Abyss (Songs of Megiddo)

by Klieve, Daniel

  And it would’ve been a fair question. A question he would’ve had no helpful answers to.

  Still. As disturbing as every contour of the situation seemed to be rapidly becoming, Dio had faith in The Organisation. Faith that they’d be taken care of. And, up until that point, he’d never had a reason to question that faith.

  “Okay.” Wright rubbed his hands together, turning back to the two of them. “You can go through, now.”

  “Through to where?” Yvonne asked. Wright smiled an understanding little smile.

  “It’s intelligent to question, Yvonne. And it’s reasonable to expect answers. But I’m not the one to give them to you. Would it reassure you to know that I went through what you’re about to go through? All generalists like myself do. As do all the ‘intakes’ of Palatine. As do many of the recruits.” He chuckled, reaching over to squeeze her shoulder. “We may be a faceless, global, clandestine, ideologically motivated, morally complicated super-conglomerate...but...gosh,” He laughed. “We still have to kowtow to the bureaucrats. That’s all this is. You understand?

  “That’s all this is?” Yvonne repeated back with abridged emphasis, raising an eyebrow. “Screening, induction, and paperwork?”

  “That sort of thing, yes,” Wright offered vaguely. Dio could tell, from her unchanged eyes, that she was far from reassured. Turning, Wright led them down a corridor off to the left of the reception desk. Three doors down on the right side, Wright reached up, and rapped briefly on the cold, white-glazed metal.

  “Come, please.” The muffled voice sounded out from within. A woman’s voice, Dio concluded after a moment’s consideration. Wright turned the knob and pushed open the door, ushering Dio and Yvonne inside.

  “This is where I leave you,” Wright smiled. Yvonne turned back, eyes full of confusion.

  “What? Why?”

  “No fear, Yvonne...no fear, my girl.” He instructed reassuringly, before leaning a little closer, and with a deadpan stage whisper: “They can smell that, you see...” He paused, their faces inches apart: nerves and trepidation versus cold, amused unreadability. Wright pulled back, laughing heartily, before walking out and closing the door behind him.

  “Was that a joke?” Dio muttered, looking around at the empty, square, white room in which they now found themselves.

  “If it was, it wasn’t fucking funny,” Yvonne replied, hugging herself around the midsection and walking cautiously forward, into the centre of the room. “That bitch, Smoke...” She muttered.

  “What about her?”

  “Just...what she said. I’m really on edge, here.” She paused; eyes narrowing: “You heard that voice, didn’t you? Saying to ‘come in’?”

  “Yeah.” Dio confirmed.

  “So why are we alone in here?”

  “We’re not.” Dio observed, pointing into the top left hand corner of the wall they were facing. A small tube capped with rounded glass hung from a few inches of exposed aluminium. Yvonne regarded the camera with suspicion.

  “I’ve seen a room like this before...” Yvonne murmured.

  “So have I...” Dio’s voice wavered; threatening to break. He thought back to that room; the white room in Tel Aviv. The one where he was tortured.

  VII – Liminality

  ~ Kayla ~

  23/11/2023

  The first speech was from a very wealthy, very old friend of Naithe’s parents, by the name of Rembrandt Donovan.

  He was one of those people who didn’t seem entirely real, even when you were talking to them face-to-face and one-to-one. He’d been everywhere and done everything. I’d always thought of him as a kind of...partly senile Richard Branson. By the time he reached the ten minute mark, I was craving nicotine. Badly.

  Thankfully, I knew Donovan was there more for Naithe’s parents – in particular, I suspected, Naithe’s mother – than for us, and felt comfortable discreetly ducking out. I kissed Naithe on the cheek, pushing back my seat as quietly as possible and slipping my feet into the incredibly uncomfortable, entirely impractical, utterly gorgeous shoes I’d chosen to wear. I’d always been a fan – in theory – of those strappy heels with criss-crossed lacing up the calves. In theory. I felt slightly less like a Greek goddess while awkwardly doubled over...half-under the table...corset threatening to crack ribs while I tried to strap myself into them. Aside from Naithe snickering quietly to himself – which I made a mental note about needing to punish him for later – it hadn’t seemed to have attracted any unnecessary attention, and thankfully, it was dark enough that no one was really too likely to notice me slipping away; regardless of whether or not they’d mind.

