Demon Mind (Vector Book 2)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Smadi’s bottom lip shook. His eyes looked watery, glistening in the dim light of the chapel. “I never wanted this. Any of this. I swear.”

  “Swearing will do you no good, even in this place,” Arnon said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came here to retrieve the particles I hid,” he said. “I feared someone would find me, and so I kept them out here until I was ready to move again.”

  “The particles,” Alex said, joining them. “The same particles that have already been used on people to incite violence or to render them catatonic?”

  Smadi pinched his eyes closed as if Alex’s words physically pained him. “Yes, I’m so sorry. I never intended for my invention to be used like this. I wanted to help people.”

  “You offered them up as crowd control measures,” Alex countered.

  “They were supposed to be used in place of tear gas and bullets,” Smadi said. “I designed the particles to hydrolytically degrade so they were not permanent and they caused no lasting harm. Then those people perverted them.”

  “You’re lying,” Arnon hissed.

  “I am not,” Smadi said. “That’s why I’m here. And that’s probably why this man tried to capture me. I’m running for my life because I don’t want to be a part of this anymore. I could not work for these people. Not after what they’ve done.”

  “Why didn’t you go to your government for protection?” Alex asked, still unsure if he should believe a word coming out of Smadi’s mouth.

  “I didn’t think it was safe,” he said. “The men who were selling my particles said they had deals with government officials. What if my own government had purchased them? They wouldn’t allow me to escape, to tell others what I had done.”

  He pointed at a slab of stone behind Alex.

  “I have a cache of the particles in there,” he said. “My original design. You can verify my story. I wanted to bring them to a lab in the EU. Any place where people would want to stop them from being used as a weapon. If you want to put an end to this madness, then take them.”

  “We don’t need your samples,” Alex said. “We’ve already got plenty.”

  “You do?” he asked. “How?”

  “That is not your concern,” Arnon said. “Who did you make a deal with?”

  “They never told me who they were,” Smadi said. “And I only know one of their names. He was the one that set up the original purchase.”

  “Give us the name,” Alex demanded.

  “Yaakov Gallin,” Smadi replied.

  Alex looked at Arnon. He saw an emotion in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before.

  Fear.

  Arnon fished her phone out of her pocket and showed an image to Smadi. “Is that him?”

  Smadi nodded, and Arnon turned back toward Alex. “When we recovered you three from the border security, we searched all your belongings. We found falsified passports. There was one with the name Yaakov Gallin.”

  Alex’s stomach sank. He knew what was coming, but he waited for Arnon to say it anyway.

  “That passport belonged to Elad Luria.”

  Beirut, Lebanon

  Elad saw the recognition in Ballard’s eyes. The man knew who he was. Knew things about him that Elad didn’t know himself.

  He thought his life was going to end in that jail cell in Israel. When Rahel Arnon had come at him with the bolt cutters, he had expected the worst. Instead, she had cut his chains and told him he would get another chance at life.

  Now, he wanted to know what had happened during his first chance. Ballard seemed to have some ideas. But they needed to make it out of Martyrs’ Square alive first.

  Ballard pressed his finger over his phone and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Hurry. We’re running out of time.”

  Already, the northern section of the square had erupted into violence. Drones hovered overhead, buzzing around as fireworks traced past them with gray fingers of trailing smoke. The haze filled the space between the buildings. Protesters were nothing more than silhouettes, looking more like monsters than humans as they crashed into each other in brutal conflict. Glass exploded from one of the office buildings, and protesters rushed inside, tearing apart the furnishings.

  Even the people who had been on the sidelines of the protests, sheltering in their businesses or homes, had been affected by the Ring of Solomon. Families attacked each other. Shopkeepers trashed their own stores. It was utter chaos.

  Ballard and Skylar began leading their group from the crowd. No one stopped them now. Anyone who hadn’t yet been infected was running from the scene.

  A series of screams and shrieks burst from behind Elad. He turned to see a pair of people plummeting from a six-story window. They grappled with each other even as they tumbled through the air, finally hitting the pavement with sickening thuds.

  “Hurry!” Skylar said.

  People who had been peacefully protesting minutes ago now tore each other apart like rabid animals. More fell from buildings. Parked vehicles were overturned or set on fire. Flames erupted from the lobby of a hotel. A low explosion thumped from somewhere near the Martyrs’ Monument.

  “Oh my God,” Elad said. He couldn’t help it. The horror of it all.

  How could anyone sell a weapon that turned innocent human beings into rampaging maniacs like this?

  “Stick close to me,” Ballard said. “I know how we can get out of this.”

  Elad didn’t think Friedman or Skylar liked that suggestion. But they were in no position to argue. All they could do was run.

  The madness taking over the crowd was spreading. As more people became possessed by the demons of this terrifying technological weapon, they began running down neighboring streets. Some chased after Elad, Skylar, and Friedman. They threw glass bottles and rocks. A few of those missiles slammed into Elad’s back. He turned, barely dodging one aimed for his head. He thought about returning fire, anything to get them to stop.

  But these were innocents whose minds had been hijacked. It wasn’t their fault. He couldn’t slaughter them for being infected.

