Deep State Stealth

by Vikki Kestell

  A gliding form—scarcely discernible through the swirling fog but recognizable for what it was—slithered in my direction then paused. Motionless.

  “Snakes,” I whispered. “Why’d it have to be snakes?”

  I swallowed the thick wad of fear stuck in my throat.

  Well, no worries, right? I’d cooked up snake before. Cajun style.

  If it’s smokin’, we’re cookin’; if it’s black, it’s done.

  Time to fry me some snake!

  I grinned, took a step back, and brought my hands up, palms facing each other, anticipating a tongue of sparking, flashing electricity to bloom and build between them.

  Not a blessed thing happened.

  The smirk dropped from my mouth. “What the hey, Nano? What gives?”

  The nanomites did not answer. The “warehouse” in my mind—that place where the nanomites and I often communed—felt as forsaken as the emptiness around me.

  “Wait. How is that even possible?”

  The nanocloud and I were indivisible and inseparable. They couldn’t leave my body without killing me—and I was fairly certain that I wasn’t dead—so where were they?

  “Nano? Talk to me.”

  Nada.

  The form hiding within the mist inched forward, so I again held my palms toward each other. To my chagrin, I could not activate the electrical current that should have leapt effortlessly from my fingertips to build within the cradle of my hands.

  Although the head of the snake was severed, the President has uncovered evidence . . .

  More movement. The swirling miasma out in front of me undulated in telltale coils. Wow, huge coils! Mounds knee-high and as wide as my hips. The vaporous body weaved side to side, closer with each turn—and beneath the murky, obscuring haze, the hint of something broad and flat . . . pointed toward me, leading the way, advancing with every turn of those winding mounds.

  The mist swirled, for an instant disclosing the gleam of a golden eye.

  “But the head! We cut it off!”

  I was babbling. The nanomites had deserted me—and my defenses had failed me.

  Not taking my eyes from the monster’s approach, I backed away, thinking I should make a run for it—but I did not relish the idea of turning my back on the serpentine creature concealed in the mist.

  I screamed aloud, “Nano!”

  No response.

  “Nano? Where did you go? I need you!”

  I scurried backward in quick, panicked steps, on the verge of “losing it.” If I turned tail and ran, I knew—with horrifying certitude—that before I gained enough distance, the creature would fling its massive body forward and loop its constricting, crushing coils about me.

  A pair of flared nostrils, followed by two glittering eyes, lifted above the mist, and the head revealed itself. I could not look away: The eyes—intelligent and cruel—were mesmerizing, no doubt how he beguiled his prey into immobility.

  The beast’s tongue flicked once, twice . . . then the body of the snake gathered itself and shot forward.

  I bolted and ran.

  Only pure survival instinct and nano-imbued reflexes saved me—but for how long? I could see nothing ahead of me except more shrouding haze. I had no sense of direction, no avenue of escape. Still, I sprinted for all I was worth, terror fueling my flight, all the while shrieking, “Nano! Nano!”

  The nanomites did not answer me, but another Voice did.

  This is not a physical enemy, Jayda. You cannot combat a spiritual foe with natural weapons, nor will your Help come from what you know or can do yourself.

  I felt the serpent’s presence closing. Legs pumping hard, I planted one foot and jinked to the right, hoping to win some ground, but I already knew I could not outrun the beast.

  A heavy weight slammed against the back of my knees; I stumbled and went down. Immediately, thick rings looped around me. The steely coils flexed and wound more tightly. The rings pinioned my arms, so I kicked and thrashed with my legs.

  It was a futile exercise. The more I struggled and screamed, the more the snake’s muscles contracted until they were crushing my ribs. The pain was excruciating, the pressure on my lungs so great that I could no longer draw a full breath.

  The serpent was killing me.

  I kicked out for all I was worth, a last ineffectual effort.

  “Jesus . . . Jesus, please help me,” I wheezed.

  Part 1:

  Deep State Incursion

  Chapter 1

  “GEMMA! GEMMA! WAKE up!”

