Kill the stars. Kill the dream.
The revolution will be etched into celebrity skin.
CHAPTER 30
Cold feelings bloomed in Darger’s hands and cheeks as she finished this chunk of Huxley’s journal. She stared at the last page. Dazed. Blinked a few times.
Finally, she reread that final line.
The revolution will be etched into celebrity skin.
Visions of Passmore and Driscoll flashed through her head. Their famous faces broken beyond repair. Fragmented. Melted. Their beauty turned grotesque. Ghastly and shocking.
The journal’s grim words seemed to match the damage done. Morbid. Callous. Traumatic and traumatized. Disturbing and disturbed.
And those icy tendrils snaked deeper into Darger’s flesh. Reached down the lengths of arms. The chill saturating her flesh until the conference room felt cavernous.
She placed the packet face down on the table, as though turning the text away from her might help her distance herself from the words. The back page gleamed accusatory white up at her, though, dared her to find the dark spots where the black lettering showed through the thin sheet of paper.
Tentatively, she reached out a hand. Fingertips reaching. Finding the sharp edges of the paper. Pressing ever so gingerly.
She scooted the packet over the glossy wood. Pushed it away. It hissed faintly against the surface of the table.
Darger’s heartbeat thrummed. Pumped the cold all through her now. Like ice water threading her body.
The room seemed utterly quiet, utterly vacant. Motionless.
She got up and began to pace. Tried to clear her mind, to think of anything but Huxley’s dark words, but they seemed to echo in her mind.
This is the world we’ve made. We use each other. Break each other. Kill each other.
The thing was, he wasn’t wrong. Not about that, at least. How many times had she cursed the evil acts people perpetrated on one another?
Huxley seemed at once to condemn the darkest aspects of humanity but also to embrace it.
Somewhere in her reading and musing, she’d lost her sense of how much time had passed. When Darger next looked at the clock, she was startled to find the hour hand approaching the seven.
She took a breath and felt a slight tremor in her chest.
Across the room, Loshak’s phone jangled, and he nearly knocked it off the table in his haste to pick it up. He swiped at the screen and grinned.
“He’s got it. Remzi decrypted the message.”
Darger blew out a breath.
“We’re cutting it close here.”
“He says Huxley was using one of the pre-existing Zodiac codes, just slightly augmented. Still took a bit to figure, but it ultimately saved him some time.”
Darger felt a slight surge of pride at that. She’d been on the right track in her amateur attempts to break the cipher after all.
Loshak waved Agent Fredrick and Agent Laboda over and opened the attachment Remzi had sent.
A photo loaded. Agent Remzi had printed out a copy of the Huxley clue and written in the corresponding letters above each symbol.
Greetings from Hell.
If you’re reading this, perhaps the game will proceed down the tracks.
Each explosion bigger than the last from here on out. Meant to kill, maim, destroy.
Some will live, and some will die screaming. Such is life in a universe that cares not.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Isn’t it exciting to know that their lives are in your hands?
The stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s always dirkest before dawn.
Will you be brave? Will you race to the rescue? Or are you yellow?
Time to find out if you’ve got the goods.
Darger read the note a few times. Realized that her lips were moving along with the words, little whispery sounds emitting from where her tongue touched the edges of her teeth.
She closed her mouth and read it again. Trying to pluck out a clue, a turn of phrase with a second meaning.
“Is that a typo on Huxley’s part?” Fredrick asked. “Dirkest before dawn?”
“Could be,” Loshak said. “Remzi said he double-checked that and the translation there is correct as an ‘i’, so it’s not a mistake on his part, at least.”
“Zodiac intentionally misspelled things in his letters,” Darger said. “He always spelled ‘paradise’ with a ‘c’ instead of an ‘s’. Could be an homage.”
Darger’s eyes slid back up the disturbing stanza, finding the one line that stuck out to her as vaguely familiar. She read it out loud.
“‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’”
“It’s a Nietzsche quote,” Loshak said. His voice seemed distant. Eyes glued to his phone. “So is the next line about no facts, only interpretations.”
“You think that’s significant?” Fredrick cupped her chin. “Two quotes from the same guy?”
“Maybe he’s pointing us to a book,” Laboda said. “He had tons of books in his house.”
“And at his mother’s house,” Darger said, thinking that maybe they were onto something now. Could Huxley have stashed something in one of the books lining his shelves?
“Hold up,” Loshak said. He was still looking at his phone, but now his brow was furrowed. “That’s not actually a Nietzsche quote — the line about suffering. It’s a Gordon Allport quote commonly misattributed to Nietzsche.”
Agent Fredrick clucked her tongue.
“Seems like every famous quote gets tied to Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln, or Friedrich frickin’ Nietzsche.”
Loshak ran his fingers through his hair.
“The main thing is, the line just doesn’t have the same weight if it’s attributed to Gordon Allport.”
“Who the hell is Gordon Allport?” Laboda said.
“Exactly.” Loshak took a big breath. “You want to know what I really think? I think Huxley got these quotes off Google. I think he probably thought it was a genuine Nietzsche quote, being that he probably put this together in five minutes.”
They were quiet for a few seconds.
“So that’s a no on the book idea?” Laboda said.
Loshak shrugged and then shook his head.
Agent Fitch came in from the hall, his biceps jumping as he cracked open a can of Mountain Dew from the vending machine. After studying the faces around him, he sensed the fresh tension in the room. The green can paused a few inches shy of his lips.
“Did I miss something?”
Darger ignored him.
“What about that last line? Time to find out if you’ve got the goods. Seems off to me.”
Loshak nodded.
“Something almost hokey about it compared to the rest of the writing.”
Fitch, now in the midst of a big slug of Mountain Dew, held up a finger, his eyes going wide.
“Ultimate Food Fight,” he said, wiping the back of his hand over his Dewed-up lips.
Everyone just stared at him.
“You guys have never watched Ultimate Food Fight? It’s fucking great! It’s a reality show. A competition, right? These families have to cook against each other, and then the losing team has to get sloppy in this, like, insane obstacle course made of food. Crawling on hands and knees through spaghetti and kiddie pools full of tapioca pudding and shit. It’s incredible.”
Still everyone stared at him.
“‘You’ve got the goods’ is the host’s catchphrase. He says that to the winners.”
Now everyone leaned forward.
“Dude hosts a few different shows, I think. Blond-haired guy. Kind of a smartass. Named Dirk something. Dirk Nielsen.”
CHAPTER 31
From the outside, the CIRG van appeared to be something like the standard UPS delivery truck. Oversized cargo bay. Low-key dark gray paint job with a single navy stripe. Otherwise unmark
ed.
The inside looked like something out of a spy movie.
Banks of monitors lined the wall, images from various satellite feeds flickering on some while streams of text fed endlessly on others. The console beneath the screens held enough colorful buttons, knobs, faders, and switches that it looked fit to record a Grammy-winning live album.
To Darger’s disappointment, the agent manning the console — McAllister — looked like neither Will Smith nor Gene Hackman. He was a small, mousy guy. Bald and bony and slight. All his features were as petite as his frame save for the big buck teeth perpetually exposed by his curled top lip. He pecked at a keyboard there, muttered into his headset, eyes constantly flicking to a different monitor. Darger wondered how he could continue working as they flew down the road, juddering over potholes, racing around corners. She suspected trying to read and write during all of that would trigger her motion sickness.
She sat on a padded bench diagonal to the display of gadgetry. She pumped her leg — tension expressed in her pistoning calf. Across from her, Fitch held a hand to his ear, listening to some radio chatter, she assumed.
“Has anyone made contact with Nielsen yet?” Darger asked.
