The Seraphim Sequence: The Fifth Column 2 (2 page)

Nasira pulled up outside Jay’s apartment block and unbuckled her seatbelt.

‘I’m going in alone,’ Damien said.

Nasira suppressed the urge to draw her pistol. ‘The hell you are.’

‘You’ll blow your chance before you even set foot in his door,’ Damien said.

Who the hell did he think he was? She was the one who didn’t trust Jay. She drummed the steering wheel.

‘Don’t even want him anyway,’ she said.

Damien shrugged. ‘I don’t have to—’

‘Just do it.’

He got out of the car and made his way toward Jay’s apartment block: a cuboid green and hot-pink building that looked like a misshapen watermelon.

This was the last place Nasira wanted to be right now—at Damien and Jay’s doorstep asking for help. They were good at what they did, she’d give them that, but they weren’t exactly the sort she’d bet her life on. After the Desecheo Island incident, stealing the Chimera vectors, she’d been more than relieved to part ways with them. Jay was charming and he meant well, but he was also a pain in the fucking ass. If ever there was a real-life equivalent to James Bond, including the sexist quips and mommy issues, it was Jay. Of course, in real life there weren’t any tuxedos or high-end luxury sports cars. Real deniable operatives like Jay weren’t paid much, but at least it was tax free.

She was here, she reminded herself, for Sophia. While Owen Freeman, the leader of the Akhana, might want the best for Sophia, he wasn’t around right now. He was tucked away in a Shadow Akhana base somewhere. The Fifth Column would like nothing better than to dispose of the leader of a resistance group like the Akhana, comprised mostly of former Fifth Column employees and servicemen and women. Not everyone under the Fifth Column’s employ was completely comfortable serving the psychopaths of the civilized world.

Freeman had assigned DC as Sophia’s bodyguard, but all he seemed to do was get in the way. And he didn’t genuinely want to protect her; he did it only because he was under orders. Nasira and DC maintained a mutual respect, but it was difficult at times. Nasira was the only one who really cared about Sophia.

Nasira almost laughed. When Sophia had first attempted to deprogram her a couple of years ago, she’d wanted to kill her. She’d wanted to separate Sophia’s head from her shoulders with a few strokes of her knife. But now Sophia was her closest friend—her only friend. Just as Damien and Jay were like brothers, she and Sophia were sisters. And now Sophia needed help. Outside help. If anyone could understand that, she hoped they could.

After the hurricane in New York had decimated the Akhana base they were stationed at, everyone had migrated to other Akhana bases, mostly in the US, some to Canada, others to parts of Asia, and others to Australia. Damien and Jay had long ago declined Sophia’s offer to join the Akhana, and Nasira had no idea how long they’d remained in New York, or even if they had remained there at all after they’d dropped off the grid entirely. It had taken her the best part of a month to track Damien down, and she’d only managed it because he’d left a New Zealand post office box number with Passport Pete.

The more she thought about it, the more she was certain Damien had purposely left that loose end untied. Maybe he wanted to be found.

***

Jay’s vision cleared. He rubbed his nose and rolled over. Damien was standing at the end of his bed.

‘Um, how long have you been here?’ Jay said.

Damien didn’t move. ‘I watch you every night.’

Jay cleared his throat as noisily as possible. ‘Most people buy me a drink first.’

Damien eyed the empty whiskey glass in Jay’s hand. ‘Most people don’t have to.’

He walked out.

Jay dropped the glass on the floor and located some clothes. His limbs were heavy and it felt like someone had emptied a bag of rocks inside his head. He found Damien in the lounge room, staring out the window of the balcony he never used.

‘You’re here early,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you normally out surfing at this time?’ Damien said.

‘I quit.’ Jay walked into the kitchen and filled the percolator with coffee. ‘Got bored of it.’

Damien was grinning. ‘It’s only been three days.’

Jay ignored him. ‘Thinking of taking up windsurfing. Coffee?’

Damien shook his head. His hands were in his pockets. ‘We need to talk.’

