Inferno 2033 Book Two: Perdition

by Michael Compton

  “Adrenaline,” Ahmer said brightly. “That was the other ingredient. Adrenaline.”

  Sands gave him a withering look.

  “Where am I?”

  Victoria’s voice was so faint it was barely audible. Sands wasn’t sure he had heard her.

  “Did she say something?”

  “She ask where is she.”

  Sands pressed against the grate, getting as close to her as he could. “Victoria, it’s Sands. Sands Simon. You’re in a prison cell.”

  “The six hundred cell.”

  “You’re on a prison ship. The Inferno.”

  She began muttering—like before, but more fluidly.

  “The power is the six hundred…not the party…not the president…the power…the power is the six hundred…”

  “Victoria, I can’t understand you.”

  Her muttering came quicker, her words jumbling into nonsense as her voice rose in volume and pitch. In the torrent of gibberish, the number six-hundred was repeated again and again. Sands had never heard Victoria’s voice like this before, as if another being had taken it over. Yet there was something strangely familiar about it.

  He looked at Ahmer. The young Pakistani had backed away from the cell, his eyes staring.

  “Ahmer, what is it?”

  Ahmer pointed. “The spot on her wrist.”

  Sands looked. Victoria had managed to free one of her arms. It was at her side, the wrist exposed. Sands saw a faint, blue-black smudge.

  “It’s a birthmark,” he said. “She’s always had it.”

  Ahmer shook his head. He pulled a pen-like device from his pack and directed a beam of invisible ultraviolet light through the grate. When the beam fell onto Victoria’s wrist, the mark leapt to life, projecting a three-dimensional hologram of a complex geometric figure.

  It was a holo-tat. Sands had seen one or two of them in the service. They were too expensive for government pay—three or four paychecks for something the size of a thimble. And under anything but UV light they didn’t look like much but a smudge of ink. Sands supposed they could be spectacular at a disco, bouncing in the dark from the bodies of a hundred gyrating dancers. Only rich hipsters got them. And the occasional Marine.

  Ahmer stared at the image hovering three inches above Victoria’s wrist, transfixed by its multicolored, interwoven angles.

  “The 600-cell.”

  But Sands was no longer looking at the holographic image. He was looking instead at Victoria’s smudged wrist, as if seeing it for the first time. He was transported for a moment back to Bashkiristan, to the hapless operative of Karga’s covert mint. Just before the mysterious spook they called Spear shot him, the operative had pulled back his shirtsleeve to reveal a “birthmark” that looked exactly like Victoria’s. “See?” he had said to G.K. “Like you.”

  “She shouldn’t be here,” Ahmer said.

  As if in reply, Victoria erupted with a stream of syllables too structured and inflected to be called gibberish. And that, too, clicked in Sands’ mind, conjuring forth the image of Bloodyface, the rapt giant speaking in tongues just before his death.

  Ahmer backed up, fear in his eyes, until he hit the bulkhead. With a glance at Sands, he ran.

  “Ahmer! Ahmer, come back here!”

  But he was gone, leaving Sands alone to witness Victoria’s mad raving.

  But not alone.

  “Someone,” Rashid said, his voice drifting to Sands’ ears from the next cell, “is speaking to God.”

  -4-

  Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

  —Amelia Earhart

  Three-and-a-half-year-old Emanuel stood next to his mother, using her lap to hold the picture book he was reading. Carrie stroked his hair with one hand, thumbing through a fat folder with the other, checking again that she hadn’t gotten any of her papers mixed in with Emanuel’s stack of coloring and story books. During their three-hour wait, Emanuel had gone from fidgety, to cranky, to sleepy, and back to fidgety again. Rick wasn’t much better. He sat with his shoulders hunched, legs crossed at the knees, fanning one dangling foot in the air like a dog with an itch.

  Carrie put a hand to Rick’s knee and squeezed until the foot went still.

  “Sorry.”

