The Cause (26 page)

As I finished reloading, a flare went up in the air. Everyone dropped to the ground. Bursts of machinegun rounds came from the interior. Merrill and I hustled to the side of the building and threw grenades inside. Merrill pushed straight through the smoke and ran into a hallway as a rush of X and E Team stormed the lobby. Seee dashed ahead running for the same hallway as Merrill.

After another minute, the captured prisoners were led out into the lobby from a conference room where they had been hiding. None of the men or women I recognized. Dressed in business attire, two of them had already pissed themselves. All of them were ordered to sit and shut up at the corner near the reception desk.

Each team put on their voice modulators. X-Team was ordered to guard the prisoners. We bound them with handcuffs and gagged them.

Merrill told us in a low-humming modulated voice that X-2
(Grus) and X-6 (Orland) were both down. X-8 (Jenks from the Cannibals) was dead. As we absorbed this, we heard Seee demanding the time from O-1 (Kumo), to which Kumo replied, “Thirteen minutes.”

O-Team set up a camera in the middle of the room. As they wired things together, they brought in lights, a mike boom, and other equipment. Once they had finished, Seee motioned for O-3 to move forward with the camera. Finally, he made a sign to stop.

“Roll camera,” Seee said.

“Rolling,” O-3 said, motioning to a guy on a laptop.

“Good evening, citizens of The United States,” Seee began, his voice wrapped in distorted machine static. “My name is Seee, and I am the leader of a liberation group called The Minutemen. As you will soon learn, under my leadership the patriots in my group have stormed the Jackson Lake Lodge at the Jackson Hole Symposium. We now hold most of the Federal Reserve Members as hostages. This indeed is a historical night, as tonight will mark the beginning of America returning to the principles of liberty on which our states were established. But please, let me not address you tonight under false pretenses.”

With a sudden jerk, Seee flipped off his SWAT mask, and with it, his voice modulator. His face, now in full view of the camera, brightened as he dropped the mask to the floor. His cheeks flushed with the excitement of letting out a secret long hidden. The men gasped knowing what this meant. Kumo charged toward him, as if his action could stop the images sliding through the wire. Merrill stepped in front of him, gazing into the blackness of his mask. Although they could not see each other’s eyes, each in his darkness knew what this meant. Still, Kumo tried to push through, rejecting what had just happened. Merrill grabbed his arm once more and said in a metallic voice, “Lau-wa-ni-gaw-wi,” which I understood to be, “Now, you must let him go.”

I could only imagine the significance of this act for Seee. It was
an act of freedom and liberation. For too long he had remained hidden with cloaked intent. A gift for The Cause, although some would later call it a curse, claiming it was egocentric and a grieving father’s tribute to a son. But those who said these things failed to see the bigger picture. The price for crawling out of the shadows and into the light was complete sacrifice for a belief larger than himself.

Seee turned his gaze directly into the camera, his voice ringing out loud and pure.

“No longer are we a nation of veneration, but now the land of degradation. The United States of America is a country withering in the wind. Once the fingers of the middleclass were the trees of prosperity, now the leaves on this tree are burning to ash by the banking cartel that you see before you today and their pandering political demagogues.

“Fellow Americans, no longer will our citizens stay quiet under curfews in the night. No longer will we yield to the gripped fist of tyranny. Some might call us traitors, and if traitors we are, we must act as so such that we die as patriots. We will not let tyrants steal the gift our forefathers have given, those who planted the seeds of unalienable rights: the right to an untethered life; the right to breathe the oxygen of liberty; the right to the pursuit of happiness, which every day is being stolen from us, one breath at a time. It is because we are gasping the last breath of air that we are forced into action. We know that the only disgrace is the disgrace of the status quo. We will not be cowed into the clutches of cowardice by the hand that holds the truncheon. Our lives no longer are our own with one billion cameras watching over us; fifty thousand drones flying their wings above us, as they throw us into internment camps and arrest us for living our lives.

“As we hold the mirror in front of ourselves, we stare into the eyes of courage, into the mouths that speak with humility, into the noses that sniff deceit, and into the ears that filter lie from
truth. As we gaze at our reflections, let us reflect to the past to when our brethren were outnumbered, outflanked, and yet outspoken to the travesties of injustice, who knew not the word ‘yield’ nor the word ‘succumb.’ In 1776, the vision of a new country held the hope of freedom that burned strong in their hearts and deep in their skins. For this was their hour, where death had little consequence against a future with no promise. Think not of our faux leaders whose words no longer have meaning, who have usurped the Constitution, who plunder common law under the guise of terrorism and national security, who spy on its people, who take bribes from the financial elite for their own benefit and enrichment. The time is now to dethrone these despots and revitalize the ideals of our Homeland.”

