An Armageddon Duology (36 page)

T
he engines shifted
to different pitch, the powerful thrust easing as the ship slowed to a stop in the dead of night. Savas remained handcuffed to the wall in the bowels of the boat. He’d seen no one in the hours since they left him there and heard no sounds but the machines churning around him.

The nausea had passed, his body having adapted to the ship’s rocking. Exhausted, unable to sleep or relax with his hands chained high on the wall, he stood upright, muscles ceaselessly contracting to keep his balance, his body unable to rest a moment during the journey. His wrists bled from the repeated trauma of rubbing against the cuffs, blood trickling down his arms. Classic protocols designed to strip him of any power to resist.

And it’s working.

For the first time in many hours, he heard human sounds. Footsteps clanged along a metal stairwell somewhere near his cell, boots banging down the outside corridor. A door opened with a grating wail. His hood was yanked off, the clotted blood ripping like weak glue. Light assaulted him.

“That’s the one,” came a voice from the blinding radiance.

Before he could discern more than the blurred outlines of bulky forms in front of him, they slipped the hood tightly over his head again. Strong arms grasped his wrists, unlocked the shackles, and twisted his hands painfully behind his back, cuffing him again.

“Move!”

They shoved him forward harshly through the doorway. And kept shoving him forward until he ran his shoulder into a metal bar. His ankle felt a platform.
A stairway?

“Climb!”

Awkwardly, blind, he stretched out his foot and planted on the first step. He ascended by sense of touch alone, slipping on several occasions only to find himself shoved upward from behind, once with the barrel of a weapon placed against his neck.

“Stop!”

He’d reached the top of the stairwell. Heavy vibrations on metal accompanied the sounds of more soldiers approaching.

“What the fuck, Harrison? Haven’t you ever taken prisoners before? Cuff the hands in front, dumb-ass! How the hell are we going to link the chain?”

They freed his hands and moved them around to his belt buckle, cuffing him again with a heavy chain latched to the restraints. The first tug nearly sent him sprawling, but he stumbled forward, trying to keep slack in the chain.

“Keep up, traitor! Or you’re going overboard to the sharks.”

The roar of the sea overpowered him—the crash of waves against the hull of the boat. Wind kicked up wildly, spraying sea across his hood. They’d reached the deck.

Denied vision for so long, his other senses began to paint phantom portraits. He sensed something looming over them as they dragged him forward, images of high walls and cliffs forming in his mind. The wind blew from the opposite direction, blocked completely by something massive and tall, a thing so large it seemed to block the sounds of the waves and reflect it back into their faces. He began to perceive a deep throbbing as if building from within his bones themselves—a gigantic motor churning beneath the waves.

A loud crash startled him, and the deck shook.

“Walk!”

Pushed forward, he stepped off the deck of the ship and onto another metallic platform, a gangplank of some sort. It bridged the gap between the boat and something far larger, a sea-going island of metal approaching like the mouth of a cave.

He toppled down, the plank ending without warning and an empty space swallowing his foot. He stumbled onto a much more solid surface, the sound of movement and laughter above him.

“Enough!” came a commanding voice. “Get him to the brig!”

Arms hoisted Savas, then pushed him forward down a secession of stairwells, through a series of heavy doors sealing like airlocks, and finally into a tight space with grill-work for walls.

The brig.

Again they left him cuffed to the wall, the chain hanging heavily along his arms, hood still cloaking his vision and nearly suffocating him. He wondered if the others would be brought here as well, but he knew it unlikely. Protocol isolated terrorist leaders, interrogations conducted without the opportunity to communicate. Standard operating procedure for these types of renditions.

A creaking metal hatch groaned and several pairs of boots tromped toward his cell. Keys unlocked the door in front of him and someone yanked the hood off. He had to turn his face from the light and shut his eyes.

“Well, you son of a bitch, you look about as fucked up as you ought to right now.”

A hand grasped his chin and jerked his face forward. Savas squinted into the painful glow, a chiseled jaw and cold blue eyes staring at him.

“And I can tell you right here, right now—it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. Real soon. We’re gonna make you wish you’d never been born, never dreamed up in that diseased head of yours to betray your nation. And before we kill you, kill your scumbag friends as well, you’re going to tell us every goddamned thing you know about this cybercriminal.”

“Fawkes?” muttered Savas.

The man struck him with the back of his hand.

“Fawkes? Who the hell is that?
Lightfoote
, you bastard. Your cyberterrorist whore! The one who let that damn worm loose!”

Lightfoote
? It didn’t make sense. These men had it all wrong. But he knew better than to try to explain. Someone had engineered a witch-hunt. He spit blood and ground his teeth.

“Go to hell.”

“Oh, sweet Mary Sue, we got ourselves a tough guy.” The man snorted. “Well, boys, we’re gonna have us a good time breaking this bronco.” He leaned in and whispered to Savas. “And we got all the time in the world to explain things to you.”

