The Phoenix Project (The Liberty Box Book 3)

by C. A. Gray

  “Oh, shut up. Don’t use my own words against me,” Voltolini snapped. The speech Williams referred to was one he’d delivered to the Tribunal over twenty years ago, explaining why force would not work against riots, and why his own method was superior. Use force to suppress a rebellion, and you’ll curb it for awhile, he’d said. Maybe it will even appear as if you’ve won. But if the reason for the rioting remains—in this case, poverty, desperation, and starvation—count on it that suppression by force will only turn a riot into a revolution.

  Wasn’t that exactly what was happening now? Twenty years later, Voltolini’s elegant solution to the rebellion problem had begun to fail for unknown reasons… even Joe couldn’t diagnose it.

  Couldn’t, or wouldn’t? Voltolini wondered. He’d have Hurst threaten him some more, see if he could tell which it was.

  Of course, the inevitable riots that followed left him with no remaining course of action but force. Which clearly wasn’t working.

  “And Barrett? Has she any new ideas?” Voltolini demanded, tossing back the last of his coffee. He added under his breath, looking at the empty mug, “I need something stronger than this.” He snapped his fingers and an immaculate waiter rushed to his side. He whispered his request, and the waiter bowed, hurrying away.

  Williams replied, “Barrett’s team is working around the clock, re-testing every aspect of the signaling systems, but so far everything seems to be in working order. We’ve brought Joe in three times to check the code, and he says the same—”

  “He would say the same, because he hates me and he wants the control centers to fail!”

  “Joe will never compromise himself in order to do you any harm, whether actively or passively,” said Williams. “I think he’s telling the truth. Between you and me, I think they’re stumped, sir.”

  The waiter reappeared at Voltolini’s side, with a steaming pot of coffee, and a glass bottle of bourbon. The waiter began to fill the mug with coffee, but Voltolini waved him away, like swatting at a fly. Then he dumped the coffee on the grass, and refilled it with bourbon and only a splash of coffee on top. The waiter’s eyebrows raised infinitesimally before he scampered away.

  “Send Barrett to Hurst, then,” Voltolini barked at Williams, taking a swig of his concoction. Hurst was the Chief Executioner.

  Williams gagged a bit. “Sorry? Sir?”

  “You heard me, send Barrett to Hurst!” Voltolini shouted. “And promote whoever the hell is under her! Get Joe out of prison and make him look again, and tell him if he doesn’t come up with something, he’ll be next! Somebody’s got to know what’s going on!”

  Williams opened his mouth and closed it again, weighing his words as if managing a volatile child. “I do have some good news as well, sir.”

  “About damn time, although I don’t know what kind of good news can possibly follow that!”

  “Two of the control centers in New Estonia are nearly complete, sir. We’ve also completed engineering of the vaccinia vector with the Epstein Barr virus to release upon their population as soon as all of the control centers are in working order.” Williams paused, and added, “I need not remind you, sir, that once the broadcasts start, revolts in New Estonia will position you for a takeover. The messages there will program the citizens to believe that the benevolent Potentate of the Republic is their only hope.”

  Voltolini barely heard him. The problem with promoting Barrett’s second-in-command, he thought, was that he’s already been working on the same problem. What we need are a fresh pair of eyes… new angles…

  He swigged another gulp of bourbon and coffee, wincing as it burned down his esophagus. Suddenly he sat up straighter, snapping his fingers.

  “I’ve got it! I’ve got it—what took me so long to think of it?” His eyes danced. “We’ve got their leader in our dungeons. Why the hell haven’t we interrogated him yet? MacNamera knows what they’re doing to the control centers. He knows how they’re interrupting the signals. He’s the one who set the whole thing in motion! Go torture it out of him!”

  Williams nodded, his expression impassive. “I rather suspect we’ll have to resort to alternate methods with him, but you are right, sir. We can certainly try.”

  “Do whatever you have to do, then. Tell him we’ll hurt Kate if he doesn’t cooperate. One way or another, I want that information!”

