So she made the final twist, and the next blow that landed was a real one, though it was not on her.
Frances struck Alan across the back, as hard as she could, and he screamed, and Frances grunted with wild joy, and while Alan arched his back orgasmically, another blow fell from Cynthia onto Frances, and the scene played itself out again.
SMACK
THUMP
THWACK
They groaned and beat each other. Blood swelled up. She twisted, and they beat each other. It was an orgy of violence and pain. They grunted and leered. It was what Witzgenstein wanted. It was her reward, and Lara could give it to her.
WHACK
SLAP
THUMP
They groaned, and cried out, and bled and pawed at each other's bodies, tearing the clothing and the skin, lost in the throes of passion, believing with every strike that it was Lara they struck.
She twisted the line, and twisted, burrowing in deeper, digging into each of them so she was an underlay beneath Witzgenstein's agitated bridle, learning as she moved, sending tendrils she'd never imagined were possible, and taking control. She let them exhaust themselves, beating until they were spent and on their knees and barely able to lift their arms any more. Frances lay on her side, drooling and moaning into the carpet. Alan lay on his back with his hands on his chest, panting ecstatically, wheezing. Cynthia caressed George's short hair and he nuzzled into her, bleeding from a broken nose.
They didn't know. They were sated, and so Witzgenstein was sated.
And through them, through that, Lara realized that this wasn't the first time. They'd done this before. They did this often. She felt the snaking lines of intimacy throughout the line, reaching between Drake's people and the children, each meeting in tight little nexuses of pain and humiliation, each of them feeding back to feed into Witzgenstein.
Perhaps she didn't even know. On some level she did. Not consciously. This was to be her rule.
Her own head still throbbed, a swelling block of white behind her eye. The first blows still pounded painfully in her arms. She was exhausted from the effort of controlling them, and slowly, shudderingly, managed to get one hand onto her belly.
Her baby was in there. The baby would be scared.
"Shhh," she breathed, stroking the swollen skin, the only part of her that didn't ache. "Little one, shhh."
Perhaps she slept for a time after that. She woke with a large figure standing over her. Her neck rolled, showing him her face.
Crow.
"Are you broken?" he asked.
She only closed her eyes. Both hands now were on her belly, encircling the child, holding it close and letting it know. She had just enough energy to reach out and twist into Crow.
He sensed her. Part of him felt her touch, a glimmer of purple on the line beneath Witzgenstein's red, and he helped hide it. She was there too, moving over him like a net of arteries.
"I think they've only made it worse, here," he said, after a time. "I think Witzgenstein's brought her death in by the front door. Lara."
Lara kneaded at the purple in him, beneath the cover of the bridle, and thought lullabies to her baby on the line. It needed a name, didn't it? She had one ready, her father's name, because she knew now that it would be a boy, and he would be strong.
Ezekiel.
Her father had loved the Bible. He'd read it every day, sitting on their porch after work, thumbing through pages he'd thumbed through a thousand times before. When she'd come home after the first day of school, carrying five thick law books heaped before her, he'd smiled.
"Everything you need to know's in this one book, daughter."
She'd laughed, stumbling up the stairs to the porch. "What about Tort reform?"
He'd laughed at that too, and put his Bible up, and rose to help her because that was the kind of man he was.
Ezekiel, she thought down to the baby. I'm here for you. Can you be here for me? Just a little longer. I'm going to have all this straightened out.
"There's going to be blood, isn't there?" Crow asked. "More than this. All of us complicit."
Lara floated on the heartbeat felt through her hands, felt in her spine and in her sides. This was the real fire, the furnace that would keep her alive and remake her into something new. She sent that feeling out to nourish Crow, and felt him responding. Witzgenstein could see that too, perhaps.
Then Crow's arms slipped underneath her, lifting her gently. She was dimly aware as he carried her away, out of the Lincoln Bedroom and down the hall, into the bedchambers of the new President of the United States. There he lay her down on a cot at the foot of the bed, and departed.
The next thing was a cool cloth at her brow.
"My child," came Witzgenstein's voice. "My poor child, what have they done to you?"
Lara murmured. She let her hands fall from her belly, and crawl weakly up her naked body, to take Witzgenstein's hand. The bridle was already opening up, vulnerable in the intimacy of the bedroom.
"What's this?" Witzgenstein asked.
Lara pulled her hand down. She put her palm over her lips and kissed.
"Ahhh," Witzgenstein murmured softly, caressing Lara's chin. "My child, what have they done to you now?"
INTERLUDE 7
In the air, the world changed as James While's strike teams arrested every SEAL Head, smoothly took charge of their hierarchical command structures, and began an immense global audit.
It was all about trust.
For seven years as the COO of the SEAL he'd been nurturing his own people, building them into the infrastructure of every facility and program, placing them in positions of power, while simultaneously winning them over with his vision, competence and disarming honesty.
They weren't all autistic. Those who were, he knew he could rely upon utterly. He'd taken the time to meet every one of them individually. To them, as to him, the world looked different, and that formed a powerful bond; especially considering who he was.
