System Seven (12 page)

Ten minutes later, the
room slipped away altogether.

He woke to the splash
of a water drop against his forehead. A dim luminance revealed the next drop
falling from the shadows above. For a heartbeat, the drop froze in midair,
suspended, then fell to splash against his skull.

Drugged?
Apparently – in trying to flinch away, not a single muscle responded,
save for his eyes. The urge to move spread downward from his face, dully denied
at every turn. The cold air of the cave wrapped around his bare arms and face,
a sensate reminder of the body he couldn’t control. A shout instead turned to a
surge of muted panic.

Calm down.
Drugs wore out, in time. Rotating his eyes in all directions helped
some. The damp walls and muddy floor of a small cave were just visible.
Had he been caught?
Memory, too, was
quietly defiant. Calculation, however, remained keen. Chinese water torture
could take hours or longer to have the desired effect. The drug in his system
would surely wear before then, requiring another dose and offering a chance at
interaction with his captors, if only one-sided.

Another drop caused a
rivulet to stream down his forehead into the well of his left eye.

He began to blink,
hoping to absorb the moisture, before realizing the futility. Another would
come soon. For now he plied at memory and tried to ignore the water.

More than once, he
realized after the fact he’d been lost in a moment stretched over several
moments. A natural rule was being bent. Drugged or not, it was fascinating.

He watched time.

The variations, the
pauses and overlaps, were so subtle that under different circumstances he
probably never would have noticed them. At one point it dawned on him that time
was also
watching
him
. Reacting. Intelligent.
Aware
. Had always been so. The thought
struck fear so profound that his automatic breathing stopped momentarily. Time
as a character? An intelligence? As if dodging discovery, the sensation left
him; time resumed its normal pace.

For a long spell he
contemplated what he’d seen, fear ghosting the periphery of his thoughts.
Something
watched him.

Drop
. Time...
Drop
. Time...
Drop
.

Lulled, he passed into
sleep.

He woke again, cold,
wet, and alarmed. The cave’s ceiling was leaking thousands of drops into the
pool forming below. The water was up to the cot, soaking his clothes and
inching towards his ears. He blinked furiously, unbelieving he would die here
without knowing how to wield the power.

The power...

Like stumbling upon a
familiar path, one thought led to the next.
The
Comannda, telepathy, dream control
. He was dreaming. Realistic as hell but
just a dream. It could be nothing else. In response, water began to dump from
the ceiling in streams, the cave filling rapidly. Still he could not move.
Drowning was not going to be very comfortable, even in a dream. He closed his eyes tightly against the
deluge. The water, which had risen now to the corner of his eyes, roared dimly
in his submerged ears. He cast about, searching for a seam, an edge he could
peel back. If this was his mind, there was a lot more to do in it than drown in
a cave.

At last he found just
what he’d imagined, an edge. With an intention born of panic, he pulled at it,
willing the change to take place. Shadows sprung across consciousness and all
at once, there was silence.

The darkness receded,
leaving him in a dusty attic, sitting atop a trunk. He gratefully inhaled,
flexed his hands, and stomped his feet. Sunlight filtered through attic
windows. It was his grandfather’s home on Herengracht Street along the canals
of Amsterdam. The attic was a favorite place to hide away in the evenings after
school, after all his chores and homework were done.

He rested a hand on
the trunk. Countless hours he’d spent holding its contents. He could still feel
the texture of the lace from his mother’s wedding dress, the etched lines on
the steel of his father’s military sword. The backgammon board and the smooth
ceramic playing discs. The dark glass bottle of cologne in the shape of an
automobile. The powerful scent would fill his senses after unscrewing the spare
tire of a cap.
Father
.

He wanted to wake up
but still didn’t have full control.

Why am I here?

The door at the bottom
of the stairs opened, betrayed by its familiar creaking. The first thought was
of Großvater Bartel. He was always the one to come up at the end of the day to
fetch him for bedtime. Someone ascended the stairs.

“Grandpa?”

Johan was stunned to
see his father arrive at the head of the stairs. He was the same, as seen from
the eyes of an eight-year-old boy.

“Father! I....” Dream
or not, this was his lifelong wish. Emotions swelled. He went to him and
embraced him, fearing he would vanish. They hugged and the years dissolved
instead. Tears fell. He was real. Somewhere beyond the world of the living, he
existed.

“Papa, I missed you. I
needed you and mama so much. So much.”

When his father didn’t
reply, Johan pulled back and saw him as an old man, as if he were still alive.
He wiped Johan’s cheeks and ruffled his hair, calming him as he always had.
Still he didn’t speak.

“Papa, talk to me.
Please. What is this about?”

It was in his eyes,
telling him he couldn’t know, wasn’t allowed to – he would have to face it on
his own. Then he spoke, his voice resonating beyond the attic, beyond the
dream.

“There is no more
noble a fight than the one you join.”

His father embraced
him once more. When he stepped back, he was young again, their time at an end.
Johan started to say goodbye but in the next instant only dust motes and the
scent of cologne lingered. The familiar absence returned.

“Papa...”

With a splitting crash
a telephone pole burst through an attic window and sent shards flying. He dove
to avoid wires unfurling into the room and woke to stinging pain and wind
rushing across his face. A power pole lay protruding through the living room
window just feet from where he lay. Electricity arced between the taut wires
leading outside. The lights flickered.

Still dreaming...?
It was too much to process, too surreal,
though the pain was convincing. He crawled to the bath and vomited in the
toilet. Thunder crashed and the house creaked under the wind’s force.

He stood and looked in
the mirror. Blood lines trickled from a thin shard of glass embedded in his
cheek. He squeezed and plucked it free. The pain felt good... still drunk and
high but alive, not drowned in a cave.
This
was the real thing.

