Seven Unholy Days (5 page)

7

2:12 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

IUKA COUNTRY INN

              WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
My eyes popped open and I shook my head. Not again. I fumbled with the switch on the lamp beside the bed but it wouldn’t turn on. It was too dark to see anything through the peephole so I left the chain in place and cracked the door. Tark.

It suddenly hit me that the power was off. My boxers clung to me with sweat. I let him in.

“Matthew, we’ve got huge problems.”

“I see that. How much dropped?”

“All of it.”

“Good grief, the whole state again?”

“Not just this state, Matthew. All of ‘em.”

“All three?”

“All sixteen,” he said.

“The hell you say!”

“The heck I say.”

              We found the security guard lying in a puddle of congealing blood inside the little guard shack at the entrance to the complex. “Tark, we’re bad out of our league. We need to call in some help, and I don’t mean the local sheriff. The FBI needs to be here.”

He took the guard’s gun from its holster, which was already unsnapped. “That’s fine, but in the meantime we’ll have to fend for ourselves. You know how to shoot?”

“I can shoot.”

“Good.” He spun the pistol on his finger and handed it to me butt first. “You take this one. I brought my own.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. Five shots, snub nose, .38 Special. Very nice personal defense weapon if you liked small revolvers. I prefer good automatics with triple the firepower. I had a stainless Beretta fifteen-shot 9mm at home, but I was a long way from the Oregon coast. The guard’s gun would have to do, a Colt that looked to have been handmade by old Samuel himself.

Inside the control room, the night monitor was sitting on the floor beside his console, conscious but groggy. He had no idea what happened, only that he had a killer headache. Tark did a walkthrough of the building and found what looked like the scene of a scuffle in a janitor’s closet, but nothing else looked out of place.

I went to the code console where Abdul Abidi spent his days and started digging into the code where the crack had been hidden that caused the earlier failure. This time wasn’t going to be quite as easy. That module of code had been encrypted and asked me for a password, which was bizarre. If they wanted to flat out deny access, all they had to do was encrypt it and leave it at that. Why set it to pop up a password prompt?

“Matthew, I just pulled this out of the CEPOCS wire.” Tark handed me a sheet of paper. I literally stopped breathing for a moment when I read it.

PRIORITY COMMUNIQUE

FROM: GREAT AMERICAN ELECTRIC

TO:

GREAT EASTERN ELECTRIC

GREAT CENTRAL ELECTRIC

GREAT MOUNTAIN ELECTRIC

GREAT PACIFIC ELECTRIC

BEGIN MESSAGE – AT 2:16 AM EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME THIS DAY, THE POWER GRID OF THE UNITED STATES WENT INTO A STATE OF TOTAL FAILURE. ADVISE ALL CONTROL CENTERS TO COMMUNICATE VIA SECURE ELECTRONIC MAIL ON EMERGENCY VPN FROM THIS POINT FORWARD TO MINIMIZE CONGESTION IN TELEPHONE SYSTEM. TAKE ALL APPROPRIATE MEASURES TO RESTORE OPERATION AND ADVISE THIS HEADQUARTERS OF ANY SUCCESS. A NATIONAL STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED BY THE PRESIDENT. STOP

8

9:45 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX

             
Jana watched Dane stow the single-engine Beech Bonanza in the hangar, then swallow a couple of pills as he walked back outside.

“What now?” she said.

“We wait for the boss. When he gets here, we stick to the plan.”

They sat on the ground beside the hangar and waited, ne
ither speaking. Within a half-hour the Gulfstream appeared on the horizon. Three minutes later, the pilot floated the sleek jet onto the runway and taxied to the hangar.

“Why is this woman here?” Hart said as soon as he stepped off the plane and saw Jana standing beside Dane.

“She’s a nurse. We lost the one we had on staff here, so I brought her with me as a replacement.”

“Brought her from where, Mr. Christian?”

“Mississippi.”

“I see.” Hart turned to Jana. “Within the realm of medical technology, what does the term CBC refer to?”

“Complete blood count.” Something about Hart’s eyes terrified her.

“And within a complete blood count, what primary param
eter might return a value of fifteen thousand?”

“White cell count.”

“Assuming a white blood cell count of fifteen thousand, what might we infer about the patient?”

“They probably have an infection of some sort.” Did the man never blink?

“Very well. What is your name?”

“Jane Ashley.”

“I assume it is Miss Ashley?”

