Seven Unholy Days

by Jerry Hatchett

  “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 difficult 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 credentials 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 equipment 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 enter 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 fixture 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 consoles 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 Glorious 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 confident 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.

  The 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 entire 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 located 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 begun 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 nightmare 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.

&
nbsp; 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 invisibly, 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 disappearing 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 applause 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 represented 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 understanding 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.

  Since that night, he had worked methodically toward the fulfillment of The Plan, and sought to recreate the ambiance of the Mirage Theater whenever possible. His passion was only fueled when he heard one of the majestic tigers had dragged one of the silly showmen off the stage by his throat. It all fit. Light. Dark. Power. Ferocity. The overwhelming predominance of the color black in the underground bunker/residence served as dramatic testimony to his effort to recreate that seminal room of inspiration.

  His obsession with the paranormal, the supernatural, and everything in between was reflected in the trappings of the main room. Books and historical documents were everywhere. Nostradamus shared shelf space with a dozen other prophets of lesser notoriety but similar genre. A large group of works by and about da Vinci detailed the many years he spent in search of a hidden code in the text of the Bible. A much later publication by Michael Drosnin told the story of the code finally being found by Israeli mathematician Eli Rips, launching a series of the same ilk by numerous unknowns. No less than a hundred UFOlogy books were there.

  More astonishing than all the other categories combined were the enormous variety of Bibles. Bibles from every era, every denomination, and every translation. One copy sat conspicuously in a lighted glass display case in the middle of the room, a thousand-year-old copy of The Torah in its original Hebrew text. The ancient version of the first books of The Old Testament would have been at home as the pride and joy of a Judaic museum. To be certain, it had been, but money in sufficient quantity can buy many things from a multitude of nefarious sources.

  At the moment, while his followers above worked like drones, Hart sat huddled over a large King James Version of the Holy Bible. Though he knew them all by heart, he pored over the words of its apocalyptic final book, absorbing them into his very soul, becoming one with the prophecies.

  Without warning, like an explosion inside his head, he thought of Matthew Decker. His stomach seethed with acid and bile climbed the back of his throat. Hardier North America, the U.S. subsidiary of Hart’s company, Hardier Enterprises, had been the early front-runner to capture the design contract for the power grid control infrastructure. Then Decker’s bought-and-paid-for politicians stepped in and cried foul because Hardier wasn’t a “real” American corporation.

  Congressional hearings went on for months. Hart refused to attend personally but teams of lawyers argued on his behalf while lobbyists doled out his money in the backrooms of Washington. When the chicanery was done, Decker Digital had the contract. Monies spent chasing the contract were for naught. The loss in potential revenue was enormous. The humiliation of having the coveted contract publicly stolen from him was worse, and the delay it introduced into the master plan was unforgivable.

  The infantile American media covered the progress of the affair ad nauseum and treated Decker like a celebrity afterward. “Join us tonight, when our special guest will be technology wizard Matt Decker.” “Up next, Matt Decker. Will his name join the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates?” “Don’t miss Matt Decker tonight.”

  Vile blather it was, even reliving it as a memory, but he closed his eyes and took deep relaxation breaths, shaping his hatred for Decker into worthwhile passion. Decker failed to comprehend what the Glorious Beginning was even about, much less stop it. Now it was time to toy with Mr. Decker, to enjoy his demise the way a beer-drinking American slob might enjoy a football game.

  The irony was a thing of beauty: Decker would play the game, trying uselessly to stop the Distraction Events. And while he lost battle after battle, time would march inexorably toward the spectacular real conclusion.

  9

  10:20 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

  GREAT CENTRAL ELECTRIC

  Trying to break into my own code was an unnatural experience, like knowing someone was trashing my house while I stood locked outside. Abdul showed up about an hour after we got there and had been rattling the keys alongside me ever since.

  Simple fixes wouldn’t work this time. The malicious code had been inserted and the system locked down through a sequence of deep encryption routines, the very style of lockdown I had planned to implement as a security barrier.

  “Maybe you should have constructed some back doors into the system,” Abdul said while he entered a flurry of keystrokes that resulted in another ACCESS DENIED message.

  “Most people consider back doors unethical.”

  “I am sorry, Matt Decker. I do not mean to say—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I did, but somebody bolted them shut.”

  “No one will know from me,” he said with a wink.

  The telephone networks, even cellular, were holding up pretty well under internal backup power, but everyone was trying to call someone, and the result was a snarled tangle of congestion. “All circuits are busy” was the mantra. It took Tark hours to reach and cancel the incoming crew he had worked so feverishly to line up the night before. Around nine, I volunteered to keep an eye on things while he went home for a shower and a quick nap. He accepted.

  No one had seen or heard from Brett Fulton, which was just as well since he was useless for the deep tech mission Abdul and I were working.

  “Where can I find James Tarkleton?” a voice behind me said.

  “Mr. Tarkleton is away from the complex at the moment,” I said as I turned around. “I’m Matt Decker.”

  The guy stopped in his tracks and stared. “I know who you are. Why are you here?”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Special Agent Bob Rowe, FBI.” He flashed his credentials. I gu
essed him to be about six-four, three inches taller than me. I initiated the handshake. His was perfect, eye contact intense and unwavering—a little too intense, something else was buried there. His face and frame were lean but solid. He looked mid-forties and made an impression.

  “Mr. Decker, I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. For security reasons the onsite privileges of all civilians, including government contractors, have been suspended. You’ll have to leave now.”

  “Like hell I will. I was left in charge of this facility and I’ll remain so until relieved by Tarkleton.”

  “It’s not optional, Decker. Let’s not make more of a scene than exists already.”

  “Agent Rowe, is it? I assure you I have the authority to be here. In fact, my clearance probably trumps yours.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  “I’m Restricted Data, about a notch and a half above Top Secret. What are you?”

  “Leave this place, Mr. Decker. Now.”

  “You’re wasting your breath. I’m glad the Bureau is here, and I’ll be happy to work with you, but if you want me out of here you better start figuring out how you plan to do it. And you better go get some help.”

  He reached to grab me and instinct took over. Inside two seconds I had his arm twisted behind his back and was prepared to relieve him of his weapon should he be foolhardy enough to touch it.

  “You know what the penalty is for assaulting a federal officer, Mr. Decker?”

  “Worst case? A slap on the wrist and a fine I can pay and never miss, Rowe. This case? Nothing. I’m not just any contractor. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’m the man the United States government wants on this problem right now and I suspect you’ll find that out soon enough.”