A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  At that very moment, inside the White House, the First Lady was helping her husband pick out a tie, the president laughing at her joke. On the precipice of war, the Chinese premier continued to sleep, dreaming of the young girl, of conquest. At his suburban home, avoiding getting ready for the Arlington ceremony one last time, Mac crawled around the couch after his children, a child again.

  In Alaska, Charybdis began activating its sub-programs, locking in a final sequence: the Tohoku-oki and Sumatran faults, the subduction zone off the Portuguese coast, the North Anatolian fault line, the Alpine-Himalayan zone stretching through Tibet, India and China, down through Burma and ringing the Middle East.

  Immune to the raging snow and winds, in a remote Alaskan forest, hundreds of satellite dishes began to move as one.

  †

  Odin continued in a wide arc over the eastern seaboard, its beam holding to a set trajectory as it raced through orbit at 17,321 miles per hour.

  In the hotel room below, the only sound was the whisper of the beam as it seared across the pillow and moved through her hair.

  Jack ripped off the remaining bindings and moved behind the desk, staring at the laptop and the silent, serene image of Odin. At the bottom of the screen, an icon glowed: pattern/liquidate.

  He’d tried to call Mac, but it had immediately gone to voicemail twice and he didn’t have time. He called the hotel and the lines were down, no doubt more of Présage’s schemes.

  He looked at the laser beam again. He was too far away from the hotel to get there in time. The police would take five minutes. From the speed of the beam, it appeared that Lani had two.

  He lined up the variables: laser, satellite, computer programs…

  What had Mac said to him, all the way back at the Maryland cottage? Remember this number, it may become important – 212-555-0000. When the operator answers, only say, Cerberus…

  He dialed and it rang ten times. On the tenth, a female voice answered, “Yes.”

  “Cerberus,” he said.

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  “O’Neill. Jack O’Neill. Please hurry.”

  The line began clicking, as if being routed.

  “Rendel here. That you, Jack?”

  “Thank God you’re there, Josh.”

  “No rest for the weary. Jeez, you and I must be the only ones in town not able to go to that Arlington ceremony. What’s up?”

  As best he could, Jack explained Project Odin and Lani’s situation in the hotel, and the plan to assassinate three of the world’s leaders, including President Walker.

  “No way, Jack, that can’t be right. Présage must be bull-shitting you. Odin is dead. Drop dead. There was one production prototype, no money left for anything else. You’re sure the image on Présage’s laptop is real? Maybe he’s running a scam on you.”

  “It’s no game, Josh. And I don’t have time to argue about it. The president said if I asked for something, it’s done. So I’m asking. Assuming it’s real, what should I do?”

  Josh became serious. “I need to see the laptop screen, in my head. Describe it to me.”

  Jack described the screen symbols, most he’d never seen before.

  Josh concentrated. “It’s the standard-issue, Odin-specific laptop device. I’m familiar with it. Now tell me, do you see a raven-like symbol on the right, toward the bottom? The icon with yellow eyes.”

  “I see it,” Jack said. The beam was an inch away.

  “Put the cursor over the icon and hit, Enter.”

  “Done,” Jack said, “Josh, what I have now is some sort of template. It just popped up. It looks like it’s for numbers, eight squares for eight numbers.”

  “Right, good so far. Now, enter in this sequence of numbers and cross your fingers.”

  “Hoping for what?” Jack said, typing in the sequence.

  “Hoping that Présage is as cocky as he looks and hasn’t changed the installed access codes. If not, I should be able to access the laptop remotely. Here it comes…”

  “You’ve got forty-five seconds, Josh. Blow the damn thing up if you have to.”

  “Got it! Holy shit, you’re right – there’s Odin! I think someone’s going to Leavenworth for a long time on this one. Hold on...”

  Jack sat helpless as he watched the screen morph into a quick series of flashes and codes as Josh sought entrance to the Odin targeting program.

