The Zul Enigma (51 page)

He wondered who had made
the connection and released the House of Representatives’ schedule of business
to the news hounds. Well, it didn’t matter any longer. The press, which for
some time had been commenting on his public disdain for NASA and his criticism
of the value of many of its projects, was now having a field day. And the icing
on the cake, as far as they were concerned, was his reaction to the appearance
of Zul. Never mind that on the contrary to putting a halt to space
investigation, he’d tried to make a critical step in readjusting its focus to
ensure the safety of Americans everywhere. Never mind he’d been trying to
protect his people. It was too late to explain all that now.

He walked to the other
end of his office and around the huge Resolute desk, where he took off his
jacket and hung it on the back of the leather upholstered chair. He sat down,
opened the top right-hand drawer and took out the Smith & Wesson Model 17
K-Frame double action revolver that was lying there. The gun had been a present
from his father. He opened the cylinder to check it was as he’d left it with
all the chambers full. He then pressed the cylinder back up into the frame of
the gun, clicked it into place and put it down on the desk.

He slid out a sheet of
his personal embossed notepaper from the maroon leather writing paper holder,
picked up his matching Mont Blanc fountain pen, unsnapped the cap and scratched
out a few lines in spider leg black ink. He up-turned the sheet, smoothed it on
the blotter, folded it, put it in an envelope and wrote his wife’s name on the
front. He then gazed at the photo on his desk of her and their two daughters
for the last time, picked up the gun, opened his mouth and put the barrel
inside, trying not to gag on the cold, hard metal. He angled it up to the roof
of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Five minutes later Tony Wilson, the White House Press Secretary, knocked on the
door. When there was no reply he opened it and, to his horror, saw the
President slumped over the side of his chair with half his head blown off. The
window behind the desk was splattered with blood, fragments of bone, brain and
hair. Tony rushed over to feel for a pulse, but there was none. The President
was dead.

CHAPTER 13

Carlos took Rebecca’s hand and helped her out of the cab.

‘You look tired,’ she
said, staring up at him as she stepped onto the pavement.

‘I am,’ Carlos replied.
‘I’ll be glad when we’re on our way back to Vienna.’

Although Carlos had
tipped the driver, he didn’t help get the luggage out of the boot.

‘How come your bag’s two
times as big as mine?’ Carlos grumbled.

‘So, what if it is? I
never pack more than I can carry myself. If it’s such a big deal, I’ll take
it.’

‘No, I’ve got it,’ he
replied, banging it down on the pavement and yanking out the extendable handle.

‘Carlos! Carlos! Look at
me.’ He looked up. She shook her head and her hair swung across her shoulders.
‘There’s no need to behave like this. It’s just a bag.’

He took a deep breath.
‘You’re right. It’s… well… hey,’ he waved an arm round his head, ‘this just
isn’t working out how I wanted.’

The previous week he’d
booked a table at Busboys and Poets in DC, thinking it would be fitting to
celebrate the end of the launch of the meditation initiative with Greg and
Joseph, at the same place they’d celebrated its inception. But what with Zul’s
appearance followed by the President’s suicide, the whole world was in chaos
and Greg had called at the last minute to say there was no way he could make
it.

They stashed their
luggage in a lock-up cupboard and a waiter showed them to the table Carlos had
requested on the mezzanine floor. He ordered a bottle of Chianti and when
Joseph arrived a few minutes later Carlos introduced him to Rebecca.

‘What do you do,
Rebecca?’ Joseph asked.

‘Recently I’ve been
volunteering for the UN, but normally I work as a freelance science reporter.
I’m here because like thousands of others I wanted to be in New York for the
launch – you see the initiative’s something very close to my heart.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I was in a very bad
place for a long time. Then I started to follow a meditation practice and it
helped me immensely – in fact, it changed my life. So I’m probably one of
this initiative’s biggest supporters.’ She laughed. ‘Anyhow… since I was “on
the spot” so to speak when Zul appeared, I’ve been inundated with calls to find
out what is really going on.’

‘Joseph’s a
communications expert,’ Carlos said. ‘He’s the one who worked out how Zul got
the e-mails and holovideo calls in.’

Rebecca’s eyes grew
wide. ‘Oh really.’

The waiter set down
three glasses and opened the wine. Carlos held up his hand to stop him pouring.
He preferred to let it breathe.

‘Of course,’ Rebecca
continued, ‘I’ve been making my own enquiries about the UN broadcast, how Zul
blocked the signal to the satellite and transmitted his own. But I’d love to
hear your view.’

 
Joseph shrugged. ‘There’s no mystery.
It’s not hard to do if you have the technology. Obviously you have to pick up
the signal before you can block it, but once that’s done you’ve cracked it,
because not only do you find out what the channel is but the satellite position
as well. After that, it’s a simple matter to transmit your own signal in place
of the original.’

‘And what about the
blocking?’ she asked.

‘That can be done
physically or electronically. We don’t know which method Zul used, because the
interruption to the signal was terminated before anyone worked out what was
going on. Since all satellite TV channels are beamed and the diameter of the
beam always remains small, regardless how far away you are, if the blocking
method
was
physical, whatever he used to do it could have been
relatively small and located miles away…’

‘… and by now is long
gone.’ Carlos added.

‘And still nobody knows
if Zul’s human or not,’ Rebecca said.

Carlos picked up the
bottle and poured wine into her glass. ‘The press are obsessed with analysing
public opinion.’

‘I know,’ Rebecca said.
‘I’ve never seen so many polls. Not even before an election.’

‘I’m surprised how many
people don’t think he’s human.’

‘I thought you’d be
pleased,’ Joseph said, holding out his glass for Carlos to fill.

