CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION CHAPTER 18: Our Daily Bread...
Moscow, Russian Federation, Monday, June 1st, 2020, 7:55 p.m. local time...
"The Third Horseman?" Chuck asked nervously. "Wait, would that be as in...the Book of Revelations?"
Jill nodded unhappily. "Yeah. The Horseman of Famine. That's how serious this could be."
The brunette fell silent for a moment, before walking over the refrigerator, and removing a bottle of whiskey.
"Drink?" she asked Chuck, who shook his head in the negative. Jill poured herself some whiskey in a coffee cup, took a gulp, and sat down with Chuck on the sofa again, the bottle sitting on the floor, easily at hand.
"I was thinking about contacting you, Chuck," Jill went on, "when you contacted me a few days ago. What I've found out since you left Moscow a few weeks ago makes things a lot more dire than I knew at the time. But...let me start at the start."
She fell silent for a moment, taking another sip of the whiskey, and said, "I'm in Moscow because Tony contacted me, about two weeks before you and I ran into each other."
Chuck nodded, he had been in Moscow the week before the Bartowski Mother's Day barbecue, and had been surprised to run into both Jill and Jack Burton, under his 'Tony Rogers' alias, in Moscow. At the time, he had known they were running a scam of some kind, and had been surprised to learn that it was not the first time, but Jill had not seemed anything like as nervous as she was now.
"Tony had been running an angle," Jill went on, "arranging for some of the shadier money men in Moscow to meet with people he knew in Germany and France, he and his new girlfriend were acting as go-betweens. He was telling the Russians that the French and German contacts were interested in taking on some investors for under-the-table patent transactions. He told the French and the Germans that the Russian investors were open to under-the-table investment. He had each side thinking the other was ready to walk away at any time when in fact they were ready to strike the deal, he was skimming off some fat profits that way. Tony and Darya were the go-betweens because there was no legal way to transact such a deal."
Chuck sighed and nodded, recognizing the tactic. At least it sounds like Jack was selling something and not just pulling a Lichtenstein. Unless...
"Just for my own edification, Selena," Chuck asked, "did these patents actually exist?"
"Of course they did," Jill said with a smile. "They might not have always been exactly what they seemed, but they were real."
Chuck sighed. Sounds like a variant on a 'gold brick scam'. Naturally. It wouldn't be any fun for Jack if he did it honestly.
"Anyway," Jill went on, "Tony and Darya were raking it in, and had been for the better part of six months. They even had their own fake law firm set up to help them grease the wheels. Tony had called me to call in a couple of favors at the stat of the operation, he had security people and translators from my organization to help him and Darya pull it off. This had been going on for months, and it was going swimmingly.
"But then they found out that one of the 'patents' they were helping to sell was actually totally different from the others," Jill continued.'
"About six weeks ago, they discovered that one of their French contacts had hooked up with someone selling samples and information about a strain of wheat-destroying fungus, and was trying to arrange to sell it to the Russian investors Tony and Darya had lined up. Tony's no fool, he could sense that things had suddenly gotten riskier, and he and Darya debated whether they should just disappear and let the deals fall through. But it was a very lucrative operation and they didn't want to abandon it before they had milked it dry."
"So he contacted you?"
"Yeah," Jill said. "We'd worked together enough to sort of trust each other, he wanted me to find out if things were as hot as he sensed they might be. The security men I had loaned Tony agreed that things were looking nastier all of a sudden, so I took a look...and I scared myself. I identified the new player on the French team as a rogue Chinese Intelligence agent, and when I worked my contacts I found out about the lab raid and the black rust fungus that the JIA people told you about. The fungus was code-tagged EREBUS by the scientists that created it, by the way, and that's what the Chinese kept calling it and what the rogue agent is using to refer to it."
Jill took a deep breath, and continued.
"My first advice to Tony was to skip town fast, but when I told him why, he got funny and wanted to know more about the black rust fungus that was stolen. I wasn't sure why, but he was really interested, and my curiosity had been piqued too, so I let Darya and Tony introduce me to the marks as an 'associate' in their fake law firm. That's what was going down when you and I were together a few weeks ago, and you asked me to make sure Tony didn't overreach himself."
