Neil turned in his chair, straightened his bow tie and patted down his thinning red hair before speaking.
“Creeper has finished scanning the encrypted communications eliminating all other groups except one. They call themselves Osiron Paramilitary. Fairly new but they’re in the database. They communicate in code, but Creeper has determined it to be a fairly common mono-alphabetic substitution cipher. Unfortunately, the decoded text is an unknown language, so it has been unable to further decode what they are actually saying. Except for three words.”
“What three words? Dante said.
“Abigail, hospital and Chapman.”
Dante felt numb as he furrowed his brow trying to figure out exactly what that meant. Abigail was at a hospital? Was she hurt? It couldn’t be that easy though, calling every hospital in California and asking for Abigail Ellis.
Skylar nodded slowly, thinking. “Creeper,” he called out.
“Yes?” said a mild female voice. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Read back the decoded message,” Skylar said.
“What is it? Like Siri or something?” Briana said.
“Oh, this blows Siri out of the water,” Skylar said, holding up his hands for silence. Everyone stopped typing and sat still, waiting for Creeper to speak again.
“Ready?” Creeper said. “Transdonu Abigail al la interkonsentita hospitalo al kuracisto Chapman, tiam atendu pliajn instrukciojn lau ordono de Malluma Mesia.”
Silence hung heavy in the air.
“Yeah,” Briana said. “Way better than Siri.”
“It sounds familiar but…is that Latin or something?” Skylar said.
“If it was Latin then Creeper would have translated it right away,” Neil said.
“Sounds like gibberish,” Dante said.
“Gibberish,” said a deep voice, laced with contempt. It was the large man next to Neil, his brow furrowed as he stared at his screen, mouse-wheeling down through an article.
“Something to add, Big Neil?” Skylar said.
Big Neil pounded his mouse on the table, but stayed silent.
Skylar looked at Neil and the thin man shrugged. Big Neil wheeled on him.
“Of course, you don’t remember, and now that’s why Creeper can’t translate,” Big Neil said. “No one listens to the genius in the corner.”
“Big Neil, please,” Skylar said, “If you know this language…”
“Ask sticks over there,” he said, jabbing a finger at Neil.
Neil opened his mouth to protest before his face tightened, the corner of his mouth turned up as understanding dawned in his eyes. “Are you kidding me? It’s Esperanto?”
“Why would Creeper need to know Esperanto?” Big Neil said, one eye twitching.
“What the hell is Esperanto?” Dante said.
Big Neil’s face relaxed. “Esperanto means ‘one who hopes’. It was developed by L.L. Zamenhof in 1886 as an international language for all people.”
“Bet you can’t translate,” Neil said, smirking.
Big Neil’s mouth screwed up tight as his face blushed a dark red. He took a deep breath before speaking. “It says, ‘Deliver Abigail to the agreed hospital to doctor Chapman, then wait for further instructions as ordered by Dark Messiah.’” Big Neil smiled broadly at them, teeth gleaming before he glanced at Dante and his face fell. “Abigail’s the one we’re…oh, my God.”
Skylar spoke to the room. “Find out which hospitals this Dr. Chapman reports to. In the meantime, have Creeper monitor all hospitals in the Greater Los Angeles Area and keep an eye out for our militia man with a limp.”
CHAPTER 84
Armory
Dante walked past the long table full of Skylar’s projects into a dimly lit hallway. Skylar had told him they were getting very close but would still have to wait for Creeper to do its analysis. He’d left the excited knot of Fer de lancers behind, mumbling how he needed to use the bathroom.
He shuffled past a thick door on the left with a keypad mounted next to it, its numbers glowing red. A door with a T handle was at the end of the passageway. The handle turned with a scrape, the door screeching open before Dante stepped inside.
