The Zul Enigma (64 page)

Even though Rachael knew
all this from her mother’s book, it was interesting to hear the story from the
Americans’ perspective.

‘The Secretary-General
persuaded Anderson to let Dr Maiz visit Vienna on his way to Spain. Barbara
escorted him but after your father collapsed at his office and was smuggled out
for treatment she was left with egg on her face. She told me Anderson was so
furious she thought he was going to can her right there and then.

‘To further muddy the
issue, by that time Barbara had watched a recording of a holovideo between your
father and Zul that took place at the safe house in DC where she’d been holding
him. NASA analysed the recording plus part of another holovideo recorded at
your father’s office in Vienna and proved he wasn’t acting out the character of
Zul like Anderson believed. Since there was no evidence he’d collaborated with
anyone else, they dropped the investigation. Thing was no one was ever able to
identify who
did
send the e-mails and holovideos.’

Scott uncrossed his
ankles and edged himself forward in the chair. ‘Can I offer you something else
to drink?’ he asked. Rachael began to shake her head when he interrupted, ‘Not
more tea. I’m tea’d out. I was thinking of something stronger. A whisky. Will
you join me?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. I’d love
to.’

‘With ice and water?’

‘Ice?’ she asked.

‘I’m old-fashioned,’ he
laughed. ‘I know we have coatings inside the glasses to keep drinks cold but to
my mind nothing beats the sound of chinking ice in a cut-glass whisky tumbler.’

Rachael smiled. ‘Yes to the
ice then, but no water.’

For a man of
eighty-eight, Scott’s hand was very steady as he poured the drinks.

‘Cheers,’ he said, ‘to
your parents,’ and they lifted their glasses in a toast.

He settled back in his
chair.

‘So tell me about my
father. What was he like?’

‘He was pretty tricky.
He escaped from us not just once but twice.’ Rachael laughed. ‘It was very
embarrassing. First time he made a break for it after a traffic accident in DC.
I met him the next day. Barbara called me in to tell his friend he was in the
clear and that’s when I met your father for the first time. Then a few hours
later I had to go back to get his decision – whether he’d commit himself
to hospital or not.’

Rachael shifted forward,
her hands clasped in her lap. ‘So what
was
he like? Do you remember?’

‘Sure I remember. He was
about five feet ten. Had curly dark brown hair beginning to go grey at the
temples. His eyes were a very dark brown too, like yours. Liquid chocolate. You
have his colouring, you know,’ Scott said. ‘They said he’d lost weight when he
was with us, but he still had a bit of a paunch when I met him. He must have
lost that setting up the Global Consciousness initiative. When I saw him on TV
later that year he’d become quite a celebrity and was looking very buff. But
when our guys picked him up he was a mess. He hadn’t shaved and it looked like
he’d slept in his Giorgio Armani…’

‘Giorgio Armani?’

‘One of the great
Italian fashion designers of the day. Your father always wore his suits.’

‘I’m amazed you remember
all this.’

Scott looked sheepish.
‘I kept all my old notes. I ran through them before you got here. So… the day I
met him he looked haunted. He was stooped over like an old man who was carrying
the whole world’s troubles on his shoulders. He sat slouched in a chair and
just stared out of the window. He was smouldering with anger. You could feel
it. When they briefed me, they said he’d had some personal bust-up with his
friend the night before and it was obvious he was furious with him and of
course madder than hell at us. He’d come to us for help and ended up getting
screwed. We were the “enemy” as far as he was concerned. We’d taken his freedom
away.’

Rachael furrowed her
brow and nodded.

‘That first time we met
he didn’t even look at me, let alone speak. And the second time? All he did was
grunt.’

