Freedom

by Daniel Suarez

  “Justice? That’ll be difficult when you might be facing disciplinary charges yourself.”

  Philips felt the rage building again. She didn’t know whether he was guessing or actually knew. The disaster at Building Twenty-Nine had indeed been laid at her feet. The Major wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the after-action reports. It was as if he never existed.

  Loki turned back toward the funeral service. “If you find The Major, let me know, and the swarm will take care of him.”

  “You know I won’t do that.”

  “You might be surprised what you’ll do. Especially when you discover what they’ve done with your laws.” Loki narrowed his eyes at something in the distance.

  Philips followed his gaze toward the edge of the funeral crowd.

  A scuffle of some sort had broken out there. She could see at least one person being grabbed by plainclothes officers about half a football field away.

  Loki watched with his shimmering eyes. “They never disappoint, do they? Leave while you can, Doctor.”

  “Loki, don’t. There are hundreds of innocent people here.”

  He ignored her, already manipulating unseen darknet objects with his gloved hands. “They just couldn’t resist. . . .”

  She stood between Loki and the distant scuffle. “This will be a bloodbath. Please, Loki. Don’t do this!”

  He spoke while looking through her; his hands moved frantically. “Did you know your friend, Jon Ross, joined the Daemon’s darknet recently, Doctor? I thought you might want to know.”

  She stopped—unsure whether to believe him. The news hit her hard. She backed away from Loki and tried to contain her emotions. First she lost Merritt, now Ross, and now she felt she could trust no one. She felt the tears coming again. Not Jon.

  Loki spoke to some unseen person. “Fuck waiting. I’ve dropped Angel Teeth. Everyone clear the area.” A pause. “I don’t give a shit.”

  Philips turned away from Loki and ran toward the disturbance. He didn’t try to stop her. Fifty yards away, among cemetery headstones, she could see men in suits trying to overpower several people she assumed must be Daemon operatives. One of the agents held aloft a pair of sports glasses as more agents converged on the site. They were already securing a perimeter.

  The mourners Philips passed by had begun to turn toward the scuffle. She noticed small children with many of them and shouted, “Evacuate the area!”

  Several responded by saying, “I’m a police officer,” and followed her.

  In half a minute Philips had pushed her way up to a dark-suited man with a radio earpiece. He was part of the security cordon around the still-struggling knot of two dozen men.

  Philips displayed her NSA credentials and spoke calmly but firmly. “I’m a federal officer. You must evacuate this cemetery as soon as possible. These mourners are in great danger.”

  The thick-necked agent didn’t bother to examine Philips’s credentials. He just looked at her. “Stand clear, ma’am.”

  “Damnit, let me speak with the agent in charge! I have firsthand knowledge of an impending attack!”

  He smiled humorlessly and spoke with an indistinct accent. “We’ve got it under control. Thanks.”

  Suddenly gunshots crackled in the cold air. People in the crowd screamed and ducked. The mourners began to flee like a spooked herd—except for the dozens of police that remained behind, drawing weapons and heading toward the shots. Philips knew they’d be agents from the FBI, DSS, DEA, ATF, and a host of state and local police. Scores of them advanced using the tombstones for cover.

  Philips faced the approaching agents and police and held up her credentials. “Stay back! Stay back! You’re in danger!”

  The first wave of officers had already reached her, their various weapons pointed upward but ready. A distinguished-looking man in his fifties, a take-charge type without a weapon, came right up to Philips. “What the hell is going on?”

  Before Philips could answer, everyone turned to see another black-suited, clean-cut man approaching from within the dense knot of operators who’d started the disturbance. The man held up credentials with a familiar logo on them—Korr Security International.

  “This is a top secret DOD-sanctioned operation, gentlemen.”

  The senior agent frowned and examined the operator’s ID. “I’m S-A-C of the FBI’s Kansas City office. I don’t take instructions from private security contractors.” He pushed past, along with scores of other federal agents and local police, guns still at the ready.

  They pushed through a couple dozen plainclothes men with radio earpieces and submachine guns pointed skyward.

