Perfect Dark: Initial Vector Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE - Stony Mountain Medium Security Institution—Manitoba, Canada February 8th, 2016

  CHAPTER 1 - pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters–Cormox Street, Vancouver; British Columbia September 4th, 2020

  CHAPTER 2 - Carrington Institute–London, England September 13th, 2020

  CHAPTER 3 - Pacific Centre-Vancouver; British Columbia September 26th, 2020

  CHAPTER 4 - Luxe LiFe Resort—Kauai, Hawaii September 26th, 2020

  CHAPTER 5 - Carrington Institute—London, England September 27th, 2020

  CHAPTER 6 - Carrington Institute—London, England September 27th, 2020

  CHAPTER 7 - dataDyne low-orbit executive transport, DragonFly II—46,000 Feet, descending September 27th, 2020

  CHAPTER 8 - pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters—Cormox Street, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020

  CHAPTER 9 - pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters—Cormox Streat, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020

  CHAPTER 10 - pharmaDyne corporate Headquarters—Cormox Street, Vancouver British Columbia September 28th, 2020

  CHAPTER 11 - pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters— Cormox Street, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020

  CHAPTER 12 - Hotel Regina-Apartment 4-2, Place des Pyramides, Paris, France September 28th, 2020

  CHAPTER 13 - Carrington Institute—Computer Lab III, London, England September 30th, 2020

  CHAPTER 14 - Ginza Station—Tokyo, Japan October 2nd, 2020

  CHAPTER 15 - InterContinental Le Grand Hotal Paris—Room 4822-2, Rue Scribe, Paris, France October 3rd, 2020

  CHAPTER 16 - Club Lisboa—48 Rua Praria Antonio, Macau, People’s Republic of China October 6th, 2020

  CHAPTER 17 - Club Lisboa—48 Rua Praia Antonio, Macau, People’s Republic of China October 6th, 2020

  CHAPTER 18 - DataFlow Corporate Headquarters—Office of Chief Executive Officeer and Director Cassandra DeVries—#7 Rue de la Baume, Paris, France October 7th, 2020

  CHAPTER 19 - Carrington Institute—Grounds—London, England October 7th, 2020

  CHAPTER 20 - Gustav Weiss, Solicitor—882 Minervasbrasse, Zurich, Switzarland October 8th, 2020

  CHAPTER 21 - Carrington Institute—Training Range—London, England October 9th, 2020

  CHAPTER 22 - Residence of Paul Sexton—#3 Fairlake Lane, Grosse Pointe, Michigan October 10th, 2020

  CHAPTER 23 - The Money Pit—337 West 78th Street, New York City, New York October 10th, 2020

  CHAPTER 24 - The Money Pit—337 West 78th Street, New York City, New York October 10th, 2020

  CHAPTER 25 - DataFlow Corporate Headquarters-Office of Chief Executive Officer and Director Cassandra Devries—#7 Rue de la Baume, Paris, France October 11 th, 2020

  CHAPTER 26 - Carrington Institute VTOL Chameleon Class Dropship #003—4,750 Feet, level Flight-South Pacific, Solomon Islands Group October 13th/ 14th International Date Line), 2020

  CHAPTER 27 - Core-Mantis OmniGlobal-Solomon Islands Health and Healing Center—Hovoro Sacurad Facility—17 km WSW Hovoro October 14th/15th (International Date Line), 2020

  CHAPTER 28 - Core-Mantis OmniGlobal-Solomon Islands Health and Healing Canbar-Hovoro Secured Facility-Building Seven (Life Storage Wing)- 17 km WSW Hovoro October 14th/15th (International Date Line), 2020

  CHAPTER 29 - DataFlow Corporate Headquarters—Communications & Support Center—#7 Rue de la Baume, Paris, France October 14th, 2020

  CHAPTER 30 - Carrington Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wye Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020

  CHAPTER 31 - Carrington Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wye Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020

  CHAPTER 32 - Carrington Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wya Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020

  CHAPTER 33 - Carrington Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wye Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020

  CHAPTER 34 - Carrington Institute—Rooms of Joanna Dark—London, England October 19th, 2020

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to the shareholders.

