Local time – 6:10pm, Saturday 16th June, 2011.
Tallinn, Estonia.
‘How is your French accent?’ Henry asked Alex. He had gently woken her from her fake slumber as they arrived at the airport. Phil dropped them off at the curb and disappeared with the van.
‘I learnt French at school, but my accent’s terrible.’
‘Ok, I think it’s best if you say nothing until we’re safely out of the airport in Prague. If you need to speak to me, we’ll use the iPad like we did on the way here.’ Alex nodded, immediately adopting her enforced silence. Their flight boarded in 15 minutes.
Phil turned up again in the departure lounge and the group fanned out, looking like single travellers rather than a team of conspirators. Alex noticed Josh take out an iPad, opening a game of Scrabble like any bored tourist. Ryan sat in the same corner of the lounge as Phil, and they successfully ignored each other. She sat with Henry, playing the role of loving French wife, and after a couple of minutes, excused herself to go to the toilet by pointing at the sign to the ladies. Once she rounded the corner and was out of sight of the lounge, she hurried towards a pod of public telephones. She had snuck a couple of Euros into her pocket when the guys weren’t looking and was relieved to see she had the right coins to use in the phone.
She tapped in the numbers from her wrist and waited a few seconds before Laura answered, her voice quiet and sad. Alex did everything she could to stop herself choking up, but she failed miserably. A huge sob broke free.
‘It’s Alex. I’m so… so…. sorry.’ Laura was grief stricken, but surprisingly there was a determination in her words that shocked Alex as much as the email did.
‘It’s OK love. We have to be brave at a time like this. Bernie would have wanted that.’ Alex felt even worse.
‘I got your email. I was so worried. Why, why do you…’
‘Listen carefully love, this is important. When I got back from the hospital, our house had been broken into and ransacked. Nothing stolen that I can see but...’
‘Someone was looking for something?’
‘Yes dear, it would seem so.’ Alex held her breath. She couldn’t understand what Laura was talking about.
‘Who was it? What were they looking for?’
‘We don’t know, but Bernie woke up briefly before going into cardiac arrest. I couldn’t be sure exactly what he was saying, but I managed to make out the word iPad.’
‘Oh my god.’
‘That’s why I needed to speak to you. You’ve got Bernie’s iPad and I’m wracked with worry that someone wants it.’
‘What could possibly be in there? It’s just Bernie’s notes.’
‘I have no idea love. But there’s something else you need to know. The doctors believe Bernie’s stroke might have been brought on by something.’ Laura was calm. Alex could understand perfectly the words she was saying, but their meaning floated around in a cloud of terror. Laura forged on, getting no response from Alex.
‘They found a chemical in his blood. They think he may have been murdered.’ Laura said the word ‘murdered’ so carefully and slowly, it hung itself around Alex’s neck like a noose. A faint beep could be heard beneath Laura’s voice, and Alex realised the phone call was about to cut out. She didn’t have any more coins.
‘Laura, I’m about to drop out. I will call you back from Prague…’
‘One more thing. Bernie had a post-it note in his pocket, I think it might have something to do with his Bilderberg story.…’ The beeping got louder, but Alex was able to make out Laura’s last few words. She concentrated on holding them in her memory.
‘It just said Wenceslas S Q U. I assume that means Wenceslas Square…’ And then the call dropped out. Alex held the silent receiver in her hand and stared at it, taking in Laura’s news. Murdered. She thought about finding a reverse phone number, so she could phone back and see if Laura could explain more. But the guys would be wondering what was taking her so long in the toilet. The last thing she wanted was to be caught making a phone call when she was meant to be a silent French woman. She went back to the departure lounge.
A queue was forming to board the plane. Henry handed her satchel bag to her and asked, ‘Are you OK? You look pale.’
She nodded and sighed, remembering just in time not to speak to him in English. Laura’s words were scarier than anything Henry had told her that day. They were even scarier than being shot at. If Bernie really had been murdered, what were the chances it had something to do with Bilderberg? Could he have been killed before he got to Prague, to ensure he didn’t write an article about the meeting? It all seemed impossible to believe, but Laura wasn’t the sort of person to exaggerate or dramatise. She was like Alex – cynical to the core. They used to laugh at Bernie’s wild theories. But there was nothing funny about this one. Bernie was gone now and it was no longer just a career-making story. Alex’s mind was made up. I have to find out what happened to Bernie. And what the story was that got him killed.
