me the BCC agent and him the cell leader. In the end, though, our paths have crossed here and now. We are on the same side now.”
“Alright, Kyle. If you believe him, then I will, too.”
“It’s not just that,” said Kyle. “We don’t have much choice but to trust him. Without his File, this operation doesn’t stand a chance.”
۞
“Alright, Ezra,” said Kyle. “I’m done configuring your File. It took a little extra work. That is one piece of very advanced technology you’ve got in your head.”
“Top of the line military hardware, enhanced with top of the line BCC software. They only give us the very best, you know,” said Ezra.
“Well, if all goes well, it’ll be not much more than a little lump of silicon at the base of your skull in just a couple of hours.”
“And I’ll be just like everyone else. I think it’ll be a refreshing change.”
“Now, the timing is essential on this. You have to activate the maggot at exactly twelve noon. All the other cells are coordinated. They’ll be following our lead. As soon as you open a hole in the security of the Intermountain server, and introduce the maggot, all of the other cells will release their own copy during the eight-millisecond fluctuation in the North American grid. Six minutes later, the NI will come to a permanent standstill.”
“Well, we’ve got over an hour and a half left. What do you want to -”
The front door blew into the house as if a tornado had ripped through the front yard. Shards of splintered doorframe flew through the hallway in a cloud of dust. The shockwave threw Ezra and Kyle to the floor.
“It’s the BCC Guard!” yelled Kyle through the ringing in his ears. “You sold us out! You son of a -”
“It wasn’t me!” yelled Ezra, as they crawled behind Kyle’s heavy oak desk and sat with their backs against it. “I swear it wasn’t me. I never ordered this assault. And I know my former boss wouldn’t have ordered it, because the last thing I told him was that I was shutting you down. Well, at least, I implied it.”
“Then who? Who could’ve given up our location?” asked Kyle.
“It was me, Mr. White,” said a female voice from the doorway. “Why don’t you just make this easy on all of us, and come out without a struggle.”
“Sascha? I can’t believe it!”
“Actually, my real name is Colonel Alyssa James. I’m a commander in Irving Butler’s private regiment of the BCC Guard.”
“You’re BCC?” said Ezra. “You’re in Butler’s ETF?”
“The Elite Task Force does more than just military operations, Hendricks. We also do covert ops. I’ve been watching you since before you ever came to this cell. Butler thought you might be starting to falter. He was right.”
“But you’ve had your File removed,” said Kyle. “Was that story about the doctor in L.A. just one of your lies?”
“Of course not. The File removal was part of building my cover. Of course, I had an upgrade installed afterward, and of course, Doctor Matheson is in custody. He won’t be removing any more Files. Now come on. It’s over. Come on out of there and nobody has to get hurt.”
Ezra provided his answer by leaping over the desk in a spiraling dive, emptying an entire clip from his hand weapon before hitting the ground. Every shot took down an ETF soldier, each bullet striking its target square between the eyes with super-human accuracy. The only one he didn’t hit was James - she had managed to disappear somewhere into the house.
“Where’d you get that gun?” asked Kyle, overwhelmed by the number of surprises being thrown at him.
“I always carry it. It’s made of a composite that your security checkpoint never catches. Sorry.”
“Um, no problem,” said Kyle.
“Stay here,” said Ezra, creeping stealthily out of the study.
The dust from the initial front door explosion had settled, and the house was eerily quiet in the aftermath of the ETF assault. Ezra stepped over the body of a dead ETF soldier, then glanced up the stairwell. He listened carefully, and heard the faint sound of an ETF Talon helicopter in whisper mode, lifting off the roof.
“Kyle!” he yelled. “Where’s your daughter?”
Kyle came running. “She was upstairs.”
“They’ve taken her.”
۞
Ezra cut his File connection and looked at Kyle.
“Mikayla is at a secure ETF location. Butler says we have two choices. We both turn ourselves in, and Mikayla will be released unharmed.”
“Or?”
“Or he’ll make her disappear.”
“Tell him he can have me, but that his fight with you is none of my business.”
“I already did. He says it’s a package deal or no deal.”
“How much time do we have left?”
“He knows about the operation, Kyle. They haven’t time to devise any counter measures, so he’s giving us a deadline of five minutes to noon. That’s fifteen minutes from now.”
