“You need to raid the Quod Corporation now. Kohl’s planning a kinetic bombardment attack using a tungsten rod. Don’t wait a single day!”
Chapter 39
I made it back to our hotel just as Kohl started speaking. It was an inspiring meditation on the wonders of the future and the Quod Corporation’s new virtual reality headset – soon to be available in all the better stores. He gave the audience a heaping serving of the techno-optimism he’d been peddling all along, but he emphasized the enlightenment talk a lot more. He seemed especially focused on how easy it would be to have an enlightenment experience for a user of the Quod Glasses, how quick it would be, how it was available to everyone. Something was changing about the crowd, too. It wasn’t as mixed, and it wasn’t as big, but those who attended seemed twice as focused. More like true believers, “Quantum Buddhists.”
“Those of you who contribute to this historic fundraising project will receive the most thrilling reward you could possibly receive,” said Vitalius Kohl. “Your own pair of the Quod Corporation’s virtual reality Quod Glasses headset, at least a full month before they become available for purchase to the broader public. When you receive the headsets, they will all be fully functional in every respect, but one – no streaming content will be available until we launch the satellite, an event that will be broadcast as a livestream on our corporate website. When this event occurs, your glasses will begin streaming our exclusive content just a few hours later, and your smooth and painless journey to enlightenment will begin.”
Smooth and painless – that was definitely false advertising, considering that the glasses wouldn’t show anything except horrific accidents and atrocities. Including, presumably, Kohl’s destruction of an entire city.
“Where were you, boss?”
An urgent stage whisper, from a visibly worried Barbara McCoy.
“The less you know,” I said, “the better.”
“I’ve been wondering if I should maybe update my resume. Things seem… kind of unstable here.”
“Don’t even wait for that,” I said. “Just walk away. Walk out of this hotel and just keeping going. And stay away from big cities for a while.”
She grinned at me nervously as if it was all a joke, then went back to her post.
“Well, Gavin. The day approaches,” said Vitalius in his hotel suite an hour later. He gestured at the empty glasses and wine bottle in front of him, so I poured us each a drink while he untied his tie. “Any questions? I’m in an expansive mood tonight as success draws near.”
I had only two questions. The first was what city he intended to destroy and the second was the date of the attack. But since I couldn’t ask either one of those questions, I sat down at the desk, unbuttoned my jacket, and took a sip of my wine.
“I do have one question,” I said. “But it isn’t relevant to anything. It’s just curiosity.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “When I get expansive I get indulgent.”
“For a long time, I had no memory of Mother being present when Mike Croop died. But she was there.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
“Jackie called Mother ‘Jessica’ that night. Not Theresa, Jessica. And Mother was irritated, she asked Jackie not to call her that. So that makes me think her real name must be Jessica.”
“Names change,” said Vitalius, taking a sip of his wine. “Jackie’s too. Her real name is Kerry Kohl, you know. It was never Jackie.”
“So why did she change it?”
“Who, Mother or Kerry? Never mind, I’ll answer both for you. If you’re on the run from the law or from organized crime, what do you do? You change your name. If you’re trying to avoid the attention of hungry spirits, you do the same. Mother was born as Jessica Venti, but she used to work as a professional spirit medium under the name of Mother Shaara. One day in a trance, she channeled an old and dangerous spirit she could not put down. It consumed her life, did everything it could to eat her sanity and leave her nothing but an empty husk. That’s when we met, actually. I was offering specialized spiritual treatments for people with her kind of problem. We met, we knew each other, and she changed her name on the day we married. To deceive the spirit.”
“But she kept the Shaara part.”
“Yes, she did.” He sighed. “That’s something I’ve never talked to anyone about. She kept her stage name as her new middle name because she didn’t want to give up her power as a medium. But that diluted the protection offered by changing her name in the first place, and she has paid the price for it. I bought her some time, but there is a reason Mother Shaara never shows her face in public. You see, my wife is… possessed.”
Not believing in possession, I didn’t have much to say about that.
“And Jackie?”
“That’s easy, Gavin. She was trying to escape from me. And there is no dark spirit as hungry as I am.”
“But why was she with you in the first place?” I asked. “She’s your brother’s daughter.”
“Herman may be a Senator now,” said Vitalius, “but he was once a highly disturbed and dysfunctional young man. He was – and still is – a member of the highly unorthodox Armageddonist sect, an exclusive fellowship that wants to set off Armageddon intentionally.”
“For what reason?” I asked.
“To make Jesus come back, of course. It’s stupid, I know, but that is their belief system. They think they can compel the Son of God. I humor their delusions.”
I refrained from comment.
“Kerry first came to Mother and I because Herman had a break-down. He was drinking too much and obsessing about Apocalypse and the Book of Revelations. He lost his bearings and was separated from Kerry’s mother for a time. He asked us to watch his daughter, and we were glad to help. But when she told us all about what Herman was up to, I presented him with an ultimatum.”
“Give you his daughter or…?”
