Freedom (2 page)

Hollis heard talking in the background. Then Metzer came back on.
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now I’ve got men missing, and motion detectors in alarm all over the estate. I’m pulling everyone back into a perimeter around the master suite.”

“How did these people get through the gates?” One of the security monitors showed the estate’s front entrance, which stood wide open.

“It’s your
job
to know! I wasn’t supposed to ever
need
this room, damnit.” He fumed for a moment then added, “Send someone up to get Mary.”

“I can’t have her in here. Just put her in a closet or something. And figure out a way to contact the police. I don’t care if you have to use fucking smoke signals!” He hung up and kept flipping through security monitors. He’d spent a fortune on security, and he wasn’t getting much of a return on his investment. He was going to sack the entire security team after this was over—starting with Metzer.

As Hollis cycled through cameras, the monitors showed various rooms on a dozen screens—multicar garage, pool patio, pub room, dining room, driveway . . .

He stopped cold. In the middle of the driveway, one of Metzer’s suited security men lay in a pool of blood, still clutching a submachine gun. His head was missing.

“Jesus Christ!” Hollis picked up the house phone and dialed Metzer’s extension. It rang several times and went to voice mail. Hollis pressed the call button on the radio base station but heard nothing but static. “Fuck!”

Then the power went out.

Here in the safe room backup batteries instantly engaged, but on the security monitors he saw most of the lights kick off around the estate. Now only interior emergency lighting remained. Outside was blackness.

Hollis clicked through the interior surveillance cameras. There—he saw two security people in the grand foyer with Metzer locking the ornate front doors of Hollis’s twenty-three-thousand-square-foot mansion. Metzer was racing upstairs, pointing and shouting to position men at the top of the staircase. They all carried MP-5 submachine guns. The second floor was apparently going to be their Alamo.

Just then the front doors blasted open, sending door hardware, wood, and glass fragments silently spraying across the polished stone floor. Something the size of a man had burst through the doors at high speed, taking out the large antique table just inside the door and crashing into the far wall. The room started to fill with smoke.

The surveillance camera showed security men opening fire from the second-floor railing. More shadows were already racing through the front door. Hollis couldn’t get a good look at them in the dim light and smoke. They moved fast—through the doorway and up the wide staircase. In mere moments they exited the frame. Hollis clicked around in frustration to find a suitable camera to see what was going on.

He soon saw his own bedroom on one monitor—he’d had this security camera installed as a precaution against sexual assault charges (one never knew what visions of rape young women might dream up after the fact). It wasn’t on the rotation available to the security team, but here he could see Metzer grabbing Mary by the wrist and pulling her from the bed. She was nude and screaming, but the muscular German was having none of it. On camera Metzer noiselessly shouted at her and pointed under the bed, letting go of her hand as he reacted to something in the hallway.

Metzer trained his weapon on the door as Mary crawled under the bed behind him and moments later Metzer opened fire on the doorway in short bursts. Through the thick concrete walls of the safe room Hollis could hear the dull thud of the shots less than thirty feet away in his bedroom. A blade of fire stabbed forth from Metzer’s weapon, illuminating the intense expression on his face—but only for a few moments before a dark form raced into frame and lashed out with twin blades in a lightning fast one-two strike that cut Metzer into three sections: head, torso, and legs. The blades crisscrossed again, inhumanly fast, chopping the pieces into pieces. Metzer’s body fell apart like quarters of beef, spraying the room with gore.

Hollis stared in shock at the screen.

The dark silhouette of the attacker moved farther into the room, twirling the twin blades to shed excess blood—spattering the walls into a macabre modern art display.

What the camera revealed beneath the emergency lights was a machine—both familiar and alien. It was a powerful racing motorcycle, but it had no rider, just a series of whip antennas and sensors. The entire bike was covered in blades, which bristled like cooling fins along both sides. Where handlebars would normally be, it wielded twin swords at the end of mechanized gambols. The entire length of the machine was drenched in blood, as though it had hacked its way in here through every security man Hollis had. And every inch of the metal appeared to be engraved with symbols and glyphs—like some sort of high-tech religious relic.

The machine stood with the aid of hydraulic kickstands it had extended. After spinning its blades clean, it folded the blades back behind its bullet-pocked cowling. Two more identical machines rolled into Hollis’s bedroom behind it.

Hollis collapsed into his console chair and stared in incomprehension at the monitor. What he was looking at made no sense.

Swirling green laser light issued from the headlight assemblies of the bikes. The scene took on the appearance of a laser light show as the beams spread through Metzer’s lingering gun smoke and traced brilliant lines along the walls and furniture in the shadows—scanning for something.

Without warning, one of the bikes roared through the bathroom doorway. Hollis could see in the mirror where it crashed through the thin wardrobe room doors. They caved in like paper, and now Hollis could actually hear the muted throbbing of a powerful motorcycle engine just beyond his panic room door.

It knew where he was.

He swiveled his chair to face the solid steel door ten feet away. That door was the only thing that stood between him and a gruesome death. His heart was hammering so hard it felt like it had moved up into his throat. Hollis dug through the desk drawer and produced a Sig Sauer P220 Super Match pistol. He chambered a round and took another glance at the bedroom monitor.