James While, rock star of the SEAL, globe-hopper, logistical genius, pattern-spotter extraordinaire, and the man with the highest score on a very specific section of the Standard IQ test. He was like them, but he was winning in the 'World of Men'. He had leveraged his inherent skills and fought his way to the top of the social chimneystack that was the largest organization on the Earth.
To them he was a hero. They wanted to be him. His attention and blessing was like manna from heaven, as he elevated them as no one else had. He changed their jobs to match their abilities. He made systems that worked around them, that afforded them success unparalleled anywhere else, built on raw ability. They were a team of thousands with loyalty expressly to him, as he came to represent the grand vision of the SEAL.
For them, that vision lay not in keeping Olan Harrison alive a few years longer, but in actually improving the world. Reducing human suffering, ending famine and disease, stopping war, strife and cruelty. He offered idealistic, unashamed goals just as he was an idealistic, unashamed man, and in doing so earned a cadre of utterly dependable mid-to-high-level managers.
Those amongst his most trusted who weren't autistic all fell upon a spectrum of underachievement. They were men and women who had been overlooked all their lives, quietly brilliant people who'd been run roughshod over by the louder, taller, prettier, more confident cliques. James While picked them out like under-ripe berries, sent them on leadership training courses, found them mentors, and set them up with structures to promote ability over social grace, building a powerful meritocracy in a virtuous, self-improving cycle.
They knew who their guardian angel was. They were grateful to be noticed, and happier than they'd ever been, and came to rely upon him like followers in a cult. To them he was infallible, a machine who was more capable than any manager they'd had, so when the order came down direct from him to take over their departments in his name, they acted as one.
The revolution went smoothly, with little blood shed.
In the Apotheo Net boardroom, si
tuated high in a downtown Kuala Lumpur skyscraper, Head Abe Strick sent two security guards into a shootout that ended with three dead and Strick himself hit in the thigh, but still the Apotheo Net was taken.
In a secret Disarmament nuclear weapons repository in the Kenyan desert there was a brief upset over launch codes, a countdown was instituted, but hammered down with at least a minute left to spare and all the African nuclear caches under While's oversight.
Farthas Gurgen of Vision locked himself into the panic room in the basement of his Mayfair London office, sending out a wild spray of documents and calls for help that James' people intercepted and corralled, before cutting all his hard lines and locking him down.
Everywhere across the SEAL similar stories played out. Rachel Heron was just the first. One after another Heads rolled around the world as James While assumed control. Olan Harrison could no longer be trusted. There was a shadow SEAL running beneath the real one, and shutting it down and tracking it back to its source was his highest priority.
Hours passed in the air as the globe tilted, and by the hour more reports came in claiming Olan Harrison could not be found. While's teams struck all of Olan's standard haunts but turfed out only secretaries and low-level functionaries. None of them confessed to knowing where he was. None admitted to even seeing him in the flesh for months, if not longer.
So James went deeper. He set teams and computer algorithms digging into an exhaustive search of Harrison's digital history, working outward from the last recorded time he was seen in person; five months ago at a gala event in Cambodia raising money for clearing landmines from the Khmer regime. James remembered there'd been a SEAL Heads meeting three days after that, at which Olan had lodged requests for additional funding.
He dived into that.
The Cambodia charity had shifted some fifty thousand dollars between accounts, and he looked for the evidence of it being spent across the group, in landmine disposal robots or schools for amputee children, but found no physical record of such purchases, only a paper trail asserting it had been usefully spent.
Fifty thousand dollars was not much, but there was no explaining its absence. Its connection to a project overseen directly by Olan Harrison made it even more suspicious. Direct charitable giving had always been Harrison's remit, and afforded him a dossier of activity that spread across all sixteen branches of the SEAL.
James While stopped mid-investigation and started redirecting his teams, turning them toward Olan's charitable activities across every department. It didn't take long for the immense scale of the monies involved to become clear.
It was billions of dollars a year. Money disappeared down the charity holes Olan had set up; coming out of the SEAL itself, coming from un-named donors who might be SEAL affiliates or might be anyone seeking to buy influence, coming from governments and corporations who wanted Olan's ear. In South Africa a system of shelters for battered women existed only in name, with the coordinates given for their five centers showing only shacks and slums in the satellite feed. In the Inuit communities of northern Alaska an investment in GM Arctic cod and char that would reproduce three times faster than normal, ensuring rich bounties of food, showed no impact at all on the coastal ecosystems, which was impossible.
The examples flooded in; not just hundreds but thousands of examples of funds reported spent but gone missing. While ordered more arrests. Every member of each charitable section of each department was put into a room and interrogated. The scale of the theft was immense and staggering, exclusively occurring in the areas James While had long considered automated.
Nobody had been checking for the rot creeping in at the root.
Olan hadn't touched any of the new projects. While shiny new investments in the Multicameral Array, Logchain, Apotheo Net hadn't been affected in quite the same way, While began to see the outlines of the false bottom beneath every one. Olan had hidden his network in plain sight, in places While was either not privileged to look into, or in areas he would never think to check.
