Eldritch Ops

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Yes, because the possessed spy with an evil sword is the white picket fence type,” I said.

  Shannon frowned. “You can drive out the demon and get rid of the sword. I can’t get rid of the fact that I’m a demonic—”

  “You’re who I want.” I got up and took her by the hands. “I’ve been with a lot of people over the years. My psychotic ex-wife, Ashley, and you are the only ones who have meant anything to me. In the end, I have a chance of being happy with you. I’m never going to let you go of you, past actions or not.”

  “Even if we have . . . complications in the future,” Shannon said.

  “You’re not just talking about having sex with one of your old boyfriends or to get intelligence, are you?” I asked.

  Shannon had done so six times in the past year. I’d done it five. I’d been more surprised by my lack of jealousy than anything else. Indeed, I was bothered by how little the whole thing had troubled me and was concerned at how little she seemed disturbed by my sleeping around—even for a good cause. It had been the cause of at least three of our fights last year. Whatever we were, however much I loved Shannon, we were not a normal couple.

  “No,” Shannon said. “There’re other reasons I’m not comfortable with total intimacy.”

  “Well, I can’t have kids and you don’t want any,” I said, having been cursed by my ex-wife. It might have been broken or it might not have been. I hadn’t bothered to check under the circumstances.

  Shannon sighed. “I’m talking about the fact that we’re both murderers. Do we deserve to be happy?”

  I paused. “That’s a question I can’t answer. I know it’s not our place to judge whether we can be happy, though, merely to experience it.”

  “There’s also the fact that either of us could die at any given time. You’re a Committee member, but you’re no safer now than when you were a field agent. I’m not the type to hang up my catsuit and pistols either.”

  “I don’t want a housewife who looks like a model. I want you.”

  Shannon raised an eyebrow. “Wait, are you saying I look like a model or are you saying I don’t?”

  “Shannon …”

  She grinned. “’Cause I’m saying I’m far better built than the majority of those twigs. I admit, I may use my shape-shifting to pad out a few areas, but—”

  “You’re not going to derail this conversation.”

  “I don’t want you to get killed, Derek.”

  “I don’t want you to get killed, either. The best way to do that is to make sure the two of us always have each other’s back.”

  “After this, we’re going to find an island somewhere, get drunk, and have a ton of sex.”

  “It sounds like a plan. Thankfully, we’re in the Caribbean already.”

  Shannon wrapped her arms around me and the two of us shared another passionate kiss. We probably would have had sex again if there hadn’t been a dead body lying three feet away. Bloody Mary had tried to entice me with those kinds of images, but I wasn’t a sadistic sociopath turned on by bloodshed.

  Yet.

  Pulling away, I instead focused on something else. Something we needed to do. “Let’s check what’s on the flash drive.”

  Shannon looked disappointed but nodded. “I want to know what’s so damned valuable myself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After rolling up the djinn’s body in a bed sheet and stuffing it in a closet, I sat down in the building’s study to examine Christopher’s flash drive. The study was a pleasant-looking office filled with little pink trolls and a roll-top desk, which was incongruous with the fact that its former owner was an Vampire Nation commodore.

  I was uncomfortable with Shannon’s belief that we were safe in a house someone had just tried to murder us in, but there was no safe place in Nassau. I had to trust her judgment and see what was worth killing me for. Not that the Vampire Nation didn’t have plenty of reasons already.

  On the desk was Shannon’s laptop, which was an Athena 9000 made by Pantheon Corp. It had the processing power of a supercomputer as well as mystical protections designed to prevent it from being hacked by anyone outside of the Red Room. Sticking in the flash drive, I found the contents of the folder were quantum-encrypted and had more defenses around them than the NSA or Division One. A single box appeared on the screen with a request for a password.

  Unlike how Hollywood depicted hacking, it was impossible to get inside this sort of program without the code sign. I’d have one shot at guessing it before the flash drive’s contents were deleted. I could feel the magical traps lying around it, ones designed to explode at the slightest tampering. I was getting tired of Christopher’s tests.

