“Great, the perfect weapon if I’m going to kill gangsters in Detroit,” I muttered, putting a round in the chamber and running a brief check on the weapon. It was immaculately well-maintained.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Nathan said. “There’s a reason guns replaced the old ways of fighting.”
I strapped on the holster and hid it under my jacket. “Thanks.”
“Don’t die,” Nathan said, closing the helicopter door before its engine started up again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
As I passed through those big metal doors, it occurred to me I might be walking to my death.
The likelihood of Nathan Hawthorne sending me to my death was about one in five. I tended to believe him when he claimed he was appalled by the experiments going on here at Camp Zero and never intended half of the horrible things I’d known him to have done. There was just enough niggling doubt as to his intentions, though, that a part of me was afraid.
Seconds after I passed through the doors, I found myself in a long, pipe-filled corridor with concrete walls. The House’s symbol was painted on the wall in the space between two rows of pipes. It consisted of a circle with a Masonic square and compass over a shield with a stylized H in front of it.
Passing through the H was a pair of crossed wands with the words Condemnant quod non intellegunt written underneath them. Translated from Latin, this phrase meant, “They condemn what they do not understand.” I felt this was the most hypocritical phrase possible, since people didn’t understand because the House kept them ignorant.
Coming down the hallway, dressed in black helmets with mirror visors and heavy black body armor, were a squadron of Sons of Mars mercenaries. Each was sporting a variant of the M100.
Less than a year ago, the private military contractors had assisted Cassandra in her attempted coup. The ringleaders had been punished, but the majority had been promoted for their efforts. The group had expanded into a massive military juggernaut with paychecks twice as lucrative. It was now the largest PMC on the planet, surpassing G4S and Hellfire Limited. In this world, money trumped ideals.
This surprises you? Mary said in my head. I would have thought it would be an accepted fact of your life.
I’m always hoping the world will surprise me.
Then you’ll always be disappointed.
The leader of the squadron got real close, so close I could see my reflection in his visor. “You’re not on the authorized list of personnel, Councilman.”
He said the word like he was cursing. I wondered what I’d done to the man to get him to dislike me. Given my previous associations with the Sons of Mars, I suspected I’d killed some of his friends. Oops.
“I was cleared for entrance by the other Councilman Hawthorne, soldier,” I said, keeping my voice civil. I didn’t want to antagonize him, mostly because I suspected his buddies would rally to his defense. The last thing I needed was a gang of thugs riding my ass when I was trying to sabotage this place.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” a feminine voice said from the back of the hall. I couldn’t see the source past the soldiers. “Did they teach you nothing about protocol wherever you trained?”
“The Marines, ma’am.”
“Well, Semper Fi and get out of my fucking way,” the woman said, and I realized it was Rebecca.
The squadron of mercenaries shared looks and parted to different sides of the hall, exposing a five-foot-four woman with brown hair in a topknot, chubby cheeks, a pair of spectacles, and a white dress shirt over black slacks. She had a lanyard around her neck and a clipboard under her arm. It was Rebecca Hawthorne all right, looking as sweet and pleasant as when I’d last seen her at the Division One New Year’s Eve Party.
Standing beside Rebecca, at about four-foot even, was an albino naked figure with an overlarge head. The being had no visible sex organs and only four fingers. It was a member of the Grey species, a genetically engineered fairy-human hybrid created by the White Room in the late fifties. Known as “living computers,” they were responsible for much of the UFO hysteria of the time. Today, they were almost extinct, the House having discontinued the experiments that created them after having successfully pushed humanity forward in the space race.
He, too, was wearing a lanyard.
“Derek! How wonderful for you to visit!” Rebecca said, smiling like it was Christmas. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to come to Camp Zero.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, totally not expecting things to have gone this way.
“Voot verrp veerp,” the Grey said.
“Well, of course he’s nervous!” Rebecca said, like she was talking to someone speaking English. “It’s not every day someone gets brought into one of the inner secrets of the House. Even when one is a member of the Committee.”
“Yes, that’s it. You’re right,” I said, looking between them. Clearly, the Grey was empathic, but thankfully, not telepathic. Otherwise, this whole plan was dead in the water before it began.
Don’t worry, Derek, Bloody Mary said. I’ll protect your precious thoughts.
Thank you, I thought back. That’s very reassuring.
You’re welcome, Bloody Mary replied.
I was being sarcastic, I said.
When are you not sarcastic? Bloody Mary asked.
She had a point. Holding out my arms, I said, “It’s good to see you, Rebecca.”
Rebecca hugged me back, making this whole plan to betray her and destroy her operation more awkward. “You have no idea how worried I was about you. I’d heard you’d disappeared for a week.”
“Well, I was just doing one of my off-the-grid self-imposed missions,” I said, half-telling the truth.
“Ah, like the time you rescued your partner in North Korea. The one who got gored by a unicorn.”
“Yes, Winston.” Poor Winston, it turned out, had been the least troublesome of my partners.
Rebecca broke our embrace and started taking me by the hand down the hall. “Harold, do me a favor and get a report ready on the past year’s activities for our guest. We have a great deal to discuss and I think it’ll be best for my brother to be informed.”
