Chapter 22. Mass murder in Cartagena Spain.
Perhaps you saw it in the international news, there was a mass grave found in Spain. It just hit the news here. They are saying near the port city of Cartagena bodies were found in an unmarked grave. It was reported no suspects have been arrested yet but it is believed an anti-Muslim immigration group in Europe was involved. The bodies were buried in a long trench behind a farm house. The neighbor said their dog was digging behind the vacant house and carried home a large bone. They called a relative who was a retired police officer and she said it looked human. Days went by and a backhoe was brought in and they started digging and uncovered lots of human bones. After two days a large tent was erected and bodies were being re-assembled and laid out for investigators. Rabat contacted me and advised I might want to pack a suitcase just because. I emailed the news to Jen and Daniel because it wasn't being covered in the USA or Canada. As of the end of the 4th day of slow digging they've recovered seven corpses, some adult, some children, some male, and some female.
What Rabat told me was if this was political the powers in charge of the EU probably wouldn't want a big trial that pissed off the peasants, they would opt for a quick spray and a quiet death for the perps. That was my job, the short-spray execution. Track `em down and intercept in public and send them a small cloud of anthrax or botulinum spores. If the EU Lords were really pissed off I'd be told to use Botulinum instead of anthrax because having your breathing muscles paralyzed while you are alive and awake is not a pleasant way to die. At least it didn't take very long, maybe 25 minutes. And with Botulinum there is no hope of rescue, it's slow and totally effective with a tiny exposure. And it works faster than anthrax. It's even dangerous for us to deploy that spray, despite being immunized for both weapons.
Many of the (11 so far) bodies are just bones but a few newer ones still have some meat stuck to the bones, hair on the skull and traces of clothing. The Spanish government so far is not asking for any help, but the TV news says Interpol is involved and so is a university in Madrid. They have no estimate of the number of dead, the pit has no signs of a bottom yet, but they are carefully removing 2-3 corpses a day using the same techniques used in Archaeology. Early comments made at the scene said it looked like the trench was dug then dead bodies were tossed in the pit, they all appeared to be dead before burial. They found evidence of tractor tire tracks so the trench was machine dug. Tractor tire tracks in the yard indicate there may be other pits full of bodies too.
Even though I don't speak Arabic I turned on the TV app in my laptop since this was the biggest news in the region. I had to program the computer to scan all TV channels first because I'd never done it before. All the networks cited different sources but carried the exact same stories, sometimes even with the same wording. That made me suspect there was a back-story not being discussed.
It looked like 6 of the 22 channels I could receive were from Spain, the rest were from Morocco.
Spain has a long history of battles with Muslim armies so emotions in Spain tend to run hot on the subject of Muslims sneaking into Spain from Africa. One local channel carried AfricaNow, a 24 hour news/weather channel. That was my biggest news source on local OTA TV.
In the morning I got a call from Washington on my landline in my office, so the call came around 10am local time, about 5am Washington time. It came from one of the INR message bots, which means it was programmed by a human to be delivered by a telemarketing bot. Several of my calls in the past came this way so there was no recording of an actual human, except me. This tech gave INR deniability in case unauthorized recordings became public, we are told to never record message-bot calls.
The recording advised there was a new INR bulletin released about suspects in the Spain mass grave case. The only suspects so far were a married couple from far northwest Pennsylvania. In the past they have voiced support of people in Spain trying to stop the immigration of Muslim people from Africa into Spain via the port of Cartagena. Three years ago the suspects purchased plane tickets from Pittsburgh to Barcelona and have not been tracked since. It is suspected they were involved in the EU anti-Muslim group in Cartagena. Neither of the suspects had prison chip implants. That afternoon I was formally activated to locate, confirm, and neutralize the suspects. Their names were Douglas and Joyce Rose. Both were born in Pittsburgh and held stable jobs and had no history of criminal activity, but based on their emails they showed a lot of support for the anti-Muslim group in Spain. I've seen weird cases before but so far this one really stinks.
Sitting on the sofa with the cell and the laptop watching the State web site was very exciting. It was easy to see that for the most incorrect and out of date info the best source was CNN International, they constantly made up facts and disguised opinion as fact. I ended-up deleting them from my memorized channels.
It's possible the suspects were the same ones who hired coyotes in Oran to sell tickets for migrant boats rigged to quickly sink halfway across the Med. If it's those murdering bastards I'd gladly risk my life to put them in the ground. People who kill innocent elderly, women, and children because of their religion or skin color shouldn't be corrupting our human gene pool.
From the evidence being uncovered in Spain it looks like they've been doing it for years longer than we knew. I've heard police are going to use ground radar to check the neighborhood for signs of digging
Did you know that science can now detect digging that was done over five thousand years ago? That is some of the technology being used to research the area around Stonehenge and other henges in the UK.
