The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  Everyone under him had focused resources into solving the attack. Perhaps the people behind the attacks might have been the same people on the screen? If so, was Hassani one of them? Would he have taken a bullet to blind them all? He recalled the odd message they had intercepted, the one in a language no one could identify and later sent over to the CIA. Perhaps the more important question was not where the message originated, but where it was received.

  If the goal had been disruption, then it meant they weren’t afraid of him. This tossed around in his head while he bit down on his tongue. Who was the mole? Who was the goddamn mole? The answer was on the receiving end of that message.

  Even if the battle was lost today, the war was just beginning, and it would be a battlefield like the one on Harold’s monitors. The skein of network dots and flashing wires, the heartbeat of the QX throbbing like neuronic pathways over the brain of the Internet. He could see a warehouse full of them, pumping blood to the body parts of the network. The heart of Turbulence would be the shield of America.

  They were staring at him, so sure of his destruction, blinking stoically as if the lot of them were pallbearers picking up a casket. They swam in the river of data, but they failed to understand its waters. Most data was inconsequential, but eddies of it would form contextually useful confluences. Words could be filtered away, funneled to crops where the seeds of deception sprouted. Manipulating a man was impossible without the right tool. SigInt provided ninety percent of the hammer. Where a hammer didn’t exist, one could be created. People left bits of themselves throughout the Internet, mosaics that could be interpolated, predicted. Spoofing reality was as simple as manipulating bitstreams. The perceived complexity of the world really boiled down to ones and zeroes—their ordering, encoding, and movement through a channel, the only necessary components to seal a person’s fate.

  He glanced back at the men in the room gawking at him, waiting for a cue. He had never felt so alone, and in the moment he missed his wife. He would need his family through this, and he vowed to reconcile with Emily. But to do that, he would need to show her more than just intent. There would have to be sacrifice. He decided he would stop drinking. To hell with it, he told himself. If it’s a war we’re going to have, I need to be sober through it.

  All of the eyes in the room crawled over him like ants on a dead locust. He turned his gaze to each one of them, but not a man would speak. Men with little power had little to say.

  “Shut it fucking down,” Montgomery said.

  “Shut what down?” Harold asked.

  “The whole thing,” Montgomery said. “Shut it down!”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Of course we can. What do you think StormBrew is all about?”

  Montgomery pulled a card out of his wallet. He remembered putting it in there, wondering when the day would come. He was surprised the day had arrived so soon. “Call the phone companies on this list and give them the T-1 stop command. The names on this card will know what it is. Give them the authorization code written on the card. Tell each of them to call me immediately. Any nodes still alive we should be able to kill.”

  Chapter 27

  “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  -Benjamin Franklin

  An explosion caught us off guard. Half the building was leveled and one of the three copters was lost to a missile. We weren’t able to ascertain what had gone wrong, but did it really matter? During the moment of chaos and pandemonium, Split got panicky and shot one of the prisoners trying to crawl away. The west side of the building engulfed in flames, large pockets of fire jumped up walls and licked the rafters. Rubble scattered everywhere, people buried beneath it. Half of O-Team wounded or dead. Merrill had been thrown across the room by the blast and lay unconscious. Through my ringing ears, Seee ordered me to replace him, commanding me to keep one man on the prisoners and use the rest to care for the wounded and evacuate them to the helicopters. He gave me a two-minute ETD to move out.

  Four minutes later, both helicopters teemed with Minutemen. Our pilot opened up the throttle, lifted up the collective, and we rose into the air. The rest of the Jackson Lake Lodge had been set on fire and burned behind us. The remaining Fed voting members had been shot. They burned with The Minutemen dead in a huge arc of towering flames.

  Out in the distance we could see a patch of woods burning. A crash spot. The co-pilot told us he saw the drones going at one another.

