BrainWeb

by Douglas E. Richards

  Hakim snaked the camera under the outer door of the private office. He extended it less than an inch and turned it up to get a panoramic view while his team packed away their assault rifles into long leather duffels. Seeing nothing troubling, Hakim opened the door a crack to get a firsthand look at the lands beyond.

  The coast was entirely clear. They could not have chosen any better.

  Television monitors were everywhere, displaying the events on the stage in brilliant, ultra-high-definition 3-D clarity. Monitors that could display content in three dimensions, without the requirement of special glasses, had been perfected only a few years previously, but had already become as common as the domestic cockroach.

  Hakim checked the digital readout on his tablet. Three minutes and fourteen seconds until the next commercial. Three minutes and thirteen seconds. Twelve. Eleven . . .

  At exactly three minutes, Hakim gave the signal, and his team exited the office and fanned out in a prearranged pattern. While they moved with purpose, they each put on a relaxed smile and walked without urgency. If they were spotted, no one would think twice about seeing yet another tuxedoed unknown.

  Yes, carrying a duffel this large was unusual, but it wasn’t a military rucksack, which Hakim’s men would have preferred, but rather a designer bag that had cost thousands. And who would possibly be suspicious since the theater was terror-proof in any case?

  Hakim checked the monitors. When the two presenters slated next exited the backstage to wait in the wings, Hakim gave the final signal. The timing was coming along perfectly. Almost exactly a minute until they would cut to a series of commercials.

  In three teams of two, Hakim’s men opened assigned doors to the trio of post-award interview rooms. Each was packed with journalists, stars, celebrity interviewers, and others. The celebrities were laser focused on building their brand by conveying just the right mixture of charm, wit, and humility. And those who weren’t stars were busy fawning over those who were.

  In fact, every single person in each room was so preoccupied that Hakim’s men wouldn’t have gotten a second look had they activated a spinning, blaring ambulance siren. Too many eyes were star-struck, and thus blinded. There was too much glamour in the room. Too much excitement.

  And things were about to get even more exciting.

  In a practiced motion, each of Hakim’s two-man teams reached into their bags and pulled the pins on gas canisters, rolling them as gently as they could to all corners of their assigned rooms before reclosing the doors in front of them. The gas was an extremely potent knockout agent, colorless and odorless, and anyone who breathed even a small amount would find the light of their consciousness extinguished within seconds.

  The glamorous crowds within the rooms, preening like peacocks in their perfectly tailored formal attire, dropped like termites in a tented house, in near simultaneous perfection. Just outside, the terrorists affixed gas masks to their faces, waited another fifteen seconds for good measure, and then entered, delighted to find exactly what they had expected inside.

  One member of each pair raced through the room and put a single silenced bullet into the foreheads of each man or woman on the floor, since the gas was fast acting but not lethal, while his partner captured these actions on video.

  While this was happening, Hakim was doing his part, taking out the three celebrities waiting in the wings with a short burst of directed gas, more lethal than the type used by his brothers, since even a silenced gun this close to the stage could have attracted attention.

  Hakim noted with pride that his men had been able to destroy sixty-eight Western pigs—celebrities, hangers-on, members of the press, and so on—within minutes of their emergence from the tunnel. And the three celebrities he had taken out brought the tally to seventy-one.

  And the fun was only just beginning.

  Hakim’s men slipped silently through one of the three backstage doors and joined him on the wings of the main stage, barely glancing at the three bodies lying haphazardly on the floor, the gas now fully dispersed.

  The terrorist leader stood near a marble table, on top of which sat eight identical statues, each depicting a knight standing on a reel of film, clutching a crusader’s sword. After taking one last glance around the area, Hakim gave a signal to his right-hand man, Sherif Ismail, who sent the stolen electronic codes and authorization handshakes to seal every door, including those between the theater and its backstage.