“Veep veep voo.” The Grey blinked, its eyelids being on its side of its blackish orbs. The Grey proceeded to walk away, casting me an unpleasant look as he did so. He didn’t trust me.
Which was the right attitude.
“Vaap!” The Grey called back at me.
“Don’t use that kind of language.” Rebecca shook a finger at the Grey before he vanished into a side door.
“You understand him?” I asked.
“He’s my familiar.”
I wondered how Rebecca had managed to create a bond with a sentient being. To do so, she’d have to have a dominant and superior view of her associate. You could turn pets into familiars, but to do so to a fellow being was tantamount to slavery, especially since familiars only lived as long as their masters.
“Impressive,” I said, pulling my arm free. “I’m not just here for a tour, Becky.”
“Oh?”
I decided I couldn’t leave Rebecca unprepared, even if I thought what was going on here was evil beyond measure. “I believe the location of Camp Zero has been compromised. Dracula is going to attack soon and in force.”
Rebecca looked like I’d told her it was probably going to rain tonight. “I’ll raise our security level to Fuchsia and tell the guards to have everyone ready.”
“Fuchsia?”
“I get to choose the colors and red-alert is passé.”
“I think you should evacuate the facility.” Abandoning it would also give me a chance to destroy their research and find some other way to stop Rebecca’s plan. Gods and immortals forbid, a nonviolent solution to all this.
Rebecca snorted. “I’m not afraid of vampires.”
“You should be.”
“Says the so-called Cleaver.”
“So-called is right. Only luck and circumstance has kept
me alive in my encounters with the undead.”
Rebecca pulled out a Hermes cellphone and typed in a short message before putting it back in her pocket. Seconds later, a series of yellow police lights in the ceiling started spinning as a siren played in the ground. The Sons of Mars mercenaries behind us jogged past us to take position elsewhere in the disguised prison facility.
“Yellow lights?” I asked.
“Fuchsia lights are harder to find than you think. I want to show you something.”
“All right.”
As I followed my sister, we passed through another set of metal doors and walked up a set of concrete stairs to another pair of doorways leading to one of the gigantic metal balls outside. The doors opened after Rebecca’s lanyard was scanned with a laser-sight, and the two of us passed into a chamber that was hard to describe.
If I had to pick my words for evoking the sense of feeling the place invoked, I’d say it was like being in the interior of the Death Star combined with an asylum. The walls of the vast chamber were filled with thousands of clear transparent steel cells arranged on top of one another, covering the entirety of the ball’s interior and forming a weird stadium-like grid around us.
Rising through the middle of the chamber was a central pillar containing a dozen elevators, which led to a staggering series of catwalks that allowed the prisoners to be attended to. At the top of this thirty-six-story geodesic sphere, twice as large as the one at Epcot Center, was a square-shaped control center that loomed over all this like a throne. You couldn’t hear the Fuchsia alarm inside. Instead, pop music was playing in the background. Right now, it was “Justified and Ancient” by the KLF.
Not all the prison cells were occupied, but I was stunned to see just how many of them were. There were at least a thousand prisoners, including quite a few that were inhuman. I saw rakshasas, djinn, shape-shifters, vampires, boggarts, and hybrids of every sort. I’d known this place had been in operation for years, but I had no idea it was anywhere near this expansive. The Red Room must have been kidnapping dozens of people a month to achieve these sorts of results, and I’d never heard a whisper of this place outside of rumor.
Rebecca pulled out her clipboard and took a pen from it, using it to point to different sections of the chamber. “The lower levels house those who are still being processed but the mid-levels are those we’ve managed to render compliant. The top levels are the best, though, because those are the ones we’re able to put into the field.”
“Put in the field?” I said, bewildered. The House must have spent a billion dollars on this place.
“Oh yes, secrecy is a paramount concern and our chief priority has always been figuring out how to create super-powered agents who could serve us in the field.”
“Which you’ve been doing for a while.”
“Oh yes, for almost a year now. The secrecy of the supernaturals has contributed to our work as they don’t question when one of their lesser members disappears. The violence inherent in the system guarantees they just blame one of the other factions. Mostly, we’ve just been using them to acquire new members of our society. I foresee Division Zero someday becoming equal to the other branches of the House. A Purple Room, if you will, delivering superpowered soldiers to fight for human rights.”
“How many humans are being . . . treated here?”
Rebecca paused to think about that. “Oh, hundreds. I’m sorry to say it’s easy to overestimate their value. Dozens have died on the missions we’ve prepared for them. I don’t supervise that part, but the project leaders warned me it was probable.”
I reevaluated my earlier conclusions and decided my sister was quite probably insane. I walked over to the first level of cells. Many of these prisoners were in pain, tortured, but their screams were muted by the soundproof interiors of their cells. Instead, all I could hear was the pleasant tones of the Eurhythmics “Sex Crime,” which had just started playing.
“How . . . do you justify this?” I gestured to the hallway of identical transparent steel cells around me.
