Page 101 of Nobody's Hero
‘Good. What else?’
‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘That’s because thereisn’tanything,’ Carlyle said. ‘Not really. We considered air and we considered water. And after much discussion, we discounted water. While some parts of the countryarereliant on a small number of sources, these lakes, springs and rivers are so vast, there’s nothing practical that could contaminate them. Even if you dropped a shipping container full of poison into the Mississippi, the effect would be negligible and short-lived. Even the Deepwater Horizon spill got cleaned up.’
‘You focused on air.’
‘We concluded the only viable way to trigger mass migration would be a biological attack on a geographically close group of major cities.’
‘Something like smallpox?’
‘Not smallpox. All that would trigger is a mass vaccination programme and a local lockdown. We wanted panic. We wanted people running for the hills.’
‘What then?’
‘We decided one of the mycotoxins would work best.
They’re naturally occurring in fungi, they can cause death and cancers and a whole bunch of horrible stuff, but mostly you get very sick.’
Koenig nodded. He could see how that would work. Stay-at-home mom wasn’t going to stay at home for long when her little darlings were breathing in deadly spores. She was going to load up the station wagon and drive to her sister’s. Or to her BFF from college. Anywhere the funky mushrooms weren’t. Koenig hadn’t studied the psychology of mass hysteria, but he figured it wouldn’t take too many people upping sticks beforeeveryonewas upping sticks. Sure, there’d be the contrary whack jobs who’d enjoy the attention they got from staying put. And you couldn’t move the ‘back in my day, things were much worse’ crowd from their prefabs with a block and tackle. But most peoplewouldmove.
Then Koenig thought about who they had strapped to a table in the back of the Gulfstream. Nash hadn’t been involved in a plot to poison the air with funky fungi. She’d been paid to kill people with very specific jobs.
‘You didn’t stop there, though, did you, Bess?’ he said. ‘Triggering a mass migration event was the start, not the finish.’
And Carlyle said, ‘Do you know how to make a fruit salad, Ben?’
Out of left field.
Chapter 107
Koenig frowned. ‘I’m more of a chocolate-milkshake guy,’ he said. ‘But . . . if the choice was between making a fruit salad or watchingPolice Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, I suppose I could peel some grapes.’ He paused half a heartbeat. ‘But the fruit salad is rhetorical. What you’rereallyasking is if I understand how supply chains work.’
‘I am,’ Carlyle said. ‘Take New York. The magnitude and scope of the infrastructure that keeps a city like New York running is beyond most people’s comprehension. Interdependent systems like sewerage, power, telecoms, water, road, rail, marine traffic, are piled on top of each other like a giant bowl of spaghetti. But here’s the thing – it’s efficient, integrated and synchronised. Finely tuned chaos theory, it’s been called. Unpredictable behaviour governed by deterministic laws. Getting the ingredients for a fruit salad to the New York delis, markets and grocery stores is nothing short of a miracle, yet it happens every single day.’
‘I guess I’ve never really thought about it,’ Koenig admitted.
‘We did,’ Carlyle said. ‘We thought about it a lot. Nine million people live in New York. Then we thought about what might happen if there were mass migration events in Philly, Baltimore and DC.’
‘Nine million becomesnineteenmillion.’
‘And now New York’s infrastructure is stretched beyond breaking point. It’s overloaded with little to no warning. The city’s reserves are quickly used up. People are panic buying. The just-in-time supply chain becomes thethree-weeks-too-latesupply chain. Now what happens?’
‘There’s a period of readjustment. It’s not pleasant, but with outside help New York begins to cope. The city manages sixty million tourists a year, so it has the capacity to expand when it needs to.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘A mass migration event on its own might not achieve the effect we wanted. The country would be lopsided, like a badly loaded washing machine, but it wouldn’t last for ever.’
She stopped talking. Let Koenig finish.
‘That’s where Hobbs and Nash came in,’ he said. ‘You don’t let your enemy regroup when they’re vulnerable. You stomp on their throats. Hobbs and Nash weren’t involved in the mass migration event; their role was about amplifying the after effects. They killed the type of people who’d be essential in the event you describe. The damage-limitation guys, the ones with institutional memory.’
‘We identified the people that cities and states would need when it came to mounting effective crisis management,’ Carlyle confirmed. ‘The ones who could steady the ship before it passed the event horizon. The protocol dictated they were killed in the lead-up to the trigger event. Quietly, nothing that would arouse suspicion.’
There was also something Carlyle wasn’t telling him. Koenig thought their deaths had served a dual purpose. Their expertise in crisis management wasn’t the primary reason; it was thesecondaryreason. He didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. He kept his face neutral. Carlyle was a good woman, and she did what she thought best. Who was he to second guess her actions?
‘The Acacia Avenue Protocol was a three-stage attack on the infrastructure of the United States,’ Carlyle continued. ‘Step one was removing the people who could limit the damage after a mass migration event.’
‘Which Hobbs and Nash have now done. Their contract was complete.’