  Hakim eyed one of the ubiquitous monitors, which continued to tile nearly every wall, helping to ensure their timing was precise. A commercial for a luxury car had just begun. He checked his watch and then nodded. “Showtime,” he whispered in Arabic.

  He adjusted his classic black tuxedo so he looked as good as possible and began walking purposefully, but casually, toward the podium. Few in the teeming audience would know who was supposed to be traversing the stage at this time to present the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

  And none would know that these presenters, Dorothy Chance and Kim Harris, stars of a new sitcom, were both now dead backstage, as was the Oscar host, an aging Hugh Jackman. Hakim had taken great satisfaction in killing Jackman, one of the most universally beloved stars in Hollywood, demonstrating that the famous Wolverine was not so immortal, after all.

  The director of this year’s Oscars, J. Sebastian Cole, and his television minions would know something was amiss, as would several others throughout the auditorium, but Hakim was counting on his elegant attire to keep everyone in their seats, with no reason to panic. And for all anyone knew, his arrival instead of the host and two sitcom stars was simply part of a surprise practical joke, inserted at the last minute.

  After all, ever since Ellen DeGeneres had had pizza delivered to the previous Oscar venue, the Dolby Theater, a number of years earlier, anything was possible.

  6

  The helicopter Hall was in landed just beyond his mind-reading range of the Cosmopolitan, and he, Megan, and the four men with them were rushed into a waiting van before the chopper blades had even come to a halt. Two additional commando teams were already in place near the theater, but out of sight, and the van raced to join them.

  Hall remained silent, streaming the televised 3-D Academy Awards presentation directly into his visual cortex. Best Production Design had just been announced, and the giddy winner, Amy McRaney, a plump woman in a sequined green gown, was droning on a bit long, prompting the gentle beginnings of the designated hurry-it-up music, signaling for her to finish. The moment she did, the full orchestra sprang to life and played the broadcast off to the first of a string of commercials.

  While Jibril Awad hadn’t had perfect operational knowledge of the attack, he did know it was timed to take place in the last part of the production, when the more coveted awards were to be given, ensuring a concurrent spike in global viewership.

  The software in Hall’s implants reacted to his mental command and instantly pulled up a chronological listing of the Oscars to be given out, displaying it just to the left of the television feed.

  The final eight awards, the heavy hitters, were next. Best original score and original song. Best adapted screenplay. Best original screenplay. Best actor and actress. Best director. And then, finally, to close out the night, best film of the year.

  The attack would happen in minutes. But Islamic Jihad had spotters, inside and outside of the theater, who would turn the Cosmopolitan to magma if they had even a hint that it was being evacuated. Or at the slightest sign of anti-terror preparations. Which is why the two commando teams already present were staying well out of sight, and why Hall wouldn’t let the men who were accompanying him now leave the van when they arrived.

  This team of ruthless, barbaric jihadists was a freight train tearing around a bend. But as much as Hall ached to scream a warning to the innocent people standing on the tracks, he could not. All he could do was watch it happen, defying his every instinct.

  It was absolutely maddening.

  Hall’s jaw c
lamped shut, forcing his teeth to grind against one another, and he willed the van to go faster.

  7

  Abdul Hakim knew he had to bring the audience fairly gently to their new reality, or risk spooking the herd, which would result in him having to blow the place much earlier than he would want.

  The trick wasn’t just to create terror, but to prolong it. To turn this auditorium into a living, writhing hell, that would rip flesh away from raw nerves around the world and expose these nerves to an unimaginably slow and steady torture, hour after endless hour.

  But if he incited panic, if the pathetic, spoiled Hollywood royalty bolted for the exits, locked though they were, or rushed the stage, he’d have to mow many of them down. And this would only serve to intensify their hysteria, forcing him to kill them all immediately. It would still be an epic attack that would never be forgotten, but only a tenth as excruciating as a fully successful attack would have been. A mistake to be avoided at all costs.

  Hakim reached the podium at the end of an enormous stage that could only be described as glorious. He had walked out onto this stage before during drills, but never when it was fully prepared for the Academy Awards.

