Chapter 2
Justin McWilliams finally had enough money. He looked online at his bank account “like poor people do,” typing in his username and password, seeing the balance on a flat screen monitor. He lived in DeKalb, Illinois. When he was born, the population was over thirty thousand people. Now it was two hundred. The other thirty thousand had left during the Great Migration when the government offered to move and place them in homes in Chicago. All that remained were farmers. His father farmed corn and soy and he was paid directly by the government. Not a lot, but like his father said: “In these times, at least we’re paid.”
Justin closed the browser and gathered himself. He heard the television downstairs and he could picture his father stretched out on his recliner, absently itching his junk. His mom would always say “Frank!” and his father would reply, “I can’t help it the dang thing is so big,” and throw a wink at Justin. It always made Justin laugh.
He heard the clanging of pots and dishes as his mom washed up after dinner. Justin took a big breath. It was time. He walked downstairs, his heart racing. He turned into the living room and caught the tail end of another one of his father’s nut grabs.
Frank McWilliams saw Justin out of the corner of his eye and turned his head back.
“Hey J, are you done with your homework?”
Justin nodded that he was, but it was assumed. Justin’s IQ was 190. He formed sentences at eighteen months, and he could solve advanced calculus problems by age four. Soon after, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. He had difficulties in crowds and relating to people. Even at home, he connected with his dad but only communicated basics with his mom. He was twelve now.
“I have three hundred and fifty dollars,” Justin stated.
His father smiled. “That’s a lot of prairie dogs.”
Four hundred and sixty-seven rounded up, Justin quickly calculated. Justin got seventy-five cents a prairie dog on the neighboring farms. He used a bolt-action, 22 magnum with a 4x Tasco scope. “You said if I saved up, I could buy a Mindlink.”
“It costs three fifty?”
“Three hundred and ten with tax.”
His father chuckled. “Mom can buy it online for you. Charlene!”
“I want to go into the city,” Justin said.
Frank turned off the television. Charlene quit doing the dishes and leaned in.
“Justin, you don’t have to,” Frank said. “We get shipments every week.”
“But if we go in, then I can get it tomorrow.” Justin looked pained. When he was frustrated he’d pat his right hand on his thigh like he was keeping a beat.
“The city is very crowded, and noisy,” Frank said slowly. He looked to his wife. He wanted his son to go, he wanted it to be his decision. But he had to know the facts. In the last year, they had seen Justin begin to open up. It was a fraction of what other children would, but it was enough to see the sweet boy inside. Before he would act out with tears or rage, but now he would try to explain himself. One of the reasons Frank sat in the chair and watched TV was that it was easier for Justin to communicate without direct eye contact.
“I want to go. That’s why it’s three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Two round trip train tickets are twenty dollars apiece.”
Frank roared with laughter.
“I want to see MindCorp,” Justin said. “I read that Cynthia Revo is like me.”
= = =
Mohammed Jawal was sixty-three years old, broad shouldered and lean. Younger, he had been a striking man. Clean-shaven, he had the hard lines of a sheik. But his welcoming brown eyes played against his otherwise intimidating appearance. He had no problems meeting women.
That was twenty years ago. Before. He now had hair down to his shoulders, the black streaked with gray. His beard ended mid-chest. He had turned over his life to Allah and in doing so, he had turned his back on Western conventions, ones that he, much to his dismay, had once embraced.
It helped you know your enemy.
True. But at one time, that had made him his own. And they had used it for their purposes.
He was alone in a New York safe house. His soldiers were preparing for their next attack. It was time for prayer.
“Allahu Akbar,” he said. God is great. God is great. Their attack in New York had gone perfectly. Other cells were vicious and immoral, but when Mohammed formed the Western Curse, he and his clerics vowed to attack the problem, not just what was convenient. Those actions, hijacking a school bus, killing innocent people in the streets, were terrorism. They were evil actions justified under vague pretenses of Jihad. They were a blot on Islam. He and his clerics, back when they were scholars and politicos and industrialists and entrepreneurs, had clearly defined who they would attack: the heads. Always the heads. We aren’t terrorists, he thought, we are freedom fighters. They are on our soil, so we are on theirs.
