by Tarah Benner
After everything she had been through, those assholes had never intended to make good on their promise. Agent Cole and Agent Reuben had just told her what she wanted to hear so that she’d bring them what they needed.
If they’d lied to her about the deal, what else had they lied about? Did they really intend to use GreenSeed’s crops to save the world? Or was it just another piece of evidence that they could use to bury the corporation that had been laughing at them for years?
Feeling defeated, Lark sniffed and bent over her lap to tug off her heavy boot. Soren, Bernie, and Simjay watched in strained silence as Lark pulled out the toenail microchip and the pouch of seeds that Kira had given her.
The pouch was surprisingly light for all the value attached to it. Inside was humanity’s best hope for the future, and now Lark didn’t know whom she could trust with it.
“What’s that?” asked Axel, pointing to the microchip.
“Our leverage over GreenSeed,” said Lark in a defeated voice. She tossed him the microchip, feeling a tiny stab of satisfaction when he caught it. He had no idea where that thing had been.
“It looks like a toenail.”
“It’s supposed to.”
“Was that glued to your toe?” he asked in a tone of disgust.
Lark nodded. “You wouldn’t believe all the James Bond shit I’ve done this week.”
“Same,” said Bernie and Simjay in unison.
“What’s that other thing?” asked Axel.
Lark turned the bag of seed over in her hand, imagining all the little packets of life it contained. “This is a sample of every supercrop GreenSeed has been testing in San Judas.”
“You’re kidding,” said Bernie.
Lark shook her head. Dragging in a deep breath, she looked up and glanced from one to the other. “What are we going to do?”
“Well, we know we can’t trust the gov’ment with it,” said Axel.
“Not like we could go back there anyway,” Soren added.
“We have to,” said Lark. “It’s the only way to get these crops out there. If we don’t —”
“We can’t,” said Soren in a hollow voice. “I can’t go back there, Lark. I won’t do it.”
Lark’s heart sank. Deep down, she knew that Soren was right. She couldn’t go crawling back to Agent Cole and Agent Reuben. She’d just killed a fellow inmate in front of hundreds of people.
Even if they hadn’t been planning to lock her up the second she returned, they sure as hell would after hearing that piece of news. She’d spend the rest of her life behind bars.
“So what do we do?” asked Bernie quietly.
Portia, who had been oddly silent throughout this entire exchange, finally spoke up. “Oh my god,” she groaned, looking at them as though they were idiots. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Lark glanced at Bernie, who held up her hands in surrender. She and Lark might have been best friends, but Bernie and Portia seemed to have forged their own weird understanding.
Portia sighed. “You want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lark.
“You have the seed,” said Portia matter-of-factly. “I don’t see why you have to give it to Homeland Security.”
“Because they’re the ones trying to end the famine.”
Portia rolled her eyes. “Please. They’re just useless middlemen. It’s the farmers that are going to end the famine . . . if there are any of them left.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Lark looked at Bernie for help. Bernie just raised her eyebrows and shook her head in bewilderment. “How are we going to get these crops to thousands of farmers?”
Portia shrugged and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out . . . I mean, what else do you have to do?”
Lark gaped at her. Judging from Portia’s tone, it sounded as though she considered it little more than a minor inconvenience that the task of saving the world had been dumped in their laps.
There was a long moment of silence as they all considered her words. It sounded simple enough, but it was absolutely crazy. They were a bunch of escaped convicts on the run. They had no special training or expertise. They wouldn’t even know where to start, and yet they were the ones tasked with delivering life-saving crops to the world?
It was ridiculous — laughable even — but Lark couldn’t see another way around it. She didn’t trust the government, and she certainly didn’t trust GreenSeed. Lark had no idea whom she could trust — apart from the people in that helicopter.
“Portia’s right,” said Lark, picking up her right leg and throwing her ankle over Bernie’s knee. “We don’t really have a choice.”
Bernie glanced at Simjay, wearing an expression that suggested Lark had lost her mind. Portia looked sour. Soren’s face was guarded and unreadable, but Lark thought she saw a flicker of his old resolve buried deep in those warm brown eyes.