The lights went out,
the plunge into darkness followed by a transformer’s explosion in the distance.
He barely noticed. If the world were to erupt in madness and soldiers were to
gun him down in the street, he could go in peace knowing somehow he’d be with
his parents again.

• • •

Soldado’s decision to
manually gather the fragments and assemble them had required hours of careful
planning, monitoring, and routing. Right in the middle of it all, SlotZero had
used his botnet to grab Crosstalk’s file. While it was good to know he was still
okay, the resulting scans and server failures had put Alcazar and Crosstalk’s
file at even greater risk.

Once assembled, he
watched the video.

Whether it was a
classified piece of conspiracy propaganda or a beyond-classified dissertation
on the inner workings of the world he didn’t know. It was that well done. Just
viewing the video changed perspective in an awkward way, leaving a vulnerable
feeling. The resulting thoughts and feelings seemed to make waves in a kind of
mental pond, just as the narrator described. It reminded him of
la gran locura
, his cocaine induced
paranoid episode that helped him swear off the drug. The feeling was simply
there
, spoiling his otherwise rational
mind. Like imagination stuck in the on position.

The Overseer system
was definitely believable, considering what they’d seen on the network. He
immediately suspended all systems, setting admin-only access until he could get
OB1Kenobi to retool the transport algorithms. It would screw over big projects
everywhere but there was no choice.

He sat back and ran a
hand through his hair.

“Un-fucking-believable.
I watch a fucking
movie
and bug out?”

His comms lit up with
messages from admins. He sent out one message to all of them:
Avoiding
NSA. Chill hard 24 hrs
.

His thoughts began to
stack up and crash into each other, making bigger and bigger waves. Something
out there felt him.

“Fuck this.” He went
to the bathroom and grabbed some pills to knock himself out. There was
something awful working the heavens and he sure as hell didn’t want to run into
it.

• • •

Mac Payant flicked
ashes into a soda can and glanced at the clock. Three in the morning and still
nothing on either Brent or his son. Plenty of time for Brent’s arrest details
to have been shared. Instead a wall had gone up between the two agencies. It
felt gray. Very gray.

On screen, he switched
back to the chess game. He clicked queen’s knight, already deployed. Squares
illuminated around it, possible moves, options. Unlike any other piece, it
could soar over the play field and land at odd, tricky angles. Never a linear
move, always a step out of sight, and harder to predict. Unlike real life, this
knight kept its color and had to play by the rules.

The gray area of
operations discovered by Brent seemed a lifetime ago. His reluctance to share
details probably saved Mac his career, if not his life. Just the one meeting to
say something wasn’t right in the agency and that he was going to dig deeper;
the code phrase ‘gray knight’ a hasty designation, a precaution. Shortly after
that, the car accident took Brent’s wife. “
Just
paranoia, forget it. Really
.” The most earnest yet most unbelievable words
he had ever spoken. For him to use the code phrase again with the mention of
his son brought it all back. Only now, feigned ignorance and inaction didn’t
have a place. Too many years, too much shoved under the rug. Whatever was
happening, Brent and his son deserved more than another turning away.

He studied the
chessboard. The questions kept circling. Who’d run the shuttle? If the FBI planned
to move Austin they would’ve just done it as they had Brent – unless a black
operation had been underway. He recalled the hacker’s message. The reference to
mind reading... something the government would absolutely want to keep to
itself. It would explain things, as everything had begun with the drop-off of
the file.

He chose not to move
the knight, instead advancing a pawn to create a left-flanking shield with the
other pawns. A safe, reinforcing move. Non-confrontational but effective. Pawns
were meant to go down first in defense, anyway. He thought of Brent, then of
himself.

Frustrated and finally
tired, he signed off and stood to stretch. Fifty years of life were trying to
take their toll and as usual he would have none of it. He stretched thoroughly,
feeling each set of muscles respond, some achingly, some gratefully. He left the small office and headed for his
bunk.

Entering the
residential wing with his keycard, he strode down the dimmed corridor. He
preferred going home to staying at the facility but under the circumstances...
he slowed as he neared Kaiya’s room. Light from under the door leaked into the
hallway. She’d been given meds to help her sleep, but perhaps she hadn’t taken
them or had passed out with the lights on. He thought of checking on her.

At the door he heard
muffled cries; a second later he recognized distress. In one motion he drew his
weapon and chambered a round, then took a quick breath and slammed the door
open. He took aim at two men at Kaiya’s bedside. One held Kaiya’s face down in
her pillow.

“Hands out, now! Let’s
see the hands!”

Randall Vasco and
Keith Crawford half-turned and slowly placed their hands out in front of them.
“Easy agent, we’re on your side.”

Kaiya screamed an
obscenity at the men before backing against the wall, heaving for breath. Tears
streaked her face and red slap marks were plain. “Shoot the fuckers, Mac!”

He’d seen enough.
“Quiet, Kaiya. Don’t move until I say.”

Crawford motioned.
“You need to stand down, Mac.”

“Stop. No movement.
None. Kaiya, crawl to the floor over to me. Stay low, stay low.”

Kaiya slithered from
the bed onto the floor, clear of the agents’ reach. She made it to Mac and
stood on unsteady legs. She’d obviously taken the sleeping meds but had been
woken up. She wore a white t-shirt and gray sweats.

“Are you okay?”

“They threatened to hurt
my mom. They know where she lives!” She glared at the agents. “They want Austin
and the laptop. They strangled me and slapped me and grabbed my tits and...
just shoot ‘em, Mac, just shoot the fuckers!” She slid her feet into deck shoes left by the door.