The Great Deception Read online

  The Great Deception

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  The Great Deception

  The Great

  Deception

  David Berko

  Table of

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Flash Bang

  Chapter 2: It’s a New World

  Chapter 3: German Affairs

  Chapter 4: Moldova

  Chapter 5: Surprise

  Chapter 6: It’s a Wrap

  Chapter 7: Picked Up

  Chapter 8: The Messenger

  Chapter 9: Interrogation

  Chapter 10: Road Trip

  Chapter 11: Cerebrum Transfiguration Surgery

  Chapter 12: Getting Somewhere

  Chapter 13: Winding Down

  Epilogue

  End

  Foreword

  *You will be taken for a ride on several layers of timelines. All at once.

  Subplot 1: Operation

  Switchblade/Scorpion War Room/Ozarks

  04/24/41

  Scorpion leadership

  Howard—director-general of Scorpion/antichrist figure

  Maxwell—the False Prophet, Howard’s right hand man

  World Leaders

  Germany: President Lothar Kirsch

  England: Prime Minister Jasper Turpin

  Russia: President Igor Orloff

  Free Republic of North America

  President Alexander Toporvsky--leader of the FRN

  (Free Republic of North America)

  Edmond Drezzler—VP of the FRN

  Donald Holiday—Director of CCC (Central Cyber Corps)

  Alfred Demsky--Director of Sentinel (FRN's intelligence agency)

  Ahmed Negler—National Security Advisor in the Toporvsky administration

  Edith Wharton—Secretary of State

  FRN Security Forces Chain of Command

  Gene Barker—Minister of Defense

  Base Commander Bill Rescheck over the Texas militia

  Base Commander Abraham Steffords over Eielson Air Force Base

  Brigadier-general Thomas Harding

  Mike Dumphrey—Air Boss

  Damion Westover--billionaire inventor Christophe Gerard--chief scientist and jointchairman of Westover Ventures Heather—former Scorpion employee

  Subplot 2: Barcelona, Spain/Jeddah, Saudi Arabia/Moldova

  4/20-4/24/41

  Alfonso Marcello—Mossad agent

  Sofia Keller—Interior Minister of Germany

  Amalia—Secretary of the Interior Ministry

  Wendel—Commissioner of the Interior Ministry

  Jabour—mysterious messenger

  King Rehan Kahlil of the United Islamic Caliphate

  Seth Markov—Mossad agent

  Baruch—Mossad agent

  Tyrone Banks—ex-Mossad

  Subplot 3: Tel Aviv, Israel

  2036

  Azriel Markov

  Esther

  Stacy

  Ephraim Markov (Malach Kemper)

  Prologue

  "I have some visitors for you to see," the rude awakening to pleasant dreams said.

  What time was it? It didn't matter. Time was irrelevant in the subterranean world of the Ozarks.

  Heather yawned and stretched. She had only been in her cell for a mere forty-eight hours, but to her it seemed like she had already reached old age.

  Heather squinted in the dim light to see who was there to see her.

  The guy on the left stood no more than five foot eight she surmised. Something about him registered as French, but she didn't know why. Heather had actually been a foreign exchange student to France as a sixteenyear-old going through UK's Post Sixteen education, similar to high school in America. Heather chose silence over a warm reception of her visitors....Her mind, actually quite distant from the four walls that trapped her. This prompted the guard to get her attention. "Heather?"

  She had learned so much about their storied history. Not only that, but she also spent a few years of ecstasy in the "City of Lights"...Paris. While there Heather became rather fond of crusty bread and café crème (coffee served with hot cream) for breakfast. She loved trundling along at a snail's pace with the slow foot traffic along the narrow sidewalks, hearing the angry honks of vespas and vendors shouting out to pedestrians, eager to make a sale. It all seemed like a romantic reverie to her now.

  "Heather?" the jailer's voice beckoned once again, a little louder than the first time.

  If only the black site had breakfast like that, she fantasized. It must have been that time of day, the AM. Unless her biological clock and fantasies were so out of sync with each other, Heather's stomach was convinced a meal of some kind was in short order. Heck, anything would do for the hungry woman in her hour of desperation. Prison rations--a spoon-full of beans and rice-actually held some appeal to the starving prisoner about now.

