He tried to look over at Big Dog. Nasira was throwing in a few punches at him. They seemed to slip in from nowhere. By the time he watched for Big Dog’s reaction, it was too late and it had already happened. Her shoulders, her arms, nothing in her body movement gave early signals that she was punching.
Jay moved his head to one side, narrowly avoiding a punch from Chickenhead, who was now wearing his trademark mischievous grin again. Jay didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of another hit. He brushed another of Chickenhead’s blows downward and stepped around him, kept moving, watching Big Dog defend against Nasira at the other end of the basketball court.
Big Dog weaved around Nasira’s blows, stepping out of view. She was in the way and Jay couldn’t see. Chickenhead pinned him down again. Jay circled around so Big Dog was in his peripheral. He focused on Chickenhead’s attacks, then focused on Big Dog, and then on Chickenhead again.
Before he knew it, he was focusing on Big Dog entirely. Chickenhead advanced. This time, Jay’s body moved before he could issue commands. Chickenhead’s fists rained in and Jay was already moving around them, sliding them fractionally off course or redirecting them somewhere else. Chickenhead’s grin faded and his forehead creased with concentration. He started using his elbows and legs to score a hit.
Jay focused on Big Dog, taking note of his movements and his style of defense. He moved in small spurts, never standing still for too long. He was lower to the ground and defended himself predominantly with hooked arms and tightly bunched fists.
Chickenhead’s foot caught Jay on the inside of his knee. Jay twisted inward, carrying his torso right into Chickenhead’s perfectly placed fist. Stupid move, Jay thought. Chickenhead’s grin returned.
‘Look sharp, mate,’ he said.
Jay absorbed the fist as Nasira had taught him. He tried to return his attention to Big Dog’s fancy footwork but Chickenhead was barraging him with strike after strike, many of them decoys for follow-ups that stung him a fraction of a second later. Bastard. Jay couldn’t see them coming and watch Big Dog at the same time. He’d only taken one breath when he’d been struck by Chickenhead four times.
‘OK, take a break,’ Nasira said.
Jay’s cheeks burned. She’d noticed him get overwhelmed. And she probably hadn’t noticed how well he was doing just before that.
‘You did well,’ she said.
Jay shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘The point isn’t how well Chickenhead beat you up. It’s whether or not you were able to focus on something else. Tell me about Big Dog’s performance.’
‘It was good,’ Jay said. ‘He moves in small steps, keeps his fists moving. He looked calm and never lost his shit.’
Nasira nodded. ‘You had a moment there when you were watching him,’ she said, ‘and you were still able to defend yourself from this big guy.’
‘Well, hit or miss,’ Jay said. ‘No pun intended.’
‘Today you’ve learnt two very important things,’ Nasira said. ‘How to fight without anticipation, and how to fight unconsciously.’
‘You can’t really do one without the other,’ Chickenhead said.
‘They go together,’ Nasira said. ‘Once you can do that, it all falls into place.’ She put her hand on Jay’s shoulder and gripped it. ‘When you’re attacked, you just move, you don’t think. And since it ain’t some inflexible technique, you’re drawing from the principle of movement. Your brain don’t need to do as much. So you react quicker. And smarter.’
Without warning, she placed her other hand under his knee and knocked him off balance. He pivoted outward and then moved in, his hand clamping over hers. One slight movement and he could break her wrist.
She smiled. ‘Nicely done.’
* * *
Damien spotted Grace in a field, edging closer to a pair of wild horses. He headed in their direction, watching as she ran her hand lightly over one horse’s brown coat. It glistened in the morning sun. The horse watched her with a careful black eye. Damien reached the edge of the field and the other horse bolted. Its friend moved a second later, leaving Grace to shoot him a disappointed stare.
He thought of what to say as he approached her. She didn’t turn away, which was a good sign. She was wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and faded blue jeans tucked into brown hiking boots. He stopped twenty feet short. She didn’t say anything. It looked like she was still deciding whether to talk to him.
‘Hi,’ he said, slightly out of breath.
‘Is socially awkward your default setting?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘On important occasions.’