  Jack turned to see the beam nearly at her temple. It was as if he could smell her skin burn. “Josh!”

  Josh’s fingers moved like a manic concert pianist, stabbing at the keys. He came to the program entrance gait and entered his back door omnibus code, a master key only he possessed.

  Lani’s skin began to singe and blacken into a thin line. Her eyelids involuntarily fluttered.

  “Josh, now!”

  The key code snaked its way to the code core. One hundred and twenty-four miles above, Odin deactivated, simply turned off, no different than a kitchen appliance. It drifted silently in space, inert, as if none of it had ever happened.

  The beam disappeared and Jack slumped into the desk chair. In the hotel room, Lani continued to sleep unaware, a three-millimeter line seared across her temple. Like the scar on her leg from the shark, it would be another reminder that she’d survived, that she was one of the survivors in this world.

  “Jack, Jack, you still there? How is she?”

  “She’s okay, Josh…she’s alright. Thanks.”

  Josh sat for a moment as a singular thought came to him, came over him, a seemingly evil thought. A perfectly symmetrical thought.

  “Jack, I’ve got an idea.”

  †

  Everyone has a dossier. Everyone has a dossier on everyone else. It’s what has happened to the world. At one time we were shocked to learn about J. Edgar Hoover’s secret blackmail files. Now it was pro forma. Now, if everyone didn’t have a file on you, you were nobody.

  Présage’s dossier – the one secretly maintained by the NSA and provided by Mac to Josh, one of their many trades – contained many unusual gaps, like ghost sections of his life had simply ceased to exist, perhaps never existed. There was one salient fact, however, that had been recorded – and that for some strange reason, Josh recalled.

  Josh reactivated Odin and the satellite whirred to life, the sounds of its programs reengaging, its solar panels repositioning, its arms and apertures recycling, all of the sounds unheard in the darkness of orbit.

  “Where did you say he was heading?” Josh yelled into the phone.

  “The VP’s office, his private office. I don’t know where it is,” Jack yelled back, adrenaline in them both.

  Josh smiled. “I do…”

  The dossier had read at the bottom, in exceedingly small type, “The Subject exhibits a physiological anomaly, possessed since birth, cause not known: a body temperature averaging 102.2 degrees…”

  The eight eyes of Odin felt the program transmitted from the surface and, as instructed, began to wait.

  “How long ago?” Josh asked.

  Jack looked at his watch. “Seven minutes, no more.”

  In his calculation, Josh assumed a certain cadence, as Présage was a tall person with a commensurate stride. Josh mapped out his probable route: down the stairs, through the White House security check points and then northwest – approximately three blocks…

  Odin’s eyes, in concert, moved in plateaus down to its targeting vantage: the eastern seaboard, clicking to the Potomac, to the city, then…

  Odin accepted the instruction and engaged.

  “It’s attempting target acquisition!” Josh shouted, staring down at his screen as he watched each of the eight eyes initiate their separate search patterns, locking onto thermals images seeking the correct description – six foot four, two hundred and twenty pounds, radiating at 102.2 degrees – before disengaging and moving on to the next, the people walking on the streets below unaware of the probes.

  Odin’s search began to increase exponentially, its tar
geting algorithm learning with each new acquisition: all glowing images, eight eyes searching at once.

  Below, the killer paused as the people on the street flowed around him, his forehead beaded with sweat from the out-of-season heat. He looked around, covering his eyes momentarily as the sun caught him from a store window. He could sense a swirling in the world, apart from the heat.

  Something made him look up.

  The first beam caught him like a bolt, the thin invisible line slicing through the cornea, through the lens and vitreous fluid, terminating at the optic nerve, exploding it, never to see again.

  The killer felt the pain and was nonplussed, observing it as it happened, his expanded powers of sight enabling him to watch as if in slow motion, as if watching someone else.

  Josh disengaged the depth limiter and released Odin for automatic/spread release, allowing the beams to spray.

