The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  This guy was an overwound clock.

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa.” Rick raised his hands. “Just be cool, okay? I don’t have any nadaný mojo. I’m just a normal human being.”

  “Normal? I don’t think so. The last time I saw you, you were unconscious and shackled to a gurney. By the time I see you again, two security personnel have been drugged unconscious, a nadaný has been freed—and, fortunately, recaptured—and you have invaded a restricted area wearing stolen security clothing. These are not the accomplishments of ‘just a normal human being.’ And, familiar as I am with your record with the CIA, I know exactly what kind of human being you are, Mister Garrick Somers.”

  That gave Rick a bit of a jolt. His file was supposedly buried so deep that only the director and a few others had access.

  “How—?”

  “You’d be amazed at the level of interagency cooperation between the clandestine services. I looked into you after you intruded on my past—”

  “Intruded? When?”

  “We’ll get to that. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that you’re now intruding on my present. Such a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in—”

  “Nor do I, Mister Somers. Nor do I.”

  “It’s Hayden now.”

  “Very well, Mister Hayden. Have a seat.”

  “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, but I do mind. Very much. The seat.” He waggled the pistol. “I insist.”

  Rick rolled the chair out from under the desk and dropped into it. Being seated, especially in a wheeled chair, put him at more of a disadvantage. Something the DIA man obviously knew.

  “Care to explain what this is all about?”

  “ ‘This’?” Greve leaned back against the door but the pistol remained steady. “Depends on what you mean by ‘this.’ From what I overheard of your conversation with Doctor LaVelle I gather you’re already well versed on the Lange-Tür Project. No, ‘this’ concerns another matter entirely.”

  Greve stepped to the solitary bookcase and pulled a large-format volume from the top shelf. Something vaguely familiar about the glossy black cover …

  Keeping his distance from Rick, he dropped it on the desk, saying, “I believe you are acquainted with this infamous tome?”

  Rick looked closer. No cover illustration, not even a title on the cheap black binding. He’d seen this book before … or one just like it. His hands shook as he lifted it from the desk and opened it to a random page. German … the text was in German.

  No … couldn’t be the same book. He read a brief passage—he’d been raised in Switzerland so German was a second language for him—then slammed it shut.

  Impossible. But here it was. That single paragraph had been enough. The same book used by the Düsseldorf sickos, the book that had started them down the road to mutilating children.

  He tapped the cover. “This was burned to ash. Where the hell did you get it?”

  “This is a copy,” Greve said. “As was the one you saw in Düsseldorf.”

  “I saw Xeroxed sheets.”

  “Made from the copy I gave them, I’m sure. The original is extremely rare and in a safe place.” He waved a hand at the bookshelf. “I have two more copies like this in reserve.”

  “Why …?” Rick shook his head. “Why would you want even one copy?”

  “I donate them to select groups and individuals to see how they’ll react.”

  “You what?”

  “I said I—”

  “I heard what you said. I just can’t believe—you mean that’s where the Düsseldorf sickos got their copy? You?”

  He nodded. “They seemed the perfect recipients, especially since they could read it in the original German.”

  “You’re one sick fuck, you know that?”

  Greve smiled. “A rather harsh assessment, don’t you think? I prefer ‘agent provocateur’ myself. They weren’t the first. Over the years I’d doled out a few to carefully screened recipients, but every single one of them went and burned their copies. Those lovely Düsseldorf nihilists were the first and only to act on it.”

  Act on it … yeah, they’d acted on it all right.

  Visions of those mutilated children swam before him.

  He resisted the impulse to hurl the book at Greve and leap across the room, trap his scrawny neck between his hands, and watch his face turn purple as Rick squeezed the life out of him. But the pistol was still pointed at his chest.

  Later. Then and there he made a promise to kill Greve. When and how … to be determined. For now, he had to let the twisted bastard rattle on.

  “We humans are a strange lot, don’t you think? The practices recorded in that book, culled from primitive and not so primitive cults all over the world, sicken most people. But every so often one comes across others who are inspired to unthinkable levels of atrocity.”

  “Where’d it come from?” Rick said. “What sick mind would even think to compile those … those obscenities … those …?” He ran out of words.

  “Some crazy nineteenth-century German intellectual traveled the world and put it together. Oddly enough, a distant relative of Doctor Osterhagen owned a copy. The good doctor hid it away for decades but eventually the book passed into my hands. Unfortunately, I don’t speak German and it turned out to be an absolute bitch to translate. What do you do when the translators keep quitting on you? Finally I photocopied it and ran it through some translating software. The resulting English was awkward but I was finally able to appreciate what the translators had found so off-putting.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “Find it off-putting? Of course I did. Those ceremonies are unspeakably monstrous. But I saw a way in which they might serve a purpose.”

  Rick shook his head, thinking, What possible purpose …?

  “You’re not going to tell me DoD wanted you to—?”

  “Oh, no-no.” He laughed. “That stodgy bunch? Not on your life.”

