Authors: Dominick Fencer,Baibin Nighthawk
79
"Sir? Yes, it’s Jago, I need to talk to you urgently. Perfect! I'll be right there."
Jago C. Green entered Colonel Walton I. Reed’s office carrying a dossier with a face grim.
"Good morning, Jago. What's happening?"
"At the moment we don't know exactly, but we’re receiving information from various rehabilitation centers that may be alarming."
"That is to say?"
"Analyzing the data we have collected and received, it seems that the patients of "Transtem 1.1" and those of "Brainexe" have altered behavior patterns in the last week..."
"What the hell are you saying? Are you sure, damn it?"
"Yes sir."
"And in a week...call the team immediately, now. I want them all right here!"
Within seven minutes, the whole team was sitting around the oval table in Colonel Reed’s office.
"Ransley, what the fuck is going on, and why I wasn’t informed earlier?"
Ransley Bain, the director of the project, got to his feet and with extreme caution and calmness began to speak; he knew Reed very well and the first thing to do was to cool him down and then try to explain him what happened.
"Sir, as you know, the data arrives daily but we only analyze it weekly, to do it every day wouldn’t make sense because we couldn’t track the problems, except for major deviations with data very far from average values. That is what’s happening right now, so we’re obliged to monitor everything, allocating double resources to the field.
“This week, for the first time in 4 years, we have found significant deviations in brain wave patterns, and the most unusual thing is that they are showing up in most of the patients."
"Have you checked previous weeks?" answered Reed furious.
"Certainly. Nothing unusual was found."
The Colonel wasn’t convinced:
“What about a virus in the system distorting the data?"
Jago C. Green jumped up from his chair and answered in an agitated way:
"No sir! Our firewalls are always subjected to hacker testing; they are impenetrable and updated all the time! It's not possible!"
"What the fuck are you saying? Everything is possible, sooner or later someone will be better than you. Don't you believe it?" shouted Reed.
Then, lowering his tone, he went on to say, "Green stop fretting, don’t take this personally, damn it. It was just a question! Are you sure that this is a phenomenon and not a false problem, maybe generated by a system failure? Last week, the satellites were down for about half an hour due to a strong solar storm, maybe somehow it also influenced our facilities."
"Sorry sir," started Green again in a calm manner. "But I’d rule it out one hundred per cent. We have panels that cover the entire Biosketch Technologies Inc. complex to neutralize diverse waves, including electromagnetic ones."
"I get it, and so what will you do?" asked the Colonel suddenly.
"At this time we’re forced to consolidate the data every day to see if it shows a progressive or regressive trend. In addition, we have already sent a request to all the centers to add qualitative data concerning the behavior to the daily data. It will begin arriving tomorrow, today is too early to give you anything concrete."
"Okay. How long before we can understand a little more after the qualitative analysis?"
"A couple of days, I would say." Ransley Bain said.
"Keep me informed and as soon as you get feedback, call me, even at night. I don’t like this at all. You can go, thank you. Green, please stay here, I need to talk to you."
The entire team, feeling the pressure and worried about the situation, quickly left the Colonel’s office in silence.
"The three Russians? Have they been affected by this?" Reed asked.
"Yes, sir. Them, too."
"Have you been contacted by an associate of Grigoriy Kozloy by any chance?"
"No sir."
"Well, then I’ll call him right away, before they do it themselves. They must have noticed, for fuck's sake! Stay here, we need to understand how to handle the situation with him and then call Anaïs. Jenkins for the time being has delivered a quick fix, but that fucking Arab..."
"Yeah, but he really doesn’t exist, sir. And no camera detected him. As you requested, I carried out all the checks directly with Jenkins. Among other things, the two cameras in the hallway leading to the cafeteria were out of service, so he could have left the building directly through the parking lot without being recorded."
"And the parking lot cameras? What the hell are they for?"
