SuperTombo

Part 1

Corporal Brent Bregs drove westbound through Paris. He hoped to get
home before dinner. He had just purchased three new records in Forum
des Halles and planned on listening to them before sitting around the
dinner table with his wife, Monique, his elder daughter Taylor, his
younger daughter McKenzie and his younger son, Cassius.

Gary Nums took six people with him, the best of the best among the
elite teams he had trained over the years. He knew Paris well, so this
action, so ordered by Alf Gotwin, could be expected to go smooth as
ice. Once you got out of Paris, the suburbs look the same everywhere.
They approached the Bregs villa, situated in a Saint-Cloud, a tony
enclave in western Paris that was surrounded by golf courses and
parks.

It was a few minutes before 8 p.m., and Germano, Dolph, Gus and Dex
had positioned themselves at the back of the Bregs home. Meanwhile,
Pim, who had just arrived from the Netherlands, and Manfredo, a former
sicario from Michoacan who now worked as a renegade for the highest
bidder with various missions completed in Prague, Manchester and
Paris, stood watch in a car parked near the front of the Bregs home.

"Germano, unpack the canisters, do it now," Nums's crackled in
Germany's earpiece. He removed three canisters from two black gym bags
and placed each one near a circulation vent.

"I am completely starved. Honey, I'm going downstairs, be right back
[...] Are the kids all washed up?" Finally, music-listening time, the
time that he had waited for for days. Bregs carried his records to the
rec room and played one, and then another one, observing the jacket's
artwork, probing for subtleties in the bassline, the kind of detail
that compact discs or digital formats couldn't muster. And yet, MP3s
sounded more agile and made the music come alive different. Just as
"July in Paris" by Jaki Byard came to a stop, Brent heard
"Bulletproof" by that singer La Roux that his daughter Aziza was
apparently very fond of seeping through the wall. This incursion into
his carefully-planned listening session made his pulse rise. He
yelled. The music stopped. The techs at State had assured him that
this place was soundproofed. That was what the real estate agent in
charge of the sale told them, at least. Bregs had paid for the five
million dollar ask in cash. "Dinner is served, angry man!" Monique
popped her head in the stairwell. "Dinner is..." Brent came up the
stairs quickly, "I heard you the first time, monkey, coming!"

Nums watched Pim and Manfredo, posted a few feet away, as they watched
the opulent villa on a computer screen. Pim had bankrolled multiple
tech ventures launched by Kim DotCom in the early aughts. He had done
a professional reconversion and now worked for Uncle Sam. Just as the
team had pulled up two hours earlier he had easily hacked into the
home's CCTV system, and now had twenty-one different points from which
he could monitor the three-story building. He picked up the radio.
"Go."

As the Bregs family sat around the dinner table, eating spaghetti
carbonara, an odor-free, colorless gas named Heptagon-10 penetrated
the living-room, envelopping them. The symptoms were as
fast-developing as they were droll. It hit the kids, first. They
giggled, then smiled, shit-faced, as if they'd downed a whole bottle
of Goldschlagger. Rafaela was first. She fell head first into her bowl
of pasta. The impact caused the plate to shatter, and shards of
porcelain lodged themselves into her right ear. Max and Aziza quickly
fell apart, under their parents' perplexed but amused gaze. Monique
swooned, chuckled and fell off her chair, landing with a hard thud.
Gary looked around the table, grabbed the table cloth with one hand,
raised the finger of his other hand and started furiously swerving it,
sword-like, out in front of him, hitting the table hard and slipping
off his chair like a slinky, taking the table cloth and everything on
the table down with him.

"Pull up the van, do it now." Jesus was the seventh man assigned to
the mission. This was his first time working on Alliance Baranski. He
threw the van in gear and rode up to the back of the house. Every
member of the Bregs household, inanimate at this moment, was thus
loaded in the back of a dark van driven by a Guatemalan by the name of
Jesus to a safehouse in southern Paris.

Alf Gotwin, who commissioned this action, had worked for the U.S.
department of State for twenty years, a lifer-in-waiting who took the
civil service exam right after graduating Columbia. The son of an Ohio
oats farmer, Gotwin had never left the state, let alone the country,
until he enlisted, did three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and then
attended Columbia on the GI Bill. A brilliant student, he was always
looking at the SIPA building. The School of International Affairs was
the tallest tower on campus, the modern counterpoint to the venerable
Low Library building. He studied under the formidable Lisa Anderson
and got his SIPA Masters with highest honors. After that, the
entrance exam to the State Department was a formality. With six months
behind him working out of the Rosslyn office, Gotwin got what he had
been asking for all along: the hardest assignments. He did a
ninety-day stint in Quetta, followed by Khartoum, Djibouti, Comorros,
he worked undercover in Bandar Abbas as a marine equipment expert
working with Iran's customs officials and then disappeared one night,
following a valuable shipment from the Iran's first port through the
country and into Afghanistan.

