He didn't have that luxury now.
He just had one more question.
"Why the T4? If it wasn't discovered like that, why store your types on it?"
She shrugged, enjoying how much she'd stumped him. "That was just the storage medium we chose to use, something borrowed off the Free Radical trials. They'd been experimenting with genetic encoding of deep data on hollowed-out, massive capacity T4 viruses. They were empty, really only as dangerous as a USB key, though efficient for serving as a placeholder when designing the samples. If you want my guess on what triggered the Event, I'd say someone rewired them, added the hydrogen line link, made them virulent, and distributed them. But I still have no idea why."
It was a lot to work with. He had to start working on it right away.
He stood up. The headache pulsed and brought keener focus.
"You've been very helpful. You'll be hearing from me soon. Until then you're under arrest, though I want you working with Joran Helkegarde. My people will explain."
She said something, but he was already moving on and out.
On the walk through the Logchain, with Heron's people gawping, he gave orders for a fresh round of strike teams around the world. He set unprecedented movements of manpower and equipment into motion, initiating a rapid coup of the SEAL. Then he got into his jet and gave coordinates, and within fifteen minutes of leaving Rachel Heron behind he took to the air.
Olan Harrison was out there, and he would answer for his lies.
12. SLAPS
Lara woke from a dream of fiery rain, panting and afraid in the dark of the Lincoln Bedroom. She shifted to sit on the edge of the bed and hug her arms round her chest, waiting for the chill in her heart to subside.
Amo.
It felt as if he'd just called her name from the middle of the room; except of course he wasn't here, and he'd never called to her like that before. Even on the stage with Drake, even in the depths of his guilt after the Maine massacre, she hadn't felt that level of dark, bitter despair. It felt like a lash across her mind, far worse than Witzgenstein's slap.
Her Amo had changed.
She didn't know where he was or what had happened, but the depths of that misery scared her. She tried to trace him back on the line, but couldn't; his comforting presence that had throbbed in her mind for so long was now far out of range, as it had been for months.
But he was hurting, that much was plain. He was lost, and afraid, and alone, just like her. He had been betrayed, and that despair was his touch reaching out for a kindred soul.
She couldn't help him. It hurt to realize that, but also it made her strong, because he was out there still, and she loved him still, and that meant something. Their bond, their children, those were things bigger than Witzgenstein, things she had to fight hard for. This morning she had knelt to a new President, she'd been humiliated in front of everyone she knew, but these were only steps on a larger journey. Amo's touch reminded her who she was, and always had been.
Steadily she regained control of her breathing. Her pulse settled.
Now they were coming.
She took deep breaths as they came up the stairs. She'd been waiting all day since the Truman Balcony, listening to the changes on the line, feeling the way Witzgenstein's touch reached out and bridled them all. It was hot and cold at once, all unconscious desire and anger, like Drake on the stage or the demon with its hand around her chest.
It wasn't controlled, though there was a will behind it, twisting its shape to focus in tune with Witzgenstein's emotions. Watching it from up close in that kiss had taught her a lot about what had happened to Crow, and why her people had surrendered so easily on the road East, and why she had knelt down herself.
Witzgenstein was using the line. She held them all in the palm of her hand, in her bridle, whether she was aware of it or not.
BANG
The door crashed open and in they came.
Lara stood to meet them in the semi-dark, lit by moonlight coming in through the tall windows. They were lit by their fizzing yellow lanterns, piling in like a mob, short only of pitchforks and torches.
Witzgenstein wasn't there, but she was; the red reins laid over them all.
At the head was Frances, followed by Alan, George, Nancy and Cynthia. They filed in hot, their feet stamping, anger writ on some of their faces, resignation on others, joy on one, reflecting Witzgenstein perfectly. Here was her mind spread wide, each one an exaggerated facet of their master.
