Amid the Shadows (17 page)

31

Christine sat on the ground
cross-legged on a thick layer of pine needles.
 
Rand sat across from her with his back leaning against the tree.
 
One leg was propped up in front of him while
his other lay flat on the ground.

Christine spoke in a low
voice.
 
“So are you immortal?”

Rand smirked.
 
“Uh, no.”

“Then how did you…” she
trailed off, pointing at his stomach.

“I heal quickly,” he
shrugged.
 
“One of my assets.”

“
One
of your
assets?
 
You have others?”

“I also age slower.
 
One of the side effects of the healing.”

She tried to keep from
rolling her eyes.
 
It was beginning to
feel like for every answer Rand gave, he was creating three new questions.
 
“So why can’t Sarah see your soul?
 
Or
 
your shadow?” she asked with an understanding smile.
 

Rand inhaled deeply.
 
“Because I don’t have one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not like you,
Christine.
 
Not exactly.
 
You are one of his
children
, and he
loves his children more than anything.
 
So much that he gave all of you the most precious thing he could, a
soul.”
 
Rand looked around at the trees.
 
Millions of green pine needles swayed and
seemed to glitter from the soft breeze.
 
“You don’t know how lucky you all are.”

“Are you saying you’re not
one of his children?” she asked.

He shook his head.
 
“No, I’m a soldier.
 
Sent here to help him fight.”

“Fight who?”

Rand nodded back toward the
cabin. “To protect Sarah.
 
He gave her a
gift, and I’m here to protect it.”

“For how long?” Christine
asked.

“Not much longer.
 
Soon it will happen.”
 

“What will happen?”

“My reason for being here,”
Rand replied.
 
“All of the years of
preparation.
 
All of the training.
 
There will soon come a point when she needs
me the most.”

Christine frowned, trying to
understand.
 
“And then what?”

At this question, a genuine
smile spread across Rand’s face.
 
“Then I
get to become one of you.”

“One of us?”

“I will be awarded a soul,”
he said.
 
“It’s what all of us wish for.”

“All of who?” she said.

“Those of us who are sent to
fight, the
lochem
.”

 
“Lochem
?”
 

“God’s warriors.”

Christine was surprised
again.
 
“You mean there’s more of you?”

“Not now, not today.
 
But there have been before,” Rand explained.
 
“At different times we have been sent, to
fight in your world, in the flesh.”

“And this is one of those
times,” Christine finished.

“Yes.”

Christine stared at him and
finally nodded.
 
She took a deep breath
and looked around at the tall grass.
 
The
silence was deafening and peaceful at the same time.
 
She had never realized how much noise she’d
grown accustomed to while living in a city.
 
The difference was incredible.
 

She looked at Rand with a
hint of regret.
 
“I guess you were pretty
upset then, when we ran out of the house last night and took off in the car.”

She was surprised when Rand
smiled.
 
“Well, it wasn’t my preferred
choice, but it did show me how well you think under pressure.”

Christine rolled her
eyes.
 
“Uh yeah, most people refer to
that as
panic
.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Rand
replied.
 
“It may feel like you panicked,
but you would be surprised how many people would have simply frozen.
 
Mental paralysis in an emergency is what gets
most people killed.
 
But you were
thinking.
 
And you knew enough to realize
that you didn’t have any good options available to you, other than to
flee.
 
So you took it.”
 
The admiration was apparent in his voice.
 
“You and Sarah are both alive because of
it.
 
Don’t underestimate the abilities
you have within yourself.
 
You were
selected for a reason.
 
Embrace it.”

Christine opened the front
door and stepped through with Rand following closely behind.
 
Sarah looked at Christine excitedly and ran
to her.

“I won!
 
I won!” she squealed.

Christine looked at the
checker board where Avery was still sitting.
 
He looked up from his chair, impressed.
 
“She’s sharp,” he said, standing up.
 
“Beat me fair and square.
 
And
that time I was trying.”

Sarah squeezed Christine then
looked up and noticed her red face.
 
“Are
you okay?”

Christine smiled down at
Sarah and gave her a giant squeeze back.
 
“I’m good honey.”
 