“Yes, sir.” Dane seemed to soften a bit en route, but not enough to land the plane and let her go. He explained the ruse and advised her to be convincing if she wanted to live. She couldn’t use her real name for fear Hart would know of Brett’s involvement and recognize the name. Jane Ashley would be easy to remember; Ashley was her mother’s maidn name and she had spent a lifetime saying, “It’s Jana, not Jane.” According to Dane, Hart also didn’t allow married workers or volunteers, no room for distractions from pure loyalty. Since she was i
ndeed a nurse there would be no problem with that aspect; she only hoped Hart didn’t find out it was Dane who had given the order for the existing nurse to be transferred immediately to what he referred to as the L.A. branch. All she wanted was to survive long enough to escape the nightmare she had fallen into.

“Your social security number, Miss Ashley?”

“Excuse me?” Her mind reeled. She couldn’t give him the real thing or he could find out who she was. But what if she made up one and he checked on it? Surely he wouldn’t go to that much trouble. Dane looked calm.

“Your social security number, Miss Ashley. It is not a diff
icult question for someone of your intelligence.”

“Four five nine—”

“Let me see your identification.”

“She didn’t have time to bring anything, sir,” Dane said.

Jana tried to hide the fear that made her want to break out in a desperate run. She held her hands together in an attempt to stop the trembling. Hart looked down, then grabbed her hand and examined it.

He released her hand and turned to Dane. “Come with me, Mr. Christian.” Dane followed him into the hangar.

             
The woman’s wrists are chafed. She has been tied up. Who is she and why is she here? Lie to me and you will die this day.”

“Her brother was one of the Mississippi assets. It was too risky to leave her behind.”

“And why did you not simply eliminate her?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I just didn’t.”

“I am beginning to question your mental well-being, Mr. Christian. Although I typically do not say such things, it is a fact that until very recently your performance was exemplary. Of late, there have been a number of what I can only deem to be mental lapses. You could have put everything at risk. I do not know what is wrong with you, but I demand that it be corrected forthwith. Is that clear?

“Yes sir.”

“Lock the woman away. After the sun sets this evening, take her to the back of the property and dispose of her permanently.” Hart walked to the waiting white Humvee and got in on the passenger side.

Dane massaged his temples. Hart had not asked where Riff was. Just as well. One crisis at a time was enough.
You can handle him just fine, Baby Brother.

A short drive later, Dane turned onto the drive that led to the security gate. Less than a hundred people had the crede
ntials necessary to make it through the gate and to the center of the two thousand acre spread, but if anyone could have approached the buildings at the core, their innocuous appearance would have raised no alarms.

Situated on flat terrain, the large metal buildings looked like nothing more than storage barns. Farm construction projects don’t garner a great deal of attention in the Midwest, and Hart had gone to great lengths to see that his was no different. The fields abounded with pampered soybeans and cornstalks, and a smattering of tractors, combines, and other agricultural equi
pment decorated the grounds near the three buildings. There was even a barn and corral with horses milling about, including a spectacular solid white one. The illusion of an ordinary farm in the heartland was convincing.

Dane touched his key fob to a reader, entered a seven digit code into a keypad and stepped up to a retina scanner. Hart waited with hands clasped in front of him as mammoth doors slid quietly back into the walls to provide a walkway into the hardened command center. Dane stepped aside for Hart to e
nter first, Street Sweeper—fully loaded with a dozen 12-gauge 00 buckshot rounds—hung over his shoulder, eyes scanning for the slightest irregularity. Once Hart was safely in, he stepped inside with Jana in tow and pressed a large red button that closed the concrete doors behind them. Once inside, the cozy farm illusion gave way to a different reality. The corrugated metal walls served only as a shell for the reinforced concrete structure inside.

Every wall, every square inch of floor, and every visible fi
xture was black. A black valance ran the upper edge of the walls, concealing hundreds of feet of neon tubing that cast a hellish orange glow against the black girders and electrical conduits above. Visibly energized by the transition from the placid faux farm outside to the techno-fervor within, Hart closed his eyes for a moment, drew a deep breath, then walked to a small tower in the middle of the cavernous room.

While he made his way up the short stairway, an eerie quiet spread over the facility as seventy-three workers—all clad in black lab coats—turned their attention away from the black co
nsoles and computer screen and to their leader on the elevated platform.

He stepped to a microphone and began to speak. “Faithful servants, I am here to thank you for a job well done. The Glor
ious Beginning was glorious indeed.” He paused briefly as a crescendo of cheers began to erupt from those gathered around him, then raised a finger to his lips, silencing the captive flock. “Operation White Horse was a resounding success.

“You have all been trained for what lies ahead, and I am co
nfident you will conduct yourselves admirably. Security is to be at maximum during these remaining seven days. No contact whatsoever between this facility and the outside is to take place, beyond what is directly necessary for implementation of the distraction events. Thank you all.”