After ISIS, or as it is also known, Daech, was founded in 2009 by
al-Zarqawi, Gotwin, who at the time was the station chief in Algiers,
monitoring an obscure group called Jund Al-Khilafah got recalled
in-extremis to Washington. They put him up at the Four Seasons, just
down the street from 1600 Pennsylvania. He had arrived at 3pm at
Dulles. That evening, he stood in the Oval, talking with President
Obama and two men he recognized as being in Secretary of State
Clinton's inner circle.

"I'm sending you to France, hopefully you can civilize the locals."
Everyone in the Oval Office laughed at POTUS's comment. The
mission-critical aspect of the mission, as one of the two men who
Gotwin did not recognize said, was containment and deterrence of
Islamist ideas. Europe's borders, ever since the Shengen Agreement
became applicable in 1995, were porous. Anyone from the Middle East
region who received support from people in European countries could
build a network for themselves, networks that would support their
terror cells. The President had enlisted Alf Gotwin, known as a pliant
self-starter in State Department circles with the brilliance of an
Einstein, to lead the countermeasure effort in Europe, containing the
rise of the undercover network that supported such jihadi extremists.

Cassius woke up first. He looked around the room. There was a small
window, the glass pane was dirty. Still, he could tell it was sunny
outside. He thought how right now he should be playing soccer in the
sun with his classmates. The room had a dank smell. There were three
mattresses nearby on which slept his parents and his two sisters. His
head hurt. Footsteps were heard coming from outside the door. A key
was inserted in the lock and turned. "Right, wake up, everyone, wake
up, wake up, wake up, NOW!" Gary Nums stepped inside the room with Pim
and Manfredo, watching the Bregs family awake in disarray, looking
about the room with a smile. Nums pointed to Corporate Bregs. "You,
stand up. The others wait." Germano laughed, "I don't really think
they have a choice, do they?"

Corporate Brent Bregs was unknown entity in the intelligence
community. It was deliberate. He had fought in every theater of war
around Europe and the Middle East. At 36, after an IUD permanently
damaged his foot while on a mission during the 1991 uprising in Iraq,
his assessment resulting in Dick Cheney deciding not to send troops to
Iraq, he went to work for the CIA and was based out of the Vaziani
military base not far from Tbilisi. He was there to monitor and report
on the Georgian Civil War following the December 1991 coup d'état on
Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He liked to keep a low profile, at a risk of
drawing suspicions unto him. Starting in March of 1992, the trail
grows cold. Information on his whereabouts are sketchy. A daughter,
McKenzie, was born in 1994 in Malta and Taylor's birth followed the
year after, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a tony French suburb.

Bregs was marched down a corridor by Pim, Manfredo and Nums and then
inside a room. 23-B was just like any other interrogation room at the
Dakota. The Dakota is how Trigon Limited, the NGO that was started by
Gotwin to seek out suspected terrorists and their support networks,
called the secure compound where Bregs and his family had been taken.
Its location, near Aubervilliers, in northern Paris, was classified.
The Dakota, an ironical reference to the famous New York City manse,
was a U.S. black site managed by the Office of the Vice Presidency and
leased, variously, to Treasury, Homeland and State. High-value
detainees, like Ayman Al-Zawahiri, El Chapo and even Charles Manson,
king of hell, had stayed at the Dakota. There was a table, a desk lamp
and a chair.

Sit down, Bregs.

-I swear to God, if you so much as lay a finger on one of them!
-« Relax, tough guy . Nums let out a chuckle. I need clarification on
something. Bregs looked up at him.

Why do you keep disappearing on us ?
I didn't disappear. I've been right here, with my family.
Why are you traveling to Malta so much ?
We have a secondary home there.

Bregs grew up in Cleveland, OH. His mother, Edna Cagliostro, was a
homemaker who had ambitions of working as a columnist but never quite
got around to it. She spent her time doing the ironing and chasing her
son Brent around their home with whatever she could find to hit him
with. She would beat young Brent for the smallest possible slight, and
humiliate him, whenever possible. She never touched a drop of alcohol
in her life, so her hand, and her resolve, to castigate Brent, was
steady.