She glanced at
Rand.
 
“I’m really, really good.”

Sarah was still looking
up.
 
“Can we go outside?”

Christine looked at Rand and
Avery with raised eyebrows.
 
“That okay?”

Avery opened a panel on the
wall, not far from the door.
 
There were
over a dozen lights tied into the panel displaying the status of various
sensors all surrounding the cabin.
 
They
were all green.
 
He nodded.
 
“Sure.
 
But please stay close.”

Sarah giggled with excitement
and instantly pulled Christine back out the front door.
 
Rand closed it quietly behind them.
 
He looked at Avery who was watching the girls
through the window.

“She gonna be okay?” Avery
asked.

“I think so.”
 
Rand turned and looked through the window
too.
 
“She’s a lot tougher than she
thinks.”

Outside Sarah and Christine
stomped through the tall grass and approached an old bird bath, long forgotten
and dry and covered in dark mold.
 

Sarah examined it
curiously.
 
“What’s this?”

“It’s called a bird bath,”
Christine explained.
 
“You fill it with
water so the birds come and drink out of it.
 
This one is old and dirty though.”

Sarah looked at her
eagerly.
 
“Could we clean it for them?”

“We’ll see,” Christine
answered in her best noncommittal tone.
 
She watched Sarah trace her finger along a small stone flower, one of
the only clean areas on the small statue.
 
She cleared her voice.
 
“Um,
Sarah?” she said.

Sarah looked up at her.

Christine took a deep
breath.
 
“Listen, I know things have
been…hard.
 
Especially what happened the
other night at McDonald’s.”
 
She frowned
trying to find the right words.
 
“Are
you…okay?”

Sarah considered the question
and then nodded her head, looking back down at the bird bath.

“I mean,” Christine
continued, “some bad things happened.”
 
This was not coming out the way she had hoped.
 
“Do you want to, you know, talk about it?”

Sarah stared at her for a
moment and then gave her an innocent shrug.
 
“They were bad men.
 
They were
reds.”

“Well, I don’t know if all
reds are supposed to die,” Christine offered.

Sarah shook her head.
 
“They were
really
red.”

Christine cocked her head and
thought to herself.
 
Did that mean all
of the colors had different degrees or shades?
 
She suddenly realized that she didn’t know
what to say next.
 
Fortunately Sarah
spotted a tree over her shoulder, with branches close to the ground.
 

“Can we play on the tree?”
she asked without actually waiting for a response.
 
Instead she ran to the tree and grabbed the
lowest limb, but she could not get any higher.
 
“Can you lift me up?”

“Sure,” Christine said, “but
don’t go too high.”

Slowly and determinedly,
Sarah climbed up several more branches and then stopped to peer out.

Something beeped and
Christine looked around wondering what made the noise.
 
She realized what the familiar sound was and
felt around the pockets of her pants.
 
Reaching into one of her front pockets, she pulled out her phone.

I
thought I turned this off,
she said to herself.
 
She then realized that the power button must
have somehow gotten depressed while she was sitting on the ground.
 
Looking at the display she could see there
was no cellular signal, but not surprisingly the phone still managed to receive
a text message.
 
She was a little
startled when she saw who it was from.

Christine,
where are you?
 
Are you okay?
 
Danny

She grinned.
 
It was almost beginning to feel that the
whole world was after them.
 
Reading
Danny’s message set her mind a little at ease that everything, eventually, just
might turn out okay.
 
Still grinning she
typed a response.
 

Yes.
 
Am fine.
 
Thx.
 
Just not in the area
now.
 
Will call you soon.

She hit send and watched the
screen confirm transmission.
 
With a
feeling of growing optimism, she turned the phone off and dropped it back into
her pocket.
 
Christine smiled back up at
Sarah who was trying to entice a small squirrel with a pine cone.

It was a good day.

32

Zahn sat comfortably in his
oversized seat aboard the Boeing 757, watching the television affixed to the
wall in front of him.
 
To his right sat
Kia Sarat and behind him nearly two dozen more of his staff.

Zahn watched his boss, the
secretary of state, give a speech on the latest bombings in D.C. and
Philadelphia.
 
