Dark Revelations

by Duane Swierczynski

  “I wasn’t lying to you when I said that I created Global Alliance to catch Labyrinth. That’s because only I knew what he was capable of, and I knew that if I ever had a chance of catching him, I’d have to assemble the best.”

  “You’re not making much sense.”

  “Before I created Global Alliance . . . I created Labyrinth.”

  Dark couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You what?”

  “This was almost fifteen years ago. We were both young and ambitious, working for an offshoot of MI6. You were part of Special Circs? Well, this was something similar—only in espionage. We were tasked with creating the ultimate agent—a man who could go anywhere, anytime, for any mission, with no limitations. Someone who could pluck an eyelash from the face of the sitting president of the United States just to prove he could do it. Literally, a man who could save the world in case of dire emergency. The code name for the project was Labyrinth.”

  “You created this motherfucker?”

  “As a force of good in the world,” Blair said. “At first, Labyrinth wasn’t a person. It was a concept. We even flipped for who would become Labyrinth.”

  “I’m guessing you lost.”

  “No. My former friend here lost. Lost himself. If I had known what madness would follow, I would have scrapped the project and burned the files.”

  “So why the fuck didn’t you tell us who we were hunting from the beginning? Knowing his real name would have been a help, for starters.”

  “Doesn’t matter what his real name was,” Blair said. “He abandoned it fifteen years ago. That was part of the project. Complete erasure of identity, so that if an enemy agent did capture Labyrinth, no reprisals could be visited upon his family. This project depended on a new name, a new face, and cutting-edge treatments and fierce field-op training. We created a laundry list of what the ultimate agent would look like, then we set about creating it—in him.”

  Dark thought about Labyrinth’s movements. The ease with which he crossed borders and thresholds and office lobbies. The way he hid his movements, his calls, his purchases, his thefts. His ability to pry his way into someone’s deepest darkest secrets. Seemed to be consistent with the abilities of an “ultimate intelligence agent.”

  But so much was left unexplained—such as the priceless artifacts, the weapons, and the funding.

  “Is he still on the Global Alliance payroll?” Dark asked. “All this time you kept bragging about your unlimited budgets and unrestrained access. That sounds a lot like what this son of a bitch has been enjoying.”

  “No,” Blair said. “I haven’t seen him in ten years. We had a . . . very violent parting of ways.”

  “What happened?”

  “We came to disagree about our mission, on the whole notion of what it meant to do good in the world. I ran specialized missions to put Labyrinth to the best possible use. However, he began to suffer delusions of grandeur—thinking he was some kind of higher being, meant to single-handedly fix the world’s ills. When I realized that the strain had been too much, and that my friend’s mind had snapped, I did what needed to be done.”

  “Which was?” Dark asked.

  “I sent a highly skilled hit team after him,” Blair said. “The elite of the elite, the military’s best manhunters. They never returned. Their bodies—never recovered. And then Labyrinth himself vanished . . . utterly and completely. But I knew he wasn’t dead. He’d just gone down deeper than he ever had before—so deep, even I couldn’t find a trace of him. Just like he had been trained to do. I moved on to other projects, but I knew Labyrinth would be back for revenge. So I slowly built Global Alliance, gathering the best operatives in the world to tackle the worst of the worst. Because I knew that someday Labyrinth would reemerge, and I would need the best possible team to neutralize him. There was no sign of him until a few weeks ago, when he emerged to send his first package to the LAPD. With that, I knew that everything I’d feared had come true. Only it wasn’t revenge he was after. All this time he’d been away, working on his plan to save the world.”

  “Save the world? By what—a campaign of terror?”

  “But it’s not a terror campaign at all. From that first package, I knew what he was doing. He was trying to turn the world.”

  Dark stared at him, waiting for him to explain.

  Blair smiled. “It was Labyrinth’s most prized ability—to be able to turn an individual. Flip an enemy from their side to your side. Coax a source into surrendering top secret information.”

  “How?”