Three days after the story broke into the news media in Europe Interpol released the names of the suspects wanted for questioning, no rewards were posted yet and nobody else has been questioned.
During this time I was working my regular hours and meeting interesting American tourists in my office. Since my office is located just outside the wall, close to the street I probably see more people than I would if the office was inside the walled city. There are a lot of tourists who cannot do the long hilly walk across the old city so my neighborhood sees a lot of pedestrians and some tour busses stop nearby and drop off hordes of tourists, often from the UK and Western Europe. There are many advantages to having your retail shop just outside the walled city.
American tourists tend to come to Tangier from Gibraltar. European tourists tend to avoid Gibraltar because it's just a tiny slice of UK and lots of Europeans dislike the UK after they left the EU. Americans like it because Gibraltar has little pubs and all the foods served in pubs in London (fish and chips, and pints of beer) without the high prices, long lines, and hoards of non-English speaking tourists.
Many tour busses cannot enter the walled city (they're too tall) so they drop them off just outside the wall. That is where my office is located. On the west side of the old city there is a street that enters the wall where people get off busses, it's only 2 blocks from my office. Of course you know those parts of the wall are modern construction, the original wall had no such openings! And if you look closely you can see it is made of modern cement blocks and mortar in many areas.
I think the city should attempt to mark which wall parts are original and which are the replica parts. I heard the walls that faced the sea were thick (10 feet of rock) and the parts facing the desert were only about 20 inches thick, like plastered mud brick. The Kasbah Museum does not have much artwork depicting the 1200 year old Roman walls because they do not want to promote the concept that Tangier today is actually like a Hollywood replica. That subject is very hush hush.
My favorite alternate (joke) version of the history of Tangier goes like this: it was a swampy old port city, full of rats, malaria, and syphilis. But in 1932 Hollywood people arrived and wanted to build a large replica walled fortress for shooting the 1934 movie Cleopatra' by Cecil B. DeMille. Tangier agreed if the studio would leave everything they built. So the 1200 year old Roman fortress story was concocted and the rest is cinematic history! Do a search online for: Kingdom of Heaven film set, Morocco.' And that is my explanation for why Tangier today is in such good shape, it's actually only 81 years old!
While there may have been hundreds of walled cities on earth 1200 years ago I bet almost none of them are still standing today due to natural disasters: fire, flooding, earthquakes, and plain old erosion. It would not surprise me if part of today's Tangier wall was built on the original foundation but perhaps the only original parts left today are probably underground now. I don't think any parts of the wall there today are original.
I got an urgent sounding email from Jen, she said her aunt was in the hospital in Austin for an emergency appendectomy, or as they called it, a Lap-Appy.
I think `lap' means they'll start surgery using small robotic arms and cut three small incisions in her abdomen and blow it full of compressed gas, maybe nitrogen? Then do the surgery with joysticks and a computer monitor. It speeds recovery time for most people. Her aunt is her mother's older sister, she's in her mid 70s. She is the lady with the religion thing. Her mom said she goes to one of those churches where people battle for a seat in the front rows and some run up and down the aisles yelling in tongues and the women all have weird hair buns.
I tried to calm Jen by writing that if her aunt had a ruptured appendix the surgery would probably have been done as an open procedure' (a classical 1960s appy surgery) instead of a closed procedure.' So that was a good sign. The big danger with appendicitis is that it might fill with pus and burst spreading bacteria inside your abdomen, which should be sterile. I reminded her that every part of your body inside should be sterile except the GI tract and respiratory tract. Even your pee should be sterile.
I doubt my emotionless explanation made her feel better, but that's the price you pay for hanging out with autistic people. I do care about her aunt, it's just hard to sense that listening to my sometimes monotone autistic voice.
There was a lot of stuff going on with my friends, they all had big plans and big stress, but nothing was happening in my life except this case (but I was told to not do anything while the INR still had a team investigating the suspects to prove or disprove their guilt). I tried to focus on my job at the little office instead of everyone else's turmoil.
Over at INR HQ in Washington I had a few conversations with the tech engineers and we discussed using sound to fingerprint ships passing through the Strait. He said he would try to get an MIT student to take it on as a master's project/thesis: Can large ships be accurately identified by sound from a distance, and is it repeatable? That project gave me another thing dangling in the air while I waited to hear back from them.
A month later I received a new box to mount outside my window, aimed at the Strait. This one had the same lens on the outside, the same broadband RF sniffer antenna, but now they added a plastic tube pointed at the waterway. My instructions were to un-plug mine and simply swap boxes and ship the current unit back to Washington. Everything I did like that for INR was always shipped to some residence in DC, always pre-paid postage (4908 Quarles St NE WDC). Like an Amazon return all I had to do was drop it off at any shipping storefront. UPS does not have a huge presence in Morocco, I think they have only one brown delivery truck for the entire Tangier metro area. And you can ship to the states at their store near the airport.
