An Armageddon Duology (29 page)

“
W
ell
, hi there, Fawkes!”

Angel stared at the computer screen and smiled. Once again buried in the basement of the Javits Federal Building late in the night. Again the mask of Guy Fawkes stared back at her, floating on the screen in front of her.

But this time, the gloating was gone.

“You fucking cunt!”

She laughed. “Don’t you swing that way, Fawkes? Or can I call you Guy? I thought you liked cunts. I
know
you liked Poison’s cunt. She says you visited all the time.”

“Fuck you!”

“And your pathetic attempt to grab her was as clumsy as your code, which, by the way, my programs are eating through right now. You notice?”

“You think you’re safe behind the firewalls of your NSA overlords, but you aren’t. I can’t reach you right now, but it’s just a matter of time before I’m back in and burn your fucking house down.”

Angel nodded as she typed. “Not before I hunt down every last one of your worms, you mean. Dissect the motherfuckers. I know you’ve been keeping score out there. See that tide rising?”

“You’re interfering in things you don’t understand!”

“Really?” She shook her head. “You going to mansplain the situation to this poor, clueless little cunt?”

“Damn you! You don’t know what I know. The power isn’t where you think it is. It hasn’t been for hundreds of years! I’ve hacked my way to it.”

She put her chin on her hand. “Fawkes, seriously. Is this where you try to tell me how we can rule the galaxy together if I’ll just embrace the dark side?”

The masked face in the video stream turned to the side. A scream sounded over the monitors.

Angel clicked her tongue. “You have major anger management issues.”

The face was back.

“Every nation, every corporation, every standing army is marching to hidden orders. Events—they’re all part of a big game board! Pieces—disposable pieces—moved by the few that really hold the power. We can’t change it from within. We can’t defeat them on their terms!” The face panted. “But they’ve made themselves dependent on the modern information system—and they can’t control it. For the first time in hundreds of years, they’ve made a fatal mistake!”

Angel stared silently for a moment. “You’re really a mental case, aren’t you?”

The scream again. “No! I can show you. Prove it! Your fucking code—it’s threatening everything! You have to listen to me!”

“Listen to you go full tin-foil-hat on me as you try to destroy the world? This crap’s not even up to the bottom suckers of the worst chat room. If you wanted to make a good first impression, you lost the chance big time when you screwed over my servers, when you brought my dad into this!”

“I will bring your shitty code down!”

She was standing now, palms down on the table. The light of the monitor reflected off her scalp and the metal in her face. “And we still got your girl! She’s singing, singing, singing like a fucking bird. Well, really, it’s a bit more like screaming. Honestly, so far—it’s just screaming. But we know we’ll get enough out of her to come after you in the real world.”

The mask hovered in the center of the monitor without speaking. Angel could hear his labored breathing. She twisted the knife.

“I can send you a live feed the next time we go at her. But do you really want to be there when we break her? Might fuck you up good, yeah? Watching what we do to her? Every little thing? Believe me, I can imagine how that’d make you feel.”

His next words were slurred—hissing. “You’re not the only one who can reach out in the real world.”

She laughed again. “You hit us with everything you had and I’m back. It’s worse for you than before. Really, Fawkes, you were an inspiration to write this code! Thank you for that.”

“I will make you hurt for this.”

“Oh, Guy,” she said dismissively, “I’m not scared of you. And neither is my code. Expect it, fucker.”

Lightfoote hit ENTER and sent a video feed through the connection. She watched a mirrored window on her monitor display the content—a young woman strapped to a table, men beating her, blood on her face and pouring from her nose.
Poison
.

She closed the connection and walled Fawkes out with the NSA module. The monitor went dark. She sat down and leaned back in the chair, disgusted with the lies they were sending him.

“But you made me get dirty, you fuck,” she whispered. “Now, come get her.”

F
or Elaine York
, the “SF” was as comforting as it was alarming.

The acronym-smiths of the bureaucracy had called the Mount Weather retreat the High Point Special Facility, HPSF, but the human beings it was designed for had digested that down to something more manageable.
High
in the Virginia mountains to be sure, it was
special
in ways only a self-contained, doomsday hideout could be. Replete with self-sustaining environmental processes for waste and water, military grade rations lining underground storage silos to feed hundreds for weeks to months of isolation—its soldiers, weaponry, and communications systems were rivaled only by NORAD. Prime vacation estate for the nation’s leaders when the world went to shit.

And the world was definitely going to shit.