‘I’m flattered.’ She started away from him, through the field. ‘Let me guess, you’re here just to talk, right?’
Damien kept pace with her. ‘Well, yeah. I didn’t bring a saddle, so—’
Grace looked quizzically over her shoulder.
‘For the … horses,’ he said. ‘So … how long have you been here for?’
‘Six months,’ she said. ‘I like it here. You could almost believe the Fifth Column is gone.’
‘Yeah, that would be nice. I’m sick of looking over my shoulder.’
‘So why are you talking to me, Damien? Are you trying to work out if I’m still a programmed robot, or are you feeling obligated to smooth things over since I last tried to kill you?’
‘I don’t think you’re programmed,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s good. Now I don’t need to kill you.’
Damien wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.
She smiled. ‘Yet.’
‘It’s just, you know, it’s been a while,’ he said.
Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘Since you irradiated me in a nuclear reaction?’
‘Since you were … not a shocktrooper.’
‘There isn’t much to talk about. We went our separate ways,’ she said. ‘I became a zombie, you became a terrorist.’
‘And what are you now?’ he said.
Grace hesitated at the edge of the pine forest. ‘Now I’m just trying to make myself useful.’ She turned to face him. ‘I’m putting together a team. It’s a babysitting job. Since you’re around — not that I need any favors — it wouldn’t hurt if you joined us.’
‘Wouldn’t that be … awkward?’
‘It’s your most redeeming feature,’ she said. ‘That and your strange knack of staying alive.’
Damien shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ll see how I go.’
Grace clapped her hands. ‘Well, that was a good talk, wasn’t it? I guess this is the part where you head back to your playgroup.’
Damien shook his head slowly. ‘You aren’t the Grace I used to know.’
‘I’m a terrorist now.’
He started back across the field, then stopped, turned back. ‘Grace, when Freeman deprogrammed you, did anyone tell you what your first operation was?’
Each Project GATE subject was programmed to believe their parents were terrorists. Their first operation was to kill them. Once they’d successfully completed this operation, they were qualified and ready for the big league. Damien remembered the moment he’d found out the truth about his own first operation. Reading those records was like learning it for the first time. It had almost destroyed him. Grace didn’t seem destroyed. She just seemed different. He could have put it down to being electrocuted by Jay at Desecheo Island and Freeman’s deprogramming, but he knew it wasn’t that. It was as though someone had swapped her out with a new, ambivalent Grace. The problem was, he missed the old one.
She didn’t react immediately, but when she did it was a slow, measured nod. ‘It’s why I switched sides,’ she said. ‘Zombie to terrorist.’
Damien nodded. ‘I see.’
She blew long strands of hair from her face. ‘I haven’t seen you in a while. And next week I probably won’t see you again. It’s no big deal.’ She shrugged. ‘They threw us into a giant Petri dish and this is where we ended up.’
‘Yeah. Strange.’ He did
n’t know what else to say. ‘At least we were successful experiments.’
‘Depends on your definition.’ She wasn’t looking at him any more but through him. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the human race was just some freak accident. Something the universe or God or aliens or whatever created before they had the chance to abort us.’
‘I’m guessing you think a lot when you’re up here,’ Damien said.
‘Only place I can.’ She crouched and pulled at blades of grass. ‘It makes you wonder what the point is though.’ She looked at him. ‘I mean, where the hell are we all going?’
Damien met her gaze. ‘Oblivion.’
Chapter Seventeen
Sophia sat on the Chico Inn balcony, absorbed in the laptop she’d borrowed from Benito. She barely noticed when he materialized with two cups.
‘Mountain tea?’ He flashed a smile. ‘Best on this side of the cordillera.’
‘Sounds good.’ She tidied her papers and put them under the weight of her P99 pistol.
He was eying her pistol. ‘Just in case, right?’
She smiled. ‘Paperweight.’
He handed her half a lime for her tea. ‘Dayap,’ he said.
She squeezed it over her tea and stirred in some brown sugar. ‘Learning the local tongue already.’
She watched as he sat down and pulled some sort of gadget from his pocket. ‘Got a new toy?’ she asked.
