The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (37 page)

For his part, Kimberlain could still not manage a firm grasp on his own emotions. The past twenty-four hours had cast his entire life in a new light: a murkier, darker light that left him feeling his way without direction. He had lost his parents to a set of conspiratorial manipulations, and now he had lost his sister to the mad manipulations of a single man.

But it wasn’t really his sister, was it? His sister had perished on that island to Leeds’s reconditioning process, and somehow that made things worse. It nagged at him like a cut that wouldn’t heal, and Kimberlain knew the only way to close it was to destroy what she had been meant to be a part of.

“Right now, I want to hear about TD-13,” he said to Captain Seven.

“Bad news, boss. We’re talking big time. This guy’s even better than you thought.”

“Let’s have it, Captain.”

“Okay. We got Briarwood Industries—your buddy Leeds—buying out PLAS-TECH right before the company wins a government contract to manufacture a certain monofilament strip. Once completed, these strips are shipped to three paper mills as part of the same government contract.”

“To produce what?”

“Money, Ferryman. Cash money.”

“As in dollar bills?”

“And fives, tens, twenties, and everything else. Currency, Ferryman. That’s where Leeds has placed his TD-13, and that’s how he’s going to poison the country. Care to see how it works, up close and personal?”

“I think so.”

“Right this way, Ferryman,” Captain Seven beckoned. “Class is in session.”

He led him through the well-appointed underground bunker, which virtually mirrored his train car. On a black table, covered by a glass dome, he had laid out a series of brand-new ten-dollar bills.

“I got these from the Federal Reserve Bank up in Boston. Not for general circulation yet, but a friend of mine took care of things. Part of the latest shipment out of a spanking new minting facility in Kansas. There’s a plan to replace all the cash in this country with fresh currency.”

“What?” the Ferryman asked.

“You heard right. Bear with me now, because here’s where things get a little complicated.” Captain Seven circled the dome containing the enclosed money as he continued. “Know what the biggest problem facing the treasury today is?”

“Off the top of my head I’d have to say cash hoarded for use by drug syndicates.”

“Nope, not even close. The biggest problem, especially in the not-so-distant future, is counterfeiting. See, the next generation of laser copiers and printers is due out inside of two years, and they can make money even the banks would accept for deposit. So some bozo in the D of C figures we better come up with a simple way of identifying the real thing.”

“The plastic strips …”

“Abso-fucking-lutely. Based on an idea the Canadians used with their funny money. They put a kind of hologram in theirs. I think it’s a naked broad but I’m not sure. Well, a hologram wouldn’t work in ours because the paper’s thicker, but a strip formed of monofilament mesh fibers would work just fine. Hold it up to any light and you see a pattern that looks like a tick-tack-toe board. No way to reproduce that with any generation of copiers coming in our lifetime.” Captain Seven took a deep breath. “So PLAS-TECH makes the strips and ships them to these paper plants.”

“Who, in turn, insert the strips into the huge rolls of paper that are then sent on to the Kansas Depository where all the new money is bring printed. But replacing all the cash out there now will take years.”

Captain Seven shook his head. “Nope. Government has a plan to get all the old money out of circulation in less than six months, starting at the beginning of September.”

“What’d you find out about T. Howard Briarwood?” Kimberlain asked, changing the subject.

“Would you believe he owns the Gerabaldi Scrap Yard in upstate New York where you mixed it up with those nasty machines?”

Kimberlain didn’t bother to answer.

“You think that’s good?” Captain Seven resumed. “Shit, it gets better. Let’s talk Briarwood Industries, Ferryman, which happens to be the largest privately held conglomerate in the world, owned and operated by the Howard Hughes of the nineties, T. Howard Briarwood. Fucking recluse runs everything from a bunch of private offices all over the country outfitted with tech stuff that’d make me proud. Doesn’t like people much, by all accounts.”

“I can understand why now.”

“Yeah, well check this out. In the just over two months Andrew Harrison Leeds was in The Locks, T. Howard Briarwood wasn’t seen in public once. Another one of his reclusive stages, his people called it. Care to guess what some of his other reclusive stages corresponded to?”