He folded his arms across his chest and recited the first chapter of the Qur’an:
“I start by the name of Allah, the Rehman, and the Raheem. All praise is for Allah who is the maker of everything, the Rehman, the Raheem, the final Master. (O Allah) we worship you and we ask help from you. Show us the right way. The way of those who got good things, not the way of those who were punished and not the way of those who believed in wrong things.”
Like his other clerics, Mohammed Jawal was highly educated. His master’s degree in political science came from Oxford and his doctorate from Yale. He was a published expert on middle-eastern policy and he had been invited to the White House as an advisor. They didn’t ignore him. Far from it. They used him. He explained each culture and how it functioned. How they could gain favor. He thought it was to improve foreign relations. He found out soon it was prep for invasion. He laughed sadly when he thought about it. How naïve of him to think good of politicians. The President was there. The Secretary of Defense. The heads of government. Even representatives from China and the EU. All the heads. It’s always the heads.
He had walked away flattered. And then six months later, they had invaded. They had taken his advice; they had contacted the royal families months before and offered not only amnesty, but gifts and futures.
Mohammed continued his prayer. He spoke in Arabic verses that moved him, that made him feel taller, closer to heaven, but at the same time meek in his God’s presence.
“Allahu Akbar.” Mohammed bowed. “Subhana rabbiyal adheem, subhanna rabbiyal adheem, subhana rabbiyal adhemm.” Glory be to my Lord Almighty.
the Western Curse was growing. It was never about religion; they were not Jihadists. It was about what was right. He did this because the West had beaten and abused his country like a slave. The West only believed in slaves, from the beginning when the cotton crop had to be harvested, to the pawn dictator that did the West’s wishes in a language they wouldn’t even take the time to understand. Slavery was all the West knew and it was time to break those bonds. It was time to pull the slave master off his horse and beat him down until he lay dead.
Damn the West for making me do this. Damn them for treating their privilege like it was their right.
= = =
It had been a month since Cynthia had agreed to help the United States. In that time, Nostradamus had been integrated into the global MindCorp network and Cynthia had recruited and implemented Sleepers to spy on the United States’ allies.
Nostradamus was interesting to Cynthia, and that made Evan interesting to Cynthia. The AI program was set up at a base in West Virginia and she tethered it to the closest Data Node. All Cores were connected, so Nostradamus could now “scrub” for data (as Lindo called it) to mine patterns from what appeared to be random information. It accessed all e-mail, all IP telephony, all virtual chats, anything financial that was purchased with credit. Anything that left a trail. It even mined news feeds.
“Scrubbing will take months, but once all the data is collected, the program will begin to see patterns the army ca
n use,” Evan explained.
“It’s quite brilliant,” Cynthia had said.
“Thank you. It works two ways. It treats all information bit torrent and it treats the entire landscape of information as a codec. That’s what the scrubbing’s for. It lays a foundation of data that the AI can then reference for anomalies. From there, it sees a pattern,” he continued. “Your network is billions of times more vast, we’ve only used Nostradamus on battlefields and with specific reconnaissance where it behaves more like a chess computer. But the same patterns will hold in cyberspace. I designed it to work micro and macro, it just comes down to processing power and storage.”
“You think ahead,” Cynthia said.
“Always.”
Peering into the EU’s and China’s backyard had fallen solely on Cynthia. When she introduced the Sleepers to WarDon and he explained to them the terms of their jail sentence if they committed treason, the mood dampened. It perked back up when they were told their salaries were doubled. In three more weeks, Cynthia had promised WarDon a dossier so thorough on the leaders of the EU and China that they could write that person’s biography in such detail and cadence that the subjects themselves would think they had written it.
“If a person’s thoughts are a bag, the Sleepers are pulling that bag inside out. There’s nothing they can hide,” Cynthia had said when she had outlined the process to WarDon.
“How don’t they know?” WarDon asked.
“Think of it this way: we’re currently in my office and you can see and interpret everything around you clearly. The desk, the seat cushion, me, Sabot, the streaked window behind me. You think you see it all, because you rely on your senses, but there is more data in this room you don’t sense. There are terabits of broadcast waves and cellular waves coursing through and around us, but we don’t even think about them because their spectrum is outside our perspective. But if I turn on a TV or radio, boom! There it is. It’s the same online. We’re working behind the scenes, on a level they can’t register because even online they rely on their base senses.”
“Couldn’t another Sleeper?” Evan asked.
