Going Dark (38 page)

“Looks like you’re our senior officer, ma’am.”

Fadul’s low, dangerous laugh reaches in over my helmet audio. “Shit, Shelley. Everyone knows Vasquez isn’t as crazy as you. Odds are she’ll live a lot longer.”

“That’s bullshit, Fadul. Vasquez thinks she’s going to Mars. How crazy is that?”

•  •  •  •

The dead sisters encourage a long, bouncy stride that gets us to the command center in just a few minutes, even at a walk. The building looks dark and uninhabited, but as we approach, the front door buzzes and unlocks, spilling a slice of light onto the ground, green in night vision. Fadul goes in first. I follow her into the dimly lit interior, peeling off my helmet again as soon as I’m inside. A rigged MP is standing sentry in the lobby just like the first time I was here, a HITR held across his body.

Kanoa is waiting for us at the mouth of a shadowy hallway. Escamilla and Dunahee are with him, all three in combat uniforms. I cross the lobby, trade fist-bumps and
hoo-yah
’s with my soldiers, and then turn to Kanoa. “We need to get Abajian out—”

“Not here,” he cuts me off. “Not now. Not even over gen-com.” He raises his voice to address the squad. “Get out of your gear. Leave it—and your weapons—here. The MP will see that they’re secure.”

We do it, un-cinching from the dead sisters and then folding the frames into their compact-carry configuration. They go in neat formation against the lobby wall, with an armored vest draped over the frame, a helmet placed on top, and a HITR leaning against the right side. Seven sets in all.

We follow Kanoa down the hall to the lighted doorway of a briefing room. Inside, five rows of six seats face a slightly elevated table, with a podium on one side and a projection screen on the wall behind. Sitting at one end of the table is ETM 7-1’s traitorous intelligence liaison, Cory
Helms. I don’t think I’ll be forgiving him anytime soon. A second chair, closer to the podium, is empty.

Captain Montrose is at the podium, consulting with Lieutenant Ashman, the intelligence officer who came to the house with orders to debrief our last mission. As we come in, she looks up, watching us with a skeptical gaze. “Please be seated,” she says.

A seat in the fourth row is already occupied. I slide in next to Leonid Sergun.

“Where the hell have you been?” I ask him.

He’s wearing a black coat, his white hair freshly buzzed to stubble. He turns to look at me, eyes stern beneath unruly eyebrows. “I have been on site for this mission, renewing old friendships and making arrangements. Not in vain, I trust? Has your god assigned this mission to you?”

I have to admit, “I don’t know.”

The rest of the squad moves up front, taking most of the seats in the first and second rows. Fadul is the exception. She slides into row three, one seat diagonally in front of me. Behind us, the door bangs shut and Kanoa strides past to a first-row seat.

I tell Leonid, “I took your suggestion. And I unsubscribed from direct updates.”

He raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t know what I mean. Not exactly. But he gives a short nod of approval before turning back to the podium. In a low voice, he says, “Captain Montrose has done most of the mission planning. He is a capable officer.”

“And Abajian?”

I hear a skeptical grunt. “I am sure he is good at politics.”

I smile, lean back, cross my arms over my chest. “Politics can be useful.”

“Very much so.”

“But so can a less-active leadership style.”

Fadul turns around, making no secret that she is following the conversation, her bright eyes amused.

“He doesn’t trust you, Shelley,” Leonid says in the same low voice. “He doesn’t trust ETM 7-1. But these soldiers gathered here, they have a reputation for doing impossible things, and he has been told to see that you take this mission.”

“Told by who? I thought this was a closed circle.”

“Abajian serves your president. It’s interesting, no? You don’t trust him. He doesn’t trust you. But the president of your country trusts you both. Who misjudges?”

Fadul smiles and turns to face front again. I scowl. I don’t have an answer for that. Up front, Captain Montrose leaves the podium to Lieutenant Ashman, who looks askance for a moment, as if she’s listening to a message delivered over her farsights.

