by Bill Bennett
As if he’d willed it, his phone rang. The caller ID showed that it was him – Skyhawk. Freddie quickly answered. Without even saying hello, he asked, ‘Is she all right?’
He strode quickly through the lounge room, through the kitchen, around a large steel and glass staircase and down a long dark corridor until he reached a huge metal door at the end. The door had no handle, there was no obvious means of entry, but Freddie made a hand gesture in front of the door, intoned a few words and it slowly opened, revealing huge reinforced hinges, like a bank vault. He nimbly skipped down several flights of stairs in the windowless well. Lights came on automatically as he made his way down, although there were no lights as such – invisible nanoparticles in the air provided a radiance that activated as he climbed down and deactivated as he passed. It was another of his little inventions – one that he was sure would have large commercial appeal. He just hadn’t had the time to patent it.
He went further down, as if he were descending into the side of the hill. Which in fact he was. At the bottom of the stairs was another large metal door. Again there was no handle, but Freddie put his hand up, made a swift gesture in the air and said a few quiet words, and the door opened.
He stepped into the Bunker – a huge domed space that looked like the underground control room of the CIA or the National Security Agency. It was dark, but lit from the glow of a gigantic LCD screen that dominated a facing wall. The screen flipped constantly between maps of the world: the United States, Western Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, India, South America, the Pacific nations, the rest of Asia. It intermittently zoomed in on a country, a city, on a district or street and up came data of current Baphomet activity and surveillance footage from CCTV cameras. Overlaid on these images were pictures of various Baphomet operatives with details of their current whereabouts, their prior activities and their standing within the Golden Order.
Set back from the screen were several rows of booths, at which sat dozens of young men and women hunched over computer screens. They all had the intense yet pallid and dishevelled look of serious geeks. This was Freddie’s crew – Cygnet’s front line – working every moment of every day to try and keep the world a safer place, even though no one outside this room knew it. They came and went through a hidden underground tunnel system that was accessed nearly two miles away, through a trapdoor in the basement of a small house in an outer suburb of Santa Fe, made invisible by an unseen cone.
Most of those working in the Bunker looked like they should be living in a homeless shelter, yet each was a highly skilled expert in some area of surveillance or counter espionage, whether it be cyber terrorism, hacking, satellite surveillance, forensic accounting, or encryption. Freddie was aware that their activity in the Bunker was highly illegal – that they were breaking goodness knows how many federal laws – but it was the only way to keep Baphomet in check; to try to stop them from bringing the world to its knees.
Cygnet was a guerrilla organisation, up against a veritable army in Baphomet, because black witchcraft was much sexier than the Silver Swan’s more benevolent activities. The Golden Order had no problems recruiting new witches, principally because young people in particular were drawn to the dark side more so than the light, which they considered boring and restrictive.
Baphomet sought to corrupt and destroy the institutions of authority and to undermine social order. They espoused the delights of greed, lust, carnality in all its forms without guilt or limitations, theft, violence and murder. Baphomet witches could indulge in it all without judgement or punishment. Needless to say their organisation had wannabe black witches banging down their doors eager to join.
Cygnet in comparison was deathly dull, believing that a person should live by certain rules and that he or she should be morally accountable for their actions. Cygnet believed in the purity of love and were driven by compassion and an overarching sense of humanity. These were concepts considered uncool by many young people; that’s why Baphomet’s numbers worldwide ranked in the tens of thousands and Cygnet’s ranked only in the hundreds.
On one side wall were large TV monitors, muted, screening live newsfeeds. Freddie had seen the footage a dozen times or more, but still it mesmerised him with its horror. A Syrian terrorist organisation had claimed responsibility for the atrocity – more than fifteen hundred commuters had been crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when it exploded and collapsed, and the media had proclaimed it the single biggest terrorist act since 9/11. The White House was calling it a political assassination, because the bombing had been timed to coincide with the transit of a government motorcade for the secretary of state. The president and his advisors were now planning retribution.
Freddie knew it wasn’t a Syrian terrorist cell. It was Baphomet. He had enough intel to know that for sure. There would be international repercussions – which no doubt was what the Golden Order wanted. Their mission statement was to create chaos, because out of chaos would come fear that would fuel social unrest, and out of that unrest would come opportunities to swing communities, societies and cultures away from democracy into the gloating hands of anarchy. Once there was a total breakdown in social order, the Golden Order could then begin an indoctrination into their dark ways.
He turned and looked up to the main screen. Every now and then, an image of Angela would appear – CCTV pictures captured on the day she disappeared; security camera footage of her buying groceries at a market, walking out to a parking lot, looking anxiously up into the sky before getting into her old truck, walking into the Valley View Motel with several shopping bags, then later that evening leaving the room again, closing the door gently so as not to make a sound before slipping off into the night, never to be seen again.
Freddie watched the images, trying to keep his emotions in check. His big sister, abducted by the most horrendous group of individuals imaginable – those that deified and worshipped Satan. And soon, they would kill her by extracting her soul. The obscenity of it angered him beyond words.