  Rick uncrossed his legs and slouched down into his chair, a mismatched plastic companion to Carrie’s. They had uneven legs and poorly contoured backs that seemed designed to aggravate a tired lumbar region. Carrie wanted to tell him to sit up straight—and take off those ridiculous aviator sunglasses. He was wearing sweats and sneakers, trying to look as unmilitary as possible, but in his brush-cut and aviators he looked exactly like what he was—a Fed, a cop, an officer, a by-the-book square out of place among the unwashed rabble.

  They were at the makeshift headquarters of the Washington bureau of Justice International, a grassroots activist organization derided among its detractors as “Greenpeace with Guns” for the actions of some of its militant associates. The headquarters was housed in an old warehouse, its thirty-foot ceiling looming darkly above a hundred open cubicles huddled in the center of the vast concrete floor. The surrounding wall was lined with folding chairs, where Carrie and Rick and Emanuel had waited with dozens of other families, mostly poor, mostly immigrants or the children of immigrants, speaking a Babel of different tongues, but all there for the same reason—someone they loved was among the “disappeared,” the countless thousands of criminals, refugees, and “undesirables” who had been arrested and sent to prison, never to be heard from again.

  Carrie’s number had finally been called, and after another hour of questionnaires and interviews, they sat before a metal desk with chipped enamel paint that looked like a castoff from some 1950s-era secretarial pool. The desk was stacked high with accordion folders and legal briefs, some of which had spilled onto the seat of the ratty swivel chair that sat behind it. There was no other furniture. Hundreds of other files were stacked in storage boxes that lined the thin cubicle walls like the earthworks of a Spanish fortress.

  Carrie noticed Rick peeking over the top of his aviators at a banner that hung from the ceiling. It read: JUSTICE INTERNATIONAL INNOCENCE PROJECT.

  “Innocence.” Rick curled his lip. “That’s a laugh.”

  Carrie cut him a look. “You’re supposed to be his defense attorney.”

  “Was his defense attorney.” He shook his head at the floor. “If the JAG gets wind of me being here I’ll need my own defense attorney.”

  “Honestly, Rick, you act like these people are criminals.”

  “They’re terrorists!”

  A young man in a blue sport coat and tie at war with rumpled khakis and jogging shoes appeared behind him.

  “Actually, we’re lawyers, Major Guidry. Just like you.”

  “How’d you know my name?”

  Carrie couldn’t help but feel disgusted by the panic in Rick’s voice. The J.I. counsel opened the file he was carrying and produced a dossier paper-clipped with a photo of Rick in his dress uniform. “You were Captain Simon’s legal counsel, I believe?”

  Rick slumped back into his chair, looking and feeling foolish.

  The counsel cleared a spot for himself and sat down, spreading the file out onto his desk. “Quite a body of evidence against the captain.” He picked up a photo, grimaced, and turned it over. To Carrie he said, “And what’s your relation?”

  “He’s my son’s father.”

  Emanuel looked up from his book, first at Carrie, then at Rick. Rick reached over and mussed his hair.

  “I see.” The counsel flipped the rest of the papers in the file into one stack and closed the folder over them. “Well, despite that banner, we don’t make judgments about guilt or innocence here.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “Habeas corpus, Counselor.” He gestured at the stacks of files around him. “We’ve got thousands of claims of false imprisonment. Some complaints may be legitimate. Some may not. But they don’t mean a thing if we can�
�t even prove the person—or the prison—exists.”

  “You see?” Rick looked at Carrie as if he’d just won an argument. “Conspiracy theories. Invisible prisons. Black Rafts. Maybe Sands was abducted by aliens.”

  “Rick, you’re not helping.”

  As the silence stretched between them, Emanuel held up his picture book for Rick to see. “Daddy, horsey. See, Daddy. Horsey.”

  “I see, son.” Rick picked him up and sat him on his knee.

  “Lion!” Emanuel pointed at another picture.

  “That’s good, Emanuel. Let the grownups talk a minute, okay?”

  The counsel pulled a grainy photo from his desk and held it up, using his pen as a pointer. “This is a satellite image of what we believe is a black raft in the Sea of Japan.”

