The Serpent's Coil

by Christy Raedeke

  Mom and Dad both go white. Neither one says anything.

  “Remember Barend Schlacter?” I ask, barely getting the words out before losing it. I put my arms on the table, lay my head down, and start crying. Neither of my parents moves; it’s Alex who puts a hand on my back.

  Drying my eyes with the deli’s small, scratchy napkins, I take a few breaths through my nose. “It’s bad,” I tell them. “Uncle Li is … gone.”

  It’s freaking me out that neither one of them is saying anything. They’re just staring at me.

  “It’s not your fault, mate,” Alex says, breaking the awkward silence. “These people are mad!”

  I look at my parents. “Will you guys say something, please?” I beg. “Ground me until I’m forty-eight, tell me you’re sending me to a military school—just say something!”

  Dad shakes his head and breathes in deeply, like he’s just woken up from drifting off. “I’m sorry, Caity, I just—”

  “We’re just trying grasp the enormity of the situation,” Mom says. “I thought we were sailing into rough waters, not a tsunami.”

  “Why Li?” Dad asks.

  “He’s been my protector—assigned to me by The Council, the only group out there that knows everything about the Fraternitas.”

  Mom looks at me sideways. “My meeting him to unlock that old Chinese safe—not a coincidence?”

  I shake my head.

  “There’s so much to tell you guys, but right now I need your help. Can you help? Will you help?”

  Both of them nod. Mom dries her eyes with a napkin, Dad’s chin is quivery.

  “Thank you. We need to do this—it’s time to go to the pyramid.”

  “The pyramid?” Mom says.

  “The Transamerica building. The pyramid. Headquarters for the Fraternitas Regni Occulti—the main puppet masters behind the Shadow Government, and the group that Barend Schlacter works for.”

  Dad wipes some barbeque sauce from his chin. “My God, they have an office? Right here?”

  “Smack dab in the middle of San Francisco.”

  “And exactly what are we going to do there?” Mom asks.

  “Well, here’s where it gets tricky,” I answer.

  Mom looks at Dad and shakes her head slightly, as if she’s almost given up on me. “Tricky hard or tricky illegal?”

  “Um, kind of both,” I say, wincing.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Deciding that I’ll explain on the way, we all get in the rental car and head for the pyramid. Alex and I sit in the back and Mr. Papers gets out of his carrier to sit on Alex’s lap. It’s nice to see him perking up again after how down he was.

  I don’t give them all the details for fear they’ll pull out, but I lay out the basics: Donald is going to get us into the Fraternitas’ headquarters so we can get into their computer systems and make some … modifications.

  Alex has filled them in on Donald’s back story, the fact that it’s he who is actually Dad’s uncle, not Hamish. But they are all, including Alex, shocked to hear that he will now be helping us.

  “How do you know it’s not a trap?” Alex asks, rightly suspicious of Donald.

  “If he’d wanted to trap me, he could have—I was alone in a sketchy hotel room and even baited him, but he didn’t waiver. Even Papers trusts him. But either way, we still get into the Fraternitas headquarters, which is all that matters now.”

  I set the scene: Donald will meet us in the parking garage and will take some video of us “captured.” Then he will call the Magistrate and tell him that he will bring us all in if the floor is cleared of all staff. This will be fairly easy since it’s nighttime and most staff will have left.

  Donald had explained to me how rare it is to have the Magistrate here. He thinks it’s because of my last talk at Palenque. Jules showed them how to access it and once they listened to it, they were enraged.

  “They’re very keen on getting you into their offices,” Donald had added.

  Dad pulls into the parking garage. “All the way to the bottom, last possible space,” I tell him. “That’s where we wait.”

  I’m surprised to feel Alex’s warm hand grab mine. I give it a squeeze and look over at him. I feel bad for having put him in the awkward position of having to deliver the news to my parents and travel with them halfway around the world. This whole thing has taken him out of his element and made him quieter, shyer. I hold tightly to his hand as we wind our way down through the dim parking lot. We get to the last space, but Donald is not there.

