There was always a big night at these things and for theirs, they had rented out the best restaurant in town. That was when Nava wanted to strike. Bentzi had agreed. Damien would eat too much and drink too much, making him an easier target and his “accidental” death all the more believable.
The Under-Secretaries-General departed the chalet hotel in a convoy of vans and minibuses accompanied by their UN security teams.
The housekeeping staff had been instructed to begin their turndown as soon as the guests had left for dinner. Bentzi watched from outside. Once Damien’s room had been serviced, he exited his vehicle, threw on a small backpack, and approached the chalet.
It was overcast, and there were no streetlights in the village.
Bentzi avoided the small stay-behind team and worked his way around back. It wasn’t a good night for his hands. He had difficulty climbing, and it took longer than it should have. When he finally reached Damien’s third-floor balcony, his hands were in a lot of pain.
He always carried two pills in a small paper envelope just in case. Pausing, he popped both and then, after pulling on a pair of special latex gloves, went to work on the lock for the large glass door.
The suite resembled the pictures he had viewed on the hotel’s web site. The walls were clad in knotty pine, the floors covered with a patterned carpet similar to the drapes. A feather duvet lay across the foot of the bed, and a row of thick pillows in perfectly pressed cases were staged along the headboard. The crisp, white sheets had been turned down and bottles of water had been left next to the bed along with a card forecasting tomorrow’s weather. After checking the bathroom, Bentzi made his way into the sitting room.
There was a couch, a coffee table, two side chairs, and a dresser. In the corner was a vintage tile stove. Not far from it was a desk. What there wasn’t, was a laptop.
The Institute wanted a copy of Damien’s hard drive. Because the death was supposed to look like an accident and not a robbery, the computer needed to remain behind. Damien had left for the dinner empty-handed, so it had to be somewhere in the room.
Bentzi checked the front closet, and there, on a luggage stand, was Damien’s suitcase.
It was a ubiquitous, soft-sided piece. It’s main compartment had been zippered and locked shut. Removing a pen, Bentzi applied pressure to the teeth of the seam and easily opened the zippered area. Inside, was a locked hard-sided briefcase. Sliding it out, he took it over to the desk.
The locks were tricky and the pain in his hands only compounded their difficulty. He took a deep breath and willed himself to slow down. Damien and his colleagues would only just be getting into their salads by this point. Even so, Bentzi radioed his team surveilling the restaurant for a situation report.
Once word came back that the party was still on cocktails, Bentzi relaxed and focused back on the case.
The thin picks were a challenge for him to hold, much less manipulate with his crooked fingers. The job should have taken seconds, not minutes. Had Nava known the state his hands were in, she would have replaced him. But she didn’t know, and Bentzi was determined to see his assignment through.
When he finally had the case open, he lifted the lid and looked inside. There were several file folders on top. Beneath those were Damien’s laptop and an additional cell phone. He had been spotted using an Apple phone and this one appeared to be an Android. Bentzi took it out and set it next to the case on the desk. The laptop would take the longest, so he decided to work on it first.
Opening his backpack, he removed a small tool kit and extracted an electric screwdriver. Once he had found the right sized head, he flipped the computer over and removed the screws from the bottom.
With the cover off, he slid an incredibly sophisticated black box the size of a paperback from his pack and began attaching leads to different places inside the laptop. He then depressed a power button on the black box and began to copy the hard drive.
The device used to suck the data out of the cell phone was smaller, about the size of a hockey puck. After finding the right USB cable, he connected the two and powered up the phone.
As the electronics did their work, he opened the physical folders and sifted through the papers. The first two were spreadsheets with budgets — dry, boring data that appeared related to Damien’s businesses. But the contents of the next folder stopped Ben Mordechai cold.
The cover page was innocuously labeled “Outcome Conference,” yet what he found on the pages that followed was anything but innocuous.
It had been prepared for a subgroup of the SMG called the “Plenary Panel” or P2 for short. Bentzi had never heard of it. Members of the panel were neither identified by name, nor their country of origin, only by number — one through seven.
After acknowledging a string of recent setbacks, the document outlined P2’s chilling goals:
1. Decrease current human population below five hundred million and keep it in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a “living” new language.
4. Redistribute global wealth under the more acceptable term “global public goods.”
5. Rebalance personal rights with “social duties.”
6. Replace passion, faith, and tradition with reason.
7. Make clever use of new technologies to go around national governments and establish direct ties with citizens.
8. Rebrand global governance as equitable, efficient, and the logical next step in human evolution.
9. Discredit, delegitimize, and dismantle the idea of the nation state/national sovereignty.
10. Prepare a mechanism to neutralize any challenges to United Nations’ authority.
Ben Mordechai couldn’t believe what he was reading. It was a blueprint for revolution. If Che Guevara was right and revolution wasn’t an apple that fell when it was ripe, but rather was made to fall, then it looked like the Plenary Panel was shaking the entire global tree.
They identified the biggest obstacles to achieving their goals as the United States and Israel. With the two nations overwhelmed and laid low by a massive event, the panel was confident that no one would stand in the United Nations’ way.
Damien’s focus on weakening both countries began to make more sense. What wasn’t clear, though, was what this massive event was intended to be and when it would take place.
In the margins were Damien’s handwritten notes. There was a three-letter designator, A-H-F, followed by words like pathogenicity, absolute risk, and dose response.
Mordechai had more questions than answers. Did the notes refer to a chemical attack? Biological? Something else entirely? When was it set to take place, what was Damien’s role, and who were the other members of the panel?
The only thing Mordechai knew for sure was that they couldn’t kill Damien. Not now. Not with so many unanswered questions.
After photographing all of the documents with his phone, he reassembled the laptop and put everything in the room back the way he had found it. Then, he radioed the team that they had to abort.
Nava was livid. The Institute was going to be furious. She demanded to know why. Mordechai told her to trust him and then broke off communication as he slipped out of the hotel the same way he had come in.
He no longer cared about the pain in his hands. All he cared about was the information that he had discovered in Damien’s room. The idea that a cabal within the United Nations hierarchy was planning a coup involving something so catastrophic that Israel and the United States would be too overwhelmed to respond was almost unimaginable. Almost.