"He has been known to do that," Chuck commented gently.
"Oh believe me, I know," Jill said with a laugh. "It's his favorite line, 'con means confidence!'. He never lacks for it. When he was teaching me the con game, I realized that he's an optimist to the core, and I saw it get him into trouble more than once. So I was already doing what you asked me to anyway. I'm very fond of Tony, he's a loveable old rogue."
That he is, Chuck admitted to himself.
"Anyway," Jill went on, "we managed to get copies of some of what the seller is offering, and video and other information about its effectiveness, and then I really started getting scared. The thing is, I could understand what some of the technical information in those papers meant, where most professional agents wouldn't get the full implications of it."
She looked at him, suddenly impish, and said, "You shouldn't have slept through intro to biochem, Chuck. It's important."
"Well, I'm sure you can explain it to me in words of a few syllables," Chuck replied with a roll of his eyes.
"What it amounts to is that the Russian scientists who created this thing created a monster. I'm still amazed that they went ahead and did it. It's brilliant, from a strictly scientific point of view. Fascinating as an exercise in applied genetics. But to actually make this thing was just insane!
"You've probably heard the arguments about deliberately making disease germs more infectious or lethal in the lab, 'gain of function' efforts for dangerous organisms are really controversial. The scientists in that lab made this thing gain function like something out of a horror movie! Just the information is bad enough, but they apparently actually created viable samples of thing thing!
"I'm still amazed at it, from a scientific point of view. But it terrifies me that it exists! If I'm reading the information that the seller has shared right, the scientists managed to incorporate large stretches of DNA and RNA into the fungal nuclei, DNA from other kinds of fungus that prey on other plants, and set it up so that they activate only under certain conditions.
"This thing starts out like a super-version of conventional 'black rust'. Once released, it'll get into a wheat crop and wreck it, pretty efficiently, but some strains will resist. The first year it was released, it might wipe out 50-75% of the wheat crop in a target country, and nearby areas depending on its spread. That alone would be a catastrophe, of course."
"That's about what the briefing they gave me back in Los Angeles said," Chuck nodded. "I take it there's worse?"
"Much worse," Jill went on. "During the first infection, this thing sends apparently sends hyphae along the vascular channels-"
"Whoa, girl," Chuck said, holding up a hand. "English translation, please!"
"Sorry, I've been reading the papers we've retrieved from the seller and I'm thinking in technical jargon. Hmm...the first infection is on the stalk of the wheat. But it sends what are called hyphae, tiny threads of fungus, down the interior of the stem and into the soil, and there it spreads out through soil around the plant. There are already lots of fungi in the ground, neutral and benign types. Some of them are critical to healthy plant growth. This thing 'bonds' to the fungi already present, and alters their activities. This part takes some time, but it goes on even while the first round of infection is taking out most of the crop above.
"After the first infection, this thing gets down into the roots and soil, and then goes dormant. It also constantly rewrites parts of its own DNA to make new, slightly different versions of itself to overcome natural resistances, to fight off fungicides, etc. When a new crop is planted, this thing is waiting in the ground, it gets right into the roots and destroys it. It spreads 'fungal threads' through the area, and makes the land impossible to use for wheat or wheat-derivative plants. But that's still not the worst.
"It periodically releases bursts of spores, starting two or three months after it first infects a site. The spores are so tiny they can be carried by the wind, or water, or stick to animals or people or machines, and spread that way. They're almost too small to see, but it releases them in incredible numbers. Once it gets established, this thing could spread like lightning, and infect whole regions, entire small countries, from a single infected field. It's amazingly tough, it can resist winter cold and summer heat, this fungus could thrive in Texas or Alaska, Egypt or Siberia. Wherever it gets established, wheat just isn't a viable crop anymore, and this thing could live for decades in the ground. It might take it some time to get across oceans, but sooner or later it would, all it would take is a few spores on a ship or a plane, or someone to spread it intentionally, and there it would be. If nothing else it would eventually do on the wind. It might take a few years to infect world-wide, but it would. This thing is just immune to most of the natural checks on its spread, and it mutates itself so fast artificial ones would be take years to become effective. And apparently it can stay dormant in the soil for 30 to 50 years.