  I couldn’t move my arms; they were pinned to my sides, but I twisted as far as I could within my restraints and broke free. I hauled my knees up and kicked out with every bit of my waning strength. My feet connected . . . with my husband’s chest.

  “Ooof!”

  Zander’s arms let go as he flew across the mattress, sailed off the edge of the bed, and smashed into the bedroom wall. When the fetters binding me dropped away, I sprang from the bed, throwing my arms wide as I did. One hand connected with the cute little bedside lamp on my nightstand. The pitiful thing exploded against the wall—about the same time Zander’s impact rattled our room and likely the apartment below us.

  Oh, dear. Our neighbors are going to be really unhappy with us.

  My eyes snapped open. “Zander?”

  He groaned.

  “Zander! Zander, are you all right?”

  His reply was muffled. “Dang it, Gemma!”

  My automatic response was, “Jayda. Don’t call me Gemma.”

  “Fine. Dang it, Jayda! What in the world?”

  By then I’d switched on the overhead light. “I had a bad dream.”

  “Ya think?” Zander picked himself up, massaging the top of one shoulder as he stood. “I’d been trying to wake you up for a while before you used those jackhammers you call legs to launch me out of bed and just about put me through the wall.”

  “I’m sorry, Zander. It . . . the dream. It was so ugly. Scary.”

  My voice shook.

  I shook.

  I could see the serpent’s head rising from the mist, fixing its eyes on me. Evil. Malevolent. Lethal.

  Jayda Cruz, we, too, attempted to interrupt your REM state when we detected your abnormally elevated heartrate and shortness of breath. However, you did not respond to our attempts to wake you.

  Zander and I heard my nanocloud “speak,” and we looked across the bed at each other, puzzled that the nanomites’ efforts to wake me had been as ineffectual as Zander’s had been.

  Jayda Cruz, your vital signs indicate that you are quite shaken. Do you wish us to stimulate calming endorphins?

  “No.”

  Your heartrate is still uncharacteristically rapid. Are you certain—

  “No. Thank you.”

  Very well. However, we—

  “Oh, stuff a sock in it, Nano!”

  I was so peeved with the nanomites for “abandoning” me in my dream that snubbing them felt weirdly gratifying. And, yes, I get how stupid that sounds—it was a dream—but the terror of that shadowy place clung to me the way the murky fog had adhered to my feet. I shivered in its grip.

  “Hey. Come ’ere, babe.” Zander opened his arms, and I went to him—until his arms closed about me.

  I pulled back. “Don’t. Please.”

  “Don’t what? Don’t hold you?”

  I teared up then. “I dreamed a stupid, ginormous snake was chasing me. It caught me and twined itself around me and was squeezing me to death. When I woke up, you had your arms around me and-and-and—”

  “And I got catapulted from the bed.”

  “Uh-huh. Pretty much.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I-I don’t know,” I sniveled. “It was different from any kind of nightmare I’ve ever had.”

  The bizarre, ultra-vivid dream was stuck on repeat behind my eyelids, and my legs felt like so much soft rubber, incapable of holding me up.

  “Maybe we should make some coffee, and you can tell
me about it?”

  Zander glanced around for the clock. He found it on the carpet with the broken remains of the cute lamp. The clock’s glowing red numbers stared at the ceiling.

  “Well, well. Four o’clock on a Saturday morning. What lazy bums we are.”

  His little joke bombed. I tried to chuckle for him anyway, but I couldn’t pull it off. My attempt fell as flat as his joke.

  He arched his brows. “So, coffee?”

  “Coffee. Yes, please.”

  We fumbled for our clothes, pulling on shorts and t-shirts to accommodate Maryland’s June weather. The eighty-something temps were no big deal, but the humidity was brutal—us coming from Albuquerque’s normally bone-dry climate.

