The Harbinger of Change Read online

  Beck chided, “Didn’t you people ever stop to think what would happen to the vaults if one of these people died or disappeared?”

  Bill stared, then started. “Gentleman, as you know, safeguards were in place to make sure the doctors didn’t really have control of their vaults the way they thought they did. Our problem is Mr. ‘Off-the-charts’ outsmarted us all and reprogrammed his vault so we have no control, so now we’ll have to wait to see what happens. I guess we can put it to the staff once more to see if anyone can come up with an idea, but the reality is, as stated in his letter, any attempt to enter that room or access that safe will be met with dire consequences. Gentlemen, when a man like James Haberman tells you that you are going to have ‘dire consequences,’ you better be upping your insurance; you’re going to need it.”

  Bill knew that Ken Beck never liked him, mostly because he came from privilege, something he’d heard Beck did not have the pleasure of doing. As a result, there was an animosity that made Beck’s composure slip a little. With too much personal inflection he shot out, “For all we know he’s working for the Ruskies, Westinghouse! And if he is, you and this whole place are going down, Bill, and no one is going to give a shit that your daddy is a State Senator.”

  Beck got up abruptly and Rogers followed as he retorted, “You’ve had a good run, Bill, but we need to get that satellite into its Beta mode, and if that means tying some heavy duty cables around Haberman’s safe and lifting it out of here with some Chinook Helicopters, then that’s what we’ll do. Then we will simply fly that fucker down to Moffett and laser it open. It’s up to you Bill, you have one month to produce him or the plan, and then it’s our turn.”

  They both left with an air of haughtiness that they really didn’t deserve to have. Especially Beck, that guy was dumpster sludge.

  Bill’s office overlooked the fountains. As he watched them and their entourages get into their respective limos and leave, he couldn’t help but think about Haberman. James sure screwed me up. He knew he was pushing James too hard. Although James would never admit it, Bill knew that he was putting too much pressure on him and the Satellite Project was James’s most aggressive new idea ever.

  He just expected James could handle it, that he thrived in that high-pressure world, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Now he was being thrown to the lions and he was really wondering, what in the world is in that safe that could blow up half a block?

  Bill only hoped these guys thought about it long and hard. Even if they breached the vault, the files had security, too. It was a losing bet; and worse, they would be “insulting a great patriot.” There was also the human element. It was in his personnel file. James Haberman did not like to lose at anything—ever. His chess playing was legendary when he was growing up, and many had him slated as the next Bobby Fisher. He was always a ferocious competitor, and it didn’t surprise Bill that James didn’t want anyone touching his work.

  Actually, it kind of showed that he was serious about coming back. Jesus Christ, I hope these idiots come to their senses before a lot of great work is lost. As he looked at the last of the Government Boys leave, he realized that the good old days were gone, and he was one step away from being unemployed, or worse, under indictment. He needed a break. His stomach rumbled and he had a thought about where to head for lunch and who he would call to join him.

  * * *

  As Dr. Cooper stared at her, transfixed in a stare of death, his eyes sought answers. Although the blade went directly into his heart, his brain had a brief amount of time to compute one last thought, to formulate a theory, and come to a conclusion. Danny looked at the woman he knew as Nancy Chavez one last time in total confusion. By the look on his face, it was obvious he did not reach resolution to his query before he slid off the end of her knife blade, and made his final descent to the floor.

  As his body was in mid-descent, Vera Maldonado had already begun to flash back to the start of her day. Just a few short hours ago, she never would have imagined she could be where she just put herself by killing this man. For two years she had lived and worked in Sunnyvale. Infiltrated as a mole under an alias inside Conceptual Labs, she had been placed there to do one thing: steal the contents of a safe. So for two years she had distracted her mind with exercise or nature in her free time. She could literally be in a Redwood Forest within minutes of her apartment. She found that cathartic these many lonely months. As she closed her door one last time earlier today, she knew she was never coming back.

