Local time – 6:45am, Sunday 17th June, 2011.
Prague, Czechoslovakia.
The six hour plane journey ahead felt like a reprieve for Alex from the awful scenes in Prague. Ryan was on her mind constantly. She couldn’t believe he had not been mentioned since the plane took off. Phil seemed angry, but didn’t say anything sympathetic about Ryan’s situation, instead joining the pilot in the cockpit. Henry opened the mini bar soon after take off and swigged down two small bottles of vodka. Alex reasoned this was a common way to deal with shock, but she felt that the bond between them was totally lost. He now sat glumly at the back of the plane and looked to be lost in his own thoughts. Josh sat on the chair next to Alex and she couldn’t help wondering if he might have lost his mind with the stress of watching Ryan being arrested; he appeared almost catatonic. He had put on his iPod headphones and the faint sound of heavy metal music buzzed irritatingly from them, but he sat staring into space without moving a muscle.
Opening Bernie’s iPad, she was surprised to be invited to join the plane’s wireless network, which was not password protected. She opened the Safari browser and the news headline on her home page leapt out at her. ‘Breaking News: Bomb at Pakistani President’s Residence’. She clicked on the news story and read that two Pakistani Government Ministers were confirmed dead in the blast. There wasn’t much more information. With a sigh, she opened more news sites – which also led with the Pakistani news. But she wanted to see news about the Bilderbergers’ virus.
There were articles on the BBC, The Times and even on her paper, The Contingent, which had a story written by Gerome, denying their reporter’s involvement in spreading the virus. Her involvement. She couldn’t imagine how Gerome was reacting to this situation. She had seen him very angry before, but predicted this situation might be making him something beyond angry. She wanted to believe that if Bernie had been alive, and wasn’t intimately involved in bringing the Bilderbergers down, his bullshit detector would have seen straight through the press releases about a Chinese cyber attack. He would have investigated what was on the video, refusing to be spoon-fed the virus lies. And she would have happily helped him, just as she was trying to help him now. There were similar news stories across the western world. Hardly any mentioned her name, and she wondered if many of the reporters had taken the advice not to open the file, so hadn’t even seen the video. She checked The Sydney Morning Herald’s news site, to see if their journalists had worked out that an ex-Sydney-sider was the face of the video. But even they seemed not to have noticed her.
The more she read the stories, the angrier she became. It wasn’t just that people had been tricked into deleting their message. Nor did she give much thought to the destruction of her career. Her fury was cementing against the Bilderbergers and their plans to take control. They had orchestrated this defensive position. They were determined to carry out their monstrous plans without scrutiny and the pathetic media was allowing them to do it.
She flicked through as many articles as she could find, and was dismayed to realise there wasn’t a single report mentioning the content of the video. It was consistently referred to as ‘a badly produced video full of conspiracy lies’ or ‘amateur attempts to simulate popular news, designed to increase the speed at which the cyber attack went viral’. Journalists from New York, Madrid, Amsterdam and London were using the same words. Copying from the same crudely written press releases. Blindly relaying the lies fed to them by Bilderbergers. Where were the questioning voices in the media? Where was the analysis? It was dead, she reminded herself unhappily. It died in the Prague police station. And it died when people like Bernie were murdered for trying to fight back. Just like the news stories about September 11 which never mentioned a group of CIA agents being killed at ground zero. The media was useless. And her attempts to change this had successfully put her in the firing line.
Alex was still glaring angrily at one particularly fact-less article by a Fox News reporter, when Phil came out of the cock pit.
‘We’ve got to decide where to land in Pakistan.’ Alex couldn’t work out if he was looking directly at her because his remaining team members were obviously in no state to contribute to decisions, or because he actually thought she might have an idea. Either way, she chose not to meet his eyes.
‘I’m just having a look at Bernie’s notes. If there’s any clue in here as to where he was headed, it shouldn’t take too long to find.’ One sentence, two lies. The second one more problematic. She erased the first lie by dutifully opening the Conspiracy Bible and scrolling through it. A search for ‘Pakistan’ yielded a few references, but none that inferred a link to a hidden nuclear weapon. She skim read the pages under the heading ‘Annie Larsen affair’ and ‘Hindu–German Conspiracy’, which both mentioned Pakistan. But since they related to the First World War, and Pakistan didn’t exist then, they were irrelevant. Searches for ‘nuclear’ and ‘weapon’ were equally fruitless. The Conspiracy Bible was filled to the brim with information, but it was completely devoid of obvious clues.
Phil stood watching Alex, and it made her feel uncomfortable. She shifted in her seat so she could hold the iPad in a position where he couldn’t see the screen. She could feel his eyes searching her. Accusing her. After a couple of awkward minutes, she was relieved when his attention shifted to Henry, and he moved to the back of the plane to have a whispered conversation. She scrolled mindlessly through Bernie’s words until the pages stopped. The document was arranged so each new conspiracy started with a bold headline. Bernie had typed a headline on this final page, ready to fill it with text at a later date. The words struck Alex as meaningful. ‘Save one life, save the world’. She couldn’t place where she had come across this phrase before, so she copied the short sentence into a Google search. The results immediately confirmed why it was so familiar – a Wiki Answers page described it as part of a quote from the Talmud, one of the main texts in Jewish law. But this wasn’t the reference that Alex knew – she had seen Schindler’s List and recalled the final scene where Schindler was given a gold ring by the Jews he saved, inscribed with the words ‘Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.’ She couldn’t recall Bernie mentioning anything about Schindler in their many discussions of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Had he come across something recently that caught his interest? Or was she only concentrating on this clue because it was the last thing her friend wrote, and she had no other ideas? Scrolling back up through the document, she resigned herself to the more difficult task of reading every single word. There was something on this iPad that the Bilderbergers wanted. And if Bernie wasn’t going to spell it out for her, she was going to have to work it out for herself.