  Rocks crashed through the windows of businesses. The people driven mad by the Ring of Solomon picked up the fragments of glass from the sidewalk. They used the crystalline daggers as weapons against the others and even themselves.

  Elad started to feel sick, watching them destroy each other.

  “Look out.” Skylar tugged on the back of Elad’s jacket and dragged him to the sidewalk.

  A truck charged past them, barreling over the road where they’d been a second ago, smoke pouring from under its hood. Cracks spiderwebbed through a windshield stained with blood. The truck drove straight down the street toward the mass of people funneling out from the square. Instead of leaping out of the wayward vehicle’s way, crazed people lunged at it.

  Most went under its tires with the crunch of bone. Others slammed into its hood and bounced off, their limbs twisted and broken.

  Those injuries did not stop them.

  “Keep moving,” Skylar said.

  Elad feared what would happen if they weren’t fast enough. If the particles infected them too. God, had they already been reinfected? Were the lingering particles in their brains enough to make them lose control again?

  If they got caught up in whatever signal set these people off, he would find out. But so far, he didn’t feel the anger, the pain. The wash of red that would turn him into an animal.

  He looked over his shoulder. Another car screeched from down a side street, chased by rioters. It slammed into a restaurant. The driver’s-side door opened, and a woman got out, blood streaming over her face. She stumbled for a moment.

  Elad expected her to collapse, to scramble to safety. Instead, she picked up a brick from the broken restaurant façade and threw it into her own car’s windshield. She heaved another brick at a pair of people rushing down the street and let out a howl. The three of them collided in a storm of animalistic shrieks.

  “Command, are you getting this?” Skylar asked,
holding her phone out as she ran. She pointed its camera back at the chaos they were escaping from. “Command, do you read?”

  “I’m not getting anything either,” Friedman said, staring at his own phone. “Comms aren’t working.”

  “Are they jamming all cells and radios?” Elad asked.

  “Maybe,” Ballard said. “We need to get as far from here as we can.” He looked hard at Elad. “I have so many questions for you, my old friend. And I’m afraid I’m going to need your help.”

  -28-

  Naxos, Greece

  Alex peered out one of the small chapel’s slitted windows. He saw a car driving up the curving road outside, crunching over the gravel. A curious passerby or a local coming to pray would eventually find them. The longer they stayed in the chapel, especially with the dead assassin, the more dangerous it would become.

  But the revelation that Elad Luria had brokered the original deal to buy the Ring of Solomon technology from Smadi meant they needed to have a very long talk with the professor.

  “You are very, very sure this is him?” Arnon said, shaking her phone in Smadi’s face.

  “Yes, I am certain,” Smadi said. “Honestly, I am not trying to deceive you.”

  “I thought Elad was on our side,” Alex said.

  “So did I.” Arnon narrowed her eyes. She stowed her gun back in her holster, but she still had her fingers clenched on Smadi’s collar. “That is why I sent David with him. He may still be useful in luring Ballard in.”

  “But if this has all been a trick, he and Skylar are in danger,” Alex said. “We’ve got to warn them.”

  He put his own gun away before attempting a call to Skylar through his comms.

  “Vector Two, do you read?”

  There was no response. Maybe she had gone radio silent because she was closing in on Ballard. But normally, she would warn Command before she went dark.

  “Command, have you heard from Vector Two?” Alex asked.

  Kasim replied immediately. “That’s a negative, Vector One. We’ve lost all comms in Beirut.”

  The cold grasp of dread squeezed Alex’s insides. Arnon tried her own team. She was met with the same wall of silence.

  “Can you give me a sitrep on Beirut?” Alex asked Kasim.

  “We’re not sure yet,” he said. “The protests have gotten extraordinarily violent. All peacekeeping forces have been withdrawn.”

  “It’s already happening,” Arnon said. “We need to get out of here.”

  “What about me?” Smadi asked.

  “You are coming with us,” she told him. Then she spoke into her comms. “Target is under our control. We need an immediate exfil.”

  She listened for a moment.

  “They’re arranging a private yacht for us.” She motioned toward the dead man by the altar. “It’s going to be too dangerous for us to take the ferry again. There are probably more people out there looking for Smadi.”

  “When will the yacht be ready?” Alex asked.

  “They have to vet their contacts,” she said. “We’ll be out of here in two hours at most.”

  “Not going to be safe to stay in here for two hours,” Alex said.

  “I have to go back to my hotel room,” Smadi said.

  “That’s out of the question,” Alex said. “You heard her. There might be others out there watching for you. We don’t need them finishing what this guy couldn’t.”

  “You don’t understand,” Smadi said. “My computer is in there. All the files on the particles. All the—”

  There was a sudden crack that echoed throughout the chapel.

  Everything seemed to go in slow motion.

  Glass exploded inward from one of the windows. Smadi’s head flicked back, his body going limp. Arnon dove for the floor. Alex ducked behind the lectern. The ringing shot rang throughout the small chapel.

  Alex crawled on his belly toward Smadi. He prayed the guy had been hit in the shoulder. Maybe his arm. He was their link to the conspiracy, to figuring out how Elad was involved.

