Vanadium Dark Read online

  “The wind blows the Vanadocams away, doesn't it?”

  “As far as Project Elephant can tell, there's a supply closet with a door at the other end. Their computer can't see anything beyond. It's not perfect. Sometimes Vanadocams get stuck to the walls, so we paint them over with lead from time to time.”

  “A conventional FBI search would uncover our secret facilities, but that's one step further than they can go without a warrant,” the man said, “which we are happy not to provide a pretext for.”

  Anzor, recovered somewhat, looked around.

  The facility was Spartan. But he saw that this was where things happened.

  Computers, notebooks, phones, polypaper.

  Reams and reams of handwritten notes, spread untidily across desks, spilling across the floor.

  Field kit. Camouflage jackets. A ghillie suit.

  Guns.

  Guns everywhere.

  In the land of the blind, the One-Eyed Man is king.

  Another man spoke up. “I bet you feel clean.”

  Anzor laughed. “Clean? Why would I feel clean?”

  “Because for the first time in twenty years, there are no Vanadocams on you. It's sickening, isn't it? Most people go their whole lives without ever being clean, without ever being free of those fucking robots floating through the air, crawling all over you, and infecting you with cancer. You've heard about that, haven't you? I can show you the cancer rates for the past twenty years. Upticks in every category. It's the subject of my next book.”

  Anzor shrugged.

  “But we're forgetting introductions.” The man said. “My name is Dan Kolde. You're Anzor Khujadze. And it is the eve of battle.”

  * * *

  Dan Kolde liked to buttonhole people and ask them a question.

  “How much time do you think you have?”

  It was a bizarre question, and people often asked for clarification.

  “How many days do you think you have left? Assume a normal lifespan? A hundred thousand? A million? Don't calculate it. Just give me a guess off the top of your head.”

  He'd wait for the answer and then ignore it completely.

  “You have about thirty thousand, if you live to the national average. Even if you live to a hundred, you've only got thirty-six thousand. Makes you think, doesn't it? Wake up, do something, go to sleep. Repeat thirty thousand times, and your life is over. You won't get to redo it.”

  He was in love with being conscious.

  He hated having to sleep, hated having to eat, hated even needing time out to take a shit. They were all distractions, diversions, whittling time away from his thirty thousand days like a knife to balsa wood.

  He hated thinking of all the flakes of his life that were already lying on the workshop floor, lost to activities such as getting dressed and taking showers. He hated thinking of how many more he'd add before the end.

  Dan’s schedule involved something in the area of a hundred and fifty seminars a year. He had flight stubs from every airport in the country. His phone bill amounted to hundreds of new dollars a month. He filled ten to twenty notebooks a year with cursive. He didn't like typing, didn't like machines at all, to be honest.

  Machines were the enemy of freedom, the abrogation of free will. When society fell apart, it would be people who suffered and died. The machines would be fine. They might even be the cause.

  When Dan was a child, his dad had filled his head with tales of this coming collapse. Modern society, he was told, was a fragile house of cards. Don't trust the skyscrapers and the billboards, son. Tomorrow they'll be gone.

  Once, Pharaohs reigned in Egypt. To a yoke-tied slave, their power seemed enduring as the stars and heavens.

  It fucking wasn't.

  Thousands of years later, people walked through Egyptian ruins. Pointing, taking photographs, laughing at the way things had once been.

  How long before people walked through American ruins? How long before people stood before the rust-pitted Statue of Liberty, and say, “and they thought they'd live forever”?

  History had not yet vindicated his father.

  The world was still turning. Even the obliteration of the NASDAQ and NYSE in New York had failed to kill the existing order. World War III had not happened.

  It looked as though Dan would be a free man living in the world of machines for a while longer.

  He remembered his father, a huge pillar of a man, like Paul Bunyan minus a blue ox. He seemed to have the intractable strength of a bear.

  Looks were deceiving. Neil Kolde was far more dangerous than a bear.

  His combat record included tours of duties in the worst hellholes of the world. In the first Gulf War, he'd fought a three-day sniper duel against a legendary Iraqi Royal Guard marksman. Over nearly thirty six hours, the two men had fired just seven shots between them.

  His father had scored the killing shot when he saw hashish smoke rising from behind a boulder. He'd experimentally fired a shot at a nearly rock, and fatally wounded the man with a one-in-a-million rebound.

  Before that, on the advice of a Lipan Apache, Neil had lived in the woods on his own for a year with no weapons, no kit, and no contact with the outside world. He ate snakes and mushrooms. The deer became so trusting of him that the didn't even run when he walked up to them, spoke a few soothing words, lanced open a vein, and drank their blood.

  Dan had received a rough childhood at the hands of this modern-day Paul Bunyan.

  One time, furious at his dad for leaving him and his mother for three weeks, he'd done something foolish. He'd asked his father why he'd gone.

