Amid the Shadows (28 page)

52

“Well, if you’re not
going to speak, I suppose we’ll need to help incentivize you.”

Christine glared at him
as Zahn walked to a nearby table and picked up an old style phone.
 
She could still see Sarah crying on the
monitor.

Zahn lifted the handset
and pushed a single button.
 
Kia Sarat’s
voice answered on the other end.
 
“Our
guest has decided she doesn’t want to talk,” Zahn explained.
 
“Why don’t you pay the little girl a
visit.
 
And feel free to be…creative.”

Zahn hung up and
watched with a smile as Christine’s eyes grew larger upon seeing Sarat enter
Sarah’s room on the monitor.
 
He
retrieved a small blindfold from his pocket when Christine blurted out, “Okay
Okay!
 
I’ll tell you!
 
Just don’t hurt her.”

Zahn rolled his eyes
and picked the phone back up.
 
God,
they were all so predictable.
 
He
rang the extension again, and Sarat stopped short of putting the blindfold over
Sarah’s eyes.
 
He put it back in his
pocket and left the room to pick up the call.

“Wait a minute,” Zahn
told him.
 
“Someone’s had a change of
heart.”
 
He hung up the phone again and
turned to Christine.
 
“You were saying?”

“She can see things,”
Christine said reluctantly.

“What kind of things?”

“Souls.
 
She can see people’s souls.”

Zahn wasn’t just
surprised; he was stunned.
 
His mouth
dropped open and he turned and stared at the monitor again, as if seeing Sarah
for the first time.
 
His expression was
quickly replaced by one of fascination.
 
“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

That was how she did
it.
 
That’s how she saw him!
 
Never in his wildest dreams.
 
He stared at the monitor for a long time and
eventually began to chuckle.
 
His chuckle
then turned into a laugh.
 
“My god,
that’s what this is about!”
 
He kept
laughing.
 
“Why did I not think of
that?
 
I never-”
 
He stopped and turned back around.
 
“Oh, Ms. Rose, you are quite the idiot.
 
You don’t even know enough to realize you’ve
given me the greatest gift of all.”

Now it was Christine’s
turn to be surprised.
 

“You haven’t the
slightest clue what’s happening here,” Zahn said, regaining his composure.
 
“I knew you had help protecting her, but I
never thought it was this.
 
This is truly
the icing on the cake.”
 
His dark grin
grew wider.
 
“He doesn’t know, does
he?”
 
Zahn cried with excitement in his
eyes.
 
“He doesn’t know who I am!
 
He’s after one of his own, and he has no
idea!”

Christine was
stunned.
 
One of his own?
He
was like Rand?
 
But how could he be
so old?
 
It was impossible to live that
long.
 
Her mind raced, trying to put the
pieces together.
 
Rand said there would
be a point where he must be there for Sarah.
 
That was his mission.
 
But what
happened if he wasn’t?
 

Christine gasped.
 
“Oh my god, you failed!” she shouted at
him.
 
“You failed your mission!”

Zahn was taken aback,
and his eyes quickly flared.

That was it!
 
Sarah had seen him somewhere.
 
She’d spotted him.
 
And if he failed his mission way back
then…then
he
never earned his soul
.
 
Which meant that if Sarah saw him, he would
have looked like Rand, SOULLESS!
 

In a single moment,
everything became clear to Christine.
 
Sarah spotted Zahn, and he knew it, he just didn’t know how!
 
He simply couldn’t figure out how she did it,
until Christine actually told him.
 
And
that meant she was right; he
was
afraid of her!

Christine flashed back
to her decision sitting in the back of the Charger, that she would fight to
protect Sarah with every breath she had.
 
And she realized her fight for Sarah wasn’t then; it was now.

This time, it was she
who smiled.
 
Zahn stared at her
curiously.

“You
are
afraid
of her, aren’t you?” Christine accused him.
 
Her smile grew.
 
“You’ve been
afraid of her the whole time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

Christine continued to
press.
 
“That’s why you always sent
someone else to do your dirty work.
 
If
you’re truly like Rand, or even stronger as you say, you could have simply come
yourself and been done with it.
 
But you
didn’t.”
 
She sneered at him.
 
“You were afraid of her.
 
You were afraid of a child.”

“Shut up!” Zahn
snapped.
 
“I had other
responsibilities.
 
You can’t imagine what
it took to make this happen.
 
Do you
think it happened overnight?
 
Can you
even fathom how many people I had to involve, most of whom never even
knew.
 
You have no idea!”

Christine glared back
shaking her head.
 