The spy box outside my window today is an eight inch cube, I expect if they add any more stuff inside the box a new mount will also be necessary to hold the extra weight. Today the mount is three large black suction cups to hold it to the glass. It also got me wondering how many boxes like mine were in use around the world today. I lost count of how many times they sent me a replacement box with no instructions; all I had to do was swap them out and plug it in.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn there were a couple similar boxes aimed at the Kremlin, and the EU HQ in Brussels, and similar buildings around the world. I don't even have to test wifi connections. Somehow they do it remotely. I suspect their box connects via a thousand different means, since so many people walk around with their cell phones enabled as hotspots or connecting via Bluetooth. And I'm sure they use a VPN too. They might be using a space-based ISP too, since many of them are primary military data networks. The box is plastic so it could have dozens of antennas hidden inside. The dimensions of the antenna reveal the frequencies being used, and the frequencies can reveal the type of signal. The antenna can also point to the place they connect to the internet. It wouldn't surprise me if they could monitor everything spoken inside my apartment, they just lack any interest.
When I looked closely at the box when I removed it from the shipping box I noticed the openings around the lenses and the microphone tube had leaked some kind of black epoxy. When an engineer wants to keep his circuits a secret he encases them in epoxy. I've heard the process of filling the case with epoxy called Potting. My guess is it contains military chips they want to keep secret.
I got a text from Patrik during the week, but I was too busy with office stuff to call, so we decided not to meet that month. I also heard from Daniel, he was considering moving closer to Jen, but apartment rents are sky high in Austin. He said he was looking around the outskirts for a small place in a quiet area, maybe to the north in the town of Pflugerville.
Daniel found a place called Stone Hill South, it was on the far north side of Pflugerville, Texas and would be about 16 miles from where Jen lives in the neighborhood called Rollingwood, on the west side of Austin. The place Dan looked at was recently discounted because it was in the news for a finance scam the original owners were running. Nobody was buying or renting in Stone Hill so he got a 1200sq ft, 1 bedroom apartment, a sub-lease, for $850 a month, unfurnished, no utilities included except trash removal. He had enough money in the bank to rent there for the rest of his life. A sub-lease meant he rented from the renter, not the owner.
Daniel owned no furniture so he got only what he needed at Goodwill, and he said his place looked and sounded empty inside. But the good news was he was out of Houston and my two friends could keep tabs on each other. Dan's biggest complaint was the 100 foot walk from his front door to his assigned parking spot. His second biggest complaint was his apartment now smells like a Goodwill Store.
He said his rent did not include pool access but they have no security so it would be super easy to just walk in to the pool area. He said he put down a deposit and pre-paid the first year rent in (cash) advance (for a discount), paid in full. He liked the area, there is a Costco, a Lowes, and several pizza and sandwich places within two miles. I carefully reminded him that Jen was talking about possibly transferring to a European office with her employer.
We've spoken about him leaving Texas but I think he sort of forgot about it. Although I never said it in plain English when I encouraged him to leave Texas I was not urging him to move here. I was thinking maybe he could move to some place familiar like Oklahoma City or Tulsa.
He's applied for jobs but never gets the job when he admits he spent two years in prison but his conviction was overturned and his record cleared. All the interviewer hears is "2 years in prison" and that's the end of the interview. He said soon he will stop mentioning it, like it never happened. But he still has the DUI on his record, so everyone thinks he must be an alcoholic too, which is also not true.
I got a note from Washington by encrypted email that the CIA contact from Oran, Aafia Fadel, the elderly woman in the apartment near the technical university had a heart attack and was treated in Oran then medjet evacuated to Washington for bypass surgery. It also means she can never return to Oran, her cover is blown but the good news is she is alive and recovering from multi-vessel bypass surgery. Their message even kept her location a secret but it was probably Walter Reed Med Ctr in Bethesda, Maryland. The guys she worked with in Oran all left Algeria to Tunisia and they can also never go home again.
Walter Reed Medical Center is about 20 miles northwest of central DC, it's situated near the I-495 loop highway known as The Beltway. The main entrance is on a 6-lane boulevard called Rockville Pike. The facility has a very distinct 20-story office tower at the entrance. The campus is also known as the Bethesda Naval Medical Center. I'm sure that is where Aafia had her surgery.
I am sure the INR is working toward activating another well connected citizen in Oran to take her place. Aafia was very good at what she did for the USA.