  Vera had sacrificed two years of her life for Pablo and would happily do ten more, for he had saved her. He had shown her that love is not cruel or hard, that love had a soft, caring hand that would always be there for her, and finally, that love didn’t want anything in return. That’s why it had to be her to do this. She was the only one who loved him enough to do this, the only one with the fortitude to see it through. Vera looked at the felled doctor as emphasis on that proclamation.

  Her heart was racing because they were about to make history. Moreover, they were about to change the balance of power in the world in a way no one could see coming. There were going to be so many firsts in what they were doing. The U.S. had been attacked before, but by other world powers, never by two people. This time they were going to be attacked by old Pablo and Vera. Two more common names there never could be. Of course, Pablo was anything but common, and this was the old blindside.

  America had endured a lot of tragedy and war in the last couple of hundred years, but this was going to be something different. This was something no one had expected in their worst nightmares, let alone their waking reality.

  All she had to do was pull off the front part of a perfectly-made plan. A plan made by the smartest man in the world. Then, Pablo promised the rest would come quickly and the U.S. would never know who or what hit them. While they were shaking down the usual suspects with Russia, China, and half the Arab World, she would simply slip back into South America unnoticed. It was such a beautiful plan, but it took time and connections to get her into Conceptual Labs.

  Conceptual Labs was a think tank that employed some of the smartest people in the world. Originally Conceptual stood on their own and just invented new weapons, but after their reputation took hold, they started taking on existing ideas and fine-tuning them; oftentimes increasing payloads, distance, accuracy, and other variables. Conceptual had the highest clearance level among civilian contractors. They were responsible for the Neutron Bomb concept as well as some of the most top-secret germ warfare enhancements known to man. Ones that terrified even the most seasoned warmongers.

  Pablo spent two years getting her trained as a technician in his own private school. He fabricated a family history for her. According to the legend he created, she was the sole survivor of a horrific car crash and was raised as a ward of the State. Her dossier came complete with phony school records, teacher reports, friends, neighbors, and even church records from Baptism to First Communion.

  Who knows how much money or effort went into this plan, she wondered sometimes. Vera could only guess it to be in the millions, which to Pablo, was nothing. Vera knew that once she closed her door this morning, there was no going back. She had no life in America anyway, as this was a fictitious existence. Her life was with Pablo. She had no remorse for her actions, no feeling of longing to stay in the land of opportunity, keep her job and simply mold into her alias of Nancy Chavez, American Citizen.

  America, a place where an orphan could climb to any title she was willing to work for. That thought was the least appealing thing Vera could think of. She missed her Pablito. She was nervous, but more about failing Pablo than anything else. She was determined not to fail him. The day before, she packed her things very carefully and loaded them into her car. Inside her case she packed a new outfit, a blonde wig, glasses, a new passport based on her escape identity, and finally, her running shoes. Using the identity in the bag, Vera was quickly going to become Michelle Fernandez, Sales Rep in the wine industry, traveling
to Chile.

  Every time Vera had self-doubt, she steadied herself with the thought that the man who had made this all happen had freed her from the shackles of one of the most brutal gangs in all of Brazil. The fact that it happened without a shot being fired or a bomb exploding was troubling enough, but even more bizarre was how the gang actually looked in awe upon this average-looking young man who had just walked in and freed her.

  She saw the sadistic way these people lived because she was one of their victims, forced to live among them. They feared little. Her liberation from them was the closest thing to a miracle as she had ever seen in her enslaved lifetime, one where there was absolutely no hope of happiness or a future. Orphaned on the streets of Rio, she was an easy target. Property from the time she was ten years old, and somehow Pablo freed her.

  After her rescue, Pablo had showered her in kindness and love, and she learned how to both give and receive love, something that did not come easily to her as she was always waiting for “the catch.” Although her nature was to never trust anyone, Pablo had broken down that wall. She learned to love him deeply, and as she did, she learned of his pain, and of his tortured past.