“If it was a non-MindCorp Sleeper doing espionage, yes. But we are sifting through their actual data stream. We aren’t hacking into it. We own it.”
= = =
Now, she and Sabot had been summoned to a new military research center being constructed north of Chicago. It was called the Derik Building. It was at five stories tall, dark and wide. At the front, it seemed hospital-like. But as Cynthia walked through, she could read signs directing staff up and down and to different wings. “Testing Range.” “Prosthetics.” “Server Field.” “Surgical Center.” “Lab Hanger 1.” “Lab Hanger 2.” “Lab Hanger 3.” Cynthia saw the Lab count reach eighteen before their escort directed them down a hall that consisted of conference rooms. Around them, construction workers and painters worked feverishly. The escort opened a door to one of the unfinished conference rooms. Evan and WarDon stood up as they entered.
WarDon and Evan had been mum on why they brought her here. WarDon was quiet, but in a good mood. He had a dazed, strip club smile on his face.
“How flexible is the Mindlink with applications?” Evan asked.
“Outside of cyberspace?”
“Yes.”
“Assuming the subject has the proper aptitude, with the right software driver it can do anything, really. You’ve seen what we’ve done with manufacturing. Why?”
“What do you know about prosthetic limbs?” Lindo asked.
“Haven’t had any use for them—what is this about?” Cynthia was tired of the build up, she felt like she was being pitched by a carnie. Show the chick with the beard, already.
“The Terror War,” WarDon said.
“That’s what Nostradamus is for, isn’t it?” Cynthia asked.
“It’s a start,” WarDon said. “We think what we’re about to show you will finish it.”
“What?”
“A soldier that’s virtually indestructible,” Evan chimed in. “Our war isn’t with nations anymore, never mind the issues with our partners in the Coalition. It’s terrorism, plain and simple. Always needling us, picking at us, three months of calm followed by a bombing. War is easy compared to this. It’s predictable. Vetted. There’s a defined finish to it. We can’t go into New York with tanks and attack choppers and level a building they’re entrenched in. We can’t kill one hundred of them by cutting down a thousand of our own.”
“This soldier would somehow stop this?” Cynthia asked. “The technology to do that . . .”
“I’ve developed over the last six years, ever since the Mindlink could process 2-way information,” Lindo said.
Next to Evan was a table stacked with lead aprons. He handed them out.
“Come with me,” he said.
They put them on and followed him through a door into another room. A dozen engineers in similar aprons stood around a huge block of an object that was ten feet wide and taller. It was covered in a tarp. Evan nodded at one of the engineers and he hit a switch. The tarp rose up and Cynthia gasped at what was revealed. A colossal metal man sat in a chair like a king. She walked up to it, miniscule compared to it. She looked at the armored feet. They were the size of a snow sled, but remarkably articulated.
The legs were protected with thick armored plates, but between the slits and at the joints, she saw shock absorbers. Their pistons and springs were gray and green like the rest of the body, and glistening with oil.
There was a ladder.
“May I?” Cynthia asked Evan.
Evan beamed at his invention. “Yes, you may.”
She climbed up the ladder to see the bionic more closely.
It would take two men to get their arms around each square thigh. The thighs had a different suspension system from the rest of the leg. Ten rubber coated slats were sandwiched together. She didn’t understand how it worked, but it was clearly for shock absorption. She would inquire later.
The pelvis and thighs were separated from the upper body by a pair of huge drive chains, each link the size of a human head. Gear teeth stuck through them.
The upper body was gigantic, but still human in form, like a bodybuilder dipped in metal.
The metal hands curled over the end of the armrests. A person could sit in their palm and the knuckles were bulbous with armor. But the joints and seams along the fingers and creased into the top of the hands showed a level of articulation that was astounding. It was the most beautiful feat of mechanical engineering Cynthia had ever seen.
Cynthia saw that there was no head. In its place was a void, and she understood why they needed the Mindlink.
“A person goes in this?” she asked, disbelieving. She leaned over the dark pit. The compartment was small. “No person could fit in this.”
“A soldier would have to make a physical concession,” Lindo said.
“Fuel?” Cynthia asked.
“It’s powered with electrical cells. It can recharge off any electrical line. I also have a hydrogen generator attachment I’m working on.”
Radiation symbols were painted on its chest and back.