  “Wait here?” Dad asks, cutting off the engine.

  “Yep,” I say.

  Mom unbuckles her seat belt and turns around in her seat to look at me. Alex gently lets go of my hand and pulls his own hand back to his lap before she can see.

  “Now that we have some time, please fill us in on what exactly we’ll be doing here,” she says.

  I give it to her straight. “It’s two things, actually. We need to jam the frequency transmitters in the U.S., Norway, and Russia that are messing with our atmosphere, and then make the IMF and World Bank erase the debt of third-world countries.”

  Mom and Dad both do the cartoon double-take.

  “What did you just say?” Mom says at the same time Dad says, “Excuse me?”

  “I know, I know,” I reply.

  “Do you, Caity? Do you?” Dad says. “You’re talking about mayhem. Undoing decades of—”

  “Decades of corruption,” I interrupt. “Decades of the richest people on Earth preying on the poorest. Decades of intentional, perpetual slavery and intentional messing with the ionosphere and magnetosphere.”

  “How can you even know all of this?” Mom asks. “What can you know about the magnetosphere?”

  “From The Council. Uncle Li and others have been teaching me. You know deep down that you can’t deny what I’m saying—no one can deny this, no one who has been paying attention.”

  Mom looks like she could use a Barbie knee to crack.

  Dad is chewing so hard on the side of his cheek that I expect to see a hole appear.

  “What’s been happening is the opposite of love,” I say. “And it has to stop.”

  Dad says, “Even if I agree that it has to stop, I don’t think you see the mass havoc it will create.”

  “But the havoc is there already! We’re just shifting to a different kind of havoc. You guys both know that all systems reorganize after chaos—it’s Science 101. We just need that chaos to produce a good reorganization instead of an evil one.”

  “And somehow this is all part of the Mayan calendar?” Mom asks.

  “The Maya had super-advanced knowledge of how where we are in the galaxy affects who we are as humans. They knew a shift would happen, leading up to and following the year 2012. Unfortunately, the Shadow Government knows this, too—and wants to stop it. Because free, enlightened people are hard to control.”

  “So tell us what you want us to do,” Mom says. “How will you help this happen?”

  “A couple of ways. The first thing is the third-world debt. We’ll need you and Dad to figure out a way to get into the IMF and World Bank systems.”

  “Caity, I’ve done programming work for World Bank, and even then I didn’t have access to their system.”

  “What happened to Angus ‘I can hack anything’ Mac Fireland?” I ask. “Besides, we’re doing it from the Fraternitas’ side. Since not all the loans are bogus, we’re just tapping into the ones that the Fraternitas is involved with—and Donald tells me they’re linked in their computer system.”

  “And the frequency transmitters?”

  “That one is actually easier. Uncle Li explained it to me. They all reboot after a shutdown, so we just need a quick piece of code that redirects them to a different satellite after blackouts.”

  “These places have backups for their backups—they’ll never have a complete blackout,” Dad says.

  “They will if a massive solar storm hits.”

  “Oh God, that’s rig
ht—there’s some connection between 2012 and sunspots?” Mom says. “One of the Berkeley alums mentioned that.”

  “Yep, the solar flare cycle is like every eleven years, and 2012 could bring some of the biggest ones in modern times. Some sunspots are the size of Jupiter, shooting billions of tons of energy toward the Earth. The Council knows how to predict solar flares and then they can switch on their hidden satellite.”

  “Hidden satellite? How can a satellite be hidden?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. All I know is that they have a satellite that’s protected from the solar flares, and when the other ones have blacked out, they’ll switch it on.”

  “So when all the other satellites go down, you plan on just bouncing the signal over to another satellite from—what planet is it on?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, I know. You just have to trust me. Once we get into the Fraternitas’ headquarters it will all make sense.”

  “If we ever get in,” Mom says, looking outside her window. “Wait, is that … Thomas?”