"Chuck, if this thing gets loose, wheat is done as a major food crop, for years at least, maybe decades. But...that's still not the worst of it."
Jill fell silent for a moment, taking another sip of her whiskey. Chuck was a little worried by that, Jill had never been a whiskey girl, her favorite booze had been wine or wine coolers. Straight whiskey was a rarity for her.
"Remember I said they incorporated DNA from other fungal forms?"
Chuck nodded.
"Well, this monster is optimized for wheat. But it can attack other grass-derived grains. I don't know if you know it, but wheat, corn, rice, they're all forms of grass, believe it or not, and they share a common ancestor. This monster can attack any of them, but it does it in different ways for each. On corn, apparently it screws up the fertilization, so the ears have only a handful of kernels. In rice, it rots the grain on the stalk. Apparently, they managed to take different kinds of fungi, one that hits corn, one that hits rice, maybe some other stuff, and combine them, using their original black rust as a host and a carrier.
"It's not nearly as efficient against the other grains as it is against wheat. This thing could effectively end global wheat production, over the course of a few years, or much faster on a local or continental scale. Against corn is appears to be only about 40% efficient, that is, it destroys 40% or so of the kernels. If a field of corn would normally yield a 1000 bushels, it would only give 600 if the soil was infected by this thing. But it gets into the soil with corn just like it does with wheat.
"With rice it's not quite as bad, and apparently flooding the fields makes it hard for this thing to go into the ground and stay dormant, so it would have to re-infect every year. But if it had gotten into the ground in other places and kept send clouds of spores out...well, anyway, in rice it cuts yields by about 25 to 30%, if the data are accurate.
"I don't know yet about the effects on things like barley or millet...but what I do know is damn well bad enough!"
Chuck pondered what she was saying, and as he did, he felt a cold chill in the pit of his stomach. He tapped into his Intersect, and the information that came flowing back was not reassuring:
...wheat is the third most heavily grown staple grain world-wide...dependence particularly high in developing and low-income countries...dependent population two billion plus...corn is the most widely grown staple crop, primary animal feed and a primary calorie source for Mexico and Central America...rice is the crop depended upon by the largest percentage of the global population...
"If something were to terminate wheat production globally," Chuck said slowly, unable to keep the horror out of his own voice, "that alone would mean starvation for at least a billion people, and hunger for more. Add in the effects you're talking about on the other crops...and maybe half the world would be facing starvation in the first year. And that would just be the start..."
"Now do you know why I said it reminded me of the Third Horseman?" Jill asked softly, and Chuck saw fear in her eyes.
Chuck let his mind consider what the general collapse of wheat production, together with a massive fall off in corn and rice, might mean, and he fell an icy chill go down his spine as he did. Mass starvation in poor countries around the world, the greatest famine in modern times. Rich nations would be hungry, some desperately so. Even the USA would be struggling with famine. As hunger weakened the populations, sickness and plagues would almost inevitably follow, compounding the catastrophe. Corn was a major feed stock for cattle and pigs, the collapse of the grain supply might be followed by the loss of a major part of the world's meat stocks.
Chuck forced himself to follow the logical path as it lead in ever-darker directions. As starvation and disease pressed the world, desperate people would struggle to reach whatever places might still be able to feed them. What food was available would be fought over, and it would be ferocious. Wars, immense wars, would almost surely erupt. Some of them might well go nuclear as desperation and panic overcame sanity.
There would be billions of starving people, Chuck realized as he thought about the situation Jill was describing. Literally billions. With all that that implies. People ready to do anything to survive...
A sudden image of Charlotte-Mary and Stephanie came into his mind, an image of them staring forlornly, hungrily, at empty plates, their faces and bodies gaunt...
What would I do, how far would I be willing to go, if it was the only way my children could eat? Chuck asked himself. Multiply that by every father on Earth, every mother...
