Freedom (4 page)

A frigid wind whipped Natalie Philips’s coat as she contemplated the minister’s words. She stared at the coffin in front of her. Lost in thought, she didn’t feel the cold.

FBI Special Agent Roy Merritt and seventy-three others were dead because of her—killed on a top-secret operation she had led. An operation that had culminated in a disaster at a place she’d rather not remember: Building Twenty-Nine. Building Twenty-Nine was gone now, vaporized. But she would never stop reliving what had happened there. It was an operation no one else at this funeral knew anything about.

At some point in her reverie the minister had stopped talking and uniformed men had begun ceremonially folding the American flag. They extended it to a Marine Corps major general who in turn presented the flag to Merritt’s young widow.

“Ma’am, on behalf of the president of the United States, the director of the FBI, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your husband’s service to his country.”

Merritt’s widow received the flag stoically, tears streaming down her face, as her two small daughters clung to her.

The bureau had presented his widow with a Memorial Star and posthumously bestowed on Merritt the Medal of Valor. Philips wondered if anyone else thought it strange that a Marine Corps general was presenting a flag to an FBI agent’s widow. The truth was that Roy Merritt was more of a hero than his family or his countrymen would ever know.

He shouldn’t even be dead, but then everyone who had served under Philips was dead or missing—all their work destroyed. It was the biggest clandestine service disaster in forty years, and Philips owned that failure. She might as well have perished with the rest of her team.

Philips took a deep breath and looked up at the massive crowd that had gathered for Merritt’s service. More than two thousand people stood among the headstones of Jackson County Cemetery north of Topeka, hats off and heads lowered. Two hundred and fourteen police cruisers and FBI sedans lined the cemetery road behind them, extending out onto the county highway.

She knew the number precisely. It was her curse to know. Her mind gathered everything she saw, and it forgot nothing. That had been her claim to fame in the NSA’s Crypto division, but it was increasingly a cross she had to bear as well. This day and the days leading up to it ran like an IMAX film in her head each night as she tried in vain to sleep.

Nearby, Merritt’s widow held her daughters close. The eldest child hid her face in her mother’s coat, but the youngest, only four, was looking around at the other adults, trying to figure out what was happening. When their gazes met, even from behind tinted, wraparound medical glasses, Philips felt her own eyes well with tears.

Philips had failed everyone.

She couldn’t withstand the little girl’s eyes. Instead she turned away and moved back through the headstones and the mourners, tears coming freely now. Philips wept as she moved among the living and the dead, wondering if her mind was capable of forgetting.

An honor guard fired three salvoes, startling Philips and provoking recollections of the desperate gunfire at Building Twenty-Nine. She felt panic rising and kept moving through the crowd. People made way for her. Kansas State Troopers in dress uniform, military men and women, local townspeople, children—people whose lives Merritt had touched. Some had traveled thousands of miles to be here. At the memorial service the night before, a hundred people stood up to tell heartwarming stories of Roy’s courage, compassion, and humor.

She recognized some of these people now as she walked past. A reformed felon. A Pashtun translator from Balochistan who was now on his way to becoming an American citizen. Merritt’s captain from his state police days. A Mexico City banker whose daughter Roy had rescued from kidnappers in a daring raid—and on and on.

As an agent in the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, Merritt had traveled the world and always into danger. But he brought the values he’d gained in this small town with him wherever he went. It had taken his death to finally bring him home.

Philips kept moving through the mourners. A young priest. City officials. A well-dressed woman in sports glasses.

Philips halted.
Sports glasses.
Her mind never missed details. She recalled the moments just before the attack. Merritt had come to her lab to bring captured Daemon equipment from Sao Paulo, Brazil. He’d brought her sports glasses—glasses that were actually a sophisticated heads-up display (or HUD) able to see into a virtual dimension. An
augmented reality
the Daemon had overlaid on the GPS grid. Sports glasses were the user interface to the Daemon.

