Search and Destroy

By F. C. Shriver

Jason Rae is an investigator at an anti-biological warfare agency.

When high-level members of the U.S. Administration start to die in mysterious circumstances, it is up to Jason to find out what is happening and to pursue those responsi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anegada Publishers
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781802272338

Book preview

ONE

By now hundreds of accounts have been written, but all of them leave enormous gaps and they contradict each other in practically every detail. Even if you masochistically went to the trouble of reading them all, you still wouldn’t be able to form a clear idea about who in fact died of natural causes and who was killed, why were they killed, how were they killed and why all that led to the worldwide crisis we had in 2025.

I thought, therefore, that I should write down a detailed account of what really happened. Not that I know absolutely everything; I would never claim that. I know most of it because I was there, it happened to me, I can write it all in the first person singular and vouch for it.

As for the rest, even though I wasn’t a personal witness, I do know what happened and I can give an account that I’m sure will be faithful to the gist of it, even if I cannot guarantee it word for word.

Given the subject matter of these notes, I very much doubt they will ever see the light of day or, in the unlikely event that they do, that it will happen in the next sixty or a hundred years. Still, it gives me some measure of satisfaction to know that in one place, at least, there is a true and complete account of the events of last year and what exactly led to them.

Given also that I’ll probably be dead by the time this comes to light, I might as well take this opportunity to introduce myself and give you a potted history of my life before all this happened, so that you know why what happened to me did in fact happen: knowing this will never be read in my lifetime also allows me to be a lot more candid than I would otherwise be.

My name is Jason Rae and I was born in Washington, the son of Jim and Sonia Rae. My mother was a successful lawyer and my father ran a financial company, together with his brother Zack. It was always my father’s dream that one day I’d take over; however, I was a bit of a pain in my younger years and had absolutely no interest in spending my life taking care of other people’s money. I had other ideas.

When I was a very young kid, I was exceptionally good at mental arithmetic, for some obscure reason. I had developed complicated schemes by which I could break down a problem mentally into easier parts, process them all separately, and reassemble them into the required answer. One day, a silly but well-intentioned teacher took me to a class of older kids so that I could show them my prowesses, presumably so that they could be inspired by them. As anybody could have easily anticipated, this did not endear me to the older kids who took to bullying me mercilessly, especially some of crueller ones. This experience marked me forever: to this day I cannot see an adult or a bigger kid bullying a young child without a devastating roiling rage erupting suddenly inside me.

When my parents found out that I was being bullied, my mother, the lawyer, was all for suing the school but my father had the more practical notion of enrolling me in a martial arts class – I took to it like a politician to lying and have enjoyed martial arts ever since; the excitement of the fight, yes, but even more than that, the pleasure of understanding an opponent and puzzling out the way to take advantage of his weaknesses.

I was also given a wonderfully complex, intricate and multileveled computer game, as a kind of consolation, and that changed my life completely. In a few short months, I was into finding hidden Easter eggs, and from there I progressed to developing game cheats, aimbots, wall hacks, ESPs and all that kind of gaming shit. In time, I found a number of other kids online who were similarly obsessed and we got into a serious amount of hacking; we would challenge each other into more and more outrageous stunts and it still amazes me that we didn’t all end up in jail.

What saved me were girls; by the time I was halfway through high school, I had found out that girls were a lot more fun than computer games and my hacking days were over.

I’m as partial to good looks in a girl as the next man and, if all I want is a playmate there’s usually no point in looking for anything else, but I have to say that all the women who have truly bowled me over in my life were much brainier than me (and had the looks too).

I met Sylvia in my final high school year. She had long leaf-brown hair tumbling over her shoulders, an almond-shaped face with dimpled cheeks and eyes that made you feel small and helpless as if you were being held under a microscope; she could fix her eyes on you and dismantle an argument to find its weakest point with the determination of a pig rooting for truffles.

