by AJ Frazer
Then Dax’s scream ripped through the high-pitched ringing in Dominic’s ears. He looked in horror as blood seeped into Dax’s tan cotton pants as he clutched the wounded leg.
Dominic leaped from his seat but felt frozen in time. He watched Dax writhe in pain while he stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened.
Sagen let go of Dax, who slumped forward over his leg, roaring in agony.
Dominic’s mind suddenly snapped back to attention, and he mobilized his legs into action. After what felt like an eternity, he made his way around the table to help Dax. In reality it took a few seconds. As he rounded the end of the table he nearly walked right into the barrel of the Walther. Looking up, he was met with a determined look from Sagen who was staring him down.
“Make the call,” said Sagen, his voice slow and steady.
Dominic looked down at Dax and back up at Sagen.
“The next one is in his head and after that I start on you. Now do it!”
Erik had materialized beside him and handed him a mobile phone. The number for Ed, his editor-in-chief, was already ringing. Dominic shook his head, trying to get rid of the shock the same way a dog shakes off water.
“This is Edward,” came a metallic voice from the phone. “Dominic, is that you? Hello?”
Dominic cleared his throat and held the phone to his ear. “Ed, listen, I need you to publish the Sagen piece immediately.” He looked at Dax who was wild with pain.
“Dom, what’s that noise? What’s going on?”
Dax was no longer screaming, but his animal-like grunting was loud and constant.
“Just do it! Now! All sites, all markets. Home-fucking-page, lead headline. Call me back on this number the moment it’s live.”
“OK, OK, I’m on it right away.”
Dominic hung up the phone and laid it on the table.
“There,” smiled Sagen, smugly. “Shame it had to come to that. Luckily for Dax here, I spared his kneecap and artery—just superficial damage. I’m sure he’ll forgive you—one day. Erik, I’m going back to check on George and the others. Could you please keep an eye on them and let me know when the article is live?” Sagen walked out of the kitchen leaving the fly-screen door to bang against its frame.
Dax was doubled over, clasping his knee. With considerable effort, Dominic pulled him upright in the chair. Dax’s face was puce, his breathing labored. He clutched his leg with both hands.
Dominic kneeled down to get a closer look. A large patch of Dax’s cargo pants was darkened by the blood and a small hole in the material signified the entry point. Mercifully, Sagen had pulled the Walther back before firing. There was a big difference between a contact wound and a point-blank wound. Dominic had seen the effects of both, neither was good, but given a choice, point-blank every time.
Dominic looked up at Erik. “Give me a hand here!”
Erik looked cold and disinterested. Finally, he walked calmly around to the other side of Dax.
“We need to get him onto the table,” said Dominic, as he swept an arm across it to remove the random items.
Dax screamed against the pain of having his leg straightened. “He fucking shot me!” he grunted, writhing on the table.
“Hold him there!” commanded Dominic. He went to the kitchen and started tearing open cupboards and drawers.
Returning with what he needed, Dominic took scissors to Dax’s cargo pants and cut them to the top of his thigh. Pulling back the material, he could see the wound clearly. The bullet had entered and exited cleanly through the muscle on the outside of his right leg. There was blood, but no arterial spurting. As far as gunshot wounds go, this was as good as they got.
“Daxy, you’re going to be all right, mate. The wound is clean, and the bullet went straight through. He missed your artery and the bone. You’re going to be fine, it’ll just hurt like hell.”
Dax strained his neck in vain to see the damage, dropping his head back with a loud knock on the wooden table.
“Easy, mate,” Dominic urged. “Don’t want to give yourself a head injury as well.”
“Faaaaaahk,” groaned Dax. “The cunt shot me!”
“It’s going to be OK. You’re going to be in shock, so you just need to stay calm. We’re going to get you out of here, OK?”
Dax grunted.
“What day is it?” Dominic asked, trying to ascertain his level of shock.
“Worst of my life.”
“OK, what’s your full name?”