  Chapter 10: Jackson

  I watched the sun come up, as usual. The morning light cast shadows of the window bars across the floor of my musty cell. Days blurred into nights here—I slept, but not on any particular schedule. How many days had passed since Kate’s visit? I thought it had only been last night, but it might have been several days already. I couldn’t tell anymore.

  “Psst,” Joe hissed through the faulty brick between us.

  “Go away,” I muttered.

  “Was that her?” he asked. “The girl who came to visit you?”

  I started at this, and a wave of irritation washed over me. I hadn’t realized we’d had an audience.

  “Must’ve been,” Joe concluded for me. “I saw her when she ran by my cell on her way out. She’s a knockout.”

  “That was supposed to be a private conversation,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just awake and couldn’t help overhearing.” When I still didn’t reply, hoping he would give up, he added, “Funny that there isn’t more security in here, eh? They just let her waltz right in.” When I didn’t comment on this, he went on, “Though I suppose between mind control and the fact that the dungeon is connected to the palace, they don’t see much reason for round the clock security.”

  “Shut up.”

  I thought he’d obeyed, because he was silent for a long stretch before he ventured, “I know I don’t deserve forgiveness for my role in turning her against you—”

  “You’re right. You don’t,” I snapped.

  He fell silent again. At last he went on, “I was a little surprised, if you want to know the truth. The Liberty Box technology should only cause a person to reframe events in light of a belief system… it shouldn’t actually cause them to blank on memories, or create new ones that never happened. That side effect never manifested in the clinical trials—”

  “Well, it sure as hell happened to Kate!”

  “I saw that,” Joe admitted. After a long pause, he added, more to himself than to me, “Then again, we never did clinical trials targeting a specific individual’s brainwaves before. She’s the first. That technology is new, so I suppose anything is possible. It almost seemed as if the targeted signals damaged her somehow.”

  I closed my eyes, clenching my teeth together as hard as I could. “Glad you can be so scientific about it.”

  Joe pressed his face right up to the hole in the wall between us—he’d pulled the brick all the way out on his side this time. “Jackson,” he pleaded, “please, just—try to understand my position…”

  “I don’t want to understand your position! I don’t want anything to do with you. Just leave me alone!”

  After a long pause, I heard the friction of the brick sliding back into place. Presently my heartbeat slowed again and I unclenched my jaw and fists, feeling the slightest twinge of remorse.

  You need to forgive him, my conscience pricked at me, in the tone of Uncle Patrick. He’s cowardly, yes. But he’s frail and pitiful, and he desperately wants a friend. Imagine living almost your entire life in prison, for decades—

  I don’t care, I snapped at the voice. He doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

  All right, perhaps he doesn’t. But deserve has nothing to do with it, replied the patient Uncle Patrick in my head. Forgive him for your own sake, then, not for his… because hatred will eat you alive from the inside…

  Then let it! I retorted, what does it matter in here anyway?

  I sighed. Truth or a lie, Jackson?

  Lie, I knew. Of course it mattered. Kate needed me. The rebels neede
d me. I couldn’t afford to play the victim. The stakes were too high.

  A commotion down the hall broke through my internal dialogue: a woman, crying, begging for her life. She was too far away, and the echoes in the hallway distorted the sound too much for me to make out what she said beyond a few words. I had the impression she had worked for the Potentate. She made promises, barely comprehensible through her desperation. I stood up, straining to understand what was said. But her voice faded away, along with two other sets of footsteps.

  The remaining footsteps continued down the hall though, closer and closer. I felt a swooping sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  He’s coming for me.

  Kate decided to kill me after all. This is it.

  He passed by me, though, and went to the cell next to mine.

  “We need you,” barked the guard to Joe. “Get up.”

  “Sounds like Barrett did something to displease the Potentate,” was Joe’s observation.

  “Let that serve as a warning to you to do better,” snapped the guard. “Hurry up, haven’t got all day.”