He'd trusted Olan Harrison, and that had been his flaw. Harrison's roaming responsibility had seemed like another check and balance in the system, not a corrupting influence. In the end it amounted to the simple laundering of money.
Out of the chaos, patterns began to emerge. Some investments were genuine, though seemingly for purposes other than those they'd been reported for. A research facility in the Alps well known for cruelty to animals had been bought out and turned into a seed preservation vault, but there was no physical evidence of seeds ever being shipped there. An investment in water wells across Kenya had been completed, but no villagers went to them and gathered water. Work on mosquito harvesting to denature their reproductive capacity and spread impotence through the population had plainly been carried out; the massive fields full of nets were there, but malaria rates were no lower even in the surrounding area.
It was all bullshit, and James While steamed through it with a growing and unfamiliar sense of anger. He didn't get angry, rarely felt emotions as other people did, but when he did they built up and steamrollered everything else, often taking days to subside. The intense focus he'd for so long prided himself on now seemed to be foolishness. Olan Harrison had used him like a cog in a machine, relying upon that foolishness which he'd pridefully considered outstanding competence.
He was standing atop an empire of lies.
He raised a hierarchy of potential targets and fired them out to strike teams around the world. The wells. The mosquito facilities. Last of all the research facility in the Alps. There was something about its data trail, about the frequency of vehicles making deliveries, about its power usage. There was a runway nearby, and an internet optic fiber running through a strong trunk line, buried in the rock. While spun back what satellite coverage he could find of the area, but there were large gaps in the footage dating back seven years.
It wasn't unusual that imagery might be unavailable; satellites constantly overlapped as their routes shifted course, leaving blind slivers between them, but this many gaps across that specific period was statistically highly unlikely. That it coincided almost precisely with the date that he had joined the SEAL was a giveaway.
He gave the order to his pilot, and seconds later the plane banked sharply to the left. James While paced, while the turn completed and the pilot came on the line to announce a new flight time, making a tight arc over Kazakhstan to touch down in the Alps in five hours and change.
James paced.
He planned. He tried to think of more areas he might have overlooked during his time as COO. He threw himself into uprooting all of Olan Harrison's entrenched corruption. He reset the stage, opened multiple screens in the jet's cabin and plowed on with stamping order back onto the world.
* * *
The plane landed on ice and skidded. James While drank an energy drink of his own design, unbranded and packed with caffeine and a range of cutting-edge stimulants. He hadn't slept now for forty-eight hours and was starting to feel the drain. He had perhaps twelve more hours before he'd have to hand off temporary control and rest. New systems had to be as ironclad as possible by then.
The jet's engines reversed and slowed despite the icy runway. While waited at the exit hatch, and as soon as the deceleration finished he swung the door lever up and pulled the cord on the emergency slide, which deployed with a yellow blast. He was on it and sliding down before it had even finished deploying, hitting the snow at a fast walk.
It was freezing outside, but he wouldn't be out in it for long. It was the middle of the night in the mountains of Switzerland, with dark clouds hanging low overhead. The descent had been pitch black and dangerous, with the runway only lit by gas flares dropped down its length.
"Sir!"
It was John Rubega, leader of one of his most trusted assault teams, who'd already taken out Quiescence in Rome a few hours back. Now they were spread across this mountain; five soldiers and three black Jeeps sat a few yards away, engines smoking in the cold.
>
"Has anyone gone in?" While asked.
"No further than the entranceway, as you ordered."
While strode past him and opened the door to the nearest Jeep. Rubega gave a motion and the driver hopped out, allowing him to replace him. The engine fired up and the vehicle pulled away, followed sharply by the others.
Rubega gave him the sit-rep as they revved up the mountain. Gray rock rushed by to the right, lit harshly by the headlights. Everything was a risk. He had his team. In ten minutes they were there; at a shallow parking lot tucked along the roadside, framing a simple door leading into the rock.
"Sir," said Rubega, "recommend-"
"We'll do this as I ordered, Commander," While said clearly, already pushing open the Jeep's door. "A tight squad, you can lead, no hair trigger."
"Yes, sir!" Rubega said and shot out of the vehicle. His team was waiting, and picked up position around James While as he advanced swiftly on the entrance dug into the cliff-face.
"Is it locked?"
"No, sir, nor trapped. Sir, let me."
While gestured ahead of him. A security light flashed on over the entrance; molded into the mountain with clean gray cement. Rubega darted in, opened the door, and barreled through into the darkness beyond.
"SEAL Security forces, put any weapons down!"
While followed tightly on his heels, into pitch black. He'd already seen the layout of the laboratory in maps, hidden up here away from sight so that animal rights campaigners would never learn of its existence, along with photographs, and had a feeling for what he was looking for. There were numerous rooms spread off the sides of a long corridor leading in, but none of them were grand enough for a man intending to live forever. At the end of the corridor lay a large open laboratory. That's where Harrison would be.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 183