“Murders committed by Leeds in one of his other identities,” Kimberlain responded.

“You get an A for the day, boss. The scary thing is that this guy really is a fucking genius.” Captain Seven cast his eyes admiringly on the ten-dollar bills laid out inside the glass dome. “Behold a masterpiece of modern science, as good as anything I could do myself, and that’s saying a lot. You said the guy who created this TD-13 claimed he didn’t produce all that much. Well, since money is handled by so many people during the course of its paper life, he wouldn’t have to.”

“The poison won’t lose its potency?” Kimberlain wondered.

“Sure it will—long after everyone is too dead to use it. See Leeds’s people—
Briarwood’
s people—took the TD-13 and microencapsulated it prior to adding it to PLAS-TECH’s strips.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the toxin will lie dormant until a certain set of circumstances are met. You got a dollar?”

Kimberlain handed him a twenty.

“To put it in your wallet or pocket, you gotta fold it first, right? Well, soon as you do that the encapsulation breaks and the poison is released. I’d say each bill’s got a life span of a hundred owners or two months, whichever comes first.”

“And which would?”

“The hundred owners, almost for sure.”

“And just how many individual bills are we talking about?”

“In a normal year, the Treasury Department replaces fifty million pieces of currency. You can multiply that by ten or twenty in the case of what’s already been minted in Kansas.”

“Past tense, Captain?”

“From what I’ve been able to gather, they’re just waiting to ship the new currency en masse to Federal Reserve distributor banks on September 1.” Captain Seven tapped the glass dome. “These are parts of an advance shipment to banks to make sure things get off to a smooth start. I gave them the full treatment. Great stuff, let me tell you. This TD-13 is a slow-acting, progressive nerve poison. Works on the internal organs until they just shut down. By the time anyone figures out what’s going on, it’s too late.”

“But the bills aren’t available to the public yet.”

“No. Instructions pertaining to that release date have been very precise.”

“So the money gets distributed,” Kimberlain concluded, “and whoever touches it gets infected by TD-13. What about people they go on to touch? Can it be spread that way, too?”

“Nope. This is a toxin, not a bacteria or a virus. And the way my simple mind has figured things, it’s plenty bad enough on its own. Say a month at most before the entire country’s been poisoned.”

A chill crept up Kimberlain’s spine as he moved away from the dome. “No, Captain, not the whole country. Not everyone touches money. Convicts and prisoners don’t. Inmates in mental institutions and asylums don’t.”

“Right on, boss.”

“The ninth dominion,” Kimberlain said, “just like Leeds ordered it. A world left for the mad, the depraved, and the criminals, thanks to these new bills stockpiled at the Kansas Depository.”

“I’d say less than five percent have been shipped so far.”

“Makes it pretty clear what’s got to be done,” Kimberlain concluded.

“Already got the stuff brewing you’ll need to pull it off. Delicate process. Got to give it time. Miss the proper temperature by a degree or two and the rats’ll be eating our guts for breakfast.”

“I blow myself up, or something along that line, you better be ready to call in your favors.”

“I got numbers from the old days. They’ll just love to hear from me again.”

“Do you remember me?” Andrew Harrison Leeds asked the massive figure chained to the hospital cot.

Garth Seckle was still in the process of coming awake. “Should I?” It hurt him to talk through his burned, scabbed lips.

“I should say so. We’re brothers, you and I. I’ve been behind you every step of the way.”

Seckle’s stare scoffed at him. Then his eyes sharpened.

“The island,” he muttered.

“Yes. I lifted you from the hell where you had been deposited so you might be free to express yourself in the manner you deserved. I supplied you with the files you needed and cheered you every step of the way.”

“Who are you?”

“Who I am doesn’t matter, Garth Seckle. What matters is that you passed your test brilliantly. What you did in those towns, the hospital; what you would have done in that resort, if Kimberlain hadn’t disrupted you.”

Garth Seckle’s eyes filled with anger.