The Colonel—
which one was he?
She’d lost track in the chaos—droned importantly about the precariousness of their plight.

“Without the logistics software, Madam President, we risk an entire breakdown of the supply chain. Our recommendations are to secure all of the major air, land, and sea routes immediately for governmental use only.”

President York stared outside the reinforced glass window at the color explosion of the surrounding forest. The morning sunrise crested over the mountains and flooded the compound with light. Waves of flaming red and orange, bright yellow and dim browns blurred in her mind with impressionistic artists’ canvases. Patches within the tapestry, like flaking paint in a poorly maintained van Gogh, revealed the skeletal tree branches buttressing the display and hinted at the coming hardness of winter. York knew that this winter would be one of the hardest in memory.

The bald man behind her continued, his ghostly reflection in the glass distracting her. “It’s not just food and fuel anymore. We’re looking at a prolonged deficit in nearly every category needed to maintain defense functionality.”

She now presided over a nation teetering toward dissolution. The major neural networks controlling the modern world were misfiring, clogged with corrupt code like amyloid plaques, rendering the body of the nation as disoriented and confused as an Alzheimer's patient. Beyond the psychological damage of losing most of the modern computer infrastructure—a loss utterly traumatizing to generations now raised on its presence and dependent on the very idea of a world entirely connected, ubiquitously digitized—the very tangible losses of computer regulated transport, manufacturing, scheduling, communications, and medical care had left increasingly large swaths of the country reeling.

“As per NSA analysis, the projections from the last few days, the attacks are intensifying, likely to reach a climax very soon.”

Remember, remember the fifth of November
.

It was November fourth, and York dreaded the passage of time like the helpless descent of a sleeper into a nightmare. “What about this anti-worm virus they were talking about?” she asked, turning around momentarily to face the officer.

“There’s too much contradictory data, Ma’am. No one knows where it’s coming from, who’s behind it, if it even
is
working against the worm. Some are convinced of it, but others aren’t. It might even be a feint by Anonymous to distract us. It is spreading, though. Pretty rapidly.”

“And the drone attacks?”

“Those have tapered off. The worm is a replicating resource, but the drones are finite. Anonymous is running out of them.”

“They seem to have done enough damage. And what of the reports of a lone mastermind—this
Fawkes
from the FBI data?”

The man shook his head. “Unconfirmed and isolated reports to a single division of FBI. Analysis casts a lot of doubt on the hypothesis.”

“Intel 1, if I’m not mistaken.”

The soldier nodded. “That is correct. But the consensus—”

“They trumped the consensus five years ago. You might remember.” She rubbed her temples. “I wish we had more time to consult with them.”

The lights flickered momentarily, then steadied. York glanced around the ceiling and then back at the Colonel.

“They’re still working out some kinks in the new electrical regulators,” he said.

York shook her head and turned back to the window. “Decades of prep time and what do we do? Repeat the same mistake the world over! The pretty digital magic, all wired up here, the Pentagon, White House! Look at the damn walls! Everything gutted now! 1970s wiring is our salvation! Sophisticated environmental, solar-powered-what-have-you duct-taped to rusted generators. I’m starting to think that when it’s all said and done we’re going to blow it all up and the damned forests out there are going to swallow what’s left of us.”

She tried to focus, but the crushing weight of the crisis and the lack of sleep was breaking down her will.

“It’s not just us,” the Colonel answered. “Every country is struggling with this. Some have it easier: North Korea was so damn paranoid that even the worm is slowed there. And the third world doesn’t have enough of a modern architecture that they’re relatively intact from the direct effects. But the indirect effects are equally crippling, Madam President.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, waving him off. “The world is
flat
as the pundits like to say. A sneeze in Beijing or Washington gives a cold to the world. You know what it feels like now? Not like a cold, but like that plague Ebola is eating its way through the arteries of civilization! It’s like the world were a giant hive, and now it’s degenerating into thousands of isolated and panicked islands.” She tried again to focus. “Market report?”

“Securities trading restrictions have effectively brought them to a standstill. The viral bidding is completely out of control. Destabilizing. The evaporating monetary base, huge capital movements into and out of banks by the worm—they’ve frozen lending and shut down more and more banks. Liquidity is gone. Commerce has come to a standstill. The food riots are growing and taking root in some of the most populous regions of the globe. Hell, right here in America.”

“More reports?”

“New York. Chicago. Atlanta.” The Colonel paused. “We’re losing control.”

Remember, remember the fifth of November
.

