The Dark River

by John Twelve Hawks

  “Pushy son of a bitch,” Boone muttered, and then glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had heard him. The Brethren’s head of security found it disturbing that a Traveler was giving him orders. Michael was now on their side, but as far as Boone was concerned he was still the enemy.

  The only biometric data available for the father was a driver’s license photo taken twenty-six years ago and a single thumbprint placed next to a notarized signature. That meant it was a waste of time to check the usual government data banks. The Brethren’s search programs would have to monitor e-mail and phone calls for any kind of communication that mentioned Matthew Corrigan’s name or statements about Travelers.

  In the last few months, the Brethren had finished building a new computer center in Berlin, but Boone wasn’t allowed to use it for his security operations. General Nash had been very mysterious about the executive board’s plans for the Berlin center, but it was clear that it was a major breakthrough in the Brethren’s goals. Apparently they were testing something called the Shadow Program, which was going to be the first step in the establishment of the Virtual Panopticon. When Boone complained about his lack of resources, the staff in Berlin had suggested a temporary solution: instead of using the computer center, they would bring in zombies to help with the search.

  A zombie was the nickname for any computer infected by a virus or Trojan horse that allowed it to be secretly controlled by an outside user. Zombie masters directed the actions of computers all over the world, using them to send out spam or extort money from vulnerable Web sites. If the site owners refused to pay, their servers were overwhelmed by thousands of requests sent out at the same moment.

  Networks of zombies called “bot nets” could be bought, stolen, or traded on the Internet black market. During the last year, the Brethren’s technical staff had purchased bot nets from different criminal groups and had developed new software that forced the captive computers to perform more elaborate tasks. Although this system wasn’t powerful enough to monitor all the computers in the world, it could handle a search for a specific target.

  Boone began typing a command to the computer center in Berlin. If the auxiliary system is operational begin searching for Matthew Corrigan.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Boone…”

  Startled, he looked up from his work. The charter pilot—a clean-cut young man in a navy blue uniform—was standing a few feet away from the workstation.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem. We’re fueled up and ready to go.”

  “I’ve just received some new information,” Boone said. “Change our destination to Westchester County Airport and contact the transportation desk. Tell them I want enough vehicles to take my staff into New York City.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll call them right now.”

  Boone waited until the pilot walked away, then resumed typing. Let the computers chase this ghost, he thought. I’ll find Gabriel in the next two days.

  He finished his message a minute later and sent it off to Berlin. By the time he reached the tarmac, hidden software programs awoke within captured computers all over the world. Fragments of computer consciousness began to assemble like an army of zombies sitting quietly in an enormous room. They waited without resistance, without consciousness of time, until a command forced them to start searching.

  In the suburbs of Madrid, a fourteen-year-old boy played an online fantasy game. In Toronto, a retired building inspector posted comments about his favorite team in a hockey forum. A few seconds later, both of their computers worked a little bit slower, but neither noticed the change. On the surface, everything was the same, but now the electronic servants obeyed a new master with a new command.

  Find the Traveler.

  4

  G abriel pressed a button on his cell phone and checked the time. It was one o’clock in the morning, but noises still rose up from the street. He could hear a car horn and a distant police siren. A vehicle with a loud stereo was cruising down the block, and the thumping bass of a rap song sounded like the beat of a muffled heart.

  The Traveler unzipped the top half of his sleeping bag and sat up. Illumination from a streetlight leaked in through the whitewashed windows, and he could see Hollis Wilson lying on a folding cot six feet away from him. The former martial-arts teacher was breathing steadily, and Gabriel decided that he was asleep.

  It had been twenty-four hours since he had learned that the people of New Harmony were dead and his father was still alive. Gabriel wondered how he was supposed to find someone who had disappeared from his life fifteen years ago. Was his father in this world or had he crossed over to another realm? Gabriel lay back down on the cot and raised his left hand. Late at night, he felt receptive to the attractions—and dangers—of his new power.

  For a few minutes he focused on the Light inside his body. Then came the difficult moment: still concentrating on the Light, he attempted to move his hand without consciously thinking about it. Sometimes this seemed impossible; how could you choose to move your body and then ignore that choice? Gabriel breathed deeply and the fingers of his hand twitched forward. Little points of Light—like the stars of a constellation—floated in the shadowy darkness while his physical hand was limp and lifeless.

  He moved his arm and the Light was reabsorbed by his body. Gabriel was shivering and breathing hard. He sat up again, pulled his legs out of the sleeping bag, and placed his bare feet on the cold wood floor. You’re acting like an idiot, he told himself. This isn’t a party trick. Either cross over or stay in this world.

  Wearing a T-shirt and cotton sweatpants, Gabriel slipped through a gap in the tarps and entered the main part of the loft. He used the bathroom, then walked over to the kitchen area to get some water from the sink. Maya was sitting on the couch near the women’s sleeping area. When the Harlequin was recovering from her bullet wound, she had spent most of her time sleeping. Now that Maya was able to walk around the city, she was filled with restless energy.