A beautiful young Asian woman sitting at one of the computers got up and gracefully walked over to him. She was tall and as she walked her shiny black hair shimmered like rippled silk. She had an implacability about her, yet as she approached Freddie she smiled.
‘Any news?’ Freddie asked. Freddie deflected flirtations like a tennis pro swatting practice balls. He’d never remarried after the death of his wife from cancer and publicly had taken no interest in any romantic attachments. That hadn’t stopped the state’s gossip media from declaring him New Mexico’s most eligible bachelor, and it certainly hadn’t stopped multitudes of women trying to catch his attention. Only one had, a woman named Victoria who was the anchor of the local TV news station – but he was keeping that super secret. Unbeknown to everyone except Angela, Vicky had joined Cygnet, become initiated and taken their vows, and through her journalistic connections had became a key resource in accessing data on various members of the Golden Order.
‘We have a few leads,’ Kee said, her voice as silken as her hair, her eyes never leaving his. She was Cygnet’s top surveillance expert. Recruited from the elite cyber counter-terrorism unit at MI5 in London, she could find anyone anywhere on the globe. She’d joined Cygnet because she’d become frustrated with the red tape and delays and strictures involved in working for a government security agency. She wanted to get things done now, and not have to worry about filling out forms and waiting for approvals. Her brother had been killed in a terrorist attack in London several years earlier, which she later discovered had been staged by Baphomet. Ever since, she’d devoted her life to avenging his death and ridding the world of the Golden Order.
‘Through some encrypted text messages that we’ve pulled down and deciphered,’ she said to Freddie, ‘we’ve discovered she’s being transported to a safe place by a very high-level agent, known as the Fallen Priest.’
‘I know of the Fallen Priest,’ Freddie said. ‘He presents as human, but he’s not of this world. He’s believed to be s
everal hundred years old. He’s Baphomet’s soul collector.’
‘Soul collector?’ Kee asked.
‘Evidently that’s what he does,’ said Freddie. ‘He collects souls for Satan. But he specialises in the difficult ones, the big trophy souls. I’d put Angela into both of those categories.’
‘Most definitely,’ Kee said, nodding.
‘Do you know where he’s taking her?’
Kee shook her head. ‘No, I think they had her in a hideaway somewhere but something must have happened because now they’re moving her again. But I don’t know where. I’m sorry. This Fallen Priest goes way under the radar. Even I can’t get a bead on him.’
‘He’s evil incarnate and he can create protections that we’d have no hope of cracking, so it’s no wonder you’re having trouble tracking him. But let me know if you hear anything more.’
‘Of course,’ she said, with the hint of a smile.
Freddie looked around the room, his gaze settling on an empty chair in front of a desktop computer. Beside the chair was a bin full of fried chicken containers, torn candy bar wrappers and empty bottles of energy drinks.
‘Where’s Gummi?’ he asked.
‘In the kitchen, where else?’ Kee said and smiled.
Gummi sat in the Bunker’s canteen with his chair precariously angled back, his sneakered feet resting on the Formica-topped table and his laptop where it was designed to be, in his lap. He glanced over and checked the timer on the microwave. Inside, turning on the carousel, was a frozen pizza coming out of its thaw, soon to be devoured. The cycle of life, as Gummi saw it.
He rubbed his red, sleep-deprived eyes and stared at the map of mainland USA on his computer screen. It was crisscrossed with hundreds of luminescent lines and where they intersected there was a pulsing black dot. Where a bunch of lines crossed, a much larger dot throbbed red. He ran his cursor over the large red dots, going from one to the other across the country, as if trying to decide which one warranted his further attention.
Gummi was twenty-three, dishevelled, and shaped like his name. He wore a crumpled brown suit with a stained white shirt hanging out over his bulbous frame. Thick black frames with bottle-glass lenses adorned his rounded face. The glasses were smudged with grease. This was Gummi’s trademark look. He regarded his appearance as a political statement, although if you asked him to articulate exactly what that statement was, he’d be hard pressed to tell you.
His ginger-coloured hair was long and unkempt, so too his three-week-old beard. He shaved once a month. That was his routine. He liked to have at least one routine involving personal hygiene. It made him feel good about himself.
His favourite food groups were burgers and fries, and his drink of choice was Monster, which he was known to use to clean his teeth – when he cleaned his teeth. He often slept in his clothes, a hangover from his days at MIT when he would go on study benders for seventy-two hours at a stretch. But it had paid off. He graduated in the top percentile of his year and even though he received lucrative offers from all the big Silicon Valley firms, offers that by now would have made him a gazillionaire, he wasn’t interested in corporate life and start-ups. He was more concerned with social reform, and so he’d become an expert hacker, a practice which he believed was a legitimate means to make the powerful and elite more transparent and accountable.
While waiting for the universe to align so he could put his dent in it – in other words, while waiting for a proper job where he could employ his not inconsiderable expertise for the betterment of humankind – he employed his not inconsiderable hacking skills for the betterment of making mischief. He targeted those people he decided he didn’t like, such as Wall Street bankers, sleazy politicians, corporate moguls and anyone on the board of the National Rifle Association. But he caught the attention of the FBI cyber unit when he hacked into a municipal grid and cut the power to Donald Trump’s Florida mansion while he was in residence on a golfing weekend. It was worth it for the CNN chopper footage of Trump stumbling out of the mansion in the dark, cursing harried staff.
