Midnight Zone: a Cade Rearden Thriller

by JK Franks

“Okay, Nomad, can’t wait. Gotta run, the Coasties are signaling that they are closing in on the coordinates.”

  “Roger that, we should be there within the hour.”

  Micah’s eyes were open; he was staring up at a diffused white light. The dreams came and went with ferocity. Now his conscious mind was attempting to catalog and coordinate what his subconscious had seen and learned. Fingers felt something, a bottle. He was unbelievably hot and thirsty; his body wasn’t moving correctly no matter what he did, and every joint ached. In the more lucid minutes, he realized he was in a boat, or maybe a raft. It smelled vaguely of plastic, like a kid’s pool float that had been lying in the sun too long. His head seemed to be touching a soft rail, or maybe it was a pillow, and he had a distinct sensation of moving up and down rhythmically.

  Slowly, the memories came swimming up from somewhere distant. Memories of a chase, an attack, friends that were with him, but now he was sure he was alone. Darkness began to tunnel his vision, the gauzy sunlight flickering on the verge of going out. He didn’t want to slip down the long tunnel into unconsciousness again. The nonstop flood of chaos, incomprehensible symbols, images, maybe even languages. His head pounded, but that might just be the thirst.

  Slowly, Micah commanded the fingers of his right hand to open and then to grasp the plastic bottle. It was cool to the touch. With a near Herculean force of will, he managed to move the bottle slightly from side to side. It had weight, mass, something was in it. Now he just had to get it to his mouth. Why am I paralyzed, why can’t I move? Maybe I’m still asleep. Something happens when you sleep to keep the body somewhat paralyzed. What was that, how do I know that? Darkness surrounded him; madness began to claw its way back. It wanted him.

  Sounds echoed through Micah’s head, occasionally joined by the steady lapping of water, but also distant muted voices. Why are we underwater? It sounded like when they were kids and he, Alan, and Jimmy would go to the pool at the American Legion. They would dive to the bottom and try to talk to each other underwater. Nothing would be understandable, but they would rise to the surface laughing and guessing what the other had said. Water, he needed water. Why would anyone be talking to me from underwater now?

  With agonizing difficulty, he unscrewed the cap on the water bottle. He dipped a single finger into the open bottle and felt the cool wetness. If he could just get that finger to his lips, maybe he would be okay. Sadly, he couldn’t even withdraw the finger from the bottle now. Darkness closed in once more.

  59

  Washington D.C.

  Brenda “Chaps” Morgan had only flown Director Stansfield a few times, but never quite like this. The director marched off the steps of the jet just ahead of her.

  “Leave your copilot to prep for the flight south. I want you with me, Morgan, and bring your sidearm.”

  “Always do,” Brenda said, joining the woman as she slid into the waiting SUV.

  Twenty minutes later, the car pulled into a private lot off Constitution Avenue. Margaret sighed; the last time she’d been here had been one of the most frustrating days of her career. Today would be different, very different. The director swiped a badge and entered through a plain metal door into a richly decorated corridor. The two women climbed a flight of stairs before Margaret stopped and faced the pilot.

  “Morgan, you know where you are?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “I need you to listen very carefully. Do whatever I ask in the next few minutes, okay? No questions. Whatever I say, you need to do it. Is that clear?”

  Confused, Chaps nodded, “Of course ma’am. You are the boss.”

  “Damn right I am,” Margaret said as she climbed a second set of older, narrower stairs and opened a door neatly concealed in the dark wood paneling. “Senator.”

  To say the man sitting behind the enormous desk was surprised would have been a massive understatement. Brenda only knew the man by reputation but had heard he’d had a hand in all the shit behind Janus and The Troubles.

  “Uh..uh, Margaret, what a pleasure.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Byron.” Margaret snapped. The stunned expression on the fat mans face made it clear he knew who was in charge.