Winters are usually mild in Tangier, sometimes we saw white shit on the Atlas Mountain peaks. It's usually only the tallest peaks that turn white. I've heard people say it's not snow, it's more like heavy sleet, ice pellets. The place near here that really gets crappy winter weather is The Rock. I bet it was a dreadful place to be stationed in the British Army during WW1 and 2. I've heard the peak of The Rock can change from summer sun to ice in less than ten minutes, and then back again.
I had a nice telephone conversation with Dan after he got settled into his new apartment. I could tell from the way his voice echoed off the walls his apartment was still mostly empty. He said he purchased a table and one chair for the kitchen, a used sofa for the living room, and a bed and a line of boxes to put in the bedroom. He also said he was having regrets that he signed a one year lease and paid in advance for a 10% discount on every month, he is thinking about leaving Texas forever.
"I also confirmed that yes, it was those exact guards I saw robbing prisoners of their hard earned money in some kind of blackmail scheme, yes both of them were the ones who died on the same day of pneumonia." He told me over the phone.
"Well I guess they earned an early death for stealing from incarcerated people, ones who cannot defend themselves." I replied.
"Yes, there were others involved but those two day shift guards ran the operation. The prisoners held a party when it was announced the two died." I'm sure Dan was slightly saddened he wasn't invited to the party. But I bet it either scared or pissed off the warden, he might have been receiving money under the table for allowing it to continue.
"I saw an article in the Dallas Times there was an ongoing IG investigation into that matter and arrests may soon follow. So I guess those deaths might have uncovered the secret." I suggested.
"It was done out in the open and in view of security cameras, each guard wore a body cam, so they have plenty of color video with sound of all their crimes."
"We'll see what happens." I replied then added, "Maybe I'll need to make another trip home to Texas if more guards are accused but not found guilty. What was the warden's name there?"
"Michael Cook." He spit out the name with a tone of disgust in his voice.
"Did you ever meet him?" I asked.
"Nope."
"Should he be on the list too?" I asked.
"What list?"
"The list of Texans who might someday come down with a really bad case of pneumonia."
"Are those spores traceable to INR or State by chance?" he asked me.
"No. If you paid attention in class they said each batch comes from a different strain. Most exist naturally on the ground in Wales, Scotland, Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia. From there they are grown in chambers until they multiply from a few cells to trillions of spores."
"Yes, I remember. They make batches and mix them with nitrogen gas and a couple drops of lavender oil then they are put in those tiny spray cans and capped then pressurized and tested, then packaged and shipped to agents around the world as needed. They said to never use the spray on a sheep or Llama ranchers or someone working in a wool processing factory, they are almost always naturally immune."
I added, "Or the guy who cares for the sheep at the zoo, he's immune too. Some carpet layers are also immune but that is why they add a tiny amount of Botulinum toxin to the spray."
I shouldn't be having conversations like that on an overseas call so I changed the subject. I was testing to see what he remembered after being in the slammer for two years. As always it was nice to hear his voice and I'm happy that he is recovering. I expect he will start his own company but I'm not sure what he'll do. Dan may need to go back to college. I suggested he open something like a hot dog stand near the UTA campus. With the current downturn in the economy it might be a great time to offer affordable and quick food to students. I think he might do very well at the right location.
Updates from DC about the mass grave near Cartagena started coming faster and a reward was posted by the EU ($75k EU) for the capture of the prime suspects. They still had no intel on the missing suspect couple from Pennsylvania, and using ground radar they believe they have located two more mass graves on the same property. It appeared the dead were asylum seekers escaping from Africa to Spain. They were offloaded from boats and taken to a safe house, and then killed and tossed in the ditch. They hired a backhoe guy to dig a trench about six feet deep and 24 inches wide and fifteen feet long and fill it over halfway with bodies then cover it over. He was interviewed already and said he was told the trenches were for buried utility lines.
They had no autopsy reports yet describing a cause of death, although none of the remains uncovered so far showed any obvious sign of trauma. That sort of suggested suffocation or perhaps even carbon monoxide or nitrogen poisoning. It's also possible they put poison in their food. It's hard to identify a cause of death on a corpse that is just bones. None of the bodies recovered so far had any bone injuries. But the bodies were sprinkled with some kind of enzyme that sped up decomposition by nearly triple the normal rate for a buried body. Each body was found with a certain worm colony known to digest dead bodies at a very rapid rate. The more they had to eat the faster they multiplied and digested buried corpses.
Most of the bodies recovered so far had no soft tissue only bones, which means none of them died recently. The current recovered body count is 27 and they believe there are at least 20x that number in other pits on the property.