“How in the world does
someone like you become so sick?!”

“HE ABANDONED ME!’
 
Zahn suddenly flew into a rage.
 
He stood over Christine with his nostrils
flaring and eyes that were now black.
 
“I
tried to be everything I thought he wanted from me!
 
I followed the path.
 
I protected others.
 
I even
saved
others, but he didn’t
care.
 
He never cared!”
 
Zahn caught himself.
 
He tried to calm down and looked at a
different picture on the wall.
 
This time
it was an old photo of a group of soldiers.
 
“I even went to war for him.
 
One
of
your
wars.
 
But I still fought
for him.”
 
Zahn’s focus drifted off
again.
 
“I’d stolen a British identity so
I could fight on the front lines, and once there, I could switch identities
with no effort at all.
 
Just grab another
card from a dead soldier.
  
It let me use
my skills without being noticed.
 
And
that’s when it happened.”

Zahn’s gaze seemed to
push deeper into the old photo.
 
“That’s
when everything changed.”

While he stared into
the picture, Christine silently traced the ropes with her hands down and around
the bottom of her chair.
 
But she could
not find how they were tied.

“That’s when the
killing began,” Zahn said.
 
His voice
slowed.
 
“I did it for the good of god,
for the side of the righteous.
 
It was my
chance to fight for him again, to prove myself again.
 
So I killed the enemy, over and over and
over, relentlessly.
 
And I was good at
it.
 
After all, fighting is what I was
made for, what all of us were made for.
 
But instead of proving my faith, something else happened.”
 
He stopped briefly again, still staring at
the wall.
 
“Do you have any idea what
it’s like to kill hundreds of people, thousands?
 
It’s almost indescribable: sick, twisted,
dark…but
powerful!
”
 
Zahn closed
his eyes.
 
“Immensely so.
 
There is something incredible that happens
when you watch the life fade and disappear from another person’s eyes.”
 
He opened his own eyes again.
 
“Ironic isn’t it?
 
For years I fought for him, and in the end,
it not only drove me to kill, it taught me to love it.”

His voice grew
cold.
 
Christine wasn’t sure if he was
still talking to her.
 
“I didn’t realize
it then, but after all those lifeless bodies, after I’d finally lost count,
something broke.
 
The world gradually
became darker and darker, and I eventually began to understand the truth.
 
And the truth is that he doesn’t really care
about any of us.
 
We’re just pawns to
him, in a giant game, to use as he pleases and to throw away when he’s done.”

Christine kept her eyes
on him and quietly tried to trace the ropes again.

“And when I realized
that, when I realized he’d already lost interest in me decades ago, I finally
felt it.
 
I felt the freedom of truth,
freedom from the belief we
Lochem are
born with, that he loves and
fights for us all.”
 
Zahn shook his
head.
 
“It’s not true, any of it.
 
It is the ultimate lie.
 
The ultimate lie about who we are and why we
are here.
 
You want to know what our
purpose is?
 
To be sheep, just sheep, all
helplessly controlled until he is done with us.”
 
His gaze remained locked onto the wall,
almost in a trance.
 
“But he made a
mistake.
 
He left someone here who
refused to be one of his sheep, who refused to live and die by his whim.
 
He abandoned the wrong person, a person who
knows nothing except how to fight.”

“And one day I saw the
light.
 
It was as if, after all those
years, my destiny had finally found me.
 
As the life left yet another person I had killed, and he slowly fell
from my grasp, my revelation crystalized.
 
With that kill, and every kill before it, I was doing what I should have
done all along, rejecting him.
 
I was
sending his precious children back to him
.
 
The ultimate insult, and the ultimate power.”

Christine froze when
Zahn suddenly turned to her with a strange, twisted look on his face.
 
“It was then my destiny became perfectly
clear.
 
Send them all home.
 
SEND THEM ALL!”

53

Sarah sat shivering in
the cold metal chair.
  
Her tiny face was
covered with glistening lines, tracks left by countless tears.
 
She was so scared.
 
She didn’t know where she was or what had
happened to everyone.
 
When she woke up,
there was no one to help her and no one to protect her.
 
The only person she’d seen was the red man
who would come into her room and stare at her for long periods of time.

The empty, grey room
was completely featureless, except for the small camera and tripod at the far
end.
 
A single light bulb overhead was
the only other item in the room with her.
 
She tried to twist around to see the door but couldn’t.
 
She was so hungry.

Sarah didn’t know she
was being watched from a distance.
 
She
quietly squirmed in her chair trying to relieve some of the pain in her
legs.
 
