There wasn’t really a choice and he knew it. Joining them would provide tools to defend himself and the others. His moral compass would dictate his actions, what he would become. The moment offered both relief and intense anxiety.
“I want to continue but only if I can protect my family. Kaiya and my dad, at least. I have to.”
“As expected.” Edward nodded. “We’ll discuss the art of the possible in that regard. For the moment, you need to get some rest.”
Chapter 5
You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don’t know, you don’t question it, you even distrust your own doubts.
-Graham Swift
“Kaiya? Could you come up to Mr. Nelson’s office?”
What now? The morning’s presentation had gone poorly. Distracted by the situation developing, she’d lacked charisma and her timing was dismal. By most any standard it had been a disaster. Surely he understood...
“Yes, I’ll be right up.” She straightened her skirt and headed for the CEO’s office.
The receptionist waved her in. She entered and saw a man with Mr. Nelson. Rugged with trim gray sideburns and a weathered face, he wore jeans and a baseball cap.
“Kaiya, this gentleman is from the Central Intelligence Agency. He allowed me to verify his status so he’s the real deal. He wants to speak with you alone regarding Austin. Are you comfortable with that?”
Her mind whirled. “Did Brent send you?”
“I’m involved at his request, yes.” He stepped forward to shake her hand. “Mac Payant. Special Agent from the NorCal office. Brent and I go way back. We need to talk about Austin.”
She turned to her boss. “I’ll be fine Mr. Nelson, and I’m sorry for all this. I really am.”
“No worries, Kaiya, I’ll be just outside with Pam if you need me.”
She listened in disbelief as Agent Payant detailed everything that had happened at the hospital since she left, up to the current multiagency search for Austin.
“You’re serious?” She looked at the agent in disbelief. “He snuck out in the middle of the night? On his own?”
“He had a helper, but he acted on his own, yes.”
“A helper? This is nuts, you know. It really is. Austin’s not a hacker, I can promise you that. He’s being framed.” She stood and paced to the window. “This smells of a cover-up. Someone knows what’s in the file. Something damaging to the President’s reputation or to the government. Do you know what it is?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Agent Payant said. “And I don’t blame you for being suspicious. I am, too. But until we understand who we’re dealing with, you may be danger. My director approved protective custody for you at my request. I could insure your safety and that’s something I know Brent and Austin would want. It’s your choice.”
Anxiety slewed into fright. “Why would he run? That’s not like him.”
“He’s scared. Someone convinced him he was safer with them. Kaiya, this is already an extraordinary situation. People want him back in custody. My gut says you could be used to make that happen.”
“The FBI? You’re saying they’re a threat?”
Mac shook his head. “I’m saying you may be used in ways you wouldn’t like and by people we don’t know. Look, Brent is family. Trust or don’t. The safe facility is less than an hour from here, if you accept.”
“What if Austin tries to reach me?”
“Has he called?”
“No.”
“Then assume he doesn’t have the option to. You have your phone if he does.”
“And my job?” she asked. “Just walk away from it?”
“It should only be temporary.”
Should be. She looked at the agent, then to the window and the tree-lined street outside. “This is really happening, isn’t it? And no one knows why.” Options cancelled themselves out in review, leaving just one. “Okay, let’s go. Before the building blows up or something. And please find Austin. You have to. You just have to.”
• • •
Late afternoon under skies darkened by storm clouds, Johan struggled against a wave of sleepiness. He brewed coffee and slid open windows, angling blinds as Max Dosch wasn’t fit to be seen yet. The makeup should already have been on but he was too absorbed in setting the stage for the file grab.
Soldado would have him shot for exposing Alcazar to such a grab. It couldn’t be helped – it was the most secure quick-and-dirty method he could design. Using a high-caliber worm virus as a core engine, he had spent hours coding intricate modifications, testing carefully, all in an effort to secure Crosstalk’s file without being traced. The Asshole Array botnet, fueled by this engine, would hum a complex tune of deception and trickery, nabbing and delivering the chunks from around the world. No system on earth should be able to track the action inside the storm that he was about to let loose. It would be over almost before it began.
One last roundabout check showed the file still intact within Alcazar’s bowels.
“Slagen. Alleen slagen.” Just succeed.
On the web site for a restaurant in Prague, a string of twenty-eight characters appeared at the bottom of the ‘About Us’ page. The font color, same as the background, made them invisible to the human eye.
Thirty seconds later, the addition served as a trigger for the launch. One zombie checked in as designed then communicated to sixty others that communicated with sixty additional zombies, who in turn each reached another sixty until a minute later over one and a half million computers achieved the same state of readiness. The Asshole Array was online.
Ten seconds passed; each computer began talking with addresses across the planet, a cacophony of ordinary communication except for the very few that made the quick grabs from Alcazar. Weather reports, site searches, YouTube streams, news sites – over twenty-five million packets per second – and of those, a few thousand contained bits of Crosstalk’s file. The tiny stolen pieces crossed the botnet, each changing hands hundreds of times in a complex shell game. The botnet’s fervor escalated and peaked twenty seconds later in a storm of traffic that registered on traffic monitoring sites around the world. Ten seconds later it slowly began diminishing, the work accomplished.