  I searched the cabin for another E-Team member, but they were all aboard the other helicopter. The remaining men in O-Team had been split between the two. Near the cockpit, Seee and I held onto a rafter next to the gunner. I stared past the gunner’s shoulder into the night. The splash of orange from the drone crash now like a match light thinning in the distance. The shadowy landscape below whirled by like a dark river. It reminded me of Burns and the numbness I felt after drowning him. I suddenly realized The Abattoir wasn’t as much about killing as it was desensitization. Anesthesia injected into us so when a man’s head gets cut off, no matter whose it was, you had no need to question guilt or innocence. No conscientious objectors, judges, arbitrators, or mediators raised their hands saying “wait a second.” We had all been convinced that to cut out the cancer, you needed a sharp knife. According to Seee’s thinking, the deed was the vessel of delivery. The population needed to feel vindicated, to bask in a euphoric wave that justice had finally been served. But what would be the reaction when we were all hunted down and executed? Perhaps Seee already had the answer swimming in his head.

  I turned to Seee and asked why he wasn’t flying with his original team, and he told me he had left Kumo in command. It seemed to wake him from his reverie as he turned to the Minutemen crammed in the copter and yelled out, “I’ve got one thing to say to you.”

  There was a pause as everyone waited.

  “Mission accomplished.”

  After that, the Minutemen began to relax, chatting amongst themselves. It was difficult to gauge morale, but a renewed sense of victory permeated throughout the cabin when Merrill finally came to. His face was blood-caked and cut. He asked which mule had kicked him. The fact he was alive and making jokes about a missing victory bottle and how one of the Fed Police had stolen his pack of smokes diverted everyone’s mind away from the common thread of angst.

  Like everyone, I wondered why continue with the ski masks? What was the point now after Seee had revealed himself over the camera? Everyone was a walking corpse. The giant was now awake.

  Seee shook me by the shoulders. “Doesn’t it feel good to believe in something?” he asked, elated with the moment. “With each swing of the sword, I felt like a drowning man allowed a breath.”

  I nodded. “I think the giant’s legs have been cut at the ankles.” He smiled, and I took his hand in mine and bumped shoulders with him. But my heart wasn’t in it. He had martyred not only himself, but all of The Minutemen who fought bravely for him. Was this the price of victory?

  The copters hovered in the air over the rendezvous point. Seee told us to leave all of our weapons inside. Merrill was put back in command of X-Team. We scaled down the ropes and hit the ground. Once we were all down, Merrill ordered us to change into our old clothes, pack up our stuff, and get the bikes started. I moved towards the trees where we had left the bikes. The night was cooler now. Behind me, I heard the copters lift off and fade away in the distance, perhaps on the way to be booby-trapped or blown up somewhere.

  A figure appeared in front of me from behind a tree. The white patch of E-1 was barely discernible on the black commando uniform. A woman’s voice called out my name.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked.

  “I guessed, but your face blends in with the dark.”

  I laughed. “I am the dark.” I gazed into her mask, trying to find her eyes within. My tone softened. “I’m glad you made it.”

  She put her hand over my heart. “Me
too.”

  Even in the darkness I could see her blink a few times before she turned away. “What is it with us?” I asked, grabbing one of her wrists as she moved away. She turned back to me, eyes slowly coming into mine. I could see her lips move, and then they quickly shut. I yanked down lightly on her wrist, hoping this might provoke a response, but she still didn’t answer. She cozied up to me and put her free hand under my mask and over my cheek, cupping it for a second. Slowly, she slipped her hand out of the mask. Like a whip, she lifted it back, and slapped me across the face while breaking my grasp on her wrist. Then she disappeared into the starry darkness.

  The teams split up, riding out in the thick of the night without head-or taillights. The whole operation had lasted only thirty-five minutes, yet it seemed as if a century had passed. We pushed along a dirt path for a while. The high hum of my bike rung in my ears. Wheels dug into the hard dusty road as we careened through the darkness. With the moonless sky and stars twinkling out in the vastness of the atmosphere, I thought of Kicking Bear under his tepee looking for light that would never come. I kept gazing up, searching for the spotlight of a chopper to swoop down upon us and strafe us with machinegun fire. But none came. Our hacked drone warriors had done the job, and I thought about the irony in that—how a weakness had become a strength.

