An Armageddon Duology (40 page)

I
’m ranting
.

Cohen paced back and forth in the President’s private office. Her mind burned. Her arms gesticulating of their own accord. She flicked glances at Savas, desperate for him to intervene, to exorcise this demon in their midst.
Say something, John!
But he sat quietly, looking too stunned by York’s revelations to do anything but nurse a cup of steaming coffee.

“Then,
everything,
it’s been a lie!” she cried. “For generations! Democracy’s been a facade! We took marching orders from these shadows? World events, wars, millions of deaths—all controlled by these ghosts?”

York nodded from behind her desk, her fingertips pressed against each other.

“Why, Ms. President?
Why?
How could you go along with this?”

“They threatened me. They could have ruined me and others. They tried to confuse me with that bullshit about building the perfect world. But the truth was all too clear. They were dictators brutally enforcing their control. I couldn’t see a way out.”

Cohen swallowed bile. Anger coursed through her, but also pity. This strong woman,
a soldier
, someone Cohen had admired for years, reduced to a lackey for other powers.
Not only York
. Every president for centuries. The image of former president Obama standing in front of a train made her dizzy. Nothing seemed real.
Who can we trust?

Cohen placed her fingers to her eyes. “Obama really met you in a secret underground railway station and brought you to them?”

York nodded. “Yes, Rebecca. And it was every bit as devastating to me as it is to you right now. But try to look beyond it. See something important. Whatever damage this Fawkes did, he provided a golden opportunity.”

“Which is?” she asked.

York stood up and walked to an American flag tacked to the wall behind her.

“The country’s divided. At war. But what we’re
really
fighting is an enemy we’ve never seen before. One that’s covertly controlled us for hundreds of years. Presidents cowered before them. Because we believed it was the only option.” She spun back around to face them. “But Anonymous changed the ground rules, ripped the carpet out from under all our feet. They’ve blown the support structures and stripped them of their armor.” She walked back to her desk and dropped into the chair, closing her eyes. “But they won’t go down without a fight. Right now, the US command structure’s in chaos. They’ve infiltrated every level, all the way to the Joint Chiefs. Military contractors at their right hand. Hastings their current puppet. But we have a loyal core, tough and smart. They’ve taken Cheyenne Mountain and set up our headquarters for the war.”

“War?” asked Cohen.

The president’s eyes flashed open. “The war to win our country back. Since you’ve been imprisoned, I’ve fanned the chaos created by Anonymous. It’s spread. I saw an opportunity. I’ve rebelled against our
masters
. The first chance in hundreds of years to free the world of their control, to create truly independent nations.”

York keyed in several strokes at her computer, and a flatscreen monitor on the wall to their left flashed to the blue-gray image of the US. She drew her finger across it from New York to the Rockies.

“We’re not going to hide. We’re going to muscle our way straight across interstate 70, and our forces are going to blow out of the sky, water, and into the earth anyone who tries to get in our way. We won’t get another chance. We have to get to that mountain.”

“But how can we stop Bilderberg?” asked Cohen. “Let’s say you make it to the mountain, even end the coup. We’re no closer to doing anything about them, knowing who or where they are. What happens after Cheyenne, Ms. President?”

“
Elaine
. Please.” York put her hands on her hips. “Look, if I’m going to be first naming you two, I want it reciprocated. I need you as real advisors. People who’ll speak their minds, tell me hard truths. I’ve got enough people to salute me.”

“Going to take some getting used to,” said Cohen. Discordant images of York fought inside her. Authority figure. Savior. Coward. Revolutionary.
Friend?
“Okay,
Elaine
, how can we do anything about them?”

“Right now, we can’t,” said York. “My first priority is to get me, what’s left of the Constitutional government—the members of Congress, the Judiciary, all we’ve managed to round up with us—get us all to NORAD. From there we stage a war of ideas and bullets until we crush this coup once and for all. Afterward, we go after the Bilderberg Group.”

“Won’t it be too late?” Cohen asked, her frustration building. “Isn’t it the same chaos that led to the coup that makes them vulnerable? If you win, if you start normalizing things, their power will return. They’ll assassinate you like Kennedy.”

“Yes, a distinct problem,” York said coldly.

Savas stood up, pacing before the map. Cohen sensed his mood before he spoke, felt the rhythm of his movement, smelled the testosterone fomenting action.
Please be back, John, we need you. I need you.
He had seemed so broken.