In a little over a minute and a half, he had taken the remaining twenty-five chunks from Alcazar.
He wasted no time copying all forty chunks to a memory stick. During the copy, the control panel for the botnet turned red, indicating massive loss of communication. From a million and a half online computers to eight hundred thousand in just seconds. He stared in disbelief. More than half the botnet had fallen.
Cold dread replaced the excitement of a moment ago. Someone’s system had tracked over half a million transfer bots in their morphing dance across protocols and ports, mapping them along the way, including the fake destinations – and then silenced each of them. In seconds.
“Fuck fuck fuck. Okay Crosstalk, what did you get me into?”
He set down a bottle of ale and brought up the Alcazar client. The local import of the forty chunks ran smoothly. Assembled, they formed a video file eighteen minutes long.
“This better be big, man. Very damned big.”
He pressed play.
“Madness.”
Thunder followed his words, rattling the glass in the cupboards. The clock on the wall showed nine-thirty.
Nature unleashed her fury over Oostendorp. Rain poured in windblown sheets to create cascading rivers from the rooftops. Trees lashed the side of the house. It was the kind of storm that made people huddle indoors and wonder why God was so angry.
Johan knew. What he’d seen was unholy. Eighteen potent minutes that confirmed the existence of a shadow world government beyond any doubt. What it could do and how long it had been doing it made him as angry as the storm.
He shuddered at the
scale suggested. The deceit, lies, and control – the knowledge – all used for enslavement and the cause of needless suffering across time. Wars, religions, disease, and ignorance were all conditions gestated by those who would have and keep ultimate power. The long threads of their plans made the world’s history look organic, natural, yet there was precious little that wasn’t orchestrated or caused by this authority.
The imbalance of karma struck his soul like a hot brand.
Dubbed the ‘Comannda’ by the narrator, their early understanding of the mind had exposed the raw nature of reality and gained them the keys to mankind’s future. Consciousness could be directed beyond the body and with that knowledge they had perfected new arts – remote viewing, dream control, and telepathy – using them with great effect throughout time. To keep control of humanity, they had only to keep people distracted from understanding their own minds.
As proof, the video contained unredacted communiques, secret video clips, and still photos documenting the planning and manipulations that brought about some of the most horrific results of the twentieth century. Engineered illness and wars allowed for population control, economic development, and to keep fear at ‘effective levels’. Distraction was paramount and served to keep unification from occurring. Should the majority learn how manipulated their lives really were, control would dissolve and their global empire would crumble.
Most jarring was a clip of John F. Kennedy in a conversation about the controlling entity he referred to as ‘the firm’. Its plans had become so damaging and morally repugnant that the elite could no longer allow it to operate as it had. It was time to reveal their existence and dismantle their structure. Discussion centered on the methods to do so and the inherent obstacles in each. A central base was mentioned but the location was unknown. The overlaid text indicated a date of October 1963, just one month before his assassination.
The last part of the video described an artificially intelligent surveillance system encircling the globe, embedded in digital systems down to the personal computer and cell phone. Such an advanced AI explained perfectly the botnet’s extraordinary demise. Only a system like that could have executed the traces. By the third viewing, careful contemplation resolved skepticism.
It fit.
The insanity of man’s history was suddenly understandable under the framework provided. The video birthed belief via the gaps it closed. It challenged doubt and churned fear like a mill.
“Where did you get this, Crosstalk? Jesus.”
He pulled the last bottle of ale from the fridge, struggling for calm. This was more than just greedy governments and corporations. Much more. Anxiety rose to a pitch. Fear burned in the moment, there in the kitchen, because he no longer felt alone with his thoughts.
“Christ.” No wonder someone didn’t want the file getting out.
He uncapped the bottle and slapped the opener on the counter. Where was skepticism? It couldn’t all be true. He chugged half the bottle in a single go, unable to stop thinking of the video, of the images, and of the narrator’s voice. Rising panic threatened to break like flood waters; the very air about him held depths, possibility.
“Gah!”
Overwhelmed, he struggled against a bizarre feeling of being incredibly small and of being connected to everything. Thoughts flowed, highly exposed. Something in the video had triggered hellacious feelings of paranoia. Like a beacon just above the ordinary, it began to feel as though the entire world could hear and feel his thoughts. The video described how the Comannda tracked people in Raon, the field of the physical, through vibes. If true, his unbalance was surely a deviation in that field. The sensation of others dawned and grew stronger with every breath.
They were getting closer.
“A trap. A fucking trap.” Crosstalk hadn’t gone crazy – he’d just been caught.
He strode to the liqueur cabinet, tore the cap from a bottle of Vodka and drank deeply. Bearing down, he fought to ditch the feeling. He tried keeping control by summoning strong memories. Morning. Breakfast. Three scrambled eggs, two halves of toast... the shapes, the colors, the smell. He’d shaken the peppershaker four, maybe five times? What was it? He recalled the rhythm. Definitely five shakes. Five simple, careless shakes in time. Pain. He’d bitten his tongue. A powerful, engaging memory he’d blocked but which now served well. He thought of anything and everything that occurred before watching the video.