  “Then what?”

  “Let’s just say I have varied allegiances.”

  Things began to fall into place.

  “Those scars on the guards’ backs … on one of my abductor’s too … the brand …”

  “You saw it?”

  He tugged at his security coverall. “I didn’t arrive with this. Had a good look while I was stripping Watts. I’m guessing you have one too?”

  “I am not the topic of our conversation.”

  Which meant he did. What was it with these secret-society guys? Why’d they feel they had to tag themselves with their cult logo? Didn’t that undercut the “secret” part?

  “Like hell you aren’t.” Rick tossed the book back on the desk. “You’re the one distributing this cult porn.” And then it hit him. “Oh, wait. When you said I ‘intruded’ on your past, you meant Düsseldorf, didn’t you.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “But what …? Why would you want children harmed … mutilated?”

  The son of a bitch pressed his free hand over his heart. “That’s the last thing I wanted! Who knew they’d choose that cult to emulate?”

  “Are there any cult practices in that book that don’t involve painful death? What were you thinking?”

  “As I said, I have varied allegiances with varied agendas.”

  “Who’re we talking about?”

  “Not germane to our discussion. As to what I was thinking, I wanted to see if they could create a breach. You see, sometimes, on rare occasions when enough chaos and misery are concentrated in a single locus, a breach occurs, allowing something to break through … to sup on the misery.”

  “No shortage of misery in that farmhouse.”

  “But it probably wasn’t enough to achieve what they wanted.”

  Rick remembered their mantra: Bringing the Dark Man.

  That was all those sickos had talked about … their lousy Dark Man who was going to … what? Rick could never pry out a clear idea of what they thought the Dark Man wa
s going to do for them when they lured him/it/whatever across from wherever. They seemed to believe the Dark Man was going to act as some sort of WMD for them. Considering how they hated everything, why not?

  “The mutilated children,” Rick said. “They called them ‘the Choir.’ ”

  Greve nodded. “Yes. A recurrent concept: Singing to the Void.”

  “But they couldn’t speak. Their tongues … their vocal cords …” Rick swallowed back a surge of bile.

  “No sound necessary. Their misery is a melody that reverberates and resonates with the miseries around them and beyond. You may have heard their song without realizing it. But that would not prevent it from affecting you.”

  Was that why he’d felt as if he’d been moving through a black fog back then?

  “I’d been watching the group intermittently,” Greve said. “My time was not entirely my own, and I was often called away. And during one of my absences, you acted.”

  Rick hadn’t been able to stomach it any longer. The Company had ordered him to stay away because it had determined that the group was no longer a threat to the U.S. or its allies. No matter how Rick had begged and pleaded and threatened that they were a danger to any child they could find and abduct, no one was listening.

  So he’d acted on his own … forced to play God, because if a God ever existed in this reality, it had been on a cigarette break.

  He trapped them in their farmhouse and ignited the explosives and incendiaries they’d stockpiled there. They’d booby-trapped the barn where they kept the children—couldn’t allow anyone to see what they’d done—and when the farmhouse went up, so did the barn.

  Eleven adults gone—good riddance—along with fifteen irreparably damaged children—a mercy.

  Greve said, “The fire and explosions you ignited added to the chaos the nihilists had created. All those young Germans burning alive pushed the level past the threshold that would allow something through. I wasn’t there to see it, but you were.”

  “I wish I hadn’t been.”

  “You were the only witness. What did you see?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Of course I want to know. That is the only reason you’re here!”

  Rick briefly considered trying to use what he’d seen as a bargaining chip to get him to release the nadaný, but was pretty certain that wouldn’t fly. Greve was too invested in the nadaný. Probably thought of them in some twisted way as his property.

  “Okay. I saw a version of what you’ve got in that fishbowl back there.”

  Greve made a fist. “I knew it! I knew it! It briefly disappeared around the time of the Düsseldorf explosion. That’s where it went!”

  What a pathetic clown.

  “Don’t tell me you really think you’ve caught an ICE.”

  “ICE? What’s an ICE?”

  “My pet acronym for Intrusive Cosmic Entity.”

  “Yes! That’s exactly what it is!”

  “Are you kidding? If that’s in any way, shape, or form related to a real ICE, it’s a toenail clipping.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “You don’t see the big picture, do you?”

  Greve looked insulted. “Of course I do. I’m privileged to be a part of that picture, to know where all this is headed.”

  Rick shook his head in disbelief. “Look, if you think you caught something, you’re more clueless than I originally thought. That thing was placed here.”

  “Placed? Ridiculous. It’s—”

  “According to your pal Stonington, back in ’57, after ten years without a lick of progress, DoD decided it had better places to spend its money and decided to shut down Lange-Tür. But then, on what was to be the last experimental run, miracle of miracles, something comes through … something not of Earth … something from Out There … something no one can explain. An Anomaly. And strangely and conveniently, Lange-Tür never works again after that. Doesn’t that strike you as contrived? I mean, just a little bit?”

