Bond 23 - Detailed Plot Development

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  • Posts: 1,894
    Actually, I was thinking the title could be something along the lines of "divine intervention". Maybe DIVINE INTERFERENCE or PROFANE INTERVENTION, since they pretty much mean the opposite of "divine intervention".
  • Posts: 1,894
    Okay, here's what I've got so far:

    In one week, MI5 is about to carry out a series of raids across the country in their biggest operation to date. However, an MI5 agent is found dead in his apartment preserved in a bath tub full of formaldehyde (inspired by the Gareth Williams case). M immediately pulls Bond from his current assignment and has him investigate.

    MI5's case is being run with support from MI6. They are trying to track down an arms dealer who has been flooding Northern Ireland with weapons. MI5 believe the Provisional IRA are on the move. The dead agent was a part of the investigation, responsible for processing human intelligence - HUMINT - at GCHQ whilst seconded to MI5. Bond discovers that each of the assets involved in the HUMINT intelligence-gathering phase are all dead. The arms dealer killed the agent for the name and has then gone after those sources. He is covering his tracks.

    However, it is not the IRA that Bond needs to worry about. One of the arms dealer's clients is a former mafia boss that the world largely forgot about once his empire went into decline. He and his immediate "family" are the core of a secular group of fanatics. They have merged with the remains of the infamous Aum Shinrikyo cult - the people responsible for the Tokyo subway attacks - and have formed their own little doomsday cult. And rather than sit around and wait for the prophecised apocalypse, they intend to bring it about.

    The difference here is that the cult leader does not see himself as one of a handful of people who will sit at God's right hand when Judgement Day comes. Rather, he is disturbed by the way all these prophecies always invariably end with the "truly faithful" being saved and everybody else facing eternal damnation. A religious man himself, the cult leader was raised on the idea that God is merciful and forgiving. However, his experiences have made him question this belief; what he has seen make him think that the fundamentalists might be right. Taking inspiration from Lucifer's infamous quote in Paradise Lost that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, the cult leader intends to bring about the "apocalypse", which involves killing every last religious zealot he can find. If they want to be saved, he will give them salvation. Under their logic, everybody else on earth will face damnation. However, the cult leader believes that this simply means God will ignore them (in keeping with the idea of a merciful and loving God; his idea of damnation is for God to reject humanity). Earth will become hell - after a fashion - but people will be free to live their own lives as they see fit, rather than as slaves to religion (we're getting close to the philosophy Plato put forward; basically, he said there are two kinds of souls: the soul ruled by emotion "passionate", and the soul ruled by reason "logical" - most religions encourage their followers to embrace the latter).

    The cult leader's plan still calls for the slaughter of millions, though. This will be done in one of two ways (I haven't decided which one just yet), but both revolve around the arms dealer (who killed the original agent and the HUMINT sources because he was afraid he had been discovered). The first of these revolves around starting a race war similar to Charles Manson's "Helter Skelter" scenario. The arming of the IRA factions in Ireland may be seen a a prologue to the larger plan, a test to see if it would work. The second way this slaughter could play out would revolve around the cult leader buying the access codes to a defunct Soviet satellite system, which he intends to use to brainwash people en masse, possibly inciting them to the aforementioned race war.
  • edited October 2011 Posts: 1,894
    Okay, pardon the triple-post, but I've just had a great idea. And yes, this came up in the A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD thread, but given the crew attached to the project (John Moore and Skip Woods), that is a trainwreck waiting to happen.

    The idea is this: an uprising in a Russian prison.

    MI6 have been monitoring a Russian spy ring - similar to Anna Chapman and the Illegal Program - and Bond is tasked with escorting the spies to a prisoner exchange with the Russians. However, the uprising takes place; the prisoners, who have no love for the government (a big part of Russian prison culture), have decided to embarrass Moscow by staging the revolt. They manage to fire a missile (somehow; I haven't decided yet) at a satellite over Russia. This triggers an ablation cascade - the satellite breaks up, with pieces of debris taking out other satellites, which break up and start taking out more satellites. The net effect is that nobody has any idea about what is happening over central Russia. All of this threatens the prisoner exchange.

    And that's as much as I've got so far.

    PS - other people can use this as a sounding board for their own ideas; it's not my personal playground.
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