Her gaze shifts back to her audience: eight of us from ETM, plus Jaynie and Flynn, and Papa. “Colonel Abajian has arrived and will be joining us shortly. In the meantime, I would like to open this briefing by emphasizing that we
do not know
the full reach and extent of the enemy’s penetration of our own command structure—and that is the reason for using irregular forces. This operation must remain secret and utterly invisible to everyone—”

The latch bangs on the door behind us. I jump hard, instinctively reaching for the pistol I’m not carrying as I rise to my feet, turning to face what’s coming.

The door swings open. Abajian strides in. We trade a glare. He heads to the front. I start to sit down again, but then I realize he’s not alone. Delphi comes in behind him. She catches the door, holds it open long enough to slip through, then lets it click shut.

She’s wearing a white pullover sweater and gray slacks. A coat is draped over her arm. Her blond hair
is pulled back into a ponytail, and her transparent farsights hardly obscure the bright blue of her eyes as they fix on me.

Up front, Lieutenant Ashman starts speaking again. “This operation,” she repeats, “
must
remain secret—” And then she interrupts herself. “Captain Shelley?”

I turn around. It’s like I’ve been staring at the sun and I need to look away.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We are trying to begin this briefing, Captain. If you would join us?”

I sit down without looking behind me again. I think it was an illusion. A hallucination exploding in my wired brain.

“It is imperative,” Lieutenant Ashman says, “that this operation remain utterly invisible to everyone outside of this room, right up until the moment we launch. We can trust no one else, because
anyone
could be an operative working against the current administration and the democratic future of our country.”

The hallucination I’m suffering is not just visible. I hear her moving behind me as she takes a seat in the empty last row. It’s a tactile hallucination too. I flinch as her hand squeezes my shoulder. “Vasquez wants me as her handler,” she whispers.

I reach back and put my hand over hers, wondering how many times I can say I’m sorry.

But that’s not why she’s here.

She squeezes my shoulder one more time. Then she pulls away.

Calm
, I tell my skullnet.
Lock it down.
And it obeys me, sending a cold, clear, analytical mood washing across my brain, a mood that reflects an ethic I’ve come to live by:

Mission first.

It’s not the Red whispering in my head. It’s just me.

Mission first.

Cerebral graffiti graven on my brain years ago.

•  •  •  •

The first bit of the presentation is a video of President Monteiro.

She is pacing back and forth in front of a gray government-issue steel desk with a windowless, unpainted concrete wall in the background. Monteiro is in her fifties, Caucasian, with short blond hair and sharp brown eyes that have begun to look a little weary. Dressed in a white blouse and gray slacks, she looks thinner than she should be.

After two turns, she stops abruptly and returns the camera’s gaze. “I am recording this video in what I’m told is a secure bunker. No spies. No listening devices.” She smiles. “Nothing better to inflame the suspicions of your enemies than a well-kept secret, right?”

She begins pacing again, her hands on her hips, her lips half curled. “I will state the obvious and say that in my administration, mistakes have been made. When I accepted this position, I presumed that twenty-four years of army service had taught me a sufficient cynicism, but eighteen months serving as president of the United States has shown me I was not nearly cynical enough.” Again she turns to the camera.

“Wars are no longer fought just among nations. There are organizational layers enfolding the globe that have nothing to do with national borders. Some are clumsy, like the Shahin Council’s attempt to carry out Broken Sky. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to defeat. Not when they’re widespread, when their operations are as thin and fluid as smoke, when they don’t give a damn about who or what gets hurt.

“James Shelley, Ray Logan, and Alex Tran, you deserve the thanks of a grateful nation for your recent actions, but those actions must remain secret, so all I can offer you is my own thanks and gratitude.”

Without turning around, Fadul gives me a mocking thumbs-up. I know it’s mocking, because this is Fadul.

“But there are worse enemies,” Monteiro says. “There is a cabal in the world far more sophisticated than the plotters behind Broken Sky. They do not represent any specific country, creed, or philosophy. Their goal is to consolidate their own power by installing puppet governments around the world. To this end, they are waging a new style of war, a quiet war, a very careful war of disruption carried out on many fronts. The Arctic War is a symptom. So is Broken Sky. So is August-19.