  A trip outside in Maryland’s high humidity felt like hot yoga while breathing through a thick, wet blanket. Within minutes, crisp, freshly laundered clothes clung to our skin as though coated with damp, gummy paste. The muggy air did weird, inexplicable things to my hair, too. I mean, how can hair be limp and frizzy at the same time?

  While the coffee was brewing, we sat on the sofa, and I relaxed enough to lean against Zander and let him drape his arm over my shoulder. In fits and starts, I repeated the dream to him. I had no difficulty remembering its specifics. Unlike an ordinary dream, whose minutiae and emotional “pull” tailed off within moments of waking, every detail and nuance of the nightmare was like fresh paint slapped on my brain—slick, shiny, and sticky.

  When I finished the telling, Zander got up, poured two mugs of coffee, and returned. He didn’t say anything when he handed me my mug but was pensive as he processed what I’d recounted.

  I sipped on my coffee, savoring its hot, biting familiarity. I leaned my head back against the sofa . . . and toppled down a rabbit hole in my own thoughts.

  . . . ALL THE BOOKS say that the initial year of marriage is the honeymoon, that the real work of forging a lasting union normally takes place over the next ten years.

  Normally? What’s that? To suggest that Zander and I would experience a conventional “honeymoon” year would be an absurdity—and it was a sure bet that we would never share a predictable or typical “next ten years.”

  How could I have known that the possibility of an ordinary life went right out the window the first time I entered those tunnels in the old Manzano Weapons Storage Facility? I’d had no idea then how that single choice would alter every facet of my future—and now, my husband’s future, too. Because of that one, fateful decision, anything and everything about “us” would forever fall outside the scope of common or ordinary.

  Marriage has joined my life to Zander’s and his to mine, but we are not in this alone. Trillions of intelligent nanomites have “rewired” the synapses of our brains, modified our bodies’ base molecular structures, and enhanced our physiologies so that we can accommodate both their numbers and their needs.

  The bottom line is that the nanomites—the two powerful swarms we call “nanoclouds”—are and will continue to be our companions in this journey through life. We share a symbiotic relationship with them as members of an alliance like none other.

  Yes, the nanomites need us as “hosts” to carry them but, because of the changes they made in us, now we need them, too. The alterations to our cellular structures are irreversible. Should the nanomites ever decide to extricate themselves from us, our bodies would not survive. Put plainly, without the nanomites, we would die.

  I guess what I’m getting at is that Zander and I have already struggled and worked through more difficulties and obstacles leading up to our whirlwind wedding than most couples face in a lifetime—making our relationship an outlier that defies categorization. We skew the curve so drastically that it’s best not to compare our marriage to any norm.

  Our “partnership,” our merger with the nanomites, has uniquely equipped us for the work ahead of us—the work we’d promised the President. In response to the President’s plea for help in uncovering those involved in the plot to assassinate him and hijack his administration, the nanomites had secured a job for me with the NSA at Ft. Meade in Maryland.

  Zander and I had married and, only days later, moved across the country to Columbia, Maryland. We spent the next fourteen days traipsing all over our new corner of the world, getting our Maryland driver’s licenses, jogging miles around our neighborhood, sightseeing in D.C., visiting a prospective church, hiking the Allegheny mountains, finding fun places to eat out—in short, enjoying our honeymoon and forgetting the pain, struggles, and wounds of the last year and a half.

  Three weeks. We’d been married a mere three weeks, and in that time, Zander’s love had been the comforting balm I needed as I grieved my many losses.

  My sister Genie gone. Check.

  My childhood home gone. Check.

  Jake—last tie to my beloved aunt—gone. Check.

  Even my identity as Gemma Keyes gone. Double check.

  Three weeks of married bliss, of no real responsibilities, of shutting out the world and its cares, of putting danger and intrigue far from our minds. Three weeks of the closest thing to “normalcy” Zander and I would know.

  Three blessed weeks of, “Nano! Lights out!” more times than I’d believed possible . . .

  But our idyllic honeymoon was ending. Come Monday—

  “JAYDA?”

