The Extinction Code by Dean Crawford Page A

guard whirled, twisted on his right boot as he brought his left knee up with a brutal jerk into Wilms’s guts. The blow ejected the air from Wilms’s lungs in a great rush as his legs folded up beneath him and he slumped to the polished floor with a cry of agony. The guards lifted him bodily, twisted his arms painfully up behind his back and dragged him toward the exit gates.
    ‘You’re done talking,’ the guard sneered into his face as he was hauled out of the cell block. ‘By this afternoon you’ll be in general population, and by tonight you’ll either be in the infirmary with a shiv sticking out of your guts or you’ll be in the morgue. Have a nice day.’
    The guard shoved Wilms through the gates and he collapsed onto his knees, his aged bones cracking on the unforgiving floor as he finally wept openly. The guards ignored him and dragged him toward the next exit gate, with every step bringing him closer to his doom.
    *
    Mitchell lay in the silence and ignored the cold that seeped it seemed into his bones, aching there as he waited. Most men his age would have long ago retired from field work, but Mitchell was driven by forces far beyond his control, his desire for not just revenge but the utter annihilation of Majestic Twelve and its Bilderberg representatives of far greater importance than his own wellbeing.
    Members of the Bilderberg, together with their sister organizations – the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, were charged with the post–war take over of the democratic process. The measures implemented by the groups provided general control of the world economy through indirect political means. Originally conceived by Joseph H. Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, they formed a proposal for a covert conference to involve NATO leaders in general discussion on international affairs. The meeting would allow each participant to speak his mind freely because no media representative would be permitted inside. If any leaks occurred, the journalists responsible would be “discouraged” from reporting it. From the outset the American group was influenced by the Rockefeller family, the owners of Standard Oil – competitors of Bernhard’s Royal Dutch Petroleum. From then on, the Bilderberg business reflected the concerns of the oil industry in its meetings. Around a hundred and fifteen participants attended the meeting, coming from government and politics, industry, finance, education and communications. Participants were invited to the Bilderberg meeting by the Chairman, following his consultations and recommendations by the Steering Committee membership. The individuals were chosen based on their knowledge, standing and experience – just like the members of Majestic Twelve.
    Although MJ–12’s origins could be found much further back in time in the wake of World War Two and the flight of the leaders of the Third Reich from Germany to South America, Mitchell knew that their agenda was reflected in the Bilderberg meetings, especially now that the west’s obsession with oil was being replaced with a keen desire to develop alternative fuels that would render the relevance of the Middle East’s powerful royal families a thing of the past. Mitchell was well aware that a paradigm shift was coming, a drastic alteration of the balance of power around the world, all of it engineered by the heads of state at the annual Bilderberg meetings and influenced directly by the members of Majestic Twelve.
    Until now.
    The work of the Defense Intelligence Agency had begun to unravel the vast network of informers and employees of Majestic Twelve, and in the course of several investigations they had succeeded in blowing wide open some of MJ–12’s most ambitious and secretive programs, agenda so classified that even the President of the United States was completely unaware of their existence.
    In the course of those investigations, Mitchell had seen his own position within MJ–12