  Odin’s second eye joined a millisecond later and sent a penetrating beam through the shoulder as Présage spun with the hit, throwing him to the ground as the beam kept penetrating: through the back muscles and blackening a point on the concrete below.

  Présage writhed on the sidewalk as people scattered from the grotesque form. Only a small boy looked up, catching a slight refraction off a cloud as another beam sliced down. Inside, the killer’s mind was separate from the pain, searching for the cause and finding no answers. He ordered his body to move as Odin’s third and fourth eye found him, the razor lights finding his leg, bone, marrow.

  And then, as if standing over a great chessboard, as if he were Apollo looking down on a board the size of the solar system, he saw it, the pieces falling into place…Odin! If he could only drag himself to the building or the alley, it might phase the targeting mechanism and give him a few seconds. Odin’s seventh eye missed as Présage struggled to pull his body to the building and the alley. He could see the shadows there, as if beckoning.

  Odin’s eighth eye did not miss.

  Like a white-hot sabre it moved in a cauterizing beam, through the frontal lobe and deep into the cerebellum. Présage could nearly see the line, visualize it, as it exited his brain, his mind, at the base of his skull.

  Odin stuttered as it began to lose its targeting window, moving past apogee and back into the deepness of space.

  As the beam left his mind, the killer thought of that place, the same as Lucien’s at the base of the skull, its coincidence. His last thought was of that place at the skull…and the ice pick and…the stain on the hilt.

  He was suddenly ripped off his feet and propelled backwards down a tunnel, a void, spiraling end over end. Just as suddenly, he stopped and found himself standing. He looked down, but couldn’t see his feet through a glowing fog. Ten feet in front of him, through a diaphanous cloud, stood a form. It stepped forward and he saw her face. It was Nancy Clutter, dressed in her Sunday best with the ice pick at her side. She smiled and, abruptly, her teeth turned to fangs and her face to fire.

  †

  Biaggi grabbed the railing and held tight as the ground continued to shake. He’d vacationed at Mount Etna and had felt a volcano, but never anything like this, never in Florence. He looked to his left, down the police station stairs to the man who’d lost his balance halfway up and had fallen to the bottom, at the cars that had run into each other in the shock, to the sirens wailing across the city without answer.

  In Paris, Elise steadied herself at Henri’s elbow as the tremors escalated, a woman to their left screaming as a cafe awning broke loose, glasses flying from the tables and the silverware clattering into the streets. The people looked up and at each other, running from the buildings, running from the streets.

  San Francisco, still recovering, began to groan with its next seizure, the remnants of the stadium succumbing, the fires reigniting, the waters of the bay roiling in white caps as if Poseidon himself were arising.

  The energy wave from Charybdis began circling the equator, the kinetic energy of one targeted earthquake feeding into the next, propelling the wave around the globe as it raced towards its threshold.

  In the Oval Office, President Walker received an urgent phone call as Josh relayed the information on Project Odin and apprised him that the Alaskan facility has been out of contact for six hours in a storm. They each paused before reaching the same conclusion. The president issued the order and confirmed it to Josh through encrypted hardcover. He then contacted General Hightower via the Com-Net link, issuing the instructions and providing the sequence.

  Josh entered the command as Odin’s eyes turned. In an exhibition of its prowess, Odin fired two hundred and forty-six laser strikes in near instantaneous progression, each finding the centers of the targets below.

  In the lab window, Sizemore and Norbert shielded their eyes as the horizon exploded again and again, orange and beautiful through the white, raging storm.

  Three seconds later, a gaping hole opened in the Arizona desert. The missile raised its nose skyward, turning 1.224 degrees south and 3.234 degrees west, before the desert turned to fire.

  One hundred and twenty-six miles above, Odin’s eight eyes each saw the missile closing rapidly, yet could not discern its meaning.

  In a flash heard by no one, Odin never perceived its own death.

  It had no soul.

  46

  Jack walked into the Oval Office.