I received a secure packet delivered to my office from DC, it had the profiles on the couple wanted for questioning in Spain on the mass graves. Douglas and Joyce Rose now had wanted posters in every post office in North America. I received one too and kept it in the top drawer of my desk. Their faces were not familiar to me, although Tangier attracts people like them, on the run and hiding from the law. I had the gut feeling eventually I'd see them.
I got out my pistol from the desk and unloaded it and inspected the ammo, then checked the cleanliness of the barrel and the mechanisms inside and decided to take it home tonight and give it a good cleaning. This one is not my standard issue automatic pistol, this is one I brought here from Texas long ago. It is a .22LR semi-auto pistol that holds 14 rounds in the magazine and has a nice feel in the hand and is a good/quick shooter. I have it in the drawer for protection.
The office wall behind the sofa (my desk faces the sofa) is limestone brick so it would stop any bullet so if I had to shoot I didn't have to worry about killing someone in the shoe shop next door. The wall opposite from the door is just drywall so I cannot shoot in that direction because there are people making leather goods on the other side of that wall and the one behind my desk. The same problem exists with shooting straight up. There's a 2-story leather factory above my office, sometimes I hear people walking around upstairs, directly above me.
I cannot shoot in the direction of the plate glass because there are always tourists and vendors on the wide sidewalk in front of my office. They park carts and have some wooden stands outside where they sell produce and fish on ice. My office is sometimes hard to see, it's sort of like you have to go to the grocery store and walk to the produce section and between the stands is the door to my office.
Two weeks later State got a tip that the suspects in the mass burial case in Spain had been spotted by facial recognition computer in Monaco. I was emailed a secure folder of data on them and the tips State received about them, and the story went like this:
They arrived in Monaco nine days ago and were staying at a cheaper hotel near the big helipad on the waterfront, which was near one of the harbors. They have a room at the Columbus Hotel, about $200 a night, which for them might be affordable, or someone else might be paying. It was possible they might have arrived in Monaco on a yacht. The INR was still working on this case so some of the information in the report was marked as unverified. They were photographed on a government photo ID camera inside the entrance to the big helio-airport in Monaco. Those images are shared worldwide for purposed just like catching international fugitives. The computer recognized their faces and sent out an alarm.
I've been told before the INR had several undercover people who lived and worked in Monaco because of its reputation and location. I'm sure I will never be told who any of them are but they probably work in the casinos.
Almost two months after the mass grave was discovered by a dog the regional director told me the goal was: the perps must not leave Monaco alive. The USA did not want them to stand trial because some evidence might serve as an embarrassment to the government of Spain and the USA, but they must pay for mass murder by quickly joining them in Heaven. I was told I would qualify for the full reward but it would come from State and not the EU. Yesterday the reward notice was updated to say: Dead or Alive. We opted for: Dead, the no-trial option.
One unusual thing about this case was something I don't hear very often. On this case I was specifically instructed to off them twice. Since the substances I use are not 100% effective, and the actual exposure cannot be seen with some targets I am instructed to kill them twice just in case either method fails. They wanted a guarantee they would not leave Monaco alive. There's a secret phrase they put in my orders that mandates `dead twice.' But I cannot repeat the phrase to anyone, even Dan and I never say it out loud, we have our own ways of saying it to each other. In school they called it Double Dead, or just Double, but that is not the actual phrase.
I agreed with the plan from State and then they sent me the most secret data on the case and the perps, including very recent security camera pictures with good facial images of him and her. They were caught on camera (repeatedly) at the hotel restaurant, and entering the Heli-Air-Voyages tour place on the waterfront (helicopter tours of Monaco).
Not far from the helipad airport are the harbor and the 450foot yacht it is believed they arrived on with a wealthy guy and his family from the Netherlands. They worked aboard their private yacht sailing the Med and the west coast of Europe. Supposedly the yacht owners were the money behind the Muslim immigrant killing operation. I suspected that family would end up on a dead list later this year after more research was finished.
The INR just learned Doug and Joyce were working aboard the yacht as chief cook and chief of staff, and once a year they tied-up in Monaco for a month and the family pays their vacation by providing them a free room in the Columbus Hotel. Supposedly, the killing operation in Spain shifted from burying bodies in Cartagena to sinking the boats at sea far enough that no bodies washed-up any beach. There are hundreds of thousands of old rotted fishing boats on the Med so there is no shortage of old boats to buy and sink while over-loaded with refugees.
I was already packed but had a few more things to add, then I went online and booked a flight to Nice, unfortunately there were no direct flights, so I flew from Tangier to Madrid then to Nice, then by taxi to Monaco and booked a room at the Columbus Hotel on the 8th floor, their room was on the 7th floor.