“Give me his daughter and back Ultima Thule financially, or we would expose him as a member of this distasteful and fanatic Armageddonist cult. Since he was already planning a career in politics, he didn’t dare oppose us.”
“So what about Mike Croop?”
“You aren’t wearing a wire, are you Gavin? Only joking. I know you would never do that to your beloved Father. So, Mike Croop. That was all years later when Kerry was a teenager. We were already planning the series of alchemical rituals that eventually took place in Hennington years later. Kerry and Mike Croop were intended as the bride and groom, for the ritual marriage stage of my transformation. But Mike Croop didn’t know it. He was dating another of my students, a young woman named Tomoe Johnson. She was a spiritual seeker, a would-be Buddhist but that was only because her mother was a Japanese woman. Her father was a black man, so as you can see I’m no white supremacist despite what some may assume.”
My head was spinning. If Mike and Jackie were originally intended for the Whitening ritual, then Father had intended to murder her years and years ago. No wonder she hated him. But on top of that, this Tomoe Johnson sounded very much like the anonymous woman from the Sōhei Faction. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with a personal vendetta against Vitalius Kohl.
“Gundarrson ran his mouth one day, and Mike Croop found out. Not about the plans for the Whitening ritual, just that we wanted to marry him to Kerry and we didn’t plan on taking no for an answer. He didn’t want to be told what to do, so he ran away. Without even telling Tomoe anything, so that shows you how he felt about her. As for how Tomoe felt about Mike Croop… well, she ended up burning our compound in Stillwater to the ground and then disappearing. So there’s that.”
Vitalius chuckled as if he found the violent exploits of Tomoe Johnson entertaining and even a little bit admirable.
“Do you see what I’m telling you, Holder? If Kerry had never come to live with us, she would never have been selected for the Whitening ritual with Mike Croop. If she had never been selected for the ritual, he would never have run away from us, and she would never have bee
n sent after him to punish him for disobedience. If Kerry had never been sent after Mike Croop, you would never have fallen in love with her, you would never have ended up in that parking lot with Mike Croop in what you mistakenly thought was a drunken skirmish between rival punk factions. Your entire identity, everything that makes you Gavin Holder, is my creation. I am your true and only Father.”
“And I’m supposed to thank you for that?” I asked him.
He looked me directly in the face. “Proverbs 30:17 - The eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it. I never trust anyone, Gavin, and with good reason. It disturbs me to learn that you’ve befriended one of my scientists. What would you do if he turned out to be a spy?”
“A spy?”
I shook my head and chuckled. “The idea that anyone as timid as Kumar could be a spy is the best thing I’ve heard all week. Thanks for the story, Father. And the laugh.”
Chapter 40
The next time I was able to go out late at night in the bunker and check my shinobimail address, there were two messages. One from the Sōhei Faction – perhaps from Tomoe Johnson herself – and the other one from Astrida, using the handle [email protected].
The email from the Sōhei Faction read: Any progress? Crew in place to raid Texas launch location. Need date to coordinate. If possible, will ask you to disarm security system from inside. We’ll take care of the rest.
I wrote back immediately: No date yet, but understood. Will do so if possible. Please inform Emily Alvin, this is too big for us.
The reply came back right away: No FBI. We’re not informants. We only work with you because you’re a fucking lunatic. Like us!
“Fucking anarchists,” I said to myself and wrote back: I hope you know what you’re doing because this is BIG. We cannot afford to let any principles stand in the way of stopping this from happening!
There was no reply right away, so I read the message from Astrida: The drive contains GPS-based instructions for a launching system that will drop something from orbit. The math on this sort of thing is very complicated because the object has to be dropped in such a way that it will hit a precise spot on a constantly spinning planet – in other words, you can’t just drop it straight down. It’s a bit like the problem faced by the first bombers in WWI – just dropping bombs by hand from the cockpit while flying over will never work, because you’re moving continuously. To hit your target, you need a lot of math! We lucked out on one thing, though. The intended target is indicated by GPS coordinates. These seem to indicate that the target is Washington DC. Here’s the relevant section of code. The GPS coordinates are in line 4.
I should have known all along. Ultima Thule’s original plan was to attack the US Congress, and Vitalius was obviously still focused on wiping out the Federal government in a single strike. If a “Rod From God” hit DC, the results would be catastrophic at the very least. Depending on how precise the targeting was, it was just possible that it could even destroy the entire Federal government at one stroke.
I had to get the FBI to raid the place. I just had to. There was no point in waiting any longer and much danger in delay. I closed up my laptop and went back to my room, where I found Kumar knocking on my door.
“Oh, hi Gavin,” he said as I approached. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure. Just let me check my Facebook quickly, there’s something important I have to do right away.”
When I got onto Messenger, I was relieved to find a message from Emily Alvin under the name of Ernie Armstrong. But I wasn’t relieved at all by what the message said.
Hey, old buddy! How are things? Town council is still fucking me around on that music festival I’ve been trying to put together. They say my backers are unreliable just because they don’t have perfect credit. Who the hell has perfect credit these days?! Anyway, hang tight!