  “At first it was a joke between us—the idea that we were leading a lab mouse through a series of corridors until he reached the center of the labyrinth. But instead of finding cheese, the poor mouse would offer up his own cheese. Gladly. Willingly. We ran many experiments in Eastern Europe—volunteers, for the most part. Labyrinth here became quite adept at running people through the corridors of their own mind, knowing exactly which buttons to push to make them scurry one way, or another. At first we used a certain regiment of drugs to soften up our subjects, but soon Labyrinth could work just as well without them. Give him a day, and he could turn your life inside out . . . just by speaking to you.”

  All at once Dark realized what Blair meant by turning the world. Labyrinth’s entire campaign was about leading the world itself, the hive mind of modern social media, down a series of corridors until they gave him what he wanted.

  Control.

  Domination.

  A voice spoke up from behind Dark.

  “Well, it didn’t work on you, Damien.”

  chapter 81

  LABYRINTH

  Oh yes.

  I am awake.

  I’ve been awake the whole time.

  I know how to take the worst blows any mortal can offer. So I let Dark beat me and handcuff me and think he had the upper hand.

  I know that I am in no real danger of being apprehended or killed.

  They can’t stop my plans now.

  No matter how hard they try.

  I also admit—I also wanted to hear my old friend DAMIEN’s explanation. And I must say, it is not entirely satisfactory.

  His version of our association, of our mission, makes our experiment sound like a bad television movie of the week.

  Oooh, the noble spy, just trying to do the right thing until his mentally imbalanced friend BETRAYED HIM and left him to pick up the pieces....

  Such utter SHIT.

  Like everything else in the world, the truth about my origin is far messier, far more complex, far more subtle than what Blair can stammer through in his ham-handed attempt to shoot me in the face and erase what he perceives as the biggest mistake of his life.

  We are the parents of the NEW ORDER, Damien, can’t you see that? But you shy away from your parental responsibilities, fearful of the implication, still wrapped up in some misguided religious guilt.

  You are the facilitator.

  I AM THE DOER.

  Just as always.

  But instead of a warm powerful glow, you see blood on your hands.

  It is not blood

  Good sir

  IT IS THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE NEW AGE

  Yes

  Yes

  Yes

  YOU ARE WEAK YOU WERE ALWAYS WEAK SO EAGER TO OPEN NEW DOORWAYS BUT SO RELUCTANT TO STEP THROUGH THEM, DAMIEN! IF THE COIN HAD TILTED TO THE RIGHT INSTEAD OF THE LEFT IT COULD BE YOU INHABITING MY SKIN . . .

  BUT IT DIDN’T

  FATE ANOINTED ME!

  And that

  KILLS YOU, DOESN’T IT?

  But I don’t speak these thoughts aloud. There is the inner me and the outer me; the outer me moves me through the world and the inner me knows that he will someday rule it.

  chapter 82

  DARK

  Dark turned to face Labyrinth, who was still handcuffed to the operating table. The man was smirking, even with blood running down from his hairline and nasty purple bruises forming on his battered flesh. Labyrinth was gloating. I
nstinctively, Dark knew that meant something else was in play—another attack under way. Labyrinth was still running them around the maze. Which was all the more reason to keep the fucker alive. Killing him would only make it more difficult to stop the death trap he’d already set into motion.

  “So I’m going to end this,” Blair said quietly.

  “No,” Dark said.

  “Tell me, Dark—what did Blair promise you to make you join his little team? Did he tell you he’d keep the monsters away from your little girl, Sibby? Did he promise you peace, of some kind? Keep you so busy chasing the so-called bad guys that you’d have no time to brood over your dead wife?”

  “He needs to die now,” Blair said. “Step aside.”

  “We have him,” Dark said. “We don’t need to kill him. We’ll make him sing.”

  “What, are you going to pour water down my throat, Dark? Make me gurgle until I . . . how did you put it, sing?”

  “He’s smarter than that,” Blair said.

  “I am, Steve Dark. Oh, I am! So, so smart. You should listen to the man. He thinks he created me, after all.”

  “I’ll shoot through you if I have to,” Blair said.

  “Then stop talking about it and just fucking do it.”

