Mercury Revolts (31 page)

“So,” said Suzy groggily, “we take out that satellite and
the whole program is toast.”

“Well, yes,” said Eddie. “But from this documentation, it’s
pretty clear that Mentaldyne is very aware of this weak point in their system.
It says, and I quote, ‘It is strongly recommended that BIO personnel be
dispatched to protect the geosynchronous transmitter from unauthorized
access.’”

“In other words,” said Michelle, “it’s going to be guarded
by angels.”

“Correct,” said Eddie. “Also, taking out the satellite is
only a temporary solution. They’ve got more satellites. They just need to get
another one in orbit and they’ll be back in business.”

“Still waiting for the good news,” said Mercury.

“OK,” said Eddie. “Now we get to the really interesting
part. You know how we couldn’t figure out how Tiamat was circumventing the MEOW
device? Well, it turns out she’s got her demons implanted with chips as well.”

“The same chips as they’re putting in humans?” asked Suzy.

“Not exactly.
They have an added
feature, some kind of neural blocker that allows angels to safely remain within
the range of the MEOW emissions. But here’s the thing: the underlying chip is
the same.”

“So it has the mind control functionality?” asked Suzy,
dubiously. “She implanted mind control chips in her own agents?”

“I told you,” Mercury said. “She’s a huge control freak.”

“Well, in this case,” said Eddie, “it could be her downfall.
All we need to do is alter the programming of the satellite, and we can take
control of every demon in her network.
Including Tiamat
herself, as a matter of fact.
She must have a chip herself, if she’s in
Washington, D.C.”

“OK,” said Suzy. “So how do we do it?”

It ended up being a bit more complicated than Eddie made it
out to be. For one thing, it would require breaking into the Mentaldyne
headquarters to directly access the computer system that controlled the satellite.
They would have to write a software patch to override the existing program to
allow transfer of the mind control program to another location. The control
software was thoroughly documented in the material
A Freeman
had sent,
and Suzy was fairly certain that with a computer and a few days, she could
write the patch.

The other complication was that the transmitter on the
satellite was hard-wired to prevent exactly what they were trying to do: the chips
implanted in Tiamat’s demons use a different set of frequencies than the
regular chips, and the transmitter was built to only allow transmissions on a
pre-determined set of frequencies. Evidently Tiamat wanted to make sure the
system was secure before risking losing control of her own agents. It was a
smart move, and it made it almost impossible for anyone to take control of
Tiamat’s minions.
Almost.

“Oh, I can build another transmitter,” said Balderhaz
offhandedly.

“Really?” asked Suzy.

“Sure,” he said. “All I need is an old Timex watch, a wire
hanger, six rolls of aluminum foil, an oil drum, a banana, a soldering iron,
twenty feet of three-quarter-inch PVC pipe…”

“Hang on!” said Eddie, who was scrambling to find a pen and
a sheet of paper.

“What’s the banana for?” asked Suzy.

“For the monkey to eat,” said Balderhaz.

“What monkey?” asked
Suzy.

“Well, you didn’t let me finish the list, did you?” said
Balderhaz.

The other concern was that
A Freeman
, whoever it was,
was setting them up. But there was general agreement that Michelle wouldn’t
risk so much simply to capture a few troublemakers, particularly now that her
plan was so far along. In any case, they didn’t have much choice: this was
their only chance to stop Michelle.

Mercury and Perp spent most of the day rounding up supplies,
starting with a laptop for Suzy and then moving on to Balderhaz’s wide-ranging
list of mundane and exotic ingredients. Mercury even found him a black-headed
spider monkey, which was inexplicably floating a few inches from the ceiling of
the living room shortly after Mercury delivered the poor simian.

True to his word, though, in three days’ time Balderhaz
produced a transmitter designed to transmit radio signals on the precise
frequencies used by the chips implanted in Tiamat and her minions. At least
that’s what Balderhaz claimed it was. To everyone else, it looked like an oil
drum topped by a giant umbrella wrapped in aluminum foil.