  From Greve’s frown, Rick guessed it did.

  “But I’m told Doctor Osterhagen made some adjustments to the equipment before that last run.”

  Rick barked a harsh laugh. “Of course he did! Because the previous run had been a failure, so it’s only logical to change something before the next run. I’m willing to bet Osterhagen made adjustments before every new run. But if the last adjustment he made was the reason for the questionable success of bringing through the Anomaly, it stands to reason the Lange-Tür portal would keep on working, doesn’t it. But it didn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean the Anomaly was placed there. For what possible purpose?”

  “To probe. To see how best to mess with our collective heads, for starters.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “What about the suicides, Greve? It gets inside people’s heads, makes them come to believe there’s no point in going on. And what if that’s just the beginning, the exploratory run, the test probe to see what works best against us? What next? Multiple Anomalies popping up all over the world?”

  “There’s only one and a Lange-Tür portal is required to bring it in. We have it contained—”

  “You only think you have it contained. It can leave any time it wants. It’s been sitting there waiting for a signal or a trigger.”

  “Waiting? It’s been well over half a century!”

  “An eye blink where these things are concerned. Less. The initial twitch that leads to an eye blink. It’s a pattern, Greve. We’re an anthill and they’re toying with us. I’ve seen it before.”

  “You’ve seen nothing. You know nothing. It’s more than that … much more.”

  The way he said it … Greve knew. Rick had never run into anyone else who knew. Did it have something to do with that brand he and the others wore … the one he wouldn’t admit he had? Did his group or cult or organization know more of the secret history than Rick did? Most likely they did, because Rick had been tackling it singlehandedly and knew he’d only scratched the surface.

  “Listen, Greve: As an undercover CIA field agent, I blundered into your game with the Düsseldorf sickos. Now, years later, I’m back, blundering into your game with the nadaný. Coincidence? Neither of us believes in coincidences, so that means we’re both involved in another game. You play games, the ICE play games, it’s all connected, Greve. All connected. ICE-ICE, baby.”

  Greve was giving him a calculating stare. “You’re far more entertaining than I had anticipated.”

  “ ‘Entertaining’? I’m entertaining?”

  “An expression I picked up during my apprentice days. But I think you’d be a good fit for my organization.”

  He had to be kidding.

  “And what sort of organization might that be?”

  “A fraternal order, you might say.”

  “Like the Masons?”

  He made a sound that might have been half burp and half laugh. “Hardly. Septimus is to the Masons what NSA is to a backwoods country sheriff’s office. They measure their age in centuries, we measure in millennia.”

  Septimus, huh? Rick wanted to say, Ooh, do I get a funny-looking brand like the other guys? but held back.

  “I’ll give it some serious thought.”

  And he just might. He never joined anything, not even the Book of the Month Club. He’d never heard of Septimus and normally would run from any organization that would accept Greve as a member. But if they’d been around half as long as Greve said, maybe they had a cache of arcane info on ICE and the secret history. If so, he wanted a gander.

  But that would come later, if ever. Right now … enough of this.

  “I’m going to stand.”

  Greve thrust the pistol forward. “Sit!”

  “Nope. Gonna stand.” Slowly he rose from the chair. “And now I’m going to walk out of here.”

  “I will shoot you dead, Hayden.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Greve blinked in shock. “If you think—”

&nbs
p; “No, I don’t think you’re afraid to shoot or not man enough to shoot or any of that stuff.” Didn’t want to threaten the guy’s masculinity. “I just think you suspect you might have use for me down the road, and I’m of no use dead.”

  Risking a lot here, but without Laura to worry about, and with Greve seeing him as a potential recruit for his cult or whatever, he felt he could take a few chances. But to minimize any impulsive move on Greve’s part—like a trigger twitch—Rick planned to broadcast every move he made.

  “I’m going to approach the door and step into the hallway.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Let’s talk options. I don’t have the option of leaving this bunker, so you’ve no worry there. You, on the other hand, have three options: You can back out the door, you can step aside and let me by, or you can shoot me. But no matter what, I’m headed for the door.”

  After hesitating a few heartbeats, Greve pulled the door open behind him and backed out, always keeping enough distance between the two of them to prevent Rick from grabbing the pistol.

  Once in the hallway, Rick began a measured walk toward the door to the restricted area. He heard Greve following about six feet behind.

  “Moe told me you abducted Ellis as well.”

  “That’s ‘Doctor LaVelle’ to you.”

  “No problem. I was thinking, should we gather him and Anulka along the way?”

  “Anulka is in lockdown and Mister Reise is far too dangerous to release from his quarters.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Tried to do. He is neutralized and will stay that way for the time being.”

  Well, damn. Rick had been hoping Greve hadn’t learned about Ellis’s tricks yet.

  So the question now was: What was Rick going to do when he reached the far end? He had no idea. But three other people would be there, and he figured they could serve only to expand his options on getting everybody who mattered out of here.

  And killing Greve, of course.

  22