“August-19 is the codename we’ve given to the quiet assassinations that have ravaged every large national government around the world—over two hundred sixty people dead so far in an ongoing assault against the world’s leadership, at least that part of it not already in the service of the enemy. The effect of this assault is pernicious, not just because of the loss of life, but also because of the fear and the suspicion that infects the survivors. Already, members of my administration are questioning one another’s loyalty simply because they remain alive. There are rumors of purges in other parts of the world. We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but if this goes on, we will.”

She squeezes her eyes briefly shut, shakes her head. But when she looks up again, her gaze is unwavering. “August-19 is the reason you are here today. I am entrusting this recording to Colonel Abajian so that I may personally ask all of you who are present to commit an illegal act—
another
illegal act—in the service of your country. I acknowledge this as a hypocritical request, given my own lectures to
some here regarding the supremacy of the rule of law. But our Republic is under assault, as are so many other governments. Colonel Abajian will present the mission scenario. There will be no retribution, no arrests, no punishment if you choose not to accept it. I will only say that if word of what we are planning gets out before we are ready to launch, there will be hell to pay.”

The video ends abruptly in a black screen.

“Wipe it,” Colonel Abajian says. “And overwrite the file traces.”

•  •  •  •

Lieutenant Ashman presents an overview of the threat:

“The substance deployed so effectively by August-19 is a molecular weapon. It’s a kind of bioactive allergen—you may think of it as artificial pollen—tailored very specifically to induce a severe allergic reaction in a target individual, resulting in anaphylactic shock and consequent death by asphyxiation. Each attack deploys a slightly different version. To be so specifically effective, the target’s genetic makeup must be known ahead of time to the designer. Deployment is through air systems. Sometimes air-conditioning, sometimes by releasing the affective dust close to the target. Though the weapon is bioactive, it is
not
a living thing. It is not contagious and it cannot reproduce or spread beyond its initial release. Unless you are specifically targeted, you do not have reason to fear it.”

“Unless they modify the coding to go universal,” Leonid mutters.

Fadul glances over her shoulder, meeting my gaze. More than ever, I am sure: This is the target we’ve been hunting on our look-and-see missions.

“Why not deploy a more generalized weapon?” Lieutenant Ashman asks. “The implication, of course, is that
August-19 could, but chooses not to, as a ‘humanitarian’ gesture.”

The propaganda angle is clear: Unpopular leaders can be selectively removed while the people they exploited are left unharmed, perhaps even cheering—at least until the system spins apart.

“We believe the weapon is the product of self-taught biohackers rather than formally educated geneticists, making the involved individuals harder to identify. They appear to be hired guns, motivated by money, not by any creed or philosophy.

“We have been hunting these individuals and their base of operations for over two months. We believe we have finally established the general location of the lab where the core of the work is being performed. This breakthrough was made as a result of information recovered during Arid Crossroad, specifically, from data contained in the farsights of Issam Salib. We have no doubt Mr. Salib was targeted for assassination because of his knowledge of locally integrated AIs, although we do not believe he was directly involved in August-19.

“The location of the August-19 facility eluded us for so long because it was camouflaged by the activity of an L-AI. Once we understood that, we were able to modify our search algorithms to account for the effect. We now believe the primary facility to be located in the Middle East, hidden within the day-to-day chaos of an urban center afflicted by decades of conflict and destabilized by runaway population growth.”

“Oh fuck,” I whisper. “Is she talking about Baghdad?”

Beside me, Leonid shakes his head. “Close. But we are looking at Basra.”

I query my encyclopedia. It reads me a brief:
Basra, once known as the Venice of the East, is a city in southern Iraq
with an estimated population of six million people, a majority under the age of thirty . . .

Ashman explains that intelligence-gathering is ongoing in an attempt to confirm the precise location of the suspect facility, but it’s a difficult task in a city divided into fiefdoms, whose inhabitants have long ago learned not to see what is not their business.

“We must give away nothing of what we know,” she warns. “Any hint that we are closing in on the location of this lab could cause our targets to flee, or inspire other powers to take preemptive measures—cruise missile strikes, even nuclear intervention. Everyone is on edge: the Russians, the Israelis, the Iranians, coalitions of dragons, even our own armed forces. Thousands could die, and we will still not know who is involved in August-19. And it is imperative that we know.