“What makes it radioactive then?” she asked. She climbed back down to the floor.
“The armor. This particular example is made out of depleted uranium. It’s more toxic than radioactive.”
“That would kill the person in it,” Cynthia said.
Lindo shrugged.
“Eventually. The interior is lead lined, we have RAD treatments devised.”
“And it works?” Cynthia couldn’t take her eyes off it. It sat over them like an ancient god.
WarDon spoke up.
“We need a custom Mindlink interface in order to bring this to life. We modified some of your online software to test it, but this needs to be a fully contained Mindlink interface. We can’t do it without you.”
“This is the prototype, there is more to it than this,” Lindo said. “But we can’t get there without you
r help.”
Her enthusiasm vanished. “You’re asking a lot. Access to my network is one thing, it’s on my terms. I can cut Nostradamus, I can pull the Sleeper program if there’s a conflict, or I think it’s being abused. But you want secrets.”
Evan started to say something. Cynthia held up her hand to stop him.
“You’re too smart to play me for dumb,” she said.
“With the Terr—” WarDon began.
“The Coalition started the Terror War, Donald!” Cynthia said. “I don’t see the problem, outside of the problem. Transportation is limited and incredibly expensive now. They can’t be shipping more terrorists over which means there are a finite supply. Find them and root them out.”
“We’re putting our best and brightest on that as we speak,” WarDon said. “But we still don’t have the armor we need to protect those lives. The cities are horrible places for war, Cynthia. It’s all high ground. We can’t bring in heavy armor. We bring in a small team that must—on the fly—decide who is a terrorist, who is a civilian, all while bullets fly past them that can go through our best body armor.
“You’re worried about your secrets? What about American lives? Would your secrets stop MindCorp from being the largest corporation in the history of man? Would it help a competitor get out of court if they stole your proprietary technology?”
Cynthia was quiet. WarDon had made a point.
“MindCorp is a monopoly in the truest sense,” WarDon emphasized. “And the U.S. understands how important it is to our way of life. But Goddammit Cynthia, have you seen a dead body? I’ve seen thousands. I’ve talked to the parents.”
“A self-contained Mindlink can be reverse engineered,” Cynthia said through gritted teeth.
“A dead kid can’t,” WarDon spat. He left the room.
Evan sat across for a moment, quietly flipping a pencil end-over-end on the table.
“I’d be very respectful of the technology, Cynthia. I would keep you abreast of everything,” he finally said.
Cynthia shook her head no.
= = =
After Cynthia and Sabot left, Evan walked to his office. Along the way soldiers and researchers said hello and he said it back. He had designed his office to be among the thousands of research servers in cold storage. The core of the core, he liked to think. He thought his CPU was the most important of them all. He liked to think of his brain as a machine.
He walked through the field of servers and into his office. After he closed the door, he stood with his back against it for a moment, breathing deeply. And then he screamed. He screamed until his throat shredded and the veins on his neck stood out like worms. He gathered himself.
“It’s fine. All in due time. All in due time,” he said aloud. “Patience,” he emphasized. I hate patience, a voice in his head shot back.
He needed the self-contained Mindlink and he had thought with Captain Happy—that was what he called the bionic soldier—he would have tricked it out of Cynthia. She was right. A self-contained Mindlink could be reverse engineered. He had hoped to do that for an army of Captain Happy’s and more: he was constructing a new weapon underground in Virginia.
She’s too smart to trick, Evan thought. She was the smartest person in the world.
The computer terminal at his desk pinged. He walked over to it and put the Mindlink on. This terminal had a direct tie line to Nostradamus and the AI had picked up a pattern.
Already.
He was impressed with himself. There was an increase in Muslim named passengers on two ‘L’ trains in Chicago. While normally it would be one in two hundred, on these cars there were five to two hundred. In addition, four graduates from Berkeley who had belonged to extremist political groups were also on these trains, separated in pairs. Nostradamus had tracked their purchase history. One had used his parents’ credit at an online sporting goods store to buy four balaclava masks. Half of the Muslims on the train had moved to Chicago within a week apart five months before. One of the Berkeley students with an electrical engineering degree was janitor at MindCorp Headquarters. One of the Muslims was an off duty train operator. Another of the Muslims had recently watched video related to the occupation in the Middle East. One of the Berkeley students had read a book about a bank robbery in 1997 at a North Hollywood bank perpetrated by two heavily armed men. A shipment of fertilizer to a farmer with a liberal dissident past outpaced his land size and yield. A city garbage truck had gone missing seven months before.