  The senator had risen at the unexpected interruption and now began to sit back down. “Oh, no, not there,” Margaret said angrily, punching a button on the desk phone and handing the receiver to the senator. “Tell your receptionist you are not to be disturbed.” The man took the phone with a shaky hand and did so. Then Margaret pointed for him to sit on the other side of the desk, in the diminutive chair the man normally reserved for his guests.

  Byron Carson maneuvered himself awkwardly around the elaborate desk, using it for support.

  “How’s the knee?” Margaret said with a grin.

  “That bastard nearly caused me to lose the leg. You know what he did, don’t you?”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about Senator.”

  “After he shot me in the knee, the bastard fucking stole my dog.”

  Margaret had been sitting on the side of the desk towering over the now quivering man and now leaned down until she was right in his face. “Never, ever refer to any member of my team in that way again. Do I make myself clear? Captain Rearden would have been well within his rights to have ended your pathetic life, you filthy piece of shit.” She leaned back, looking at the man. “Damn, Carson, eat a fucking salad once in a while and lay off the cigars. What good does it do me to have kept you alive if you keep trying to kill yourself?”

  He nodded. “Wh..what do you want, Margaret?”

  “I want you to answer my questions, Byron.” She spat the man’s name out like it left a bad taste in her mouth. “I also want to make sure you are going to be completely forthcoming. Otherwise, I am going to have my assistant shoot you in the other knee.” Glancing up, she made eye contact with Chaps, who nodded, removed her handgun, and shifted to the other side of the seated man.

  “Wait, wait,” the senator said in a tone that was reserved for roller coaster rides ridden by teenage girls. “Of course, I will tell you anything, that was our agreement.”

  “You’ve already broken our agreement, Carson. The names you gave Rearden, your accomplices, your friends. You left a few off, didn’t you?”

  “No, I…I mean, I don’t think so. I was in pain, I’m not sure what all I said.”

  “I have a recording; would you like me to play it? Maybe it will help motivate you to be more truthful this time.”

  “No, no, please. Margaret, I wouldn’t do that, I am a patriot. I didn’t know how far Janus was going to go. Besides, haven’t I done everything you asked since then? I made sure your project got the charter, your name was never linked to any government program.”

  She knew the man was being only halfway truthful. He had done the big things they’d demanded, but he’d also done his best to find out where The Cove was. Apparently, Janus didn’t offer much in the way of intel to his underling, and this political scumbag had been head of the minions.

  “Someone else was behind this, I…I asked Janus about that many times, but it never gave me anything.”

  “Byron, you are a piece of shit, but you’ve never been stupid. I feel sure you used your assets to chase down the possibilities. I don’t want your accomplices; I want to know about Ivan Thrall.” Doris had supplied her the name, but how she got it was still a mystery. She’d said that the CommDot on Nance had picked up a voice that matched Thrall’s perfectly.

  It was obvious the name hit home. The senator made no suggestion indicating he thought the man was dead and the question absurd. Quite the opposite, in fact. “I’m terribly sorry but I don’t know, Director.”

  “Sorry?” Margaret said flatly. “Forgiveness is between you and God Senator. I simply view it as my job to arrange the meeting.” Turning to her pilot, “Chaps, when you shoot him try not to get blood on my outfit.” Morgan adjusted her position and aimed at the man’s kneecap. “I understand knee wounds are some of the most
painful and the most difficult to recover from.”

  Silent tears were streaming down the senator’s face and an expanding circle of darker fabric appeared in the crotch of his dress slacks. “Please…please, no.”

  “No, that probably won’t work. Just put the gun under his chin, we can make it look like a suicide. The evidence that will suddenly appear in the press would have ruined the senator, anyway. They will assume this was the only way he had to avoid prosecution. Check the desk, I feel sure the senator has his own gun somewhere in there.”

  If the senator had been terrified before, now he was completely apoplectic, descending into a fit of snot, tears, and sobs. “One chance, Senator,” Margaret said through gritted teeth.

  “Found it,” Brenda said, holding up a small Beretta wrapped inside a white handkerchief.