‘Sure.’ Jay put the percolator on the stove and gestured to the couch. ‘So … is this a job?’

‘Didn’t you just get back from one?’

‘A week ago. I told you.’

‘Sorry, I lost track,’ Damien said.

Jay crossed his arms. ‘So it’s not a job. Girlfriend problems? No, can’t be that. Erection problems? I mean, when you’re in front of the computer.’

‘Not exactly.’ Damien sat on the edge of the couch. Not a good sign.

Jay looked around the apartment. It was almost as empty as it had been when Jay had moved in a few months ago. Decoration ended at a couch and table. He’d told Damien he hadn’t gotten around to paintings or a television or anything yet, but the truth was he couldn’t be bothered.

Jay waited. He really needed to piss, but he didn’t want to delay this any more.

‘We haven’t been compromised, have we?’ he said. ‘You run the same route every morning. You know that’s stupid, right? But you keep doing it.’

Damien shook his head. He dug into a pocket and offered him something. Jay leaned forward to find a Christian cross hanging from a fine gold chain. He plucked it from Damien’s hand and let it hang.

‘I’m not religious,’ he said.

‘Your father was.’

Jay’s stomach turned. He was mostly sure it wasn’t the hangover. He placed the necklace on the coffee table. ‘Do I want to know where you got this?’

‘Nasira.’

Jay didn’t have a response ready. ‘How do you know that?’ he managed.

‘I ran into her.’

Jay licked his lips. ‘I thought they were killed in America.’ He swallowed.

Nasira didn’t matter any more. He was happy she was alive, sure, but it didn’t change anything.

‘What’s she doing here of all places?’

‘They left America not long after we did,’ Damien said. ‘They’re in Australia now.’

‘They?’

Damien shrugged. ‘Nasira, Sophia, Benito. Whoever’s left.’

Jay shook his head. ‘Great. And how did she find
you
?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Bullshit.’

Damien stood upright. ‘I let her find me, OK?’

Jay didn’t know what to say. ‘Why? That’s my first question.’

The percolator started bubbling.

‘We’re looking for work, right?’ Damien said. ‘That’s why you let me in.’

‘You let yourself in.’ Escaping to the kitchen, he took the percolator off the stove.  

‘With a lockpick.’

‘Keep doing that and you’ll fuck up my lock.’

‘Then give me a key.’

‘Only when you stop talking to strange women,’ Jay said. ‘That’s my job. And as far as Nasira’s concerned, I’m not going down that road. I’ve made that mistake once, I’m not making it again.’

He poured two cups, added a little something extra to his. He turned around, surprised to find Damien at the other side of the bench. He almost spilled coffee on himself.

‘It’s your road,’ Damien said.

‘Not any more.’ Jay sipped both cups to figure out which one was his. ‘Here.’

Damien took his cup. ‘You’re adding rum to your coffee now?’

‘I like the taste.’ Jay sipped his coffee and winced. He didn’t.

‘Seems like every time you come back from that sandpit you drink more,’ Damien said. ‘What was the job this time?’

Jay pushed past him. ‘Security. Narcotics facility in the Stan.’

‘You may as well just join the Fifth Column again,’ Damien said.

Anger bristled inside Jay. He clenched his teeth to suppress it. ‘Maybe I will. Maybe I’m done with this joint.’

‘There are better things out there,’ Damien said.

‘Like what?’

Damien opened his mouth, but said nothing.

Jay wasn’t even sure he knew what he wanted any more. When he was still in the Fifth Column, part of Project GATE, he’d had a greater purpose. He’d been assigned to an assortment of operations, each diverse and unique; had undergone frequent training. He knew now it was a charade, that he’d been serving the strategies of men who could hardly be called human. But at the time it’d felt good to be a part of something magnificent. Doing it all on his own was harder. He had to rely on his own devices, on his own path.

Damien didn’t seem to have that difficulty. Sure, he was lonely, and Jay was pretty sure he hadn’t been laid in three years. But he seemed to be doing just fine as a civilian.