  “Enjoy your cancer, sweetheart,” Naithe stage-whispered after me.

  “Always do, honey...” I tossed back at him, blowing him a kiss as I almost skipped my way outside, trying not to trip over myself in the ridiculous heels I was wearing.

  There was a little corridor to the left that ran down, past the kitchen and bar, and onto a veranda that looked out over the car-park. I slipped out and down the small run of stairs that joined the two. Standing there, half in the dark at the edge of the lake of bitumen, I shivered. What sounded like a curlew called out from somewhere off in the distance. I fished around in my purse, finding my cigarettes...pulling one out and slipping it between my lips, before fumbling around in the mess of flotsam and jetsam for a lighter. Finding one, I settled back against the thick trunk of an anonymous tree, folding one securely strapped-up leg over the other under the weight of the long, layered white dress.

  Funny. I remember thinking: Funny: how we take random bits and pieces from distant memories of far off places, and superimpose them on wherever we end up until that, too, becomes familiar to the point of predictable.

  The sound of curlews calling out at night was something I hadn’t heard in a very long time. Not since the holidays my parents had taken me on to Queensland, really. I’d been scared of them at first. It was such a haunting, otherworldly sound, and it made its way across the landscape – thin and wafting; every call a perfect replication of the last – blown through the underbrush on invisible currents of crisp, murmuring, post-dusk breeze. The first time I heard them, I remember thinking that it must have been the moon. It looked so lonely, up there by itself in the heart of the dark sky...and it didn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that it might be singing away the lonely night. Or crying. Crying its lonely heart out.

  Ironically...for most of the tenth year of my life – and what I could remember of the years leading up to it – I was just another little girl with a messed up home-life. So I had yet to reach a point where I could fully relate to such a characterisation.

  There was something about those calls, though, that transcended location. Always the same; always echoing out above the other late evening noises. Even near the beach, we could hear the cries of the curlews over the hypnotic metronome of the incoming tide. I never really found any resolution, there. I’d never stopped feeling uncomfortable when I heard those haunting calls. It almost made me laugh – the way that the curlews called to mind a lack of catharsis; a barren, unresolved space in time...like I was stuffing far too much meaning into something exceedingly unremarkable – until the pieces slipped into place and I remembered why that was the case, and how it related to the ‘why’ of those trips having stopped.

  Funny. I thought bitterly. Funny: the things we can’t bring ourselves to remember. Funny: the things we shouldn’t let ourselves forget.

  I held the lighter up to the cigarette wedged tightly – the filter squashed flat, as if by the weight of my neuroses – between my lips. I flicked at it with my thumb – once...twice...three times – and held steady until the tip of the cigarette was engulfed in a miasma of swirling orange.

  “Chilly, KK?” Meg sidled up. She dropped Naithe’s suit jacket over my shoulders, and I carefully shrugged into it around the lit cigarette: passing it from hand to hand.

  “Nutmeg.” I grinned. She smiled back at me, lighting her cigarette. “I feel l
ike we should be wearing trench-coats and Fedoras.”

  “More like tin-foil Fedoras, if you catch my drift.”

  “Ahh.” I smiled knowingly. “That.”

  A few months ago, there’d been a massive explosion in the sky above New York City. The shockwave had shattered thousands of windows and glass storefronts, and wreaked havoc with computers and automated systems of all kinds. Despite what specialists had been referring to as the ‘unavoidably similar profiles’ of the blast and a mid-sized nuclear detonation, there was no radiation. In fact, there was nothing but a lot of smashed windows and messed up computers to evidence that it had even happened in the first place.

