Darke Mission (12 page)

While Mitterrand was alive, the powerful but ultimately dark forces of his political enemies and the pharmaceutical industry left Beljanski and his research team alone. It did not last. At 6am on the morning of October 6
^th
, 1996 the GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention Group), trained to deal with violence, riots and terrorism, descended on the Beljanski laboratories. Involved in the operation were eighty anti-terrorist soldiers, a helicopter, police dogs, machine guns, flak jackets and all the hardware reminiscent of a siege scene from
Braquo
. Dr Beljanski, now seventy-three years old, was rudely awakened from his sleep, placed in handcuffs and forced to do the ‘perp walk' so popular with US police officers. Dr Beljanski's laboratory was closed down. This was a true story and it didn't get any better. Dr Beljanski was set to be put on trial. Tragically, he died while awaiting the opportunity to state his case. In May 2002, four years after his death, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Mirko Beljanski had been denied a fair trial and the opportunity to defend his research. The French authorities were truly fucked up, thought JJ and he was glad that these days they were more or less a lapdog of the Bundestag. JJ decided not to share that opinion with Yves-Jacques.

Fortunately, for JJ, and probably a host of other cancer patients, Dr Beljanski had a loving, clever and committed daughter, Sylvie. She went to New York and arrived with much of her father's research that she had salvaged from the outrageous intrusion by the GIGN and set up an institute in her father's name with the intention of helping those with cancer worldwide.

While sifting through other research articles by this truly amazing molecular biologist, JJ came across another one of direct relevance to him. Apparently, and obviously before he was hounded to his death by French bureaucracy and vested interests, Dr Beljanski had won a contract from the French army to study the effects of wartime radiation on their soldiers and try to discover ways to alleviate it. The talented scientist beavered away and eventually showed that the golden leaf extract from the Ginkgo Biloba plant had beneficial effects on the immune system, protecting it against the negative impact of radiation. The golden leaf extract has a totally different biochemical composition from the more commonly seen green leaf.

JJ was so impressed by Mirko Beljanski's work, his story, his daughter, his brain, that he blasted off an email to the Beljanski Foundation in New York and, via their supplier, ordered their Pao-V and Ginkgo-V products. Protecting the body from radiation effects and suppressing prostate cancer cells were just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. With a wry smile on his face, JJ was now looking forward to his next appointment with Dr Van den Berk. He fully intended to tell his consultant that he was going alternative.

JJ was emotionally feeling a bit more relaxed about his cancer fight. He now believed his attack arsenal against the cancer enemy had just muscled up. He was on the traditional medicine path, and he was committed to it, but JJ believed he had augmented his weaponry with select supplements like, taurine, selenium, magnesium citrate, saw palmetto, lycopene, turmeric and green tea extract. The Beljanski products, he hoped, would further raise the attack and defence capability of his cancer weapons of mass destruction.

Finally, after even more hours of research, browsing, rejecting and accepting linked articles on his tablet, he added one final alternative medicine regime: the Budwig Protocol. This approach to killing cancer was developed by Dr Johanna Budwig and essentially involved digesting a diet of cottage cheese and flaxseed oil thoroughly mixed. Nigh every nutritionist's advice on dairy was to avoid it and on the face of it cottage cheese should be in the trash. However, Dr Budwig had shown that the dairy properties of the cottage cheese were eliminated when combined with the flaxseed oil in very specific proportions. The resultant mixture, or gruel as JJ was to call it in the future, was meant to revive stagnant electrons in the body, which in turn dissolved the cancerous tumours, wherever in the body they may be. Solely based on his research, and a somewhat cursory perusal of Budwig supporters and Budwig detractors, JJ concluded that while not as apparently impressive as Mirko Beljanski's contribution to his armoury, the Budwig Protocol had enough going for it to give it a try. After all, in the grand scheme of things, how much damage could an odd tasting yogurt-like concoction really do, and you never know, it might do some good.