For this mission I brought some extra secret-technology along I only saw demonstrated in Quantico, a tiny robotic vehicle about the size of a Matchbox car. When I get an order to get rid of people like this couple my employer usually wants me to use multiple means to make extra-sure they do not survive. There is always the rule that I must not get caught, so my killing technique is always done silently and from a distance, and in this case: twice. This is why we are not allowed to walk up on the sidewalk and open fire.
I left Tangier that day and had to sit and take a nap at the international terminal in Madrid. One thing I always pack when I travel by commercial air is a small device I bought online called a TV-B-Gone. I had to take a 9 hour nap on a bench seat waiting for my flight to Nice and of course they had CNN International on the TV so I used the TVBG to shut it off. After that the waiting area was peaceful but the bench still sucked but I was able to get some sleep. My carry-on bag was safely tucked under my knees.
One of the airport maintenance people came by with a ladder and turned the TV back on, so after he left I zapped it again with the small remote control and peace returned to the waiting area. Some other people nearby also waiting on their flight applauded then the TV went off.
I landed in Nice France at 1:50pm and went outside and got a taxi to my hotel in Monaco. I've been there before but not that part of the city. The Columbus Hotel was near the waterfront and across the street from a nice flower park and my room had a view looking west over the harbor and I could see the big helipad too. My view of the harbor was partially blocked by an apartment building.
It got me wondering, in the entire country of Monaco how many helipads there were. So many of these tall buildings had a helipad on the roof, along with a heated pool and sun deck, it would be interesting to see how they controlled the airspace. They probably had one or two altitudes they were assigned so they didn't interfere with emergency services in the air, or commercial aircraft. But from what I heard the country of Monaco was thick with the sound of helicopter blades. That would drive me nuts hearing helicopters all day.
Although they are better today than they used to be, the reason why helicopters make that thumping sound is because of an interaction between the main rotor and the tail rotor. If they encircle the tail rotor it decouples from the main rotor and you are left with the sound of the turbine engine. I never felt totally safe flying in a helicopter, they are often not a very pleasant ride.
I got to my room and unpacked my clothes. I opened my computer and connected to the hotel wifi and downloaded the latest updates on the case from INR. Local surveillance showed the couple walked daily from the hotel to the yacht, but it's only about 1500 feet each way. I could intercept them on the sidewalk once I figured out who they were, so I got changed and grabbed my cell and the tiny spray can and left for the harbor.
It's a downhill stroll from the hotel to the waterfront, then you walk along the sidewalk west toward the harbor, past the helipad and some parks. Monaco is a beautiful city, they spend a lot of money on gardens and growing things. It's a great place to visit but I'd never want to live here. Maybe if I was super wealthy and elderly, maybe it might be okay, but not at age 35. About the only thing you don't have to pay for in Monaco is the air, everything else costs.
Thirty minutes later I arrived at the harbor and then I had to identify which yacht was my target, I had to use my cell with the zoom lens to take photos of the registration numbers for a positive ID. The third one I checked was my target. It was tied up with the stern toward the seawall, about forty feet out from the concrete wall. There were five large yachts tied side by side, their bows were tied to buoys to keep them in place in parallel lines.
That part of the old harbor in Monaco is a square corner with concrete walls on three sides. They have it dredged out but near the seawall it is too shallow for these really large ocean-going yachts. The city installed buoys anchored tightly to the bottom of the harbor so the yachts are parked close, side by side in this one corner, there is room for five of them. All of these yachts look to be well over 350 feet long, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for one of these floating mansions. Due to the harbor none of them can park against the seawall so their only way of getting on and off is by calling for the shuttle boat service.
The shuttle boat is like a pontoon boat, a flat platform (8'x8') with railings all the way around and a canvas cover above, it would be nearly impossible to sink or capsize. It motors over to a boarding spot on each yacht, ties up, and guests step-off or climb-off the yacht onto the platform and there is a quick ride, less than 60 seconds to a concrete pier. The pilot opens the gate and they casually step off onto the concrete pier. From there they climb a covered staircase and end up on a sidewalk at a taxi stop. The shuttle can also be used to deliver supplies to any ship in the harbor, and it runs 24/7. Getting off your yacht and onto the shuttle is like getting out of a private business jet.
The distance from the water to the sidewalk on top of the seawall is about 16 feet. Most of the seawall has a decorative iron railing along the edge painted forest green.
So I walked over near the shuttle pier where I could watch for the target couple, a man and woman in their 50s. Because it's Monaco the shuttle pier was built to shield yacht passengers from view on shore but the walkway up to street level eventually made them visible. The place was designed so they stepped off their yacht and onto the shuttle boat, then motored to the pier and stepped onto the pier, then up a flight of stairs to sidewalk level where they could hail a taxi and disappear into the city. At that spot there were benches for tourists sit and stare at the enormous yachts, which was where I sat facing the yachts. From my perch if I leaned over the railing and looked straight down I could see the shuttle boat pier. I expected Doug and Joyce to be wearing (disguises) sun hats and large sunglasses.