  "I'm not gonna call you again," the angry officer said reaching out with a night stick, ready to punish her with it.

  The snarky warden finally got through to Heather.

  Her head slowly swiveled to eye the other stranger that stood at the entrance to her cell. He was much more handsome than the French fellow. And younger!

  She suddenly found her voice...it came out in the form of a question.

  "What's your name?"

  Damion stared at her a little longer than he should have. When she spoke all he saw was a pair of lips moving.

  Christophe next to him had been less distracted by Heather's attractiveness. "I believe she just asked you what your name is," he kindly prodded the billionaire for a response.

  "Huh, wha--?"

  "What's your name?" Heather repeated the question, this time staring full into Damion's face, her brown eyes shining.

  Damion almost had forgotten about Kara, the news reporter he would have gone out with later in the week had it not been for his current fate. Yet, for some reason she seemed less and less enchanting in comparison to the woman before him. Her British accent was...refreshing. Something about her made the self-made, rich genius feel at peace. Kara only gave him an overdose of nervous excitement he never quite grew accustomed to much less comfortable with.

  "Damion, Damion Westover," he shyly replied. His green eyes couldn't maintain contact with Heather's when he spoke to her. "What are they doing here?" Heather asked the warden who still was there. He only shrugged and turned to leave. "You have thirty minutes," he said over his shoulder to Damion and Christophe.

  Heather watched him walk down the hall and disappear around the corner. Her gaze then returned to the pair of men. They just stood there looking stupid and listless. Her mind quickly thought up a good question to break the ice. "What charges were you guys brought here on?

  --

  Mossad safe house: Barcelona, Spain

  It is the second largest city in Spain, largest commercial hub in Europe...with a population

  of four million, not including the metro…welcome to Barcelona.

  Majestic Spanish cathedrals with their towering minarets and buttresses sharply contrasted against the modern glass and steel skyscrapers that made up the panorama of Barcelona's skyline along the northeastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula off the Mediterranean.

  In the Fort Pienc neighborhood of the Eixample district in the old part of the city, a vagr
ant stumbled around, looking all pathetic. He dressed better than he was able to afford even though his standard of living was well below the poverty line.

  His shifty eyes hid behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. He wore a kerchief to cover his mess of hair. Large golden earrings tugged at his earlobe's cartilage. Everything else about him was normal. Whatever that was.

  Alley cats hissed at him; stray dogs would growl; and people either shunned him or pretended like he didn't exist. For the latter, the poor man didn't know which was better. That little saying that went something like you can't judge a book by its cover? This soul was living proof of that. He existed to fly in the face of man's empty appraisal of the outer appearance when forming character judgments.

  During the day he assumed the lowly status of down-and-outer, drifter. By night he was a completely different person with a different identity and everything. His daytime role as a bum was the perfect cover for the clandestine services that he performed. This was how he lived for many years after he expatriated from Israel back in late 2029. Dekel Hornik was his real name, however his Spanish alias was much cleverer than that. They called him Alfonso Marcello.

  ...

  It was eleven o' clock in Barcelona on a Wednesday morning. The sun smiled down on the Mediterranean coastal city. The temperature rose to a crisp sixty-five degrees out, but with the sun it felt warmer than the thermometer would lead one to believe.

  Alfonso walked by a row of street vendors, offending the customers with his body odor.

  His last shower had been three days prior. Deodorant was a negative.

  His final destination was a little secluded park. In his hand he held a copy of La Vanguardia newspaper. The mystery vagrant never actually read it, but looked the part, posing in the park with his daily copy opened up somewhere towards the business section. Nothing too strange or out of the ordinary with that.

  Blending in was easy. Reading a newspaper in a park or tooling around town didn't require a degree in stealth from Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, whom he worked for. However, staying off-grid when he was on assignment proved most challenging.

  --

  Scorpion War Room:

  Vandenberg AFB, California

  Once the former home to the U.S. Air Force's Space Command, Vandenberg Air Force Base now serves Scorpion as its strategic war room location. The base is located near Lompoc, California--a town of less than fifty thousand souls.

  More importantly though is the Santa Ynez Mountains that overshadow the base. They form the perfect natural barrier to the east. Due west of Vandenberg an underwater gateway in the Pacific connects the great blue ocean with Scorpion's war room that exists deep below the nearby mountain range.