“I do have one more trick up my sleeve,” said Kyle. “When I first joined the Underground, I met some shady people. They talked me into writing some code – some malicious code. I was still angry, still finding my way, and I agreed. When I was done writing it, I decided it wasn’t right, and I left their group to join the cell I’m in now. I’ve never deployed that code, because I don’t believe in those tactics. But I do still have it saved on my hard drive.”
“What does it do?”
“Can you send a comm to Butler with a simultaneous secondary channel?
“I used to do it all the time to upload data to him while talking to him.”
“Then you’ll see what my code can do.”
“How long will it take you to prepare?”
“Five minutes.”
Kyle entered a password on his computer and pulled up a file. “You just need to configure your reception port to receive a data stream from my computer. The code, as packaged, will not harm you. But once it is sent from your File to Butler’s, it will be triggered.”
Ezra made the necessary adjustments to his File by thinking the commands. He nodded that he was ready, and Kyle sent the code package to Ezra.
“Alright, Ezra. We’ll only have one shot at this. You need to keep Butler distracted so he won’t realize what’s happening on channel two.”
“Don’t worry, I can handle it.”
Ezra opened a comm link to Butler.
“Butler, we’ve made our decision. I’ll turn myself in, though I’ll have some conditions I’ll want to discuss afterward. As for Mr. White, he has also agreed to turn himself in. He says ‘just don’t harm his daughter.’ He even says he’ll make available to you all of his programming files. In fact, I’m sending you a sample now, on channel two. And there’s a lot more where that came from.”
Before Butler could even answer, Ezra could hear through the comm link an agonized yell, followed by silence.
“What happened?” he asked Kyle.
“The code you sent caused a cascade failure of Butler’s File subprocessor. The feedback created fused the main processor to his brain stem, and there was probably a small explosion inside his skull. Butler is either vegetative, comatose, or dead.”
“Good.” Ezra felt nothing for the loss of his boss. “Now we’ve bought ourselves some time. Without Butler in charge to give the orders, the ETFs holding Mikayla will not act against her.”
“Exactly. And in ten minutes, things are going to get very interesting for the ETFs.”
“They sure will,” said Ezra. “They’ll be running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They rely completely on File comm for their operations. It’ll take them a while to get their manual backup systems up and running. By then, we’ll be the least of their problems.”
“And there’ll be no reason for them to hold Mikayla any more. And once the dust settles, if they demand a head, I’ll give them mine, as long as they let her go.
”
“Well -”
Ezra’s breath caught in his throat and he stopped dead in his tracks. “This isn’t right. I’m getting a comm from Butler.”
“That’s impossible,” said Kyle.
“No, it’s Butler. He wants me to route his message through to your computer, so we can both see and hear him.”
“Wait, let me activate the firewall and dump the storage to a bunker, so he can’t do any damage remotely through your connection. Alright, go ahead.”
A heavyset, balding man in a three-piece suit appeared on the screen. He had a giant diamond earring in his left earlobe, and a fat cigar clenched between his teeth. He removed the cigar with his sausage-like fingers and said, “Hendricks. White,” his voice like gravel. “I can’t tell you how . . . displeased I am that you have killed my clone. I’ve had him for many years. He served me well. He will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace.”
“Clone?” said Kyle. “Cloning was banned more than thirty years ago.”
“For the public,” said Ezra. “But among some of us in government, rumor has had it that the most elite circles of leadership continued the practice, making backups of themselves in case of accidents, or assassinations, or in case of -”
“In case of situations like this,” finished Butler with a snarl. “Now, you have thirty seconds to destroy the maggot, or the girl dies. And when she’s dead, I will send my ETFs after you, and they will never stop until you are dead. Oh, and we’ll also dispose of Devin. With his new File, we already know where he is, and I have a team on the way to pick him up. So, what’s it going to be?”
Kyle glanced at the chronometer in the upper left of his computer screen. He moved his foot toward Ezra and tapped Ezra’s leg. “When does the thirty seconds start?” asked Kyle.
“Now!” boomed Butler.
At that moment, Ezra introduced the maggot to the comm stream on channel two. The clock read 11:59:58.
“Alright,” said Kyle, stalling for the six minutes needed for the maggot to take effect. “What if I send you the maggot, inactivated, and let you destroy it, then you’ll have proof that it is gone.”