The other two bikes had flipped the bed over with their sword arms, revealing the naked and helpless Mary beneath. She lay curled up, silently screaming beneath the blinding laser lights.

Oh god
.
No . . .

But perhaps this would appease them?

The bikes just stood observing Mary as she shrieked in terror at the sight of Metzer’s butchered remains on the floor around her. Hollis decided he would do something for Mary’s family after this. He would find out more about her. He’d help her family.

But the machines didn’t attack. Instead, they just stood watching as she got to her feet and fled the room.

Hollis tapped buttons on the console, bringing up the image outside his safe room door. There he could see the third machine waiting. It seemed to know exactly where the concealed door was. From blueprints? There was no doubt that whoever was behind this had serious power. Access to his communications and electrical layout would have been no problem for someone who could do this. It was his secure room that had saved him, and there was no home automation link to its steel door. Once locked, it could only be opened manually from the inside.

Suddenly the house phone rang on the console next to him. Hollis recoiled from it. He glanced up at the screen again. The bloodstained machine stood impassively outside, still aimed at the secret door.

The phone rang again, and Hollis just stared at it. Perhaps it was someone on the security team? Hollis pressed the speakerphone button. “Hello?”

The line was silent for a moment—but then his own voice came back to him, talking fast, as Hollis always did on business calls. . . .

It was definitely Hollis’s voice. Someone had tapped his phone calls. Another clip immediately followed. . . .

Someone somewhere had intercepted his words. But why?

Looking at the remorseless killing machine outside, he somehow couldn’t picture it being spawned by human rights activists. Whoever was behind it was decidedly more dangerous.

His laughing voice came to him again over the speaker.
“We made it legal. Our people wrote the congressional bill.”

On the security monitor a different type of bike entered the wardrobe room. This machine wasn’t covered in blades, but in piping and pressure tanks. As it came in, the other bike moved aside. The new arrival slammed down hydraulic jacks to plant it firmly just outside the panic room door. Then, instead of twin blade arms, it extended a single robotic nozzle arm, with hoses trailing back along its length to half a dozen pressure tanks. A spark flashed, and then a white-hot flame suddenly stabbed out from the nozzle—instantly turning the wood paneling in front of the panic room door into a solid wall of flame.

Hollis stared at the machine on-screen, paralyzed in fear. He knew what it was. He’d owned stock in steel mills in the nineties. It was a plasma torch. Someone had mounted it on this terror machine, and it now stood before his safe room door, blasting aside the wooden millwork surrounding his bunker as though it were nothing more than ash. Already the scores of fine suits and leather shoes and carpeting in the wardrobe room were engulfed in flames as the twenty-five-thousand-degree cutting head on the machine penetrated the steel door like a knife through modeling clay.

The sprinkler system leapt into action, spraying water over the outside room, but the fire’s intensity vaporized it. The surveillance camera showed the remorseless machines standing their ground, one cutting, the other waiting, but soon, even the camera started to fail—and melt. The screen turned grainy and then went black.

Behind him, Hollis was suddenly deafened by a burst of pressure and a cracking sound as a white-hot jet of plasma burst through the steel doorway and began tracing a molten line along the length of the door. The sofa and wet bar beyond it burst into flames, and the glass cover of the flat-screen television shattered—the whole thing folding over itself like a big wax candle. Blue-hot sparks of molten steel scattered like marbles across the concrete floor. The safe room sprinklers popped and started raining over everything to no effect.

Hollis’s recorded voice still spoke to him over the speakerphone as he sat in a catatonic state, while the sprinklers soaked him with freezing water.

Already the torch had finished cutting through the vault-like door. In a moment a huge section of steel fell forward with a crash that shook the concrete floor. The door’s edges still glowed red. Hollis turned to watch with the detachment of someone on morphine.

As he began to feel the heat of the flames outside and inside, even through all the water raining down on him, the killing machine entered his safe room and unfolded both sword blades with swift precision. The bike was stained with cooked blood and charred flesh. Steam rose from its metal frame.

Hollis put the pistol against his head as the killing machine moved toward him. It raised its blades in the same way he’d seen it do with Metzer.

There was no escape. Hollis pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The safety was on.

Hollis’s own words were the last thing he heard as he fumbled for the gun’s safety switch. . . .

 

 

T
he surveillance video showed a man screaming as a robotic motorcycle wielding twin swords chopped him to pieces.

A voice spoke in the darkness. “Who was he?”

“Anthony Hollis—ran a highly successful hedge fund.”

“Has his name been in the news?”

“Yes. Lots of detractors in the business press. Four hundred and six negative mentions in the past year alone.” A pause. “You think the Daemon botnet is behind this?”

“Play it back. Slowly.”

The video replayed in slow motion, frame by frame. A blade-covered motorcycle advanced on the cornered man. The image stopped then zoomed in. Though motion blurred, the screen was frozen in midstroke, a sword leveled at the man’s neck while spiraling lasers in the bike’s headlight assembly illuminated his terrified face.

“Unmanned vehicle. Like some sort of ground level Predator drone. Daemon operatives call them ‘razorbacks.’ The same type Dr. Philips described in her report on the attack at Building Twenty-Nine.”

“So the Daemon is conducting class warfare now?”

“I don’t think so. These people were all engaged in a specific type of financial activity.”