‘It’s all I’ve ever known,’ Jay said. ‘I actually liked it.’

‘Nasira wants to speak to you,’ Damien said. ‘To both of us.’

‘About what?’

‘Sophia needs help. Recon on some installations. Nothing too dangerous, just gathering some intel.’

‘Boring,’ Jay said. ‘Why us?’

‘She needs someone who can get close enough without being seen or heard,’ Damien said. ‘Not exactly many people out there who can do that.’

‘You’d have to be crazy even to give Nasira the time of day. She tried to kill me once. You do remember that, right?’

‘When a great ship is moored, it’s safe from the storms,’ Damien said. ‘But that’s not what great ships are built for.’

Jay nodded. ‘That’s actually pretty nice. Where’d you read it?’

‘On a billboard on the way here.’

Moonshine lit the loading bay through the skylight. DC steered Sophia past a row of sleeping forklifts and into the dockside building, then over to the freight elevator. He pulled the door shut and thumbed the faded green button.

‘Dolph knows what you’re doing,’ he said, staring calmly ahead without looking at her.

Dolph was the leader of Australia’s only Akhana base, and was appointed a few months ago when the previous leader resigned. Elizabeth was strong-headed and compassionate—two qualities Sophia admired. But when she began showing signs of early stage sporadic Alzheimer’s disease, she was the first to admit her leadership role was at an end and the Akhana base’s Council needed to be informed. Sophia had tried to conceal Elizabeth’s symptoms, but it soon became difficult to explain why she was starting to forget Council members’ names and recent events. Sophia had eventually given in, and had watched in silence as Elizabeth officially stepped down. Waiting in the wings to replace her was Dolph, an underqualified, inflammatory Council member who wasn’t overly fond of Sophia. He had his own ideas about how the Akhana should be run, and with the Fifth Column dismantling the Akhana base by base, everyone else—Owen Freeman included—was too distracted to pull him in line.

Sophia suspected the Fifth Column were taking advantage of the pressure on the Akhana to cook up something unhindered. She didn’t want to find out what that was when it was too late. She needed to know now.

‘I’ve made no attempt to conceal my activities from Dolph,’ she said to DC.

‘That’s the problem.’

The elevator settled underground and DC opened the doors. Benito was waiting for them, wringing his hands.

Dr Benito Montoya had been the Akhana’s in-place defector at the Fifth Column’s Desecheo Island facility. He’d been instrumental in helping Sophia infiltrate the facility to access the Chimera vector codes, and she’d barely whisked him out alive. He and Nasira were Sophia’s family now; the only people other than Freeman whom she trusted implicitly.

‘Tension is a primary attribute of your personality so I tend to ignore it,’ Sophia said to him. ‘But you’re looking overly tense right now.’

Benito pushed his glasses up his nose and walked with them. ‘Dolph wanted to know the minute you landed.’

‘And how is that different from every other time I get back?’ Sophia asked.

‘The Council are gathered.’ Benito looked over his shoulder at DC. ‘He requires both of you to be present.’

***

The meeting room was an old storage chamber, musty and populated with plastic chairs and fold-up tables. The place looked more like the activities room at a kids’ scout camp.

‘Council,’ Sophia greeted them as she entered.

They hardly nodded in return. She decided to take a seat at the least populated end of the room so she could survey everyone present, including the security personnel who were there in larger numbers than usual. DC and Benito flanked her, but only Benito sat down.

Dolph stirred a mug of coffee with a popsicle stick. He was an elegant man with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly brown hair. He sipped the coffee, then emptied three sachets of sugar into it. Sophia waited for him to speak, but he seemed more interested in his laptop. He was making her wait. Fine, she thought. While he tapped away, she planned her responses to his predictable line of questioning. She was halfway through her first sentence when he looked up.

‘Thank you for joining us, Dr Montoya, DC, Sophia,’ he said. ‘Should I ask how your operation went? The one that wasn’t sanctioned.’