“
T
hree cars have pulled
up outside, Francisco!” Houston held the Browning beside her temple, parting the yellowed curtains as she stared through the window.
Things are moving too fast!
Already a noose was closing on them. “Two vans. A black town car. They’re pouring out like roaches, heading for the steps.” She darted away from the window and ran to the center of the room.

They’d killed the lights. The musty brownstone in Harlem was strobed by headlight beams darting through the windows. She saw the broad form of Lopez drop a laptop into a backpack and drape it stiffly over his shoulders.
He’s still in pain
. He picked up a pump-action shotgun from the floor, catching and holding her eyes for an instant. A sheen of pale skin gleamed as it moved through the light streaming through the window. Lightfoote stood beside him with a drawn pistol, bald head and piercings flashing.

“They’ll send a few round the back, coordinate the entry,” said Houston. “We’ve got thirty seconds.”

Lightfoote checked the display on a smartphone. “Getting a signal from the sensors—back and front. Right on the money, Sara. Let’s see if they’re ready for this.”

“Watch for debris!” cried Houston.
I never get the damn yields right!

The three crouched behind overturned boxes and furniture. Dust from the long-abandoned building filled the air with fine snow. The front doors rattled violently from a sudden blow. Lopez raised a metallic box in one hand.

“Now!” cried Houston. She ducked as he pressed the button.

Two explosions rocked the building. The front door erupted in a fireball, launching wood and metal in all directions. Several windows near the entrance shattered, exploding outward. Poorly maintained sprinkler systems sputtered, rusty water haphazardly raining across the interior, smoke-stained rivulets running across the floor.

“Go!” yelled Houston. She leapt forward.

The three sprinted, weapons pointed toward the shattered doorway. Mangled bodies were strewn across the brownstone steps, blood black with soot, dripping like molasses to the street below. A driver gawked at them from one of the vans, the door half open, his body tense and frozen in shock.

Use it.
Houston set herself, firing two shots before he could react, and he toppled to the ground. The door slammed in the other van. The engine coughed and raced as the driver gunned the accelerator, the gears popping loudly as he shifted. The van lurched forward.

A shotgun blast from Lopez burst the back tire. The van pitched as the driver tried to turn sharply. The right side elevated off the ground and the van flipped violently onto its roof. It landed with a shattering of window glass and crunching metal on the left side. The front end plowed into a lamppost. With a single beat of silence, a fire ignited in the engine.

An empty car waited beside the entrance. Either the driver had fled or been killed in the explosions. Houston waved them to the vehicle.
Did any survive the rear blast?
If so, they had only seconds. “I’ll drive. Move!”

The three dashed down the steps and into the car. Houston in the driver’s seat, Lopez and Lightfoote aiming their weapons out the rear windows. The car jumped forward with a squeal and raced into the streets of Harlem.

“Damn that was fast!” Houston gunned the engine and aimed for Harlem River Drive. “Backtrace said an hour?”

Lightfoote shouted from the back, the air rushing through the windows mangling her words. “Barely! The NSA is back. Their fingerprints are all over the trace. But that fast? That wasn’t a general scan. We’re their target—they
know!”
The waterfall of sound stopped as the back windows were shut.

“Jesus!”

Lopez grimaced and placed the shotgun on the floorboard. “That was a strike team. Serious players.”

“But not after
you
,” said Lightfoote. “They don’t even know you two exist.”

Houston nodded, steering roughly, the tires screeching as she ran a red light. The relative quiet felt unnatural, adrenaline still coursing through her veins. “I’m getting a little tired of running like this.”

Lightfoote swung away from the window and set down her gun. “We’re going to have to be a lot more careful. They
really
want this damn file.”

“Then it’s important,” said Houston, darting onto the highway. Taillights flashed past her, horns blaring.

“Whatever’s in it,” said Lopez, “must be bigger than we can imagine. They’ve taken the FBI team captive. They’re tracking us with the full power of the NSA, sending professionals after us. We need to figure out what it is we have.”

Lightfoote sighed. “That’s what I was trying to do, dammit!”

“Well, your hacker friends are going to have to work faster,” said Lopez. “We barely got out of that.”

Houston turned toward the Willis Avenue bridge.
I have to think clearly.
“I’m going to avoid the toll stations. Take us on I-87 into the Bronx. Disappear this car as soon as we can. Steal another one. Angel, we need to get you online again. You need to find this hacker collective.”

“I’ve got to warn them,” said Lightfoote. “If they tracked us, they can track them. They’ve got to take measures to prepare. Disappear and arm themselves. They’re going to be risking their lives to do this.”

“But will they?” asked Lopez.

Houston cursed as a delivery truck weaved in front of them. “Francisco, she’s a hero in the hacker underground. You saw those chat rooms, the messages she got.”

“People worship a hero from a distance. Not many want to be heroes when the bullets fly.”