The more Chuck thought about the implications of what Jill had told him, the more terrifying they became.
"Jill, how sure are you about this? I mean about how bad this thing is?"
"As sure as I can possibly be, without actually having a sample of this monster to study. I've got some of the papers and stolen information that the Chinese raided from the Russian scientists, and I've got copies of some of the Chinese tests and lab work after they took this thing, either from our seller or from my sources in Beijing. But it's admittedly all second-hand, I can't be certain it's actually that bad until I get a sample of this thing to study.
"But the information I've seen looks consistent, and convincing."
"So what now? What are you and Tony doing, Jill?"
Jill sighed. "We're hoping to set up a deal whereby the seller thinks he's selling to a Russian buyer, but we'll intercept it and take it out of circulation. Whether the seller gets his money, I don't give a damn either way right now, I just want this thing contained before it gets loose. It could happen by accident, or if someone knew what they had, they could blackmail the world with it and probably get whatever they wanted. But that wouldn't be as bad as it getting loose! I may not be in business as a charity...but I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I've still got a lot of family left, Chuck, my folks, my brother and sister, and I sure as Hell don't want my little girl growing up in that kind of a nightmare!"
"Wait a minute-this thing started out in Russia, and now Russians are lining up to buy it? Is this the Russian government involved in this?"
"I don't think so," Jill replied. "But I can't be sure. I have contacts in the Russian intel apparat, and some other parts of the state, but not as thoroughly as I do in a lot of places. Russia was a paranoid place even under the Tsars, the Communists just made it worse, and it's still true now. I don't dare press too hard. But apparently that lab was either privately controlled or being run as a rogue operation.
"As for Tony's buyers, they've definitely got government connections, that's how business is done in this country. But they're mostly mining and oil wealth, looking for things to buy to keep their money hidden from Putin. I don't think there's any connection between them and whoever ran that lab."
"Well, that's good as far as it goes, I guess," Chuck said. "Let's hope it stays that way!"
An SVR safehouse in the suburbs of Moscow, Russian Federation, Monday, June 1st, 2020, 9:52 p.m. local time...
Elaine Carmichael and her associate, the man who went by the name of John Casey, arrived at the meet site in an unmarked and non-descript van, and as soon as they emerged from the vehicle it pulled away. It was not going far, though, and they both had CI subvocal communicators on their persons.
"Comms check?" Ellie subvocalized, and through bone conduction, the answer came back, "Clear."
"You good, John?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said softly. She knew he disliked using the subvocal communicators that were a CI trade secret, it had taken him some time to get the hang of 'speaking without speaking'. But he was effective with them now, and they were too good not to use in situations like this.
"Ready to meet our partners?"
"You mean the ex-communist thugs? As ready as I'll ever be."
In fact, the SVR personnel waiting for them in the ordinary-appearing suburban house were hardly likely to be ex-Communists, Ellie mused. They were mostly a group of men in their thirties, the oldest appeared to be at most mid-forties. They would have been small children when the Berlin Wall came down.
On the other hand, Ellie mused, several of them might very well qualify as thugs. With a practiced eye, she knew they were all armed and most of them had the 'relaxed but ready' stance of people with practical experience in violence.
Introductions were made, though Ellie was certain that not a single name given was real, including of course her own. They were joined, shortly after Ellie and John arrived, by Arkady Agapov and Svetlana Bortnik, and discussions went back and forth about what had happened in Italy, and how they would determine who had actually ordered it.
The plan that came together was actually fairly simple, and if it worked at all it ought to take no more than a few days. Agapov and Bortnik would pretend to report to their immediate superiors that they had successfully accomplished their mission in Italy. The Nachera family was ready to provide their own part in the pretense. The report ought to go up the organizational ladder until it reached whoever had initiated the rogue operation...and then it would of course stop. Since the SVR senior leadership now knew about the operation, it ought to be possible to quickly identify the source.
Ought to be. Once thing Ellie had learned in over seven years as an agent, was that 'ought' was fraught. The damndest things could go wrong with supposedly simple operations, with little or no warning.
