“I think we have lit a fuse to chaos itself. As the mud people die, the white races will not unify as a single people. You know that as well as I do. That was Hitler’s folly, because he believed that whites would naturally form alliances as the dirt races were extinguished. You and I, Otto… we’re guilty of being caught up in fervor.”
“Why this change of heart? Are you doubting our purpose?”
Cyrus laughed. “Good God, no. If anything, I have never felt my resolve and my focus — my mental focus, Otto — to be stronger. With the betrayal of the Twins I feel like blinders have been removed and a bigger, grander picture is spread out before me.”
“Are we having an incident, Mr. Cyrus? Should I get your pills?”
“No… no, nothing like that. I’m in earnest when I say that I have never been more focused.”
“Then what are you saying? I’m old, it’s late, and I’m tired, so please tell me in less grandiose terms.”
Cyrus nodded. “Fair enough.” He sipped his wine and set the glass on the cooling desert sand. “I have been reimagining the world as it will be after the Extinction Wave—Waves—have passed. There will be no reemergence of old powers. The Aryan nations will not rise. That was a propaganda that we both believed, and we’ve believed it for so long that we forgot to think it through; we forgot to allow the ancient dream to evolve even while we evolved our plans as we acquired new science. The deaths of five billion people will not bring a paradise on earth. It will not create an Aryan utopia.”
“Then what will it bring?”
“I told you. Chaos. Mass deaths will bring fear. Fear will inspire suspicion, and suspicion will become war. Our Extinction Wave is going to plunge our world into an age of total global warfare. Nations will fall; empires will collide; the entire planet will be awash in blood.”
Otto was staring at him now.
Cyrus looked up at the endless stars.
“We were born in conflict, Otto. Our species. Darwin was right about survival of the fittest. That’s what this will become. Evolution through attrition. We will light a furnace in which anything that is weak will be burned to ashes. True to our deepest dreams, Otto… only the strong shall survive. It is up to us to ensure that strength is measured by how skillfully the sword of technology is used. But make no mistake, we are about to destroy the world as we know it.” He closed his eyes. “And it will be glorious.”
Chapter Ninety-Seven
When I woke, Grace was gone. She left like a phantom early in the morning. I looked for her, but every time I found her she was busy. Too busy to talk, too busy to make eye contact that lasted longer than a microsecond. It hurt, but I understood it. Those three little words we had whispered to each other in the dark had been like fragmentation grenades tossed into our professional relationship. This morning was like the deck of the Titanic twenty minutes after the iceberg.
A pretty hefty dose of depression was settling over me as I made my way to the conference room for my seven o’clock meeting with Church and Dr. Hu.
They were both there. Church studied me for a long moment before greeting me with a wordless nod; Hu didn’t bother even looking up from his laptop. I poured a cup of coffee from a pot that smelled like it had been brewing since last month.
“Please tell me we’re ready to roll,” I said. “I feel a strong need for some recreational violence.”
“Switch to decaf,” Hu murmured distractedly.
“Have we checked out those New Men? I mean… does the Kid’s story hold water about them being Neanderthals?”
“Too soon to tell,” said Hu. “We’re running DNA tests now, but you forgot to bring me a blood sample or bring back a specimen.”
“By ‘specimen’ you better mean a urine sample,” I said, “because if you’re referring to those people as specimens I’m going to—”
“They aren’t people,” said Hu. “If they are Neanderthals, then they are not human. No, wait, before you leap over the table and kick my ass, think for a minute. You’re going to make the argument that Neanderthals evolved from Homo erectus just like we did and therefore common ancestry makes them human. Whereas I can applaud your hippie granola we’re-all-one-big-family sensibilities, the fact is that they were distinctly different from modern humans. They may not have even interbred with early humans, and our last common ancestor died out about six hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Besides, the Kid was wrong when he said that they were reclaimed from mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrion only has a little over sixteen thousand DNA letters that code for thirteen proteins. To reclaim and grow an extinct species you’d need DNA from the nucleus, which has three billion letters that produce more than twenty thousand proteins.”
“Who the fuck cares?” I yelled. “They’re people. They talk; they think; they look like people…”
“I don’t know what they are, Ledger, but they’re still scientific oddities. Not people.”
“Enough,” said Church quietly. He looked at me. “The New Men will be transported to a U.S. military facility in Central America.”
“You mean an internment camp?”
“No. They will receive medical attention and assessment to determine how we can best integrate them into society, if they can be integrated into society, and with the heavy conditioning and genetic manipulation they’ve undergone we may have to face the reality that they cannot be successfully integrated into our culture.”
“So what will happen to them?”
“Ultimately? I don’t know. I’ve made a strong case on their behalf to the President, and he agrees that this needs to be handled with the utmost care and the greatest concern for their well-being and their rights.”
“Rights?” asked Hu. “What rights?”
Church turned to face him and Hu withered under the cold, hard stare. “The President agrees with me that they are to be treated as liberated prisoners of war. Their basic human rights will be addressed first, and at some later point wiser people than us will determine how best to serve their needs.” He paused. “Terrible things have been done to these people, and in many ways this is as great a human rights atrocity as the death camps.”
“Sure,” said Hu. “Fine. Whatever.” He went back to work on his laptop, and I drank my coffee and poured another cup.
Hu brightened. “Okay, maybe I got something…”
“Got what?” I asked. “A conscience?”
Church interrupted, “We’ve had a busy night collating the information from the Hive. We still haven’t pinned down the location of the Deck, but Bug thinks that will happen this morning. First Sergeant Sims is already prepping Echo and Alpha teams for a full-out assault. If the facility is in Arizona, then we can get ground support from the L.A. office. Unfortunately, Zebra and X-ray teams are still in Canada. If this morning goes well for them, then they’ll close out that matter and we can put them on the ground.”
“What about the teams from the Hangar?” The Brooklyn facility had four field teams. Baltimore and L.A. had two each, Denver and Chicago had one. I knew that the Chicago team had been chopped down in a mission two weeks ago that had killed the team leader and four of the six operators. They were vetting new candidates from Delta and the SEALs.
“Tango and Leopard are overseas. Hardball is in the process of moving to Denver to replace Jigsaw. They’re on standby.”
Unlike traditional branches of the military the DMS didn’t use the standard A, B, C code names for all of the teams. They did originally, but as teams were wiped out they were replaced by teams with new names that started with the same letter. If Grace and I ever came up for air we were supposed to start building new B and C teams to replace the original Bravo and Charlie Teams massacred during a major terrorist action in late June.