Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (27 page)

The man in the dark slacks and flowing shirt laughs easily. “What you said was, ‘
When is the moon.’ Try introducing yourself.”

“My name is Tharcia.” It makes sense when her mind forms it, but her ears hear tumbled syllables, as when she read the verses of the strange-sounding spell.
Is that what did this? Cold, dude.

“Excellent. Will you please join me?”

Tharcia takes two steps forward, halts, glances back at the restroom entrance. Aware of her defenseless body barefoot in the stretchy leggings and the lavender shirt.

“Lylit… told me things.”

The man nods, fifty feet away. “Yes. I suspect she explained about her and me. Why I am here.”

“She said you have been looking for her for a very long time.”

“Indeed. Call me Lian. Tharcia, will you please come?”

Tharcia steps along the concrete path. The man smiles encouragingly. As she approaches, he sits on a bench. Ten feet away she stops.

“Lylit told me she and I are twins.”

“Yes. You are a chimera. Very unusual. I am asking around to find who might be your father.”

“I know who he is.”

“
Doubtful.”

“I am sure.”

“Your mother took many lovers.”

“Don’t insult my mom!”

“It is objective truth. I don’t mean to insult her. I do not judge.”

“I want to go home!”

“Ah, that is not yet possible. We are locked in a situation here, you and I.”

A
sound from overhead, a rising wind. Bright light floods the space, a ball of flame grows above the courtyard. It makes a whooshing sound as spinning air rushes in, takes form as a whirlwind gathering leaves and small debris from the ground which ignite and twist upward, a swirl of fiery trails rising from the ball of whitest light. It is very pretty. But the sound is a banshee scream rising from the depths of hell. Tharcia draws back.

“What is that?”

Lian lifts his head and Tharcia follows his gaze. A large airplane circles, two miles out, steeply banked. Small pencils of colored light stab the air.

“Laser cannon, I would guess.”

“Huh?”

“They are trying to kill us.”

“Kill us! Why?”

“They are afraid.”

“Can we get out of here?”

“No. We remain here until you
explain why you summoned me.”

If General Ralph Solberg weren’t so edgy, he’d fall down from exhaustion. For the moment he’s escaped the world, crammed himself in a swing space supply closet with two guards outside the door, shut off the light. The glow from his laptop is all he needs among the brooms, mops, and solvent buckets. That, and time to get the racket out of his head so he can think about one thing at a time. His phone is off. He needs to make sense of the flood of reports.

The
Fish Jump
meeting results are as complete as they need be. All interviewed thus far recite the same observations about what happened in the conference room. Friedman advised him that further evaluations would be wasted energy, and Solberg agreed. Friedman is interested in putting together a tactical eval team to understand the cases of mass hallucination and hysteria in the general population. Not to mention within Solberg’s own staff. Four have gone home. One is frantic to locate her husband, another started vomiting uncontrollably, two others didn’t sign in after lunch. The general sees the system shredding from within. Not a terrorist bomb, not an attack, but an invisible enemy, the unraveling of self-control that overtakes people when unimaginable threats rise to the heights of terror.

Solberg wishes vainly that he could spend some time with his wife and two sons. They accept his assurances over the phone, but are frightened. Fortunately, his position has allowed him to place
military guard on them at home. He struggles to identify a plan for keeping them safe. Not only them, but the thousands under his command.

His
most recent setback, the airborne laser cannon which fired six flaming shafts on the courtyard, had no effect. Zero. The net result was a thermal updraft and a small cumulus cloud at four thousand feet, which blew over Arlington, dropped some rain, and dissipated. The people in the courtyard watched the light show untouched. On the way back to base, the YAL-1 fired on a heavy steel boiler in a scrap yard and burned a two-foot hole through it. Solberg concludes the intruder’s force field is invincible to modern weapons. He wishes the rest of the command chain felt the same.

Solberg in the last hour has received an intercepted communique from the Chicago Diocese of the Catholic Church, inviting
two hundred Catholic priests from across the nation to convene in Arlington. Day after tomorrow. Background developed on the priests by the FBI reveals that each is a spiritual scholar, trained by the Vatican in demonic possession and witchcraft. All are experienced exorcists. Solberg has dispatched two Navy psychologists to interview the priests about their request to visit the Pentagon. The priests plan an exorcism.

The
priestly convocation fits with all the half-heard rumors, the whispered stories that are bitten off when senior officers enter a room. Unconfirmed by measurement or observation, the rising hysteria orbits an irrational idea: that the Devil himself has materialized in the core of the U.S. Pentagon. Solberg’s head spins. In his thirty-plus years of command and service he’s never considered such an intractable problem.

Solberg strains to keep his mind on task.
On his laptop he reviews a report about the young woman’s shirt, its
Goddess Culture
slogan. Shirts like it were found in several online clothing shops. The best match and most attractive sales pitch is attributed to an online store with a total of thirty-one shirts listed. All are the work of a 12-year old girl in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The pre-teen had used her mother’s credit card to register the domain name and set up a shopping cart. The designs are her own work using Photoshop
, her Nikon Coolpix, and a vibrant imagination. The marketing message, written with no misspellings or punctuation errors, reads like second-wave feminism, concerned with women’s reproductive rights and rape crisis centers, and includes a quoted rant from Simone de Beauvoir against patriarchal society. Solberg shakes his head. Since when do ten-somethings read de Beauvoir? That trail had led two FBI Special Agents into the smallest niche of American pop culture, the perp a girl who has not entered her teens. The FBI did not interview the subjects. Another dry lead.