  As Joe passed by my cell, I got a good look at him for the first time. He wore the same prison jumpsuit as I did, but it hung on him as if his bones were little more than a coat rack. In the daylight I could see that he was younger than he’d originally seemed: in his fifties maybe, or early sixties. His eyes seemed much too big for his gaunt face, and he looked at me as he passed me by, like he was saying both goodbye and I’m sorry.

  I did feel a twinge of pity for him. I couldn’t help it.

  Once Joe and the guard’s footsteps faded away, though, I heard more coming in my direction. Three of them, their shoes click-clacking on the dank concrete floor.

  The door to my cell swung open, admitting three men: one enormous, almost twice my size, with a jaw like a horse. One I thought I recognized as Williams, the head of the Secret Service. The third was an agent I’d never seen before.

  Williams stepped forward. “We have some questions for you. Tell us what we want to know, and you’ll end this day in one piece as you began it. Resist in any way, and Hurst here will be forced to loosen your tongue.” He gestured at the giant.

  I looked from Hurst to Williams, confused, waiting for him to go on.

  “As I’m sure you are aware, rebellions have popped up in five cities in the Republic so far. In those cities, while the control center signals appear to be in working order from what we can tell, the people no longer respond to them. You’re their leader. What are the rebels doing to the signals?”

  I blinked, the wheels in my head turning slowly. The repeaters. They’re breaking the repeaters! That meant Will and the hunters had to still be alive.

  “You just realized something,” Williams barked. “Talk.”

  “I’m not their leader,” I said, suddenly feeling lighter than I had in days. The hunters are alive. There’s hope. I started to laugh—a weak, wheezy sound, even to my ears.

  Hurst’s fist found my stomach first. I collapsed onto the ground, and then his foot collided with my already sore ribs. I tried to stand up again.

  “Talk, dammit!” Williams demanded. “How are they doing it?”

  Fist to cheek. Foot to shin. Knee to groin. Stars of pain floated before my eyes, and I collapsed again.

  There was a time when I’d been able to fight off five men at once, I thought vaguely, and it wasn’t so very long ago…

  “Stop,” I heard Williams say to Hurst through a haze, just as he prepared to kick me again. Williams crouched down next to me, his face inches from mine. I could already feel one of my eyes swelling shut. “Do you know what the rebels are doing to the signals?”

  “No,” I choked out. It was a half-truth. I suspected; I didn’t know for sure.

  “If you did know, would you tell us?”

  I wheezed another laugh, wincing with the pain in my ribs. “No.”

  Williams gave a curt nod, turning to the third agent in the room, who up until now had been silent. “You know what to do,” he said, and the agent turned and left.

  For the first time, fear seized my heart. “Where is he going?”

  Instead of answering me, Williams leaned down closer. “You’re not the only prisoner we have here, MacNamera. Guess who else is here?”

  I knew where this was going. “If you touch her—”

  “We won’t,” Williams interrupted me. “We won’t lift a finger against her, just so long as you tell us what we want to know. Now let me ask you again. Do you know how the rebels are disrupting the control center signals?”

  I closed my eyes. Grandfather? I screamed his name in my mind, desperate for guidance. Was this a bluff? Surely Kate was too valuable to the Potentate. Surely they wouldn’t really hurt her…

  Unless they were willing to take the gamble that my information was even more valuable than she was. Would they sacrifice her on that chance?

  “Do you know how the rebels are disrupting the signals?” Williams shouted again.

  “No,” I gasped.

  He stood up, arching his eyebrows. “Very well.”

  I heard two sets of footsteps returning, and I strained for half a second before I was certain that neither of them belonged to Kate. I almost cried with relief.

  My eyes were still closed when a genial, incongruously cheerful voice broke in, “I apologize that we have not yet had the pleasure.”

  I looked up and saw the Potentate. I thought about standing up and punching him in the face, but then I winced in pain just from inhaling. Besides, with Hurst still standing there, that probably wouldn’t be a great move for my longevity.