‘Oh, right, yes.’ He placed a small circuit board with two cables protruding from either end on top of her papers. ‘You’ll like this very much,’ he said, looking very pleased with himself.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘What is it?’
‘I call it the Interceptor.’
‘What does it intercept?’
‘User authentication. Passwords. From your security pass, fingerprint, your iris, anything.’
She held it up in the sunlight. ‘You mean like a credit-card skimmer?’
‘Yes, precisely. Small enough to hide inside an access-card reader. No one even knows it’s there.’
‘This is relevant to my interests,’ Sophia said. ‘Go on.’
‘Someone with clearance uses the reader and the Interceptor intercepts the code between the reader and the controller,’ Benito said. ‘That’s the problem with the Fifth Column’s security — the code’s transmitted in plain text, it’s not even encrypted. Hardly any access-card readers are.’
‘So your Interceptor captures the code and stores it,’ Sophia said. ‘You can reuse it later?’
‘Swipe your own replay card and it gives you the same access as the previous person,’ Benito said, brandishing several access cards. ‘I coded them to do different things. Replay, block access to everyone — might be handy if you want to lock yourself inside for a time.’
‘Can you make more of these?’ Sophia said.
‘How many more?’
‘Three, four?’
‘I’ll need some more blank access cards, but I could do that. Something to keep me occupied.’ He paused to take a sip of tea. ‘It’s a spectacular view up here. But you haven’t looked at it once.’
Sophia put the Interceptor down and looked at the mountains and town beneath for the first time. ‘I’ve been a little distracted,’ she said.
Benito leaned over to see his laptop screen. It was plastered with YouTube videos, news reports and Twitter feeds.
‘You’re tweeting the revolution?’ he asked.
Sophia shook her head. ‘Just reading between the lines.’
‘Find anything interesting?’
Sophia cycled through the tabs in her browser. One of them was a forty-minute video of a Hollywood celebrity babbling incoherently to camera; another a school shooting with twenty different versions of events.
‘I guess that qualifies as interesting,’ Benito said.
‘There’s more where that came from. It’s the riots that bother me.’
‘I imagine riots bother everyone. But you’re not everyone.’
‘They’re happening on a regular basis now,’ she said. ‘And it’s always the same — they just burst out of nowhere. Sometimes they target something specific, and sometimes it’s just—’
‘Mindless?’ Benito finished.
‘Yeah. The protests, the peaceful ones, they don’t even make the news. Media blackout, just like Denton’s speech. I only know they exist because of Twitter and some exhaustive searching. But the violent ones, the riots, they’re always covered.’
‘You’re thinking it’s that Seraphim thing, aren’t you?’
‘That day at the UN headquarters,’ she said. ‘With Denton, with Damien and Jay. There was a riot just out the front, do you remember?’
‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said.
‘The rage in their eyes … it seemed unfocused.’
Benito’s gaze drifted to Adamicz’s papers, weighted down with her pistol so a breeze wouldn’t carry them away.
‘Light reading?’ he said.
‘He’s talking about Wilhelm Reich.’
‘The psychoanalyst,’ Benito said. ‘Controversial. And a little crazy.’
‘Crazy enough to work for the Fifth Column. He was the man who discovered the extremely low frequencies that affect human brain waves. He caught Denton’s attention when the FDA filed an injunction against him. From 1947 he worked in Project Phoenix and then after that, Project Seraphim. For almost a decade.’
Benito sipped his tea. ‘I didn’t know Denton was interested in sex boxes that cured cancer. Then again, nothing would surprise me these days.’
‘I think there was more to it than that,’ Sophia said.
Benito blinked. ‘More to it than sex boxes?’
Sophia pulled a sheet of paper from her pile and read aloud: ‘When Reich discovered his research was being used for purposes of mind control, he left Project Seraphim and the Fifth Column altogether. It was only one week later that he was sentenced to two years in prison. Much of his work was burnt by the FDA.’
‘Denton burned him,’ Benito said.
‘That’s what I thought. He died in prison a year later, days before he was due for parole.’