  For about a week after the blast, it’d been damage control. The week after that had seen a massive number of claims, news stories and photographs that, supposedly, pointed to a conspiracy by the American government to cover up something about the blast. Something alien, or, more likely, odd and unprecedented enough to challenge the public understanding of American military capabilities, and the capabilities of hostile nations interested in destabilising the superpower.

  As you’d expect, by and large, such claims were met with scepticism. From where I stood, the reactions were widely considered to be, as my Editor had put it: “tabloidy as fuck”, and most decent journalists knew better than to get involved outside very matter-of-fact engagement with the particulars of the aftermath.

  This was the case, at least, until the claims started to go away. Some of them were obvious hoaxes, and these had dropped off the radar to little or no effect. Other ‘witnesses’ had simply decided to change their minds, which was mostly dismissed as their reconsidering their positions as the initial excitement began to die down. In a small handful of cases – small being an extremely relative term – witnesses couldn’t be found.

  These cases were the ones that had created initial interest. The next major development was the revelation that, alongside these cases, numerous people – many of them very, very important people – were going missing. From all over the United States. Without explanation: Without a trace. And I mean that literally: there was no forensic or eyewitness evidence in any of these cases. At all.

  Cases fitting this profile began to be referred to as ‘The Disappearances’: an ever-growing list of people who had just vanished, as if into thin air.

  The interest rapidly became an obsession. The obsession became an international media gold rush. There hadn’t been a frenzy like it since the first Damascus Incident. Journalists – mostly American, but many not – converged on the locales where the most of The Disappearances had taken place. Not entirely selflessly, I’d managed to negotiate my way into covering the Disappearance of the Weisbrod Aircraft Museum’s Director of Restorations in Pueblo: Ambrose Portokolos.

  Darren – my Editor in Melbourne – had a relationship with a couple of senior people at the Colorado Tribune, who had agreed to sponsor me for a work visa so long as they didn’t have to pay me, and received equal access to everything I wrote. It’d seemed like a completely unfair deal to me, so I’d been shocked – and, if I’m honest...maybe even a little insulted – when Darren had enthusiastically packed me off to Pueblo, agreeing to keep paying my salary while I was gone.

  I hadn’t, up until then, realised that Meg had any interest whatsoever in The Disappearances. I told her so. She rolled her eyes, and shrugged as if to say ‘I know, right?’

  “Lilum Multinational is pretty much at war with the US government over it.” She explained. “We have this division – you wouldn’t have heard of it; I hadn’t heard of it until about a week ago – that do analysis on satellite imagery. Or...telemetry? Honestly, this really isn’t my wheelhouse, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.”

  “Sure.” I shrugged.

  “Anyway: they do a lot of work with NASA and the European Space Agency...and a lot of that work is really high level.” I nodded.

  “You don’t get much more ‘high level’ than ‘in orbit’, right?” She smirked.

  “I’m only dignifying that with a smile because it’s your wedding day. We’ve been over this.”

  “Naithe thinks it’s cute.” I insisted.

  “When it comes to you, Naithe thinks Gastroenteritis is cute.” I found myself sincerely hoping that was an exaggeration.

  “I’m funny,” I insisted. She raised an eyebrow, but remained silent on the topic, continuing:

  “When I say ‘high level’, I mean classified. And when I say ‘classified’, I don’t mean ‘tell someone and you get a visit from the FBI’ classified, I mean ‘tell someone and you get a bullet from MI6’ classified. So, a week after the explosion, a Project Head working on a joint...thing, with NASA – I don’t have the clearance to know anything more than that it was a thing, y’know? – along with two of his aides...disappeared.”

  “Sounds sinister...”

  “Well Mister Lilum sure seemed to think so.” Craig Lilum was the CEO of Lilum Multinational. The powerful British corporation had its fingers in more pies than one could realistically count. Seriously: it would have taken days. So it didn’t shock me in the least to hear that they were getting in on the investigation, too. I was, however, extremely interested in hearing more about ‘why’. “He’s put together a team. I’m working with the ‘media specialists’.”