She turned to look back at the woman, who was moving slowly but deliberately through the crowd as though searching for something. Philips turned to follow her but passed another mourner, a middle-aged man in a black suit, wearing similar glasses. The thick posts and unusual design of these glasses could easily be ignored as an annoying new fashion, but they could not be a coincidence. The man glanced at her and kept walking, also seemingly searching for something. Hot fear surged through her.

Could they really be brazen enough to attend Merritt’s funeral? Her tears stopped. She palmed her L3 SME secure cell phone and marched purposefully through the crowd, putting distance between herself and the operatives. Before she walked ten feet she saw another man wearing HUD glasses. Philips stepped behind a tall headstone and looked for a sheltered place to phone for help. At the edge of the crowd she saw a weatherworn burial vault and headed toward it.

As she walked, she kept spotting Daemon operatives, moving through the mourners in a skirmish line, still scanning for something. There seemed to be no standard profile. They were equally male or female, young to middle-aged. There were dozens of them.

As Philips stepped behind the granite burial vault, she flipped open her phone—but then realized that she didn’t know who to call. Roy Merritt would have been her first choice. In fact, just about everyone she could think of calling was now dead or missing. There were hundreds of police officers and FBI agents all around her attending the funeral, but they wouldn’t have any idea how dangerous these people were. And what about the innocent people in the crowd? Did she really want to provoke a confrontation? But the operatives were here for a purpose. She had to do something.

It was then that Philips noticed she had no cell signal. There was no service at all.

“It’s rude to make phone calls at a funeral.”

Philips looked up to see a twentysomething man dressed in a dark suit, overcoat, and black gloves. An FBI badge hung from his breast pocket, giving him the appearance of an overeager rookie. She recognized him instantly. He was a Daemon operative. With short-cropped hair he was indistinguishable from a dozen other young FBI agents in the crowd, but unlike the other Daemon operatives he wore no glasses. Instead his pupils shone with the iridescence of mother-of-pearl—apparently contact lenses.

He was the one who had destroyed Daemon Task Force headquarters and slain all her people. This was Roy Merritt’s killer. The highest-level Daemon operative known.

“Loki.”

He approached her calmly, surveying the crowd. “I hear Roy didn’t have much in the way of family. Who the hell
are
all these people?”

“You made a mistake coming here.”

“Look. Actual tears on people’s faces. I don’t think you or I will draw a crowd like this, Doctor. What is it about Roy Merritt that inspires everyone so much?”

Philips glared. “It has to do with serving others—something you’d know nothing about.”

He stood silently for a beat. “I serve a greater good.”

“You’re a mass murderer who worships at the feet of a dead lunatic.”

“Is that right?” He noticed her still punching keys on her phone. “Don’t bother. It’s being jammed.”

Philips lowered it. “Why would you bring your people here?” “They’re not my people. They came on their own. There’s a video simulcast of the funeral beaming out to the darknet. Hundreds of thousands are watching this event worldwide.”

“Why, so they can gloat over their victory?”

He gave her a sideways glance. “Don’t be a bitch, Doctor. This was no victory. Roy Merritt is the famous Burning Man to them. A worthy adversary who’s gone viral. There’s no predicting these things in a network. The factions came to pay their last respects—and to find his killer.”

She thought he was being glib, but he looked serious. “If that’s true, how do you think they’ll react when they find out
you
killed Roy?”

He smiled grimly. “They all know what happened. You’re the only one without a clue.” He stared at her intently.

Loki pointed to Philips’s tinted glasses. “How are your eyes, Doctor? Corneal damage? You must have been close.”

Anger rose within her at his mention of the attack at Building Twenty-Nine. “There are hundreds of police officers around us. You won’t escape this time.”

“Did you expect me to go into hiding? Is that it? Well, I’ve grown beyond hiding, Doctor. Besides, it would be a shame to sully the memory of Roy Merritt by turning his funeral into a massacre.”

She studied his face and decided he wasn’t bluffing. “We will stop you.”