  PROLOGUE

  Stony Mountain Medium Security Institution—Manitoba, Canada February 8th, 2016

  The outbreak started three days into the new year. A family of four was admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, all diagnosed as suffering from acute bouts of influenza. The only thing remarkable about this was that the bug had hit the whole family at once with equal severity, from the adults down to the youngest child, a little girl named Penelope, age three.

  Even that fact failed to raise any substantial interest, and truly, it shouldn’t have. To all appearances, this was nothing more sinister than the latest iteration of the venerable influenza A virus. Here it was, the dead of winter, the heart of flu season, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention down south in the United States had already issued a warning for the prevalent 2015-16 strain, identified as influenza A subtype H7N10.

  Another year, another shift in the virus, but nothing to raise alarms about.

  The fourth of January saw another eleven cases admitted, bringing the total to fifteen.

  The fifth saw the number quadruple, to sixty, and with it came the first round of fatalities. All four of the patients admitted on the third had died, as had five of the eleven admitted on the fourth.

  On the morning of the sixth, the Canadian government broadcast an emergency health warning about the growing epidemic. Later studies revealed that their warnings went largely unheeded; the public preferred to get their news from more trusted corporate sources.

  By noon, the number of diagnosed cases in Montreal alone had mushroomed to seven hundred and seventeen. By midnight, the death toll had reached one hundred and fifty-two. These were official numbers, and certainly wildly inaccurate, as no attempt had yet been made to tally the undocumented cases. Hospitals as far as Vancouver to the west and Halifax to the east began reporting bed shortages. Emergency relief personnel were activated, and the Canadian Red Cross opened triage centers in almost all of Canada’s major urban zones. Rumors of a declaration of martial law began to circulate.

  At which point, nobody who was paying any sort of attention at all thought they were dealing with influenza A subtype H7N10 any longer.

  This was something different, something much more virulent, and something far more resistant to treatment.

  On the seventh of January, 2016, the virus exploded, with over twenty-three thousand, four hundred and forty-two cases of what the media was now calling “the Canadian superflu” diagnosed all across the country. Scientists at the CDC and elsewhere were calling it influenza A subtype H17N22, but that was at best unbridled optimism, because the government scientists who examined the virus didn’t have the first idea what they were looking at.

  Everyone else had taken to calling it “The Flu.”

  The death toll broke one thousand, and was picking up speed.

  International travel to and from Canada was cancelled as the country went into massive quarantine. Rioting broke out in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, and St. John’s as false rumors of a vaccine spread in each respective community. The RCMP and Canadian Army were turned out onto the streets to keep order. The United States closed all northern crossings, and issued orders that border patrol agents were to shoot to kill anyone attempting to enter the country.

  Beck-Yama InterNational, dataDyne, and Core-Mantis OmniGlobal all took the unprecedented step of closing their Canadian offices, ordering their employees to remain at home—or more precisely, ordering them to stay away from their offices—unless they could provide notarized proof that
they were virus-free. Global markets responded immediately to the action of the three largest hypercorporations, promptly plummeting an average of twenty-three percentage points. Trading was closed on the New York, Tokyo, Sydney, and London exchanges.

  Pundits were now comparing the Canadian outbreak to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, which had left twentyfive million dead before it had run its course. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City, bookies were giving three-to-one odds that the death toll would break fifty million before the virus burnt itself out.

  By the tenth of January, 2016, Canada had come to a spasmodic, wheezing, and fever-wracked halt.

  The world waited, afraid to breathe.

  It was a matter of priorities, and prisons didn’t rate, not in a crisis.