  We stopped at a clump of woods and Seee told me to follow him while Merrill and the rest of X-Team veered away. I wondered what this meant, but I wasn’t given the opportunity to question it. We rode by the burned-out farmhouse and abandoned barn, but passed it, continuing until we hit the highway. There we stopped, hiding the bikes behind a patch of trees. Then something happened I didn’t understand. A car approached slowly, lit up the brights once, and stopped. Seee stepped out onto the road while the driver rolled down the window. Something was passed, and then the car took off. Seee stepped back off the road and told me to get back on the bike. After another couple of minutes trailing down another rugged path, we came to a stop. We threw off our helmets, and for the first time since the old barn, I took off my mask. Seee made his way to a break in the woods and began stripping the camouflage webbing off a two-seater Cessna. “This is just to get us past any initial roadblocks. It’s dangerous to take back roads as well within a certain circumference.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Can I ask what the purpose of that was back there on the highway?”

  “It was a simulation.”

  “Simulating what?”

  “A lie we might have to tell one day.”

  “A simulation of a lie makes it more the truth. Is that it?”

  “That’s why I did it.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “You’re with me,” he said. “I suppose so. I’m pretty hot right now.”

  We dragged the plane out into an open field. The blinking lights on the wings had been smashed out, but enough starlight gleamed on the runway’s path. Within a couple of minutes, we climbed up in the plane and took off, altitude kept low.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Seee said. “Why me? What am I doing here?”

  I sat silent, gazing out of the window listening to his voice over the high throb of the props. The red giant, Alpha Herculis, was out there beaming in the night, and now I stretched my neck to look for it.

  “We’ve got one more mission to do, you and I. I also wanted to thank you personally for everything you’ve done.” Words of praise rarely came from Seee’s lips. In the moment, they captured me. “The Anthill has told me you are still holding some things back though.”

  “I am a man not trusted,” I said. “I understand why. I haven’t complained. But why should I put one-hundred percent of my faith in The Cause if The Cause doesn’t trust me? I’ve already been used as a pawn for Stellar Wind.”

  “I have no disputes with that,” Seee said. “It has been a challenge to convince others of your loyalty. I won’t deny it.”

  “So you believe in me then?”

  “I do,” he said. “I have from the start.”

  “Did you know from the beginning? Before I even got to The Abattoir?”

  “We knew about Pelletier. He knew something about us, but not enough. But what was he going to tell his superiors even if he knew more? These are political men. They think of containment. But now, we have forced their hand.”

  “You’ve fried us all,” I said bitterly.

  “Not the case. Some will go underground. Others have had elaborate alibis created for them. Beyond the electronic trail, we have people trails too.”

  “The Company will cut out the whole heart of operations now.”

  “We agree, but they will likely do it slowly.”

  “The Abattoir is blown,” I said.

  “We don’t think so, but we have other locations if it’s the case.”

  “Rose might have found out about it.”

  “How?” Seee asked.

  “Well, they were dialed in to my machine when I was hacking into Rose. Certainly she caught that.”

  “She should have erased it from her memory. Isn’t that the case? It’s what I’ve been told by The Anthill.”

  “I think so,” I said. “But it’s difficult to tell. She has added complexity. We are dealing with a neuromorphic machine. The Rose at the test lab is not the Rose underground in Bluffdale.”

  “We will plan for that contingency,” Seee said.

  The interior of the plane was alight with the glow of instruments. The air speed indicator showed 80 MPH, the altimeter read 2000 feet; the directional gyro said we were flying southwest.

  “So what’s your opinion of tonight?” Seee asked.