  “You didn’t tell me you got a promotion,” I feigned hurt with a wounded little pout. She shook her head, as if to say: ‘no, it’s not like that’.

  “I said ‘team’: but it’s more like an assembly of semi-useful spare-parts, really. And, so far as I can tell, I’m only really on it because I was already working in the New York offices, which is where the division is headquartered. I guess you could call it a ‘lateral role re-orientation’.”

  “Is that a thing?” I queried sceptically.

  “Just the latest corporate terminology for ‘you’re getting shafted but we’re not going to actually say it’.”

  “Seems to be an awful lot of ‘corporate terminology’ for that.”

  “Right? Eskimos and snow, I guess.” I affected a pained expression.

  “‘Inuit’, I think you’ll find...”

  “Huh?”

  “‘Eskimo’ isn’t politically correct. Should be ‘Inuit’.” She raised an eyebrow.

  “How...has no one beat you to death, at this point? And I’m asking that as someone who fucking...adores you.” I smirked, motioning for her to continue:

  “So you got ‘synergised’ right up the – ”

  “ – Yeah. That.” She sighed. “So definitely not a promotion. We’re basically just shadowing journalists.” I smirked knowingly.

  “Ahh. And how’s that going?” There had been more than a little historical animosity between journalists and PR professionals: ‘hacks’ and ‘flacks’, as we sometimes referred to each other. Y’know...when we wanted to be polite. Typically, the bulk of the negative sentiment came from journalists, and not for no reason. The PR establishment was structured in such a way that it often rewarded ‘scatter-gun’ and ‘artillery bombardment’ strategies for pushing press releases and ‘getting the word out’. Even if ‘the word’ happened to be a series of blatant lies, distortions, attempts at misdirection, or irrelevant, un-newsworthy drivel. And it – ‘the word’, that is – did tend to be, in my experience, at least one of those things.

  Justified or not, attitudes often carried over into other encounters between the two groups, with the level of hostility usually having a lot to do with how busy and stressful the professional lives of the journalists in question were at a given point in time. And, being journalists, their professional lives were often quite busy and stressful. Even having a good professional relationship with someone in PR, it was easy to sometimes feel like you were dealing with a friend who was all ‘take’ and no ‘give’. A good press release was great; it was an easy story. A really good press release was even better: it was – basically – a story you didn’t have to write. You’d just tweak it here a
nd there, put your name on it, and wave it on through for publication. But more often than not, you did find yourself being pressured to move information that really didn’t deserve your time or attention.

  Anyway. The main point, there, was that tensions and hostilities intensified when things were stressful for journalists...and – apart from the outliers like myself – the journalists investigating The Disappearances were working in a market that was utterly saturated with ambitious and talented writers. Too many salmon in the stream: not enough food or breathing room. And it was getting worse by the day. Knowing that Meg had been working in New York: if she’d told me that journalists had been turning up at the Lilum Multi. offices waving pitchforks and burning torches, I would have been...yeah...surprised: inasmuch as I’d have been expecting them to be waving far more dangerous and offensive things.

  “Let’s just say...if I wanted to spend all day on the phone having complete strangers telling me to ‘fuck off and die’, I’d have gone into telemarketing. But the real problem isn’t the abuse. I have a thick enough skin to take that in my stride.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Well, from what I can tell, there are other divisions working alongside us that we aren’t in direct contact with. Rumour has it that a lot of former Intelligence people have been pulled into it. More analysts, I guess. But without us to source the information, they have nothing to analyse beyond what they can pick up at any given newsstand, all by themselves. Which makes us redundant. Which might make some of us unemployed.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help...” I grimaced apologetically. “Lately...with the wedding and everything, I’ve been a bit out of the loop. To say I put this thing on the back burner would be a bit of an understatement.”