Mark of Evil (45 page)

“Hey, Darlene, please let me make this up. I’m not a bad guy. How can I prove myself to you? Make this right?”

She grabbed her car keys and headed to the front door. “How about being a man? Use your brain to figure that out, and whatever guts you still have left, unless you’ve pawned those off too.” Then she was gone.

Dillon dejectedly dumped himself down onto the couch, clicked the web TV on, and perused the channels. He stopped on the AmeriNews network. A man in his late sixties was talking about the Global Alliance takeover of the United States and calling it “a crime against humanity.” Underneath his image the network flashed his name:
Former Senator Alvin Leander
.

As Leander lambasted the Alliance, Dillon Ritzian’s eyes widened and he leaned closer to the TV set.

SIXTY-ONE

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

The message from the plane carrying Ethan March streaked through the CIA and ended up on the desk of the director. The agency chief, William Tatter, had his own opinions about the killing of Hank Hewbright, even if he couldn’t prove it yet. But there was no way he was about to ignore a possible coup within the White House, especially now that the United States was on the verge of being absorbed into the Global Alliance empire.

He called Secretary of Defense Rollie Allenworth and laid out the three points: President Zandibar’s executive order turning America’s top secret national defense computer system at Bluffdale over to the Global Alliance; Ethan March’s plan to sabotage that Alliance takeover; and the rather dated but never rescinded presidential directive that gave the Department of Defense, rather than the White House,
special powers to block any Internet cyber attack that threatened American national security.

“And this Ethan March fellow, he’s ready to enter the Bluffdale area?” Allenworth asked.

“He is. At this very moment. I have some people ready to drop him there, but not without your authorization.”

Allenworth mulled it over out loud. “It looks like we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Our new president has explicitly turned over our entire Bluffdale computer complex to the Alliance. But there’s also a prior executive directive that President Zandibar may not know about yet, but soon will, that gives me the authority, not him, to stop a hostile attack on America’s access to the Internet. And in the middle of all that, we have the murder of a sitting president that raises some very ugly questions. So how do we reconcile all of that?”

After a few moments the secretary of defense answered his own question. “Bill, remember your military history? During the eighteenth century, England would deputize privateers—private ships’ captains who were empowered to attack and plunder enemy ships on the high seas with only two stipulations: the attack had to be consistent with English interests, and the privateers had to split the loot with the English Crown.”

“Sounds intriguing,” William Tatter replied. “Ethan March as a privateer? The difference here is that there’s no loot to split.”

“I beg to differ,” the secretary of defense said. “Some things are more valuable than gold or silver.”

IN THE SKY OVER UTAH

The CIA plane had already turned eastward and was almost out of Utah airspace when a supervisor in clandestine services at Langley
contacted the two agents and gave them the plan. The DOD was authorizing them, as “loaned agents” of DOD, to drop Ethan March as close to the National Data Center facility as possible, but under no circumstances to land at the military airstrip that was part of the National Guard facility located adjacent to the computer complex.

“So what, exactly, do they want us to do?” the copilot said.

“Seems clear to me. They want us to help Ethan March. But we’re supposed to stay invisible while we do it,” the pilot shot back. “In other words, we can get him to the target site, but we can’t land the plane.”

The copilot rolled his eyes as the plane slowly banked and then headed back toward Bluffdale. No one spoke until Ethan broke the silence.

“What’s in this box back here?” he asked, pointing to a large cargo case a few feet from him.

“Parachutes,” the copilot said.

Ethan smiled. “When I was training in the air force, I took a lot of jumps out of planes.”

“You don’t say,” the copilot said. Now he had a grin of his own.

BOUNTIFUL, UTAH

The charter jet carrying John Galligher, Chiro, and the quantum computer landed about thirty minutes outside of Bluffdale at the nearest civilian airport—Salt Lake Skypark Airport in a town called Bountiful. Galligher and Chiro carefully wheeled the C-Note computer down a little chute from the jet to the tarmac. It was big and bulky, but light enough for the two of them to manage.

Ethan had arranged for the Roundtable in Colorado to provide a truck for the mission; it was already on the tarmac waiting for them. Ethan had had his people print the words
Triple T Construction
on the
side—the name of the primary contractor involved in the construction of the National Data Center. That, plus a file containing phony authorization papers lying on the front seat, would hopefully get them at least through the first security gate on the property. It was risky, but what option did they have?

Galligher and Chiro rolled the big black computer up the ramp and into the back of the truck, where they used four-inch straps to cinch it against one of the inside panels. Galligher had also put in a special request of his own to Alvin Leander and his Roundtable partners—he wanted a Croatian RT20 20mm elephant gun loaded into the rental truck. Galligher knew a former FBI buddy of his who had one at his retirement cabin in the Utah mountains. So when Galligher opened the double doors in the back of the truck, he smiled when he saw the big gun case waiting for him.

After the two men transferred a few toolboxes full of gadgets and equipment into the truck and laid a tarp over the gun case, Chiro insisted that he ride next to his computer in the back. Galligher pointed to the tall machine that was bigger than a refrigerator. “Make sure your child stays in his car seat,” he cracked before telling his partner he would see him in about half an hour. He shut the double doors in the back and slid the locking lever into place and then trotted to the driver’s side.

