by Jack Mars
Maria hesitated, but nodded. “All right. But make it quick. We’ll meet you at the elevators.” The two of them headed down the hall as Zero pulled out his cell phone—as well as the small white card that Strickland had given him.
With his finger on the call button, he changed his mind and instead opened the video calling app, holding the phone in front of him at an angle so his face was in view of the camera.
The line rang only once before Maya answered. Her face was etched with concern, and he could see behind her that she was standing in the kitchen. “Dad?”
“Maya. Something’s come up.”
“I know,” she said somberly. “I’ve been watching the news since you left.”
“It’s already on the news?”
“There’s a video,” she told him. “From someone who was there.”
Zero winced. If the video had already leaked, there would be no way to stifle it. By now it was likely on social media, which meant that within minutes it would be viral, if it wasn’t already, shared and re-shared on millions of screens.
But if he was judging Maya’s expression correctly, she had thought it just as frightening as he had. And if that was the case, she would understand what he had to do.
“Dad, what the hell was that?” she asked.
“I can’t say,” he told her, being purposely vague. “But we need to find the people behind it. Which means I need you to do something for me… and for your sister.”
“Of course,” she agreed immediately. “Whatever you need.”
“Thank you. But first… can you put Sara on?”
“One sec.” The screen blurred with movement as Maya passed the phone off, and a moment later Sara looked back at him on the tiny screen, her gaze flat and her voice low. “You’re not coming home, are you?”
“Sara. You know there’s no place I’d rather be than home with you…”
“Dad,” she interrupted, “you don’t have to talk to me like I’m a kid.”
“Please,” he implored, “let me finish. I need to say this, and I don’t have a lot of time.” He took a breath and gathered his thoughts. “There’s no place I’d rather be than home with you—and there’s no place I’d rather you be than home with me. But you’re right; you’re not a kid anymore. I can’t treat you like you are. We both know that you need more than what I can offer you.”
Sara picked up right away on what he was suggesting. “I don’t want to go to one of those places. They’re not for people like me.”
They’re precisely for people like you, he thought, but he didn’t want to say that and risk turning it into an argument. “This one is,” he said instead. “It’s a nice place, in Virginia Beach. Strickland recommended it. He spent some time there himself. You trust him, don’t you?”
Sara remained silent. He knew she did, but admitting it meant that she was budging on her position. “I want to stay with you,” she said at last. “I’m doing better. I don’t need rehab.”
“You do need it,” Zero countered, keeping his voice gentle. “You just don’t want it, because…” A thin, sad smile spread on his lips. “Because you’re more like me than you want to admit. You think like me. You’ve done great these past four weeks, but you’ve always kept an escape route in your head. I’ve seen it in your eyes. Plotting how to get a fix. Where you might go. How far you could get.”
Sara didn’t deny it, but she didn’t look directly at him, either.
“But that’s not you,” he continued. “That’s the addiction. These people can help. Since you’re emancipated, I can’t force you to go. It has to be your choice… but I’d like you to try it.”
He fell silent, waiting for her response. The faraway look in her eye wasn’t defiance, or anger—it was fear. She was afraid of going to a place like that. Maybe, he thought, she was afraid of being forced to acknowledge some ugly truths about herself.
“Okay,” she said finally in a murmur. “Okay, Dad. I’ll go. I’ll try.”
He did his best to hold back the sigh of relief and smiled appreciably instead. “Good. Thank you. This will be good for you, I promise. I’ll come visit you as soon as I’m able.”
She nodded, and he could have sworn he saw the hint of tears in her eyes. But none fell; she wouldn’t let them.
“Where’s your sister?” he asked.
Maya appeared over Sara’s shoulder, evidently having heard the exchange. “I’m here.”
“Will you take her?” he asked. “Enjoy today together. Go tomorrow. Take my car.”
Maya nodded. “Of course.”
“Thank you. The place is called Seaside House. Todd called ahead; there’s a spot for her whenever she arrives.” He glanced over his shoulder at the empty corridor. Maria and Strickland were waiting for him. “I have to go now. I love you both.”
“Love you too,” Sara said quietly.
“Be safe,” Maya told him.
He ended the call. For a moment he just stood there, wondering if he’d made the right call. Hoping that Sara didn’t find a reason to hate him all over again. Painfully aware that it was impossible for the same person to hold the titles of world’s best father and world’s best covert operative at the same time.
Then he gathered all those thoughts, shoved them aside, and strode toward the elevators to meet up with the other two—and to find out just what the hell this OMNI thing was.
CHAPTER NINE
Zero was quiet on the elevator ride down to the sublevel that contained the CIA’s top-secret research and development department. Neither Maria nor Todd asked about the nature of the call he’d made or its outcome, though he was certain they both wanted to; at one time or another they’d both been close with the girls.
But he was glad they didn’t ask. He didn’t really want to talk about it, let alone start doubting his decisions again.
The elevator chimed and the doors opened onto a subterranean corridor with cinderblock walls painted gray, windowless and lit with fluorescent lights. Maria’s heels clacked against the cold floor, the sound reverberating off the walls, until she came to an unmarked steel door that resembled a vault. She swiped a keycard in the narrow slot near the handle. The electronic lock buzzed loudly as several bolts slid aside, and she pushed the door inward.