M
ost worrisome to Solberg is a small but vocal cadre of senior officers who want to lay down a bunker buster on the supposed force field at the Pentagon. Solberg finds the idea horrific and irresponsible. It’s a concept formerly confined within the bounds of terror threat anticipation. Now it’s on a list of possible solutions to the Pentagon intruder problem. Solberg has done his share of yelling in those meetings and con calls. His position that they do not understand the problem sufficiently does gain some sway, but thoughts of abrupt deadly force capture the attention as soon as other voices rise up. The older, supposedly wiser post-military graybeards. And especially the rasping insistence of Doctor Martin Shackleford.

Solberg’s opinion of the scientist has eroded. First, he’d learned that one of the physicist’s scientific papers had been found flawed in experimental design. A goof, likely, but unprofessional, and in Solberg’s view
, dangerous. Second, there is Shackleford’s insistence that he has detected a weak spot in the courtyard force field, and wants to test it with a sizeable explosive. All based on a mathematician friend of Albert Einstein’s back in Princeton days, who caused him to doubt his own relativity theory.

Using a field sensor borrowed from an MIT professor, Shackleford had made certain measurements and created a 3D image of what he claims are force gradients within the portal field. A clear vortex where gradient lines converge is visible in Shackleford’s imagery, but Solberg is not
confident in Shackleford’s conclusion. He needs a more lucid explanation of the science. The general is not convinced the vortex is a vulnerability which a high explosive will breach. Other scientists tell him that enormous energies could be bound up in that field. Fracturing it could release that energy, potentially far worse than any known warhead. More information is needed.

Among conjectures
resonating with Solberg is that the intruder and his mysterious armor have nothing to do with any terror threat, war game, or demonstration of secret capability by a foreign power. According to prominent psychics, the visitor and his field might vanish as abruptly as they came. After all, the Psychic Network was quick to point out, the Pentagon is a pentagram, that geometrical figure which according to folkloric legend is the natural prison of all captured demons. The psychic realm is a long way from Solberg’s wheelhouse, but it’s always paid him to ask questions and keep an open mind.

Solberg shakes his head. There’s
the recent disappearance of the courtyard visitor, his return in the form of a scaly lizard. Literally the stuff of B-grade horror flicks. Live observers and recorded video alike show first that the man disappeared without taking a step from the spot he’d occupied for three days. Vanished. Gone. He had come and gone like that dozens of times, always reappearing as though nothing had happened. This time, what appeared five minutes later was not a man, but a 20-foot tall winged dragon, holding a blonde girl by the wrist. Soon after, the winged thing morphed into original form, the well-dressed man with the physique of a Greek god.

And the girl! How can you trace someone who appears out of thin air?
Although FBI Facial Recognition searches on the man after three days revealed nothing, they surfaced quick hits on the girl. An address in California, FBI en route. Solberg anticipates that intelligence with relish. It could shed real light on this situation.

Solberg’s gut tells him the military solutions so far proposed are entirely inappropriate to the task. Even disastrous. Which leads him to the question his mind will not let go.
Exactly what is that task?

Clay sits on his porch in warm sunshine, applying antibiotic ointment to the back of his cat, Bomber. Forsaking his usual stand-offish independence, Bomber today holds still for gooey attention from Clay. Arriving home an hour ago, Clay saw him at his dish, weak and eating slowly, an odd discoloration on his back. A band of black-burnt hair and scalded flesh encircles the animal’s midriff. On one side the mark is a stripe, on the other it separates into three.

G
ently, Clay smears clear ointment into the cat’s wound, reminding Bomber that licking it off is not going to help. Clay had manipulated the animal’s legs, tail, back, neck and jaw, found no bones broken. Bomber’s eyes are clear. It’s only the burns. Clay speaks softly in a low, reassuring voice, trying to understand how Bomber could have received such an injury.

Other things are strange about the house. The front door stood open when Clay arrived an hour earlier. The fire cold, autumn leaves scattered inside. Tharcia
is not in the house, her sleeping bag on his bed, her car standing silent. Her coffee cup was on the porch, something knocked it over. Wouldn’t put it past Bomber. She’s out for a run in the hills, or off with a friend. But it’s odd she left her phone, on the floor beside his bed, which occasionally plays harp glissandi and calls out,
Heyyy baby!

He
’d tried Tharcia’s bedroom door, its knob hung with a bundle of dried ferns. It opened easily, and shock of shocks, everything is normal. No ice. The window open, warm November breezes. The neat room, evidence of her careful planning, a handwritten poem in her sketchbook. House has an empty feel, he doesn’t like it. The altar, candles, bone-handled dagger, special crystals.
What would it be like if her stuff worked?

Crunch of tires on gravel
bring Clay back to the present. An official car drives to a stop beside the porch. Detective Garcia steps out, walks up the steps.

“What happened to your cat, Clay?”

“Damfino. Found him this way when I got in.” Clay concentrates on keeping Bomber relaxed.

“Looks like a burn. Got in from where?”

“Out.”

“Alright, Mr. Clay. It will help us both greatly if you are candid with me. Please look at these photos.” Garcia holds before Clay’s
face three photos of Lillian and her black Aston Martin.

Clay jerks forward in shock. Garcia’s hand flashes inside his jacket. But Clay is not getting up to attack, he is intent on the photos. The woman in the images appears quite dead.

“This is impossible! She drove me to Santa Cruz this afternoon!”

“This is no time for jokes
and evasion, Mr. Clay.”

Clay sets the cat on the
chair, stands to face the detective. His eyes are wary.

“When did you get these? Please tell me what this is
about. We were out last night. Pebble Beach. People saw us there. We drove down in her car. She dropped me downtown a while ago. I just got home and found my cat like this. Where did you get these?”