The Seraphim Sequence: The Fifth Column 2 (12 page)

Damien kept pace with her. ‘Well, yeah. I didn’t bring a saddle, so—’

Grace looked quizzically over her shoulder.

‘For the … horses,’ he said. ‘So … how long have you been here for?’

‘Six months,’ she said. ‘I like it here. You could almost believe the Fifth Column is gone.’

‘Yeah, that would be nice. I’m sick of looking over my shoulder.’

‘So why are you talking to me, Damien? Are you trying to work out if I’m still a programmed robot, or are you feeling obligated to smooth things over since I last tried to kill you?’

‘I don’t think you’re programmed,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s good. Now I don’t need to kill you.’

Damien wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

She smiled. ‘Yet.’

‘It’s just, you know, it’s been a while,’ he said.

Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘Since you irradiated me in a nuclear reaction?’

‘Since you were … not a shocktrooper.’

‘There isn’t much to talk about. We went our separate ways,’ she said. ‘I became a zombie, you became a terrorist.’

‘And what are you now?’ he said.

Grace hesitated at the edge of the pine forest. ‘Now I’m just trying to make myself useful.’ She turned to face him. ‘I’m putting together a team. It’s a babysitting job. Since you’re around—not that I need any favors—it wouldn’t hurt if you joined us.’

‘Wouldn’t that be … awkward?’

‘It’s your most redeeming feature,’ she said. ‘That and your strange knack of staying alive.’

Damien shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ll see how I go.’

Grace clapped her hands. ‘Well, that was a good talk, wasn’t it? I guess this is the part where you head back to your playgroup.’

Damien shook his head slowly. ‘You aren’t the Grace I used to know.’

‘I’m a terrorist now.’

He started back across the field, then stopped, turned back. ‘Grace, when Freeman deprogrammed you, did anyone tell you what your first operation was?’

Each Project GATE subject was programmed to believe their parents were terrorists. Their first operation was to kill them. Once they’d successfully completed this operation, they were qualified and ready for the big league. Damien remembered the moment he’d found out the truth about his own first operation. Reading those records was like learning it for the first time. It had almost destroyed him. Grace didn’t seem destroyed. She just seemed different. He could have put it down to being electrocuted by Jay at Desecheo Island and Freeman’s deprogramming, but he knew it wasn’t that. It was as though someone had swapped her out with a new, ambivalent Grace. The problem was, he missed the old one.

She didn’t react immediately, but when she did it was a slow, measured nod. ‘It’s why I switched sides,’ she said. ‘Zombie to terrorist.’

Damien nodded. ‘I see.’

She blew long strands of hair from her face. ‘I haven’t seen you in a while. And next week I probably won’t see you again. It’s no big deal.’ She shrugged. ‘They threw us into a giant Petri dish and this is where we ended up.’

‘Yeah. Strange.’ He didn’t know what else to say. ‘At least we were successful experiments.’

‘Depends on your definition.’ She wasn’t looking at him any more but through him. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the human race was just some freak accident. Something the universe or God or aliens or whatever created before they had the chance to abort us.’

‘I’m guessing you think a lot when you’re up here,’ Damien said.

‘Only place I can.’ She crouched and pulled at blades of grass. ‘It makes you wonder what the point is though.’ She looked at him. ‘I mean, where the hell are we all going?’

Damien met her gaze. ‘Oblivion.’

Sophia sat on the Chico Inn balcony, absorbed in the laptop she’d borrowed from Benito. She barely noticed when he materialized with two cups.

‘Mountain tea?’ He flashed a smile. ‘Best on this side of the cordillera.’

‘Sounds good.’ She tidied her papers and put them under the weight of her P99 pistol.

He was eying her pistol. ‘Just in case, right?’

She smiled. ‘Paperweight.’

He handed her half a lime for her tea. ‘Dayap,’ he said.

She squeezed it over her tea and stirred in some brown sugar. ‘Learning the local tongue already.’

She watched as he sat down and pulled some sort of gadget from his pocket. ‘Got a new toy?’ she asked.