‘Not exactly best-case scenario,’ Sophia said. ‘The target was killed before I—we could get to him.’

Dolph sniffed hard to clear his nostrils. He was trying his best to look disappointed. ‘I really don’t know what else to do. I’ve removed your command, your team. I don’t understand why you are persisting with this … obsession.’

One of the Council members, Camila, with silvering hair and bejeweled hands, leaned forward. ‘Sophia, if you could explain everything it would really help us understand.’ Her voice was almost annoyingly gentle.

‘Council,’ Benito said, ‘Sophia is at your disposal.’

‘Sophia is capable of speaking for herself,’ Dolph said. ‘As she has demonstrated many times.’

‘Dr Montoya is right,’ Sophia said. ‘I’m at the Council’s disposal. But one operative—’

‘Former operative,’ Dolph said.

Sophia exhaled. ‘Isn’t enough. I’m more valuable to the Council as part of a team. A team of
former
operatives.’

‘As was clearly the case with Desecheo Island.’ Dolph stood and leaned on the table’s edge. ‘Because we all know how that turned out. You cost us two bases—Belize and Manhattan.’

After Sophia’s escape from the Desecheo Island facility, she had returned to the Akhana’s Belize base with Benito and Nasira to meet defected Fifth Column scientist Cecilia McLoughlin. Cecilia had been instrumental in helping Sophia succeed in snatching the Chimera vectors from Desecheo Island, but Sophia was unaware that Cecilia was playing the Akhana and the Fifth Column against each other for her own purposes. She’d manipulated Sophia into releasing one of the Chimera vectors worldwide, supposedly to wipe out the psychopathic gene in humans by rendering sterile any woman who carried the dormant gene—women who would unknowingly give birth to monsters. The anti-psychopath Chimera vector did render women sterile as Cecilia had promised, but she had conveniently failed to mention the side effects. The vector had triggered multiple organ failure in more than four hundred million women. Over the following months, they had died slow, painful deaths. Sophia and the Akhana had become responsible for the greatest genocide in modern history. Not exactly Sophia’s finest moment.

But not content with mass murder, Cecilia had taken the helm of the Fifth Column and, using her insider knowledge of every Akhana base location, had begun to wipe them out, starting with Belize. Sophia had shot and killed her before she got any further, but that hadn’t stopped the infiltration. The Akhana were now under Fifth Column control; or would have been if Cecilia had known
every
Akhana base. Thankfully there was the Shadow Akhana.

Sophia launched to her feet. ‘Manhattan had nothing to do with that. It was the hurricane that wiped it out.’

‘Cause and effect, Sophia. Cause and effect.’

‘How about this for cause and effect? The Fifth Column is growing more and more powerful and your best plan so far is to harass their accounting department,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’re trembling in fear as we speak.’

‘We have an army of talented hackers that is being squandered.’

‘Some anonymous bunch of bulletin-board users is not your army.’ Sophia stepped forward and noticed the security—former Blue Berets—stiffen. That was interesting. ‘You have no idea who they are. They could be anyone.’

‘Therein lies their power,’ Dolph said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the Akhana are compromised. A dozen bases are all we have left.’

Sophia wondered how he knew that. The Shadow Akhana bases communicated remotely, via the Akhana’s darknet, and the only person in the world who knew their numbers and locations was the resistance’s leader, Owen Freeman. And no one knew where he was, not since Manhattan. His safety was paramount and integral to everyone else’s safety. Although Sophia suspected DC might have an idea.

‘There’s no other way to say it,’ Dolph went on. ‘You contributed to the present conditions.’

Camila stood and turned to Dolph. ‘Sophia was manipulated into acting as she did. Anyone in her position with the intent of doing the right thing would have done the same.’

‘Do you want to know the reason why we only have a few bases left?’ Sophia said. ‘Because I made a horrible mistake. I trusted Cecilia McLoughlin, and she turned out to be a psychopath. I let her right in and she took everything. And I never saw it coming.’

She looked down to find her hands balled into fists. She released them.