Sixty-five percent of all passengers taking these trains took the next train north. Nostradamus crunched other mundane information. E-mails. Travel patterns of the general populace that had moved here within the last five months, past travel logs for the names listed, chats and e-mails associated with the Berkeley students. Once it latched on to a pattern, it could raise it above the noise floor of the zeros and ones that made up our digital lives. With 66.7% accuracy Nostradamus predicted that both the MindCorp Data Node north of the city and MindCorp Headquarters would be attacked today.
The protocol for Evan was to report this immediately to WarDon, who would then galvanize the proper military division into action. But Evan saw the long view. Cynthia was too smart to trick, but she had emotions. He smiled and then he instructed Nostradamus to ignore these patterns, backup to a local drive, and erase the information from its shared log.
He’d let this play out.
= = =
Frank felt that today was a turning point in Justin’s short life. That morning, he and Charlene had woken to Justin standing next to their bed.
“Morning, bud,” Frank said, stretching. Justin had a huge grin on his face and his eyes were alight. Frank had never seen that before.
“Can we go?” Justin asked. Frank looked at the clock. It was 5:00 am.
“The earliest train is at 7:00 am,” Frank said. Instead of throwing a tantrum or not processing this basic reality, Justin nodded.
“I’ll go downstairs and wait.”
Frank got out of bed and got ready. When he came down, Justin had packed their lunch and coffee was brewing. Charlene choked up. Frank put his arm around her.
“What?” Justin said. His voice was back to flat, a tell of Asperger’s.
“Nothing, Justin. Are you excited?” Frank asked.
The flatness vanished. He looked directly at them. “Did you know that MindCorp is not only the tallest skyscraper in Chicago, but it is over three times as large, in cubic volume, as the Sears Tower? Cynthia started MindCorp ten years ago, she said the Mindlink was like a photographic negative in her mind that never let her . . .”
He rattled off facts and Frank and his wife bathed in them.
The sky was clear and Frank watched Justin as he stared out the window and the landscape changed from field after field, to abandoned suburbs, to the dermis of the city—the ghettos—to the gigantic cement and steel tentacles that reached up into the sky. Before the Great Migration, DeKalb had been sixty miles outside of Chicago. Now it was just forty. From the silo on the farm, the wall of skyscrapers looked like a tsunami coming to shore. And now they were there.
It was dark in the city, something Frank hadn’t expected. It didn’t register right away. The hour trip in and the rapid change of the landscape, made him feel like he had traveled further and longer than he actually had. The thousands of skyscrapers acted like ivy encroaching a window, choking out the light.
“How’re you doing?” Frank asked Justin. His son smiled up at him.
The train slowed down on its way to O’Hare National Train Station. From that hub they would go into the city. Frank furrowed his brow looking at the train schedule monitor on the wall of the car. With the Great Migration, Chicago had bloated to four times its previous size. There were hundreds of train and ‘L’ schedules.
“The 7:00 a.m. train gets in at 8:30 a.m.” Justin looked at a clock on the wall. “We’re arriving on time.”
He scanned the schedule, it flickered different routes like a stock ticker.
“The 8:50 a.m. train on Ramp 14 arrives at Ogilvy Transportation Center at 9:25. From there we take the Blue to the Red to the M, which will take us directly to MindCorp.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then you’re in charge. You can handle it, right?”
Justin squeezed his dad’s hand.
They left O’Hare National and the ground dropped below Justin as the train track rose and they entered the city. They glided twenty stories above the streets. Above and below them, dozens of tracks and trains crisscrossed, servicing different parts of the city, now no longer downtown centric. During the day they were gliding caskets, homes for bums, derelicts, and drunks who never left them as they spun around their tracks like perpetual motion machines. During mealtimes and at night, the trains would be flooded with the bed-headed masses taking a break from their online jobs, networked interests and social clubs. Taking a break to breathe air that didn’t smell like them, walking in the park to get the tingling out of their feet.
The Mindlink had turned the city into a dorm. There were stores and restaurants, centers to congregate, but most services provided home delivery. The roads were empty except for government subsidized service vehicles, police, and electric delivery trucks. It was walk or rail. Bike tires were too expensive.