Fluorescent lights winked on along the walls, filling the room with stark white illumination. It was a large space, reminiscent of a parking garage with its low ceiling and concrete supports. It was painted the same pale green as the rest of the fallout shelter with the occasional chalky white streak trailing down. At the center were two large objects, each about the size of a car, covered with thin black tarps. Dante came closer and saw that a large double door had recently been installed in the ceiling above, the edges of the concrete still bleached and chalky white where the opening had been cut. Large pneumatic rams were mounted on the floor, two for each door allowing it to open upward and out. He lifted the tarp, peeking underneath.
“Take a look,” Skylar said from behind.
Dante glanced over his shoulder then pulled the tarp off and onto the floor. A large, sleek drone crouched there, about the size of an SUV. Its intricate looking parts were painted a solid, matte black. Four propellers were tucked along its flanks, mounted at the end of delicate but strong looking support arms. Skylar waved a hand and the mega drone whirred to life. Dante stepped back as a warning beep trilled before the arms unfolded and extended the propellers out from each corner.
“You built this?” Dante said.
“One of our people is the lead designer at a drone company. He’d always dreamed of making a big one but his bosses didn’t see the money in them so they refused. Fer de lance paid for them. We have the pieces and components built to spec then we assembled them here. These babies are all carbon fiber and aircraft aluminum and can carry up to a thousand pounds.”
“How are you paying for all this? It can’t be with the money I invested.”
“It is though. Well, your money and other investors. We need legitimate sources so we don’t raise any red flags just stealing it. That way Spearhead, the front company, can still be protected by bankruptcy and we can just hide the money in Irish banks just like all the other big American companies. Hey, if it’s good enough for them, right?”
“Your name is for shit now, though. You’ve burned too many people.”
“Not my real name. We chose a generic, easy to dismiss, Gen Z type name. It worked with you, didn’t it?”
“What about your run on college Jeopardy?” Dante said.
“Manufactured by us. There’re a few articles about how it’s bullshit by the two people who cared, but we buried them a few pages in. It’s amazing how many people don’t go past the first page of search results, isn’t it?”
“But why? What is all this really for?”
“Fer de lance is a necessity. We speak truth to power. And when that fails, we take action. A group like ours wouldn’t be necessary if the FBI and CIA could do their jobs properly. There’s just too many restrictions and they’re too easily corruptible. Who’s going to help when your own government can’t because they’ve been compromised?”
“And your group is incorruptible.”
“Of course not. When it comes to that I burn it down and start over. I have that luxury. Government agencies don’t.” Skylar closed his hands together and the drone retracted into its original position. “Help me with the cover, will you?”
Dante lifted one side while Skylar lifted the other, arms spread wide. They covered the drone and the two men regarded each other in silence for a moment before Skylar spoke, his voice a low croak.
“When Edward Snowden revealed that the CIA was able to spy on us, their own citizens whenever they choose without oversight, without impunity, Fer de lance not only became a necessity but an inevitability. Morally compromised people worry about control and blame, not helping one man find his daughter. That’s where we come in. We’re going to find her, Dante. I promise. And when we do, we’re going to burn Dark Messiah to cinder. Cancer like that has to be destroyed
before it can spread. It’s already metastasized to the FBI and who knows where else. It’s the only way.” Skylar gazed at Dante a moment before speaking again. “Let me show you something.”
Dante followed him back down the hall. The younger man stopped in front of the thick metal door and entered a sequence of numbers on the keypad. The door swung inward and Dante followed him inside.
Hundreds of rifles of all kinds lined the walls, standing floor to ceiling in two rows on metal racks. Ammo boxes were stacked on three heavy wooden pallets in the center. Large white bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer were piled up on another pallet next to the ammo. A long-barreled rifle on a tripod stood nearby. There was no trigger or stock, just a small, rounded box attached to the back with a stubby antenna sticking up from the side.
“Remote-controlled sniper rifle,” Skylar said, placing a hand on top. “Why would somebody even need this?”
There was another pallet stacked with slender bricks wrapped in dark green plastic. Each brick was labeled with blocky, yellow letters that read: CHARGE DEMOLITION M112 WITH TAGGANT (1-1/4 LBS COMP C-4).
