“Military,” he said with a raspy voice. They were setting up roadblocks on all of the main roads. His mind drifted through the throng of bored and cold soldiers, but none of them knew why they were here, or why they had been issued live ammunition. He would have to find an officer or someone else of importance to find out just how much danger he was in. The problem was that taking over a mind was like shooting off a flare for Amanda; in an instant, she would know exactly where to find him, and he wasn’t quite ready for their next meeting. He waited a moment, giving destiny the opportunity to provide him with the information that he needed, but after several minutes of silence, he decided to shower instead.
Fifteen minutes later, clean and refreshed, he dropped his key on the unmade bed and left for his car. He made it twenty feet before the night manager called to him. The man was wearing a parka that was open enough for Reisch to see the same torn and dirty T-shirt that had graced his portly form the night before. He slogged through the snow in unlaced army boots, and Reisch thought he should kill the man on general principles alone.
“Excuse me,” he called, and Reisch found his mind open enough to read. Quarantine? The word was unfamiliar, but the fat man provided enough of a definition to make the meaning clear. “The state police told me to tell all our guests that they were to stay put.” Apparently, he had been going from room to room telling everyone about the ban on travel.
“I’m just getting some supplies.” Reisch smiled and eased the man’s mind. The night manager said something else, but Reisch had already turned for the Mercedes. The small SUV sprung into life immediately despite the cold, and he let the engine warm. No one was watching or looking for him as far as his mind’s eye could see. This was all about the virus, not about him. The Americans were finally reacting to the outbreak. After seven long years, it was finally starting.
Reisch’s smile broadened. He knew that it was wrong to take credit for this, but he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. All his actions had been scripted by a force or an entity far beyond even his understanding, but he had played his role faithfully. His reward for success would be survival; had he failed, he would rightly perish along with the rest of the unworthy.
Reisch turned on the radio and listened as the announcer read the manifesto of Jeser. It had been written by fools. He corrected his disparaging thought; he could afford to be magnanimous in victory. They weren’t fools, just irredeemably misguided, and their time was just about up. In due course, after they had their moment in the sun, he would bring about their destruction as dispassionately as he had brought about the Americans’; he wouldn’t celebrate, or mourn their passing.
The radio reporter had been replaced by an epidemiology expert. His conclusions were a little more optimistic than the planners’, but that was understandable; it would take the Americans some time to come to terms with their imminent demise.
Within a month, American society would be in disarray. By six months, the great country would be little more than a graveyard, with a few thousand survivors wandering through the waste, struggling with their newfound abilities and searching for a purpose. Reisch would collect and direct them. He would help them discover the natural order of existence; it wouldn’t be difficult, most of them would have begun to sense it, and perhaps live by it. They would forge a new civilization, purged of corrupting concepts such as equality and democracy; the strong would thrive, and as time passed, the new species would become their own gods. Later, Reisch would repeat the process in Europe, then in Asia, and continue until humanity had been completely replaced by the Select. The key to success was to make the process gradual, with the first step being the trickiest. The United States had a lot of bombs and was the least predictable in its death-throes; it didn’t take much effort to push a button and ruin everything.
He dropped the car into gear and drove out of the snowy parking lot. The fat man was still waking people up and barely registered the Mercedes.
“Where are we going?” A tired-looking Pushkin asked from the backseat.
“I need to eat,” Reisch said simply, basking in the glow of all the frenetic activity around him. He drove under an overpass and weaved his way through town, finally stopping at a McDonalds. He bought some scalding but weak coffee along with a Mc-something that passed for food. He slowly ate, thinking about the thousands of survivors. The number was only a guess; it might be just a few hundred, or perhaps as many as a million.
“So we are finally off to Costa Rica,” Pushkin said while drifting to the front seat. “Are you going to complete the mission now, or wait? There may not be a better opportunity.”
“You know that it is not due for another forty-four hours.”
“There are a lot of people out here, and some of them are bound to be looking for you. Anticipate complications Klaus.”
Reisch paused at the mention of his given name. “Sending it now will effect containment.”
“In the end, your little bag here,” Pushkin playfully spun the black satchel, “makes containment rather moot.”
“We have to get to the end first, before we can talk about what is moot.” Reisch scored a rare debate point.
“You’re a little selective in your trust of Professor Avanti. You trust his estimates for spread of the first virus but not his estimates for containment of the second. You do remember that everything he told Jeser was a lie.”
Reisch still hadn’t made up his mind about Avanti. He first met the Ukrainian in Libya in the early nineties. Klaus had been without steady work since the collapse of the Soviets, and Pushkin had arranged for the two to meet. At first they were rather leery of one another; Reisch was uncomfortable with the Ukrainian’s reputation of radical Islamic beliefs, and for his part, Avanti was unnerved by Reisch’s reputation of violent instability. To complicate matters, Avanti was part of a nascent organization that was forming around Osama bin Laden, the Saudi hero of the Afghan resistance.
“When you introduced us, did you know that Avanti worked with bin Laden?” Reisch asked his former boss, temporarily changing the subject.
“I knew that you had been assigned to kill bin Laden and failed.”
“The failure was not mine. Your glorious Red Army packed it in before I could even make it to Pakistan.”
Despite the irony, both Reisch and Avanti came to accept the fact that a former Soviet operative would provide security for a Jihadists camp that had ties with bin Laden. Years later, when Avanti split from Al-Qaeda, all conflicts of interest had been resolved, and the two men developed a mutual respect. With a free hand, and an endless stream of money supplied by the Saudis, Avanti expanded the hidden laboratory beneath the camp, assembled a world-class team of virologists and microbiologists, and Jeser was born. Much smaller, and more secretive than Al-Qaeda, they shared similar goals; at least that’s what their financiers believed. Reisch knew that Avanti was no more an Islamist than he was. The Ukrainian was hardly a Muslim at all; he drank daily and frequented brothels at every opportunity. He often joked with Reisch about how the good and pious Saudi money was paying for his life of decadence. His goal was not the dissemination of the Islamic faith or the global institution of Islamic law; his goal was not nearly so noble; he simply wanted to ensure the survival of humanity by destroying the majority of humans.
“I think Avanti is correct. I don’t see the Hybrid virus being contained.” It was a rare declarative statement from Pushkin.
“In many ways you two were very similar.” Reisch said with a reminiscent undertone. “You both lived a life of excess, but never allowed it to interfere with your responsibilities. You both were well educated and at times quite profound, and you both managed to save my life.”