Seee unsheathed Uriah’s sword from the scabbard behind his back. He motioned to Kumo and Merrill to bring the chairman forward. They pushed the gagged chairman and thrust him in front of Seee. Seee grabbed the chairman’s bald head and leaned him over a chair. The camera was at the vantage point where the chairman was the center point, his face pale and full of fright. The image must have been a shock for an audience who had seen him many times before in front of a camera. The usually loquacious chairman who had no trouble speaking for hours in front of Senate committees, suddenly had nothing to say.

See continued. “Our Declaration of Independence states, ‘Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.’ Yet, it also states that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to the unalienable rights of its citizens, then it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. Let us ask, who has given the right to the Federal Reserve to determine the fortunes of our people? Tell me which citizen has voted for it? Then ask the question, how is it that the financial oligarchy in this country is able to so blatantly steal from the people without crime or repercussion?”

The samurai sword glittered high in the air as the light struck
it.

“We of The Minutemen keep our hearts true to the principles with that of the founders of this nation. We hereby declare rebellion against unjust overlords to an immutable Democrat-Republican farce of a government, a government that has pocketed our freedom and stolen our livelihoods. It is now that we descend upon them to demand America back, condemning to death those who have stolen it. Tonight, fellow Americans, we will do what is necessary. Tonight, we will have our justice.”

Control room 52 was barren of windows. A plain white-painted room without a picture or canvas hanging on the wall, the men inside worked for the Application Vulnerabilities Department, a branch of the Systems Intelligence Directorate. The air stung from the frosty blasts of an industrial-sized air conditioner. The men inside were typical SID men. They didn’t cavort with each other at bars after long working hours, nor did they put out family photos near their workstations, nor did they speak much concerning personal matters. Conversational etiquette was rigid and ritualistic. Any topic outside of the weather, automobiles, or technology was out-of-bounds and unwelcome. Usually the men remained calm and collected. Emotion was a foreign concept to a Skulleye. But now, the twenty men crammed in the room were like penguins trying to fly. One of them had just thrown his keyboard into a wall. Eyes in the room filled with disaster.

The room was an auxiliary control room, not large or impressive. But now the room seemed to have grown as the story spattered the room’s screens. Montgomery stood unevenly, infused by the
Breaking News
jumping off the monitors, letters flying forward like moths under a bright bulb. Words of immediacy, white injected into the bright orange square map of the world. The world was on fire. That was the message. The enlarged fonts of the white letters were the drug of suddenness and shock, a hook the media could bite into and ride.
Breaking News! Breaking News!
Its own brand. A product one could hawk and light up in neon.

Montgomery rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand
and felt his deeply lined face. He caught himself playing with the Distinguished Service Medal ribbon sewn into his uniform. He didn’t mind the sensationalism when it worked in his favor. The words could sell fear and trepidation, keep people in their homes, fund budgets. But today the words were out of context, and he studied them while cramming his fists into his trouser pockets.

Montgomery had been called into control room 52 when it first began. Tom Harold, the chief analyst, phoned him in his office and told him a hostage situation was ongoing at the Jackson Lake Lodge, the location of the Federal Reserve meeting. It was hitting the Internet faster than they could control it. Before he rushed down three flights of stairs, Montgomery called Olson Hodge, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and learned that the Fed police had been overrun and something had gone wrong with the drones patrolling the area. As soon as he rushed into the room, Harold told him it had gone viral.

“What’s been done?” Montgomery had asked.

“Denial of service attacks on any site that comes up where we can detect the broadcast. But it’s spreading. We’re sending reset packets to clients to terminate their connections, but we don’t have control over all the routes. It’s in the blood. It’s all over the network and new sites are springing up all over the place. We’re dealing with a botnet that’s better than we are.”

“What about Turbulence? Don’t we have something in the anti-virus software?”

“It seems that every machine infected is non-sponsored,” Harold replied.

“Freeware? Do you think that’s the source?”

“Impossible to tell at this point. We’re tasking the QX to do an analysis.”