“We’ll see,” said Lightfoote. “Maybe not for the good of it, or for me. Maybe for the challenge of Fawkes’s encryption. Something Big Brother wants us
not
to see. Maybe they want to see it as much as we do. Maybe they want to be the ones to spill the secret.”

“Maybe,” Lopez muttered.

“Either way,” continued Lightfoote, “we need to come up with a new plan. Digital security for sure. We’ll need every anonymous protocol around. We’ll need to move frequently. No more than a few hours at any connection. We need decoy stations to mimic our profile, lock those down and have them waste manpower checking them out.”

“And we need to distribute the file.”

“Yes, get it out to every hacker with a functioning processor. Parallel processing. Together, we can crack it.”

“You sound confident,” said Houston. “How can you be so sure?”

Lightfoote stared forward into the red taillights in front of them.

“Because we have to.”

S
avas felt himself scream again
, but his body had been pushed far beyond conscious control. He could only react to the waves of torment and panic. The survival machine encasing his consciousness performed desperate actions shaped by millions of years of evolution.

The cry exploded from his lips without volition, drowned in the waterfall pouring into his lungs. Strapped to a wooden board, a partially permeable fabric tight over his mouth, only a fraction of the liquid penetrated, but it triggered thrashing and an adrenaline response. The rest spilled over his face, completing the illusion of submersion, dying, suffocating, and strangling to a final end. His muscles convulsed as he struggled against the restraints.

It ended and a boot plunged into his left side to cast him face first onto the wet metal. The impact registered as a small gnat in a hurricane of agony. Fabric fell from his mouth and he coughed violently, puttering out small sprays of water. Too little to have actually killed him, the volume still set all his physiology of imminent death into motion. He gasped for air.

“You’re just making it harder on yourself. As well as the others,” came the cold voice that had begun to haunt his dreams.

Savas coughed roughly. “Others. No. What—”

“How long will you make us work her over, Savas? Just tell us the truth and her pain can stop.”

“I’ve told you everything!” He didn’t recognize his own voice. The words were the cries of an asylum inmate.

“
Where
is Angel Lightfoote? Tell us and you can go. She can go. It’s that easy.”

Savas struggled to hold back tears.

“
Please
. I don’t
know
.”

“What was in the email? Tell us that then. Was it another worm you would use to attack the country?”

“We didn’t
attack
.”

Savas cried out as a boot toe speared him in the side. The kick lifted him off the floor, and he moaned.

“Stop insulting us. Do you think that mock tribunal is going to get you out of this? You’ll be convicted, I have no doubt. But even if you aren’t, there’s no way—
no
way—you traitorous scum, that I’ll let you leave this place alive. Do you understand? You aren’t going to walk out of here after what you’ve done. Maybe, just maybe if you play ball, and help us track down these terrorists, your precious Rebecca might live.”

“Please, don’t hurt her. I’ve told you everything I know.”

A hand reached down and pulled his head back by the hair.

“What is the Nash Criterion? What does it
mean?”

“Don’t. Know.” He gasped. “Fawkes. Last email. Death trigger. No time.”

The hand smashed his head into the metal grating. The room spun. He couldn’t focus on the words. Strong arms dragged him from the room and down a short hallway, grated metal cages lining each side. Faceless forms slung him into one and he landed heavily on his shoulder, a stab of pain jolting him conscious.

A broad shape stood silhouetted in the doorway, the outlines of the man’s face barely discernible. But the Voice—everything had mutated into a voice now. No eyes, no face, no person. Just a hateful Voice that meant pain and impossible requests. The Voice dragged him and others through hell and back, teasing them with relief that came in the form of unscalable mountains, nonexistent answers, locks that could never be opened, and pain that would never end.

“This is really going nowhere,” said the Voice. “It’s time you thought carefully about giving us some of those answers, agent Savas. And soon. Your friends don’t have much time left.”

“I told you
everything.”

“You can do more. And I know just the ticket. We’ll resume our discussions soon and we’ll let you in on some of our work with the others. Maybe we’ll let you sit in and watch as we work on your sweet Rebecca? Would you like to see her?”

“No, please—”

“I can see it would mean a lot to you. We don’t usually have an option like this for difficult prisoners. Can you imagine all the work we put in only to have some motherfucker like you die on us? What a waste of our time! But bring in a child, or lover, and these tough men break like china. I think you’re one of those men, Savas. I think when you’ve seen enough of what we’ll do to her, you’ll shatter like a plate and tell us what we want to know.”

“No, please! I’ll tell you now! Everything, I promise. Whatever you want to know.” He would lie. He would make up any story. Find one they could accept. Anything to stop them.

“Now, that’s very helpful of you, John. But it’s just lying desperation. I’ve seen that, too. No, no—only when you’re truly broken will you skip the lies and get to the truth. I just hope that point comes before your dear Rebecca is too damaged to be worth anything to you anymore.”

“No!”

Another kick to the face cut short his scream. The door slammed shut as he rolled away from it, nauseous and dizzy.

Footsteps and laughter poured like acid over his fading consciousness.