“That is acceptable. But I will hold your daughter until I have confirmation that the maggot has been decompiled.”
“Okay,” said Kyle. “It’ll take me five minutes to upload the maggot to an insulated comm signal that Ezra can safely transmit to you. As it is right now, it’s configured to activate as soon as it hits the NI. I need a few minutes to restore the safety protocols. And we’ll need to know the destination.”
“Send it to BCC Primary Virtual Lab, Hendricks,” said Butler. “You know the NI address.”
Kyle began working his computer, doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Only he was doing it to a copy of the maggot. The maggot itself was already streaming through the NI at the speed of light, sliding under firewalls, jumping over server dams, circumventing stormbunkers and filtering through security protocols. In another two minutes, the NI would cease to exist. Butler would be cut off from his ETF soldiers, unable to issue any commands.
“Alright,” said Kyle at last. “It’s ready. You can scan it through the comm link before we send it if you like, to make sure it really is safe and secure.”
“Even though your daughter’s life is on the line, I will scan it,” said Butler. “I know that you people can be fanatical.”
After a thirty second scan, Butler confirmed the maggot was safe for transmission.
“I took the liberty of scanning your hard drive, too,” said Butler. “Just to make sure you weren’t harboring any copies. Surprisingly, it was clean. It also showed no record of any copies having been transferred to mobile devices. Now, send it.”
The record of having transferred the original maggot to Ezra was sitting safely in the hard drive’s invisible bunker. With a few keystrokes, the inert copy was transferred to Ezra, who immediately sent it on to the BCC lab.
“Alright, you’ve got it,” said Kyle. “Now, release my daughter.”
“Not until I’ve received confirmation from the lab that the maggot has been destroyed.’
Kyle started to sweat. In less than a minute, the NI would be terminated, and Butler would neither be able to receive confirmation, nor relay the command to release Mikayla.
And then it happened.
The first indication was a temporary disruption of the power grid – a disturbance that hadn’t happened since the quake of ’64. Then Ezra grabbed his head and doubled over.
“You alright?” said Kyle.
“Yeah,” said Ezra. “Just felt like someone took a hammer to the back of my skull for a second there, but other than that, I’m fine.”
“Well? Are you getting any signals?”
“Nothing. It’s so . . . quiet. I had forgotten that I had my tunes playing underneath everything. Now it’s just silent. I’ve got no connection. Can you check to see if it’s just me?”
“Yeah, I can run some ping tests from my computer to verify the NI is down. Hold on.”
Kyle ran three different diagnostics. “It’s gone, Ezra. The NI is gone. I routed a signal to the Intermountain server, and the ping report shows all North American subservers are down. The global master servers are also down. And they are fried. They won’t be coming back up.”
“Then why aren’t you smiling?”
“I’ll smile when I see my kids again.”
“Then let’s go get them.”
۞
Ezra had run some scans on a subchannel while he was comming with Butler, and obtained three subchannel codes from Butler’s auxiliary carrier. One was in contact with his home, one was connected to his bank, and the other was in touch with an ETF unit stationed in the Provo Canyon. That had to be where Mikayla was being held.
Ezra and Kyle followed the lead to the ETF stronghold as fast as Ezra’s ground transport could carry them. As they approached, the usual calm of the station had been replaced by organized chaos. ETF soldiers were scrambling all over, attempting to set up antiquated communication devices that had been in storage for years.
“It will be a relatively simple matter for me to slip in, incapacitate the guards outside Mikayla’s holding cell, and spirit her away to safety,” said Ezra as they crouched and peered through the chain link fence around the compound.
“No way,” said Kyle. “I’m going in with you.”
“Kyle, I’ve spent my life running these kinds of operations. I’m a fighter. Let me do the dirty work. This is no place for a techie. Trust me, I’ll bring her back safely.”
“Forget about it,” said Kyle. “There’s no way I can just sit out here while you go in there alone. Who knows, maybe my skills will come in handy.”
“Fine, but I’ll take point. And here, take this,” he said, handing Kyle a tiny hand weapon. “It’s a low-energy gamma pistol. Just aim in the general direction and press the red button.”
“Another one of the toys you’ve been carrying this whole time?”
Ezra just shrugged and said, “C’mon.”
They climbed a tree that allowed them to drop over the fence into the compound, and headed to the back of the main building. They found a quiet back door with no guard, just a security panel.