  Vera saw the reason for her rescue now. She was not the only victim that would be rescued by this kind and wonderful man as he continued on his path of righteousness. Only now he was looking to save the whole planet at once, not just one soul at a time.

  Vera looked around the room. It was just as Pablo described, with even an accurate description of James’s safe. James let Pablo in on the secret. When he was in his prime, he would request outlandish things from Bill Westinghouse just to see how far he could get him to jump. The safe, with a style reminiscent of Modern Art, was just one example that Vera knew of. The secret James gave to Pablo was that only one vault of the safe contained anything at all. The whole monstrosity was just pointless subterfuge.

  Vera was racking her mind as how to extricate herself from this dilemma. She knew her last thoughts were just serving to distract herself from the unthinkable. Vera’s mind drifted to her Pablo. Just thinking about how he would approach this scenario helped her, immensely. Unfortunately, thinking about Pablo also led her mind to wander.

  After Pablo saved her, it took a lot of patience on his part to make her anywhere near right in the head. Once Pablo programmed her to be able to live life free of the memories of daily torture, he had created a situation that was designed to set her free. She remembered awakening alone one morning and immediately becoming scared and confused by Pablo’s absence. Vera knew right away that she was somewhere unfamiliar, but when she pulled back the curtain she could never have guessed just how far she had traveled the night before.

  They had been to Paris three months earlier, so she immediately knew what the tower meant. Why am I here though? That’s mostly what was swimming through her foggy head. How much wine did I have last night anyway? Where was Pablo? She scanned the room and spotted something on a table. It was a briefcase and an envelope. On the envelope was written “Vera.”

  Shaking, she opened the envelope first, not the briefcase. What it contained, rocked her to her foundation. Pablo had truly set her free. In the briefcase were fifty thousand U.S. dollars. In the envelope there was a bank account number and a statement from the Dexia bank in Zurich. The amount of three million dollars was listed as the last deposit. She was a millionaire! The letter read that if he truly loved her, then he would do this for her. He knew his life is going to be complicated and it would not be fair to her. He wanted her to truly live, enjoy life to the fullest and owe to no one. The letters last words were, “Go out and live life and forget about Pablo Manuel.”

  Looking at the letter she thought of her Pablo at the time, oh what a foolish man he was, but his heart was in the right place. Of course, when she immediately returned to him, he knew that as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t about money. It was about loyalty, love, and God’s will.

  When she volunteered to do this for him, Pablo quickly came around to the realization that she was completely loyal to her man, and he had trusted her unconditionally ever since. Her loyalty was as unquestionable and solid as that of any zealot. Pablo now understood that she found salvation in him, the man who had brought her the two things she never dared to hope for: kindness and love.

  Pablo reluctantly accepted the fact that she would die for him, which was a realistically possible outcome of what she had to do now. Vera made Pablo face the fact she was not exactly the jail type, so if it went bad, it was going bad “all the way.”

  Looking down on the shell that had once housed the life of Dr. Daniel Cooper, Vera remembered her mindset as she backed out of her parking stall earlier that morning. Her mindset was that she intended to do whatever it took to get this done for her savior, and Dr. Cooper dead on the floor was just one more example of how much she loved her Pablo. Switching channels in her mind, she went over the layout of Conceptual Labs' compound one last time.

  Conceptual Labs was a futuristic four-story glass building locked in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Although the building was made of glass, it had no opening exterior windows and had only the main entrance, fire exits, and roof exits as its points of entry and exit. It was a beautiful complex though, with an innovative pool as its centerpiece. Inside the pool were several ceramic fountains of dolphins and other aquatic life. It also had spherical objects that hung on bent metal poles over the water. The poles put on a beautiful light show at night and were placed in no order around the fountain plaza, giving the fountain a completely different look than it had in the daytime.