The meeting lasted about ninety minutes, and preliminary plans were laid, another meeting was set for the following day. As John and Ellie rode back to their own safehouse in the CI van, Ellie called home, and CI HQ reported that Chuck had returned safely from his own errand, and had been briefed on Ellie's operation in Moscow.
"Chuck okay?" Casey asked her when she signed off.
"He's back at the Estates," Ellie answered. "I wish we were with him. This city gets to me."
"Commietown," John Casey replied with a wolfish grin. "Hopefully I'll get to kill a few commies while I'm here."
Ellie smiled, knowing Casey was mostly joking, and glad to know Chuck was safely home. He might be one of the most effective, dangerous, and capable independent agents in the business...but he would always be her little brother and she knew she would always feel a need to protect him.
Ellie would have been a good deal less relaxed just then had she realized that Chuck Bartowski was not, in actual fact, safe back in California, but was in reality only a few miles away from her at that moment.
A secretly CIA-run small hotel in Moscow, Russian Federation, Monday, June 1st, 2020, 11:55 p.m. local time...
"No question about it, Sarah, it was Amy!" Carina Miller said to her friend, as the two women conferred in the safety of a CIA-secured suite. "I saw her! I was in my public persona, over at the Tolstoi, and as I was walking through my level of the hotel I saw I saw Amy get into an elevator, not thirty feet from me! No question about it, I got a good look at her face, though she didn't look as if she had seen me."
"Did you try to follow?"
"Sure, but she lost me, by the time I got down to the lobby level she was gone!"
Sarah sighed. Their plan had been for Carina to come into town openly, under a very public sort of alias, and check into the five-star Gagarin-Tolstoi, making plenty of 'noise' to draw attention. She had done that, but if Carina was right that she had spotted Amy right there in the hotel, that was another indication that somebody knew way more about their plans than they had been hoping.
"I saw Gaez," Sarah said, "and you saw Amy. Too big a coincidence. They're letting us spot them, they know we're here and what we're doing."
"Well, is that so bad?" Carina asked thoughtfully. "After all, we already were pretty sure they were trying to lure us in, the whole idea here is to make contact and turn things around on them."
"Yeah, but we're not ready yet," Sarah fretted. "Our support isn't in place, and apparently they know way too much about our movements."
"You're thinking about our mystery-leaker, aren't you?" Carina asked, as she sat down on the bed.
"Yes," Sarah admitted. "If whoever it is is working with whoever liberated Gaez and Amy, then they may know every move we're making as fast as we make it. That's what worries me.
After a moment Sarah added, "It's also why I want to make some changes to our plans, and we're going to keep them under our hats. If we don't report every detail of what we're doing, it can't get leaked."
"Works for me," Carina said. "Meantime, I have to get back to my own hotel, I can't be gone too long if I want to maintain my cover."
Sarah nodded. Normally she might have envied Carina staying at the luxurious Gagarin-Tolstoi, but just now she was happier to be staying in the plain rooms at the tiny second-rate hotel that was a CIA safehouse.
"Okay, and I'll tell Zondra what's going on by dead drop," Sarah replied.
After Carina left, Sarah kicked off her high heels and stretched out on her bed, her mind a whirl. She still had not been able to get into contact with Chuck, her calls to CI HQ informed her that he was 'out on an errand', and they could not tell her where or why, and calls directly to his numbers (he had several secure numbers that Sarah knew) simply kept bouncing.
That's not necessarily bad, Sarah reminded herself. There are lots of places, and reasons, where he could not be called and it be perfectly innocent. But he needs to know about Zarnow!
Of course, along with worry about her ex-husband, there was the steady worry about her father. She knew her father was likely in the same city as herself, most likely he was only a few miles away, but he was still one man amid millions, she would have to wait for a good opportunity to try and make contact.
Sarah tried calling Ellie, but again, could not get through. No surprise, though, CI HQ had said that Elaine Carmichael had gone to join Charles, so the same things keeping him out of touch would likely apply to Ellie as well.
Sarah finally fell asleep, blissfully unaware that she had not, in fact, spoken with either CIA or CI HQ in days.