Lark cleared her throat and tugged up her pant leg, revealing the hideous black ankle monitor that was blinking bright red. “Can you help me get this off?”
“Not sure that’s gonna do a whole lotta good,” said Axel, who had gone strangely quiet as he stared out the window.
“What is it?” asked Soren, turning to see what Axel was looking at.
Lark followed Axel’s gaze into the distance, where an ominous shadow was cutting through the clouds. Soren’s neck went ramrod straight, and Bernie and Simjay moved closer to see out the window.
Lark squinted, trying to identify the flying object. It was too big to be a drone and too small to be a commercial jet. It had a jaunty-looking rudder and a jagged, almost reptilian silhouette. It was definitely an aircraft, but it was unlike any aircraft that Lark had ever seen.
The realization hit her like a shot to the heart, and her blood went cold in her veins. The shadow belonged to a military aircraft — the sort of plane one might expect to see flying over a war zone. It was right on their tail and appeared to be closing the distance.
Soren turned around to look at her, and Lark read the fear in his eyes. The Department of Homeland Security was onto them, and they wanted what Lark had promised.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Ruthless. The Lawless Saga began as a story I just had to tell, but seeing how people like you have responded has made it twice as fun to write. I have been delighted by the messages and compliments I’ve received throughout this series, so thank you for your support.
As most of you already know, this is not the end of Lark and Soren’s story. I always try to plan an entire series before writing book one, but sometimes my characters have other ideas. They needed one more book to finish their journey. Four books is an awkward length for a series, but there’s no arguing with the likes of Portia and Axel.
I live in Colorado Springs, and I had a blast writing about Cheyenne Mountain Complex in the shadow of the mountain itself. This Cold War relic is once again a center for training, intelligence, and cyber defense in America.
The U.S. Strategic Command, the Air Force Space Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Missile Defense Agency all have a presence there today, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the Department of Homeland Security could one day set up shop there, too.
Unfortunately, due to the critical function Cheyenne Mountain Complex serves, public tours are no longer available. People must have a “mission-critical rationale” for their visit, and the tour must be “essential in performing their daily functions in defending the homelands.”
While I would argue that opening a dialogue about the dangers of climate change, corporate power run amok, and the infringement of our constitutional rights is essential to defending the homeland, I don’t know that they would see it that way.
So, of course, I had to embellish a few things that I couldn’t find in my research. I don’t know if there is any sort of dungeon where prisoners are held for questioning, but if t
here is, it isn’t something the U.S. government advertises. None of the articles I read mentioned a hangar at the top of the mountain, either, but all of the specs are accurate.
The facility is actually fifteen buildings encased within the mountain under 2,500 feet of granite. There really are twenty-five-ton blast doors designed to withstand a nuclear explosion, giant springs to absorb movement in the event of an earthquake, and blast valves with filters to protect workers during a biological attack. The mountain itself would shield the facility from an electromagnetic pulse, and the workers there seem to be prepared for just about anything.
Reading about the facility, it seemed almost like the campus of some Silicon Valley tech company. There’s a dentist, a chapel, a little self-serve store, a room for spin classes that converts to a hospital — even a Subway on site. But everyone who works in the mountain is hyperaware of one harsh reality: In the event of a national emergency, they will be locked inside to do their jobs while their families are stuck on the outside.
Of course, Cheyenne Mountain Complex isn’t the only modern-day fortress in the United States. The bunker under the Denver airport is probably just an urban legend, but there are plenty of top-secret facilities that still exist today. However, in the era of Google Earth, no facility can really be kept secret.
“Bunkers are typically obsolete the day they open their doors,” writes author Sharon Weinberger.
The public knows about them; therefore enemies of the state do, too. Plus, a bunker where employees are stripped of their electronic devices and cut off from the rest of the world is little help in coordinating a response to any kind of attack.
In my version of the future, the main function of Cheyenne Mountain Complex is to serve as the new headquarters for agencies once climate change renders their current offices unusable. (You can use this nifty interactive map to see projections on rising sea levels. Watch out, D.C.)