"They do their job on a daily basis, the video quality is excellent. It's just that at least thirty people were impossible to identify, their faces turned away from the cameras, so the Arab isn’t the only one who didn’t want to be recorded. Colonel, you were the first, I recognized your shoes...so..."
Walton I. Reed grimaced angrily at Green and abruptly picked up the smartphone.
"I’ll call Grigoriy, you crappy little hacker..." he said sneering.
"Hi Grigoriy, any news? I'm fine, thanks, and you? I’m happy for you, yes, that's right, it is the same with us. Have you already carried out any tests on them? You're a Nazi, Grigoriy. Blame anything but a Russian. Do you find the patients more aggressive? I understand, but against whom? Um...let's see how the situation evolves. This phenomenon could be a consequence of the transplantation and the subsequent conditioning.
“It seems that civilian patients are less susceptible. However, I prefer a certain type of behavior from a soldier; we're not creating missionary nuns. I'm glad to hear that. See you soon. Bye."
Walton I. Reed hung up and turned to speak to Green with a relieved smile on his face:
"He’s satisfied with the work in progress. He’s already carried out some tests on their three patients. They proved to be less vulnerable to fatigue and much more aggressive..."
"Aggressive? How exactly?"
"Attacking people in their vicinity. They are trained for this, damn it! But, are you stupid or have they transplanted you with a banana scaffold in place of neuronal tissue?
“Please call Anaïs. I want you to stay in the meeting, we need to understand the problem with Jenkins, if the loser succeeded or the girl smelled something strange in the air. By the way, has she fully recovered?"
"She says yes, I’d say no, but you know her, she can’t sit still, however she still has an alarming color, poor thing. Savannah sure beat her up badly. I’ll call her on the phone now."
Jago dialed Skylinep92’s cell phone number.
"Hey, force of nature, the Colonel and I are waiting for you in the office to evaluate the situation and agree on the next steps... We’re waiting for you."
"She’s coming Colonel. She’ll be here in two minutes."
A short while later, Anaïs Degann knocked on Walton I. Reed’s door.
"Can I come in?" she called.
"Come in Anaïs, finally you're much better!” said Reed when he saw her enter. “That bastard Savannah hasn’t ruined your face, thank goodness!".
“Good morning sir, hello Jago. If Savannah wanted to kill me he would have done that, and I think he deliberately avoided hurting me too much. But this, as I have already said, doesn’t have a rational explanation, or at least one I can find."
Anaïs Degann didn’t sit down on the chair, but leaned against the desk, the light seeping through the curtains gave her a delicate appearance, almost ethereal.
"Tell me about Jenkins and the meeting yesterday, my dear," said Reed.
“Sure, you were right. He confirmed the official version of events given to me. Savannah is a corrupt and arrogant criminal, which coincides with the psychological profile prepared by the British agency…then the Arab showed up."
Anaïs paused to watch Green and Reed’s reactions and the non-verbal language of their body told her that they were on their toes.
"The Arab didn’t introduce himself, he said he knew Savannah well because he had been his partner on the last mission in Afghanistan and that he had quite a different recollection of him; he was with him on the Pakistani border, but he reported that no drug negotiations took place. He was a liar, Colonel; he was probably bored and alone, and he just interrupted to learn my name. He was gallant; but Jenkins is right, he wasn’t credible."
Anaïs saw that, after her speech, both relaxed and this annoyed her very much; now she was certain that she hadn’t been made aware of certain information expressly, but pretended not to notice. She would investigate the matter calmly and as usual she would move with caution.
In fact, she remembered the winner of the number one danger for a secret agent: the risk of being manipulated; she raised her head naturally and looked out of the window, so that the two men couldn’t catch her eye.
She had never trusted anyone and, although Colonel Reed had been her mother’s lover for years, she had always detested him: he was a powerful man and boastful, given to blatant gestures and at the same time to vulgar pettiness.
Even if Reed had taken her under his wing, she was aware of being a stranger and a danger for him. She might reveal his long extramarital affair to his family at any time.
