Alpha Six The Nano-Net

Chapter 1 He exhaled. Only amateurs held their breath. They think it will make them hold the rifle steadier. Nonsense. When you hold your breath, you tremble inside. This trembling leads to a missed shot. He was no amateur. That's why he exhaled after the target was precisely visible in the crosshairs of his Steiner M7Xi-IFS sniper scope. He had already taken into account all corrections with regard to wind direction, wind strength and air pressure anyway and set them on his aiming optics. This meant that a miss was not possible. Nevertheless, something was not right. As always, after gently pulling the trigger, he looked a bit longer through the high-quality optics of his scope. The target behaved as if nothing had happened. As if he had fired a blank cartridge. He hadn't. On the contrary, he made his own cartridges. Each one with the greatest care, and that for more than 20 years. Never had a cartridge failed. Never had he missed. He still looked at the target and could not understand why nothing happened. No security guards throwing themselves on both politicians and dragging them off the stage. No emergency shutdown of the lights. No gunmen positioning themselves around the protectees with guns drawn in pincer form. Nothing. Nothing had changed, even though he had fired. He was quite sure of that. The cartridge case had been ejected, he had clearly felt the familiar, slight recoil at his shoulder, but nothing had changed in the target area. With stressed amazement, if such a thing existed at all, he reached for the binoculars, a pair of Ednar -6x42 military binoculars from Leica, and used them to try to see what was going on up ahead. The scene was still unchanged. Both government leaders continued to talk casually. They were currently the most popular in Europe, if not the world. He had received one million for shooting the man. Two million if he also got the woman afterwards. He had refused that. It was too uncertain, because if the bodyguards reacted as trained, he would not even get to fire another bullet. That's why he had rejected the two million right away. But at the moment it was not about the second bullet at all. The first bullet was nowhere to be seen. He could not have missed it. At the edge of the slightly elevated stage, where the two were discussing in front of running cameras and a green backdrop, he suddenly noticed a beam of red light. The red light flickered in his direction. At first, he thought it was coming from the virtual computer-generated background projected on the green area behind the politicians. These backgrounds would be perceived by TV viewers as real, even though they were only virtual inserts. The green background was only necessary so that the cameras could recognize the virtual image. This was nothing new in this day and age. All of a sudden, he saw more of these rays of light. He took down the binoculars and tried to see with the n***d eye what was going on. The red light disappeared. He yanked the Leica binoculars back up and immediately the optics showed the red light beams. They seemed to be coming from several places, but they were all pointing at him. Holy crap, it was laser beams cutting at his location. They were targeting him, not him targeting them. He was right at the intersection of the laser beams. It would probably only take minutes for them to get there. He took his rifle, jumped up and ran to the stairwell. From below, he heard footsteps. Heavy boots struck as he ran. He had to get up there. He sprinted to the top of the stairs. Ran up the steps. Fourth floor, fifth, sixth, and then to the top floor. The bullets whistled around his ears. They shot at him with HK-MP7 submachine guns. He immediately pulled his head behind the door and ran away to the right. They would not catch him. He was no amateur, after all, and of course he had an alternative plan. The rubble chute. He dove away to the right again, ran across the small hallway, and kicked open the makeshift door at the end of the hall as he ran. As soon as it flew open, he sprinted straight through to the bedroom - it was probably supposed to be a bedroom, but in a new building that wasn't clearly assignable - and immediately jumped feet-first into the construction debris chute. Not a particularly clean exit and not particularly pleasant either, but hey, he had to get away. With a thump he landed in the rubble container in which he had already packed a landing of fibreglass wool in the morning. He would have had no desire to land on bricks and wall rubble. Think first, then jump. Just in case, as the saying went. Well, the case had occurred. Against all expectations, it had happened. There was nothing to hear, no sirens, no commands. Maybe they hadn't seen this way out, hadn't calculated this possibility of escape. He didn't know, but he had a bad feeling. But since there was nothing he could do anyway except get out of the container and hope for good luck, he jumped out of the tin box onto the street and ran. Then he fell down. He had gotten caught in a net. Like a fish in the sea, only he hit the road hard. "Protect 7 got him," he heard a man near him say. ... "Damn it, Alpha Six, are you behind this?" "They screwed you, Stan." Steady Stan looked a bit confused. Actually, his name was Stanislav Koshlivac. A well known sniper in insider circles, who shot for one side as well as the other. Depending on who paid the most. His god was money. Everything else did not interest him. At most, gold or diamonds and, more recently, Bitcoin. Steady Stan looked around and found that he was sitting in a basement room that somehow had a layer of windows about 3 inches high all around the top edge, just as if the room was underground -up to the layer of windows. Or the room was at ground level and the windows were at the top in front of the ceiling, so light was coming in but no one could see in. Weird room. Stan was sitting in a chair by himself in the middle of the room and of course he was handcuffed to the chair. And this was bolted to the floor. "But this isn't legal, what you're doing to me here," he growled after jiggling the handcuffs. "They screwed you, completely screwed you, and you fell for it." "Who screwed me?" "This is what interests me" "Should I demand a lawyer now?" Eric Ritter, BND agent with the mission code 'Alpha Six' laughed out loud. "Stan, don't joke around. You know who I am and what I do. Help me find out who set you up and I'll see what I can do." "You know how the game works." You bet Stan knew that. He had even worked with Ritter a few years ago. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Back then it had been a partnership of convenience, but now he had an assassination attempt on two European heads of state on his hands and still didn't understand what had gone wrong. Something wasn't right at all. Ritter's voice snapped him out of his musings. "You're trying to figure out why you missed and how we caught you," he noted. "You won't find out, but rest assured it was a set-up and your principals won." "How can they have won if the target is still alive?" "Besides, I didn't miss - that would be a first." "Tell me who gave you the job and I'll take care of him." "I've never passed, and I've never betrayed a client. You know that very well, and you also know that I'm not going to start now." "They just screwed you over." ... Eric let him sit. He would say nothing. Outside , he made sure the prisoner was closely guarded and that the supposed basement room became a maximum security prison. Should Stan stew until he became soft. Which would not happen, that he knew. But a little thawing might. First they had to find and pursue other approaches. The head of operations of the agency was waiting for him in the courtyard. "As expected, he says nothing," he noted. He had probably recognized it right away from Ritter's facial expression. "Does it show?" "Well, after seven days of rainy weather, I'm sure you wouldn't look any sorrier." "They used it to test our new nano security system. They didn't want to take out the chancellor or the president." "I guess that's your opinion Alpha Six. A shot at the Chancellor, or for that matter the President, whoever the target was, by Steady Stan, screams of a different assessment." "They would have put up with their deaths, but only as a nice side effect. But they really just wanted to know if the new system was being used yet and how it was working. Whether it was working." "They could only find out if they started at the top, because if they did, the system would only be used on special occasions. That's what they assumed." "Let's assume you're right. But who is behind it? What do they get out of it now that they've learned it exists and that we're using it?" "That, Grand Master, is the question I will pursue further later." "What do you mean later?" the operations chief shouted after Ritter, because he was quickly moving away in the direction of the underground parking garage. "After means after lunch." ... He bit heartily into the knuckle. As he did so, he held it in front of his mouth with both hands like a barbarian and sank his white teeth into it. Lisa was more civilized and used a knife and fork to enjoy the veal shank. Dr. Lisa Stockmeyr, who conducted the basic research for the NPSx92 system with her start-up in Munich. Dr. Stockmeyr was a 28-year-old prodigy and also a particularly pretty child with a blond mane and bright blue eyes. She had a doctorate in chemistry and was considered the leading thinker on graphene and nanotubes. Some top universities had almost fought over her to get her into their chairs. She hadn't even finished half of her dissertation when people from Cambridge and Harvard came calling. They even flew her to Standford in a private jet, but Lisa wanted to stay true to her Lower Bavarian home and founded her own company in the middle of Munich. Right near Ludwig Maximilian University, where she had begun her studies. Munich was Upper Bavaria, but closer to her Lower Bavarian home than England or Boston, Massachusetts or even Silicon Valley in California, where Stanford University was located. Maybe she even knows Fredl Fesl personally, Ritter thought as he bit into the knuckle. Whenever he was in Munich and had a little time to spare, he took the opportunity to have a real Bavarian meal at the Haxnbauer in downtown Munich. The Haxnbauer had been around since 1963 and he and the agents who had done his job before him were always welcome there. It was an agency tradition, so to speak. "Did you know that Fredl Fesl is a good friend of my father?" Ritter was not surprised, after all she used the expression 'Lower Bavarian homeland Lower Bavaria', invented by the songwriter Fredl Fesel, as often as she could. "Almost thought so, Dr.," he said with a grin on his face. "It's nice that you're in Munich again, thought of me right away, and are taking me out to eat to fortify yourself before you go with me to my lab later." "Your lab?" "Of course, I have a laboratory at home". She smiled broadly and seemed to be looking forward to the lab experiment. "Well, I wonder if that's such a good thing." "Sure, or do you think I'm wearing the bracelet you gave me with no ulterior motive". "Hmmm... " It wasn't easy to speak neatly with a mouth full of knuckles, so he just nodded in agreement. "I'm always happy when you wear the bracelet and would be even happier if you always wore it. Because I want to surprise you just like that and then I would be disappointed if you wore one from someone else." She laughed uproariously. "Don't worry - it won't happen unless you make me wait three weeks or more again." "You know I have to be on the road a lot, and when I come to Munich, I'll come to you right away." She knew he lived in Berlin and had never been there, just as he had never been to Munich and, in fact, had never been anywhere. His job at the Military Procurement Office involved traveling from one cool technology company to the next to buy high-tech for the army. That's how they had met. At some point, after many scientists had discussed their ideas with her and after many attempts to synthesize the new chemistry, which eventually succeeded, an Eric Ritter, procurement specialist from the German Federal Office of Military Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) had announced himself. She was curious about him, if only because his business card barely sufficed to print the full name of his agency. She had expected a dusty clerk who had been moving files around the agency for 30 or 40 years and was astonished when Ritter stood in the doorway. 6,12 tall, dark hair, dark eyes, tanned and athletic. "Hi, I've been announced. My name is Ritter, Eric Ritter." "Like Bond, James Bond?" she cheekily asked back then. That broke the ice and they had a good time - whenever he was in Munich. "Ricky, I wear the bracelet all the time, except when I'm in the lab mixing up something with dangerous chemicals that is even more explosive than you are" "There's no such thing." "Right, so let's pay and go to my lab.“