In Ruthless, the Department of Homeland Security uses Cheyenne Mountain Complex as a “black site” to house prisoners off the books — a controversial practice that is rooted in reality.
According to a 2012 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, 119 suspects were held for detention in secret facilities spanning eight countries following the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Twenty-six of those “ghost prisoners” were held due to mistaken identity, and thirty-nine were subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — also known as sleep deprivation, slapping, nudity, being doused with ice water, and chained to a wall in a standing position for days on end. Three of the detained individuals were waterboarded.
The prevailing justification for torturing our enemies is that it saves American lives. Unfortunately, officials concluded that enhanced interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and “were often counterproductive” in the fight against Al-Qaeda.
President Trump has said that he believes waterboarding works, though brain researchers who have studied the use of enhanced interrogation methods say that torture does not produce reliable information. Prolonged stress and pain inhibits both short- and long-term memory, and extreme panic only prompts subjects to keep talking (even talking nonsense) to avoid more pain.
President Obama signed an executive order banning torture in 2009, but it could easily be overturned. This order did not ban CIA detention but granted the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all U.S. detainment facilities. However, the committee cannot disclose its findings to the public, and torture has occurred under the ICRC’s watch.
In 2012, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the U.S. government to detain “belligerent” individuals indefinitely without charges or a trial. While the NDAA was intended to help the U.S. military fight terrorists, it’s clear that it applies to U.S. citizens, too.
“If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re going to be held in military custody, and you’re going to be questioned about what you know,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “You’re not going to be given a lawyer if our national security interests dictate that you not be given a lawyer.”
Whatever our politics, we should all be concerned about the NDAA because it overrides habeas corpus, the legal procedure that prevents the government from holding you indefinitely without justification. While Lark refers to an expansion of the NDAA in chapter one that allows the Department of Homeland Security to detain her, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine her being held prisoner under the current law if she were classified as a “belligerent” individual.
With the constant influx of new and evolving threats, I think we can only expect more infringements on our personal liberties in the years to come. One example is the perceived danger of 3D-printed handguns like the ones Conrad makes in the book.
The design and reliability of 3D-printed guns have been evolving since May 2013 when the plans for the first fully printable gun were published online. (The plans were downloaded 100,000 times in two days before the Department of State ordered the group to take them down.)
The guns’ chief limitation is that they are printed with PLA, a bioplastic that makes the gun just as hazardous to the person firing it as the intended target. (The plastic 3D-printed guns usually break or misfire on the first shot.)
Machinist Michael Crumling has designed special ammunition that contains the pressure of the explosion in the cartridge itself, but so far gun enthusiasts have had little success firing traditional ammunition out of an all-plastic gun.
Still, the rapid pace of innovation has law enforcement and national security experts concerned. The TSA confiscated a 3D-printed gun replica at the Reno airport in 2016, and although its owner appeared to have no ill intent, it illuminated the broader threat posed by new technology when law enforcement lags behind.
We live in a world that’s evolving at warp speed, and our laws simply can’t keep up. Yes, there are plenty of bad people out there. Yes, it can be scary. But no matter how crazy the world gets, we cannot let feelings of panic and helplessness cloud our judgement.
I think this is more important to remember now than ever before. The evening news is grim. We are constantly bombarded with stories that agitate our basic survival instincts, and social media makes us feel that we must “pick a side” and declare an identity.
But just because our politics are more polarized than ever, it doesn’t mean the world truly reflects those extremes. Issues are rarely if ever black and white. It doesn’t have to be freedom or security, weakness or brutality.
We cannot give in to hatred just because it’s easier than understanding. We must continue to think for ourselves, ask questions, dig deeper, and advocate for issues that are important to us. Our future depends on it.
The best things in life are free.
As an early reader of Ruthless, you’re entitled to a free novelette that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s called Desolation, and it follows the events leading up to Bernie’s imprisonment.
You can download it here, or type the following address into your computer’s browser:
www.tarahbenner.com/desolation-giveaway