  “What sort of password would Christopher think only I would get,” I muttered aloud, thinking of all the private jokes we shared. There was the name of the Hong Kong agent in Vegas we’d both been with, favorite movies, and countersigns we’d used on missions. In the end, it came down to what sort of man Christopher thought I was.

  I typed in the word “PASSWORD,” then hit enter. The screen faded away to the picture of Christopher’s face. He was wearing the same clothes from the ski lodge, which made me think this message had been recorded right before he left for Aspen. The background was a digital electronic landscape, stretching to infinity.

  “Password? Really?” Christopher said, staring. “That’s how little you think of me?”

  “What is the password?” I asked.

  “Anything Derek Hawthorne types in,” Christopher said. “It’s safer that way.”

  I frowned. “So, is this you or some sort of interactive program?”

  “An invention of my own. It’s sort of a digital homunculus. It’s my memories, personality, and beliefs but with no real will. It exists to answer your questions before deleting itself—leaving all of the information inside to use as you see fit.”

  “Like what was in the Bloodsword,” I said.

  “Yes,” Christopher confirmed.

  “Why not tell me this when we first talked?” I asked.

  “I gave you the Bloodsword to give you leverage against Dracula. Adding my plans to it would result in him getting access to them if you decided to trade it back or lost it. Please, tell me you didn’t kill anyone with it.”

  “A couple of dozen, it seems. Vampires, all of them.”

  Christopher’s digital face scrunched up. “I see.”

  “The Vampire Nation is a clear and present threat to the world. I won’t back down from them due to intimidation or because it’s safe.”

  “I know, Derek. It makes you the perfect person to understand this information.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The real me, the flesh and blood undead me, is mesmerized. All vampires since Dracula started enslaving his descendants are bent to his will. As a creation of magic, I’m not subject to the same mystical compulsions. Thus, I can look back on myself and say—I am brainwashed. It’s why I need your help to stop me from destroying everything I hold dear, however unwittingly.”

  I wondered why the “other” Christopher in the Bloodsword reacted differently from this one. It had been more interested in guiding me to Nassau. “You’re a machine evaluating yourself and now moving against the person you share the memories of. I find that creepy as fuck.”

  “Not a fan of artificial intelligence?” Christopher asked.

  “I’m afraid Lucy will invent something that escapes into the internet and destroys us all. I’m not here to discuss things with a machine,” I said.

  “It’s nevertheless true. Decades after your personality has been set in stone by the mesmerism, you become the person they try and make you into being—loyal, psychotic, and insane. This means that not all vampires are entirely responsible for their actions because of this mesmerism. The undead just need a small amount of blood to survive, and there’s tens of thousands who deserve to be freed from their master’s control rather than exterminated.”

  “War is not something that te
nds to show mercy.” I wasn’t about to reveal the Red Room’s plans to go to war with the Vampire Nation.

  “Total war is also an abomination. I say this as someone whose parents experienced the horrors of the Imperial Japanese,” Christopher said.

  “What have you got to show me?” I asked, looking at him straight in the eyes.

  “Something that will change everything,” Christopher said.

  Christopher’s digital face disappeared, and I was left with a terabyte of files to look over. There were videos, thousands of pages of documents, pictures, and confidential reports that the House had concealed not just from the agency at large, but also from me. Despite being a member of the Committee, I hadn’t seen any of it. What I did see chilled my blood.

  It took almost five hours to study the material enough to get a sense of it, and I would have to spend weeks reviewing it to grasp it all. Nevertheless, the material within was damning, and if it was a forgery, it was a very good forgery. There were several times I wished I could have consulted with Christopher’s digital homunculus, but his words about it deleting itself appeared to be true. I regretted that, because there were still a lot of questions I wanted answers to.