The Mindlink (and Mindlink accessories!) were sold throughout the city, but the only place that could fill a child with wonder was located at the building where Cynthia sat at that very moment, one hundred and fifty stories up. Justin and Frank got on the M rail and it quickly separated from the tangle of tracks around it. It had one stop on its monitor and they were just a mile away.
The train slowed like a rollercoaster at the end of its ride as they approached MindCorp. Frank looked around. There were no other trains. There were few paths to MindCorp and this was one of them. The negative space between MindCorp and the other buildings made it feel surreal, as if it was a portal into another dimension. And then Frank realized that this was true, and probably intentional. This was science fiction. MindCorp did create another world.
The building occupied four city blocks and it looked like a gun pointed at God. It was black and clean without a hint of rust or neglect. In fact, it was one of the few buildings in the city that still maintained the air of prosperity.
“Is it as big as you pictured?” Frank asked Justin. Justin didn’t respond. His face was pressed against the window taking it all in. The building looked magical, it looked powerful. It looked like it ruled the world. They entered a tunnel halfway up MindCorp and in that momentary darkness, Frank blinked his eyes, turned around, and realized they were the only two people on the train.
Of course. Everyone else already owns a Mindlink.
But it made him shiver. It didn’t feel right. Surely in a city of fifteen million, someone else would have to stop by.
The train came to a halt and the door whooshed open. They stepped out to no one. On the far end, a line of twenty unmanned kiosks had countless Mindlinks (and Mindlink accessories!) queued up behind glass on mechanical arms. They heard a clatter from far below, followed by another, but it was nearly drowned out from the automated monitors that welcomed them to MindCorp.
“No one’s here,” Justin said.
He looked up and down the two hundred yard hallway. There were a couple of trashcans, but no janitor. At the kiosk there was a help button, but no one that smiled and said ‘hello.’ At the far end was a store with its security gate rolled down. The lights were out. It felt deserted.
“I think we’re late to the party,” Frank said. “Let’s go ahead and buy one and get some lunch before we head home.”
Unceremoniously, Frank and Justin walked over. They looked at the machine, shrugged, and then Frank swiped his credit card. A box big enough to hold a bicycle helmet slid off its rack and fell to the bottom of the kiosk. The door opened, Justin picked it up, and that was that.
“Hey!” someone hissed. It came from the store. Frank searched the darkness for the voice. A young, round, black woman appeared at the gate fumbling with her keys. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?” Frank said. They walked toward her.
“We’re under attack!”
Just then a flashing light spun and a siren bellowed. Chatter echoed up from below. Gunfire.
= = =
Raimey had been back in Chicago for two days and already the shit was heating up. Nostradamus had pinged the potential attack just minutes before. The team was so caught off guard, they had to change into their gear on the way. They were en route to a Data Node north of the city to intercept a potential terrorist threat.
“I thought we were on leave,” Janis said as he stripped down to nothing and put on his black Kevlar suit.
“Dammit, Janis. You don’t wear underwear?” one of the soldiers barked after getting an eyeful of his undercarriage.
“Not when I’m just walking around,” Janis said, like it was obvious. He slapped a cup on and punched it. “But I protect them when it counts.”
Raimey viewed the information that Nostradamus had sent his HUD comm, a transparent monitor just off his line of sight that showed real-time information. A mile out from the Data Node, they heard the explosion. The aftershock ricocheted through the close-cropped high rises, raining glass on the dazed citizens below. They heard it clang against the truck’s armored roof.
“Sounds big,” a soldier said.
“Call fire,” Raimey said into the comm; it was linked to Headquarters.
“Already did, they will wait for your word,” an operator replied. The operator flew a drone ahead of them, circling the scene. It flashed from infrared to HD, searching for hostiles. “We see no action at the Node. The bomb has gone off, but no action.”
They got to the Data Node. Just like the one in New York, the office building was destroyed and there was damage to surrounding buildings, but the terrorists had made no attempt to enter the Data Core where the bulk of the operation occurred.
Strange. Raimey thought. They set up a perimeter and searched through the surrounding buildings.
“What was the delivery device?” Raimey asked.
“Hold,” the operator said. She reviewed the footage frame-by-frame. “It looks like a truck, maybe a garbage truck. The drone was too far away when the bomb detonated to have a 100% ID.”