I checked my app to see if anyone nearby had a prison implant but there were none in this part of Monaco. Heaven forbid!
The hours slowly ticked by and the temperature dropped a lot when the sun started to get low in the sky late in the day. At 5:51pm a taxi arrived and let off a middle aged couple, sun glasses and long coats. They were the right age, race, physical size, etc., to match the description provided by INR so I possibly found my targets. I took hi-res video of them getting out of the taxi. They crossed the sidewalk and started down the stairs to the shuttle pier. I shot video and got face video and body footage too. He even glanced at me but my cell was hidden so I'm sure he never saw they were being video recorded. I sent that video immediately to INR for analysis, directly from my cell.
About twenty minutes later I got a report back on the video it was graded a high probability those people were my targets. My next step was to design their exposure. All I needed to do was get them to inhale a few anthrax spores and nature would do the rest. I lit a cigarette to study the air currents around the top of the stairs and on the sidewalk. What I decided was I needed a way to release spores into the air and have the natural air currents push the cloud of spores to their location.
The spores have weight, but not very much. One spore is too small to be seen by humans unless you use a microscope. In school we saw drift studies done outside. They compared exhaled cigarette smoke (which is visible) to a cloud of spores that was marked with a UV dye that made them slightly visible in UV light (blacklight). It was proven in all weather conditions that the two were very similar but the spores lost height faster than the cigarette smoke particles. It traced a very predictable/repeatable curve. We had to memorize that downward arc, the ratio of vertical drop over horizontal drift, a simple math problem. The arc is like hitting a wiffle ball with a plastic bat. We also studied the cloud created by the spray can in the atmosphere. It came down to the cloud size and drift and how it lost height over time. I'll explain more shortly.
When you walk up the stairs from the shuttle pier you turn to the left and you are standing on the sidewalk, facing the street. If you are standing there waiting on a taxi the air moves left to right so I had to spray on the far left side of the taxi stop. I would also need some height and the only thing there to give me elevation was the base of a street light pole. I eyeballed the distance and estimated the street light pole base was 30 feet from the taxi stop. I did some simple mental math and calculated the can needed to spray about ten feet above the sidewalk for two people whose noses would be about 5'5" above the sidewalk. The concrete base is three feet tall, then my shoulder would add another five feet, then my left arm would add about two feet so 2+3+5=10 feet. Bingo! I would climb up and stand on the light pole base and extend my arm up behind the pole so they couldn't see it, then spray an entire can towards the taxi stop, then jump down to the sidewalk and walk over to the railing and pretend to be admiring the yachts tied up down on the water.
Seconds later they would reach the top of the stairs, turn left and stand there waiting for a taxi to roll to a stop directly in front of them. If they were stupid they would wait for the driver to get out and open the door. Then they would get in the back seat and close the door. The driver would get back inside and drive off. The cloud would begin to arrive about the time they reached the top step and turned left and looked around for any taxi. While they waited the invisible cloud of spores would hit them in the face and be inhaled. The lavender oil would be pleasing and cause them to inhale again more deeply, thereby exposing them to even more spores. The bad news was the taxi driver would probably also be exposed.
This was going to be my first attempt at exposing the perps (Douglas and Joyce Rose); I also had robotics to use inside the hotel. This mission just getting started, it was very likely both of them would be dead tomorrow. If they slept in their room tonight it was likely they would be dead before noon tomorrow.
The fact that they were only wearing minor disguises told me they were risk-aware but probably felt fairly safe in Monaco and would let their guard down, especially after drinks at dinner.
I moved to a new spot about 50 feet further west on the sidewalk so I could watch people on the shuttle boat as they motored toward the pier. I could even use the night vision feature on my cell if they stayed on board long after the evening meal. I thought it was strange that they came back to the yacht even though they were both on vacation. I texted INR and they suggested since she was the chief cook she felt some responsibility the meals were served as perfectly as possible so she always ate with the family, sort of like the royal food tester. I suspected both of them were food tasters for the family who owned the yacht because they were universally hated around Europe.
They suggested the family had lots of enemies and they were always worried about poisoning so they used a food tester to pre-eat their meals to ensure they were safe for the family. Joyce and Douglas supervised purchasing the groceries used on board so they had a personal interest in food safety, even on their days off. Plus it was probably a better meal than they would get in most restaurants in Monaco, and for them it was free too. It was like eating in a 5 star restaurant every day for free. I don't think any of them truly believed someone would try to poison the family, especially in Monaco.