Lara felt her in the air. Though she was far away, her attention was here, on this, salivating at the prospect of what was to come. These people were her lackeys only. Lara was the real deal. She'd stood on the stage. She'd been there with Amo at the beginning. She wasn't like the rest.
"How dare you," said Frances, and drew a metal police baton from its sheath at her hip. With one practiced movement she flicked it to the side, racking out the full length. It glinted in the yellow light. "How dare you call her yours?"
"Child, you must've known it'd come to this," said Cynthia sadly, circling round. "Foolishness. Pride."
The fear still came. The pain would be real, and Lara let her legs buckle, dropping her to her knees. She hung her head again, and held the cold despair from Amo close, huddling round the pain it gave off. This was for him as well.
"I'm pregnant," was all she said, humble and demure. "Don't hurt my child."
Frances strode over. "Bitch, you should have thought of that."
The others advanced more cautiously, but still they came. They had weapons too. Frances reached out and snatched a fistful of Lara's hair, forcing her head roughly back.
"I love my President," Lara said, defiant still, putting on a show of loyalty still. "I cannot apologize for that."
"Yours?" Frances spat, shaking Lara's head by the hair, drawing tears from her eyes. "What do you know about her, you arrogant whore? You who banished us all, just for daring to believe? You who lay with the Antichrist? What would you know about my President?"
Here it came. Lara didn't resist. She didn't beg for her child again. Everything was a gamble, and every step cut a path deeper into Witzgenstein's emotions, and maybe into the line.
"So they walked Jesus to his cross," she said softly, and spread her arms wide. "That he might atone for all the people's sins." She looked into Frances' eyes. "So shall you do unto me."
Frances eyes blazed with joyous rage. "Jesus?! You filthy harlot, how dare you say his name!"
So the first blow fell.
It took her in the left temple, swung from high and above Frances' shoulder, teed up perfectly by her hand in her hair. It came on like a rocket; hard metal crunching against her skull and driving her sideways, filling her head with a sudden and piercing cold.
She rocked but the hand in her hair held her upright. The world blurred and her left eye went immediately white, all vision gone.
Then Frances was there again, shaking her baton, shaking Lara's head like a rag doll.
"Say his name again," she spat. "Say it, whore!"
The others stood by. Cynthia shook her head. So sad, Lara thought dizzily, so sad, for things to come to this. But this was what she deserved, after all. Lara who'd held herself up so high. Lara who had consorted with the devil and led them all astray. A baptism of blood.
"Tell my President," Lara managed, as blood streamed down the side of her face, salty in her mouth. "Tell her I love her still."
Frances hollered and struck her again, this time on the shoulder, and Lara's left arm instantly deadened. It was like being gripped by the demon in Pittsburgh; enfolded in a vice of tightening pain and lost control. She grunted and would have toppled, but Frances still held her head up, looking at this squad of executioners. Perhaps she was going to die here tonight. She couldn't open her mouth to speak now anyway. She could just look at them, into Alan's eyes, into Cynthia's, showing them her sincerity.
But she didn't need to speak.
Instead she reached out, into the muddle
of crossed wires in the line, as Witzgenstein's puppet-master emotions swung these people through the repressed motions she demanded, and twisted.
She'd never known it was possible. She wouldn't ever have thought of it, except for Crow. The way he had changed was impossible, but each time she'd seen him it had been there. He thought he'd changed his mind, he thought Witzgenstein was good, he'd turned against everything he once believed, and her touch in all that was apparent.
Hidden beneath the screen of her own pain, beneath the mask she put forward for Witzgenstein to see, Lara twisted
Frances stepped to the side and now Alan stepped forward. His face showed nothing but certainty, as he swung his baton and brought it round to smack sharply off her right forearm. But it wasn't as hard as Frances. The full weight was withheld, and though the pain was terrible, ringing up her bones and into her shoulder, it was less. Her right arm drooped still, falling to dangle beside her left, but inside she cried out her victory. To be a demon and reach out to crush enemies across the line was easy, but to make them turn on each other, and crush themselves so they didn't even know they were doing it, that was the real skill.