“Dax I’m-gonna-kill-that-fucker Beresford.”
“All right, that’s the spirit.” Dominic took a box of sodium bicarbonate that he had found in the kitchen and sprinkled it generously onto the wound before flushing it with fresh water to clean it out. He dried it off with a clean tea towel then tightly wrapped another around it to stop the bleeding. Skills for life, the instructors at Lympstone had told him in his Royal Marine training decades ago. How bloody right they were.
“We need to get him to a hospital,” said Dominic.
“In time,” said Erik.
“Now! He needs to be out of here now!”
“That is not possible, I’m afraid. But we will have him to a hospital within twenty-four hours, I assure you.”
“Jesus!” Dominic was exasperated by the futility of arguing with fanatics. “Well you must have something for the pain. Morphine? And some form of antibiotic?”
“Let me go see what we have,” replied Erik blandly.
Dominic went back to Dax and leaned over his head. “It’s going to be all right, mate. We’ll get you something for the pain. Like I said, the wound looks good. You’ll be walking on it in no time.”
Dax just nodded feverishly; his breathing still erratic. Craning his head he looked at Dominic with wild, searching eyes. “You’re not just saying that? You sure there’s no arterial blood?”
“Positive. Good thing you shave your legs, mate, otherwise the sticky plaster would hurt coming off.”
Dax eased his head back down more gently this time and stared up at the ceiling. “Fuck you and fuck that bastard.”
“Good to see the bullet hasn’t affected your attitude. I’ve done what he asked. It’s all over now.”
“It’s over when he’s on his arse and I’m putting the boot into him.”
“Hate to break it to you, mate, but you’re not going to be putting the boot into anyone for a while yet.”
“Prick’ll keep,” groaned Dax.
Erik came back in with a large plastic medical box. He swung it up onto the bench beside the table and opened it. “Here.” He handed Dominic a syringe wrapped in cellophane. “Morphine.”
Dominic looked at it and read the instructions on the side of the pack. “No allergies to morphine, Dax?”
“I’ll take my chances,” replied Dax through gritted teeth.
Dominic pulled Dax’s shirt collar down over his right shoulder and wiped the arm with a sterile pad. Tearing open the pack, he squirted out a tiny amount to remove any air before stabbing the needle quickly into Dax’s arm and depressing the plunger.
“Give it a couple of minutes and you’ll think it’s Christmas,” said Dominic.
Dax just nodded, his jaw clenching as sweat droplets cascaded off his forehead.
Dominic got another tea towel and wiped his brow before folding it over a few times and jacking up Dax’s head with it. “We’ll wait for the morphine to kick in and then we can move you to the bed.”
Once they had Dax in the bed, Erik left immediately. After elevating Dax’s leg and ensuring he was comfortable, Dominic went back to the kitchen—he needed to find Sagen and end this madness.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dominic strode across the yard to the mobile-office trailers. Fists clenched, he belted on the door continuously until it was opened by a young, slim, swarthy Indian or Middle Eastern man.
“What do you—?”
Dominic dropped his shoulder and barged past the scrawny man.
“Hey!�
�� the man protested, stumbling backward. “You can’t come in here!”
“Just let him in,” came Sagen’s resigned voice from inside the darkened room.
Dominic’s eyes were slow to adjust to the dim lighting. “Where the fuck are you, Sagen?”
“Right here. Look, I’m sorry, but you were being a real pain in the ass back there and I just didn’t have time to negotiate.”
Dominic bore down on Sagen’s silhouette. There were others sitting at computer terminals who moved out of the way as Dominic charged forward.
“Look, Dominic,” started Sagen. “It was a clean shot and I—”
Dominic launched his right fist at Sagen’s face. Nothing pretty, nothing slick—all martial, no arts. Just a good old-fashioned fist in the face. It landed right on Sagen’s cheekbone. Sagen flailed backward, a row of computer terminals breaking his fall.
“Fuck!” spat Sagen, rubbing his cheek. “All right, I deserve that.”