  “Yes!” Labyrinth cried. “Do it! Pull the trigger! Please please please! It will help things considerably!”

  And then something exploded above them.

  Glass beads rained down as Hans Roeding rappelled down from the skylight, gun in hand, trained on Labyrinth’s head. And it stayed trained on Labyrinth all the way down, until Roeding’s boots landed with a dull crunch on shattered glass. At the same moment, Natasha and O’Brian came smashing through the doors to the operating theater. The cavalry had arrived.

  But then Roeding surprised them all by swinging his arm around so that he was aiming at Blair.

  “Drop the gun, Blair,” Roeding said.

  Both Natasha and O’Brian cried out, confused—what the fuck are you doing? Why are you threatening Blair? What’s going on? Dark, however, knew what was going on. The note he’d received in the hospital had been a taunt from Labyrinth, but it also was the truth. He had infiltrated the ranks of Global Alliance. He’d turned Hans Roeding. God knows what it took to run the tough old soldier through the tortured maze of his own mind.

  “Hans, no—don’t tell me . . . not you . . .”

  “The gun. Now.”

  Blair turned his attention back to Labyrinth, who had a beatific smile on his face.

  “Heads, you lose,” Labyrinth said.

  An anguished wail blasted from Blair’s mouth, a cry of betrayal, of frustration, of ultimate rage, and suddenly, he didn’t care that he had a gun pointed at his own head. All that mattered was killing his creation.

  But when he squeezed the trigger—it, of course, did nothing.

  That’s because Hans Roeding took care of all weapons for Global Alliance, from blades to handguns to shoulder-launched rockets.

  Hans Roeding had been working for Labyrinth all along, which meant he had installed cutoff devices triggered by the sound of his master’s voice. Try to shoot Labyrinth with one of Roeding’s guns, and the gun would shut down. Revert to a useless lump of iron. Roeding—the Global Alliance weapons master—could also easily fill a Glock 19 with blanks. That’s what had happened in Edinburgh. Dark had been shooting with fucking blanks! If Dark had been using a gun with live ammunition, Labyrinth would have been stopped back then.

  Blair realized the depths of Roeding’s betrayal as his finger and thumb squeezed hard again on the trigger, and absolutely nothing happened.

  “No,” he said. “No no no, I vetted you, I vetted all of you. . . .”

  “Enough,” Roeding said and snapped off two shots. Tandem bursts of blood sprayed out of Blair’s chest as he was lifted off his feet and thrown backward. The cry that escaped Blair’s mouth was surprisingly shrill, like from a child who’d suffered his first pair of skinned knees.

  Natasha put her own gun to Roeding’s head and squeezed the trigger and—

  Nothing.

  Roeding spun around, gun now pointed at Natasha’s midsection. There was the hint of a smile on his face, the first time Dark had ever seen such a thing. He wasn’t just carrying out his master’s orders. He was enjoying this.

  Dark reacted instantly—crouching down, picking up the bloody scalpel and winging it through the air. It embedded itself in the side of Roeding’s throat.

  The soldier coughed, took a step to the side. Blood dribbled past his lips.

  “Bitch.”

  Natasha leaped out of the way as Roeding fired anyway, bullets blasting through wooden benches over two centuries old, before he fell to his knees and dropped the gun. A puppet with his strings cut.

  Before he bled out, however, Roeding whispered something. Dark caught it on the edge of his hearing:

  “Enter the maze.”

  What did that mean?

  Hans Roeding was dead before he could answer.

  On the floor, Labyrinth was still gloating. All of this was just too vastly entertaining.

  “Well, so much for Global Alliance,” he said. “Let’s see, we’ve got one team leader dead, one betrayer dead . . . leaving the emotionally compromised newbie, the fetching linguist, and the drunk geek.”

  Dark crouched down so that he was eye to eye with Labyrinth. “You’re going to be locked up for the rest of your life. That is, until they decide to stick a needle in your arm. All in all, I’d rather be the emotionally compromised newbie.”