Now, as he paced around, Montgomery stared at the center screen at the front of the room where the volume was on.
Breaking News! Breaking News!
The words blipping on the
monitor. A CNN commentator gasped about the atrocity in a dramatic voice, describing what the audience had just witnessed. In the background behind the commentator, a video was frozen in a loop, the volume muted. It showed the terrorist leader dressed up in black commando gear. His face was strikingly visible, and this caused Montgomery’s stomach to turn. The man clearly didn’t expect to live, and this added a new element of danger to the situation. The man gripped a gleaming samurai sword that danced in the lights high up in the air above his head. Something surrealistic grabbed Montgomery concerning the hostage the man was pointing at. Pinned down over a chair, only the hostage’s bald head could be seen, the skull the shape of an egg balanced on its narrow end, the thin shoulders hidden behind the rough hands of men whose faces angled outside of the frame. For a second, the hostage didn’t look human, as if the masked commandos at his side were holding down a mannequin. For an instant, Montgomery fooled himself into believing it was a hoax.

The man wielding the samurai sword said something deafly to the camera, the muted words buried by the CNN commentator filling in the audience that a group of unknown terrorists had stormed the Jackson Hole Symposium.

Passion poured from the leader’s face even though he couldn’t be heard. His lips moved with a clarity of emotion; his eyes glared at the camera and leapt into the viewer’s mind—a haunting look, his face iridescent with color. A stare whose gravity pulled you in, tapped into raw emotion and commanded your attention. The passionate man looked to be orating a manifesto. Where had he seen him? Somewhere. But something had changed. The colors on the screen became oblique as Montgomery’s stare turned inward and his eyes glossed over. The violence of what he was seeing reminded him of his row with his wife. How had things gotten so out of hand?

The rules by which they had lived shattered as the two little
witnesses stood shell-shocked at the foot of the stairs, tiny mouths agape, watching their brutal fight. Little Brandon had stared up at him in horror, and Elisabeth had cried. Diamonds in the blackened coal of his marriage, what did they think of him now?

Recently he saw this man. But the voice wasn’t audible over the commentator.
Breaking News! Breaking News!

He remembered Galeano’s
The Book of Embraces
, the father who takes his son to see the ocean for the first time.
And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it. And when he finally managed to speak, trembling
,
stuttering, he asked his father: “Help me to see!”

Montgomery suddenly realized he recognized the man. Tetsu without the beard, his hair longer now, the short military crew gone. He didn’t look like a soldier. He looked like your average Joe.

The room compressed. The walls tightened around him. He broke his hypnotic gaze and stared at the men in the room. Whispers were gathering inside their minds. They simply hadn’t voiced them.

He’s through
.

This man
.

Right under his nose
.

They might think these things, but they would never say them. The truth was they didn’t understand the upper echelon where laws mutated to meet a need. Rules of rubber. Steel law applied only to the broad genre of men as it applied to the men stuck in here.

Breaking News! Fed Chair executed by band of unknown terrorists
.

Montgomery yelled at the men in the room to get the real clip on. He wanted to hear the voice. They scrambled to meet the command.

After it was played, he saw he was not mistaken. The revelation it was Tetsu multiplied his problems. Wasn’t it in a
Dostoevsky novel where someone said,
I drink to multiply my problems?
How he longed for a drink. But even as he thought this, he remembered sending in Tetsu to see The Dupe. Poor decisions were sinking him.

He heard Tetsu’s words calling out
again—It is now that we descend upon them to demand America back, condemning to death those who have stolen it
. He felt a vague connection with the man. What was it about the sword wavering in tiny circles above the man saying the next second was a foregone conclusion? Deep inside his mind, lurking like a pearl in the shell of his conscious, was the miasma of a thrill, a giddy tingling at seeing the blade fall, witnessing the chairman’s decapitation. There was a bit of irony in it. The untouchables who believed they could tame the business cycle and bend the economy to their will. Somehow, they had it coming. It was Marie Antoinette and
let them eat cake
.

The chairman’s horrified face had appeared only briefly, the leader quick to yank his head down and position the man such that any muffled pleas wouldn’t tap into the viewer’s emotion. The gory scene afterward didn’t shake Montgomery. He had seen much worse, and not in videos. Once he had seen a man’s head sawed off with the serrated edge spine of a tang knife. The task today had been performed without emotional attachment, as if the man had lopped a coconut in two. It wasn’t a Saddam Hussein sort of execution, slow and deliberate, filled with taunts and jeers. The finish was quick, and the leader was fast to wipe his face off and readdress the camera. But the significance of the event was non-trivial: one of the most powerful men in the world—executed. This was part of the message of course.
No one is safe. No one is beyond the law. We can get to you
. This sense of dire consequence filled Montgomery. It heightened the danger, raised the stakes, and even though his heart pounded with the ferocity of a steam engine, he felt the moment defined itself as a catalyst for the future. This man Tetsu had just slammed his foot on the accelerator, and Montgomery saw how the pieces might fall into
place. The think tanks had already done half the work. All of the detention and anti-terrorist laws had been passed years ago. Once the new QXs were delivered, the results from Pathfinder could be used. Best not get the local police involved where rampant distrust of the Army’s robots was already a disease. It could be handled at the National Guard level. They would do the pickups, and the Charge Squad would do the interrogations.
We’ll create rats and crush any planned demonstrations
, he thought. Then they’d be sent to the Uplift camps where memories could be erased with doses of Elevation.