  “Jesus H. Christ, who the hell authorized a takedown in the middle of a thousand innocent people?”

  Philips followed on the senior agent’s heels.

  Korr officers held up their hands. “Sir! You can’t come in here!”

  “I’m in charge of the FBI’s Kansas City office, and until I see some government badges, I’ll go where I damn well please!”

  The swarm of police and federal agents broke through to the center of the Korr team. The scene there shocked everyone.

  Six bodies lay steaming on the frozen grass in a pool of blood, with more blood spattered over nearby headstones. One was a wounded Korr officer gulping air and being tended to by his colleagues. The other bodies looked to be Daemon operatives—one of them a young woman—lifeless eyes staring skyward. Philips noticed hundreds of footprints trampling the ground, indicating a mighty struggle.

  The FBI SAC stood agape. “Mother of god . . .”

  A tall, muscular Korr officer came up to him, showing credentials. “Sir, this is a top secret military operation. I need you to call—”

  Suddenly there was a high-pitched whistle, followed by a sharp thwack. Everyone stared in horror at a dagger-shaped steel point that now protruded from the Korr officer’s left cheek. Blood ran from his nose and a large steel dart now extended from the top rear of his skull, like a sinister plume, with an antenna rising out the back. The stricken Korr officer staggered with a surprised look on his face. Servomotors on the vanes of the dart whirred and adjusted in response to his movements—apparently the guidance system.

  The man collapsed as the others stared in shock.

  And then more whistling was heard.

  Without a word everyone scattered.

  As she ran, Philips looked up into the clear Kansas sky and saw several glints of steel coming in. She dodged between tombstones as she heard the ringing of steel spikes ricocheting off stone behind her. Screams of pain came on the wind, and she turned to see first one, and then another Korr officer drop as they fled with the rest of the crowd—singled out by the deadly rain. Many of the darts missed their mark, but the spikes were relentless, eventually striking flesh and bringing the Korr men down, one by one. She saw an injured man try to get back up, only to be struck in the back by several more darts.

  Philips slowed and watched in amazement as a Korr officer threw down his MP-5 submachine gun and ran toward other officers—who avoided him like the plague.

  “Help me! Someone help me! Help!”

  There was no cover in the middle of the vast Kansas cemetery, and he zigzagged among the mournful monuments as spikes clanged off stone and buried themselves in the grass behind him.

  But finally a dart struck the man in the shoulder. He fell—only to be struck by several more darts as he crawled on the ground.

  A Kansas state trooper in dress uniform grabbed Philips by the arm. “Miss, stay back!”

  She cast her gaze farther afield, seeing more Korr contractors in the distance—visible because they ran alone or in pairs, slaloming, only to be struck down by a series of glinting missiles.

  It was a surgical strike. Philips looked back where Loki had been, but as she expected, he was gone. In the far distance she could see thousands of mourners fleeing to their cars. She knew that finding Loki among them would be next to impossible—not to mention dangerous to the public.

&nb
sp; She looked over toward Roy Merritt’s deserted gravesite and cursed Loki. And The Major.

  Their war would never stop—not even to honor the dead.

  Chapter 4: // End of the Line

  “You know who you look like? That guy who killed all those cops. The one they executed.”

  Pete Sebeck leveled his gaze at the convenience store clerk. She was a matronly Caucasian woman in her fifties. A portable television blared on a shelf behind her, tuned to the most popular tabloid news show in the country—News to America. Rotating graphics and techno music in the opening sequence proved distracting. “Well, if they executed him, I can’t very well be him, can I?”

  She laughed. “I’m not saying you are him. Just that you look like him.”

  Sebeck handed her a twenty-dollar bill.

  She took the money. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

  He shook his head.

  “No offense. He was good-looking.” She paused, tapping her stick-on nails on the counter. Click-click-click. “What was his name? The Daemon hoax guy. Killed a whole bunch of people. Almost got away with like a hundred million dollars.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  She rang up the sale. “Man, that’s gonna drive me crazy.” She circled her face while clutching his change. “It’s in your face. He was on television every day for like a year. His head wasn’t shaved, though. And he didn’t have the Van Dyke.”

