Paschal went bright red which caused an even greater outburst of laughter. “I told you, I didn’t lose my virginity to her…”
“I guess you’d lost it somewhere else first then. Careless of you.” Dr. Kuroneko spoke suavely. “Of course you realize she’s now got your sperm stored away? She’ll transfer it to an Incubus who will then impregnate a woman with it.”
“Ugh, squick.” The executive assistant taking meeting notes in the corner of the room shuddered with distaste.
“You know Colonel, you could be in serious trouble there.” The emotionless, uninflected voice sounded strange in contrast to the joking that had been going on. “The recipient of that Incubus’s attentions could well sue you for paternity. After all the courts have already ruled that a woman who impregnates herself with the contents of a discarded condom has a right to demand child support.”
“You’re joking.” Paschal sounded genuinely panicky. “Aren’t you?” Then he looked at the speaker more closely. “I thought your company had lost its contract when the new administration came in.”
“It did. But the number of people who can do the sort of work we do is very limited. So, when the old company loses the contract, we all get laid off but the new company has to hire staff to do the work. We’re the only ones available so they offer us our old jobs back. In the old days, we used to clear our desks one afternoon, go home, pick up the recruiting call and be at our new desks the next morning. These days things are much more efficient. The old company just transfers the lease on the building and our employment contracts to the new company and we don’t even have to move offices.”
“Has it always been like that?” Schatten was fascinated by the insight.
“Mostly, McNamara bought his own people in from outside, the whizz-kids they were called, and they made a pig’s breakfast of everything. But they went when he did and things got back to normal. Or as close to normal as anything gets inside the beltway. Anyway, Luga’s back on the team?”
“She is. Thanks to the brave Colonel’s sacrifice and devotion to duty.”
“Good, I like Luga.” The targeteer settled down in a seat.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Schatten opened his pad, “You all heard about the attack on El Paso and Ciudad Juarez last night?”
A ripple of acknowledgement ran around the room and the meeting got serious very suddenly.
“We have preliminary casualty figures. More than 30,000 dead, about three quarters of them in Ciudad Juarez. Just over 6,000 in El Paso itself. To put those numbers into perspective, the population of El Paso is roughly 750,000 while that of Ciudad Juarez is 1,300,000. So, the death rate was 800 per hundred thousand or 0.8 percent in El Paso and 1,846 per hundred thousand or 1.84 percent in Ciudad Juarez.”
“That’s very interesting.” Dr. Kuroneko looked at the numbers he’d scribbled down. “The differential is statistically significant.”
“It’s more than that, take a look at this.” Surlethe reached up and flipped the chart over to an acetate overlay map of the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez metropolis. Some of the areas were shaded black and it didn’t take much imagination to see that the depth of the shading represented the proportion of the population that had died.
“It’s related to population density. Hardly surprising.” The monotone voice was not impressed.
“Not quite no, it’s a reasonable assumption and one we made at first.” Surlethe flipped another acetate overlay on to the map. “This is the population density distribution. You can see that it doesn’t quite fit, there are substantial discrepancies. But when we use this overlay, the fit is exact.”
Surlethe flipped a third acetate overlay into place and the attendees nodded. The fit was indeed exact. “And what is that map?”
“It’s a map of the city divided into areas by relative income. And the conclusion is very obvious. Where people are rich, nobody died. Where people are poor, some died. Where they were destitute, a large number died. Even then, the number of surviving humans far outweigh the dead. But every cat, every dog, every rat, every bird, every animal of every sort is dead. Rich neighborhood or slum neighborhood, it doesn’t matter. The animals died, all of them. But the rich didn’t die but the poor did. What does that prove?”
“That Yahweh is a Republican?” One of the staffers trotted out the crack, then looked embarrassed at the lack of response.
“Quite.” Dr. Surlethe’s comment was withering. “It strongly suggests that it’s wealth that provided the defense against this kind of attack. We’re assuming an Archangel called Uriel is responsible by the way, we’ve got circumstantial evidence for that and can tie it to a lot more attacks like this down south. They all show the same pattern by the way, poor areas got hit much harder than rich areas.
“So, how do the rich differ from the poor?”
“They have more money.” The targeteer reflected that the comment was a BLIFO, a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. “and that means they buy better things. Newer things as well, not old or second-hand stuff. The really poor do without or pick up trash. How did these people, and the animals come to think of it, die anyway?”
“That’s the curious thing, the coroners and medical examiners are hard at work trying to find out. The problem is, of course, that the majority of the victims are poor and in poor health to start with. They had a lot of pre-existing conditions that could have caused their deaths, would have done given time, so disentangling what they actually died of is a problem. Then, again, some of the dead did die of natural causes, run down to give one example when a car went out of control because its driver died. The scene was a bit like the attack on Fort Knox in the film of Goldfinger.”
“There’s much easier ways of knocking over Fort Knox than that.” The targeteer spoke idly. “Anyway, do we have any reliable autopsy results?”
Doctor Surlethe fought down the intense desire to ask what was the best way to rob Fort Knox and opened a file. “We have none from the American side, but we do have some preliminary results from an autopsy of an eccentric rich resident of Ciudad Juarez. Apparently, he believed that tinfoil hats were a plot by the United Nations to take over the world and refused to wear one. He did, however, cover his house in aluminum foil. According to the autopsy, he just died of not living. There was no actual cause for his death, he wasn’t in perfect health but he had no conditions that would explain how he died. He just stopped living. The Mexican medical examiner, a good doctor by the way, the people in El Paso speak highly of her, admits to being beaten by this one. There’s no reason why he died, he just did.”
“Was he found inside or outside his house?” The targeteer had leaned forward slightly.
“Sort of both, he was on the patio. The roof was foil-covered but not the sides. Why?”
“We know the Baldrick’s mind control powers work by biologically generated electro-magnetic radiation. That’s why we all wear hats these days.” Unconsciously he touched his ‘Nuke the Whales’ baseball cap, a gesture that was repeated by several of those present. To humans, headwear had become the same sort of good-luck talisman that had once been represented by rabbits feet, crucifixes and Saint Christopher medallions. “They can use that capability to project images into the human mind and make us believe, and act on, those images. They can’t read minds of course, never could, but they can possess our minds. So, suppose this Uriel fellow has the ability to simply suppress the parts of our minds that keep us alive. You know, make our hearts beat, keep us breathing, all that good stuff.”
The targeteer thought for a second. “I wonder if there’s an eccentric old lady in El Paso who put a tinfoil hat on her much-beloved little dog? And, if there is, I bet that dog is still alive.”