An Armageddon Duology (24 page)

H
e spoke
to them on five different encrypted video conferencing calls. They were hired guns and bombers, assassins trained under diverse conditions spanning the military to organized crime. He’d baited them through the underground online marketplaces with money few could refuse. He’d filtered through information searches, background checks, and video chat interviews. He’d tested each of them with small-scale operations, sifting the wheat from the chaff, identifying the unreliable, the unstable, the less competent, and those who reported back to others and revealed themselves as informants. Sometimes he was forced to erase those who could pose a threat.

The few who survived the process were moved like chess pieces, directed remotely so that groups were formed, hierarchies established, rules set and punished harshly when broken. And always there was money. Hard to comprehend amounts of money, accounts protected from the worm scattered across the world. Houses and lands were purchased. Protected lives and identities created and promised. All for the taking should a final set of missions be accomplished. And all to be snatched away once the missions completed. He was fighting against the plutocracy and he was sure as hell not going to create another one.

Fawkes adjusted the mask over his face. A mask of a smiling, goateed madman from another age, always in place, his identity revealed only to those bodyguards who worked directly with him. He prepared a final address. Now he would move the strikes forward quickly in time. Now he would give a last set of instructions for the beginning stages of the end. Dangerous people at the FBI and other agencies had forced his hand sooner than he would have liked. He preferred careful probing of systems and weakness, test shots and stress tests that allowed him to screen his people as much as the target systems. He liked to thoroughly debug the code.

But the time for precise experimentation was gone. The time for drastic action had revealed itself. He could not afford another near disaster like that on the boat. How had they found him so quickly? Attacked him so easily? He had taken every precaution! Every trace erased from the digital world. But he was clearly not careful enough. Which meant he had to hurry. There was no telling from what direction they were coming, what flaws in the program were still lurking, waiting to collapse like poorly designed walls under siege.

Chaos was his ally. The more dysfunctional the world became around them, the less the governmental apparatus could use its considerable firepower to find and kill him. The attacks would begin there with the heads of the hydra in Washington. They thought they
had
been attacked! But they had seen only the weak pieces, a feint to test the strength of their defenses. And those defenses had been found lacking.

But the hydra’s handlers were not in Washington, but Europe and Asia. And so he would begin the dismantling of the European society and destabilization of China and the lesser economies. There could be war. These disturbances might be enough.

Otherwise, he would bring the final direct attack. He would darken America and plunge the nation into complete anarchy. Moments before the lights went off in the centers of power in the United States, the signal would be given for the worm to complete its final function. The digital mind of the planet, on which all the modern societies rested, that calculated trade and commerce, that built buildings and cars, that became nearly a higher order organism of parsing ideas and thoughts in a fiber-optic neural network, a brain beyond anything the solar system had likely ever seen—it would die. Erased. Unmade in a cascade of deletion that would render them beyond salvage. Once the signal was given, the mad mind of Earth would die.

Only then might there be a chance for something more worthy, more pure to rise from the ashes. Fawkes didn’t care if it was Humans 2.0 or the dolphin beta release. It had to be something new. Utterly new. The corrupt, cancerous, and insane thing called modern culture, what the deluded called modern civilization, had to be sterilized. Every cell wiped to prevent reinfection.

The worm would do that. The final cargo to be uploaded was designed and long perfected. It would exploit the enormous security and logical holes in the neuronal system of the world mind and scramble it, then like an acid eat away at the fibers and proteins until even the very DNA was digested.

Fawkes smiled behind the mask as he spoke to his blind tools. The FBI group had nearly ended it, but had only accelerated the date of doom.

He would start with them. He would pay that bitch in the bowels of Manhattan a short visit. Then he would show her who really ran things in cyberspace.

“Knock, knock, Angel.”

T
he names unfurled
across the screen like entries in some doomsday book.

It was the new month, November first at three in the morning, and Angel had spent it deep in the basement of the FBI building. She rubbed her eyes. The holes across her left ear were swollen and red from the piercings that had been squashed as she slept during the last worm decryption job. Running one hand over the orange stubble of hair on her scalp, she clicked with the other to silence the alert tone from the computer that had called her out of some murky dream—only to stare at another nightmare.

She read through it again. The list was a who’s who of the power brokers in Congress and business.

“Oh, look—there’s the president herself!”

Of course.
If you’re going to bring down the US in one blitzkrieg, you ought to have her on the list. That made sense.

But did any of it really make sense? Angel knew her brain was close to oatmeal at this point, but were these really hit lists? What madman would try to off that many high-profile people? What lunatic could ever think something like that was even possible? And to what end?

Chaos
. She shook her head. It all seemed to point in that direction. The banking meltdown. The attacks. This list of powerful names. Fawkes had made no demands. He hadn’t tried to leverage the threats into anything. He seemed to be running by a playbook no one had ever seen before. No one could anticipate his moves.