‘What from?’
‘Heart failure.’
‘I guess Denton got what he wanted out of him.’ Benito shook his head. ‘As a scientist I can tell you that once you start working for the secret government you’re isolated from the mainstream scientific community.’
Sophia blew steam from her tea. ‘To prevent leaks?’
‘They say it’s because our research is ten, twenty years ahead of mainstream science. But you know the real reason. It’s to keep you under their control. You don’t go back. You can never go back.’
‘These Seraphim arrays,’ she said, brushing her finger over the page corners, ‘they can work together in sequence.’
‘And you think it’s mind control?’
‘Adamicz said in his journal he tested ELF waves on the Branch Davidians.’
Benito looked unsure. ‘The Waco siege?’
‘He said the ELF waves drove them crazy,’ Sophia said. ‘They destroyed themselves.’
The church bell rang in the distance. A shiver worked its way up Sophia’s spine.
‘Waco wasn’t a disaster,’ Benito said.
Sophia nodded. ‘It was a success.’
Benito sipped his tea. ‘As if I wasn’t depressed enough already.’
Sophia looked down over the balcony and spotted DC and Freeman walking down the curved hill. Their conversation looked thoughtful. A trio of kids ran past them, giggling and panting for air.
‘Yeah, well at least you’re not having amphetamine withdrawals,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’ Benito said.
Sophia shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
Benito watched the kids as they chased each other on the street below. A parent called out for them to come inside.
‘Do you ever think of your parents?’ she asked.
Benito took a moment to reply. �
�All the time. My father, stubborn old son of a bitch. I loved him.’
‘And he loved you?’
Benito laughed. ‘He’d never admit it. Took him until his deathbed before he actually said the words.’
‘And your mother?’
He shrugged and sipped his tea. ‘Lesbian.’
Benito had lost his entire family years ago in a terrorist attack at a wedding reception in Jordan. During the Desecheo Island operation, he’d met his family’s killer: Sophia. It wasn’t until they’d relocated to Australia that he’d been able to start looking her in the eye again. He knew she was a deniable operator, programmed to do the horrible things she had done; that it wasn’t really her who had murdered his family but her handler, Denton. The Fifth Column as a whole. It was the reason Benito had defected to begin with, the reason he’d joined the Akhana. But their deaths were still on Sophia’s hands. She could still smell the coppery tang of their blood. She didn’t deserve Benito’s forgiveness.
She closed her browser and all the tabs it contained. ‘I need a break.’
‘I can never go back, can I?’ Benito said.
The question caught her completely off guard. ‘What do you mean? To the Fifth Column? Why would you want to?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘To a normal life. I can never go back. It’s like this forever, isn’t it?’
Sophia focused on the laptop screen. She didn’t know what to say, but she couldn’t lie to him.
‘Until we win,’ she said. ‘Or lose.’
* * *
Sophia was expecting a little more when she entered the comm center. It was basically a large lounge room flanked by five- and ten-year-old notebooks and desktop computers, their fans humming with varying degrees of ferocity. The meeting between the Shadow Akhana elders would take place over the darknet, their own covert communications network. As Freeman explained it, the darknet was by far the most advanced covert communications network on the planet — the brainchild of Fifth Column engineers who’d defected to the Akhana. Freeman had quickly funded its development with money previously siphoned from the Fifth Column. The darknet provided the Akhana with multi-jurisdictional routing of all communications, ensuring their traffic never entered and exited the network through the same country. To connect to the darknet, each computer needed to be connected to an Akhana-designed cryptorouter. All traffic between the cryptorouter and the darknet was encrypted with military-grade cryptography. Even the traffic between the entry, termination and exit nodes was encrypted, making it almost impossible for the Fifth Column to conduct a fingerprinting or watermark attack. Freeman had told Sophia that once a person using a cryptorouter was communicating with another person with a cryptorouter, it was simply not possible for a third party to break it. He’d also admitted the Fifth Column had likely implemented a similar network for themselves. And the Shadow Akhana wouldn’t have a hope of penetrating theirs for the very same reason.
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