Focused on a recessed ceiling light, he drank vodka from the bottle. When his throat burned and stomach protested, he stoked his hash pipe and pulled from it deeply, again and again. Still they came, mosquitoes of possibility, closer every time, searching. His thoughts were the flashes of light attracting them. What would happen when they arrived wasn’t clear but fear went ahead of the thought, which meant everything.
What he sought hit him in a lurching wave, a sudden rising disintegration as he sank to the floor. To watch the threatening thoughts dissolve and float around him, to have his own center back, felt divine. The pipe fell to the hardwood, spilling ash. Thunder crashed and rolled, now muted and inconsequential. Exhaustion added its part and soon the others faded in the haze of altered consciousness. He languished in the drifting safety it provided. A despairing thought came and went but left its mark: there could be no karmic correction for this.
Ten minutes later, the room slipped away altogether.
He woke to the splash of a water drop against his forehead. A dim luminance revealed the next drop falling from the shadows above. For a heartbeat, the drop froze in midair, suspended, then fell to splash against his skull.
Drugged? Apparently – in trying to flinch away, not a single muscle responded, save for his eyes. The urge to move spread downward from his face, dully denied at every turn. The cold air of the cave wrapped around his bare arms and face, a sensate reminder of the body he couldn’t control. A shout instead turned to a surge of muted panic.
Calm down. Drugs wore out, in time. Rotating his eyes in all directions helped some. The damp walls and muddy floor of a small cave were just visible. Had he been caught? Memory, too, was quietly defiant. Calculation, however, remained keen. Chinese water torture could take hours or longer to have the desired effect. The drug in his system would surely wear before then, requiring another dose and offering a chance at interaction with his captors, if only one-sided.
Another drop caused a rivulet to stream down his forehead into the well of his left eye.
He began to blink, hoping to absorb the moisture, before realizing the futility. Another would come soon. For now he plied at memory and tried to ignore the water.
More than once, he realized after the fact he’d been lost in a moment stretched over several moments. A natural rule was being bent. Drugged or not, it was fascinating.
He watched time.
The variations, the pauses and overlaps, were so subtle that under different circumstances he probably never would have noticed them. At one point it dawned on him that time was also watching him. Reacting. Intelligent. Aware. Had always been so. The thought struck fear so profound that his automatic breathing stopped momentarily. Time as a character? An intelligence? As if dodging discovery, the sensation left him; time resumed its normal pace.
For a long spell he contemplated what he’d seen, fear ghosting the periphery of his thoughts. Something watched him.
Drop. Time... Drop. Time... Drop.
Lulled, he passed into sleep.
He woke again, cold, wet, and alarmed. The cave’s ceiling was leaking thousands of drops into the pool forming below. The water was up to the cot, soaking his clothes and inching towards his ears. He blinked furiously, unbelieving he would die here without knowing how to wield the power.
The power...
Like stumbling upon a familiar path, one thought led to the next. The Comannda, telepathy, dream control. He was dreaming. Realistic as hell but just a dream. It could be nothing else. In response, water began to dump from the ceiling in streams, the cave filling rapidly.
Still he could not move. Drowning was not going to be very comfortable, even in a dream. He closed his eyes tightly against the deluge. The water, which had risen now to the corner of his eyes, roared dimly in his submerged ears. He cast about, searching for a seam, an edge he could peel back. If this was his mind, there was a lot more to do in it than drown in a cave.
At last he found just what he’d imagined, an edge. With an intention born of panic, he pulled at it, willing the change to take place. Shadows sprung across consciousness and all at once, there was silence.
The darkness receded, leaving him in a dusty attic, sitting atop a trunk. He gratefully inhaled, flexed his hands, and stomped his feet. Sunlight filtered through attic windows. It was his grandfather’s home on Herengracht Street along the canals of Amsterdam. The attic was a favorite place to hide away in the evenings after school, after all his chores and homework were done.
He rested a hand on the trunk. Countless hours he’d spent holding its contents. He could still feel the texture of the lace from his mother’s wedding dress, the etched lines on the steel of his father’s military sword. The backgammon board and the smooth ceramic playing discs. The dark glass bottle of cologne in the shape of an automobile. The powerful scent would fill his senses after unscrewing the spare tire of a cap. Father.
He wanted to wake up but still didn’t have full control.
Why am I here?
The door at the bottom of the stairs opened, betrayed by its familiar creaking. The first thought was of Großvater Bartel. He was always the one to come up at the end of the day to fetch him for bedtime. Someone ascended the stairs.
“Grandpa?”
Johan was stunned to see his father arrive at the head of the stairs. He was the same, as seen from the eyes of an eight-year-old boy.
“Father! I....” Dream or not, this was his lifelong wish. Emotions swelled. He went to him and embraced him, fearing he would vanish. They hugged and the years dissolved instead. Tears fell. He was real. Somewhere beyond the world of the living, he existed.
System Seven Page 9