With FBI heat on him, Gummi quickly moved to Philadelphia where he changed his identity and disappeared. Shortly after, he was contacted by Cygnet. How they found him when the FBI couldn’t was still a mystery to him. Later he would discover that it was Kee who found him, and this was the start of a one-sided love affair with the stunning surveillance expert.
Within the rarified super-geek echelons of hackerdom, Cygnet was a myth, a spectre, an ephemeron – something that seemed to only exist in late-night chat rooms and deep-net hacker forums. The talk was that it was a band of kick-ass white witches trying to save the world. Very cool. Many geeks had tried to track them down, but even the guys that had hacked into NSA mainframes couldn’t find them.
Then one day Gummi was at the local 7-Eleven buying some Doritos and Coke Zero, because he was trying to lose weight, when a large black man wearing a loose brown suit and dark sunglasses sidled up beside him and said there was someone who wanted to talk to him. The head of Cygnet.
How could Gummi refuse?
He was blindfolded and taken to what he later learned was a Cygnet safe-house. Via an encrypted video link he had his first conversation with Angela Lennox. For an hour she asked him question after question – about his family life, his political views, his personal likes and dislikes. At the end of it, she thanked him and was about to finish up when Gummi asked if he could question her. At first, she was amused by his audacity, but she answered his questions directly, and Gummi got a sense of her resolve, her courage and her idealism. And he discovered that what bothered her about the current state of the world was what bothered him too – injustice, intolerance, an overwhelming acceptance of fear as the natural state of being. That’s when he decided to devote his life to Cygnet.
She offered him a job – to be the key hacker and programmer for the organisation. But first, he had to become an initiated white witch. That was the toughest thing he’d ever undertaken, other than trying to give up Junior Mints. It damn near killed him going through the purification stage, which he did in an isolated canyon in Arizona. He seriously thought he would either go mad, or die and burn in hell. Several times he wanted to pull out of the whole dumb thing and walk away. But he thought of Angela and how disappointed she’d be in him, so somehow he toughed it out and got through it.
His first task at Cygnet was to hack into the email addresses of key Baphomet operatives – something he did with ease. They were quickly able to learn what disturbances the Golden Order was planning and they gained a greater understanding of their internal structure as well.
Gummi also took on a personal project. He really wasn’t sure if he began it because he relished the technical challenge, or because he wanted to impress Angela and show Kee that he was more than just a geeky fat-ass that dribbled Monster and chucked down donuts at 4 a.m. He wanted to contribute something significant to Cygnet. And so, geo-mapping the Dragon Knots became his obsession.
For two hundred years, Cygnet had been collecting information on the myriad of spiritual energetic lines that enmeshed the planet. The repository of all that knowledge within Cygnet was the woolly-headed professor who ran the Santa Fe witchcraft museum. As Henri Duprey explained it to him, some of the world’s great sacred and holy sites were believed to be built on these lines, called ley lines. The cathedrals of Notre Dame in Paris, St Paul’s in London, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul were all supposed to be on ley lines. Also the holy springs at Lourdes, the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and the supposed burial place of King Arthur in Glastonbury.
But with any force there’s always an equal and opposite force and the negative equivalent of ley lines were fey lines – foul energetic lines that Baphomet called Dragon Lines. They too laced the planet, and the places where they intersected were called Dragon Knots. Auschwitz was believed to lie on a Dragon Knot, so too the killing fields of Cambodia and the sacrificial temples on Machu Picchu in Peru. And it was said that the Vatican in Rome lay
on a Dragon Knot too.
The professor believed that Baphomet fed off the foul energies that emanated from these Dragon Lines, and so Gummi took it upon himself to map them into a computer program, allowing Cygnet to get a better fix on their dark enemy. He spent months with Duprey, working closely with him to get a handle on all the data so he could input it correctly. At the time, he didn’t realise that it would become a valuable asset in the hunt for Angela Lennox, the woman he’d set out to impress. And that it would also make the professor a prime target for Baphomet.
Gummi was shocked to hear how Baphomet had killed the dear old man in Paris, away from the white-light protections around his home and office. Perhaps they’d heard about his work on the Dragon Line map. Did that make him, Gummi, a target too?
The professor’s killing had made him even more determined to get the Dragon Line map fully operational, both in memory of the wonderful man, but also so they could find Angela Lennox. Henri had been certain they’d hidden her at a site that sat on a Dragon Knot, but which one? There were more than fifty red dots throbbing on his map – each one a major knot. He needed more information. Perhaps Angela’s daughter, Lily, could somehow help.
He’d been awestruck when he saw images of her up on the big-screen monitors. With her striking red hair and green eyes and the cutest freckles, she was very much her mother’s daughter. Beautiful and proud. But Gummi also sensed in that photo her mother’s immutable strength of will and qualities of quiet resolve that perhaps Lily herself wasn’t yet aware she possessed; the qualities needed to lead them all. It would take very little for Gummi to follow her to the end of the world.