  “Good, don’t get your prints on it. They aren’t in any database, but why raise questions?”

  “Thrall,” the man sobbed out. “Thrall built the code for the AI.”

  “We fucking know that, you goddamn imbecile,” Director Stansfield said. “He built it, and the NSA stole it.”

  “Not the NSA,” the man said, voice still hitching. The smell of fresh urine wafted upward from the pitiful excuse of humanity’s finest. “The DOD.”

  This was new information. She held a hand up to pause Brenda from any more threats right now. “What would the Department of Defense’s interest be?”

  Carson’s voice was shaking, “DARPA really. Ivan had something. A top secret project, something called Saraph. It means angel. A saraph is a type of celestial, or heavenly, being, the word originating in ancient Judaism. That was the code name the Israeli scientists originally gave the project, the DOD simply referred to it as the Angel.”

  “None of that is in any files, Senator,” Margaret said.

  “It wouldn’t be, totally self-contained. Just another black budget boondoggle. Nothing much came from it other than Prime, but it was apparent to all of us that Thrall was a genius.”

  “What did Janus have to do with any of this?”

  Margaret checked the feed from Doris indicating that the man was apparently under duress but being truthful.

  “Margaret, none of this should be connected to Janus. The original version, at Cryptus, was needed as a tool for analyzing or decoding some ancient script or something. I was never fully read in. We are the ones who made the software into a hunter killer AI.”

  “So, the original purpose of Janus was simply as a faster research tool?” That in itself was frightening, but what could have needed that level of processing power?

  “The project was very complex,” the senator continued. “It involved very advanced data storage, flight systems, pressure hulls. It was wide ranging. Too wide ranging, as it turned out, and terrifying. For a while, Thrall delivered just enough to keep the military happy. He obviously wasn’t interested in providing much of anything tangible to the Defense Department. Eventually, they wanted more than even he could produce. A few of my colleagues decided the most valuable asset was the AI software.”

  “So, they shut him down,” Margaret said.

  “And seized Janus, or Prime, or whatever it was called,” Carson replied, finally regaining a degree of his composure. “Then the boondoggle became ours to deal with, and we massively fucked that up, too.”

  “Go back,” she said. “You mentioned Judaism. What did Israel have to do with this, and what was the Saraph?”

  Carson leaned back and tried to get comfortable in the awkward little chair, “That goes back a long way, Director. Long before either of us were in the picture.

  From what I understand, an Israeli scientist had gotten hold of something important. This was back in the late forties, not too long after the war ended. The only description I ever read was it was the most important biological discovery ever made. Naturally, in time, the United States decided they wanted it, so they used the Six-Day War in 1967 to steal it. Unfortunately, things didn’t go to plan. The Navy ship involved was attacked by Israel, and the artifact was supposedly lost in the battle. For a while, it was thought the Russians might have even had it.”

  Margaret searched her memory. Something about the senator’s statement seemed familiar. “The USS Liberty. It was attacked in the summer of sixty-seven by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats. Lots of American sailors killed and injured, but the whole event was pretty much white-washed from any investigation.”

  “Or the history books, which is even more important in this town,” Carson added, daring to express a small bit of humor into the still tense conversation. “I know, if the sample, or research, or whatever it was vanished, how did Thrall wind up with it?”

  “Yes, Senator, that would be the magic question.” Data started streaming along the lower lenses of Margaret’s eyeglasses.

  “Check the crew manifest for the Liberty, that might explain it,” Carson said.

  ‘Seaman First Class, Peter Thrall from Walnut Creek, California.’ The feed from Doris froze on the name. “His father was on the Liberty,” Margaret said.

  “Impressive. Yes, the U.S. had an asset onboard as well. He’d been the man charged with acquiring the material and, hopefully, the scientist. But the scientist didn’t survive as far as we can tell. We assumed Thrall’s father somehow found the information and understood enough to keep it hidden until he was stateside, and then he guided his son’s academic path in an attempt to understand what they had.”