Alan sent a kick square into her chest and she snapped backward, bouncing off the floor, but it wasn't rib crushing. There she lay, gasping for breath louder than she needed to, performing for Janine as the others descended.
There they beat her.
Her arms, her legs. Her back. The soles of her feet.
But they didn't strike her head again. They didn't strike her belly. And they didn't strike hard.
She cried out. She spread her arms and they beat them back, but softly. They slapped her face until her cheeks rang but no blood was drawn. Throughout Frances leered down, unaware that Lara was using her own reeling emotions as a lure to reel her in.
"My President, Lara," she said. "Don't forget that. Not yours. You're nobody. You'll be lucky if we let you carry out the shit after this."
They flipped her on her side so they could lash the backs of her thighs, but their blows came more like feather-strokes now. Someone had a cane and they used it, but by then the beating had become a slow-motion pantomime, with each of them taking it in turns to lay the cane across her flesh and pull it fast, grunting with the exertion and leaving no mark behind.
They believed it. Their eyes were Witzgenstein's eyes and their hands were her hands, and they didn't know what they were doing. Lara struggled and the curtains came off her, perhaps torn away, until she was just a naked black woman in the Lincoln Bedroom, being savaged by five white people with weapons, and Frances licked her lips and redoubled her cane-laying, her cane-pulling.
Lara twisted and kept twisting, drawing the threads of their signals on the line closer to her, wrapping them around her hands until she was in there with Witzgenstein, but invisible, sinking in beneath the rage. They didn't see her, didn't feel her; all they knew was the grand show of her pain.
Lara thought back to the boy who'd been lynched when she was just a little girl, that had started her off on her career into the law. As each false blow fell, as Frances luxuriated in her simulated pain, as the others blinked away their sweat and wiped imaginary blood off their sticks, she thought about what the reality of what he'd gone through.
He'd truly suffered and truly died, and his killers had truly gotten away with it, and that had destroyed Lara. The panic attacks that followed had broken her, cracking her resolve and leaving her collapsed in the fountain of a law company's lobby, because they'd won.
But not now. With every fake blow, she felt the ice of Amo's touch within grow warmer, and remembered what true faith was, because this was her act of defiance. This was how she turned the world around, using the weapon that had birthed her into this new world. Their fake blows were hammer strikes on a lump of iron on the blacksmith's anvil, beating her into a truer shape.
She screamed and welcomed every soft strike. She gathered up the pain and humiliation and poured it like gasoline onto the warming ice in her middle, because this was to be their forging as much as it was hers, weaving her into their own signals on the line. Nothing would be the same again. Perhaps if the fire grew strong enough then Amo would hear her call in return, and draw strength from her will to survive.
So she made the final twist, and the next blow that landed was a real one, though it was not on her.
Frances struck Alan across the back, as hard as she could, and he screamed, and Frances grunted with wild joy, and while Alan arched his back orgasmically, another blow fell from Cynthia onto Frances, and the scene played itself out again.
SMACK
THUMP
THWACK
They groaned and beat each other. Blood swelled up. She twisted, and they beat each other. It was an orgy of violence and pain. They grunted and leered. It was what Witzgenstein wanted. It was her reward, and Lara could give it to her.
WHACK
SLAP
THUMP
They groaned, and cried out, and bled and pawed at each other's bodies, tearing the clothing and the skin, lost in the throes of passion, believing with every strike that it was Lara they struck.
She twisted the line, and twisted, burrowing in deeper, digging into each of them so she was an underlay beneath Witzgenstein's agitated bridle, learning as she moved, sending tendrils she'd never imagined were possible, and taking control. She let them exhaust themselves, beating until they were spent and on their knees and barely able to lift their arms any more. Frances lay on her side, drooling and moaning into the carpet. Alan lay on his back with his hands on his chest, panting ecstatically, wheezing. Cynthia caressed George's short hair and he nuzzled into her, bleeding from a broken nose.
