Most of them thought they understood what he was saying. 

   Jarogniew smiled a vicious smile to an oblivious audience. 

   The time was now.

   For hundreds of years the power elite, the anointed ones destined to rule mankind, had used a system of incrementalism, slowly changing paradigms and archetypes, humanizing the mechanical and dehumanizing the living.  Injecting insanity into the collective unconscious, making the masses pliable, and ultimately useful as serfs working the cotton fields of a dying global economy.

   However, his fellow elite failed to identify their own shifting status in the grand hierarchy.

   They occupied the gilded halls of academia, manned the round table groups, and staffed the foundations, the men who pulled the invisible puppet strings tied to the alleged seats of power.  They belonged to a kind of shadow government, invisible custodians that most were subconsciously aware of, even if programmed cognitive dissonance told them otherwise.  This farce was falling apart before their eyes.

   Jarogniew sneered as he watched the rain water streak down his limousine window.

   Bohemian Grove, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Club of Rome, The Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Club.  They had all served their purpose, managing global order as the monarchy and the Lombardi cartels had before them. 

   Mostly they were just old men, playing at Byzantine power games while the world passed them by.  The awakening would crush them, rising up like a phoenix in the coming years, ending absolutism once and for all.

   He had seen it in his mind's eye long ago. 

   Over a decade had passed since he had sat his own faction down for a private meeting, creating what they internally called The Council of Three.  They were the capstone of the pyramid.  If they didn't act now, bypassing incrementalism for something more drastic, they would all lose control over everything,
everyone
, forever.  Their great work would be left unfulfilled.

   Disgust for his elitist minions fading, Jarogniew's face crested with the familiar smile, the animalistic intensity glowing in his eyes.

   Drawing together and compartmentalizing various experts and controllers, they had dusted off old plans and put together new ones, utilizing control grids already in place, innovating and inventing new ones as needed.

   For well over a hundred years, true scientific progress and knowledge had been concealed from the public, for their own good of course.  The greater public was only exposed to the third tier of scientific knowledge; governmental programs classified as Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information were allowed access to Tier Two tech.  Only those supranational entities who worked at a level darker than black knew about Tier One.

   Tier Two had instituted various eugenics programs for the last hundred years, continuing into the present.  Social anthropologists had combed the globe, categorizing and cataloging various ethnic groups.  In the modern hospitals of the Western world, each child's blood was taken at birth, logged in massive paper databases before the advent of computers. 

   These data inputs had allowed them to design the perfect virus, guaranteed to prune the world's population by at least ninety-five percent.  All of it was very under the radar, and had to be, since the last eugenicist who had blown off incrementalism had sensitized the world to the concept of racial hygiene.

   The public had already been primed.  The previous year’s swine flu had been intentionally introduced into the populace, its strain was novel, or without any pedigree.  The so-called H4N7 had carried the precursors for what was to come.  It carried with it a stealth virus that had entered into the masses' genomes and would lie dormant until the time was right.  The genetic engineering involved was several generations ahead of anything the public was aware of.

   Once the biological trigger was released, the two strains would combine with each other, forming a binary biological weapon.  The oncogenes in human DNA would then be switched on, stimulating uncontrollable cellular growth, causing a cancer that would literally eat the body from the inside out.

   With customary thoroughness, The Council of Three had experimented with human subjects to ensure that the binary virus killed in hours, or at most a few days, once activated.

   Using advanced game theory- numbers crunched with quantum computers using all variable inputs- they had planned the collapse of civilization.  From day zero through day thirty, when the holocaust would be more or less completed.  Every event was planned, structured, and war gamed.

   Even as the world's population ticked down to an estimated hundred million, The Council needed to prevent an all-out nuclear apocalypse and safeguard critical infrastructure that they would need in the aftermath to build their new society.

   The eaters and consumers could be difficult little devils, especially in the midst of an apparent species-wide extinction, so special measures needed to be taken to prevent them from doing any more damage then they'd already done.

   Project Snow Beam circled the earth in geosynchronous orbit, sophisticated detection systems scanning for the launch of intercontinental missiles which would be shot down moments after exiting their silos, if it came to that.  Yes, the Chinese were still playing target practice on old weather satellites with their ground-based lasers, but Jarogniew was convinced that the risk of interference had been appropriately mitigated.

   Soon they would hit Day Zero Minus One.  The Council along with high level minions and servants would then occupy safe zones and armored redoubts, safe from societal collapse.  Key strategic assets would be moved into place.  Samruk International and others would occupy centralized hubs, such as Denver Airport, to respond to contingencies.

   On Day Zero the trigger virus would be released and quickly identified by various departments of health.  The media would roll out preplanned press releases.  The United States would use cold war era defense plans updated for the war on terror, instituting Continuity of Government.  In effect, America would be placed under martial law, the President declared dictator for the duration of the emergency.

   With all three branches of government operating from secret bunker complexes in the Virginia Mountains, The Council would allow them to manage the crisis, to a point.  COG would help contain and isolate trouble spots around the country, easing the process as best possible.

   Twenty-seven threat fusion centers would be operational, until eventually overrun or the operators themselves were killed off by the virus.  Their stated function was to guard against terrorism, but in reality they were always designed to spy on and monitor the American public, cracking down on anyone who threatened the establishment.

   On Day Sixteen the President would be assassinated in his underground bomb shelter, Congress and the Senate would have nerve gas piped into their bunkers.  In effect, The Council was the shadow government's shadow.  They would move in to run key systems, once the situation had gone critical when the government was at its weakest.  To the very few outside observers left, it would all seem to be done in a very spontaneous but organic manner.

   The military and police forces would be quickly exhausted, expended on futile attempts to save the public amid the riots and irrationality.  While the public self-destructed, The Council would send in its enforcement arm to protect key areas.  Dams, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure needed to be preserved for the elite.

   Of course no virus was a hundred percent lethal.  Some would isolate themselves in remote areas, safe from the transmission vectors the virus would travel along.  Others would have freak immunities to even the most cleverly designed virus, nature's way of safeguarding the human species from such pandemics.  Some of these loners would roam the world's wastelands, others would gather into tribal groups, and some would form terror cells which would eventually attempt to strike out at the elite.

   Day Seventeen would mark when The Council would send its mercenaries out to preempt any such efforts.  Lone survivors would be executed; larger groups would be brought back to collectivized camps for more efficient processing.  Of course Council members and those in their employ would be inoculated against the virus on Day Zero Minus Two.

   The population would continue to plummet, ticking down to about one hundred million.  Over six billion would perish when all was said and done.  It had been a serious debate within The Council; a few extremists wanted them all eliminated, but eventually cooler heads had prevailed.  Jarogniew had managed to convince the elites that they still needed warm bodies, at least enough to work the fields for another couple of decades.