She thought of Christine and felt
the tears begin to fill her eyes again.

It was then that
something stirred inside of her.
 
She
felt it in the deepest recesses of her little heart, something warm and
comforting.
 
She could feel the tears
slow and some of the fear subside as the feeling grew stronger and
stronger.
 
Rand was coming.

54

Even
in the evening, Bogota Colombia was hot and humid, much more than Ron Tran was
expecting when he exited the plane.
 
China had humidity, but not like this.
 
The sweat began almost immediately as he walked across the tarmac toward
the terminal.
 

All
of his belongings fit into four large suitcases and a backpack which bounced
lightly against his back.
 
The computer
in his bag looked like any other, and frankly any agent that asked him to boot
it up would never have known what he was looking at anyway.
 
Nevertheless, Tran never let it out of his
sight.

He
breathed a sigh of relief to find the terminal building air-conditioned, and he
stopped to catch his breath.
  
Looking
around, he could instantly see the difference in security that a third world
country had to offer.
 
He spotted just
two security agents, both eating dinner and engrossed in a conversation with
each other.
 
The rest of the travelers
walked by them without attracting a second glance.
 
Drug trafficking was the number one concern
in Colombia, but not when it came to arriving flights.
 
After all, who would bother bringing drugs
into
the country?

Tran
checked his watch and subtracted some hours in his head.
 
He browsed the video screen and found the
gate number for his connecting flight to Buenos Aires.
 
He had over two hours to wait.
 
Tran spotted several televisions mounted from
the ceiling in a larger waiting room and walked over.
 
He could see what he was looking for before
he even got close.

Only
two of the seven screens displayed live video feeds from China.
 
The rest were covering the rioting in South
America which was still escalating over the loss of the Pope.
 
The two locations of the China feeds were
different, but the images of the crowds were very similar.
 
Unable to read the Spanish captions at the
bottom, Tran watched silently as the effects of his super virus took hold.
 
Behind the reporters were huge lines outside
government buildings with hundreds, even thousands, of Chinese yelling and
frantically pushing forward.

Tran’s
attack was in full force with millions of computers around the globe attacking
every government controlled server or system they could find.
 
Most were outward facing systems such as
government controlled banks, social service departments, public utilities, and
even airports.
 
With millions of people
unable to travel or access their bank accounts, fear quickly spread and a run
on the banks ensued.
 
Thousands more
gathered around the country’s limited social program buildings, demanding their
assistance checks in cash instead of deposits into their bank accounts.
 
To make matters worse, many of those working
within the areas hit worst by the enormous crowds had left work when the panic
began, leaving critical services such as gas and electrical plants mostly
unmanned, and the ripple effect quickly began to spread through the country’s
economy.

Politicians
and other public officials desperately tried to calm the crowds, which only
seemed to deepen the fears of the citizenry.
 
The panic was spreading rapidly, and the Chinese government was trying
to identify the sources of the attacks and find a way to stop them.
 
But the sources were far too numerous and
distributed.
 
The attacks were coming
from virtually every country in the world with the highest concentrations
originating from both the United States and Russia.

Yet,
what no one was watching was the internal systems and networks where Stux2 had
silently begun spreading the moment it detected the global attack on the
outside.
 
While both the government and
the public continued to panic, Stux2 moved from server to server at lightning
speed, finding vulnerabilities and compromising them, then checking for the
unique technical characteristics of China’s Command and Control System.

Tran
continued watching the monitors as the chaos unfolded.
 
The attack had begun barely eight hours
prior, and the country was already in turmoil.
 
He thought about what things would be like in another twenty-four hours,
or forty-eight.
 
They were all sheep.

Tran
covered his mouth and shook his head, trying to show just the right amount of
concern in case someone was watching him.
 
He displayed a worried look and searched for a public phone.
 
He found one and stood in front of it,
pretending to dial and then speak to someone for several minutes.
 
Finally, he nodded and hung up the dead
receiver.
 
He looked around again; no one
was watching.
 
Satisfied, Tran walked to
a small café and sat down.
 
He guessed it
would take twenty-four more hours for Stux2 to find what it was looking
for.
 
When it did, it would quickly
disable the overrides and safety switches by informing the system that all
switches had
already
been turned off, and the nuclear authorization
codes already entered.
 
Finally, after it
had found and programmed all 240 of the remote warheads, it would take full
control of China’s nuclear arsenal.
 

If
people were afraid now, they would be absolutely petrified when they saw the
exhaust trails of China’s missiles overhead.
 
By that time,
everyone
in the airport would be crowded around
those televisions.
 
And he would be gone.