“You can’t even stop tweens from stealing music. How are you going to stop
me?
Feds: always overreaching. And what if you could stop me?” He gestured to the Daemon operatives still moving through the crowd. “It wouldn’t stop them.”

“We’ll find the Daemon’s weak spot sooner or later, and we’ll destroy it. If you help me, I’ll see that you’re treated with leniency.”

“You really have no idea what’s going on, do you? You’re like Merritt was. A true believer. You should have listened to Jon Ross: never trust a government.”

He noticed the momentary look of shock on her face. “You did
know
The Major was spying on you, right? Tapping into his surveillance system was what gave me access to everything on your task force. Including your private conversations with the illustrious Mr. Ross.”

Philips felt doubly defeated and stood grasping for something to say.

“I have video from every camera at Building Twenty-Nine before it was destroyed.” He paused. “By the way, you and Jon Ross should just have fucked and gotten it over with.”

Philips couldn’t help a pang of loss at the mention of Ross’s name. Not an hour passed when she didn’t think about him—and how he’d saved her life. She recalled their last moment together. Then she purposely met Loki’s gaze. “Get to the point.”

“Have I upset you? I didn’t think you’d go for the criminal type, Doctor.”

“Jon Ross is dead.”

“So I hear.” Loki slipped a hand into his jacket. “You might find some of my surveillance video interesting.” He withdrew a metallic scroll and offered it to Philips.

She hesitated.

“If I came here to kill you, Doctor, I wouldn’t waste time talking first. Just open it.”

She took the metallic scroll and pulled the twin tubes apart to reveal a glossy, flexible video screen already glowing with electrical energy.

“You don’t understand the Daemon. You keep thinking it’s something we obey like automatons. But that’s not it at all. The Daemon’s darknet is just a reflection of the people in it. It’s a new social order. One that’s immune to bullshit.”

She held the flexible screen up as it began to play security camera video from within Building Twenty-Nine—just before the entire place was obliterated by a massive demolition charge. The scene showed Philips, Ross, a man known only as “The Major,” and several black-clad Korr security guards, standing near body bags in the gaming pit. The Major was officially the Daemon Task Force’s Department of Defense liaison—although, he’d also been connected with the Special Collections Service, a section of the CIA. At present, neither organization acknowledged his existence and his identity remained classified, even to her.

On-screen The Major was aiming a Glock 9mm pistol at Philips’s face. Jon Ross rushed to stand between them.

She felt torn at the sight of Ross’s handsome face. Seeing him stand in harm’s way for her.

In the real world Loki waved a gloved hand and froze the image. He pointed at The Major. “You remember this asshole?”

She nodded.

Loki pulled at the air with his gloved hand and the image zoomed in. The quasi-DOD liaison officer wore a tan sports jacket with a dark green button-down shirt. “A great many people have not forgotten him.”

Another wave of his hand and the image switched to a high-def video of a mortally wounded Roy Merritt lying in the middle of an industrial street. Blood covered Roy’s torso. He was panting and staring at two small photographs in his hand. A flash appeared in the doorway of a helicopter in the distance, and Merritt’s head exploded.

Philips recoiled in horror. Remorse flooded over her again. She glared at Loki with hatred. “
This
is what you wanted me to see? Do you find some twisted enjoyment in this?”

“It’s car camera video from my AutoM8. The cameras are part of the navigation system. I uploaded these videos to the darknet, and the crowd soon found the answer.” He pulled at the air with his black gloves, and the video screen in Philips’s hands zoomed in on the shooter in the helicopter doorway. The HD image looked grainy at this magnification, but the hooded figure in the doorway was clear enough. The shooter was wearing a tan sports jacket and a dark green button-down shirt. Loki waved his hand again and the screen split in two, with the earlier image of The Major holding a pistol to Philips’s head alongside the image of the shooter in the doorway of the helicopter. They were dressed identically. They were the same person.

Philips lowered the flexible screen and stared into space. “The Major.”

“Yes, The Major. Didn’t you wonder why no second helicopter arrived to pick you up? You’re not supposed to be alive, Doctor.”