  “How did you get that?” Rick demanded.

  “Illegally, Major. Would you like me to tell you more?”

  His silence indicated he would not.

  “Ms. Guidry, I can’t promise you anything about your case. Frankly, we don’t have the resources to investigate a quarter of the cases that come to us. But I can tell you, with high confidence, that very soon we will have hard proof of the government’s secret prison program.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if Captain Sands is one of the ‘disappeared,’ his chances of reappearing are about to go up.”

  -5-

  Don’t be humble; you’re not that great.

  — Golda Meir

  Vice President Brzinski sat on a leather sofa in what his staff called “the screening room”—a partitioned area of his office in the West Wing—scanning a bank of six video monitors. All but one were muted, and Brzinski had his eyes fixed on that one as if it had just called him a dirty name.

  On the monitor, an anchorwoman furrowed her botoxed brow with journalistic seriousness as she sat before a stock image of a man gripping the bars of his prison cell and staring forlornly into space. The punning caption asked: “PASS-port to Nowhere?”

  “In a statement released just hours ago, Justice International—the activist group President Stockdale has characterized as ‘terrorists with legal briefs’—claims to have located one of the rumored secret prison ships known as ‘black rafts’ off the coast of South Korea.”

  The image shifted to a grainy satellite photo similar to the one the JI legal counsel had shown Carrie and Rick. Brzinski’s eyes flitted quickly to the other monitors, several of which featured the same image.

  “Along with their statement,” the reporter continued, “Justice International released this photograph, which appears to be a satellite image of a large container ship. JI offered no further proof of the ship’s nature or location, nor anything to verify the image’s authenticity. They do claim, however, to have dispatched a flotilla of boats to intercept the ship and provide first-hand—”

  Brzinski snuffed the six video eyes with an angry thrust of his remote and turned to his chief aide and bodyguard, the man known as “Spear.”

  “We’ve got a leak.”

  Spear, who had a habit of standing at rigid attention, even when he was in his civilian dress of black suit and tie, gave a single shake of his head. “I don’t think so, sir. That so-called satellite image is laughable.”

  “And yet they seem to know the location of one of our ships. ‘Sea of Japan, off the coast of South Korea’—that’s not a guess.”

  “No, sir.”

  “How did they find it? These things are supposed to be invisible.”

  “Invisible to radar, sir. Not invisible.”

  Brzinski fixed Spear with a look so dark it rattled his normally unshakeable military cool.

  “Don’t bandy words with me, boy.”

  “No, sir.”

  The voice of Brzinski’s secretary came over the intercom. Her tone conveyed as much as she dared of the impatience of a thrice-repeated request. “Sir, the President is waiting.”

  “Let him wait!”

  Spear kept his counsel. His respect for the wrath of the Vice President outweighed his respect for the chain of command. Besides, he could see that Brzinski was hatching a plan. The downward wedge of his dark eyebrows breached and he looked at Spear with something akin to a twinkle.

  “It seems we have the proverbial two birds to kill.”

  Spear nodded his understanding. “With one very big stone?”

  ***

  In the Oval Office, President Stockdale stared glumly at the unsigned order that lay on his desk. His inaugural Bible and gun were at his elbow—the double comfort he carried with him everywhere he went. The gun was loaded. The Secret Service didn’t like it, but what the Secret Service liked or didn’t like carried little weight in Stockdale’s administration. They were more like event planners now. They provided logistics, but Spear and his Force guard, always in their distinctive black camo, provided the real security. As rigid and upright as the flags that flanked the President’s desk, they stood silent sentinel to even the most top secret discussions.

  The President sighed. He was surrounded by Brzinski, Secretary of Defense “Mal” Mallory, and Secretary of State Ken Lum, who all pressed around him as if physically urging him to put pen to paper.

  “But how do we drop a nuke in the Sea of Japan without killing people—that’s what I want to know.”

