Ernest Lozano exited the Senate building into a budding September maelstrom. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The western sky had taken on a bizarre appearance — the cloud’s low-hanging ceiling undulating like a forty-foot sea, the distant horizon over Washington, DC, appearing lime green.
Lozano descended one concrete stair at a time, each weight-bearing step causing his two artificial knees to buckle. Reaching the sidewalk, he limped toward a line of black limousines parked bumper to bumper along two city blocks.
There were many entry points into the lucrative military intelligence — private industrial complex, but the two most effective remained politics and the military. Lozano’s career had been swept along by the latter, his years spent in Army Intelligence introducing him to gun runners, drug warlords, mercenaries, and despotic dictators — all part of a moving current navigated by clandestine factions within the CIA and other intel organizations. It was an arena that suffered no fools nor sense of morality, its operators using fear and fraud to create new niches within the global marketplace.
What few Americans understood was that the “war on terror” was big business, and big business had to be protected at all costs — costs defined in terms of swaying the legislation in power, be it through charitable contributions, political favors, or campaign contributions. It was the military-industrial complex that ruled the roost, and the new game in town was biowarfare. Unlike weapon systems, biowarfare monies could be tucked out of sight, budgeted under everything from Homeland Security to the National Cancer Institute, or farmed out to private companies like Battelle.
Of course, there were also practical military applications to consider.
To Ernest Lozano and the “Pentagon piranhas” he did business with, biological warfare was the wave of the future. Oil refineries and natural-gas pipelines were vital commodities that had to be protected; without them, populations would starve, economies would collapse. Tanks and soldiers were profitable, but their resources were limited to the availability of steel and flesh. A biological weapon was clean, quick, and indiscriminating in its lethality. Plus, there were plenty of residual profits to be made by allies in the pharmaceutical industry when it came time to mass-produce a cure. The swine flu “epidemic” had been a trial run — a resounding financial success.
Lozano walked to the last limousine. He verified the license plate, then signaled to the female driver, a short-haired woman in her forties, her black turtleneck sweater barely concealing a bodybuilder’s physique and her 9mm sidearm.
Like Lozano, Sheridan Ernstmeyer was former CIA. Unlike Lozano, Sheridan had chosen combat over cash, joining the Joint Special Operations Command. The JSOC was an independent wing of Special Ops, exempt from any congressional or departmental oversight. Established after 9/11, the unit had been used as an assassination ring to eliminate perceived enemies of the United States, both home and abroad.
Sheridan unlocked the doors, allowing Lozano to climb inside the limo.
Alone in back was a spry seventy-three-year-old man. Silky white hair yielded to a receding hairline, magnifying the gray-blue slightly upturned eyes — an effect resulting from a recent face-lift.
Known around Washington circles as a “ruthless intellect,” Bertrand DeBorn had established his tough-guy image during the late seventies, when he and two of his fellow foreign policy advisors in the Carter administration were reported missing on a three-day hunting trip in the Alaskan wilderness. A search-and-rescue mission had been deployed for more than a week when DeBorn was reportedly found by loggers, “delirious, dehydrated, and suffering from frostbite,” thirteen miles southwest of his hunting lodge. Rumors of a “savage bear attack” were kept purposely vague, the only verifiable injuries coming from the frostbite that had cost DeBorn two toes on each of his feet.
The remains of his dovish-leaning colleagues were never found.
Old European blood ran through the National Security Advisor’s veins. As a young man, DeBorn’s paternal grandfather had survived Stalin’s Great Revolution by trekking from Siberia to Warsaw. Once in Poland, he pretended to toe the Communist Party line rather than face a firing squad. DeBorn’s father, Vasiyl, had been far more vocal about his hatred toward totalitarianism. Working covertly as a Cold War correspondent, Vasiyl smuggled letters out of Poland that detailed torture at the hands of the communist regime.
When he was eleven, Bertrand had witnessed his father’s arrest by the secret police. Vasiyl DeBorn was tortured in prison over the next six months before being executed.
Bertrand dedicated the rest of his life to fighting the Communist Manifesto. His anti-Soviet views would play to a large audience in Washington during the 1970s and ’80s. A hawkish Democrat, DeBorn was one of the architects of a plan to dethrone the Shah of Iran in order to strengthen Islamic Fundamentalism. By arming the Mujahadeen, DeBorn hoped the Afghani freedom fighters could give the communists their own debilitating version of Vietnam. They did far more, forcing the communists out of Afghanistan to a rousing defeat. That his plan indirectly gave rise to the birth of al-Qaeda never bothered DeBorn, who considered it a small price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A decade later, the Bush/Cheney White House would use al-Qaeda to justify their own “war on terror,” a decision that infuriated DeBorn, who saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the real enemy of democracy. Working behind the scenes, DeBorn helped seal the deal with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski to deploy a U.S. missile interceptor system in Poland, a strategic move designed to incite officials in Moscow. Years later, he would team with Vice President Cheney to convince Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to attack the South Ossetian rebels during the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, an action designed to unleash a very public counterattack by Russia.
A founding member of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, Bertrand DeBorn was a man on a mission to change the world, the cost be damned. The Washington power broker had backed Eric Kogelo’s candidacy in the last presidential election, serving as a military advisor, offering the voting public the assurances they needed that the junior senator could handle the war on terror while bringing a conclusion to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having spent many long hours conversing with the candidate, DeBorn saw in Kogelo a conservative in liberal’s clothing who could inspire like John F. Kennedy yet whose foreign views could be manipulated, aligning certain global variables necessary to bring about a new paradigm sought by both neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats for decades: a New World Order.
Novus Ordo Mundi: one government overseeing one united global economy serviced by a single monetary system. One language: English. One unified code of laws policed by one integrated military force shining its light of justice on every terrorist organization and third-world dictatorship cowering in the shadows of global apathy. To conspiracy wackos, the NWO represented an Orwellian nightmare, but to the world’s richest and most influential movers and shakers, it was the only future that made any sense. Like it or not, the era of cheap oil that moved the global economy was quickly drawing to a close, bringing a forecast of famine and recession. Change was necessary to prevent anarchy and ensure the market’s survival… a survival of the fittest. Like an unkempt forest, populations had to be pruned to prevent a potential blaze. Left to the tree huggers and liberal extremists, everything would end up burning to the ground — taking civilization with it.