The rendezvous point with Ethan was supposed to be three miles outside of the National Data Center, but two miles past the first guardhouse. Galligher made it to that first security checkpoint in good time. The gated guard booth on Redwood Road was surrounded by a high razor-wire fence stretching into the Utah desert. The National Guard had previously manned that post, as Camp Williams was adjacent to the computer complex, but now they had been replaced by Global Alliance security guards. Galligher handed over the phony paperwork. It contained a persuasive-looking order for him to repair a damaged fiber-optic line.

The two guards whispered something to each other. Then the one with the electronic clipboard said to Galligher in an Eastern Bloc accent, “But you are not on list.”

“Fine,” Galligher said. “When your computer system doesn’t work today, and New Babylon strings you up by your fingernails, don’t complain to me.”

More hushed whispers between the men. Finally the guy with the e-pad said, “When you report to operations department, have them call me. If you don’t do that, there will be big-time trouble.” Then he touched something in the booth and the gate over the road opened wide.

Galligher nodded, but added, “Okay. But it may be awhile. First, we’ve got to run some field tests on the outside connections.”

Galligher geared up the truck and took off down the paved stretch of Redwood Road that meandered through the desert until his odometer read two miles from the guardhouse. He climbed out and opened up the back door and told Chiro to sit tight while he checked things out.

Galligher could see, off in the distance, the mammoth computer complex on the rise of the plateau, with the mountains in the background. He used his high-powered binoculars to get a closer look at the computer headquarters that was several times larger than the Houston Space Center. There were ten huge buildings grouped together, and off to the side about a hundred yards sat two square, windowless structures that he figured might be power substations to run the digital intelligence center.

But he wasn’t much interested in the architecture now. He was concerned about the fact that the place was swarming with security. He could see hundreds of blue, well-armed droid-bots marching around the place. And Global Alliance armored jeeps patrolling with big-caliber guns. And more Alliance guys with automatic weapons at various sectors just inside the inner razor-wire perimeter. But not
a sign of American military presence. President Zandibar had obviously put a massive rush on the transfer of power here at Bluffdale.

Galligher kept searching the area, but Ethan March was nowhere to be found. Galligher was about to blow a gasket. He had his own doubts about Ethan anyway, but now he had traveled across the country and was parked outside the target site right on time, yet the Remnant’s fearless leader was AWOL. He took his binoculars again and scanned the sandy flats around him.

Then he spotted something moving. It was a man crossing the desert toward him, about a mile away, and he was walking fast. Galligher kept peering through his binoculars until he could make out the man. Then he smiled. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “Nicely done.”

Ethan March was walking alone through scrub brush heading toward the truck. The whole thing reminded Galligher of the old John Wayne movie
Hondo
, with the Duke shuffling out of the badlands on foot—his horse having given out—carrying only his saddle. But Ethan wasn’t the Duke, and anyway, that was just a movie. What was happening around him today was real, and so were the bullets in the weapons that studded the framework of those droids and in the clips of the machine guns carried by the Global Alliance security forces down there in the complex.

Ethan was dirty and tired looking by the time he reached the truck. He was wearing a sand-colored jumpsuit that blended with the landscape and the hills. He quickly unzipped it and pulled it off. “Had to parachute down,” he said. “They gave me one of those nifty triangle canopy stealth chutes—super-fast descent and almost invisible to detection.” Galligher gave him a confused look and Ethan added, “It’s a long story. Anyway, I buried my chute in the sand. Any sign of drone-bots flying overhead yet?”

Galligher shook his head no and trotted over to the back of the truck to tell Chiro to climb out and join them. As soon as the three of
them stood next to the truck, Galligher jumped right into it. “What’s the plan?”

Ethan raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

Galligher started to boil. “You’re kidding, right?” When Ethan said that he wasn’t, Galligher mumbled loud enough for everyone to hear, “God, give me patience with this guy.”

But Ethan shrugged it off. “We’re going to have to improvise, John. That’s the fact. Time to put our game faces on.”

Chiro joined in. “Up at our hotel in White Horse, I tried to figure a way to hack into the system from the outside, using an Internet virus, like a bot-net,” he said. “But it’s impervious to initial entry that way. Maybe if I had more time . . . This transfer of American facilities over to the Alliance came way too fast. I owe everyone an apology for my failure—”

Ethan cut him short. “Listen to me, Chiro. You’re a godsend. The Lord is going to use your computer brilliance today, I’m sure of it.”

As Ethan turned to give Chiro a pat on the shoulder, Galligher noticed something. There was dried blood in the inside of Ethan’s ear. Galligher moved around to the other side of Ethan’s head and saw more blood, and some of it caked in his hair. Galligher looked intently at Ethan’s face. The man had dark circles under his eyes and looked like he hadn’t slept for a few days. And something else—his left eye was vibrating like a little NFL figurine on a car dashboard.

Back when Galligher worked in the Bureau, a few of his fellow agents had sustained serious head injuries in the line of duty, and he’d learned to recognize some of the signs. “What did they do to you in that lab anyway?” he asked Ethan.