  Labyrinth smiled. “Don’t worry. I can still lead you to the promised land. You can still complete your mission, even without Mr. Blair. Do you want the next riddle, team?”

  “Fuck you,” Natasha said, then checked Roeding’s vitals—there were none—before prying the gun loose from his dead hand.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  The man who called himself Labyrinth smiled and closed his bruised eyes and recited aloud in a mock stentorian tone: NEVER WAS, AM ALWAYS TO BE. NO ONE EVER SAW ME , NOR EVER WILL. AND YET I AM THE CONFIDENCE OF ALL, TO LIVE AND BREATHE ON THIS TERRESTRIAL BALL. WHAT AM I?

  Dark knew the answer. The riddles were never the problem. Once you started to think in terms of metaphor and code, the answers began to appear more clearly. The keys in the riddle were the words was and to be. Tenses. Past, and future. The speaker wasn’t a person, it was an abstract concept.

  Dark said,

  “The answer is the future.”

  “Say it, Steve Dark. Tell me I am the future. Say it! I AM THE FUTURE!”

  But Dark ignored him.

  “Where are the other clues?” Natasha asked. “The who, and the when?”

  “Well, you interrupted me before I had a chance to leave them. You’ll find the who up on the third level. As for the when . . . did you know that all surgeries in this theater used to be conducted in the daylight only?”

  Dark glanced over at Natasha, who was already on the move, racing up the creaking wooden stairs to the third level. But was she racing into another trap? Dark was overcome with the horrible feeling that Labyrinth had engineered all of this, every last move, in this operating theater.

  Maybe Blair had been right all along. That the only way to beat Labyrinth was to enter the maze with him.

  “I didn’t know that,” Dark said. “Why the daylight?”

  “Because there was no electric lighting. Come on, Dark, I thought you were sharper than that. The surgeons had to rely on optimal daylight, streaming in from above. Most procedures were performed from eleven A.M. until about two P.M.”

  Natasha called from above, “I’ve got a locked trunk up here. I’m going to open it.”

  “Don’t,” Dark said, then grabbed Labyrinth by his throat and squeezed. “I’m going to make him open it for us.”

  Yeah—enter the maze with him, then kick his ass and force him to show you the way out.

  “I assure you, Natasha Garcon,” Labyrinth sai
d, his voice strained, “that there is nothing dangerous inside that trunk. You may open it without fear.”

  Never trust the fucking monsters. Never. Dark implored her—

  “Goddamnit, don’t do it. . . .”

  The crack of a gunshot echoed through the amphitheater. “Lock’s off. Opening it.” Labyrinth smiled, shaking his head gently back and forth. He kept his eyes—which seemed to grow blacker by the second—locked on Dark.

  “Well?” O’Brian called out. “What’s inside of it?”

  Natasha’s voice was hesitant, uncertain. “Photographs,” she said. “Appears to be hundreds . . . maybe even thousands of baby photographs. Recent, vintage, color, black-and-white, all kinds.”

  Dark’s mind raced. A trunk full of baby photos. The second artifact, beyond the timepiece, always pointed to the victim. Was Labyrinth trying to say that he was going to kill thousands of children? Or already had?

  “So . . . what the bloody hell does it mean?” said O’Brian.

  Labyrinth rolled his eyes.

  “So impatient that you don’t even want to flex that fat gray muscle in your skull, Mr. O’Brian? Actually, you’ll like this one, since your Irish Catholic mother no doubt squeezed out you and your multiple siblings as often as bowel movements.”

  “Dark, you’re closer. Will you push some teeth down the fucker’s throat?”

  Labyrinth continued,

  “The notion of family has become corrupted. With adultery, divorce, stepfamilies, single families, family doesn’t mean anything anymore. The idea of the nuclear family will be reimagined! We’ll treat everyone as family! One family under Labyrinth! We should equally love and support each other, regardless of heritage. Wipe the slate clean. Start over.”

  Start over . . .

  Dark realized what Labyrinth had done.

  “The photos . . . in random order. He’s fucked with the birth records.”

  “Good, good,” Labyrinth said. “How did I do it? What gave me access?”