‘I’m surprised.
Pleasantly. I thought Zul’s appearance would destroy the progress we’d made so
far with the Global Consciousness initiative, especially when reports about the
bickering at the Emergency Session started coming out.’

‘But the reverse
happened. If anything, Zul’s appearance added magic,’ Rebecca smiled and lifted
her glass, ‘so let’s drink to the continued success of the initiative.’

‘What do you make of
Anderson’s suicide?’ Joseph asked.

‘Ironic it happened on
Independence Day.’ Rebecca gave Carlos a disapproving look. ‘What? He was
paranoid from the start Zul would bring him down… and he did.’

‘Forget Zul.’ Rebecca
leaned forward. ‘I heard a rumour today that some of Anderson’s own people
wanted to shut him up.’

Joseph tilted his head.
‘Why would they want to do that?’

‘If only I knew,’
Rebecca laughed, ‘then I’d have a story.’

‘The budget cuts,’
Carlos shouted, flinging his arms in the air.

‘Shush!’ Rebecca looked
over her shoulder, ‘people are staring.’ Then she whispered, ‘What about the
budget cuts?’ and both she and Joseph bent in closer.

‘We all know he planned
to sneak the NASA legislation through this week…’ Carlos wagged a finger at
Rebecca. ‘This is off the record, okay? What if he still intended spending the
money on space related research but instead of with NASA he wanted to spend it
somewhere else?’

‘Like where?’

‘DARPA!’

‘DARPA?’ Joseph
exclaimed. ‘Do you know what kind of projects they handle?’

‘Yes,’ Rebecca gasped,
‘sophisticated military projects. Like man-to-man battlefield communications
using neural signals in the brain instead of vocalised speech…’

‘Silent Talk,’ Carlos
interrupted, ‘and DARPA isn’t involved with anything that
doesn’t
have a
military application. Perhaps Anderson was about to disclose an objective that
not many people are aware of,’ he said picking up his wine glass and staring at
the red liquid swirling inside.

‘What do you mean?’
Rebecca asked.

‘Hey, it’s pretty much
common knowledge that the US military wants control of space, but the thing
that’s never discussed openly is the next logical step – space ownership
– in other words the ability to control the whole world from space. By
giving NASA’s budget to DARPA, Anderson would have been telling the world that
the US government was only interested in spending money on space projects with
military objectives. Now even if the US Military approved of such a policy,
they wouldn’t have wanted the whole world knowing about it.’

‘Because it might have
drawn public attention to their intention to own space?’

‘Sí.’

‘But does the American
military support space ownership?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Not unanimously,
maybe,’ Carlos replied, ‘but I believe there’s a faction pushing for it very
strongly. But for sure they don’t want it made public.’

Joseph shook his head.
‘But why do you think that’s what he was going to do?’

‘A comment at the
Pentagon when I was there for a meeting back in March. I didn’t get it then,
but now… Come on, Joseph, I’ve been warning Greg about this for years.’

‘So,’ Rebecca said, ‘you
think this space ownership faction wanted to shut Anderson up before people
started adding two and two together and turned it into an ugly, public debate?’

Carlos nodded.

‘I could use this,’
Rebecca said in a low voice.

‘It’s only my view…’

‘But it’s a good theory,
Carlos’ she interrupted, ‘and I want to follow it up.’

He shrugged. ‘Up to you…
but I tell you right now you won’t get very far.’

‘You might be
surprised.’ She bunched up her serviette and threw it on the table. ‘I won’t
fly back to Vienna with you this afternoon Carlos, I’m going to stay on here in
DC. Excuse me gentlemen,’ she said, ‘but I have some calls to make,’ and she
picked up her handbag and left the table.

‘Youthful optimism!’
Joseph said looking after her as she walked off. ‘She’s very pretty. Are you…?’

‘We’re just friends.’

Joseph raised an
eyebrow.

‘I mean it,’ Carlos
growled.

Joseph picked up his
wine. ‘So how did you feel when you saw Zul appear?’

‘For a moment I thought
he was going to say it was a hoax.’ Carlos put one hand on his heart and
nodded, ‘so I was very happy when he began describing the evolutionary
process.’

‘It’s forced NASA to
fire up another investigation.’

Carlos grinned. ‘I can
imagine. They can’t ignore it now Zul’s gone public.’

‘Weren’t you worried
he’d go into too much detail?’

 
‘
Sí
. Terrified. But logic told me
he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t help get us humans where we need to be.’ He lifted his
glass. ‘And what do
you
think now?’ he asked Joseph.

‘Same as before. Until
there’s proof, we can’t be sure either way. What about Greg?’

‘Since Monday, he’s
taking Zul much more seriously.’

‘And the Clean Up Plan?
How’s that coming along?’

‘He’s more serious about
that too.’

***

The moment Carlos walked out of the Rathaus metro station, he saw Rebecca
waving at him.

‘Carlos! Hi!’ she
called.

He walked over and she
put a hand on his arm as she stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

‘Been waiting long?’ he
asked.

‘I was early so I had a
walk around. I can’t believe it. The whole place is transformed.’

‘The festival runs from
July to the beginning of September every year,’ he said.

‘Just look at all the
chairs set out in the plaza. And the jumbo screen. The concerts will be
amazing. And all the different kinds of food set out…’ Carlos smiled at her
excitement.

It had been sunny all
day and with twilight approaching, the sky was striped with a sunset pallette
of pinks, oranges and purples. A medley of Strauss waltzes poured from the
banks of speakers and flooded the square as a prelude to the main event, which
that particular night was to be a performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen.

‘I’m starving,’ Carlos
said.

They decided on an Indian food stall and were so hungry they didn’t exchange a
word until they’d finished eating. Carlos wiped up the spillage with paper
napkins, cleared the empty plates and went to get them another round of drinks.