“Relax. You will have your opportunity to avenge yourself upon him. But he is meaningless to you and to us.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because I need you. I had known about your imprisonment in the stockade for years, but waited until the time was right to arrange your release. Your potential was there. I only sought to bring it out to its fullest, to let the rage in you blossom so you might serve me better.”

“Serve you?”

“It will be by your own choice.”

Seckle tried to touch his face. The chain’s wouldn’t let him. “Last night, your helicopter?”

Leeds nodded. “Dispatched because the time has come to put your skills to infinitely better use.”

“Where am I?”

“A facility I have appropriated for the time being. You haven’t asked about your wounds.”

“I can move. I can breathe. I can see.”

“You can do far more than that, my good fellow. Besides one cracked rib, a shotgun graze in your side, and some very nasty burns, your wounds are strictly superficial in nature.”

Seckle looked down and saw the white gauze bandages wrapped around both his hands. He could feel the bandages over his left temple and above his eyebrow as well.

“I’m going to remove your chains now,” Leeds told him. “They were put in place for your own protection until your situation could be adequately explained. Now that that has been done, you deserve to be released. You and I are alone in here. If you wish to kill me, I suppose you could be successful.”

Without hesitating, Leeds used a key first on the manacles fastened around Seckle’s ankles and then on the ones around his wrists. Tiny Tim stretched the life and blood back into them, rising slowly to a sitting position.

“What do you want from me?”

“Your participation in a new order of the world.”

“Who
are
you?”

“The person who made you, Seckle. The person who lifted you out of the human scrap heap you had been dumped into, so you might have a chance to be even more than yourself again.”

Tiny Tim looked interested now. “And this … new order?”

“Coming very soon. Yours to be a part of, if you so choose. It will be a world you were made for, my brother, a world that is made for you.”

“Interesting.”

Andrew Harrison Leeds smiled. “There’s someone else I’d like you to meet.”

Chapter 37

“SIGN IN, PLEASE.”

The driver of the large armored truck marked F
EDERAL
R
ESERVE
scribbled his name on the appropriate line and returned the clipboard to the gate guard.

“You know the routine,” the guard said.

“Oh yeah. This place gives me the creeps. Looks too damn new.”

“It looks new because it is new.”

The Kansas Depository was one of only two facilities outside Washington responsible for printing new money and disposing of the old. Though construction was well underway before the government opted for an elaborate money replacement program, the facility proved perfect for the task of minting the new currency. Only slight modifications in the machinery were required, since Kansas was outfitted to take on a large measure of the printing load anyway.

Of the nine levels comprising the facility, only four lay aboveground. These contained the money presses and general offices that were open for public tours on a daily basis. What the public never saw were the five underground stories that contained the massive storage facilities for freshly minted money and the high-tech shredders and furnaces used for disposing of the old. The underground levels boasted ceilings in excess of forty feet high, and two of them were literally jammed with plastic-wrapped stacks of soon-to-be-shipped currency.

The complex was surrounded by a ten-foot-high electrified fence. Upward of fifteen men patrolled the perimeter at any given time, with another twenty serving inside the depository, many responsible for watching the workers. Floodlights streaming from the rectangular building’s roof kept the outside brightly lit twenty-four hours a day. There were four machine-gun towers and a titanium steel gate at the entrance that could hold back a tank.

The midnight truck had been right on time, and with the clipboard back in his bulletproof shed the head guard activated the gate’s opening mechanism to allow the truck to slide into the complex. The truck entered the building through a garage door on the first floor, where another security gate waited. Once this station was satisfactorily passed, the truck’s contents could be unloaded under the watchful eye of ten armed guards who were in turn watched by two supervisors. The system had checks and balances for its checks and balances.

The bags of “dead” money were tossed from the truck and piled by one team, then dumped down a shaft that looked like a giant laundry chute by another. The chute formed the first step on the road to what depository workers referred to as “the ovens.” To reach the ovens, the dead money first had to be dumped out onto conveyor belts that sent the bills through a massive shredder before the remains were burned. The depository was open twenty-four hours a day, but only for sixteen hours were the shredder and ovens operational. The shipping of new bills and receiving of old ones went on continuously.