At that time, I was thinking of a career in IT but she quickly disabused me of that: IT was old hat and the real advances in the future would come in biology, not so much the boring biology we’d been taught in high school but the molecular and in particular the quantum biology that she could see coming and that would, to her mind, dominate the rest of the twenty-first century and beyond.

It was love at first sight: Sylvia, I mean, not biology, but she was so persuasive (and so pretty) that biology was soon my career of choice too. We went to college together and, by the time we were halfway through our degrees, we had decided to go for doctorates. Not only was Sylvia brilliant, but she had that essential gift in research: a nose for what problems are hard but will yield solutions as opposed to those we could spend our lives butting our heads against and get nowhere. She had very clear ideas for future research after we finished our degrees and it was she who got us our scholarships in Cambridge, U.K.

Why go all the way to the U.K. if there are so many excellent universities in the U.S.? Well, part of it was a desire to go and see the world, and part a wish not to be under the thumbs of our respective parents.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother and always got along with my father but, maybe because he had been so successful in his life, he always spoke as if he knew best and that grated quite a lot with me. Sylvia’s mother was the same, so a bit of distance seemed like a good idea; they could always come and visit.

We got married before we went and, for a while, life couldn’t have been any better: cycling around Cambridge was fun, we were very much in love and our research work was exciting and productive.

Unfortunately, it did not last. Not long after we got to Cambridge, Sylvia was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctors told us it was inoperable and that, though she could be made comfortable till the inevitable end, there was absolutely nothing that could be done to reverse the process. I wasn’t prepared to accept that; I went into total denial and felt crushed by the injustice and unfairness of it all: how could that happen to a twenty-two-year-old so brilliant and so full of life?

I could not escape a feeling of guilt, either; somehow, logically or not, I felt it had been my job to protect her and keep her safe and I had failed, abysmally. I was also torn apart by the double life I started to lead, outwardly full of cheer whenever I was with Sylvia and completely listless and despondent when I wasn’t.

One day, as I walked into her hospital room, she told me to sit down and not interrupt; she then told me there was no need to keep up the pretence that she was going to get better, she was not stupid and it was just getting on her nerves. Before I could protest, she told me she had taken it upon herself to speak with my supervisor and she knew I wasn’t making any progress in my research; she followed that by saying she’d had enough of conversations about the stupid disease and the bloody treatment and she wanted to spend the rest of her days in more interesting discussions so I needed to get my act together, pull my socks up, work like mad and report to her every day so that we could have an adult conversation about interesting research topics instead of all the trash we’d been talking about.

There was no arguing with her logic (there never was, with her) and I did as I was told: I worked hard in the lab and discussed the progress with her every day. To the very end, she was as sharp as she’d ever been and if I managed to finish my thesis, it was 100% due to her and I don’t mean bland stuff like encouragement and that sort of crap, either – no, most of the best ideas in the thesis came directly from her, she should have got the PhD, not I.

Her parents and mine were there when she died and I was left completely empty and rudderless – she had been the source of stability, structure and organisation in our lives since we were in high school and I had absolutely no idea how to move forward now. It was good that I was in the final steps of revising my thesis for final submission and then had the viva and the rest of it to go through, as that kept me occupied and distracted for a while.

However, when the PhD was done and I returned to the U.S., I realised that, without Sylvia, I wasn’t looking forward to a life of research. Much as it pained me to admit it, my father had been right all along, I wasn’t cut out to be a lab rat.

It was my father who introduced me to Joe Pelletier. He didn’t tell me what Joe did and, to this day, I never found out if he really knew. He just told me that Joe was looking for someone with my qualifications, and that was how we met.

Joe’s offer of employment couldn’t have come at a better time: it provided a new direction to my life at the exact moment when I had lost what had been giving it meaning for so long, and it gave me a renewed opportunity to fight the good fight and put things right in the world when I was aching deeply from not having been able to do anything for Sylvia. 