  “Mr. President, I can’t promise we won’t lose a fishing boat or two…” Brzinski smiled as if the possibility were an amusing fancy. “But those are acceptable losses against all-out nuclear war.”

  “But won’t we be starting a nuclear war?”

  “Preempting one,” Brzinski explained with a teacher’s patience. “And besides, we won’t be the ones starting it.”

  Stockdale turned to the secretary of Defense. “Mal, are you on board with this? Won’t North Korea retaliate?”

  “They’ll never get the chance,” Mallory said. “The second the missile launches, President Park will blame Kim—”

  “Now, Park,” the President interrupted, “he’s our guy, right?”

  Mallory’s lips stretched into a taught line, but his tone remained even. “Yes, he’s the president of South Korea. We immediately confirm his claim about the launch. While Kim—that’s the president of North Korea—”

  “I know who Kim is, dammit!”

  “Of course, sir. Kim’s first instinct will be to denounce his accusers. But while he’s making his denials, we’ll already be taking out his nuclear arsenal.”

  Stockdale pondered deeply. “So it’s a pretext.”

  The others exchanged glances, but no one spoke. Best to let the President work out whatever he could for himself.

  “But what about China and Russia? Won’t they know we launched first?”

  “The fog of war, sir,” Lum offered. “I can assure you that no matter the facts on the ground, politically—where the real decisions are made—these matters are always up for interpretation.”

  Stockdale slapped his desk. “But dang it, how do we know Kim even plans to attack? Where’s the evidence?”

  “What kind of evidence would you like, Mr. President? A mushroom cloud?”

  Brzinski had a knack for saying the most awful things in the most pleasant way. It made Stockdale angry, but he never knew quite how to address it.

  “Don’t get dramatic.”

  Brzinski leaned in confidentially, his tone quiet, but plain for all to hear. “Mr. President, there is an untapped reservoir of two hundred billion barrels of oil on the Korean Peninsula. The question you have to ask yourself is this: Is it going to be controlled by the leader of the free world—or a cartoon dictator in high heels?”

  Stockdale stewed a moment as all eyes—even those of Spear and his guard—were upon him. He reached for his pen.

  -6-

  Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

  —Jean Paul Sartre

  Sands was sitting in the lotus position in the center of his cell, just finishing his meditation,
when the monitor came on for its morning broadcast. First, it was some inane cartoon in Spanish. It didn’t seem too funny to Sands, but he heard idiot laughter from a few of the other cells in the block. After that, a dramatic headline announced “Breaking News,” but instead of a news anchor speaking in dramatic tones directly into the camera, the image was of President Stockdale sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, apparently reading his inaugural Bible.

  In one of those phony TV moments in which the person on screen pretends the camera is some unannounced visitor, Stockdale looked up, grunted a good-morning, and closed his book. He set the Bible aside, placed his trusty pistol upon it, and looked into the camera.

  Sands shook his head. What an act.

  “My fellow Americans—and to all freedom-loving people around the world—just an hour ago, in an unprovoked attack on a peaceful neighbor, North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Seung launched a nuclear missile at South Korea. Fortunately, that missile landed harmlessly in the Sea of Japan…”

  “Bullshit.”

  The single word from Victoria’s cell was soft but clear. Sands bounced to his feet and went to the grate. “Victoria! It’s Sands. Do you recognize me?”

  Victoria’s face turned in the direction of Sands’ voice. She could barely hold her head up. Her eyes were slits, the corners of her lashes caked together. Her partially free arm moved spasmodically.

  “Don’t struggle. You’re in restraints.”

  “Sands?”

  “That’s right. Sands Simon. Your old Stanford buddy.”

  A faint smile played across her dry lips. “Imagining things.”

  “No, Victoria, it’s really me. Victoria!”

  He called her name a few more times, but she was out again. On the overhead monitor, the President droned on.

  “That’s why, as I speak, our bombers are taking out Kim’s nuclear threat. The United States of America will not stand idly by as our allies—”

  The screen went to static. The monitor remained on, but nothing was being broadcast.