When York didn’t answer, the Colonel coughed. “It is the consensus of the Joint Chiefs and what remains of the military advisement panel that we should implement Directive 51.”

York glanced sharply over her shoulder to glare at the Colonel. The rest of her body followed and she walked deliberately to her desk. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees, the scarred walls of hanging circuits and controllers feeling like violated strips of her own body.

“So it’s come to that.”

The Colonel spoke quickly. “The situation is critical. Standard Constitutional protocols are hampering our ability to respond to this crisis. It’s urgent that we temporarily suspend the government and act under the emergency directive.”

York nodded. “It’s frightening how well prepared the United States government is to abolish the United States government.”

“You would be overseeing all the branches, Madam President. Nothing is abolished. Power is only concentrated.”

“Yes, with the executive. With
me
, as you note. That is exactly what frightens me.” She sat down behind the desk and sighed. “I know about REX84, Colonel. You remember the Readiness Exercise of 1984? My father served on the Senate panel that authorized and buried it.”

The military man stiffened. “That was an important first step, Ma’am, the first real plan to cover something outside of nuclear war. It was needed! We weren’t ready for every contingency.”

She nodded, her fingertips pressed against each other. “I know. We’d seen it happen to other nations. Well, after REX84, all a president had to do was declare a
State of National Emergency
and bang! The machine would kick into full gear. Martial law. Military control of state and local governments. Detention of citizens who were scored as national security threats.”

“Simulations were run. It’s the best way to contain such crises. Maybe the
only
way.”

“But Directive 51 goes one step further, doesn’t it? Bush and Cheney made sure of that. At least with 84 we had a Constitutional structure, a president answerable, in theory anyway, to Congress and the Judiciary. But here comes 51,
paying respects
to the three branches of government, to separation of powers. But bottom line? The president has unlimited power.” She coughed. “At least I won’t be called
chancellor
. But we don’t kid ourselves, do we, Colonel? Not when survival is on the line.”

Concentration camps. Military rule. Dictatorship.

“Everything’s temporary. Reversible once the crisis is resolved. Meanwhile, we can have some breathing room. We can act without the delays of Congress and the fiscal limitations! The only other option is to invite collapse of this government!”

The man was red-faced. York arched an eyebrow.

“So the analysts predict,” he said, passing his hand over his scalp.

“Here’s a mouthful for you, Colonel:
Ermächtigungsgesetz
. German for Enabling Act. You heard of it?”

“No.” His face appeared strained.

“Passed by the Nazi-controlled parliament in 1933. They called it the ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the State.’ My father also taught about it in law school. It suspended constitutional authority and placed absolute power in the hands of the Chancellor, whom you may have heard of.”

“Ma’am, we aren’t Nazi Germany.”

“Neither was Rome, but it was easier for them, too. In hard times just turn over power to a strong leader. Doesn’t usually end well.” She laughed, closing her eyes. “Here we were the last twenty years, repeating the mistakes of the Weimar and serving as a script for George Lucas and Alan Moore. Do I make a better Susan or Palpatine, do you think?”

“This isn’t fantasy. This is serious. Look what’s happening! There’s a lot of concern about how to maintain order and preserve the nation through this catastrophe, Madam President. There are growing and serious divisions in the military.”

Her head cocked to one side. “Is that a threat, Colonel?”

He paled. “No, Madam President, what I mean is—”

She stood up from her desk, gripping its edge. “What you mean is that order—more to the point,
loyalty
to this office
—
is being lost. Whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, Colonel, what you’re telling me is that the military no longer has confidence in civilian rule. I see the beginnings of a coup.”

“You misunderstand—”

“Out!” she shouted, walking around the desk. “Go back to your handlers and tell them that they had better not underestimate my support. We’re at a precipice, Colonel, both externally and internally. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to bow to any pressure to burn our Constitution. Go back and tell them that I will ignore Directive 51. Tell them that they need to make their choices, and that those choices will define them for the rest of their lives!”

After a final, panicked stare, the man dashed out of the room. York stood in front of the door, trembling, pressing her fingertips to her temples again.

NORAD. The command structure there was solid, loyal. At least she
hoped
it still was
.
The location was even more secure. She would make arrangements to relocate the principle elements of government. But she had to move quickly. They were at a tipping point.
The irony.
She was as vulnerable here in this doomsday locker as anywhere.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
.

The second line of the old song danced rebelliously in her mind.

Gunpowder, treason, and plot!