“Remember the hair dryer,” said Perp to Mercury as they
regarded the sad-looking contraption.

“Yeah,” said Mercury. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to remember
that Balderhaz was a genius.

“What’s that noise?” asked Perp. There was a loud banging
going on somewhere nearby.

“Balderhaz is trapped in the beet cellar again,” said
Mercury.

Suzy finished the software patch a few hours later.
Exhausted, she went to bed. The angels didn’t need rest, but if she was going
to hack into the Myrmidon control system, she needed to get some sleep.

Tomorrow night they would execute their two-pronged attack
on Tiamat’s authoritarian regime.

Chapter Forty-two
      
 

Provo,
Utah; August 2016

Michelle
crept along the shadow of the Mentaldyne building, with Eddie following about
thirty feet behind, carrying a hair dryer. It hadn’t been difficult to get
through the first layer of Mentaldyne’s security—just a matter of bending a
chain link fence and then bending light to prevent the guards from spotting
them. The next part, however, was going to be trickier. As expected, Tiamat had
placed a Balderhaz Cube somewhere in the facility to forestall any attempts by
rogue angels to use their supernatural powers to infiltrate the place. It was
past midnight, but the parking lot was nearly full and occasionally someone
would enter or exit the building. The facility was obviously working around the
clock to meet the demand for the Myrmidon chips.

A door swung open a few yards
ahead of Michelle, and she pressed herself against the wall to avoid being
seen. A worker wearing an anti-static suit exited the door and began walking to
the parking lot. Michelle, moving in complete silence, slipped behind the man
and wedged her foot in the door before it swung shut. She peered through the
opening,
then
stuck her head inside. After a moment,
she pulled it back, motioned for Eddie to approach, and then slipped inside.
Eddie, keeping his eye on the worker, who was now digging through his car’s
glove box for something, managed to grab the door before it closed, and slipped
in after Michelle.

He found himself on a sort of
factory floor, with dozens of workers in anti-static suits carrying out tasks
at assembly line stations and various machines. Fortunately, they were so busy
that for some time nobody seemed to notice the two intruders. Michelle
continued along the wall to the left, acting for
all the
world like she belonged there. Occasionally a worker would look over at her and
immediately look away, as if
he
were the one trespassing. Such was the
power of Michelle’s charisma: although she had the appearance of a
thirteen-year-old black girl, she could generally go anywhere she wanted
without being questioned. If Michelle had been in Alabama in 1940s, she might
have ended segregation twenty years early through the sheer force of her will.

Eddie did his best to remain unnoticed
in Michelle’s charismatic wake. He felt completely out of place—although, to be
fair, Eddie usually felt that way even when he wasn’t skulking about a mind
control chip factory. It didn’t help that in this particular case he was
inexplicably carrying a hair dryer.

Neither of them knew exactly
where the control center for the transmitter was; the plan was simply to get
inside and snoop around until they found it. It seemed like a terrible plan to
Eddie, but he couldn’t think of anything better, and in any case he had been
overruled. So here he was, tailing Michelle through the Mentaldyne facility.

They must have been getting
close, because suddenly Michelle was stopped by a burly foreman standing in her
path. “This is a restricted area,” he growled. “Where’s your badge?”

“Where is my
badge
?”
asked Michelle, with a tone of disgust.
“Really?
I
count at least twenty ten-sixteen violations within thirty feet of here, and
you’re going to fixate on my
badge
?”

The man shrank back, suddenly
unsure of himself.
“Ten-sixteen violations?”

Michelle sighed as if to
indicate her disbelief at having to deal with such unfathomable incompetence.
“Inadequate lighting, insufficient ventilation, ozone levels off the charts…”

“Ozone levels?” asked the
man.

Michelle breathed deeply
through her nose.
“Ozone!
You don’t smell that? My
guess is that we’re up around eight-eight,
maybe eighty-nine
pee-pee-em
.” She turned to look at Eddie. “What do you think?”