  “That’s really playing the long-game. So, the material was biological. So, the Saraph is alive—was alive? Why would Thrall’s father have pushed him into a degree in computer engineering if that were true?” Margaret didn’t want to tip her own hand, but the question seemed like a logical one for the discussion.

  “No…no,” Carson said worriedly. “It’s beyond my understanding. I know one part was some sort of organic-based data storage system. Massive amounts of data embedded in strands of DNA. It was not binary code either, really advanced stuff, but neither the biological side nor the computer portion were the important stuff. The data itself was what seemed to hold such promise. The tiny bits I saw could have revolutionized the world. We know now at least one component could have had devastating potential if weaponized. In the end, though, it was just too hard to decipher reliably.”

  “What would that component have done?” Margaret asked.

  Carson shook his head and actually laughed. “It was one of Thrall’s side projects. You know how he liked to think of himself as such an environmentalist. He was obsessed with protecting the oceans and, well, apparently his yacht got stuck in the floating garbage patch of the north Pacific. You know the place—they say it’s the size of Texas where all the plastic and garbage of the entire ocean seems to come together in one massive floating dump. Thrall was sailing from Japan to one of his homes in Fairbanks, it was nighttime, everyone asleep, and the boat was on autopilot and, well, it ground to a halt. The prop had fouled in some abandoned fishing nets. Apparently scared the shit out of him. He woke up the next morning in the midst of garbage, mounds of it as far as the eye could see. In places, he said the ocean had piled it one on top of the other until the garbage was as deep as the boat’s sides.

  “Anyway,” Carson went on, “he had to call for help, but eventually managed to cut away the netting, raise sails, and get to open water. Apparently, humans polluting the world’s waterways was just too much for him, so be began pouring money and research into the Oceania side project. Using some of the information from the Saraph data, he claimed to have a way of eliminating pollution forever.

  “Oh, um…he called it Icarus. We could barely understand the concept, but somehow, it was supposed to use dark energy combined with helium-3 and some other exotic components to build a space-based system that could dramatically alter the planet's weather pattern or something.”

  “I’m confused, how would that help end pollution?” Margaret asked.

  “Simple, Director. He could target and kil
l the worst offenders. The system design included a pulsed energy device that could target nearly any region of the planet for total annihilation.”

  Stansfield nodded, “Senator, what was the asset’s name? The one who stole it from Israel.”

  Carson searched his memory, the obscure bit of intel nearly lost in the vast secret vault of his mind. “It was an odd name, a Jewish name…um, Golette, Ishel Golette.”

  “You knew that Thrall had survived, didn’t you?” Margaret asked with thinly veiled annoyance. “After his shipwreck, I mean.”

  “No, no, I didn’t know.” The senator looked nervously at Chaps who still held his gun, then glanced uneasily around his office, one of the largest and most impressive of any sitting U.S. senator. “I suspected, yes. The timing seemed too convenient, and later, Janus seemed to bring in a lot of people that were formerly attached to Cryptus and Project Saraph. A few too many for it to just be coincidence.”

  “Any chance we haven’t tracked them all down yet? Who else should be on our radar?”

  Carson ran a hand over his face and seemed to notice his incontinence problem for the first time. “I, uh…Cryptus had a lot of financial backers. Starting there would be a good suggestion. There was one other man. I don’t recall ever knowing his real name, but they referred to him as The Lion. He and Thrall were close, but I only saw him once after Thrall disappeared.”

  Carson was obviously reluctant to continue. Brenda moved a little closer, exposing the short barrel of the Beretta. “He…he was in the DARPA control hub when Janus, you know, when he executed Domino Team. I didn’t fully understand it but decided not to pursue it. He obviously had clearance to be there. In fact, I think he may have owned the paramilitary security group that was running the op.”

  Margaret thought about it, “No name, no anything. How can we find this man?”

  “I, um…I had someone track him. They never got a fixed location, but that person may know.”