No matter how many times Zero had come to the lab, as they called the R&D sublevel’s main floor, it was still astonishing to step into. The walls and floor were glaring white, always appearing as if they’d just been polished. Powerful halogen bulbs burned bright as daylight overhead, even though they were deep underground. Tall stainless steel shelves and lengthy workbenches were arranged symmetrically in the shape of a huge H running almost the entire length of the warehouse-size main chamber.
When Zero’s memories had returned, he was able to remember just how many times he’d been down there before, to prepare for every op, to gear up for every raid. The familiar scent, a blend of motor oil and a vague antiseptic smell, was downright nostalgic to him.
Maria led the way across the lab’s floor toward an indistinguishable hissing sound. As they rounded a corner they found a man in a gray shield mask and thick gloves, bent over the guts of some device that Zero could not begin to guess the nature of. The source of the hiss was the arc welder in his hand, blue sparks cascading from the metal.
“Bixby,” Maria called, not wanting to get too close. “Bixby!”
The looked up sharply, apparently startled by their sudden appearance. He quickly turned off the arc welder and lifted the shield of his heavy-duty mask, grinning sheepishly behind it.
“Sorry,” said Bixby. “I was just tinkering while I waited.”
Bixby was in his early sixties, but no one would have guessed it by his youthful smile and bright eyes. When he wasn’t wearing a welding mask, his gray hair was always parted and combed neatly over his black horn-rimmed glasses. It was strange seeing him in the thick leather gloves and mask, while wearing a blue shirt and red tie under a gray vest. The small black smudge of
grease on his left cheek only served to complete his dichotomous look.
“Just tinkering, huh?” said Strickland. He glanced around, noticing that no one else was present in the lab—there were usually at least a couple of other engineers or interns about—before asking, “Bixby… you don’t live here, do you?”
“Of course not,” he chuckled. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, because today is Thanksgiving,” Strickland said plainly.
“Oh.” The CIA’s top engineer frowned. “That explains why my brother keeps trying to call me…”
“Bixby,” Maria said firmly. “You’ve seen the report?”
He nodded gravely. “I have. Terrible shame, that. Definitely indicative of an ultrasonic attack, just like in Cuba. Very potent; I daresay more powerful than anything our military is using currently.”
“We need OMNI,” Maria told him.
Bixby’s gaze flitted from her to Strickland to Zero and back to her. “Are you… sure?”
She nodded curtly. “The president said ‘every resource.’ I know you don’t like it. I don’t like it either. But we need it.”
“Okay. Right this way, Agents.” Bixby tugged off the thick leather gloves and, with a wave of his hand, gestured them to follow as he headed toward an antechamber of the lab.
Zero understood now why Rutledge had placed the odd emphasis when he said “every resource.” Bixby’s hesitation could only mean that he and Strickland weren’t cleared to know what this machine was—which was strange, because he thought he had the CIA’s highest security clearance. But then again, he realized, he of all people should know that behind every secret was usually another secret. No matter what he was told, there was simply no way he knew everything there was to know about the CIA, let alone the US government.
Take, for instance, the lab itself, a veritable labyrinth of rooms and corridors so expansive that it might have run the entire length of CIA headquarters. Zero knew that the halls beyond the main floor held an armory, a firing range, a clean room, a radiation chamber, several other workshops and smaller dedicated labs—and he was still certain that he’d only seen a portion of what was kept down there.
Case in point: Bixby led them out of the lab and past the firing range, down a hall, and through a small robotics lab, pausing at each door to swipe the keycard he kept on a lanyard at his hip. They entered another white corridor, one that Zero was fairly certain he’d never been in before, and strode down its length until Bixby stopped at a place where there didn’t appear to be anything at all.
The engineer ran one finger down the wall, feeling for something—a small round indentation, hardly bigger than a dime and veritably invisible unless one knew it was there. He craned his neck and held his eye to it; a blue light flashed, scanning his retina, and a narrow section of the white wall slid aside with a small whoosh.
Zero hadn’t even noticed a seam.
“You guys really don’t want anyone finding this thing, huh?” Strickland noted.
They found themselves in a chamber no bigger than Zero’s bedroom in Bethesda. Three of the walls were lined with rack upon rack of black servers, small lights at the front of each giving the room a bizarre purplish glow, blue wires running between them and bundled impeccably. The room smelled like a hospital, and the collective hum of what must have been a hundred machines made it feel as if the floor was vibrating.
At the far end was a single flat-screen monitor, twice as wide as it was tall, mounted to the wall and displaying a blue background with four simple white letters: OMNI. Beside the monitor was a single black speaker, about a foot and a half in diameter—and if Zero wasn’t mistaken, it was vibrating slightly.
Bixby held both arms out in a grand gesture as the hidden door slid closed behind them. “This,” he announced, “is OMNI.”
“Great,” Strickland said flatly. “…What is it?”