  “The what?”

  “The beard.”

  “Is that what this is called?”

  “You trim it like that, and you don’t even know what it’s called?” She laughed and handed over his change. “It’s called a Van Dyke. My ex-husband had one. Used it to cover a port-wine stain on his chin. Some people get the Van Dyke confused with the Winnfield or the Anchor, but they’re not the same thing.”

  Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Sebeck! That was his name, Pete Sebeck. He was a detective, too. Did you know that? Killed his best friend, a woman, and like a dozen FBI agents before they caught him.”

  Sebeck stared at her through sports glasses. “Well, he’s dead now.” He grabbed his energy drinks off the counter.

  “Need a bag?”

  “No, thanks.”

  On the television behind her Sebeck couldn’t help but notice the blonde lip-glossed news model, Anji Anderson, stoking public hysteria about the latest prepackaged threat. It was especially ironic since Sebeck knew that, like him, Anderson was a Daemon operative. He still couldn’t figure out how she fit into Sobol’s master plan. In the two years he’d been in prison before his faked execution, Anderson had used sexed-up innocence combined with self-righteous indignation to claw her way from obscurity to the top of the prime-time ratings. She’d turned Sebeck into an infamous serial killer. The Daemon had everything to do with that.

  “How can you watch this crap?”

  “Anji? She’s great. I just love her. She’s doing this whole series on the collapse of the U.S. dollar. It’s on the way. There’s not a damned thing we can do about it either. I’m savin’ up cigarettes. They’ll be like gold after the crash.”

  He stared at her for a moment to be certain she was serious, then walked out shaking his head. Sebeck sat on a desert hillside in darkness, staring up at a brilliant field of stars in the crisp night air. The Milky Way was a smudge of light out of the corner of his eye. He took a deep breath and listened to the silence.

  It felt good to get away from the highway.

  Sebeck had been on the road for weeks; following a line only he could see, toward a destination even he did not know. Before this journey he had never thought of the modern world as a machine—with humanity just the cells of its body. But a lot had changed since his arrest and execution by the government—and his subsequent rescue by the Daemon.

  As a cop, he found it difficult to accept that the law was an illusion. If the powers that be identified you as a threat, right or wrong, you were destroyed.

  Was that the lesson Matthew Sobol had taught him by destroying the person Sebeck once was? Sebeck’s only ally now was the very thing he’d been fighting against—the Daemon. No one knew how far its powers stretched or if it could be stopped. And the dead man who created it had assigned Sebeck a fearsome task.

  Justify the freedom of humanity.

  Coming from a software construct that had already orchestrated the deaths of thousands of people, it was a charge Sebeck didn’t take lightly—and one he had no idea how to accomplish.

  Each day he followed the Thread—a glowing blue line that existed in a private virtual dimension Daemon operatives called D-Space, which was visually overlaid on the GPS grid. It was an augmented reality, whose 3-D objects were only visible through HUD glasses the Daemon had provided for him. For weeks now the Thread had led Sebeck through the American Southwest, and finally up onto this hillside in the New Mexico desert. Wherever he was going, it seemed he was about to arrive.

  Just then Sebeck heard labored breathing on the path below him. He saw an ethereal name call-out bobbing toward him in the fabric of D-Space. Name call-outs were a means of identifying other members of the Daemon’s darknet (or encrypted network). The glowing words Chunky Monkey hovered three feet over a pear-shaped silhouette moving in the shadows. It was the network name of Laney Price, Sebeck’s Daemon-assigned minder. Sebeck knew that a similar call-out reading Unnamed_1 floated above his own head in D-Space. Matthew Sobol had indeed unnamed him by erasing Sebeck’s existence to the modern world, and giving him a new life on the darknet.

  Sebeck waited as Price labored toward him then collapsed on the ground nearby. The light from pico projectors in Price’s own

  HUD glasses cast a soft glow onto his face, revealing a twentysomething kid with a thick beard and a mane of unkempt black hair. His face shined with sweat.