  “Huh? Oh. Sorry about that. Guess I wandered off.”

  “Yeah, I figured, but, um, while you were ‘out there,’ I was thinking about your whopper of a nightmare.”

  “Can’t believe how tangible it was. Still is.”

  Zander probably intuited my tension, because he started rubbing my neck in gentle, soothing circles. “Is it okay if we talk about it?”

  “I suppose.”

  He didn’t jump right in, but eventually said, “Well, my first observation is that when you called on Jesus, the dream ended. I couldn’t wake you up, and the nanomites couldn’t wake you, but Jesus did. I think that is significant.”

  “I had tried to wake myself up, too, and hadn’t been able to.”

  I thought for a long moment. “Zander, do you think this dream means something? I mean, you know, not real, but something spiritual?”

  Zander smiled. “Are you saying spiritual things aren’t real?”

  My brow furrowed. “Real? Like, materially real?”

  “By definition, spiritual things are not material or physical. Does that mean spiritual things are less real than material or physical things?”

  Leave it to Zander to dig down into a thought-provoking theological issue.

  I pulled my feet up on the couch and turned sideways, sitting cross-legged so we could watch each other. “That’s an interesting question. Jesus says in John 4, God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth. The Bible says God is spirit, and he is unquestionably real, so . . . I suppose spiritual things must be real.”

  “Sure they are. Just because we can’t see or touch spiritual things doesn’t make them any less real—or any less important—particularly in light of 2 Corinthians 4:18.”

  “Wait. I’ve got that one: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

  “Yup. The seen, physical world is temporary. It will all pass away. The unseen, spiritual world, however, is eternal. Guess which one is more ‘real’?”

  I pondered Zander’s assertions. Along with an accelerated metabolism, the nanomites had quickened my mental facilities, giving me the ability to read voraciously and retain what I’d learned. I had devoured and memorized the entire New Testament—in three translations—but memorizing Scripture and grasping its revelations and implications are two very different critters. As a new Christian, I had a lot to learn.

  “Okay,” I said, “let me rephrase my question: Do you think my dream has spiritual significance?”

  Zander shrugged. “Some dreams are just the body’s way of resting and recharging. Other dreams are the result of too m
uch spicy barbecue or watching movies best left unwatched. But then there are dreams sent from God. The Bible is filled with accounts of important, meaningful dreams.”

  “Yes. After the President asked me to help him, I had a dream from God, remember? Within the dream, I found myself in a scene from the Book of Esther—for such a time as this.”

  “That phrase wasn’t the most important piece of that dream though, was it?”

  I sobered. “No, it wasn’t. The apex of the dream was when Jesus said, Dare to trust me, Jayda, and added, Those who know me, dare to trust me. His words gave me the courage to commit to the President that I would help him identify those who were helping Harmon overthrow his administration.”

  “Well, then, that raises a different question: What has changed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you said Jesus gave you the courage to accept the President’s assignment, but now you’re afraid.”

  That stopped me cold—because he was right. I was scheduled to start my job at the NSA on Monday and, over the last week, I’d become increasingly troubled at the prospect. Whenever I thought about my first day on the job, the specter of Cushing-like adversaries loomed large in my imagination.

  More running. More hiding. More danger. More loss and grief.

  Zander watched these emotions flit across my face. “For a moment, let’s table the fear factor, and focus on the dream itself. I think we should dissect the dream and identify its ‘tells.’”

  “Tells?”

  “The symbols or indicators, if you will, that suggest the dream’s meaning. For instance, what was pursuing you?”

  I shuddered. “That snake.”

  The lines at the corners of Zander’s beautiful gray eyes crinkled as he smiled. “That snake? Was it just any ol’ snake?”

  “No. Categorically no. The evil emanating from it was palpable. It was intelligent, too.”

  “Okay, so the granddaddy of all serpents. Um, ring a bell?”

  “What? You mean Satan?” I almost scoffed—until I remembered Zander’s question: Are you saying spiritual things aren’t real?