“Skylar,” Dante said, eyes hard.
“It’s not what you think. This is all stuff we’ve confiscated from militia groups. We’re not warriors, at least in the physical sense. Our battlefield is online. This is all off the streets now, because of us, out of the hands of people who wish to do harm to others. Angry with the government. Understandable, but misguided. We find out where their stockpiles are, take what we can then inform the authorities. Anonymously of course. We work with government agencies while minimizing risk to us as much as possible.”
“I’m afraid this much power puts you in a very precarious position though. How do you know something you do is going to be worth the end result? Things never go as planned. With my work, I screw up and maybe we miss a deadline, lose a client. You screw up, people get hurt, maybe lose their lives. Are you ready to take that responsibility?”
Skylar held his gaze. “Ask me again when Abigail is back home safe. You may see what we’re doing here in a very different light.”
Dante nodded. “So why show me all this?”
“I am fearless, and therefore powerful. Remember?”
“Yes, but-”
“You spoke at my high school years ago. Those words changed my life, struck me like a bolt of lightning. Helped me see things so clearly. Set me on a path. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew it wasn’t going to be pushing a boulder uphill for the rest of my life, just to have it roll back down and crush me in the end.”
“Skylar, those aren’t even my words. It’s from Frankenstein for fucks’ sake.”
“One of my favorite books.”
“Yeah, I can tell.” He sighed, the air rattling in his lungs. “It’s all bullshit, Skylar. Just a rah-rah speech. ‘I am fearless and therefore powerful’. Look at me. I’ve never been so afraid in my life.” Dante looked down at his prosthetic hand. “I guess I believed it at one time. Now, I…just don’t know anymore.”
“No, Dante. It’s the answer. Fear is at the very core of all irrational, non-critical thought. It fuels the fires of anger and rage, both of which are emotional extensions of fear. In truth, angry people are the most fearful of all of us and, therefore, the most dangerous. If our own authorities can be so easily compromised, as they have been in your case, what other answer is there than to take up the spear and wield it ourselves?”
Dante nodded, thinking a moment before he spoke. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about what you’ve built here, Skylar. I don’t exactly agree with your worldview, but if you find Abigail, then I swear to you, I’ll be in your debt for the rest of my life.”
“I appreciate it, I really do,” Skylar said. “And I’ll remember you said that.”
“A word of warning though,” Dante said, “from Mary Shelley’s story.”
Skylar gazed at him, one eyebrow raised.
“You remember how it ends, right?” Dante said.
“In fire and death,” said a voice from the doorway.
Dante turned to see the person in the black burka, only the eyes visible, bleary and red. The eyes blinked with a twitchy intensity before the figure reached up and tugged the hood off their head and let it crumple to the ground.
“Hello Dante,” Colin said.
CHAPTER 85
Colin
Dante advanced on him. “Look at me.”
He grabbed Colin by the neck with his left hand and squeezed, cocking his right hand back into a fist over his shoulder. The thin man’s eyes bulged as he clawed at the fingers clamped around this throat, eyes widening as Dante’s prosthetic hand cinched to a grinding halt.
“Why?” Dante said. “Tell me why!”
“Wait,” Colin gasped, struggling to loosen the fingers around his neck.
Dante drove a fist into his stomach and Colin doubled over, legs dropping out from under him. Grabbing two handfuls of his shirt, Dante yanked him to his feet again, pulling him close. He barely seemed to weigh anything.
“They have her, Colin. They have Abigail.”
“I can help, please!” Colin said, voice a wheezy rasp as he struggled to free himself.
Skylar came forward and put a hand on Dante’s arm. “He came to us. Hear what he has to say first. Then if you want to kill him, go right ahead.”