‘Oh, right, yes.’ He placed a small circuit board with two cables protruding from either end on top of her papers. ‘You’ll like this very much,’ he said, looking very pleased with himself.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘What is it?’

‘I call it the Interceptor.’

‘What does it intercept?’

‘User authentication. Passwords. From your security pass, fingerprint, your iris, anything.’

She held it up in the sunlight. ‘You mean like a credit-card skimmer?’

‘Yes, precisely. Small enough to hide inside an access-card reader. No one even knows it’s there.’

‘This is relevant to my interests,’ Sophia said. ‘Go on.’

‘Someone with clearance uses the reader and the Interceptor intercepts the code between the reader and the controller,’ Benito said. ‘That’s the problem with the Fifth Column’s security—the code’s transmitted in plain text, it’s not even encrypted. Hardly any access-card readers are.’

‘So your Interceptor captures the code and stores it,’ Sophia said. ‘You can reuse it later?’

‘Swipe your own replay card and it gives you the same access as the previous person,’ Benito said, brandishing several access cards. ‘I coded them to do different things. Replay, block access to everyone—might be handy if you want to lock yourself inside for a time.’

‘Can you make more of these?’ Sophia said.

‘How many more?’

‘Three, four?’

‘I’ll need some more blank access cards, but I could do that. Something to keep me occupied.’ He paused to take a sip of tea. ‘It’s a spectacular view up here. But you haven’t looked at it once.’

Sophia put the Interceptor down and looked at the mountains and town beneath for the first time. ‘I’ve been a little distracted,’ she said.

Benito leaned over to see his laptop screen. It was plastered with YouTube videos, news reports and Twitter feeds.

‘You’re tweeting the revolution?’ he asked.

Sophia shook her head. ‘Just reading between the lines.’

‘Find anything interesting?’

Sophia cycled through the tabs in her browser. One of them was a forty-minute video of a Hollywood celebrity babbling incoherently to camera; another a school shooting with twenty different versions of events.

‘I guess that qualifies as interesting,’ Benito said.

‘There’s more where that came from. It’s the riots that bother me.’

‘I imagine riots bother everyone. But you’re not everyone.’

‘They’re happening on a regular basis now,’ she said. ‘And it’s always the same—they just burst out of nowhere. Sometimes they target something specific, and sometimes it’s just—’

‘Mindless?’ Benito finished.

‘Yeah. The protests, the peaceful ones, they don’t even make the news. Media blackout, just like Denton’s speech. I only know they exist because of Twitter and some exhaustive searching. But the violent ones, the riots, they’re always covered.’

‘You’re thinking it’s that Seraphim thing, aren’t you?’

‘That day at the UN headquarters,’ she said. ‘With Denton, with Damien and Jay. There was a riot just out the front, do you remember?’

‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said.

‘The rage in their eyes …  it seemed unfocused.’

Benito’s gaze drifted to Adamicz’s papers, weighted down with her pistol so a breeze wouldn’t carry them away.

‘Light reading?’ he said.

‘He’s talking about Wilhelm Reich.’

‘The psychoanalyst,’ Benito said. ‘Controversial. And a little crazy.’

‘Crazy enough to work for the Fifth Column. He was the man who discovered the extremely low frequencies that affect human brain waves. He caught Denton’s attention when the FDA filed an injunction against him. From 1947 he worked in Project Phoenix and then after that, Project Seraphim. For almost a decade.’

Benito sipped his tea. ‘I didn’t know Denton was interested in sex boxes that cured cancer. Then again, nothing would surprise me these days.’

‘I think there was more to it than that,’ Sophia said.

Benito blinked. ‘More to it than sex boxes?’

Sophia pulled a sheet of paper from her pile and read aloud: ‘
When Reich discovered his research was being used for purposes of mind control, he left Project Seraphim and the Fifth Column altogether. It was only one week later that he was sentenced to two years in prison. Much of his work was burnt by the FDA.
’

‘Denton burned him,’ Benito said.