  I was writing down notes on a yellow pad when Shannon walked in, having changed into blue jeans and a white t-shirt. She was sipping a mug of coffee and looking at me with concern. “So, anything interesting?”

  I stared at the screen before closing my eyes, giving them a chance to rest. “Yes. Division Zero.”

  Shannon snorted. “Division Zero is a myth. The kind of thing bored agents discuss because we’re all a bunch of paranoid megalomaniacs.”

  “And sex addicts, don’t forget that,” I said, giving a half smile before frowning again. “It would seem Division Zero is not as mythical as people believe. It’s one of the many products of Protocol Zero being put into effect—kind of obvious in hindsight.”

  “An entire division of the Red Room exists to study brainwashing?” I asked, having almost forgotten about the reason Christopher had involved me in all this Caribbean vampirates business.

  “Yes. You know the CIA’s psychic experiments?” Christopher asked.

  “Project: Stargate?” Shannon suggested.

  “Got it in one,” Christopher said.

  Project: Stargate was a program conducted by the CIA and DIA from the 1970s to 1995. Officially, the program was terminated after experts concluded it provided no useful data and its leaders were likely tampering with reports. The Red Room ran the project from behind the scenes, and any real psychics were shuffled off to the Black Room. The CIA still got their money’s worth, as it provided actionable intelligence during the height of the Cold War. Division One had broken a lot of neutrality agreements to gain access to Washington funding, providing both actionable intelligence and mystical assistance to the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the reasons other Divisions hated us until I’d forced us all to work together and gave everyone a mutual target to hate.

  “According to these documents, they stumbled onto how to duplicate vampire mesmerism just before Project: Stargate was shut down. Their first experiments were crude but capable of being non-mystical indoctrination techniques, the kinds cults and quack psychotherapists used to use. Combining the two, it became possible to completely change a person’s loyalty. Given enough time, anyone could do a one-eighty on their beliefs. Not to mention psychic surgery.”

  “Psychic surgery?” Shannon asked.

  “A psychic technique popularized in the Philippines and Spain before the Red Room denounced it as a fraud. Mostly because it was. Basically, it’s literally conducting surgery with your mind and dissolving tumors as well as sealing injuries. Only one psychic in a hundred can do it. Andy Kaufman died because he relied on it to cure his cancer.”

  “Damn, I was hoping he’d faked his death. The Red Room practices this?”

  “Division Zero’s version is more like psychic neurosurgery combined with lobotomies. You dig a hole in someone’s brain and fill it up with whatever you want. There are subtler uses too, including using these techniques to remove soldier’s capacity for PTSD and their fear of monsters.”

  Shannon snorted. “Pfft! That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “It’s been obligatory for new recruits to the Black Room since 2001,” I said.

  Shannon stared. “What?”

  “Remember those mandatory health spa trips they started enforcing last year? They use soft music and blinking lights to make sure we drink the House Kool-Aid.”

  Shannon clenched her fists. “Oh, those bastards.”

  “Eh, it didn’t work on me or you, according to these documents. We’re listed with an X on our ability to respond to the treatments. I’m not sure I disapprove, either. I saw a lot of people go into these treatment centers a complete wreck only to emerge with the ability to live normal lives.”

  “Except they were sent right back into combat thereafter.”

  She had a point. “Yeah, they were. Much like in World War 1, hospitals existed to patch up agents before putting them back into the field.”

  I pointed at the screen before me, showing a secret communication from the House in the late seventies. “The Project: Stargate research helped complete the House’s ultimate goal of Protocol Zero—the destruction of all vampires everywhere.”

  “That doesn’t sound too evil. Individuals aside, vampires are pretty bad.”