They had the live feed up now. Montgomery diverted his attention to the monitor. It looked like they had grabbed Jacob Lauder, dragging him to the slab. He remembered his conversation with Lauder, their pointed discussion about the economy and Lauder’s research. He wondered if Lauder had a model for this, how the surrealism of the moment mapped to the real world. He wondered if Keynesian delusion was something Lauder would confess now, or if he would stay defiant to the end. He found it amazing how ones beliefs could flip-flop in an instant when the ingredient of fear was introduced.

Montgomery gazed at another screen showing a schematic of the cyberwar in action. It displayed how the nodes airing live streams of the event were spreading, along with how well the NSA was overwhelming each with denial of service attacks. The technology amazed Montgomery. How you could sniff out a maze of networks for a similar byte stream and tell what it was. Some friendly red nodes chewed up enemy nodes at a much faster pace whose meaning Montgomery didn’t understand.

“What are these?” he asked.

“It’s the QX, sir,” Harold said. “It can crack into the machine and disable it much faster than bringing it down with DOS attacks.”

“But it’s not fast enough, is it?” Montgomery speculated.

“No, sir. The botnet has too many nodes spreading.”

“They’re about to execute another hostage,” another analyst whose name Montgomery had forgotten yelled out.

Montgomery glanced past the analyst toward the old filing cabinets still in the room. Many years ago he had worked in here when they first began using the term Skulleyes to name themselves. He remembered the play on a skull’s invisible eye, how it could see while it remained unseen. They had stored transcripts of the Pope, Angela Merkel, and UN Council meetings in there. Relics of the days when they kept faith in hard copy, but even then the belief was waning. Old NSA history was in there too. Days when Poindexter had a major influence, a time when the world of SigInt was static and predictable. Not like today, where the war of brains ruled, where the smartest reaped the spoils. They had learned this well against the Iranians when they destroyed their centrifuges. How it had changed everything. Now, the room was inert, a room full of shrugs at the disintegrating nation, Skulleyes who had been poked in the eye and now scampered around blind.

Montgomery wondered how he was going to fix things—whether they were even fixable. His eyes moved back to the monitor, where Tetsu had just cut off another head. The image almost made him laugh. Things were fixable. The man Tetsu behind the screen, although misled about who wielded true power, was a realist about what had to be done. Too idealistic perhaps, but a pragmatist nonetheless.

Montgomery rubbed his wounded hand. He seemed to have a perpetual itch even after they had taken the bandages off. He thought back to the day his hand was nearly shot off and Hassani nearly killed. He replayed the scene in his mind. The handshake. Didn’t it seem dragged out—too long? How had the shooters gotten in and out of the compound so cleanly? Thorough checks of personnel entering and leaving the compound were made. They had checked the perimeter fences. It led them to believe a mole was hidden in the organization, and he had set up an
internal team to investigate. But it still didn’t answer the question of why. Certainly they could have killed him if they had wanted to. None of it made any sense. Or did it?

Everyone under him had focused resources into solving the attack. Perhaps the people behind the attacks might have been the same people on the screen? If so, was Hassani one of them? Would he have taken a bullet to blind them all? He recalled the odd message they had intercepted, the one in a language no one could identify and later sent over to the CIA. Perhaps the more important question was not where the message originated, but where it was received.

If the goal had been disruption, then it meant they weren’t afraid of him. This tossed around in his head while he bit down on his tongue. Who was the mole? Who was the goddamn mole? The answer was on the receiving end of that message.

Even if the battle was lost today, the war was just beginning, and it would be a battlefield like the one on Harold’s monitors. The skein of network dots and flashing wires, the heartbeat of the QX throbbing like neuronic pathways over the brain of the Internet. He could see a warehouse full of them, pumping blood to the body parts of the network. The heart of Turbulence would be the shield of America.