  The building facade was a montage of twisted stainless and glass designed to give the effect that one was in the future, but a disjointed future with no symmetry as far as Vera was concerned. The complex itself had a very high razor-wire fence surrounding it and a trench that was fifteen feet deep on the inside of the wire. So driving a car in or out through the fence line was not going to happen.

  The fence line looked like a Demilitarized Zone, but it was covered nicely with a large tree line of Eucalyptus, managed to perfection. Just past the outer trench, a huge row of Oleander was planted to camouflage the final outer fence. The front of the complex was controlled by a guard shack and had some special terrorist prevention enhancements.

  Any person driving by and not knowing what Conceptual did would never guess some of the world’s most hideous weapons and enhancements came from this place, including some of the foremost in laser and EMP technology. That’s where Vera worked, in the EMP lab.

  Dr. Cooper had spotted her around Conceptual. He was obviously one of the men that Pablo’s pheromones had affected, and he happened to be the very man that Vera needed to get inside of James’s vault. Vera loathed the man, especially the way he made her call him “Danny” and always undressed her with his eyes. But he was everything she could have hoped for in every other respect. As brilliant as he was, he was no match for her incredible Latin beauty and Pablo’s sensory enhancements.

  Dr. Cooper had been nerdy, of average height and weight, with unkempt, jet-black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, straight from the Sixties. He always wore the obligatory short-sleeved, white shirt with a pen in the front pocket, black dress pants, and black dress shoes, every single day.

  She, on the other hand, was so gorgeous that she would catch men staring at her wherever she went. At five foot nine and measurements of 36-26-36 to go with her hourglass frame and beautiful straight black hair, she had the keys to the castle. Given all the free time she had, she was always driving out to remote places and running up to ten miles at a time. As a result, she was really in shape. Vera was careful not to be too revealing, though. She covered up her figure a lot, even finding some really non-cute, non-prescription glasses, just to nerd herself up, as she had perfect vision.

  At the Christmas party though, she dressed in a very tight dress that molded to her body. Even then she kept it covered up with a coat. That was until she spotted Danny alone at the snac
k table. She casually strode over and got some celery and carrots and started a light conversation. During that conversation she flapped her full-length coat like a bat’s wings while asking him, “Is it hot in here?”

  After that night, he was dumb around her. She would use tactics like inadvertently touching him at work or letting her hair fall on him “accidentally.” A touch here, a scent there, and Dr. Daniel Cooper was madly in love with Vera almost immediately, but lately, more than ever, as they worked in close proximity on a daily basis. She had been rejecting him for almost a year now, but recently, she came in forlorn. When he asked her why she was upset, she divulged a fake boyfriend breakup story and softened her stance against him. Dr. Cooper was not suspicious at all, but almost surely if she would have allowed his advances to happen early on in their working relationship, it would have raised a red flag.

  Relationships with Lab Assistants were not permitted at Conceptual. In fact, there was a laundry list of things employees weren’t allowed to do. They weren’t allowed to have foreign national friends, or especially lovers. They weren’t allowed to have gambling debts, or any debts at all, outside what was considered normal living expenditures. Credit checks were run every six months. Employees weren’t allowed to have any kind of convictions, either, not even a DUI.

  The security staff controlled the cameras throughout the building, except in the actual labs. There, the doctor in charge controlled the cameras and recordings. Security was so tight in Daniel’s sector that even Conceptual Labs’ own security personnel did not have clearance to see what was going on.

  Each doctor was in charge of their own lab and also had a room containing a private vault to store their work in at the end of each workday. All hard drives from the tabulation computers and lab cameras were kept in the safe rooms, monitored by numerous security controls. The camera drives were not housed in the project safe, but rather in a separate-locking storage cabinet. Conceptual was a company that took no chances in the espionage field, so the doctors in charge were vetted harder than the President. If one masturbated in seventh grade camp, then they were going to find out about it, if one wanted to become a Project Manager at Conceptual that is. Being an assistant was only slightly less intrusive, and Vera knew that it must have cost Pablo a fortune.