  Everything was so much larger than life. Everything glowed, glittered, and dazzled the senses. The venue pulsated with a powerful sheen and vitality, bursting with untold megawatts of light from the two-story Academy Awards sign behind him and other oversized props. Everything was gold and silver and crystal. Two thirty-foot reproductions of the famous Oscar statues stood guard on either side of a stage so polished it seemed almost radioactive, and golden rows of stairs ran along its entire length.

  Hakim gazed out at an ocean of human decadence, row after endless row. While the stage was magnificent, the auditorium was even more so, surpassing even the Dolby Theater that had long housed this narcissistic ceremony. The domed auditorium ceiling was five stories high, with regal pillars of box seats on either side. It had a seating capacity of just over four thousand, almost eight hundred greater than the Dolby, and it was currently packed with a sea of elites in designer gowns and tuxes.

  The first ten or twenty long rows were filled predominantly with scrubbed, massaged, and manicured Hollywood royalty, whose jobs often depended on being fit, looking great, and exuding elegance and superiority like a skunk exuded stink. Additional rows were also filled with the privileged, but far more of these were overweight or unattractive: the media, writers, FX and other tech specialists, families, and additional behind-the-scenes experts.

  Twenty-six musicians were situated in an oval trench carved below the back of the stage, which could be crossed by a wide bridge. While orchestra pits were traditionally in front, the Oscars’ organizers had long since decided they didn’t want to wedge musicians between the audience and the stage.

  Before the Cosmopolitan had been constructed, in 2013, the organizers had even gone so far as to have the orchestra located a mile from the theater. There the musicians watched the proceedings on monitors so the live, if somewhat dislocated, orchestra music could be piped through fiber optic cables to the two hundred and one individually powered Dolby loudspeakers inside the Dolby Theater.

  The Cosmopolitan Theater had taken a different approach. The orchestra pit was under the back half of the stage, in an acoustically pure room. When the entire stage wasn’t needed, the pit was open to the air. When this valuable real estate was needed for a major production number, however, the stage floor could be extended so that it slid over the pit, sealing the orchestra into a soundproof cocoon in a matter of seconds, after which the music would be piped the short distance to the loudspeakers.

  Hakim took a deep breath and began. “Hello,” he said gently, unthreateningly, into the microphone, as if trying to entice a shy squirrel to take a nut from his hand. “For those of you expecting a different presenter right now,” he continued in nearly perfect English with a gracious, Hollywood smile, “I want you to know we’ve arranged for a surprise this year. But you won’t consider this a good surprise,” he added, his tone still pleasant. “But here is the key: if everyone remains calm, remains seated, everyone will get through this.”

  There was a low rumble from the crowd and hundreds of glances were exchanged throughout the theater, as everyone tried to gauge the reaction of others to the incongruity of these words. If this was a practical joke, the audience wasn’t sure it was funny.

  Fixed cameras were scattered throughout the auditorium, stage, and even orchestra pit, with the director and his team in a separate facility nearby, surrounded by endless feeds and electronics. Four men were also in the aisles with handheld network cameras, racing around like track athletes to get the best close-ups of stars in their seats.

  “To director Sebastian Cole, and those of you filming and broadcasting these proceedings,” continued Hakim, “I’ll need you to continue to do so. All of our lives depend on it.”

  He paused to let this sink in, but only for a second. “Our lives also depend on everyone remaining calm, quiet, and in your seats,” he added evenly into the microphone, and his voice boomed from two hundred and forty speakers, an unnecessary overkill designed to one-up the Dolby Theater and its own excessive sound system.

  So far, so good, thought Hakim. The crowd was squirming, troubled, and confused. But they had not panicked.

  Now that they were somewhat braced and forewarned, he waved a hand, and his six colleagues, all in black tuxes like his own, rushed onto the stage from the wings, their KH2002 machine guns held out in front of them and pointed toward the ocean of humanity seated in the auditorium.