As he sat in the interrogation room, Bregs looked up at large
dry-erase board. Someone had drawn a penis with hairs coming out of
it.

Gotwin stepped outside and took a phone call. Bregs didn't move,
looking at the penis on the board and thinking about how ludicrous the
situation was. The Project needed to be protected at all costs. These
kinds of disturbances, such as the one that Gotwin had visited on him
and his family, were to be expected. Bregs did a quick adding up. He
hadn't been brought in for questioning in thirteen months.

- K, let's take him to check-out. Gotwin popped in head in for hardly
a second, snapped the order, swung around and disappeared into the
hallway.

If the U.S. intelligence Administration were run as efficiently as
Silicon Valley, Bregs thought as he was being accompanied to the front
of the building, these kinds of unwanted sollicitations wouldn't take
place so often. Bregs threw himself into his wife's arms. Monique was
crying. « They're not letting go of us, do not worry about that, » he
had told her. "Yes, but we are safe, for now. "

The next day, Bregs drove to the office. His offices were in an
ordinary-looking three-story residential building located at 30,
Mazzola in Saint Paul's Bay, Malta. As usual, Zed was slouched over a
bank of monitors, his workspace smelled like feta cheese. "There he
is, there's the colonel," Zed was positively elated. "Guvment got you
again, sir?" Zed did an impression of a black teenager really well.
"Oh, you heard. I'm hoping you have some good news for me."
The last satellite launch, three months earlier, had turned out to be
a near-total disaster. Zed, whom Bregs had snatched up from MIT right
as he graduated at the top of his class, managed two central commands
located in the continental U.S. with his bank of monitors. He could
see and hear everything. Zed had tinkered with sound systems when a
teenager, and had worked for a short while with an Italian sports car
company before college, rigging windshields with an ultrasonic
generator that deflected water through sound waves, thus eliminating
the need for wipers. Since he was young, he hadn't negotiated a proper
contract. Once everyone realized the potential goldmine that Zed had
created, all hell broke loose. Zed's father got involved in trying to
get the company to adhere to a better contract, but a legal fight
ensued and Zed stopped working for the company.

"We're gonna have ourselves a beautiful launch, Corporal," he said in
between two bites of a sandwich. The guys in CentCom C are real
gung-ho about it. 2010 could be the year of the Tombocalypse!

"Good. I need full readiness within twenty days, you know this."
"Yessir." Zed swiveled back towards his screens, watching intently. On
the lower right-hand corner of his bank of six screens, something that
looked like a spacecraft stood, waiting.

Bregs walked back to his office and sat down. There was piles of
boxes, they had not even had time to properly move in, and it had been
a year since they arrived in Malta to work on the project. There was
such a thick layer of secrecy that it was hard to get at the resources
that the U.S. government had to offer, in terms of logistics, helping
them get settled into the neighborhood. But at least, Bregs had a
direct line to Castor Rapp, the president's chief of staff.

"Whoever controls the weather controls the world." That was how
Castor Rapp had ominously put it to Bregs, when they met ten years
earlier, as they pored over a proposal by then-unknown firm ARCINTIS.
While everyone was fretting about Y2K readiness and spending their
hard-earned cash on software that would prove futile, Bregs and Rap
were meeting in a dank, windowless basement in the Pentagon figuring
out how to impact the weather.

Rap was a procurement officer who had just been named Pentagon Special
Liaison to the Appropriations Committee, the most important committee
in the legislative branch. This made Rapp god around the Pentagon
hierarchy.

Rapp and Bregs met through the President, Robert Lacy, who at the time
was governor of South Dakota, a state that was rated as being
high-risk for climate change impact. Bregs and Lacy went to the same
high-school (name?) and were on the squash team. "Bob is putting
pressure on me, Corporal. We need to find solutions. His state don't
get enough rain, or it gets too much of it. What to do? Do you
understand me?" Rapp had a strange way to pronounce certain words, and
Bregs found this grating. How could this work, he thought, while
reading over the proposal advanced by ARCINTIS. The company, which was
six years old, was laying forward plans, in an ultra-secret manner,
for the construction of what they called SUPERTOMBO PAC, a brand-new
technology which was basically a tweeter, the size of a two-story
building, which had to be launched via spacecraft and put into orbit
around the earth. Once in orbit, the SUPERTOMBO would emit soundwaves
not audible to the human ear but powerful enough to wreak havoc among
the elements, changing weather scenarios.