  “Couldn’t we have . . . waited until daylight . . . Sergeant?”

  “The Thread has never led us off the highway. We’re close to something.”

  Price gazed around wearily. “It’s really leading you out here?” Sebeck could see the blue line extending like a crooked laser beam from where he stood, shooting uphill and disappearing over the ridgeline. It was the path Sobol had told him to follow. It was coded to him, and he was supposedly the only person in the world who could see it.

  “You don’t have to come with me.”

  “It’s my job, Sergeant.”

  “You honestly don’t know where the Thread is heading?”

  Price shook his head. “I’m just another slob on the darknet. Like you.”

  “No. Not like me. You volunteered for the Daemon. That’s the difference between us, Laney. Don’t forget it—because I won’t.”

  “For me it was an easy choice.”

  They sat for several minutes looking up at the stars and the occasional meteor trail.

  Price nodded, soaking up the atmosphere. “It’s pretty rockin’ out here.”

  Sebeck jerked his thumb uphill. “Let’s keep going.”

  In barely half a mile they crested the desert ridge in the moonlight. Price was panting and cursing by the time they reached the top. Sebeck was still in good physical shape—his prison ritual of sit-ups and push-ups remained the first thing he did every morning.

  A quarter moon and a brilliant field of stars illuminated the surrounding mesas. Ahead Sebeck could see clustered shadows. The Thread led straight toward them.

  “There’s something up ahead.”

  Price was still sucking wind. “Anasazi Indian ruins.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “D-Space geotags. Layer nine. I could show you how to—”

  “And you claim you don’t know where we’re headed. Sure. . . .” Sebeck continued down the path.

  Behind him Price cursed again and struggled to keep up. Soon they came to the edge of stone ruins. They were taller than Sebeck would have expected for ancient Indian dwellings. The thick masonry walls were still several stories high, pierced by windows and doorways. He’d hea
rd of cliff dwellers in the Southwest, but not freestanding stone buildings.

  The Thread led directly through a low doorway in the face of a towering masonry wall. Sebeck approached and reached out his hand to run it along the wall’s face. It was remarkably straight and tightly constructed.

  He kneeled down to look ahead and could see moonlight illuminating several roofless rooms, connected by a series of open doorways that lined up perfectly.

  The sound of Price’s footsteps were behind him. Sebeck turned.

  “Why are we here, Laney?”

  “I told you, man. I don’t know. I’m just supposed to help you reach your goal—that doesn’t mean I know where it is.”

  Sebeck glared at him then ducked into the rooms beyond. Price followed, and they moved cautiously through roofless rooms. Walls loomed above them, framing a field of stars.

  Before long the Thread led Sebeck down a worn stone stairway, and out into a circular chamber about forty feet in diameter, open to the sky. Above them, the distant mesas and cliffs of the canyon formed a jagged silhouette along the horizon. Twenty-foot walls surrounded the space, with several more entrances leading into it, but here the Thread ended in a swirling aura of blue light that floated above the glowing apparition of a man. The ghostly figure wore a Victorian jacket and tie, and leaned on a silver shod cane.

  It was a man Sebeck knew—the digital ghost of Matthew Sobol. The creator of the Daemon. Sobol’s avatar looked healthier than when Sebeck saw it last. It now took the form of a brown-haired, thirtysomething man—apparently how Sobol appeared before his brain cancer wasted him away. Weeks ago, Sobol’s recorded avatar had appeared to him in D-Space and offered Sebeck the opportunity to justify the freedom of humanity. Insane or not, it was a task Sebeck had dared not refuse. Especially given the Daemon’s growing power.

  Sebeck glanced back at Price. “Can you see what I’m seeing?”

  Price nodded emphatically. “Hell yeah. Looks like he recorded it before his surgery.”

  “Then it’s a recording?”

  “Interactive temporal offset projection. A three-dimensional bot, waiting here in D-Space for a specific event to occur. I think your arrival is that event, Sergeant.”