  “I’m still thinking about it. It’s what you said you’d do, right? Rip out the heart of the financial oligarchy? Will it sway public opinion? Will they think it was just?”

  “Justice has dissolved in this country. No longer is it the salt of the people. It is water—the liquid to the slippery slope of tyranny.”

  “You are saying that law is no longer equally distributed,” I said.

  “Do you think it is?”

  “No, but will tonight really change the power structure?”

  “True power lives dormant in the masses. In the police state we live in today, the only way to get it to wake is if there is simultaneous acceptance of the same idea and a willingness to fight for it. This is what we have accomplished today.”

  “Really?” I asked. “So many people—they believe in nothing but themselves. Ask the sheep for sacrifice and all you’ll see are lambs running from the wolf.”

  “I’m not sure I agree. Isn’t it our duty to protect the lambs? They are our people, are they not?”

  “We must force a choice,” I said. “The cliff or the wolf. The population cannot escape without blood being spilled.”

  “The angry heart beats louder than the arrhythmic one.”

  “A revolution does not burst into flame with dead coals. They must be lit and kept alive. Do you think this one event will change anything?”

  He looked a bit forlorn when I said this. His eye twitched and for a moment I could see this was perhaps the first time he had contemplated the question: what if nothing changed?

  Finally, he said, “I have to believe that it will. Further blood might have to be spilled, but for The Cause the ends justify the means. Not all revolutions turn into violent ones. Look at the Rose Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union; arguably the Iranian Revolution was fairly bloodless. The people were hungry for change.”

  “The common thread you speak about in these cases was a weak, unpopular control authority. That is not what we have today. While unpopular, they are still well within control.”

  “I know,” Seee admitted. “But not as much today as yesterday.”

  “You yourself have preached that anarchy is not the answer.”

  “It isn’t,” Seee said, “but it might be a necessary intermediary.”

 
“What you did was dangerous,” I said. “It exposes all of The Minutemen.”

  “It was a calculated risk. The people must see a real face. Someone who is willing to say enough.”

  “I don’t believe it was the right move. The Cause doesn’t end with today. It starts tomorrow.”

  He smiled at this, pleased with the words, his face aglow with the controls. “You don’t see all of the angles yet. You don’t have all of the information. But you will.”

  Seee flicked the nose lights on and off in a Morse code. A farmer on the ground turned on some lights and for a moment there was a landing strip in front of us before the lights disappeared. It was all Seee needed to guide the plane in for a landing. As we descended, he asked me to put on the mask again, saying he didn’t want me compromised. He told me not to speak, unless I used the modulator.

  We landed in an open field, a strip of land a hundred miles south of Salt Lake City. Once we were on the ground, we jumped out and Seee ran up to the man guiding us in and bound him up in a big bear hug.

  After Seee let the man down, I had almost caught up to them. “We did it!” Seee said.

  “You sure did,” the man said. “We were watching it on the Internet until it went down.”

  “Your Internet went down?” Seee asked.

  “It did,” the man said. “I called around to a couple of neighbors, and it seems I’m not the only one.”

  The man stood burly and stout, a gray-bearded guy with rugged facial features, worker hands rough and callused. I silently took the scratched and scabby hand he offered, but no names passed between us. Although the man averted his eyes and an awkward silence crept between us, a certain politeness in him smoothed the situation.

  “How much did you see before it cut out?” Seee asked.

  The man cackled and said, “Enough to know the chairman is dead and at least one other.”

  “Things are moving fast, my friend,” Seee said. “Let’s get this plane inside.”

  We rolled the Cessna into the barn. Once inside, we didn’t linger. A minute more for a further update and farewell, and we hopped up onto another set of motorcycles with a new set of gear already prepared for us. I slung a new backpack over my shoulders, started up the bike, and rode out of the barn following Seee. We stopped at the edge of the man’s property, and Seee told me a rendezvous address in case we were split up.