  But when he got to Smadi, he saw the devastation. A direct hit had erased the professor’s forehead.

  The dead gunman had been working with someone after all. He had probably called for backup when he’d first been cornered. Or someone had been waiting for him, and when he hadn’t left the chapel, they moved in.

  Whatever the case, there was at least one sniper with a perfect vantage point on the windows on the eastside of the chapel. The same side where the door into the chapel was.

  Arnon studied Smadi’s body. “I guess all our fighting about what was going to happen to him doesn’t matter now, does it? We lost our only lead.”

  “No,” Alex said. “We still have one. Elad is alive. We have to get out of here, if only to warn Skylar and Friedman.”

  Beirut, Lebanon

  Skylar tried to drown out the distant booms and agonized screams. She had been in the middle of battlefields. She’d flown over conflict zones and been mired in the fog of war plenty of times.

  Somehow, this felt worse.

  Civilians had been weaponized and turned against each other for some political purpose. She could only imagine the terrible videos that would invade the news later. People would blame the protesters. It would drive a narrative that she feared would allow groups like Hezbollah to decry democracy and citizens’ rights. It would devastate these people’s fight for preserving their freedom.

  This Ring of Solomon weapon was more despicable, more evil than she had originally imagined.

  “My comms still aren’t working,” Friedman said.

  “Same,” Skylar said between breaths.

  “We’re far enough from Martyrs’ Square that it shouldn’t be an issue, right?” Elad asked.

  “Unless they shut down the whole city’s communications,” Ballard suggested.

  Skylar ran through her options for an exfil without comms. They weren’t great. For a brief moment, she wished that Alex had been sent here instead. The man had a knack for finding creative solutions to problems.

  Now that they finally had Ballard, the linchpin to the mystery that had started this dark pursuit, she was going to get her answers at last. Too bad there wasn’t a damn person she could tell.

  “Where are we going?” Friedman asked Ballard.

  “I have another safe house in Hamra,” he said.

  From their premission briefing, Skylar knew the area was a popular neighborhood with a lively dining and clubbing scene. It was filled with people from all over the world, a mixture representing a wide swath of religions and political beliefs. The artistic and intellectual vibe around the area attracted flocks of tourists. A perfect place to blend in. It was also far enough removed from the events unfolding in Martyrs’ Square that it should be much safer.

  “Stick close to me,” Ballard warned again.

  “You’re going to tell us where the hell you’ve been for the past few weeks, right?” Skylar asked him.

  “I’ll tell you now,” Ballard said.

  They took another corner and passed a lush park filled with greenery. Most of the people around the park seemed to be glued to their phones. They were probably just as lost as her, cut off from their cell networks. Unable to make sense of the terrible sounds coming from Martyrs’ Square. How addicted were these kids to modern technology that they’d keep staring at a phone with no service?

  “I had to dive deep undercover,” Ballard said. “You know what I was doing in Jordan, I take it?”

  “Monitoring chemical and biological weapons transfers across the border between terrorist groups,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “I found out about that weapon you saw just now.”

  “The Ring of Solomon,” Friedman clarified.

  Ballard held up a hand to slow them down. They didn’t need to attract any more attention by fleeing through the neighborhood.

  “Yes, that’s what they’re calling it,” he said. “My contacts said there was going to be a test here
today. A demonstration of its power.”

  “I guess the test was successful,” Friedman said wryly.

  “It would seem so,” Ballard agreed.

  He motioned down another street past a corner coffee shop. People there working on laptops had frozen, transfixed by their screens. A few employees huddled around a table. They appeared to be crying and comforting each other. Looked like the cafe, at least, had an internet connection.

  Skylar knew this was a day that no one in the city would easily forget. How many more scenes like this would play out if the Ring of Solomon continued to spread?

  “Do you… do you know what happened to me?” Elad asked Ballard.

  “You truly don’t remember?” Ballard asked.

  Elad shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “We were working together in Jordan,” he said in a hushed voice. “And then… you’re sure you don’t remember at all?”

  “I was infected with the Ring of Solomon,” he said. “My memories were destroyed.”

  “That’s very unfortunate,” Ballard said. “Tell me, what do you last remember?”

  “What does that matter now?” Elad asked.

  “It’s just—here, this way,” Ballard punched in a key code to an apartment building door.

  The door unlocked, and he led them up the five-story apartment building to a two-bedroom flat on the top floor.

  “I never thought I would see you again, Elad,” Ballard said, locking the door behind them. He motioned for them to settle in around the plush white couches in the living area as he headed toward the kitchen.

  Sitting down was the last thing Skylar wanted to do. Adrenaline still filled her vessels, and the smell of sulfur from the fireworks clung to their sweat-soaked clothes. No way was she going to hang out here and pretend like they were just four friends casually chatting in a trendy Beirut apartment.

  “Enough of this bull,” she said to Ballard. “You’ve got to tell us everything. What groups you were tracking. Who bought this Ring of Solomon. Who told you to be here today. Why you went dark instead of telling the Agency what was going on.”