  “Hey Jack,” the president smiled widely, holding up three newspapers and coming around the desk. “Have you seen all of these headlines? My God, Jack, my staff would kill for this coverage. Maybe you should consider running for my job!”

  Walker laughed, “On second thought, strike that – trust me, you don’t want it.”

  They shook hands like soldiers that had made it back alive. “Well, sir,” Jack smiled, “I’m sure glad that you wanted it.”

  “You know,” Walker said, “that’s one of the things that people don’t get, that you only find out once you get here – that once in, you can’t leave! History is watching, your kids are watching, the world a hundred years from now is watching. What, when my wife asked me if I really wanted to run for a second term, did I really have a choice? Do you think I could leave the next four years of history up to that other party, those closet brown-shirts? Hell, they would have bankrupted the place…again.”

  “Over here, Jack,” the president motioned, walking towards the couch. “So, tell me, anything you want, really. Because, no doubt, you’ve earned it.”

  Jack smiled and shook his head, “I’m fine, Mr. President. Just keep doing your job and we’ll always be even.”

  President Walker became serious, moving closer. “You don’t understand, Jack. You saved the presidency. Moreover, you saved my wife from being a widow and my children from growing up without me. It’s not a small thing. The world and Charybdis aside, this is personal. I want to do something for you both. Lani too.”

  Jack sat up straighter, returning the serious look. “What I want, sir, you can’t do. Or, rather, shouldn’t.”

  The president considered the words, his political intuition alert. He ignored it.

  “I mean it, Jack, tell me. I’ll do my best.”

  Jack walked over to the coffee table and retrieved a pen and note pad. “Trust me, you don’t want me to say this out loud.” He wrote down the two requests: one from Lani, the other his.

  They stood and the president stared at the note. “The first one, consider it done.”

  Walker then slowly moved towards his desk, continuing to stare at the note. He finally looked up, smiling, “Yours, well, that could get me impeached.”

  “That’s what I meant – it’s simply not possible. There’s not a…”

  President Walker interrupted, “It’s done too.”

  Jack squinted, “Sir, you can’t. And I mean that.”

  “Then tell me, Jack, forgetting everything else: Is it the right thing to do?”

  Jack studied him and finally nodded.

  “I can tell there’s something else,” Walker
said.

  “I want to be there when it happens.”

  The president nodded in quiet recognition. He walked over to his desk and touched a pad and a drawer opened. He dropped the paper and the drawer automatically closed, vaporizing the note.

  “Come on over here, Jack. I want to show you something.”

  He joined the president at the window as they both gazed out, side by side.

  “Take a look, Jack. Take a look at something good.”

  They stood without saying a word, the Washington Monument gleaming in the morning sun, the workers setting up the parade routes, the people laughing and celebrating on the street and no longer strangers, at least for this one day.

  They turned and looked at each other, knowing that their mission still wasn’t done.

  †

  Mac Osborne had called Jenny Huff only a day after she’d arrived back home.

  “What did he say, exactly?” Diane Huff asked. “Tell me again, Jenny. My mind must be playing tricks on me.”

  “No tricks,” Jenny had said to her mother-in-law. “All he said was that it’s important for us to go to Washington, D.C. and meet with him. He wants to show us something, show us together. He wouldn’t say what. He’s the Director of the NSA, so I assume it’s important.”

  They packed their bags with haste. Jenny called her best friend, Calinda, about watching the kids and about getting them to their soccer practices and about the exam that Danny Jr. had coming up and didn’t want to study for. Duane Huff called his buddies at the Elk’s Club and told them they’d have to find someone else at the booth for the charity barbecue that weekend. Diane Huff called her best friend, Rita, and apologized about cancelling their lunch and shopping plans for the next day, and, no, everything was fine, she just needed to go out of town for a few days.

  Jenny Huff looked from the darkened window of the NSA limousine as it drove from the airport towards the Capitol. It seemed as if she’d never left this place, a part of her still here in this city, searching for something. It was so far away, so close.