Strangely enough, the training and induction programme brought me back memories from my younger days, especially in martial arts and in computer hacking. Things were a lot more serious though, nothing like the martial arts competitions I had been in, for instance. As my martial arts instructor used to say, you’re not here to win a medal; you’re here to make sure the other son of a bitch doesn’t get up. Computer hacking too was a revelation, a lot more structured and disciplined than I was used to. Also, I’d always done it bare-handed, so to speak; to see the equipment they had was an absolute eye-opener; and of course, from then on, I was doing it legally!

The induction programme was also a great distraction from the misery that had been my life since the death of Sylvia, and I joined the agency with enormous anticipation and a great willingness to pursue this new career of mine. The rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of history, I think I’ve provided enough of mine, and it’s high time I moved on to describe what really happened in the last couple of years.

I’ll start a bit before the very beginning which I find, pace Julie Andrews, to be a very good place to start.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

TWO

Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 28th 2024

‘Hi Jason,’ Joe said, ‘shall we go for a walk?’

Code words, of course. I left my jacket hanging on the back of my chair but got my scarf out of the drawer where I always kept it. Not much need for a scarf in Washington at the end of May, but it was all part of the procedure; I could see Joe had one draped over his shoulders. He kept two in the office, a cashmere one for cold days and a silk one for the summer. I contented myself with just a polyester one that did duty all-year-round.

We went down the stairs and out of the door. In these mid-reaches of Connecticut Avenue, halfway between Lafayette Square and Chevy Chase, the traffic is not as frenetic as it is downtown but the ever-present sound of the car engines and the smell of exhaust fumes hit us nonetheless as soon as we left the building.

I took my tie off and put it in my pocket. Joe kept his on, of course; he would just as easily take his pants off in public as his tie. In all the years I’ve known Joe, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve seen him without a jacket and tie, and those were occasions where informality was de rigueur. Joe is a natural government apparatchik and swims in the murky Washington waters as easily as a shark in the limpid Caribbean Sea, his teeth always on display in a disarming smile, his eyes ever looking for the main chance and his mind always busy figuring out the odds.

We turned right and walked north along Connecticut. The day before had been Memorial Day and we could see some empty beer cans in the green areas bordering the street, presumably the remnants of impromptu late-night partying that had escaped the attention of the cleaners so far.

As we approached Albemarle Street, we passed a pizza place and a hamburger joint which had plenty of customers even in mid-afternoon, and the smells of food wafted towards us. We turned right at Albemarle and presently arrived at the entrance to Soapstone Valley Park and the beginning of the heavily wooded Soapstone Valley Trail.

We did all this without speaking any further which again, was par for the course – Joe was paranoid about security and did not trust our meeting rooms, no matter how many times they were swept for bugs (who could guarantee the sweepers weren’t working for the CIA or, even worse, for Homeland Security?) To talk about stuff he didn’t want them to know about, he preferred to go out into the woods and use scarves so that no one could use directional microphones amongst all the trees or lip-read at a distance. Whether or not this worked, I had no idea, but he was the boss and I could always do with a walk in the woods, anyway.

‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news, all of them hot off the press,’ he started. ‘Dominic is retiring.’

Dominic Fulbright was the Head of the outfit parallel to ours at Homeland Security. For years, he’d been intriguing to have our two operations combined, with him as the Head, naturally. If asked, I’d have had to say it made a lot of sense to merge our two outfits, not that I would have wanted Dominic as a boss, though.

‘Is that so?’ I said, noncommittally. ‘Do you know who’s going to replace him?’

Joe smiled like a contented cat. At least I assumed he smiled; I couldn’t see his mouth but his eyes were wrinkling joyfully: ‘You’re looking at him; with Dominic gone, I’ve no objection to a merger and I’ll take over the whole operation.’

‘Wow! That’s great. What’s the bad news?’

Joe winced. ‘Well, it’s not going to happen all in one go. First, we merge and Dominic will be in charge, which is the sop to his pride that made the merger possible; I’ll be his deputy. Then, in about a year’s time, he goes and I take over. He’s well past his retirement age, anyway, so it was just a matter of time. I’ve been organising this with the right people for quite a while and it was put to bed this afternoon – it’s final.’