‘That’s what I thought. He died in prison a year later, days before he was due for parole.’

‘What from?’

‘Heart failure.’

‘I guess Denton got what he wanted out of him.’ Benito shook his head. ‘As a scientist I can tell you that once you start working for the secret government you’re isolated from the mainstream scientific community.’

Sophia blew steam from her tea. ‘To prevent leaks?’

‘They say it’s because our research is ten, twenty years ahead of mainstream science. But you know the real reason. It’s to keep you under their control. You don’t go back. You can never go back.’

‘These Seraphim arrays,’ she said, brushing her finger over the page corners, ‘they can work together in sequence.’

‘And you think it’s mind control?’

‘Adamicz said in his journal he tested ELF waves on the Branch Davidians.’

Benito looked unsure. ‘The Waco siege?’

‘He said the ELF waves drove them crazy,’ Sophia said. ‘They destroyed themselves.’

The church bell rang in the distance. A shiver worked its way up Sophia’s spine.

‘Waco wasn’t a disaster,’ Benito said.

Sophia nodded. ‘It was a success.’

Benito sipped his tea. ‘As if I wasn’t depressed enough already.’

Sophia looked down over the balcony and spotted DC and Freeman walking down the curved hill. Their conversation looked thoughtful. A trio of kids ran past them, giggling and panting for air.

‘Yeah, well at least you’re not having amphetamine withdrawals,’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’ Benito said.

Sophia shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Benito watched the kids as they chased each other on the street below. A parent called out for them to come inside.

‘Do you ever think of your parents?’ she asked.

Benito took a moment to reply. ‘All the time. My father, stubborn old son of a bitch. I loved him.’

‘And he loved you?’

Benito laughed. ‘He’d never admit it. Took him until his deathbed before he actually said the words.’

‘And your mother?’

He shrugged and sipped his tea. ‘Lesbian.’

Benito had lost his entire family years ago in a terrorist attack at a wedding reception in Jordan. During the Desecheo Island operation, he’d met his family’s killer: Sophia. It wasn’t until they’d relocated to Australia that he’d been able to start looking her in the eye again. He knew she was a deniable operator, programmed to do the horrible things she had done; that it wasn’t really her who had murdered his family but her handler, Denton. The Fifth Column as a whole. It was the reason Benito had defected to begin with, the reason he’d joined the Akhana. But their deaths were still on Sophia’s hands. She could still smell the coppery tang of their blood. She didn’t deserve Benito’s forgiveness.

She closed her browser and all the tabs it contained. ‘I need a break.’

‘I can never go back, can I?’ Benito said.

The question caught her completely off guard. ‘What do you mean? To the Fifth Column? Why would you want to?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘To a normal life. I can never go back. It’s like this forever, isn’t it?’

Sophia focused on the laptop screen. She didn’t know what to say, but she couldn’t lie to him.

‘Until we win,’ she said. ‘Or lose.’

***

Sophia was expecting a little more when she entered the comm center. It was basically a large lounge room flanked by five- and ten-year-old notebooks and desktop computers, their fans humming with varying degrees of ferocity. The meeting between the Shadow Akhana elders would take place over the darknet, their own covert communications network. As Freeman explained it, the darknet was by far the most advanced covert communications network on the planet—the brainchild of Fifth Column engineers who’d defected to the Akhana. Freeman had quickly funded its development with money previously siphoned from the Fifth Column. The darknet provided the Akhana with multi-jurisdictional routing of all communications, ensuring their traffic never entered and exited the network through the same country. To connect to the darknet, each computer needed to be connected to an Akhana-designed cryptorouter. All traffic between the cryptorouter and the darknet was encrypted with military-grade cryptography. Even the traffic between the entry, termination and exit nodes was encrypted, making it almost impossible for the Fifth Column to conduct a fingerprinting or watermark attack. Freeman had told Sophia that once a person using a cryptorouter was communicating with another person with a cryptorouter, it was simply not possible for a third party to break it. He’d also admitted the Fifth Column had likely implemented a similar network for themselves. And the Shadow Akhana wouldn’t have a hope of penetrating theirs for the very same reason.