“Alright, then, Kyle, here’s that chance to be useful that you were just talking about. Go ahead and do your magic.”
Kyle attempted to break the code using three different crypto-sequences, but access was denied. He pulled out his hand weapon, set the power level to the lowest setting, and fired it at the panel.
“I could’ve done that,” said Ezra.
Kyle just raised a finger as if to say, “wait.”
As he continued to fire the weapon, the surface of the panel started to glow. Then he stopped firing and tried the last crypto-sequence again, burning his fingertips as he hit the keys. This time, it worked.
“What did you just do?” asked Ezra.
“The first two crypto-sequences helped me determine that it was a Series-Seven BCC mechanism, which uses a server-based system to push out a constantly randomized access code. Neuralinx was contracted to the BCC to produce these. In fact, I used to run QA of assembly lines for these things back when I was a Neuralinx grunt. Anyway, the low-level gamma radiation temporarily disabled the panel’s connection to the building’s server, allowing me to break the code with the final crypto-sequence. Simple, really.”
They entered the building, Ezra on point. He quickly neutralized a guard in the first hallway while Kyle tapped into a wall terminal to obtain a building schematic.
“The holding cells are directly below us,” said Kyle.
They made their way downstairs and found Mikayla’s cell. Ezra took out three more guards with his bare hands, and Kyle rushed into the cell to embrace his baby.
“Dad!”
“C’mon, we have to get out of here now,” said Ezra to the hugging pair. “One of those guards sent a distress signal to the base commander before I could stop him.”
The three of them fled back the way they came, and burst out the back door of the facility. They came to the chain link fence and stopped. Ezra grabbed the gamma weapon from Kyle, set it to full power, and dissolved a circular area of the fence large enough for them to escape through. They jumped into their ground vehicle and disappeared down the canyon road. They were not pursued.
When they returned home, Devin was waiting on the front porch.
“Looks like Butler was bluffing about abducting your son,” said Ezra.
“Looks like you’re right,” Kyle said, this time providing the smile Ezra had been waiting for previously.
Ezra felt a pang in his heart as he watched father and son reunited. He put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder.
“I have to go now.”
“Where?”
“I have some unfinished business to take care of.”
۞
Former BCC Agent Ezra Hendricks had two stops to make. First, Washington D.C. As he entered the District, he saw the immediate aftermath of the fall of the NI. Some minor rioting had erupted, but it was quickly put down by the local peace forces. Some people were wandering around, as if in a daze, looking lost. But surprisingly, many others were celebrating.
Amid the subdued confusion, Ezra made his way to the Gates building, headquarters of the BCC. With the NI down, he easily made it past security by flashing his hardcopy BCC credentials. Once inside, he moved determinedly toward Butler’s office.
On the sixth floor, he strode down the empty corridor toward the glass door at the end. No one stood guard. The whole floor seemed lifeless. A moment before he got to the door, a projectile whistled past his head and the glass shattered a split second later. He hit the floor and rolled to the side of the hallway, weapon drawn and pointed back the way he’d come. A voice came through the public address system.
“You’re so predictable, Agent Hendricks.”
“Actually, it’s you who’s predictable, Colonel James,” Ezra yelled. “I knew if I came here to tie up loose ends with Butler, that you wouldn’t be far behind. All you’ve done is save me a trip to ETF headquarters.”
“You’ll be coming to ETF headquarters, alright. For your autopsy.”
A shower of bullets rained down the hallway, riddling the wall behind Ezra with holes. Plaster crumbs flew everywhere. Ezra pulled a small device from his inside pocket, activated it, and threw it down the hall. At first, a thick smokescreen emerged, filling the space between James and Hendricks. He scrambled to his feet, dove through the shattered door to Butler’s office, then pushed a button on his remote, activating the explosive charge component of the device. The floor rocked with the power of the blast.
Ezra took the time he’d bought to make a quick visual scan of the office. It seemed empty. He pulled out a handheld computer and scanned for heat signatures. On the device’s display, the red silhouette of a man was clearly showing inside a hidden closet in Butler’s office.
Ezra busted through the wall, grabbed Butler by the neck, and dragged him to the main office door. With his gun to Butler’s temple, he yelled, “Come out where I can see you, James. I’ve got your boss. You don’t want to do anything stupid.”