“Um, yes,” said Eddie.
“Eighty, like, at least eighty-eight.
Maybe eight-nine
pee-pee-ems.”
Then he sniffed for good measure.

“Even Eddie can smell it, and
he lost sixty percent of his olfactory capability in the Halifax incident. You
seriously don’t smell that?”

The man sniffed nervously. “I
don’t… I’m not sure…”

Michelle produced something
from her pocket. Eddie was pretty sure it was some kind of hair clip. She held
it up to the man’s nose. “Do you smell that?”

“Um,” he said. “I think so?”

“What does it smell like?”
Michelle asked.

“Um,
vanilla?” the man ventured.

“Hell,” said Michelle to
Eddie, shoving the object back in her pocket. “Get Houston on the phone. Tell
’em it’s Halifax all over again. We’ve got a Level Six with at least eighty
percent olfactory loss.” She turned back to the foreman. “Any seizures?” she
asked.
“Paralysis?”

He shook his head.

“Tell ’em the paralysis
hasn’t set in yet,” she said to Eddie. She turned back to the foreman. “Do you
have a cot?
Someplace to lie down?”

“Um, yeah,” said the man.
“In the front office.”

“All right,” said Michelle.
“Do you think you can get there on your own, or do you need Eddie to carry
you?”

The man glanced at Eddie,
whom he outweighed by at least a hundred pounds. “I can, um, get there on my
own.”

“OK,” said Michelle. “We’ve
got the TFZ team on standby. You go lie
down,
we’ll be
right behind you. And remember to keep breathing!”

The man nodded and shuffled
away with a worried expression on his face.

Michelle continued into the
“restricted area” as if nothing had happened. Eddie followed, feeling nearly
overwhelmed with anxiety. He wished he could go lie down on a cot until the TFZ
team got here.

At last they found a door
with the label:

MYRMIDON
CONTROL AREA

AUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL ONLY

A bad feeling, over and above
his near-crippling anxiety, gripped Eddie. Their little mission was going way
too smoothly. He somehow couldn’t believe that one easily cowed foreman was the
only resistance they were going to meet.

Michelle turned the handle of
the door and it opened. It was dark inside except for the glow of several dozen
tiny LED lights. Michelle and Eddie slipped into the room and Michelle closed
the door behind them. Eddie fumbled around until he found a light switch. A
bank of fluorescent lights blinked on overhead, revealing a large room that was
lined on three sides with computer workstations. Michelle took a seat in one of
the dozen chairs and pulled a thumb drive from her pocket.

Eddie couldn’t believe it.
All she had to do was plug that thing into one of the computers and upload
Suzy’s patch, and they’d be done. Maybe he’d been worried for nothing. He
pulled his cell phone from his pocket and tapped the screen, bringing up a text
message. He typed:

we’re
in position.
use
gps to

But before he could finish
the message, the door opened and six large men with assault rifles filed in.
Michelle slipped the thumb drive into her pocket and stood up, backing away
from the computers. Eddie had just enough time to hit Send before one of the
men struck him in the temple with the butt of his rifle, knocking him to the
floor. Eddie was vaguely aware of someone prying the hair dryer from his left
hand and the cell phone from his right. His head throbbing, Eddie rolled onto
his back in time to see a seventh man stroll into the room. This man was built
like Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons. And he was smiling.

“Tiamat thought you might try
breaking in here,” said Gamaliel, closing the door behind him.  “I’m a little
disappointed that Mercury’s not with you, but you two will do for now.” He took
the hair dryer from the man who had pried it from Eddie’s hand.
“And how considerate!
You brought your secret weapon with
you.”

“You’re making a mistake,
Gamaliel!” shouted Michelle. “Tiamat is crazy. She’s going to make this world
into hell on earth. Come work for me. We’ll overthrow Tiamat and—”