"Well," Jago C. Green broke the unusual silence that had suddenly arisen. "How do you intend to proceed with the Savannah issue, Anaïs?"
"I'll go back to Little Rock. He must have taken a bus to continue his journey. He knows he cannot escape all the cameras so, unless he has somehow managed to evade them with help, it means that he’s not in the city. The cameras lost track of him completely."
"It could be a bluff, Skylinep92. Don't you think?" replied Green with an ironic tone.
"Jago, you may be among the best hackers in the world, but you don’t understand anything about people’s psychological profiles. Savannah doesn't give a fuck about a bluff, he’s a psychiatrist and in addition he’s resolute and has an extraordinary aptitude for command. He’s self-centered, and certainly doesn’t like being inactive. No, bluffing is not a game he likes to play; you've seen what he's done."
"So, according to you, what game is he playing?" Green asked sarcastically.
"Well, we saw in New York: he plays a pretty good game, I'd say," she replied remembering the scene in the hotel bedroom with the model.
"Anaïs!?"
Colonel Walton I. Reed was laughing quielty, looking at Jago C. Green’s embarrassed face.
"I want to follow the two bus routes,” continued Anaïs, “the first to Texas, the second to California. It’s our only possibility, everything else is quiet, no informant has any useful news and Interpol is scratching the dirt."
"Anaïs!? What is it with you today?!" Green interrupted again, trying to keep up appearances.
"Jago, calm down. You’re like a hysterical and bigoted housewife. I’ll start from the Texas track, the bus makes four stops and then arrives in Dallas, the ride end of that route. We’ll check every city for new hires in hospitals, private practices, universities, plus the opening of new bank accounts, but we can forget that he might use his old alias. We have tapped Aisha Moreau’s old and new cell phone numbers since we intercepted Savannah in her apartment, but he’s never called her…just as he never called his mother. I'll find him, he hurt me, hurt me bad..."
"When are you leaving?" asked Colonel Reed.
"If you don’t have other priority tasks for me, I'll leave tomorrow."
"That's fine by me, go ahead. Jago will always follow you in support and as usual I’ll receive your reports."
"Yes sir, goodbye, sir. Jago? Can we take care of the logistics now?"
80
It was two in the morning when Mark finished compiling a report on the deviations in the brain waves of the patients enrolled in the "Transtem 1.1" project: all but one, Brad Foster, had significant deviations from the strength and frequency means.
The side effects dated back one week and the frequency of the deviations was gradually increasing, as had the frequency of brain waves, though not proportionally.
Mark didn’t have a clear enough picture to make a judgment: it was true that he had aggregated the data and had found that, except for Brad, all the other patients had suffered the same effect. On the other hand, he needed to monitor the situation more closely, considering behavioral factors and other accessory parameters. The effect might be temporary, but the point was that most of the patients were not in hospital; in fact, they had been given the transplants in different years.
As for Brad, the situation was a mystery: the only certain thing was that Brad was the youngest of the patients. But Mark, even if he couldn’t rule out anything at this stage, didn’t consider age as a variable having significant impact on the recorded patterns. There were only two things that all patients had in common: they had been transplanted with brain tissue, and all had the same problems with regard to brain waves and behavior, but these were not sufficient evidence to base for an explanation.
Mark felt an unpleasant sensation when he thought about the thirty-five patients of the "Transtem 1.1" project, and he didn’t feel at ease. It was the first time he had seen so many people suddenly reacting in the same way. He had even lost sleep over the thought. Instead of turning off his computer and going to bed, he got up from the desk and made some coffee. He felt suddenly hungry and ate half a pack of chocolate wafers with his coffee, then returned to the computer and began searching the web.
At four in the morning, he fell asleep on the keyboard of his laptop after another search for useful information: he had verified there hadn’t been any solar storms that could be somehow interacting with the patients. Though no one had ever been able to confirm or deny that such electromagnetic radiation significantly interfered with human systems, every single event that was out of the ordinary was a trail for him to evaluate.