He had seen this. He had done this in battle. This was a diversion.
“Check other Cores and transportation centers,” Raimey said. He mirrored the channel frequency to his team. “Everyone pull in. Let SWAT handle this. This doesn’t feel right.”
“Diversion?” Janis said. Raimey could hear that he was jogging back.
“Yep.”
“It’s a good one.”
“Yeah. We’re the only anti-terrorist team here.”
Just then the operator wired them into a police band. Shots had been fired at MindCorp Headquarters.
“I have another drone flying that way,” the operator said. “It’ll be less than five minutes.”
The team converged from various alleys and buildings and they headed to MindCorp.
= = =
Sabot didn’t bother with an explanation. Cynthia was online in a sea of data, building the final report for WarDon on China and the EU, and then in a flash she was over his shoulder. For a split second, she thought he wanted to fuck, until he ignored her playful banter.
“You’re not going to believe what China has!”
“No talking,” Sabot said.
She knew there was trouble. Sabot kept a 10mm Glock on him, but he went to a hidden compartment in her office and pulled out a massive, 10 gauge shotgun that had a twenty round drum magazine.
“Stay behind me.”
“What about the cameras?”
“They shut them down.”
“The elevators?”
“They’re gone too. But one stopped at the 145th floor. Be quiet.”
The 145th floor and higher were e
xecutive offices and also Cynthia’s home. Immediately she understood the ramification: they knew her home was on these floors, they just didn’t know which one. They were searching floor-by-floor.
Muted automatic fire came from below. Sabot turned back to Cynthia and put his hand to her mouth. She started to cry. He stared directly into her eyes. “This is why I’m here.” He put his hand to her face. “We’re going up top.”
She knew to say no more. He opened the door to the stairway and another burst of machine gun chatter was louder, but still a floor or two down. They heard people screaming.
Sabot saw movement a flight up from him and he didn’t hesitate. Sabot blocked Cynthia from view and fired his shotgun. The ten gauge buckshot ripped through the shadow and a man riddled with wounds tumbled down to their feet.
“Don’t look,” Sabot said as he pulled Cynthia past the man. His chest and face were ruined. Sabot quickly checked: the radio they used was open. His team would have heard the gunfire. Below, a stairwell door slammed open and a herd of footsteps made their way toward them.
He grabbed Cynthia and took her up to the roof. The frigid, whipping wind greeted them. Sabot flanked the door and pointed out a huge air conditioner twenty yards away.
“Get behind that. Don’t come out no matter what.”
She didn’t object. She ran.
Sabot lay prone, off center from the door, and waited with three pounds of pull on a four-pound trigger. No one was going to take his girl.
= = =
Raimey counted four bodies as they entered MindCorp headquarters. A woman without a face and three sprawled security guards. The terrorists weren’t taking hostages. When they arrived, employees were fleeing from the building. Raimey kept ten of the team back to watch everyone go, just in case the terrorists used the outrush as cover. They had already proven clever.
The elevators were shut down.
“We got to go up the stairs,” Raimey said.
“This place is like a mile tall,” Janis complained. They jogged to the stairwell and quickly entered, sweeping the immediate area. Police followed behind them to maintain the cleared floors.
“You always pride yourself on your body,” Raimey said as they ascended.
“My body, not my cardio. You ever see me on a treadmill?” Janis replied. Both had their submachine guns tucked to their cheek, its red dot sight a part of their vision.
“We have action on the roof,” the operation said in their comm. “Early report from the employees is that the terrorists went directly to the elevator.”
“They’re going for Cynthia Revo,” Raimey said.
“Yes, that’s what we believe,” the operator said. “No employees—aside from those on the ground floor—said they saw the terrorists.”
“Ok. Keep the cops coming, filling in behind us.”
“Yes. Sending schematic of top floors.”
In their HUD comm a map popped up, pinging their location in the building.
It took them thirty minutes to run up the entire flight of stairs. The main stairwell ended in a vault-like door to the executive suites. It had been blown open and the door hung like a hangnail.
“Careful.”
They got in and found bodies, quickly clearing the space, calling out to the comm operator.