Sara was sitting before the main computer screen, which had a dusty webcam clamped on top. On the screen was a contact list showing different codenames. One by one, they blinked to green. It looked like some sort of Skype clone, probably custom-built by Shadow Akhana developers. In fact, the computer’s operating system looked custom-built.

Freeman must have noticed her looking. ‘That’s Kirin, our security-hardened OS,’ he said. ‘Based on FreeBSD.’

‘You said Project Seraphim would be discussed,’ Sophia said.

‘That’s on the table. We don’t have the numbers or the budget the Fifth Column do, so our priorities are one: keep ourselves afloat; and two: identify the Fifth Column’s activities that most threaten our survival.’

‘Owen,’ Sara said, ‘everyone is online.’

‘Your presence is still … controversial,’ Freeman said to Sophia. ‘It might be best if you keep clear of the webcams today.’

Sophia nodded, and he sat at another computer to fire up his webcam. For a moment she felt like some sort of embarrassment to the Shadow Akhana. It annoyed her that despite all the trust and respect Freeman had for her, he still treated her like some sort of reckless teenager who didn’t know any better.

The webcam-free side of the lounge room was crowded with a captive audience. She found herself standing near local Akhana members and Benito and DC. Behind them, Nasira had arrived. Sophia couldn’t see Damien or Jay even though they’d been invited. Nasira had probably worked them to the bone. But Grace appeared a moment later, also alone. That, Sophia was pleased about.

Freeman initiated a video conference call. Computer screens lit up across the desks, each displaying a single video feed of a Shadow Akhana leader. They seemed to have an even split of genders. Some appeared East Asian, others South-East Asian.

Freeman ran a few checks with the elders to make sure everyone could see and hear properly and their software and webcams were in working order. Once that was done, he didn’t waste any more time.

‘As of right now, we are all that’s left,’ he said. ‘The compromising of all external Akhana bases and installations is the very reason we created the Shadow Akhana. And only just in time, too.’

He kept his voice slow and measured, probably so the elders had a chance at decoding his Australian accent.

‘We’re lucky to be alive,’ Sara added.

‘And as long as we are, we will not rest,’ said the elder on the far-left screen, his accent noticeably Japanese. He was a middle-aged man with pale skin, coarse black hair and small eyes and lips.

‘Assuming everyone has read their briefing beforehand, we have quite a few threats from the Fifth Column at present,’ Freeman said. ‘Well, humanity has quite a few threats. Which this far down the line is essentially the same thing. The first issue is the financial crises. Sharlen, this one’s yours.’

Everyone’s attention shifted to another screen. Sophia followed their gaze to an older woman with permed hair and wide-rimmed glasses.

‘Yes, it appears the world ended in 2012,’ she said, ‘but not in the way people expected. The many causes of the financial crises over the last decade are complex, but to put it simple: the psychopaths who operate the Fifth Column is working very hard to gain control of our planet’s resources, or what’s left of them. Exactly as we have predicted.’

‘This is no surprise,’ the Japanese man said.

‘My point,’ Sharlen said quickly, ‘is that one crisis after another is fomenting social upheaval. We have seen this already.’

‘May I just interject here,’ said another elder, this one a younger woman with pale blue contact lenses. It looked like she had on three different sets of clothing at once, each of them thin and layered. On top she was wearing what was possibly a children’s cardigan. Sophia couldn’t help noticing the care she had taken with her make-up. Her eyebrows were impeccably plucked and trimmed, her mascara perfectly applied, with expertly drawn eyeliner and a thoughtful, muted choice of lipstick. Given that the other elder was Japanese, Sophia pegged this younger woman as Korean.

‘This is more of an issue for climate change,’ the woman said. ‘When the weather becomes unstable, the crops don’t come in and people get hungry.’

‘Danbi has an excellent point,’ Freeman said. ‘And with food scarcity comes sickness.’