“Not yet. Bainbridge Tower is one of those cushy high-rise penthouses. Dude even has a private elevator, apparently. Anyway, the front desk tried calling him. No answer. So then they sent someone up to knock at his door. Again, no answer. They’re not sure if he’s not home or just not answering.”
She checked the time on her phone. If Huxley’s suggested timeframe held remotely true, they had less than 30 minutes until this next bomb blew, a thought that made her stomach lurch. She wondered if they’d even get there in time, let alone defuse it.
She voiced none of these thoughts aloud, of course — not even to Loshak who sat next to her. It’d feel wrong to say it, to even indirectly suggest failure, with the bomb technicians prepping for the operation right next to her.
One of them was going to go in there, for Christ’s sake.
That honor would go to Agent Michael Dobbins. He still had the short-cropped hair and chiseled features of a cadet fresh out of the Marines, but the faintest sag to the flesh beneath his cheekbones betrayed the illusion and hinted at his real age, probably somewhere in his mid-thirties.
He strapped himself into the EOD suit as they rode toward the scene, adjusting the black ballistic panels on the front which looked to be more rigid than the rest. The bulky green Kevlar blast suit instantly made Darger think of Jeremy Renner and Guy Pearce in The Hurt Locker, tottering around as if they were wearing fat suits.
If Dobbins felt any fear at the moment, his eyes didn’t show it. He looked more determined than anything, Darger thought. A thoughtful kind of smile played at his lips now and again as he fussed with his gear. He toyed with the controls to the cooling unit attached to the suit. Fitch had explained how a system of capillaries pumped two liters of ice water through the Nomex body suit Dobbins wore under the armor. Dobbins tried maxing the settings, and when it got too cold he cranked the dial back and jogged in place for a second — Darger thought it looked like he had to go to the bathroom.
The agent next to him, Mike Alvarez, would be the voice in Dobbins’ head, watching his every move through the camera in the EOD suit, talking him through the operation. After a round of mic checks, the dark-haired man typed furiously at the laptop sitting on his knees. The computer and the headset running over his ears and angling a microphone in front of his lips combined to make him look more like a telemarketer than a man about to head up a bomb disposal operation for the federal government.
Darger checked her phone again. They now had 24 minutes give or take. She swallowed. She hoped there was some amount of leeway to that detonation time, but nobody could know until it either happened or didn’t. The whole thing knotted up her guts, made sweat bead along her brow. Her pulse thudded in her ears, quavered in her neck.
“We got an ETA?” Alvarez asked, looking up at the mousy guy behind the console.
“Current estimate is six minutes.” He talked through those buck teeth, his voice strangely flat and emotionless, eyes swiveling just a little in a way that reminded Darger of one of those creepy antique dolls.
Alvarez nodded and swung his gaze over to Dobbins.
“You ready to rock, Dobber?”
Dobbins smirked before he responded.
“I was born ready, shitdick.”
That got a big laugh out of Fitch, who stomped the floor in his excitement, his heavy boot a sledgehammer head thudding down next to Darger’s foot.
“Fuck yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s what I love about these bomb techs… you gotta have balls the size of goddamn grapefruits to do what they do. You probably gotta cart ’em around in a wheelbarrow, huh Dobbins?”
Dobbins opted to neither confirm nor deny the size of his testicles, instead rolling his neck back and forth and bouncing on his toes. His body language made him look like a fighter about to throw down in the octagon.
They sped through Manhattan, heading north. Darger wheeled around to look out the windshield and spotted the spire of the Chrysler building tinted gold by the rising sun. She went to check the time again, but it was a notification at the top of the screen that caught her eye this time.
“Shit.”
Loshak leaned closer.
“What now?”
She showed him the screen of her phone.
“The stuff we found at the park got leaked online again. The code, the journal, even the schematics. It’s all on there.”
“When?” Loshak asked.
“Just a few minutes ago.”
“Same account?”