The impassioned speech was
filled with platitudes and empty promises, just as they always were.
 
Zahn could not think of a more worthless
politician and stopped listening after he heard the fifth promise for
justice
.
 
However, even with his disgust, Zahn remained
somewhat elated.
 
Had it not been for his
boss, all of this would have been significantly harder.
 

He switched channels to
another program and listened to the anchors discuss the news that the Pope
himself was planning to visit the United States in a couple days as a gesture
of faith and solidarity.
 
The man and woman
on TV were tripping over themselves to agree on what an important gesture it
was to the US citizenry.
 

He looked at his watch and
pulled out a small phone he had purchased in Dubai.
 
He powered it on and waited until he could
turn on the GPS feature.
 
After a few
minutes, it finally reported them flying just south of Shanghai.

Zahn typed a short text
message on the phone and sent it.
 
He
then turned to Sarat, who had intentionally cleared his throat after reading a
message off his own phone.

“We’ve received communication
from Rose.
 
We’re working on their exact
location now,” Sarat reported.

“Well, that wasn’t too
difficult.”
 
Zahn said, leaning his chair
back a little.

“It was a good idea.”
 

“It’s time to reign them
in.
 
Send everyone in the area.
 
I don’t want another hole for them to slip
through.”
 

Sarat nodded.

Zahn looked down when the
phone in his hand made a chirping sound, indicating the receipt of a new
message.
 
He opened the small window and
read it.

Systems
locked and loaded.
 
Virus in place and
verified.
 
Bots waiting for command.

Zahn pursed his lips and
nodded approvingly.
 
He remembered
finding Ron Tran.
 
Finding someone who
wanted to change the world was difficult enough, but finding someone who also had
the skills to do it, and was a world class hacker, was far more difficult.
 
So much so that it caused him to consider
whether perhaps fate had somehow intervened.

Zahn was surprised at how
smart Tran had turned out to be after their first meeting.
 
A little young, but he had a firm grip on what
made the world tick, who benefited, and how the elites would do almost anything
to keep it that way.
 

Zahn typed a message back.

How
many bots?

Tran’s reply was short.

Almost
7,000,000.

Zahn smiled.
 
He was not as tech savvy as he would have
liked to be.
 
Having to immerse himself
deep within the political system in order to pull this off was hard enough, but
Tran made up for it and then some.

In fact, knowing what was
involved, Zahn was a little surprised Tran was able to actually deliver.
  
Seven million compromised computers, more
than he had promised, waiting for the command to do his bidding.
 
He was impressed.
 
Seven million, all standing at the ready to
carry out what was going to be the largest ‘head fake’ in human history.
 
It was enough to make Zahn grin from ear to
ear.

Sarat watched Zahn’s exchange
with Tran with interest.
 
Sarat had never
liked Tran.
 
He was a young kid, or
bache
,
amongst an entire generation addicted to self-servitude.
 
But he also knew that Tran was an integral
part of the plan.

Sarat thought of how he and
Tran could not have come from more different experiences.
 
Tran was raised in a world of gluttonous
technological wonder, while Sarat was raised in the deserts of Afghanistan
trying to survive.
 
He wondered how Tran would
have turned out after being told since the day he was born, as Sarat and his
friends were, that the Russians had killed their fathers.
 
To be born and bred for hatred and revenge,
and dream of the day they could strike deep into the heart of the very beast
that had robbed them of ever knowing their own fathers.

In the end though, it was not
just hatred that drove him.
 
It was also
desire.
 
Desire to rise from his humble,
even desperate beginnings, to greatness.
 
He wanted to destroy the monster that had consumed the world and to
become a king in the process.

Zahn ended the text exchange
with a single word and closed the phone.

Begin.

Zahn turned his attention
back to Sarat.
 
“Continue.”

“Argentina is ready.”

“Excellent.”
 
It was getting close
, he thought.
 

“Another thing,” Sarat
said.
 
“Your boss sent you an email
congratulating you on the progress in Dubai.”

Zahn almost laughed.
 
He wondered how many trips and “talks” he’d
made representing the country in the last several years.
 
The State Department was the perfect
organization to use.
 