Rebecca Hawthorne clutched her clipboard tight and frowned, ignoring the horrific nature of our surroundings. “It’s my life’s work. This is the place we’re making incredible strides in the field of behavior modification and correctional procedure.”
One of the Red Room’s slang terms was newspeak. It was what agents used to refer to any outlet (government, corporate, or otherwise) that used buzzwords to try and cover up the actual substance of what they were doing. I had to wonder if my kid sister thought her actions were justified or was trying to convince herself. The background music pointed to the former, or to a lack of self-awareness bordering on the absurd.
“I can’t say I’m not intrigued,” I lied, realizing I didn’t want to tip her off. To cover my disgust, I looked to my side. There, through a glass wall, I saw a room where a man was tied up in a ward-covered straight jacket. Hundreds of spiders were covering his body and face, crawling up and down his body. Bad mistake. Biting my lip, I pondered what I was going to say next. I didn’t suffer from arachnophobia, but I suspected he did, by the look of sheer terror on his face. What was weird was he didn’t scream, just contorted in disturbing ways. “Though some might find your methods unconventional.”
Rebecca frowned. “The processing for breaking down psyches here is crude. It’s brute force technique designed to reduce a subject to a neutral mental state, so they can be reprogrammed for Red Room service.”
“Elsewhere you change behavior with lollipops and stuffed animals?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Rebecca didn’t seem to hear my reproach. “More so than you think. If allowed a proper time period, soft techniques can convince a subject they’re willingly abandoning their past principles and embracing a new lifestyle. There’s no one more dedicated to a new religion than a fresh convert, and the zeal displayed by some of the subjects I’ve treated is beyond compare. One carried a surgically implanted bomb to assassinate John Ross the Red Slaver.”
I tried to hold back my disgust. How could she be proud she’d created a suicide bomber? “I want to speak with our father.”
Rebecca glared. “He’s not in charge here.”
It was defensive, almost petulant, which wasn’t what I expected.
“He’s not?”
Rebecca puffed up her chest in pride. “No, he’s not. I was chosen by the Chairman of the Committee to head up this project when I was nineteen. I was placed in charge of a lot of older agents who’d been working this facility for decades and who were using outdated methods. Many were cruel and abusive too. You wouldn’t have been believed what sort of abuses were going on here before I cleaned the place up.”
Keeping a straight face, I slipped into full “agent mode” and abandoned my love for my sibling to get as much information as possible. “There’s a difference between abuse for a subject’s own good versus something done for an torturer’s own sadism.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said.
I’d used that line when talking with torturers. “So, when did our father become involved?”
Rebecca looked peevish, like Nathan was interfering in her first real job. “He was involved in the original Project: Stargate research because of his powers influencing people. All very crude, half-assed, and very unscientific. He left when he became head of Division One and didn’t become re-involved until my success with Ruthford.”
“Wait, Osama Bin Vampire is here?”
“That description is crude and disrespectful.”
“Sorry.”
“John Ruthford was captured two years ago during a routine operation that lucked out. He proved to be resistant to enhanced interrogation—”
I gritted my teeth, hating that euphemism.
“That was when I applied my own techniques and proved I wasn’t just theory. Within six months, he had shared every bit of actionable data on the Vampire Nation and his sub-organization within it. From there, we’ve been using him to send transmissions to his follo
wers and play various factions against one another.”
I thought about the missile strike against Ruthford’s estate. It was a complete waste and pointless. He hadn’t been an actual terrorist threat to the Red Room for years.
“We’ve even let him go on unsupervised trips to the outside world now.” Rebecca started walking down the hall.
I followed her. “Annabelle Jones? Christopher’s wife? She’s here now?”
I walked in a circle, passing several other cells, these containing prisoners who had IVs attached to their arms and looked drugged to the gills. One of them, a black woman, was drawing on the ground with crayons. I shuddered to imagine what my sister had put her through and what they were going to do with her next.
Rebecca nodded. “Oh yes, upstairs.”
“I need to speak with her now,” I said, deciding I had to kill someone.
“Certainly,” Rebecca said, smiling.
Chapter Thirty
I’d done some questionable things in my time, but the sheer depravity and lack of respect for free will on display was a new level of evil for me. Worse than the Wazir turning a bunch of school kids into cannibalistic draugr. It put the final nail in the coffin for any loyalty I might have still felt for the Red Room and its masters. The House had created a facility to turn people into objects—and not just one or two, but on a mass scale.
There were two other geodesic domes here, probably containing other prison facilities they planned to fill up. How many thousands more people did they intend to brainwash? Were they going to do this to the public at large? Did the future hold nothing but brainwashed slaves?
Literally, the only thing preventing me from killing Rebecca Hawthorne right then was the fact that she was my sister. I wanted to believe she’d been put through a process like the ones being conducted here. As horrifying as the torture on display was, it would be better she be a victim of it than a perpetrator.
Is torture so much worse than murder? Is brainwashing? Bloody Mary asked, curious.
“Yes,” I whispered, following Rebecca to the elevators. “Are you sure Annabelle can be trusted?”
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