JJ was now set on his strategy and tactics to battle prostate cancer. The strategy was to burn the cancer cells and starve them by traditional means. Then he'd strengthen his part of the battlefield with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and products which protected his immune system from radiation and the gooey side effects of hormone treatment. Just in case those black-hearted, soulless, carnivorous cancer cells were hanging on for dear life, he'd also hit them with a few Beljanski Pao Pereira pills and a daily dollop of Budwig gruel. If the little shits were still going after all that, thought JJ, then he was truly in deep doo.

While JJ was feeling somewhat pleased with himself regarding his research findings and his augmented plan, Cyrus was in his room, playing
Sonic Racing
on the latest version of Nintendo 3DS. He hadn't really played that game for some time, but the graphics and the circuits had become ever more visually captivating. He was tired anyway after tennis club and wanted to wind down playing something non-athletic that was easy for him even when the game was on its hard setting. Occasionally Cyrus felt a bit lonely, he wished he'd had a sister, big or wee, but that didn't seem on the cards now.

Cyrus knew something was up with his dad. In many ways it all seemed fine, JJ would still come home at a normal time, they'd chat about the usual stuff, his day at school, his pals, any girlfriends and the like. They'd play a Wii game or two sometimes and Cyrus occasionally could talk his dad into playing
Yu-Gi-Oh
which was a card based non-electronic game involving spells, traps and monsters. Cyrus had liked that game for a long time and now that JJ had at least partially assimilated the rules, the game could be quite interesting. It made Cyrus chuckle though when his dad launched a big monster attack with an elemental hero, just knowing that he was going to drain Cyrus's remaining life points and win the game, to be told by his son ‘Not so fast. I play the trap cards Mirror Force and Cemetery Bomb'. The first one negated his dad's attack and the second one cost him 100 life points for every card in his dad's graveyard. Cyrus had already mentally counted the cards in JJ's graveyard, a bit like an autistic savant, so he knew his dad's life points would shrink to zero and he would be down and out. When this happened JJ would fall on his back and let out a child-like
Aaaaarghh!
Cyrus thought this was funny. JJ was a great dad and a good pal.

In recent weeks though Cyrus had noticed that when his dad stayed up late he could no longer hear the distant hum of the television or the occasional tyre screeching and fender bending racket that usually meant JJ was watching, for the umpteenth time, one of the
Fast and Furious
films. Number 5 was his dad's favourite mainly due to the participation of ‘The Rock' and the selection of muscle cars, street racers and warrior trucks involved. This franchise of movies had now matched the number of
Rocky
films there were but Vin Diesel was chubbing up a lot and the tragic death of Paul Walker meant the onscreen chemistry was never likely to be the same.

These days it seemed a bit quiet in the living room. Cyrus had once half snuck down the stairs like a ninja to see what his dad was up to, but he seemed simply to be staring at his computer tablet, taking notes, and not doing much else. The angle of the dangle of Cyrus's viewpoint didn't allow him to see exactly what his dad was looking at. God, he hoped it wasn't porn and that his dad was not in the beginning of a mid-life crisis. That would be sad. Maybe understandable since as far as Cyrus knew, JJ hadn't had any female encounters of the sexual kind since Mum died, but sad anyway. He'd talk Gil into finding out. There were bound to be some legit dating websites thought Cyrus, even though in his heart of hearts he wasn't sure he could easily handle the prospect of his dad with another woman.

Cyrus finished up his game of
Sonic All Star Racing
, read a couple of chapters of
The Hunger Games
and slowly dozed off. As he was drifting off he was thinking about Lucy. Lucy was in his class and they'd known each other since they were two years old, having met at a local nursery. They weren't girlfriend/boyfriend in any touchy feely way but they were close and both sets of parents always thought it would be super cute if they ended up getting married. A few years back, when Cyrus was a novice computer literate outside game world, he sent Lucy an email from his recently enabled school email account. Cyrus was nine. The email was innocent enough simply saying ‘Hi Lucy. I like you very much. I hope you like me too'. Now, in Lucy and Cyrus's case that was almost a rhetorical question. They both liked each other, they both knew it and everyone at school knew it too. Both Lucy and Cyrus were in year 5 at the time. However, the internet gremlins clearly had it in for young Master Darke that day. His email went to another Lucy, this one in year 6. The format of email address at the school was your first name in full and then the first letter of your surname. Lucy's surname was Hamilton but there was a Lucy Hemmingway in year 6 and by gremlin or by seniority Cyrus's email found its way to Miss Hemmingway. Cyrus learned several lessons from this experience. First, check you've got the right email address before you plop yourself in a hole. Second, once in a hole with your life long girl friend looking down on you, stop digging, go mea culpa or plead insanity and make it up to her.