Until now. Her virus was functioning, reporting on the worm’s activities. And her little digital operating room had revealed more and more of the inner workings of the worm. Like any code, it was a series of instructions, fragile logic and loops calling out to be hacked. All she needed was time. But there was precious little of that left.

Angel sat upright and gulped down a wash of cold coffee. She’d bring this directly to Savas in the morning. Those names had serious protection, especially after events of the last two weeks. But was it enough? Could the secret service, the military, private contractors, could any of them anticipate what attacks might come from a man that was as diabolical as he was creative? Could anyone?

Her screen went dark.

“What the hell?”

She clicked on keys and the mouse, but there was no response.
Wonderful
. It was a very bad time for a device failure. She began to reach around for the power switch to forcibly reboot the machine when a line of green text ran across her screen.

“HELLO, ANGEL.”

It was like some old mainframe terminal, letters appearing left to right revealing words, then phrases. Carriage returns advancing text. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach. Someone else had hijacked her computer, and she had no doubts about who that was.

The GUI was gone, but she found that she could type.

“HI, FAWKES.”

She jumped up and disconnected the VMS machine from the internal network. She hoped to God he didn’t have any inkling of what she was doing with it.

More text appeared.

“LIKE THE MATRIX, RIGHT? IT’S BEEN INTERESTING WATCHING YOU WORK. BUT I’VE GOT THINGS TO DO AND YOU’RE CRAMPING MY STYLE.”

A green light appeared on the upper lip of the screen indicating that the camera was on. She ignored it and the video image that appeared on the screen. She raced toward the bank of computers along the wall.

A mocking voice came over the speakers.

“No use, Angel, baby. I’ve turned all the drives to goo already. You don’t think I’d give you the chance to shut them down first, do you?”

She reached the first machines and scanned for the main power connector.

“Thorough, aren’t you? Look at your pretty little ass wiggle! Here, I’ll just put a stop to all this unnecessary work so we can chat a little bit.”

The cluster of computers switched off. Machine-gun like clicks of the system shutting down, the lowering pitch of hundreds of disk drives spinning to a stop—it was like some sonic rush of wind through the room.

“There. That’s better.”

She turned to face the only active monitor left. A masked figure stared back at her, smile frozen in place. She walked up to the terminal and sat down.

“Practical. I like that,” came the distorted voice. “Butch, too. You swing both ways?”

“I’ll be swinging at you.”

He laughed, the sound crackling as the distorted audio maxed out the dynamic range of the electronics.

“Feisty! I should’a known that, though. I knew right off that those bugs crawling up my ass weren’t NSA. Not close to their style. Crude, self-taught. More clever. You weren’t raised in some dot gov hacking camp.”

Angel resisted the urge to look at the VMS machine. Everything might depend on whether he had discovered it. It loomed like a presence behind her, some spirit that waited for her attention that she had to ignore. Until this asshole had his gloat and finished the wipe.

“It’s not over, Fawkes.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Angel Lightfoote, special agent Intel 1. Angel Lightfoote of the scrubbed records.”

She bit her lip and tried to keep her composure.

“What? You thought I wouldn’t do my homework? You got
history
, girl! Most of it wiped. Somebody wanted you cleaned up and made presentable. Would that be this Savas guy? No? Probably the other one, Kanter, the one blown up a while back?”

“Fuck you,” she hissed.

“Oh, emotions, Angel. Not a girl’s best friend in this game. Don’t get attached. Don’t feel bad for Blown-Up Man. Slows you down. Blinds you.”

“Makes you human. He was a hundred times the man you are.”

“A man who was into other men, huh? Hundreds of times, I bet.”

She flipped him off.

“Well, good old
Larry
must have gone the extra mile. I was scraping the digital basements.
Nothing
. But then I found all that stuff on dear old
dad
.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she ground her teeth.

“That all had to suck, yeah? Tell me, were you really there, in that cage when he bit it? Yeah? I thought so. Fucked you up good, didn’t it? Did dear old dad have to watch what they did to you? Every little thing? I can imagine the next few years. No wonder they had to bleach your record! Is that what they did upstairs in that shiny little head of yours, too?”

The sly face on the mask, the smirk of Guy Fawkes, the tormenting knowledge this sociopath had about her life, it was too much. Angel reached down and picked up a metallic wastebasket from the ground.

“Angel, darling, let’s not fight.”

“It’s not over, you bastard. I promise you.
Never
make it personal? Well, you just sure as hell did! And I’m coming for you!”

She swung the basket at the monitor. Again and again she pummeled the screen, plastic cracking, pixels shattering. The monitor fell to the ground, a black circle from the impact in the middle of the masked face, blocking it out. Still she smashed it. Over and over on the ground, a fissure opening in the screen, the dark circle expanding like some black hole to swallow the entire image.

All the while, laughter.

Fawkes’ wild laughter spilled like acid from the speakers into her ears. Finally, she turned to the power cord and grabbed it with both hands, yanking it from the socket, releasing a tormented scream.