“A shot in the air is how you get someone’s attention!” Dominic stood over him, his left fist gripping Sagen’s shirt front, his right arm cocked ready to deliver another blow.
The room was frozen in shock until two dark shadows moved toward them.
Sagen subtly waved them back with his hand. “Perhaps, but I’m not a patient man and, besides, look what you created.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sagen smiled like a lunatic. “Your article was the trigger. It’s what Biblical was waiting for. It’s begun.”
Dominic stared at Sagen. “What the fuck do you mean?”
“I mean, in a way, you launched Biblical. Congratulations, Dominic.” Sagen was laughing now.
“What do you—?”
Sagen abruptly stopped laughing and became deadly serious. “Biblical was waiting for the article. It was programmed to respond to the piece. I needed to be sure that an objective real piece of information about me existed before Biblical was released. History will not be written by me unfortunately, so I wanted to ensure some truth was out there in the world. Once Biblical recognized certain keywords from the copy, it delivered its payload.”
Dominic lowered his arm and released his grip on Sagen. Shocked, he looked around the room. Taking in all the monitors and banks of computers. This was the mother ship, ground zero. Biblical HQ.
“You mean it’s gone?”
“Gone?” Sagen chuckled. He got to his feet, touching his cheek gingerly. “You have no idea, do you? I mean, I knew Zhen had told you about it and I was damn sure those idiots at MI6 had confirmed it. But you really don’t get it, do you?”
Dominic glared at Sagen. “Spit it out then!”
Sagen moved toward the main bank of screens where the monitors were stacked three by three. “Well, first, I didn’t create Biblical—it was already created by the US government’s DARPA division. They and the CIA laid the groundwork by figuring out how to harness artificial intelligence to create perfect computer programs. Programs that could write themselves and rewrite themselves constantly so that they were invisible—impossible to hack or track.”
Sagen waved his hand around the room. “These are the geniuses—the top hackers from US intelligence, Mossad Unit 8200, Kaspersky Labs, Herjavec, etcetera. They were disenfranchised by political turmoil in the US, by Brexit in the UK, by Russia’s behavior in the Crimea, by China’s aggression in the South China Sea. And they also saw that politics can’t fix the world’s biggest problem—the climate emergency. So they joined me and we just effected the greatest change for mankind since the discovery of fire.”
Dominic put a hand to his head. “So it’s too late.”
“Too late? It’s been too late for a long time. Please don’t think that what you see here is Biblical.” He nodded toward the computer banks. “Biblical has been everywhere for a long time, just dormant. Constantly moving, constantly reprogramming itself autonomously. Undetectable and unpreventable. Do you remember STUXNET or rather Olympic Games? Duqu? Flame?”
Dominic had no idea what he was talking about.
“Those worms,” continued Sagen, “were the start of it. The US developed a number of cyber weapons to take out critical infrastructure. Like Iran’s nuclear program, Venezuela’s power grid or China’s social media networks. STUXNET in particular was smart in the way it was precision-targeted to specific Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers attached to pumps, valves, and small motors. They caused a bit of a nuisance to Iran, but ultimately, that was about it.”
Sagen was getting more theatrical now—like a showman. “Now, what you may not have heard about is a little worm called Nitro Zeus. Again, created by the US government to address an all-out war between Iran and Israel. What they didn’t realize—until it was too late—was that Nitro Zeus went way beyond Iran and Israel. It went across the world, even the US. I mean it was totally benign, but it was there nonetheless. And Nitro Zeus wasn’t limited to just Siemens PLCs—no, no, no—Nitro Zeus was altogether far more aggressive. It pervaded every single form of critical infrastructure IT.”
Sagen leaned back on a desk. “But the US was not so concerned. It was a benign piece of code, albeit five hundred times bigger than any other virus and absolutely pristine—no bugs. It was a simply beautiful piece of code. But it was like a warhead without a missile, or a gun without a trigger. They hadn’t figured out how to control it, how to weaponize it.