They had tremendous
clout in Washington, although he always found that rather laughable. They
thought as highly of themselves as almost anyone else in government, and that
was really saying something.
 
In the end,
Zahn likened the department to an old guard dog that couldn’t see, couldn’t
hear, had no teeth, and just barely could find his food bowl.

Yes, the State Department was
the perfect place from which to justify his many trips to the Mideast and forge
the relationships he needed.
 
In fact, he
doubted that when it was all over they would even be able to put enough
together to realize the sheer depth of that irony.

“Send him my standard, humble
reply.”
 
It was virtually too late to
stop anything now, but being thorough, right up until the last minute, was the
smart thing to do.

The television caught their
attention.
 
They both turned to listen to
another newscaster talk about the Pope’s arrival to New York in two short
days.
 
The city was working to quickly
put together a reception worthy of the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church.

The news channels spoke at
length about the support the Pope’s visit would provide, but Zahn and Sarat
knew the real reason was to prevent a nationwide panic.

Uninterested, Sarat turned
back to Zahn.
 
“So, what are we doing
when we get the girl?”

Zahn thought about the
question.
 
What was so special about that
Baxter girl?
 
She’d spotted him in front
of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just moments after the bomb went off.
 
Why was she staring at him?
 
There were hundreds of people running in
every direction; smoke and debris were everywhere, and she was staring at
him.
 
Did she know who he was, or was she
just wondering why he was the only person not running?
 
Did someone tell her?
 
The mother admitted nothing before her death,
but someone had to know.
 
How else would
the girl have known?
 
He had to find
out.
 
Until now, his planning and
execution had been perfect, without anyone suspecting a thing.

The easy solution from the
beginning was to just kill the girl.
 
He
wanted to get rid of her quickly before she could tell anyone else, but now it
had been too long.
 
She must have told
someone by now, which meant things could still unravel quickly.
 
The frustration over not knowing how she saw
him was gradually turning into anger.
 
He
had
to know.
 

“Get her.”
 
He finally replied to Sarat.
 

Sarat’s eyes opened showing
his surprise.
 
“You mean take her alive?”

“If at all possible.
 
If not, kill her and the woman.”
 
Zahn’s tone was matter of fact.
 
He could not take the chance of being
exposed.
 
Not now.
 
Not this close.

Sarat nodded without
objection.
 
What Zahn didn’t know was
that his man Sarat was beginning to have thoughts of his own regarding little
Sarah Baxter.

At that moment, twenty-five
thousand feet below Zahn and in downtown Shanghai, Ron Tran exited another
internet café and walked south toward the Huangpu River.
 
It had been four days since his visit to the
café in Beijing where he had begun compromising machine after machine and
adding them to his bot network.
 
The
process had gone viral and was now secretly inserting itself into nearly 50,000
computers per hour and accelerating.
 

The afternoon was warm and
overcast with an unusually thick curtain of dark pollution.
 
Sadly, every year China was experiencing more
and more days declared unsafe by their government and was advising citizens to
stay inside.

On that day, many people who
needed to be outside, including Tran, wore a thin surgical mask over their nose
and mouth as they quickly walked from building to building.

Tran could taste the smog
through his white mask, and it made him nauseous.
 
It was a shining example of how another
government was in the process of killing its own people, as they struggled to
maintain an iron grip on their power base.

Tran covered the last few
blocks and crossed over the large street.
 
He waited for a long line of cars to pass, then walked along the paved
sidewalk running beside the river.
 
He
finally stopped at one spot near a restaurant where the water met the pier just
a few feet away.
 
Tran walked to the edge
and looked down into the small swells lapping at the wooden pillars.
 
The color of the water was a dull gray.
 
He shook his head and looked around
casually.
 
A few people wandered by, but
no one seemed to pay him any attention.
 

Tran reached into his pocket
and pulled out the phone he had just used to exchange messages with Zahn.
 
With one quick motion, he tossed it up and
over the rail, watching it splash into the polluted river.
 
He smirked to himself, realizing that his
sudden act of polluting had just made him part of the problem.

What
the hell
, he thought.
 
Soon it won’t even matter.