He stepped back from the microphone and made his way down the stairs amid a clamor of cheers and applause. On the floor, he walked through the facility, shaking hands with some of the volunteers, hugging others, working his away through the crowd like a campaigning politician until each one had been warmly greeted.

             
Th
e inner diameter of the concrete tube was five feet, the pneumatically driven elevator inside it built on the same principle as the hard plastic cylinders that whisk back and forth between bank tellers and their drive-through customers. No cables to break. No gears or pulleys to be exposed to topside trauma. The air compressors that pressurized the chamber for lift and controlled descent were buried deep below the surface, along with the generators to power them and everything else in the subterranean fortress. Huge underground tanks were filled with enough diesel to run the generators for years if need be.

The transport tube was an ingenious design, with redundant radio transmitters inside the elevator-cylinder to control the e
ntire mechanism. Iris-style aperture doors built of inch-thick steel plates were stationed every hundred feet, automatically closing to seal the tube as the cylinder passed them on its downward trek, and automatically opening when it came up.

The mechanisms to drive these safety diaphragms were l
ocated below, eliminating exposure to any aboveground risk. The walls of the shaft were two and a half feet of heavily reinforced concrete. At the bottom of the shaft, a quarter-mile under the topsoil of the Nebraska farmland, lay Hart’s private chambers.

With his loathsome parents out of the way and an unlucky gardener convicted of their murders, young Abraham had b
egun to seek his destiny, feeling, knowing, that he was to be a part of something great, something so wondrous as to change the very course of history. A multi-billion dollar inheritance provided a great deal of freedom for destiny seeking.

The nightmares went on for years, several of them recurring: pieces of his parents reassembling themselves on the kitchen floor and chasing him through the house, a serpentine razor strap that talked in his father’s voice as it slithered on the floor, and most frequently, being chased through a void of darkness, able to see a brilliant point of light in the distance that he could never reach no matter how hard he ran toward it. Over time he came to understand that the dark/light dream was not a nigh
tmare at all, but rather a divine revelation, pieces of a puzzle that would somehow be a part of his glorious future. Darkness and light, darkness and light. Keys. Power.

He studied intensely and traveled the world in search of something that would trigger the metamorphosis from random bits and pieces into a solid understanding of what lay ahead.

During an extended visit to Las Vegas, he reluctantly agreed to take a visiting executive from his company to a Siegfried & Roy performance. As far as he was concerned, tawdry American tourists were something to be observed, not actually associated with up close as they sat with mouths agape at the sight of parlor tricks. The man was a valued employee, however, one that he could trust to covertly establish connections for certain technology and materiel if need be. Abraham hadn’t needed such things yet, but you had to be prepared.

As expected, the few moments of Siegfried & Roy “magic” that he did watch bored him beyond description. What he had not expected, however, was that the experience would be the catalyst to gel everything about his future, everyone’s future, into a vision of crystal clarity. The appearance of the showroom itself had started the final melding process in his mind and soul that evening. A dome-shaped room, the Mirage Theater was black. Very black. Black floor, black walls, black ceiling. The housings of light fixtures were black, as was the multitude of sound reinforcement gear that hung on black chains, almost i
nvisibly, from the dome above. All the seating was black, though the welting cord around the edges of the black upholstery on the V.I.P. booths was made of gently glowing fiber optic material that added to the sci-fi ambiance of the room.

With the houselights down, it was as if one had stepped into a boundless void, suspended in space. He instantly felt at home and his mind began to work. The show began within minutes, but while his stupid associate marveled at elephants disappea
ring and whores being sawn in half, he sank deeper and deeper into himself. His thoughts raced as all the years of frustrated attempts to understand his place in the universe collapsed into clear understanding of what he had to do.

He closed his eyes and reveled in euphoria while the a
pplause went on around him in response to the show. When his excited guest repeatedly tapped him on the shoulder and insisted that he should see the final scene on the stage, Hart’s first thought had been to show his irritation by using the base of his palm to drive the idiot’s nasal bone into his tiny brain, then watch him spasm quickly into death. Exercising restraint, he instead elected to open his eyes and look at whatever it was that was supposed to be so interesting.

The beauty of the sight illuminated his mind and solidified the vision that had been developing. Two dozen gorgeous white tigers sat perched on bubbled outcroppings of a clear acrylic dome in the middle of the stage. Their striking white color re
presented purity and justice in the blackness of the world around them, their strength the natural order of control.

At that moment, the vision became solid, the puzzle-piece fragments of the years coalescing into an intricate understan
ding of who he was and what he would become. A transition was in order, and the name was a good place to start. Abraham Hardier would become Abraham Hart, the old making way for the new, the past surrendering to the future. He had delivered himself. Now he would deliver the world.