  Earlier that morning Scorpion's directorgeneral, Howard (no one knew his last name), sent out the invitation to the rest of the world's supreme leaders to attend an event they soon would never forget. Russia the Bear, Germany the Leopard, and Great Britain the Lion all would send their supreme diplomats to attend the symposium of a lifetime. History's timeline was about to experience a major jolt the seven continents would all feel.

  --

  Chapter 1

  West LA, California

  Mike Dumphree is the Airboss of the AWACS plane that directs the traffic and foresees threats before the rest of the force can.

  On that April the 24th of 2041, there was no way he could have anticipated what was over the skies of Los Angeles. His own two eyes detected trouble before his advanced radar ever did. Whatever was out there was unlike anything ever encountered by man.

  Mike broadcasted to all fighters this urgent message: "Don't wait for them to open up fire...pursue and destroy. Every last one of

  'em. Hawk, over."

  Each one of the colonels over all the groups in the three wings that made up the coalition force checked in, one at a time, acknowledging transmission received.

  The luminous orb-shaped station that floated within missile range of the coalition force of Operation Switchblade came to a full stop. It had many levels with orifices every two decks or so. To the naked eye it looked like a giant mothership with aircraft bays all throughout the platform. This observation wouldn't be too far off the mark either.

  Suddenly little green balls of energy without any apparent shape or form came shooting out from the porous vessel from every conceivable direction. The alien bogies cut through the air no problem with a quickness that went against the laws of physics. If that wasn't terrifying enough, what came next would be. At the center of the mothership was what appeared to be an energy core of some kind. It turned red. Next, the top section of the sphere began to part in corkscrew fashion. A large canon emerged from the beast and fired two missiles that went straight up.

  --

  Due to the clandestine objective of the war council coming together at Vandenberg, the base's underwater entrance in the Pacific would receive the leaders of the world's remaining empires instead of its space pad on land. In such an event, the leaders were flown to a secure location in Tokyo where they boarded a flight that would take them over the Pacific towards the west coast of S6.

  However, it wasn't all that simple. The Free Republic of North America flew squadrons out of Hawaii looking for such activity in the region. The FRN knew that Scorpion was holding these summits, yet they were unsuccessful thus far in intercepting any of the foreign diplomats on their trek to the war room at Vandenberg.

  The flight manifest for the leaders of the world's last great remaining empires was quite different from any other. Departing from Tokyo--nothing too out of the ordinary there. Landing in the...Pacific Ocean? No typo, no joke. The why has already been explained: FRN's dragnet security could only be beat one way--underwater, not over it.

  Scorpion's hypersonic jet with its scramjet engine would fly the diplomats out of Japan's largest city at Mach 10: the closest thing to mastering Einstein's famous relativity theory, e=mc2, while still flying through earth's atmosphere. The brief joy ride would then terminate with the jet slowing to subsonic speeds and ejecting a capsule from its underbelly, two hundred miles out from S6's shoreline.

  The escape pod is in fact specifically designed to sink. As soon as the several ton submersible hits the waves of the North Pacific Ocean, its ballast tanks fill with the salty water that drowns the vehicle to a depth of a thousand meters, safely within its crush depth limits. From there another submarine that has quietly lurked around the outer edge of the continental shelf off the coast of North America for weeks, possibly even months, links up with the vessel and begins the crew transfer.

  Scorpion's sub would stick to the lesstraveled ocean trenches, away from all the sonar traps the FRN had littered across the ocean floor.

  Its Harpoon-class nuclear submarine with a super cavitation drive could plow through the viscous waters at an astonishing rate of a hundred knots.

  That Wednesday morning it would need the speed: the council at Vandenberg's War Room would convene at 03:30 hours.

  --

  Since the revolution of aviation in the aerospace sector, anyone could book a flight with the hypersonic-flight monopoly, Orbital Flyer, for a quarterly stipend of four thousand DigiCoin (equivalent to $1000 USD). For that membership one could fly four times in the three month pay period anywhere around the globe. Once the four credits are used up, before renewal comes calling, an agent would automatically dial the paying customer and make an offer for additional credits at a discounted rate.