  Most in the audience blanched, and some looked as if they were about to vomit, but there were a few vapid faces who Hakim could have sworn were waiting for this to be revealed as a tasteless practical joke. Waiting for the seven terrorists to break into a dance number, sort of a terrorist version of Springtime For Hitler.

  Hakim’s demeanor visibly darkened, a charming Satan suddenly sprouting horns. “We are Islamic Jihad!” he hissed. “And we now own this theater. And all of you!”

  The crowd chatter grew to a roar and numerous people rose.

  “Sit down and shut up!” shouted Hakim, and the speakers delivered his roar as though God himself had issued this demand.

  At Hakim’s nod, Sherif Ismail shot a burst from his assault rifle into the ceiling. As plaster rained down the reality of the situation became clear, and the entire auditorium was cowed into silence, rapidly retaking their seats as ordered.

  Another of Hakim’s men sent a digital command through his phone, and the floor of the stage zipped along hidden tracks and trapped dozens of musicians inside their soundproof pit.

  “This theater has been completely sealed,” continued Hakim, his voice no longer either pleasant or heated, but rather icy cold, measured, and in command. “All exits have been locked down, including the two in the orchestra pit behind me. There is no way out unless we let you out.”

  After they had chewed on this for a moment he continued. “In addition, we’ve mined this entire structure. Powerful explosives are part of the walls, floor, and ceiling. Enough to turn this theater into a fireball that will light up the entire city, killing every one of you.” He raised his eyebrows. “And every one of us.”

  Hakim paused, and then, with a dramatic flourish added, “But we are fully prepared to die. Can you say the same? If not, or if you don’t want to be responsible for four thousand deaths, you will remain calm and silent.

  “Here are the rules: all who are here, and those watching on TV, need to listen very carefully. We have full control of all security cameras. So we can see all approaches. Second, there are members of Islamic Jihad monitoring all major television stations around the world. So don’t even think about cutting the feed. The world will not be allowed to look away. If the television coverage ever stops, we will blow this theater.”

  Hakim’s eyes burned with an almost demonic passion as he continued. “If anyone from the outside makes the slightest att
empt to enter, we will blow this theater. If power is cut off, we will blow this theater. If I feel too strong of a breeze, we will blow this theater.” He leaned forward intently and glared into the stationary camera that had zoomed in on his face. “Are you listening, President Cochran? The evil that you and your murderous military have visited upon the children of Islam has come home to roost. And all of your men and jets and bombs are powerless to stop us.”

  A malicious smirk appeared on Hakim’s face. “As an example of our resolve, you should know that seventy-one infidels backstage are already lying in pools of their own blood.”

  As he spoke, the technical specialist on his team began transmitting the video footage of the slaughter they had orchestrated backstage to a small screen he had removed from his bag, which was facing the audience. Behind the stage, three evenly spaced twenty-foot-tall monitors displayed the network television feed, so those sitting in the back could see more clearly the fine detail of the proceedings.

  Hakim glanced behind him at one of the two-story screens and was infuriated to see a massive image of his face rather than the video footage of their massacre backstage. “Sebastian Cole, zoom in on our screen!” he demanded of the unseen director. “Now! Or I’ll spray the front row.”

  In seconds, what was being displayed on the tiny screen could now be seen on the towering ones behind him, and on television screens around the world. In high-definition 3-D clarity. The images of helpless, unconscious innocents—celebrities and unknowns alike—being shot in the head caused absolute pandemonium. Members of the audience screamed, or gasped, or whispered in horror. Chatter grew to a roar and numerous attendees rose once again from their seats.

  Hakim had been fully prepared for this reaction. He pumped several non-silenced rounds into the ceiling, right next to the microphone. The shots were ear crushing when transmitted through the powerful speakers, and their thunder filled the entire theater, causing such severe vibrations that they momentarily turned the Cosmopolitan into the epicenter of a small earthquake.