  Voltolini crouched down beside me. “I understand you’ve been giving us a little trouble, Mr. MacNamera. You see, we know the rebels are acting under your orders—”

  “They’re not,” I choked out. “I don’t know why you all think I’m their leader, but I’m not.”

  “Oh?” he raised his eyebrows and puffed out his lip, an affected expression that somehow rendered him even more hateable. “It was you that led ten citizens, including two Enemies of State and one of our own agents, out into that forest of yours with great fanfare, murdering two of our agents along the way, was it not?”

  “But—”

  “It was you who murdered seven members of my Tribunal on the very roof of my own home, was it not?”

  “You have it wrong!” I protested, struggling to sit up, and keeping my eye on Hurst’s boot. If we were going to have this conversation, I at least intended to look the bastard in the eye. “First of all, it certainly was not ‘murder.’ It was self-defense or protection of the innocent in both cases, and you know it. Second, the rebels sanctioned neither of those events. I was acting on my own.”

  Voltolini shifted his position and sat on the ground beside me, leaning forward across his knees. It felt like he was trying to seem relatable, like we were playing “good cop, bad cop.”

  “I see,” Voltolini murmured, frowning. “Who is their leader, then? If not you?”

  If I gave him Nick’s name, his face would be on the broadcast of the evening news. He was almost certainly on the grid with the rest of the hunters, breaking the repeaters, or whatever they were doing. Publicity could mean death to him.

  Maybe I should have let Voltolini think I was their leader after all.

  “Hurst,” Voltolini purred, scooting away from me to give Hurst’s boot easier access. An explosion of pain ripped through my body, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see.

  Williams cleared his throat. “May I speak with you privately, sir?”

  Williams and Voltolini stepped out into the hallway of the dungeon, while Hurst stayed in the corner of my cell, a hulking mass with arms crossed across his chest. The other agent stood in his shadow. Both Williams and Voltolini lowered their voices out in the corridor, but I could still make out most of what they said with effort. Years of seeing with senses other than my eyes had rendered them
all exceptionally sharp.

  Williams said, “If… keep on beating him, likely he will die of internal injuries… without treatment…”

  And Voltolini’s voice: “If… see that he’s dying… hurry up and execute… cameras.”

  So they’d prop me up and shoot me before I died on my own, I guess. Lovely.

  “Yes, but… never find out… knows…” said Williams. “…Kate.” My blood ran cold again.

  Voltolini: “Too precious. Cannot sacrifice… for this.”

  Williams: “But if he thinks we would…?”

  Silence for a long moment. Then two sets of footsteps returned.

  Voltolini sat down on the floor beside me again, like we were co-conspirators, and he puffed out his lower lip again in that ridiculous manner of his.

  “I’ve been holding out on you, Jackson,” he said. “We do have another… shall we say, bargaining chip. I assume you must be in love with her, since you went to all that effort to rescue her at her trial?”

  I sat up again, seeing brief flashes of light and darkness behind my eyes. I’d assess the damage when they left. And now I knew they would, soon.

  “What I’m getting at,” Voltolini went on, “is, how much are your secrets worth to you? You’ll sacrifice your own life, I can see that. Very noble of you. But… would you sacrifice hers?”

  “You’d be an idiot to hurt her,” I said, buoyed by what I’d overheard. “She’s much too valuable to you. You already have her brainwashed, and she still has power over the people. They listen to her. She can rescind every word of her broadcast on the air, and you need that now more than ever, since you’re losing control of cities one by one—”

  “I am not losing control!” For the first time, Voltolini’s face contorted, and he slammed his open palm on the concrete floor, his eyes flashing.

  “Ah,” I murmured. “Nice to finally meet you, Ben.”

  Voltolini stood up abruptly and marched out of the cell like he couldn’t wait to get away from me. I saw the brief flashes of surprise on the faces of the other three men, but they followed him out, and Voltolini slammed the door of my cell shut. Then he grabbed two of the bars, and spat, “The next time I see you will be on execution hill!”