They found a body in the stairwell that had been shot at close range with a shotgun. The face looked like it had been fed through a meat grinder. They continued up the stairs and a smell they were all familiar with, the smell of open wounds, filled the air. When they got to the roof entrance, a pile of bodies greeted them. Quickly they checked. They were terrorists. Some with dark skin, others as white as can be. All walks of life together, with guns and bad intentions.
“U.S. special forces!” Raimey called out through the door. They’d have to drag bodies aside to get out.
“This is Jeremiah Sabot, Cynthia Revo’s bodyguard. Come out slow with your guns down.”
“Could be a trap,” Janis said.
“Could be.”
“You go out first.”
= = =
Frank carried Justin out of MindCorp like an infant. In one hand Justin held the Mindlink. He sucked his thumb with the other. After two hours of hiding in a store, the cops had come out to the ‘L’ landing. In those two hours they heard gun fire above them and at one point a window crashed outward and a flailing body zipped past, hitting the rail and tumbling away.
One of the cops tried to help with Justin.
“I got him,” Frank said. The look in his eye caused the cop to retreat.
The elevators were turned back on and they and others left the building in an orderly fashion.
Walking out, they saw a large black soldier with a hooked scar around his right eye. He was searching the crowd. His gray eyes found them.
“Is your son alright?” Raimey asked.
“No,” Frank said. Raimey looked at the boy, he was shaking, nearly catatonic.
“He has Asperger’s. He can’t handle these kind of things.”
Raimey gave a warm smile. “No one can handle these kind of things. Do you need a paramedic?”
“No, we just need to get home.”
Raimey called over a cop. “Can you drive these two home?”
The young cop nodded and led them to his car. When he found out where they lived, he dropped them off at the most outward train station to O’Hare.
“I need special approval to drive out that far,” the cop had said.
Frank nodded, exhausted. Whatever.
They got back to DeKalb at midnight. Charlene greeted them at the door with concern on her face. Justin had not spoken since the incident. His thumb was chapped from sucking it. He gripped the Mindlink like it was a teddy bear.
“What happened?” Charlene asked. Frank handed Justin to Charlene and he quietly wrapped himself around her.
“We’re never going back to the city,” Frank said. “Ever.”
= = =
Cynthia was in similar duress. Her hands shook so violently she couldn’t light her joint. She reached for pills and Sabot stopped her. He was eerily calm.
She had not seen the shootout, but she had heard everything. The sounds and cries were almost worse in her mind. Men pleaded for mercy and her lover gave them none. One sounded like a kid. Sabot used the shotgun to maim and if that didn’t do the entire work, the pistol to finish. It was twenty minutes of hell and afterwards Sabot carried her past the bodies so she wouldn’t see.
“It’s not worth it,” he had said.
They were back in her home. After special forces—and then the police—took their statements and they were all alone, Sabot took off his vest, put away the guns, and poured a tall glass of whiskey, ignoring the ice.
He lit the joint for her and held it for her to puff. On a whim he sucked on it too. She couldn’t help but laugh.
“Life’s short,” he said.
He took her to the bath and got the water running. He took off her clothes and put her in, massaging her shoulders, the heat and his hands combining to bleed away her tension.
“How do you do it?” Cynthia asked. His hands felt like steel bars breaking away the knots.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” Sabot said. His voice was hitched. She turned and saw two tear lines down his cheeks. She pulled against him and felt protected. He could do it because he had to.
= = =
About the time the hijacked garbage truck pulled in front of the northern Data Node, Evan called WarDon and told him that Nostradamus had picked up a pattern. He watched the rest of the night unfold via Mindlink: news feeds, police scanners, military comms he had access to because of his position. He waited for the call and it came at 3:00 a.m.
He faked groggy. “Hello?”
“The bionic would stop them?” Cynthia asked.
Evan smiled and quickly pulled it back. A person could hear smile over the phone. “Are you ok?”
“I’m fine, but it was close. Nostradamus a
nd the bionic, that would stop them?” Cynthia asked again. “Could you protect MindCorp?”
“Nostradamus can be tailored for any search criteria,” Evan offered. “We plan on having the bionics on ready in every city like SWAT.”
“Twenty five people died tonight,” Cynthia said.
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
“Let’s meet tomorrow. I need to understand the software function and parameters for the . . . what do you call it?”
“Captai—” he stopped himself. That was his inside joke. “Tank Major. It’s a Tank Major battle chassis.”
“See you tomorrow.”