Once on the plane, Alex opened the iPad and then Bernie’s conspiracy bible. She scrolled through a few pages, but soon realised it was pointless searching for some unknown clue. She did a search for the word: Paldiski. But it wasn’t there. Then she searched for Bilderberg and the page jumped to Bernie’s comprehensive section about the history of the Bilderberg group. She highlighted the whole chapter and searched for ‘army’. No results. She had read most of this information that morning while waiting for something to happen outside the castle gates. It was pretty straightforward – names, dates and vague assertions that the members were trying to cooperate across borders and eventually form a world government. This was what all the Bilderberg conspiracies Bernie included were suggesting – that they were more than a social group and far too powerful to be trusted. But they all said the Bilderbergers ‘planned’ to form a world government. Bernie never spoke of this threat like it needed urgent attention, nor did he refer to any acts of violence relating to their plans. There was no proof in Bernie’s notes that he had any idea about Josh’s claims about the September 11 plot and the formation of a world army to take over after a nuclear missile attack. When Bernie chatted about his plans for a story about the conference, Alex got the impression he wanted to discredit the group and their motives with some sort of scandal. A member leaking too much to the press, or disagreements about who should be invited. But if he was really onto something more serious than gossip, he had shown no sign of it in the weeks leading up to the assignment. The plane jolted slightly from turbulence and Alex looked up. She noticed Henry was scanning the text she was reading. She clicked open the notepad and typed a question:
‘How are you going to get the agenda?’
He shrugged and wrote: ‘Any ideas?’
Alex felt let down. Henry and his team seemed so confident about their plans, she hadn’t realised they had a huge hole. It would be very incriminating if they could link the leaked list of army facilities with a topic of discussion at the Bilderberg meeting. But it was time to get real. Those agendas would be so tightly held it was stupid to hope someone might be careless enough to leave one lying around. Alex wondered if the agenda would even be printed on paper, or if it only existed in data form, which could be encrypted and deleted. They would never risk it turning up on Wikileaks, so maybe they were careful not to write anything down. People had got their hands on agendas from Bilderberg before, but if the group was really behind the 9/11 attack and was currently plotting a nuclear assault in order to scare the world into blindly giving them complete control, those agendas must have been fakes. Bernie showed her one that a well known Bilderberg conspiracy theorist claimed had been smuggled out by a mole in the conference. It was a very general outline of discussions around the role of the World Bank, European economies and the war in Afghanistan. It didn’t exactly say ‘army logistics and facility construction’ or ‘procuring nuclear weapons.’ And would they use secret code names on the agenda? Quite possibly, Alex thought glumly. Henry looked like he was waiting for her to write something, as if she might have a suggestion. Disappointing him, she wrote:
‘Getting our hands on a real Bild agenda is as likely as finding out who killed JFK.’ Henry looked hurt. He didn’t write anything else; instead he looked out the window as if deep in thought. Alex’s mention of JFK filled her mind with images of Bernie’s excited grin as he chatted away about possible theories on who shot Kennedy. He knew everything there was to know about the assassination – he read all the books, all the newspaper articles and blogs that continued to suggest possible motives and government cover ups. More recently he had even spent days trawling the Wikileaks site, looking for any hint of a clue to the assassination plot. He also loved the Watergate scandal. Much to Laura’s irritation, he spent a week of annual leave listening to the Nixon tapes and reading restricted documents that had just been released to the public. The Nixon tapes. Alex had an idea.
She nudged Henry on the elbow and started typing: ‘Why do we need a copy of the agenda? Wouldn’t it be better to hear their plans?’ Henry nodded, but he didn’t look pleased.
He wrote: ‘A recording would be great, but there’s no way to get a device into the castle. We’ve checked out the security.’
Alex grabbed the iPad back excitedly and wrote: ‘Yes there is. There’s a very simple way.’