The sound ceased. What little was still glowing on the screen went black. The room was plunged into near darkness, the glow of the EXIT sign over the side door painting the room dimly in an infernal red.

She wiped sweat and tears from her face and stumbled over to the VMS machine. Her right hand was bloodied. She crouched and touched the surface of the old computer with her left, resting her head against the cold metal.

Her head nodded rhythmically as she began to rock back and forth on the ground. She repeated words over and over, her voice much higher, nearly that of a child’s.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She wept.

T
he marine contingency
posted around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had swelled beyond anything Elaine York had ever experienced. A former army field officer, one of the few women to be deployed into live hostilities in the first Iraq War, she didn’t shrink from conflict, armed or not. But to see the White House nearly obscured by flak jackets and fatigues was to enter into the kind of nightmare reserved for over-the-top Hollywood blockbusters. That it could become real had never truly entered into her imagination.

President York stepped away from the window and turned back to her desk. Her last images of a figure sprinting down the circular roadway in front of the main doors—George Tooze, her Secretary of Homeland Security. She sat down and tried to compose herself. Her head throbbed from two straight days without sleep. Her mind still reeled from continuous updates, each more alarming than the last, from every corner of the globe. And now Tooze racing over like a high school sprinter, his sixty-five-year old body likely straining under the duress. This was not going to be good.

And yet, what had been? The latest report from the NSA couldn’t have been worse. The damned worm had begun to disrupt vital elements of the world’s infrastructure. Haphazardly, to be sure, but her advisors, and her own gut, spoke to the possibility that what they had seen so far had only been feints.
Tests
to optimize the monster running through the cortex of the modern world and yet which had, even on their own, produced planetary chaos.

Food and oil supply chains were disrupted from agribusiness farms to the international shipping systems on which a hungry world depended. Sea and air systems were scrambled, systems that transported the world’s goods, including the ever-critical supply of oil. Hospitals were running out of supplies. Telecoms were unreliable. The world was losing its collective mind.

She half-expected red lights to be flashing around her and sirens wailing. The National Terrorism Advisory System threat assessment was at "IMMINENT." All branches of the military were at DEFCON 2 or higher, the birds in international airspace with different flags buzzing around each other nearly an invitation to a catastrophic mistake. The Force Protection Condition was DELTA nearly everywhere. INFOCON was at 1 and might as well have just put up a white flag and shut down.

And here was Tooze.

The flushed face of her trusted adviser burst into the Oval Office. He held an envelope in one hand that he brandished before him like a radioactive substance.

“A number,” he gasped, resting a hand on the other side of her desk. He held up the letter again. “Limited lifespan. It’s from Bilderberg.”

Time seemed to stop and she felt her mind disengage. She remembered the first time that she had experienced death. Her mother had been braiding her hair one morning, and by afternoon she had been a seven-year-old raised by a single-parent father. The moment had been just as immediate as the rush of Tooze into the room. One minute, she could hear the sounds of her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen while she played in the living room. The next, a crash and house-jolting thud. She had run in to find her mother unconscious on the floor. She would never wake. A brain aneurysm, or a big balloon that popped in her head as one of the doctors had tried to explain it to her. She had feared balloons ever since. It could happen so fast. Pressure. Weakness. Then—pop.

She rose, turned away from Tooze, and walked back to the window to stare at the troops outside. So much firepower. Such an apparatus in the nation’s military. And, in the face of the forces that truly controlled the world, so powerless.

Had it come to this? This new land and new dream of not even three centuries, of miracle cures, trips to the moon, supercomputers in your pocket—had its time come so soon? All because of this terrorist and his devil worm?

Pop.

“Ms. President? Elaine?”

She turned back to Tooze and felt the room sway, barely keeping her balance. “Thank you, George,” she said, pulling the paper from his hand and trying to remove a tear discreetly. “I will need to be alone for this call.”

He nodded, his face telling her all she needed to know, that he too understood the significance of what she was about to do.

“I’ll be outside,” he said. “Don’t lose hope.”

He turned and walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Sighing, she approached the grand desk and pressed her thumb against a fingerprint-reader on a drawer, then entered a code into a keypad next to it. There was a clear click, and she pulled the drawer open. Inside was what looked to be a bulked up cellular phone from decades past. She knew it to be a special device, engineered to work through a covert collection of satellites, encrypting transmissions through means not even the worm could break. At least some things were beyond its reach. In the realm of monsters, the worm was just another fiend.

Bilderberg
. So it had finally come to this. Like ghosts, powers that many felt but never saw, sometimes they became incarnate. Like the beginning of her presidency, they had come and impressed upon her their reality. Sometimes the phantoms moved objects around a haunted home. Or a nation. Sometimes they killed.

She read the number off the paper in the envelope and keyed it in. A series of strange sounds of static and digital processing harshly burbled from the speaker. Then a loud click.

She exhaled slowly.

“This is Elaine York calling from the White House.”