My heart sank right down into my stomach. There was only one way to interpret this. She couldn’t get the green light from her superiors to raid the Quod Corporation because they just weren’t willing to cause problems for the celebrity brother of a US Senator based on my word alone. After what happened in Hennington, they simply didn’t believe me.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m on my own.”
“What’s that?” asked Kumar nervously.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing I can do anything about anyway. What’s up, Kumar?”
“It’s just… it’s strange. People have started acting weird around me. Kind of distant. I’m starting to think they suspect me of something.”
“I don’t want to make you feel any worse, Kumar, but they do. Vitalius is nervous about you and me hanging out. He thinks it’s a potential security risk.”
“Then I should go!”
“You probably should, and you should probably keep your distance after this. But I need you to do me a favor first.”
“A favor? How big a favor are we talking?” he asked.
“Not so much a favor as a mission. The last one you’ll need to do before all this is over.”
He stood there for a minute just looking at me before he answered. It was awkward. I got the impression he wasn’t sure whether to trust me either, which was starting to seem like the world’s default attitude toward me. Then he nodded.
“Okay, Gavin. What do you have for me?”
Chapter 41
On the Texas Panhandle, you can see your own future. The land is flat, so flat you can see the hours of driving stretched out ahead of you in every detail. There are no surprises when you’re crossing the Panhandle, only items on a long, long checklist – that dried-out stream bed you saw coming up an hour ago, that slight rise in the road you’ve been approaching all day. I was staring out the window, watching the empty lands roll by us slowly. Jesse Spindrift was driving, assigned to keep an eye on me by the increasingly distrustful Vitalius Kohl. We had nothing to say to each other, so we weren’t talking. He drove, I stared out the window. That was all.
The special reward Quod Glasses headsets had already gone out to the early adopters, the people who had given money to the Quod Corporation crowdfunding project. The date for the rocket launch was coming up, and I had been ordered to go out to the rocket launch location and oversee final security preparations before the launch. Despite being given this important job, I had not been given the necessary authority to do it properly even if I had actually intended to. Vitalius never trusted anyone enough to give them real authority over anything. Instead, there were always overlapping functions, overlapping spheres of authority, rival teams with opposed interests.
In this case my old friends, the mercenaries, had been given the primary responsibility for securing the launch site. This had me worried on its own. The only other time I had seen the Sōhei Faction in combat was when they had destroyed their opponents, the rogue faction of Ultima Thule that had been attempting to run off with all the organization’s ill-gotten gains instead of staging a terrorist attack on the US Congress like Vitalius wanted them to. The Sōhei Faction fighters had proven highly effective against Ultima Thule, but Ultima Thule had never been more than a motley crew of peckerwood bank robbers and survivalist militia wannabes. Just because the Sōhei Faction could defeat a bunch of losers like that did not imply they would fare equally well against a team of professional mercenaries with battle experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That might have been okay if I had been given any actual authority over the mercenaries. I could have interfered with their tactical effectiveness in a dozen different ways, giving my allies the opportunity they needed. But I had no such authority. They were all under the command of a Captain Rideout, who I had never even met before and had no influence over at all. Instead, I was only in charge of the security procedures for the civilian employees, critical security infrastructure, and so on.
But at least that was something I could use. Because critical security infrastructure included
the electric fence.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen, I’m Captain Rideout. Welcome to the Quod Corporation Launch Facility. Have you eaten?”
We arrived at the launch facility close to sunset and were escorted to the commanding officer immediately by the guards at the gate. Now we stood in front of Captain Rideout, a clean-shaven man with a military bearing. His sharp and self-disciplined image was in strong contrast to many of the mercenaries under his command, who cultivated the rough and bearded look of elite special forces soldiers.
“Thank you, Captain Rideout, we ate on the road. If it’s okay with you, we’d like to get to work immediately.”
“Of course,” he said, and gave us a tour of the facility and grounds. The place was simple and straightforward, a facility for corporate satellite launches long before it was purchased by the Quod Corporation. The engineers who worked there had been included in the package, so there were only a few true Quod Corporation loyalists here other than Jesse Spindrift. There was a launch pad complete with rocket – presumably containing the Quod Glasses satellite and its secret payload of tungsten rods – and a small, low building housing the command center. Other than that there wasn’t much, just a collection of storage sheds and an electric fence topped with barbed wire.
I found myself wondering where the Sōhei Faction could possibly be hiding and if they were even out there at all. Were they out there in the empty flatness beyond the highway? Were they waiting in a cheap roadside motel three hours away from here? Or were they hundreds of miles away, incapable of doing anything at all despite all their tough talk?
“As you can see,” said Captain Rideout, “We have our own units guarding every approach, and there’s not really much for you to do here. Not sure why corporate wanted to waste your time this way, but that’s how it goes. The launch is tomorrow morning at oh-eight-hundred, so all you really need to do is watch. Unless you think it’s necessary to interview some of the engineers.”
Firebolt Page 13