A secret location, Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020, 2:15 a.m. local time...
"How are our little manipulations holding up?" Langston Graham asked the chief of his signal intelligence unit, as they looked at the huge display screens in the communications center.
"On the whole, they appear to be working remarkably well," Kyle Marcos answered. "Surprisingly so. "We're managing to redirect most of the calls to and from the Carmichaels and the CAT squad, and we've been able to fake up responses well enough that they appear to be accepting them. It helps that our moles have stolen quite a few of the CI and CIA/NSA standard code phrases and formats, that makes it much easier to 'spoof' them. Their headquarters people think they're talking to their field people, and vice versa, in fact they're both talking to us."
Graham nodded in satisfaction. It had been risky using the Bell Protocol, but so far the risk was paying off. FULCRUM had spent years incorporating hidden taps and interrupts into the hardware of the world-wide communications networks, but rare used the capacity, hoarding it. They had penetrated enough of the phone and data network that some wag in their engineering teams had started referring to the taps and overrides as the 'Bell protocol', after the Bell System, and it had stuck.
"However," Marcos continued, his habitual nervousness returning, "it's only a matter of time before someone figures out that something isn't right, and probably not too much longer. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is that somebody will ask a question we can't accurately spoof, we'll give an answer that we don't know is wrong, or somebody will just start to notice cumulative issues. Right now the subjects are all under pressure and busy, but I suspect our deception won't hold long if they get a chance to slow down."
"Another forty-eight hours should be enough that it doesn't matter anymore," Graham said.
"Well, that could be a problem, sir. Statistically, I would put the chance that either we'll screw up, or one or more of them will figure out something is wrong on their own, well before the forty-eight hour mark, as a near certainty."
"Hmm..." Graham did not like the sound of that. He was moving the pieces on the board so as to be able to solve several problems with a single fell swoop. If he could neutralize the Bartowski Brats, and their allies in the government and elsewhere, all at once, many of FULCRUM's potential problems would evaporate. But strike too soon and they risked giving away the game and possibly letting their enemies rally and hit back.
It's painfully easy to underestimate Bartowski, Graham reminded himself sternly. Remember his track record. He comes across as a naïve idiot sometimes...but he's left a trail of defeated enemies behind him since 2007. And he and his sister seem to be more than the sum of the two.
But we need a little more time. A little more time to get them all set up for the kill shot. And then there's this Wild Card person...
Graham turned to his adjutant, an attractive woman of middle years, and asked her, "Tara, what have you been able to find out about this Wild Card?"
"Not much," 'Tara Phelps' said. Graham had given her that code name himself when he had recruited her, it was his own private joke. "Just what's more or less commonly known to the intel community. A mysterious woman, runs her own organization, buys and sells information and rare commodities, as well as 'assisting' in other matters for a price. There's no question the CIA leadership knows who she is, as does MI6, the SVR, the GRU, probably most of the senior intel leadership around the world, but they're all keeping it tightly secret, and we haven't been able to turn anyone who knows.
"Oh, and we know she has a brat with Bartowski," Ms. Phelps continued, "that he's raising. And that she built a lot of her initial success on stolen FULCRUM information. But that's about it."
"Our sources say she and Bartowski are working in contact in Moscow," Graham mused. "We need to know more about her, we can't have a joker in the deck at this juncture. I think I'm going to task Mr. Delgado to find out more about her.
"What about Beckman?" Graham asked Phelps.
"Nothing," Phelps replied. "Our last confirmed location on General Beckman was Washington D.C. a few days ago, since then she appears to have vanished off the radar."
"She knows I'll be coming for her," Graham nodded. "Make locating her an Alpha Priority task."
"Yes, sir," Phelps said.
"In the meantime, we need to stir the pot a bit in Moscow," Graham said thoughtfully. "Keep them all off balance, until we're ready to take them all off the board permanently and simultaneously.
He walked over to a console, pressed a button, and when the microphone activated he said, "Put me through to Mr. Delgado, I have a job for him."
TO BE CONTINUED...