I could see plenty of holes in this plan and I guessed that it was Joe’s ambition that was hiding them from him: ‘A year is a long time,’ I demurred. ‘How sure are you that there’ll be no funny business in between?’

‘As sure as one can be,’ Joe said, decidedly. ‘I’ve been promised the job by all those who matter and when the merger is announced, the whole schedule for the transition will be made official at the same time, so there’ll be no going back.’

He stopped talking and let the implications sink in. He adjusted his scarf, lowered his voice and continued: ‘There are a few things we’ve got to sort out now, before the merger, of course…’

I could see where he was going. There was a lot of stuff he wouldn’t want Dominic and his minions to find out.

‘What do you want to do regarding Sphinx?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s one of the things. You’ll have to fly there and make sure he’ll be happy with the new arrangements.’

I knew that Joe was in two minds about Sphinx, the code name of my friend Ahmad. On the one hand, if it wasn’t for him, we would have been working for Dominic for ages. Joe had started our agency well before I joined, on the back of the anthrax scare, and just before Homeland Security was created. He had always fought tooth and nail to stay independent, but by the time I joined, the anthrax scare was old news and there’d been no biological attacks since then; Sphinx and his first-class intelligence provided just the shot in the arm that Joe needed, and he’d been living off that ever since, so he absolutely needed Sphinx. On the other hand, Sphinx was my agent, and that rankled with Joe; he had asked to meet him many times, but Ahmad had always refused; he wanted me to be his sole contact.

A middle-aged couple was approaching from the opposite direction and we stopped talking and pulled our scarves down to avoid looking like bank robbers.

‘Glorious weather, isn’t it?’ said the lady as we passed each other; she was dressed as a serious jogger in a stylish pink tracksuit; her husband was in shorts and wearing a T-shirt and cap advertising the San Francisco Giants.

‘Indeed it is!’ agreed Joe, all flashing teeth. Her husband and I just nodded and smiled.

When they were well past us, we pulled up our scarves and Joe continued: ‘We’ll all be working for DHS, but that doesn’t mean anything will change as far as Sphinx is concerned; he’ll still contact us only through you and vice versa. Please explain all this to him and make sure he’s happy.’

‘OK, I’ll arrange to fly there,’ I said. I very much hoped Ahmad would be OK with the new arrangements; we needed him a lot more than he needed us, and if he decided his safety and anonymity were not compatible with working for such a large and porous organisation as the DHS, that would probably mean the end of our collaboration.

‘Don’t use the normal channels to organise travel,’ instructed Joe; ‘we’ve got to be careful from now on. I’ll tell you what: there’s a conference on biological and chemical warfare coming up.’

‘I know, the Venice one – you always go to it.’

‘This year I cannot go, obviously, I’ll be too busy with the transition. I was going to fly out tonight, but I thought you could take my place and, once you’re in Venice, organise to travel to Riyadh; better do it with your own money to avoid leaving a trace and I’ll make sure you do not end up out of pocket. Oh, and use some alias and a fake passport on that leg of the trip, of course.’

We walked in silence for a bit. I wished he’d given me more advance notice; it was a bit of a pain to be told I’d be flying tonight but I would cope, somehow. I’d better tell Ahmad straight away, I thought, I hope he’ll be available.

‘I’ll be sorry not to go to Venice,’ Joe continued wistfully. ‘There’s a room, a suite rather, room 103 at the hotel where I always stay, which, I’m told, has a magnificent view over the Grand Canal. I was never able to book it in previous years, no matter how early I tried, but this year I finally managed it.’ He sighed. ‘Well, it wasn’t to be. You’ll enjoy it, I’m sure – not that you’ll stay there for long.’

We discussed a few other matters that needed to be sorted out and eventually turned back towards the office. When we got there, he gave me the brochures of the conference.

‘I’ll tell them you’re going in my place and I’ll get travel to organise your tickets to Venice and notify the hotel,’ he