“You said Angel was following up on the message from Fawkes?” he asked.

York sighed. “She didn’t say much, but it sounded like they had discovered something important.”

He turned to York. “You said you wanted advice. Well, let’s start now. You’ve got a solid game plan for fighting this coup. God willing, you’ll get to Cheyenne Mountain. But we need something else for Bilderberg. Maybe Angel and our other friends are our secret weapon. Can you get us in contact with them? We need to find out what they’ve discovered.”

York nodded. “I can try. We have less than half the satellite networks functioning, but at least we control most of those.”

Cohen shook her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s dead, but Fawkes is still jerking our chain.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Savas staring at York. “But until today, I’d never thought to ask where the chains came from.”

“Fawkes saw them,” said Cohen. The mysterious hacker came into focus for the first time. “He was willing to burn down the world, cause the deaths of billions of people to break them. But no—not like that. We aren’t terrorists or mass murderers. There has to be another way.” She turned her gaze to York. “We have to find another way.”

“Then let’s start by finding out what the lunatic was trying to tell us,” said York. “We’ll reach out to your people. I’ll make this a priority.”

Cohen exhaled slowly. “And let’s hope they escape the net a little longer.”

“
I
’m hearing more
from upstairs. Looks like the neighbors moving back.” Houston pressed her ear against the door of the telecommunications closet, straining to filter the muffled sounds. “Someone’s bound to come down here at some point. It’ll be soon.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lightfoote, glancing back from her laptop. “We have to leave anyway. I’m getting hits on my sentries—NSA is poking around. I give us a few more hours before they zero in.”

“Packing,” said Lopez, dropping food and firearms into bags. “No need to convince me. They aren’t messing around. Not another Harlem raid.”

Houston walked away from the door and stood over Lightfoote, gazing at the laptop screen. A strange image glowed before her. “Well, at least we got what we came for.”

Lopez barked a laugh as he zipped closed one of the duffels. “Sure. And
still
we are no closer to understanding what the Nash Criterion is all about.” He gestured toward the screen. “Just look at that chaos!”

Houston frowned.
He has a point.
“Angel, nothing in that image makes sense. Are you sure it’s decoded correctly?”

“Sara, if it weren’t it would be gibberish.”

“It
is
gibberish,” said Lopez.

“No! It’s an
image.
A clear image. The encryption was broken correctly or it would be total junk—no image, no text, just incomprehensible bytes. We have the contents. It’s a very high-resolution TIFF file. That just doesn’t pop out randomly. The decoding is correct. We just don’t know what it means.”

Houston pointed to several regions of the screen. “An image of an image. What is this? Some lunatic’s cork artwork? What are these chicken-scratch labels on all these graphs?” She read out loud. “Epsilon-equilibrium, evolutionarily stable strategy, subgame perfect equilibrium, perfect Bayesian, Riemannian manifolds, catenary formulas, n-person games, C1-isometric embeddings—what the hell? What does it all mean?”

Lightfoote looked at the ground. “I don’t know.”

Houston continued. “And this thing on the edge—gold color, half a circle, a line—looks like alien hieroglyphics.”

“No idea.”

“I thought you were the genius here,” muttered Lopez, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes. “Two days, no sleep. A hacker underworld. A thousand computers processing and what? This
nonsense
. This is what people want to kill us for?”

“I’m not a mathematician,” snapped Lightfoote. “I don’t know what this is about. Neither did any of the hacker groups.”

“I taught high school math once upon a time,” said Lopez. “These aren’t any topics I’ve heard of. We’re wasting time we don’t have.”

We’re getting run down, turning on each other.
Houston tried to diffuse the tension. “Maybe higher level stuff, Francisco. It reads like a graduate school math course book scribbled all over some wild cork board.” She wasn’t even convincing herself.

Lightfoote cocked her head to one side, staring at the screen. “Sara’s right.”

“I am?”

“This
is
a board. Look—the edge,
here
. That golden alien symbol—it’s cut off, only part of it shown. Thumb tacks, tape. It’s like something out of
A Beautiful Mind
.” She began to type furiously.

“A beautiful mind?” asked Lopez.

Yes!
Houston remembered—vague images of Russell Crowe, Princeton, and equations. “The movie? With the crazy economist?”

“John Nash. It was about John
Nash
. Not an economist. A
mathematician
who did economic work. Got a Nobel Prize. The file, remember? The
Nash
Criterion? Look!” Several biographical pages opened in her browser with photos of a gaunt, gray-haired man.