  “Everything okay?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. I’m just thirsty.”

  He turned on the cold-water tap and drank directly from the faucet. One of the things he liked about New York City was the water. When he’d lived in Los Angeles with Michael, the public water always had a faint chemical taste.

  Gabriel walked back across the loft and sat beside Maya. Even after the argument about his father, he still enjoyed looking at her. Maya had her Sikh mother’s black hair and her German father’s strong features. Her eyes were a distinctive pale blue, like two faint dots of watercolor floating on a white background. Out on the street she concealed her eyes beneath sunglasses, and a wig covered her hair. But the Harlequin couldn’t disguise how she moved her body. She walked into a grocery store and stood in a subway car with the balanced posture of a fighter who could take the first punch and not be knocked off her feet.

  When they first encountered each other in Los Angeles, he thought Maya was the most unusual person he had ever met in his life. The Harlequin was a modern woman in many ways—an expert in all aspects of surveillance technology. But she also had carried the weight of hundreds of years of tradition on her shoulders. Maya’s father, Thorn, had taught his little girl that Harlequins were Damned by the flesh. Saved by the blood. Maya seemed to believe that she was guilty of some fundamental error that could only be corrected by risking her life.

  Maya saw the world clearly—any foolishness and clutter in her perceptions had been destroyed years ago. Gabriel knew that she would never break the rules and fall in love with a Traveler. And right now, his own future was so unclear that he felt that it was equally irresponsible for him to change their relationship.

  He and Maya had their defined roles as Traveler and Harlequin, and yet he was drawn to her physically. When she was recovering from the bullet wound, he had picked her up and carried her from the cot to the couch, feeling the weight of her body and smelling her skin and hair. Sometimes the tarp wasn’t fully closed and he saw her ta
lking to Vicki as she pulled on her clothes. There was nothing between them—but there was everything. Even sitting beside her on the couch felt both pleasant and uncomfortable.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said gently.

  “I can’t close my eyes.” When Maya was tired, her British accent became stronger. “The brain won’t stop.”

  “I can understand that. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got too many thoughts and not enough places to put them.”

  There was another moment of silence and he listened to her breathing. Gabriel reminded himself that Maya had lied about his father. Were there other secrets? What else did he need to know? The Harlequin moved a few inches away from Gabriel so they weren’t so close. Maya’s body tensed and he heard her take a deep breath, as if she were about to do something dangerous.

  “I’ve also been thinking about the argument we had last night.”

  “You should have told me about my father,” Gabriel said.

  “I was trying to protect you. Don’t you believe that?”

  “I’m still not satisfied.” Gabriel leaned toward her. “Okay—so my father sent a letter to the people at New Harmony. Are you sure you don’t know where the letter came from?”

  “I told you about Carnivore. The government is constantly monitoring e-mail. Martin would never have sent crucial information through the Internet.”

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  “You’re a Traveler, Gabriel. You can look at my face and see that I’m not lying.”

  “I didn’t think I needed to do that. Not with you.” Gabriel got up from the couch and walked back to his cot. He lay down, but it was difficult to sleep. Gabriel knew Maya cared about him, but she didn’t seem to understand how much he wanted to find his father. Only his father could tell him what he was supposed to do now that he was a Traveler. He knew that he was changing, becoming a different person, but he didn’t know why.

  Closing his eyes, he dreamed of his father walking down a dark street in New York City. Gabriel shouted and ran after him, but his father was too far away to hear. Matthew Corrigan turned a corner, and when Gabriel reached it his father had disappeared.

  Within the dream, Gabriel stood beneath a streetlight on pavement dark and glistening from the rain. He glanced around him and saw a surveillance camera mounted on the roof of a building. There was another camera on the lamppost and a half dozen others at various points on the empty street. That was when he knew that Michael was also searching, but his brother had the cameras and the scanners and all the other devices of the Vast Machine. It was like a race—a terrible competition between them—and there was no way he could win.

  5

  A lthough Harlequins sometimes saw themselves as the last defenders of history, their historical knowledge was based more on tradition than on the facts found in textbooks. Growing up in London, Maya had memorized the location of the traditional execution sites scattered around the city. Her father had shown her each place during their daily lessons on weapons and street fighting. Tyburn was for felons, the Tower of London was for traitors, the shriveled bodies of dead pirates hung for years from the Execution Dock at Wapping. At various times, the authorities had killed Jews, Catholics, and a long list of dissenters who worshipped a different god or preached a different vision of the world. A certain spot in West Smithfield was used for the execution of heretics, witches, and women who had killed their husbands—as well as the anonymous Harlequins who had died protecting Travelers.

  Maya felt the same sense of accumulated misery the moment she entered the Criminal Court building in lower Manhattan. Standing just inside the main entrance, she gazed upward at the clock that hung from the two-story ceiling. The building’s white marble walls, the Art Deco lighting fixtures, and the ornate railing on the stairways suggested the grand sensibility of an earlier era. Then she lowered her eyes and studied the world that surrounded her: the police and the criminals, the bailiffs and lawyers, the victims and witnesses—everyone shuffling across the dirty floor to the gateway metal detector that awaited them.