‘I’m sorry…’

‘Don’t apologise. Later,
after Barbara told me the whole story, it was obvious he was a passionate man
standing up for his principles. I never judged him for the way he behaved. In
fact, I admired him for it. If he’d been guilty he’d have been pleading and
trying to persuade us to change our minds, not cutting us dead.’ Scott leaned
forward. ‘You know, Barbara always thought your father was innocent. It came as
a big shock when the Tribunal announced they’d arrested him, even though he’d
already been tried and judged guilty by the press,’ and he shook his head. ‘At
NI, after Barbara dropped the case against him, she didn’t close the file. She
was determined to find out who was behind Zul.

‘But as the weeks went
by and nothing more happened she had to pull the priority. Of course the file
got attention big time after Zul appeared on that satellite broadcast, but the
new Director never got to the bottom of it. After she left, Barbara kept on it
too, but what with setting up on her own and trying to drum up business, her
resources were stretched and she couldn’t do much. She told me about the
interviews though.’

‘Interviews? What
interviews?’

‘With your mother. She
liked her, you know. She called her the English rose,’ and Rachael smiled.
‘After the Tribunal was set up, it petitioned every scrap of evidence from NASA
and from us. Every communication, every e-mail, every transcript of every
meeting, every report, the holovideo copies… they impounded it all. They interviewed
Barbara – she was expecting to be called in to testify – she
would’ve spoken out. But…’

Diane walked into the
room. ‘You two still chatting?’

Scott turned and smiled
at his wife. ‘We’re going to be a while yet.’

‘Then I’m going for a
lie down. Be sure to wake me before Rachael leaves. I want to say goodbye.’

Rachael smiled as Diane
shut the door, then looked back at Scott. ‘Over the last couple of weeks,’ she
said, ‘I’ve scoured the Internet for information about my parents. Right after
the massacre, some people claimed my father had been set up as a scapegoat. Did
you think that?’

‘Barbara and I often
discussed it and yeah, that’s what we thought. I promised I’d help her
investigate, but… well…’

‘What?’

He sighed. ‘Given the
resources required to develop the virus, the people responsible obviously
operated at a very high level. We’d have had to dig very, very deep to find
anything. Plus it was unlikely they’d left any clues. Then I was up to my neck
in it at NI. For months we waded through a barrage of data, cross-checking
people registered at Survivor On Line against existing records and the Internet
Virtual Archives. For years Barbara’s bread and butter business was tracing
missing persons… you wouldn’t believe how many people used the angst and confusion
of the time as cover to disappear. She wanted me to put in more time on your
father’s case – but I was flat out. Then, after Global Governance was
ratified, all the nation state intelligence agencies were disbanded.’

‘Did you ever consider
it
was
Zul? That some alien being tampered with the vaccine?’

‘Sure, we talked that
through… many times. And we always ended up at the same point. We couldn’t rule
it out one hundred per cent… but it was extremely unlikely.’

The recurring conundrum,
Rachael thought. ‘What did you do after NI was disbanded?’

‘I signed on with Global
Intelligence, a division of the Global Assistance Unit. There were guys from
all over – CIA and FBI, Brits from the Secret Intelligence Service, there
were Israelis, Europeans, Russians, South Americans, Canadians, Australians.
All sorts. It was a busy time setting up something that worked with such a
fusion of cultures. Plus I’d just met Diane. Even Barbara gave up eventually.’

He shook his head. ‘Like
your mother, we thought the Tribunal’s decision was rigged. Of course, in the
months leading up to Dr Maiz’s arrest, the press had taken a lot of pleasure
publicising his views on the dangers of an overpopulated planet. He’d always
been very outspoken on that score, so there was no shortage of material for
them to use. But as for having any hard evidence? I don’t believe they had
anything on him at all. Then when he and his girlfriend,’ he looked at Rachael,
‘your mother, may they rest in peace, were taken out like that,’ he shook his
head, ‘then we knew. Whoever
was
behind it wanted them both out of the
way before the trial could even get started. They wanted to block any further
debate and silence any opposition.’

‘But how could you
accept it?’ Rachael shrugged, the hurt she felt causing her voice to falter.