“Politically though they were in a jam—there was no way to warn other countries, as it would simply highlight that it was their fault. So they stayed quiet, shut down the Nitro Zeus program and tried to forget all about it.
“Now, what Biblical does is it enslaves Nitro Zeus to—”
“You’re completely insane!” Dominic didn’t care for technicalities—having not understood about ninety percent of what Sagen had just said—and he cared less for monologues. “What have you done? We need to turn it off!”
“What have I done?” Sagen stared blankly. “Well, what the nuke was to bombs, Biblical is to malware. It is off the scale—beyond the imagination of even the wildest hacktivist. It is right now attacking command-and-control systems across the globe. Industrial controls, military controls, government, utilities, finance, the lot. Full-scale cyber destruction. Well, not quite full-scale. Not yet anyway.”
Dominic thought he might faint; his head was swirling with vertigo. He’d failed to stop the lunatic, failed to protect the world from certain disaster. The nausea rose; he was going to be sick.
“Biblical and Nitro Zeus work together and systematically annihilate computer code. Binary line by binary line, ones and zeros—poof! Into the ether of the ether—a kind of codified holocaust. And it’s happening almost instantly—far too quickly for anyone to do anything about it. With no code, there is no network—with no network, there is nothing. Look over here, you can see how it is tracking across the globe.”
Sagen pointed to a screen that showed a map of the world and a mess of red and green dots, thousands of them across the map with large blobs of color representing cities.
“What is this?”
“It’s monitoring Biblical’s progress. Red signifies a critical infrastructure system that Biblical has taken down, green is about to be. It should all be over by lunchtime.”
“Lunchtime?” echoed Dominic incredulous. “Every critical system in the world destroyed in a morning?”
“Not every system. Some we have spared—including yours. Not that many people will be able to access it, but Jagged Edge Media will be the only news service in the world left standing. Hope you didn’t sell all your shares when you tried to save your financial skin earlier this week.”
Dominic was speechless, while Sagen grinned like the Cheshire cat. His swollen eye made him look even more maniacal. He then turned to the few remaining people in the room, beaming at them like a proud father.
“It’s time,” he said calmly. “You know what to do from here. Erik is outside ready. Congratulations. Today you changed the world, gave it
a real chance of survival. You are all heroes, saints, and apostles, and you will never be forgotten.”
The occupants of the room got up quietly and left. No fanfare, no long goodbyes, just efficient evacuation. Except for the skinny man Dominic had shoulder-barged. He walked over to Sagen and the two embraced. They shared a glance before the man turned and left without a word.
“So what now?” asked Dominic, after the room had emptied.
“I would expect we’ll have a visit in the next thirty minutes from a team of rather grumpy, heavily armed Australians. Right now they’re figuring a way around their communications problems—caused by Biblical, of course—and will raid this location. I assume MI6 gave you something to bring along to our meet?”
“Yes, a USB to put into a computer once I found you.”
“Oh, go ahead.” Sagen shrugged. “You know that it will do nothing to stop Biblical. Its main purpose is simply a location beacon. Whatever payload it has is pointless.”
Dominic had figured as much. He looked down at a laptop and took the USB out of his pocket. He slid it in. Nothing happened; the screen didn’t even flicker.
“There. Now, shall we check on your friend? I do feel terrible about shooting him.”
“I doubt he wants to see you.”
Sagen nodded reflectively. “Don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to see the man who just shot me either. Please give him my sincere apologies.”
“You should run, like the rest of them. They’ll be coming for you with full force.”
Sagen shrugged and headed calmly for the door. “Follow me.”
As he opened the door, the sound of the Hughes 500 filled the air. The whining jet turbine strained as the small helicopter lifted off and gathered height.
They walked out into the brilliant sunshine, eyes squinting, faces contorting against the sharp contrast. The helicopter cut a loud path directly over them, still low, kicking up a plume of dust around them. It headed southeast, into the heart of the Australian outback.