Of course if they supervise and select food to purchase, the food sellers to purchase from, and they are also royal food tasters made me wonder how much they were trusted by the owners of the yacht, maybe not as much as one would believe. Perhaps this is why they eat with the family daily, so they had the same risk as the family. They always sat down to eat before the family so if the food was poisoned they might show symptoms before the family arrived at the table. That means they were completely unaware there were time released poisons that could sit inside your body for days to weeks before they were suddenly released in your GI tract, which made food testers obsolete. It also meant that when poisoned you would probably never know where or when it came from.
There are highly toxic nerve agents available to most countries that can be added to foods and remain undetected by the target. When ingested this V-Class nerve agent implants itself inside the small intestine wall. Over time the coating of each micro-pellet wears off and begins to release its chemical into the intestines. It passes through the liver untouched and appears in the blood where it builds until it reaches sufficient concentration when it suddenly begins to operate. Nerve agents disrupt the proper conduction of nerve impulses across a synapse. The effect is every muscle becomes stiff and gradually ceases to function, like rigor mortis for the living. This includes the heart and lungs, as well as skeletal muscles and brain functions too. From symptom onset to loss of consciousness is usually about six hours. The effect cannot be reversed and is always fatal. It is literally like a time bomb and is usually put into food or beverages. You cannot see it, taste it, or smell it.
I had time to study the area and the air currents, I even took pictures and sent them to INR. The indicator of sufficient exposure might be if one of them turned to sniff the air again.
At 7:50pm most of the yachts had some post-dinner outdoor activity and the shuttle boat was briefly busy (dinner guests leaving). I stood on the sidewalk by the railing and saw the third load of passengers looked the same as the couple I saw earlier. I quickly checked the air currents with a wet finger held vertically, they felt exactly the same, maybe 2mph from west to east. That would give me a nine or ten second drift time; I timed other passengers as they climbed the stairs and turned left, stepped forward and waited for the taxi to appear.
I had to work fast and got the spray can out, cap off, setting for a wide spray. I was going to let an entire can empty into the air. The street lights had a square concrete pillar base, about three feet tall, on top of those was where the lamp posts were bolted. I climbed up onto the nearest one and held the can in my hand aimed at the taxi stop knowing the spore cloud would drift east and down.
The staircase from the shuttle boat pier up to the sidewalk was lit by colored LEDs, they snapped on while I was watching for my perps to step off the shuttle boat.
The shuttle boat arrived and I saw my targets step-off and start the long trudge up the staircase to sidewalk level (16 feet). I put the phone away and pulled out the can. I climbed up onto the concrete base and when I saw their heads through the railing overlooking the stairs I started the spray. I held the button down with the can aimed at the taxi stop. Of course the spore cloud quickly became invisible, even I couldn't smell the lavender, which worried me a bit.
Seconds later they appeared at the top of the stairs, turned left onto the sidewalk and stood waiting for a taxi. As they reached the top step my gas can ran out so I jumped down and walked back to the railing and sat on the bench. I saw a black car approach from my left as I sat down on the bench. I thought I saw her sniff the air and lean over and comment to him. Both of them turned and faced west and seemed to be looking for a source of the pleasant lavender scent as the taxi rolled to a stop. The driver got out and quickly opened the back door and they both got in and the driver shut the door. My best guess was they inhaled spores for about 14 seconds. They had no clue they were just exposed to a biologic weapon. I think the driver was also exposed.
The taxi sped off and I started walking back to the same hotel they might be heading toward as well. They might have gone to a bar, but I was going to the hotel to deploy more technology. Walking down the sidewalk I dropped the empty gas can in a sidewalk trash can. I had time to do some mental math and decided the extra delay caused by them waiting for the driver to open the back door only increased their intake of anthrax. My best estimate was they both received a moderate dose, which would kill them within 72 hours. But my boss ordered I immediately start over and use other means to expose them to something more lethal, the famous `double tap.'
I could have used a pistol or a knife but my boss did not want a dramatic bloody mess on the sidewalk or on the TV news. Bullets would have been the fastest way but I might end up in jail until State could come get me.
That was something we asked a lot in school at Quantico, `what happens if on assignment you are caught and arrested for murder?' The answer was we would be arrested like any other suspect and thrown in jail and interrogated, possibly beat severely in custody to obtain a confession but within 72 hours someone from State or Interpol would arrive and demand your release, explaining the killing was a diplomatic issue, there would be no state charges. Of course by then you've been beat, photographed and finger printed. They would try to destroy the records but it's not guaranteed. Their best advice was always: Be careful and don't get caught, don't create a crime scene, leave no evidence. That policy was why in the case of Doug and Joyce they wanted a hands-off execution.
Contact the author: borischenaz mailfence com
Reminder: this story is 100% fiction.