Lopez had joined them, staring at the screen. “That one of your cork boards?”

He indicated an image of hundreds of pieces of paper taped to a board and adjacent wall. Riotous handwriting and equations covered the scraps. Houston knew immediately they were on to something.

“My God, he
was
crazy,” she said.

Lightfoote nodded, furiously scanning text. “Schizophrenia. Says here he thought aliens were talking in code to him through the newspapers.”

“That qualifies,” said Lopez.

Lightfoote continued. “See this timeline of his life? He was a new star in the ’50s, went nuts, disappeared for
forty years
, then resurfaces half-sane to claim a Nobel prize.” She read in silence down the page. “Says he’s still crazy but—get this—he can recognize
patterns
of thought, split them into
crazy
and
not crazy
from observing other’s reactions. Statistical analysis of sanity.”

Houston was stunned. “Is that possible?”

“Hard to believe,” said Lightfoote. “But this handwriting—look familiar?”

“Definitely,” said Houston.

Lopez laughed. “Well, it looks like the same decorator was involved, that’s for sure.” Houston’s head was hurting. “I don’t get it. What would some insane university professor have to do with Fawkes or Bilderberg?”

Lightfoote continued to type at a mad pace. “That’s what we need to find out, right?”

The haunting mask of Guy Fawkes danced in Houston’s mind, along with the bloodied head of the hacker Fawkes lying face down in Savas’s office. “Maybe this really is just all for the
lolz
, Angel—Fawkes with a final, last laugh at us.”

An image appeared on the screen of an open space within a building, a large display surrounded by onlookers in the middle of the frame. Houston squinted.
Was that
—

“Look at this,” said Lightfoote. “Maybe Fawkes
was
trolling us. But this board is
real.
”

Lightfoote zoomed into the image, centering on the display. A large cork board with numerous scraps of handwritten notes filled the screen. The extreme pixelation obscured the finer detail.

Houston felt a chill. “My God, it’s the same. Where is this?”

“Nash Museum, Princeton University.” Lightfoote rested her forehead on the top of her hand. “It’s an exhibit—elements from his life, artifacts from his crazy time, too.”

“Why would Fawkes send us a picture from a museum dedicated to the ramblings of a nutcase?” asked Lopez, his arms raised in frustration.

“A Nobel Prize-winning nutcase,” said Lightfoote. “Prize in
economics
.”

Houston nodded. “Fawkes was all about the world financial system, taking it down. His Bilderberg paranoia was tied up in that. Cohen’s words, remember? Right before the soldiers descended. Maybe Nash knew something, wrote it down in his crazy period. No one understood.”

“But only Fawkes did? Really?” said Lopez.

“He was a crazy genius too, Francisco. Maybe that’s why he only gave us half the photo.”

“Or maybe he wanted to make it difficult for just anyone to figure this out,” said Lightfoote. “He’s pushing us to go there. I can’t get anything else online. Image searches only give the low res photo—can’t do much with that. We need to see this thing. The whole poster board.” She looked over her shoulder at Houston and Lopez. “We need to go to Princeton.”

“I was afraid this was coming,” said Lopez. “A dangerous journey. And, even if there is something in this, what if we can’t figure it out? Maybe it’s hidden in the crazy of this Nash? You’re asking us to travel across a war zone—with military forces hunting us down—to try and decipher the ravings of a lunatic!” He stared at Lightfoote.

“Even Angel admits it’s a strange mission,” she said.

Houston reached over and touched Lopez on the cheek. “We’re tired. We’re fried from this and people trying to turn us into Swiss cheese. But it looks
real.
We have to figure it out.” His face softened as she held his eyes.

“We might get some tutoring,” said Lightfoote.

“From someone at Princeton?” asked Houston. “John Nash? He’s still there?”

“Unfortunately, no. Says here he died in a car crash in 2015. Taxi.”

“An eighty-six year old dies in a taxi crash?” said Houston.

Lightfoote nodded. “It’s a strange one. But I meant this guy—Avi Kaplan. He runs the museum. Some ex-Nash student who was close to him for decades. Worked on many of his important papers. Helped Nash’s wife during his crazy years.”

“I see this is destiny,” said Lopez. “When do we leave?”

Lightfoote bit her lower lip. “Tonight. Angel needs one more hack. To send a message.”

Houston raised an eyebrow. “To who?”

“President York. We need to talk to her.”