  Hospitals had to be staffed, emergency medical teams dispatched, and like all things in the age of the so-called “hypercorporations,” the best care went to those with the most money. First it went to the executives at dataDyne and Core-Mantis OmniGlobal and Beck-Yama InterNational and the like. Next, to their resources, namely, their employees. From there it moved to essential services, government offices, police, fire, military, and medical.

  Then, and only then, did it trickle down to the general public.

  For those people in societal limbo, the homeless, institutionalized, or imprisoned, there was nothing left.

  And this was why, when Laurent Hayes was discovered at Stony Mountain Medium Security Institution, it wasn’t just a miracle that he was alive.

  It was a gift from God.

  He was found locked in his cell in solitary confinement, secured behind his door, just as every other inmate had been discovered. He was dressed in a powder-blue prison jumpsuit, the same as every other inmate had worn. And like every other inmate, the hair at the back of his head had been seared off, to allow for easy reading of the barcode tattooed there.

  It was only when the disposal team member, dressed in his hazmat gear and sucking wet and stale oxygen through his rebreather, reached down to scan the barcode on the back of Laurent Hayes’s neck that it was discovered he wasn’t like every other inmate. It had nothing to do with the actual inmate data that filled the palm-sized reader, not the fact that his name was Laurent N. Hayes, or that he was only sixteen years old, or that he was serving life for a string of three murders he’d committed at the age of fourteen.

  It was that when the reader touched the base of Laurent Hayes’s skull, Laurent Hayes spoke.

  “Piss off,” Laurent Hayes croaked.

  He was rushed to St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, where he was initially treated for starvation and dehydration. Blood was drawn, tested, and then, three hours later, drawn and tested a second time. Four separate teams of physicians examined him over the next eighteen hours, culminating, finally, in a visit from a team of specialists, some from as far away as Geneva.

  It was at this point, being poked and prodded by yet another set of unfamiliar and unwelcome hands, that Laurent Hayes began to wonder what all the fuss was about. So he reached out and grabbed the nearest invading hand by the wrist, discovering that it was attached to a middle-aged woman intent on giving his lungs yet another listen.

  “They just didn’t feed me, all right?” Hayes said. His voice, when he spoke, came out softly, his throat still raw from dehydration. “Screws stopped feeding me, the whole damn place went quiet.”

  “Screws?”

  “Guards, the guards.”

  She nodded slowly, then tried to free her hand from his grip. Laurent held her wrist a fraction longer, to make his point, before releasing it.

  “The guards stopped coming to work when the inmates began getting sick,” she told him. “That was almost two weeks ago.”

  “Sick?”

  “When did you go into solitary?”

  He couldn’t remember. It was one of the things he hated about prison, the loss of time. He shrugged.

  “We thought that might be why, you understand,” she said. “You’d been in solitary and hadn’t been exposed.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Hayes asked.

  “Canada is in the grip of a massive influenza pandemic, Mister Hayes. Millions have died.”

  He stared at her, blankly, trying to imagine something that could kill millions and get away with it.

  “We thought you had avoided exposure,” she continued. “That locked in solitary, you had avoided contracting the superflu. But the blood tests keep coming back the same, and that’s why we’re here, Mister Hayes.”

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got this bug?”

  “Yes and no, Mister Hayes. Viruses don’t die off in the bloodstream. They either continue to replicate and take over, or they’re rendered ineffective. So, technically, yes, you have the superflu.”

  Hayes swore, thinking that it was just another example of how the universe hated him, how every good thing he ever managed to get, it would take away. Here he was, out of prison, and this white coat was smiling down at him while she delivered his death sentence.

  He was swearing so much, in fact, that he entirely missed the rest of what she was telling him.

  “What?” Laurent Hayes demanded.

  “I said, you appear to be immune,” the woman repeated, and she gave him a big smile. “You’re one of a kind, Mister Hayes. In your blood, right now, is a cure that can save millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people.”

  He stared at her, suspicious. “My blood?”

  “Yes, Mister Hayes.”

  He considered that, thinking that for once, perhaps, the universe was finally doing right by him. His blood could save millions, maybe hundreds of millions.