“No. Another freshly created account.” Darger considered this for a moment. “I think Huxley must have set it up to post automatically somehow. If someone was leaking it on our side, why wait until after we’d solved it?”
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Fitch said, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Why go to all this trouble with the clues and whatnot and then leak them to the public? Doesn’t that increase the odds of the clue getting solved and the next attack being thwarted?”
“Maybe. But it also creates quite a spectacle,” Loshak said. “Look at the views on that post.”
It was already in the hundreds of thousands despite the post only being seven minutes old. Darger frowned at the screen.
“He’s in the spotlight now for sure.”
The procession continued past Central Park, which was already bustling with people jogging, biking, pushing strollers. Suddenly the van tilted underfoot and the engine whined as it lugged them uphill.
Everyone adjusted their position to compensate. Leaning in unison. The mousy guy splayed his hands on the console.
“I think that’s it, right there,” Fitch said, aiming a finger at one of the skyscrapers visible through the windshield. “Bainbridge Tower.”
Darger shifted in her seat to get a better view of the fifty-story tower made of glass and steel. Luxury apartments with a priceless view of Central Park.
The grade leveled out beneath them. Their collective lean relented. Gravity once more pulling straight down.
The van zipped into a lane marked “Taxi and Limousine Parking Only.”
Several police cruisers already hunkered in the narrow drive, lights spinning. Officers had blocked off the street and initiated an evacuation of the building, clearing the way for Dobbins to get up to the penthouse where the bomb would be.
The van turned parallel along the sidewalk leading up to the front doors. Parked between the cruisers.
That sickening feeling lurched in Darger’s gut — the overwhelming inertia of stopping after all that forward momentum, the unbearable quiet surrounding them after the engine cut out. Every follicle of hair on her body tingled in that still moment, and her stomach fluttered rapid twitches like dragonfly wings.
Darger checked the time. Only 21 minutes now.
This was it.
&
nbsp; CHAPTER 32
The side door of the security van slid open, and bright morning sunlight glinted into the space. Dobbins stepped into the orangey glow, the lupine grin on his face conveying utter confidence.
“Welp. Going in,” he said. “Just another day at the office, right?”
The others chattered platitudes around him like football players about to surge out of the tunnel. Messages that bordered on nonsensical, especially the stuff Fitch said.
“Go time, Dobber.”
“Let’s do this. Time to go get it.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, motherfucker. Now or never.”
They circled him like vultures. Slapping him on the shoulders as they chanted.
He broke out of the circle after a few seconds. Moved into the open. Tottered up to the building in the blast suit. Legs kicking out choppy steps on the sidewalk, mobility limited by the bulky gear. Upper body swaying with each step. From the back, he looked a little like he was strapped into an inflatable sumo suit. Despite the clunky body language, he scooted right up the walk without delay.
He pushed through the front doors of the building. Disappeared behind the glare obscuring the pane of glass. Swallowed up by the shimmering brightness.
The others pulled back into the van. Closed the door. Cut off that orange sunlight all at once to plunge them back into the shade.
They huddled in the bluish glow of the monitors along the wall. Watched the feed from the camera in Dobbins’ helmet.
He bobbed along, the image on the monitor rising and falling with his lumbering gait. Crossed the lobby. Entered the penthouse’s private elevator with a special keycard. Then he stood motionless as the stainless steel box lurched upward, taking him toward the top floor in what felt like slow motion.
Dobbins narrated all of this, his voice sounding tinny through the speakers in the console.
“Elevator is on its way up now. It’ll be a minute or so before we get to the top floor.”
Darger couldn’t help but picture Huxley’s target as Dobbins rode up to his living space. Dirk Nielsen, reality show host extraordinaire. That smiling orange face perpetually telling audiences that one of his various shows would be back after these messages. Tan skin stretched over riveted musculature. Hollow cheeks. Blond hair that always looked freshly wet. Eyes just a bit too close together in a way that made him look like a bird.
Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight Page 14