They didn't know. They were sated, and so Witzgenstein was sated.
And through them, through that, Lara realized that this wasn't the first time. They'd done this before. They did this often. She felt the snaking lines of intimacy throughout the line, reaching between Drake's people and the children, each meeting in tight little nexuses of pain and humiliation, each of them feeding back to feed into Witzgenstein.
Perhaps she didn't even know. On some level she did. Not consciously. This was to be her rule.
Her own head still throbbed, a swelling block of white behind her eye. The first blows still pounded painfully in her arms. She was exhausted from the effort of controlling them, and slowly, shudderingly, managed to get one hand onto her belly.
Her baby was in there. The baby would be scared.
"Shhh," she breathed, stroking the swollen skin, the only part of her that didn't ache. "Little one, shhh."
Perhaps she slept for a time after that. She woke with a large figure standing over her. Her neck rolled, showing him her face.
Crow.
"Are you broken?" he asked.
She only closed her eyes. Both hands now were on her belly, encircling the child, holding it close and letting it know. She had just enough energy to reach out and twist into Crow.
He sensed her. Part of him felt her touch, a glimmer of purple on the line beneath Witzgenstein's red, and he helped hide it. She was there too, moving over him like a net of arteries.
"I think they've only made it worse, here," he said, after a time. "I think Witzgenstein's brought her death in by the front door. Lara."
Lara kneaded at the purple in him, beneath the cover of the bridle, and thought lullabies to her baby on the line. It needed a name, didn't it? She had one ready, her father's name, because she knew now that it would be a boy, and he would be strong.
Ezekiel.
Her father had loved the Bible. He'd read it every day, sitting on their porch after work, thumbing through pages he'd thumbed through a thousand times before. When she'd come home after the first day of school, carrying five thick law books heaped before her, he'd smiled.
"Everything you need to know's in this one book, daughter."
She'd laughed, stumbling up the stairs to the porch. "What about Tort reform?"
He'd l
aughed at that too, and put his Bible up, and rose to help her because that was the kind of man he was.
Ezekiel, she thought down to the baby. I'm here for you. Can you be here for me? Just a little longer. I'm going to have all this straightened out.
"There's going to be blood, isn't there?" Crow asked. "More than this. All of us complicit."
Lara floated on the heartbeat felt through her hands, felt in her spine and in her sides. This was the real fire, the furnace that would keep her alive and remake her into something new. She sent that feeling out to nourish Crow, and felt him responding. Witzgenstein could see that too, perhaps.
Then Crow's arms slipped underneath her, lifting her gently. She was dimly aware as he carried her away, out of the Lincoln Bedroom and down the hall, into the bedchambers of the new President of the United States. There he lay her down on a cot at the foot of the bed, and departed.
The next thing was a cool cloth at her brow.
"My child," came Witzgenstein's voice. "My poor child, what have they done to you?"
Lara murmured. She let her hands fall from her belly, and crawl weakly up her naked body, to take Witzgenstein's hand. The bridle was already opening up, vulnerable in the intimacy of the bedroom.
"What's this?" Witzgenstein asked.
Lara pulled her hand down. She put her palm over her lips and kissed.
"Ahhh," Witzgenstein murmured softly, caressing Lara's chin. "My child, what have they done to you now?"
INTERLUDE 7
In the air, the world changed as James While's strike teams arrested every SEAL Head, smoothly took charge of their hierarchical command structures, and began an immense global audit.
It was all about trust.
For seven years as the COO of the SEAL he'd been nurturing his own people, building them into the infrastructure of every facility and program, placing them in positions of power, while simultaneously winning them over with his vision, competence and disarming honesty.
They weren't all autistic. Those who were, he knew he could rely upon utterly. He'd taken the time to meet every one of them individually. To them, as to him, the world looked different, and that formed a powerful bond; especially considering who he was.
The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 16