  We all look out the window to see Donald walking toward us. I open the car door and say hello, and then Mom and Dad get out. Donald shakes everyone’s hand. Alex doesn’t look him in the eye as he shakes his hand. I wonder if he’s still freaked out by him, or if he feels guilty for drugging him on Easter Island. Donald even shakes Mr. Papers’ hand as he sits on my shoulder.

  There’s an awkward silence while we all stand around, so I say, “Okay, what’s next?”

  “I reckon we should take the video in the stairwell, where there’s some light,” Donald says. Then he pulls five handkerchiefs from his coat pocket. “Got to make this look realistic, all apologies to you.”

  “You’re going to gag us?” I ask, thinking maybe I’m being played after all.

  “Have to. But I won’t bind your hands, I’ll let you just hold them behind your backs so it looks like you’re bound.”

  “Fair enough,” I say, following Donald to the stairwell.

  Donald lines us up against the concrete wall, careful to place us out of sight of any writing. This looks like it could be a cell anywhere. He puts Dad and Alex in the back and Mom and me up front. We all take a handkerchief to tie around our mouths like gags, then we put our hands behind our backs. We try to look as miserable as possible. I only have to think about losing Uncle Li to be sobbing.

  Donald turns on his phone video and starts taping. “Here they are, Magistrate,” he says. “Clan Mac Fireland and the lad who was helping Caitrina execute her plans.” Then he reaches over and roughly pulls my gag down. “Anything to say for yourself, Caitrina?” he says. I shake my head, still crying. “She’s ready to give up her secrets,” Donald says. “Should be a very easy interrogation, I reckon.”

  At that he stops the video and tells us we can remove our gags. I’m shaking from even pretending to be captured.

  “Need you to stay put for a moment while I go out to send this video. Can’t get a good signal down here,” he says.

  We spend a tense few minutes pacing in the small concrete space, and freeze when we hear the elevator coming back down.

  Donald walks out. “It’s done,” he says. “The Magistrate is clearing everyone off the floor; there were only a few staffers left there anyway.”

  I open my backpack for Mr. Papers and then zip up the top, leaving just enough room for his tiny hand to reach though and unzip the bag if he needs to.

  We silently get on the elevator and take it up to the main floor of the pyramid, then transfer to another elevator. Donald uses a key code to get access to the floor the Fraternitas is on. I look over at Alex and see beads of sweat on his forehead. I wonder if he’ll even speak to me again, once this is all over.

  The speedy elevator going so high up plays with my stomach. I have to breathe deeply to keep calm for what’s ahead. Finally the elevator slows, dings, and stops. Though I know almost anything could happen when those doors open, I’m truly shocked at who I see standing right in front of me when they do: Jules D’Aubigne.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Draped over one of the expensive-looking modern chairs in the waiting area, Jules lifts a hand and says, “Quelle surprise!”

  I walk out looking at the floor. I can’t bear to look him in the eye. Donald pushes at us like he’s herding sheep until we’re standing in a tight group in front of Jules.

  “Père, ils sont ici!” Jules yells, casually checking his phone as we stand before him. I carefully set down my backpack behind Dad. As I glance down, I see Mr. Papers’ fingertips reaching through the small hole.

  “Bonsoir!” comes a voice from a dark hallway. When the speaker reaches the light, I can’t help but gasp a little. He looks so much like Jules they could be brothers. Even now, with hatred for Jules burning inside me, I see his face as a work of art. And his father’s, even more so. Age has added color and depth to his face, and fullness to his jaw. Their suits are the same cut and style, and they hold themselves in that indescribable European way that tells you they are wealthy and entitled.

  “Quite a beastly little crew you have there,” the older D’Aubigne says to Donald. “You didn’t think to bind their hands?”

  “Couldn’t really be seen guiding four cuffed people up the elevator now, could I? Besides, who needs cuffs when you have one of these?” he says, reaching under his coat where a gun is hidden.

  D’Aubigne nods. Turning to us, he puts his hand on his chest and says, “I am Claude D’Aubigne, thirty-third Magistrate of the Fraternitas Regni Occulti.” He delivers this like he expects us to bow and curtsey, or kiss his ring.