James stepped out into view from a recessed doorway halfway down the hall. She put her hands up to show she’d dropped her weapon. “Okay, Hendricks, you got us. Now what are you going to do?”
“Yes,” barked Butler. “What is it you want from us?”
“I want a lot of things that you can’t give me,” said Ezra. “And some things that I know you won’t give me. You wanted to control the world with the Files. But you couldn’t even control me. Oh, you hold a lot of power and influence and can pull a lot of strings. Your puppets in Congress passed the File Commerce Act, and you hold majority stock in Neuralinx. Your little plan to enslave the world has failed, and now everyone is free. Everyone but me, that is. You see, even with the NI down, I’ll never have peace. Not as long as you intend to hunt me down. So I want some guarantees from you. I want my freedom. Do we have a deal, or -”
Before Ezra could finish, James dropped to the floor with lightning speed. A tiny pistol made its way to her hand from a hidden mechanism up her sleeve, and she fired.
As Ezra saw her dropping, he instinctively moved Butler a little more in front of him. Butler was hit in the neck. As he dropped, Ezra dropped with him, trying to stay behind the rotund man for protection from the additional shots James was firing.
One precise shot from Ezra ended it. James lay in a pool of blood. Ezra crawled out from under the heavy, lifeless body of Irving Butler. He staggered through the debris in the hall toward the elevator, until he heard security personnel charging up the stairs next to the elevator. He quickly turned and headed back into Butler’s office. He knew the BCC head maintained a secret escape stairway somewhere. He easily located it by scanning the walls, stepped through, clambered down the dark stairwell and out of the building into a back alley. He quickly disappeared into the city, and didn’t look back.
His second stop was to a small country cemetery a few miles outside of Medford, Oregon. He climbed the grassy hill and located a pair of lonely headstones, surrounded on three sides by lilacs. He stooped to lay some yellow flowers on the larger grave, then decided to just sit down in the soft grass.
“Hello, Celeste. Hi, Jakey. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve come to see you. I’ve made some changes in my life. And there’ve been some major changes in the world. I’ve made some friends.” He laughed to himself. “Imagine that, me with friends. And the friends I’ve made are people I used to consider anti-social menaces. Ha! Anyway, I’ve decided to start writing a journal. An actual pen-and-paper journal. And I’m going to take up gardening again – you know, like I used to do in our first home together. And I’ve decided to move to Utah, where my new friends live.”
He dug in his pocket and pulled out Celeste’s wedding band. It had been in storage for years. He read the inscription one last time: Heart to heart, never to part. Then he placed it on her grave and enjoyed the sunshine on his face for a while before walking back down the hill.
۞
Kyle White closed his leather-bound journal and tucked the pen in the gap between the outer binding and the spine. He looked out the window of his new Heber City home and smiled to himself. It was nice to sit in his study with the shades open. Just one more of the freedoms he was enjoying now that he no longer had to live as a fugitive.
Today would’ve been Kyle and Lauren’s twenty-first wedding anniversary. It had taken a long time, but Kyle was now ready to move on. A new world emerging, and a new way of life for Kyle, made it feel like all kinds of doors were opening – even the door to that very private place in his heart he had reserved for the love of a woman.
In the past several months since the NI came down, peop
le were waking up from their File-induced enslavement, and realizing that the destruction of the NI was for the best. Freedom had returned to the citizens. The Undergrounds had disbanded and come out of the shadows. And even Devin recognized that he was better off without the File.
For the first time in seventeen years, Kyle felt truly at peace, and felt like he could finally let go and move on with his life. He took Lauren’s ring out of a drawer and read the inscription one last time: Love transcends all.
A knock came at the front door. Kyle put the ring away and stepped out of his study to the entry. He opened the door to see a daylight nightmare. Beneath the scars and horrible disfigurement, he could make out the face of Colonel James. And she had a gun pointed directly at his head.
“White, I told you last time to come without a struggle. This time I -”
A bullet zipped past Kyle’s shoulder and struck James between the eyes. Her body was forced off the ground and flew to the bottom of the front steps, landing in a mangled heap. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Kyle turned to see his daughter trembling on the stairs behind him.
“I warned you about her, Dad,” said Mikayla, dropping the smoking rifle clattering to the floor and rushing into her father’s arms.
THE END
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