Dante released his grip and Colin fell to the ground, rubbing his throat and coughing from deep in his lungs. Dante resisted the urge to kick him in the face. He glowered at his old friend, doubled over and panting. His face softened and he stumbled back before slumping on to a stack of ammo cans. Looking down at his hands, he unclenched his fists and motioned with a short chop of his hand.
Colin crawled over and sat across from Dante on the floor.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say it. Just tell me what you know.”
“I got my life back,” Colin said. “What pathetic little life I had.”
Dante glared at him. “All I care about-”
“You’re going to hear this!” Colin said, light flaring in his eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose yourself. Lose who you are and not know how to find your way back. There is nothing more frightening. Through medication and therapy, hard work, I got my life back. Dark Messiah threatened to take it all away again.”
Dante’s eyes fell away to the floor. “Okay, I get that. What do they have on you?”
Colin exhaled a shuddering breath. “Video of me with someone. My neighbor’s wife down the hall.”
“Jesus, Colin.”
“I know, I know. Fucking stupid, right? I was just so lonely and…she liked me. Me.” Colin smiled, wistful. Then his face fell. “That was me in your deep fake donkey video. My body at least, cut out and pasted in. A warning to me what would happen if I stepped out of line.”
Dante nodded. “Understood. Now, Dark Messiah. Tell me.”
“Baby Jesus 1.0,” Colin said.
Dante sighed. “What the hell does that mean?”
“In the field of artificial intelligence,” Skylar said,” Baby Jesus 1.0 started it all. Just showed up on a porn BBS of all places, out of the blue back in 1986.”
“BBS? As in Bulletin Board Service?” Dante said.
“Bulletin Board System,” Colin said. “The pre-Internet. This was the early eighties, before our time. With a modem, users could connect to servers and read news, upload or download data, direct chat with others or post to message boards.”
“Yeah, I remember you talking about that old school stuff. Sounds like the Internet now,” Dante said.
“Similar, just not so pretty. Text-based, a lot of ASCII art. Plus, this was back in the day when computers and modems were still very expensive and mostly for hardcore computer nerds,” Colin said. “When people realized what Baby Jesus was, it went up on BBSs everywhere and guys began to play around with it. Nobody knows who wrote it but it worked in ways that had never been seen before. It was the first actual, w
orking ANN or Artificial Neural Network. The first learning software ever. It was groundbreaking. Visionary doesn’t come close to describing it. People gave it different subjects to learn, from animals to presidents, movies and history, then they uploaded their updated version for someone else to grab and add to it. It grew exponentially after someone wrote a scraper that could connect directly to any server, enabling it to learn everything it could by itself.”
“I don’t understand exactly why any of this is special. What was the point?” Dante said.
“You gotta understand this was way back before how the Internet is now. No Google. Siri and Alexa are decades off. You had to hunt down the information you wanted and even then, you didn’t know if it existed in electronic form. If it was on a BBS somewhere, somebody had to have input it by hand. So, Baby Jesus was revolutionary in that you could just ask it what you wanted to learn more about. It was the first digital Oracle of any kind in history.”
“I get that. But why was it called Baby Jesus 1.0?”
“Who knows? Most likely because it quoted the Bible when you first ran it, specifically the Ten Commandments. The name was probably just a joke. Computer nerd humor has always been on the weird side,” Colin replied.
“The Ten Commandments makes sense actually,” Dante said.
“How do you mean?” Skylar said.
“Simple set of numbered instructions to follow,” Dante said. “So, what does Baby Jesus have to do with me?”
“After what happened at The Place,” Colin said, “I wasn’t just hiding in my room all the time. I was learning how to code. I was really into the idea of artificial intelligence and I used to hang out on a few AI message boards. Baby Jesus kept coming up. It was the nineties, so by this time, it was pretty far along in its learning. Version eleven or twelve. It went by a new name as well. Messiah.”
Dante raised an eyebrow but stayed silent.
“You could ask it questions and it would answer, but they weren’t conversations exactly, just Q and A. That was where my contribution came in. I gave it a personality.”
Crucible of Fear Page 28