The Lucies didn't make Cyrus suffer too much. The year 6 Lucy just made him cringe with the occasional ‘Hi Cyrus' in that teasing, drawn out,
High School Musical
insincere way that can only mean trouble. The real Lucy let him off the hook after a few ice creams, a cinema visit, help with her homework, some bag carrying and a small present. JJ thought this episode was hilarious and mused that nine year old girls in his Glasgow school in the day weren't as sharp. They didn't have school email accounts either. Cyrus didn't think it was hilarious but he made very few computer mistakes thereafter and was most relieved that Lucy Hamilton had remained to this day his best girl friend.

* * *

Zhang Bai Ling was American, twenty-nine years old and about 5ft 7in, quite tall for a girl of Chinese descent. She was slim, long dark hair and deep brown eyes. More importantly, she was a mathematical child prodigy and at the age of fourteen used to wind down trying to solve Yang-Mills existence and glueball mass gap. At age twenty-one she was recruited to the NSA and a year later was working for them in a non-dangerous undercover role at LINEAR, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program based in Socorro, New Mexico. LINEAR was sponsored by MIT, arguably the best university in the world, the United States Air Force, and NASA. The American authorities were obsessed with their enemies in inner and outer space and somebody elevated in the Department of Defense's hierarchy thought that all those asteroid belts and meteors that were peppering outlying districts of Russia in 2011 and 2012 were too much and too often to be sheer coincidence. If they could pepper the Russian badlands then they could shower the homeland so somebody better get inside LINEAR and keep a watchful security eye on events. That somebody was Bai Ling.

The main task of LINEAR was to apply the most sophisticated technology to the problem of detecting and cataloguing Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) that threatened our planet. These were also known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs). The LINEAR team used ground based deep space surveillance telescopes. The data were collated and then sent to the main Lincoln laboratory facility in Lexington, Massachusetts. Once the data were compiled and checked they were forwarded to the MPC, i.e. the Minor Planet Center, not the UK's Monetary Policy Committee. The MPC then assigned designations to LINEAR's new discoveries of NEOs, comets, unusual objects and main belt asteroids. By the middle of 2013, LINEAR had sent a total of over 50 million observations to the MPC. Of these, around 5,000 were NEO discoveries and about 800 comet discoveries. The data content that had triggered the interest of the NSA was that, in the past year or so, the number of NEO events had deviated sharply upwards from their annual average of the previous few years. Something was going on and the NSA wanted to hear about it. Bai Ling was sent there to listen, observe and report back.

The NSA has more numerous and sophisticated electronic eyes and ears than any other secret agency in the world. It plugs into emails, phone calls, internet usage of many, many Americans, and people of interest on and off American soil. It may be legal and it may not be but after 9/11 America's clandestine agencies didn't much give a monkey's toss. Their job was to ferret out mega bad guys, in particular any who might even be thinking about a terrorist attack on US citizens and properties. Yet even armed with all that hardware and software a determined terrorist cell or lone wolf activist could not be caught if all of their communications were verbal, face to face, eschewing all modern and electronic means of conversing. So good guy human plants were still necessary.

Bai Ling was a proficient martial artist, came second in her training class on firearm skills and long distance target shooting i.e. sniping. She yearned for a more front line anti-terrorist role than the one she had been allocated. Whatever some crazy Star Wars fed Dr Strangelove type in the Defense Department might think, Bai Ling seriously doubted that there was a Death Star annihilation beam aimed at the United States, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. In fact, she was getting more than a little bored with her job at LINEAR. None of the chitty-chatty of her normal, daily work routine contained anything suspicious at all. The scientists and mathematicians that she came in contact with were either pure workaholics or workaholics that wanted to grope her. They got short shrift but she resisted injuring them severely, which she could have done very easily.