‘If you trust these kid hackers of yours, you’re allowing wolves in sheep’s clothing to slip through. I’ve witnessed first-hand how psychopaths can worm their way into an organization and subvert it from the inside out. It’s how the Fifth Column was born, and it’s how the Akhana was destroyed. It’s why Freeman created the Shadow Akhana. Any resistance that doesn’t understand psychopaths is doomed to fail. It’s why every resistance in last few thousand years has been crushed, their existence struck from history. Do you want us to fall with them?’

‘We need to hit the Fifth Column where it hurts,’ Dolph said. ‘Their finances.’

‘That won’t work.’

‘I wasn’t asking for your opinion.’

‘Listen to me,’ Sophia said. ‘The Fifth Column is going to great lengths to conceal the fact that they’re busy constructing a whole bunch of new installations. They even have shocktroopers on guard duty. That never happens.’

Dolph shook his head. ‘And you know this because you’re an expert on the Fifth Column, I suppose.’

‘No,’ Sophia said. ‘But if your crack team of hackers checked out the satellites, we might have some idea of what we’re dealing with. Until then, I need operatives on the ground—’

‘What do you think the Fifth Column is building?’ Dolph cut in. ‘The Death Star perhaps?’

‘You’re messing with the wrong crowd,’ Sophia said, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘These hackers might have good intentions, but all it takes is one man without a conscience.’

‘I don’t want former operatives,’ Dolph said. ‘They don’t function, they don’t socialize appropriately, they don’t cooperate outside their skewed military hierarchy. They’re broken and they’re dangerous. I hereby call for a vote to suspend Sophia’s operational capabilities and ground her to the base indefinitely.’

‘I try to help you and your first reaction is to lock me up?’ Sophia yelled.

‘It’s not my first reaction, it’s my last. I’ve given you many chances. Every step of the way you betray us, you sabotage us,’ Dolph said. ‘All those in favor.’

Sophia watched all but three of the ten Council members raise their hands. People who had previously loathed Dolph were now ruling in his favor. Camila had raised her hand too. Sophia felt her own hands clench.

She spoke directly to Camila. ‘Why would you stand by and let him compromise the Shadow Akhana with a gang of bedroom hackers you can’t even trust?’

‘Because this gang of bedroom hackers didn’t commit mass genocide,’ Dolph said. He pointed his finger at her. ‘Why should I trust someone who left for dead the only person who trusted them?’

Sophia’s jaw clenched. Blood gushed to her cheeks. ‘And which person would that be?’

Dolph glared at her, then finally said, ‘Doctor Adamicz.’

Sophia went very still. Leoncjusz Adamicz had been part of her family too. For the few months they’d spent hiding in a dusty library in Italy, Adamicz had become like a father to her. He’d worked closely with Benito and Cecilia to extract her from the Fifth Column and was single-handedly responsible for deprogramming her. Sophia had slipped away from his protection to revisit her home. She knew her parents were dead, but she’d needed to see it, to make it real. When she’d returned, Adamicz was also dead, lying on the library floor in a pool of his own blood. There had been no one there to help him, no one to protect him. It wasn’t until much later that she’d learnt who had killed Adamicz. Cecilia McLoughlin. She’d sent operatives to kill him.

Nothing else existed in this moment except Sophia and Dolph. She drew her P99 pistol, pointed the barrel at his face. She felt the aim of the security personnel on her, their rifles cocked and ready to fire.

A ghost of a smile tugged the corner of Dolph’s mouth. ‘Don’t think they won’t shoot a woman.’

His eye twitched, but he wasn’t as scared as she’d hoped and that annoyed her.

‘Even for an operative like you, one bullet in the brain and it’s all over,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Sophia. Lower the weapon.’

Sophia breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. From the corner of her vision she could see DC had moved outward, his MP7 aimed at her head.

‘The Council has already made their decision,’ Dolph said. ‘Put down the weapon.’

Sophia placed her pistol on the floor and stepped back. The security team moved around and cuffed her.