‘Because nobody wanted
it to drag on. See, all the time we focused on that we were reminded of the
single most hideous event that had ever happened. We knew it was wrong, but all
we wanted was to block it out of our minds… forever. People were desperate for
swift closure so they could make a fresh start. I know it’s hard for you to
hear, let alone accept, but the Tribunal drew the line under the massacre when
it announced your father was responsible. And that event marked the world’s new
start, regardless that some people still suspected he was innocent.’

‘But…’

Scott held up his hand.
‘I’m not saying it was right or fair. I’m just saying we survivors needed some
resolution of that nightmare event to allow us to get on with building a new
future. And don’t forget, Rachael, we were all still shell-shocked back then.
No one was thinking clearly. Most of us were barely getting by from one day to
the next.’

Scott shook his head at
the memory of those terrible times.

‘Up until just after the
massacre, my father was convinced Zul was real. After researching and writing
the book, my mother believed it too. Of course, afterwards she knew he’d been
framed. And that’s what I believe – not just because he’s my father.’

‘I can’t begin to
imagine how devastated they must have been. Especially Dr Maiz. After
everything he’d been through, everything he’d done.’

‘It was horrendous for
my mother too. She’d given out free vaccine in Europe. Her diary? It’s
excruciating to read.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ Scott
said in a low voice, ‘and I can understand you wanting to clear your father’s
name.’

‘I know over fifty years
have gone by, but now I’ve found out who I am… who my birth parents are… I’m
going to do my damnedest to finish what my mother started. For the sake of every
single person who died, and for my parents, I want to expose the culprits. And
I tell you, if any one of them is still alive today, I want to make them pay.’

CHAPTER 3

Breaking only to eat and sleep, Rachael had worn her dead-head sixteen hours a day
for nearly three weeks solid searching for information in the Virtual Archives,
set up in 2012. The VA, as it was known, allowed corporations and individuals
to store data split between two discrete domains: a protected one for
confidential information and a public one for general access. The Internet,
which had hardly changed since then, proved to be the most useful tool used in
the global reorganisation process.

The way industry worked,
on the other hand, had changed beyond recognition. Technological progress came
to a halt for years, as the planet pooled its experts and resources and
directed all their energies into consolidating, re-evaluating and redesigning
the global economy to function the best way possible with such a vastly reduced
population. By the 2020s, however, when conditions were more stable, companies
were once again able to look ahead and focus on research and development.

The electronics industry
in particular had made great advances and fifteen years before came up with the
dead-head, a revolutionary device allowing direct brain-to-brain exchange and
storage, as well as brain-to-VA exchange and storage, providing instant access
and downloading capability to vast quantities of data not only lodged on the
Internet but also archived in the public access areas located in people’s
memories.

These were the primary
sources of data Rachael trawled through, as she searched for information about
people connected with the Zul mystery.

Not surprisingly, the
results were disappointing.

The first name she
searched for was William Johnston – the man who had killed her parents
– but she discovered he had long since died.

OOSA had been
restructured and renamed Global Outer Space Affairs, and she discovered that
Corrinne, her father’s Administration Assistant, had continued working there
until she retired, but had died of a stroke in 2025. Hans Baade, the Network
Security Manager in her father’s time, left soon after the global massacre. His
movements were more difficult to trace, but Rachael was pretty sure it was his
death announcement that had been published in a couple of Austrian virtual
publications the previous year.

On the other side of the
Atlantic, she read that Anita Goodwin, Secretary of State in President
Anderson’s administration, left politics after he committed suicide and died in
2053 at the grand old age of ninety. Rachael could find no information on
Anderson’s secretary, Amanda, but General James Schwabe retired as a five star
General and died in 2031 at age seventy-six. She also discovered that after
Barbara Lord was fired by Anderson, she set up her own private security firm
and sold it for several million Global Dollars when she retired at age
sixty-five. She died two years later, having never married.