  “Protocol Ten was ‘try to figure out how to kill all vampires with plague.’ Protocol Eight was ‘try and figure out how to prevent shape changers from being born’, Protocol Seven was ‘try and figure out how to prevent naturally occurring magic and how to induce it in test subjects.’ Protocol Thirteen is ‘make Pantheon Corp the largest corporation on Earth by starting wars’, which is where Truman broke with them. They’re not a good bunch of rules. I knew about most of them, but they concealed Zero from me. Probably because they were still doing it and it wasn’t a money-sink like the others.”

  “We really need to stop making jokes about the House being the Illuminati because it’s not funny anymore.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Division Zero has a giant research center devoted to this—called, appropriately enough, Camp Zero. Which, if you can’t tell, shows these guys aren’t very imaginative when it comes to naming.”

  “So there’s a base somewhere where traitorous Red Room and House agents get sent to have their brains picked apart?”

  I nodded. “Yep. Camp Zero is located a hundred and fifty miles away on an island black site. It’s concealed from the rest of the world but has easy access to ships and helicopters carrying prisoners for quote-unquote treatment.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Shannon said, appalled.

  “It gets worse.”

  “Magical Guantanamo Bay gets worse?”

  “Two and a half years ago, they managed to achieve consistent results for breaking not only agents with lingering loyalty to the Red Room, but also enemy agents. They developed a ninety-eight-percent-effective means of creating sleeper agents. Full-on Manchurian Candidate stuff where vampires, blood slaves, werewolves, humans, and so on could be made into unwitting pawns. They started inserting these agents throughout the Vampire Nation and its territories and have been using them to weaken them ever since.”

  “We’re back to this being sorta bad.”

  “It’s very bad. They’ve started wars, terrorist plots, and even financial crises to weaken the Vampire Nation’s material resources. According to these reports, the vampires are a paper tiger now and in a perfect position to be eradicated. It just cost the lives of two hundred thousand people.”

  Shannon stared. “Wow.”

  “Mission accomplished,” I said, disgusted. I looked at her mug of coffee. “May I?”

  Shannon handed it over and I took a sip. “Knock yourself out. I added a little something extra. Blame the Irish in me.”

  “You’re Scottish,” I said, taking a dri
nk. “My father is the Committee member supervising it.”

  Shannon just stared at me. “You can keep the coffee. Wow.”

  I took a long drink. I needed it. “Yeah, just when you think my opinion can’t get any lower. I can kind of, maybe, see the justification for creating saboteurs with mind control. I don’t approve of it, but it’s no different than killing people. Doing it on your fellow agents, though, is unforgivable.”

  “Why didn’t he order it done to Ashley, then?” Shannon asked.

  “Excuse me?” I replied, confused.

  “You said there’s this place to send traitors to be brainwashed, and he runs it. Last year, your father told you he never believed for a second you’d kill Ashley. Hell, he’s probably the person who sent Penny to meet you in the car.”

  “Are you defending my father?” I asked.

  “Just confused,” Shannon said.

  I thought about what she was suggesting. “I don’t know. The father I’ve come to know is very different from the one I grew up with, and all my family tells me he is. My Uncle Talbot described Nathan Hawthorne as one of the greatest heroes of World War 2. Like a Pacific Theater version of Captain America. He was always a good father, supportive and nurturing. Then he ordered me to kill my fiancé, got two of my siblings killed and a third possessed, and has been neck-deep in the House’s secret projects ever since before I joined the Committee.”

  “We’re not exactly saints either. I don’t mean to tell you how to live your life, but maybe you should give him the benefit of the doubt,” Shannon said.

  “Because he’s my father?” I said, lightly mocking the idea.

  “Because I don’t want you getting yourself killed trying to do the right thing. I’d rather have you by my side, alive and corrupt, than try to take on the second-most powerful member of the Committee. Your dad or not.”

  “Says the woman on a mission from God.” I meant that literally. Shannon had been directed by an Archangel to join the House. I still found that hard to believe.

  “I’m a Christian existentialist. Nietzsche said, ‘God is dead’, but what he should have said was he gave us a mind to figure out what is righteous and what is wrong.”