  “All right,” Laurent Hayes said, after a moment. “How much are you going to pay me for it?”

  As it turned out, they wanted his blood for free, and when he objected, they put him in restraints and posted a guard on his room. He shouted and cursed until he’d used what little of his voice had returned, and then began thrashing against his restraints until two orderlies and the smiling woman had to return to sedate him.

  The world was just beginning to slip away from him when the screaming started somewhere down the hall.

  He heard gunshots.

  Then he heard nothing.

  For Immediate Release to approved news outlets:

  dataDyne Subsidiary CEO Awarded Nobel Prize

  Los Angeles, California—10 December 2016

  dataDyne is pleased to congratulate Dr. Friedrich Murray, Director of Research and New Product Development for pharmaDyne Corporation, for receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine from the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet. Dr. Murray, who will shortly move to the CEO position of pharmaDyne, was instrumental for his discovery of a vaccine for influenza A subtype H22N17.

  The influenza A subtype H22N17 outbreak earlier this year visited a medical horror on the people of Canada the like of which has never before been seen in the history of mankind. Over the course of three months, this “superflu” pandemic ravaged Canada, tragically claiming over thirty-seven million lives before its spread was arrested by the distribution of Dr. Murray’s vaccine. Without question, it was Dr. Murray’s work, and the work of his pharmaDyne team, that not only led to the containment of the virus, but to its ultimate eradication.

  dataDyne is proud of Dr. Murray’s accomplishments, and how his discovery reflects our core company values: innovation, dedication, and a commitment to improving the quality of life for our customers, and for people around the globe.

  dataDyne Corporation was founded as a technology company (dataDyne Industries) in 1985 by industrialist /philanthropist Zhang Li. Today, dataDyne is a diversified, global company, with subsidiaries in the media /entertainment, technology, personal electronics, defense and aerospace, and pharmaceutical industries.

  pharmaDyne is a Toronto-based subsidiary of dataDyne, with research and development facilities in Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa.

  This release is © 2016, dataDyne Co
rporation/Media Relations Division, and is authorized for personal use and for distribution through dataDyne approved news sources and dataDyne lifeCard PDA newsfeed subscribers only. Unauthorized distribution is prohibited and punishable under the 2012 International Corporate Information Security Act, Section 30, Subsection 19, Paragraph 10.2.1.A.

  CHAPTER 1

  pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters–Cormox Street, Vancouver; British Columbia September 4th, 2020

  The primary goal was always to preserve his cover, to keep himself safe in the enemy’s camp, and for that reason Benjamin Able was ordered to make contact with the Institute solely at his discretion, and never, ever directly after leaving work. It was a directive straight from Carrington himself: Institute assets within dataDyne or any of its subsidiaries were to be preserved at all costs.

  Ben knew the edict, and it gave him no small amount of comfort. He knew what he did was dangerous, he knew that, potentially, it could cost him his life. He knew, as well, that it would have been so much easier to simply buy the package, to believe the lie, exactly as it seemed the way the rest of the world had. To submit to the benevolent care of the hypercorporations, to Core-Mantis and Beck-Yama and Zentek.

  To submit to the will of dataDyne, whose slogan, ever-present beneath the double-D diamond logo, was the closest thing to truth the corporation ever offered the world: Your life, our hands. For the longest time, Benjamin Able had believed he was the only person who understood the irony in that, and the implicit threat.

  Until the man from the Carrington Institute had tracked him down over five years earlier, knocking on the door of his dorm room at the University of British Columbia in the middle of a bitterly cold winter’s night. Ben was majoring in political science, burning midnight oil to complete a term paper. A certain brunette in his Lit class had finally agreed, after weeks of persistence on Ben’s part, to go out for pizza and a movie, but he was far enough behind in his work that he worried he’d have to cancel. When he’d answered the door, he’d expected to have friends from down the hall and the offer of a diner run, and he was already readying his excuses for staying behind.