  Dimitri Aronov was a plump older man with three strands of greasy black hair plastered across the top of his bald head. Carrying a battered leather briefcase, the Russian émigré approached the metal detector. When he entered the gateway, he stopped for a second and glanced over his shoulder at Maya.

  “What’s the problem?” the guard asked. “Keep moving….”

  “Of course, Officer. Of course.”

  Aronov stepped through the gateway, then sighed and rolled his eyes as if he just remembered that he left an important file in his car. He passed back through the checkpoint and followed Maya out the revolving door. For a moment, they stood at the top of the broad stairway and looked out at the skyline of lower Manhattan. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Thick gray clouds hung over the city, and the sun was a blurred patch of light on the western horizon.

  “So? What do you think, Miss Strand?”

  “I don’t think anything—yet.”

  “You saw it yourself. No alarm. No arrest.”

  “Let’s take a look at your product.”

  Together, they came down the steps, zigzagged through the sluggish traffic clogging Centre Street, and walked into the small park at the middle of the square. The Collect Pond Park had once been the site of a massive pool of raw sewage during the early days of New York. It was still a dark place, overshadowed by the tall buildings that surrounded the patch of ground. While several signs commanded New Yorkers not to feed pigeons, a flock of the birds fluttered back and forth and pecked at the dirt.

  They sat down on a wooden bench just beyond the range of the park’s two surveillance cameras. Aronov placed the briefcase on the bench and wiggled his fingers. “Please inspect the merchandise.”

  Maya snapped open the top of the briefcase. She peered inside and found a handgun that looked like a 9mm automatic. The weapon had over-and-under barrels and a textured grip. When she picked it up, she discovered that it was very light—almost like a child’s toy.

  Aronov began to speak in the cadence of a salesman. “The frame, the grip, and the trigger are high-density plastic. The barrels, the slides, and firing pin are superhard ceramic—as strong as steel. As you just witnessed, the assembled weapon will pass through any standard metal detector. Airports are not as easy. Most of them have back scanners or millimeter wave machines. But you can break the weapon into two or three pieces and hide them in a laptop computer.”

  “What does it fire?”

  “The bullets were always the problem. The CIA has designed the same kind of gun using a caseless system. Amusing, yes? They are supposed to be fighting terrorism, so they created the perfect terrorist weapon. But my friends in Moscow went for a less sophisticated solution. May I?”

  Aronov reached into the briefcase. He pushed back the slide and revealed what looked like a stubby brown cigarette with a black tip. “This is a paper cartridge with a ceramic bullet. Think of it as the modern equivalent of the system used by an eighteenth-century musket. The propellant ignites in two stages and pushes the bullet out the barrel. It’s slow to reload, so…” Aronov wrapped his left hand around the gun and snapped the second barrel into place. “You get two quick shots, but that’s all you’re going to need. The bullet cuts through your target like a piece of shrapnel.”

  Maya leaned away from the briefcase and looked around to see if anyone was watching. The gray façade of the Criminal Courts building loomed above them. Police cars and the white-and-blue buses used to transport prisoners were double-parked on the street. She could hear the traffic circling the little park, smell Aronov’s floral cologne mixed with the slippery scent of wet leaves.

  “Impressive, yes? You must agree.”

  “How much?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars. Cash.”

  “For a handgun? That’s nonsense.”

  “My dear Miss Strand…” The Russian smiled and shook his head. “It would be
difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone else selling this weapon. Besides, we’ve done business together. You realize that my merchandise is of the best quality.”

  “I don’t even know if the gun can fire.”

  Aronov shut the briefcase and placed it on the pavement beside his feet. “If you wish, we can drive out to a garage owned by a friend of mine in New Jersey. No neighbors. Thick walls. The cartridges are expensive, but I’ll let you shoot two of them before you give me the money.”

  “Let me think it over.”

  “I’ll drive past the street entrance to Lincoln Center at seven o’clock this evening. If you’re there, you get a special deal for one night only—ten thousand dollars and six cartridges.”

  “A special deal is eight thousand.”

  “Nine.”

  Maya nodded. “I’ll pay you that if everything works as promised.”

  As she left the park and cut across Centre Street, Maya called Hollis on her cell phone. He answered his phone immediately, but didn’t speak.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Columbus Park.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.” She dropped the phone into her shoulder bag and took out a random number generator—an electronic device about the size of a matchbox that hung from a cord around her neck.

  Maya and the other Harlequins called their enemies the Tabula because this group saw human consciousness as a tabula rasa—a blank slate that could be scrawled with slogans of hatred and fear. While the Tabula believed that everything could be controlled, Harlequins cultivated a philosophy of randomness. Sometimes they made their choices with dice or the number generator.

  An odd number means turn left, Maya thought. Even means go right. She pressed a button on the device, and when 365 flashed on the display screen, she headed left down Hogan Place.