  We all just stand there, hoping Donald will do something with his gun like he said he would.

  Claude D’Aubigne comes closer to us, close enough for him to reach out and touch my hair. “Rough around the edges,” he says, looking at me like I’m a piece of livestock he’s considering buying. “Funny that a girl such as yourself should wind up with this much power.”

  I don’t want to look at him, but if I look down or away, he wins. So I stare into his eyes, which are the blue of a glacial lake.

  Jules gets up from the chair he was lounging in and walks lazily over, as if having four captured people brought in is an everyday occurence.

  “She’s a quirky little thing, isn’t she?” he says to his father, now standing right next to him. “With quirky little ideas.”

  I can’t help but shake my head.

  “What?” Jules says. “Please, feel free to speak.”

  “I tell the truth,” I say. “My quirky little ideas are the truth.”

  “What is true has no bearing,” Jules says with a scoff. “Those elders have played you for a fool. You are the mouthpiece for a dying group of simple people. You and your little calendars and tones; do you think they have any power over the technology that we have in place?”

  “What are you so afraid of?” I ask. “To want to live in a world run by the Shadow Government, you must be afraid of something.”

  Jules smiles and glances at his dad, who is standing with his arms crossed looking amused at this debate.

  “Why yes, I am terribly afraid of something: poverty. Why should I have to give up my power, my money, my status?”

  “You didn’t even earn it,” I hiss. “You just inherited it.”

  “And you—have you earned the right to do what you’re doing, or did you inherit it?”

  That hurt.

  “You’re living out of balance,” I say. “It can’t be sustained. Don’t you see that? I don’t care how awesome it is to have all that power and money—eventually it will come to an end. And I think that will be a lot sooner than you expect.”

  “I pity you,” he says, looking at me like he wants to hit me. “You will fail. You will fail spectacularly.”

  Just as I’m trying to think of a comeback, I hear the familiar sound of Mr. Papers and his little tube. The first needle hits Claude D’Aubigne, who gasps and reaches back to feel what’s stuck in his head before falling to his
knees and ending up face-down on the ground.

  “Père!” Jules screams, leaning over his dad. “Père!”

  He doesn’t seem to notice the long thin needle sticking out from the base of Claude D’Aubigne’s hair. “Donald, help—” he screams, before he too is hit with a needle. “What is that?” he says, walking in circles and trying to pull the slippery little needle out of the back of his skull. It takes a few seconds before his eyes roll back and he falls forward onto one of the fancy modern lobby chairs.

  I glance over at my parents, who are clearly not prepared to see what they’ve just seen.

  “Did Papers just kill them?” Dad asks, his face chalky.

  “Nae, just hit them in the Wind Mansion—bit of ninja acupuncture,” answers Donald. “They’ll be out for a spell.”

  “Is it safe to leave them here?” I ask. “Or should we hide them away?”

  “There’s an interrogation room on this floor,” Donald says, walking over to the reception desk and foraging around in one of the drawers. He pulls out a roll of packing tape. “We can lock them up there.”

  “An interrogation room? Who would they interrogate here?” Mom asks.

  Donald and I both look at Mom like she’s a child. “Seriously? Mom, you have no idea who we’re dealing with here.”

  “Help me bind them,” Donald says to Alex and Dad. They both nod and bend down to help. Once Jules and Claude’s arms and legs are bound, Donald props them up against the wall. Mr. Papers checks all their pockets, pulls out cell phones and cardkeys, and hands them to me.

  “Let’s go see if we can get into the interrogation room, shall we? May need your lock-picking skills, ma’am,” Donald says to my mom, who grabs my hand and pulls me along with her.

  Dad and Alex stay with Jules and Claude D’Aubigne, though with all the packing tape we’ve used, there’s no way they could get free anytime soon, even if they did come to.

  Donald leads us through a maze of hallways and stops at a room that says Interview Suite on it. “Ever seen one of these?” he asks, gesturing to the keypad lock on the door.