Zero frowned as he crouched slightly, holding his ear close to the dark speaker. It was vibrating with sound, just barely audible over the collective hum of the servers. It sounded at first like just a dull hiss—but no, he realized. It was voices. Many of them, overlapping one another, each one indistinguishable from the next, like a thousand whispers at the same time.
He pulled away quickly. The sound of it was unsettling.
“What you’re looking at is one of the CIA’s most closely guarded secrets,” Maria told them. “Very few people in the world know about this. So when this is all over, I’d appreciate if you both promptly forgot about it.”
“What does it do?” Strickland asked. But Zero already had a hunch. The haunting whispers he’d heard through the speaker were voices—conversations, and possibly ones that were going on at that very moment.
“When Director Shaw came over from the NSA,” Maria explained, “one of his first priorities was establishing a closer cooperation between the two agencies. It’s no secret that Title Two of the Patriot Act allowed for the surveillance of anyone who is suspected to be involved in terroristic activity. The NSA can tap into any on-network device… phones, computers, tablets, traffic cams, radio frequencies, open-circuit security systems, you name it.”
“Sure,” said Zero, “as long as the person they’re surveilling is a suspect.”
“But what happens when we don’t have a specific suspect to monitor?” Maria asked pointedly. “What happens when national security is threatened, and the perpetrators could be anywhere?”
“Then… everyone becomes a suspect,” Strickland murmured.
She nodded. “Think of OMNI like a search engine for sound. In the event of a pending attack—like we find ourselves in now—it helps us narrow our search. There’s an emergency protocol that can only be activated by the president. The NSA opens all available channels, more than a billion devices in just the continental United States, and the results filter through OMNI.”
“But like a search engine,” Bixby chimed in, “it’s not foolproof. We need parameters in order to home in on the results, to get what we want, or else we could end up with a thousand dead ends.” He turned to Maria and asked, “So, what are our parameters?”
“Russian chatter,” she told him. “Specifically female. Flag keywords that could pertain to the attacks—‘sonic,’ ‘Havana,’ ‘Kansas,’ anything else you can think of.”
The wide screen behind them flickered suddenly, the word “OMNI” vanishing and replaced by rapidly scrolling code.
“There’s the executive order,” Bixby noted. “NSA is active.” He pulled a sliding keyboard from beneath the monitor and began inputting the parameters.
Zero was torn. On the one hand, he was grateful they had something to give them a lead, an edge in finding these people, and hopefully before another attack occurred. But on the other hand, the mere existence of something like OMNI felt… controversial wasn’t the right word. It just felt wrong.
He was glad to be back with the agency. But more than once before, he had thought about packing up with the girls and going dark, just leaving and starting anew somewhere else. Much like he had told Sara only minutes earlier, they thought alike; he too was always keeping an escape route in mind.
A machine like OMNI would make that very difficult, if not impossible.
The dark speaker hummed louder as Bixby’s fingers flew across the keys, narrowing the filtered results from a billion devices. Voices came through a dozen at a time; first in Russian, then decidedly female, vacillating between brief snippets of hundreds of conversations from people who had no idea that the CIA was listening in.
The sound of it made him shudder. He didn’t want to be in this room anymore.
“Okay,” Bixby announced as he adjusted the settings on his smart watch. “I’ll get an alert as soon as we have a viable hit.” He turned to Zero and flashed his familiar grin. “In the meantime, let’s gear up.”
*
Back on the main lab floor, Zero watched as Bixby laid out an array of gadgets on the stainless steel surface of a workbench. Strickl
and stood on the other side of the table, though Maria had headed back up to her office with some excuse about paperwork.
There always seems to be paperwork, Zero mused.
“I’ve got some very cool stuff for you guys,” the engineer said proudly. “But first, a few things you should know. This weapon is a high-powered acoustic device that emits ‘infrasound,’ super low-frequency sound waves that are below the normal limit of what the human ear can detect. You wouldn’t hear this type of weapon as much as you would feel it. Even at a longer range, one would experience dizziness, nausea, and headaches. At mid-range the possible effects would include all that, plus hearing loss from ruptured eardrums and blurred vision—from the vibration of your eyeballs.”
He plucked up a black, kidney-shaped earbud and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “These are noise-cancelling earplugs that emit a high-pitched frequency, which should be able to combat the long-range effects of the weapon.”
“Should?” Strickland raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll be honest. They’re untested in the field against sonic weapons,” Bixby admitted. “But yes, they should work—though they won’t be able to defend against the more deleterious effects that occur at closer range.”
“Which are?” Zero asked. He had witnessed some of them in the video of Springfield, Kansas, but hadn’t been entirely sure what he was seeing.
“At the closest range, this kind of ultrasonic weapon could cause permanent hearing loss, blindness, and internal trauma.” Bixby said it as simply as a narrator dictating the side effects in a drug commercial. “There’s no other way to put it. From what we’ve seen in the other attacks, the frequency can literally rattle your organs into rupturing.”
Zero closed his eyes as an image from the video spun through his head again—specifically the young male football player who had fallen to his hands and knees, spitting blood onto the pavement. He thought of the single casualty in the Havana attack, the young woman, and wondered if that had been her cause of death. It sounded like a horrible way to go.