  “Come on, boy. Come down to the beach.”

  Dan had paled. A painful lesson was coming. “Dad, I don't wanna go.”

  “Come, or I'll fetch the belt.”

  Anxious, he followed the huge man down to the water's edge. They were at low tide, and flurries of mud crabs retreated to their holes as they passed.

  Suddenly, his dad had seized a handful of his hair, put him in a vicious arm lock, and pushed his head under the water.

  Fortunately, he'd just breathed in. The cold shock of the water almost made him lose it.

  He felt the salt water work its way under his eyelids, stinging his eyes. He writhed and wriggled, but he had no more chance of escaping his father's kimura than he had of drinking the entire ocean.

  For a full minute, he managed to stay calm.

  Finally, with lactic acid burning him on the inside and with darkness dimming his vision, Dan lost control. Blind spasms of emotion took hold of him. He was no longer a human. He was a fireball of panic.

  He opened in his mouth, his unhinged mind somehow believing that he could breathe the water.

  Then his father pulled him out of the water and put him on his stomach, emptying him out like a water skin. The seawater left his lungs in a rush, and he lay there, retching and trembling. He felt scoured inside.

  “How'd that feel, boy?”

  Dan didn't answer. Couldn't.

  “You asked me why I did it, and now you know why. Think of how you felt when your head was underwater. You would have given anything to be able to breath, wouldn't you? You would have given the devil your soul for one breath of air.”

  Stars did an uneasy gestalt before Dan's eyes.

  “Think of how that felt, and understand. That's how I much I hate being tied down.”

  The incident stayed with Dan.

  He no longer felt bad when his father ran out on them to go walking in the woods, or hiking in the Rockies.

  Like breathing, some needs were very important.

  Neil Kolde had died in 2023. A snake lunged at him, and Neil had almost avoided it.

  'Almost' never stopped anyone from dying of necrotic fasciitis.

  He'd taken a hunting knife, sliced an X-shape over the snakebite, and sucked the blood. For all his woodsmanship, Dan's father had been an uneducated man. Snake venom doesn't enter the bloodstream. It attacks the lymphatic system.

  This l
ittle John Wayne act had doomed him. When emergency had arrived, they'd asked him what kind of snake had bitten him. He didn't know. Hadn't gotten a good look at the thing.

  There would have been some trace of the venom around the bite, but he'd sucked it all away. They'd had no idea what antivenom to administer.

  Dan had been sad, both for his own loss, and for America's. There was a dearth of men like Neil in America. The only thing for it was to pick up the mantle, and follow in his father's footsteps.

  What would you have made of this, Dad? he’d thought a week after the New York bombing, reading an online news article about the newly formed initiative that would later be named Project Elephant.

  Funded by the Department of Defense, the project aimed to built a new nation-wide surveillance network.

  A week before, it would never have made it before the Senate.

  But the nation was in shock. And when you're in shock, you will accept any sort of medicine, even poison with a pretty label.

  I think you would have started learning how to build pipe bombs and Y-fuzes too, Father.

  There were protests. Dan was not one of the milksops who only protested after they'd learned the full extent of what the project would do, the liberties it would take away. He protested right from the very beginning.

  As Project Elephant inexorably marched toward completion, he became more desperate, and his tactics reflected this.

  In Washington, twenty thousand people marched on the White House. Police failed to disperse the crowd with words, and then failed with riot batons, and then succeeded with rubber bullets.

  Dan remembered when he'd been shot. A tremendous hammer blow had struck his temple, and he'd had a second where he didn't know where he was or what he was doing.

  There’d been no pain...but only for a second.

  His sense of balance had returned, and he was struck by an almost thrilling agony. It felt like a cattle brand was being pressed against his skull, sizzling someone's mark into his skin.

  Later, he'd reflect and realize that it was the opposite of a cattle brand. It was a mark that said he was rejected, that he didn't belong in the new world.

  Riding high on adrenaline and pain, he’d righted himself and hurled himself on the man who had shot him.

  The pig in blue was out of formation, separated from his fellow jackboots by the press of bodies. He had three inches and sixty pounds on Dan, but in that moment, amid the gun smoke and riot gas, he could do nothing but take a beating.

  Dan, screaming obscenities, put his booted foot into the man's stomach. The cop doubled over. Dan took him to the ground, tearing his helmet off and raining blows on his unprotected head and neck. Splotches of blood appeared like a Biblical plague over the guy's face. At first, Dan thought that it was the cop's blood. Then, he realized it was his own, falling from where the rubber bullet had broken his skin.

  He hammered and punched the guy until his rage was sated, and he lunged into the crowd, weaving through mobs of people to confuse any pursuit.

  He might have been photographed beating the cop, he realized. And that would have been the end of a promising academic career. A big risk.

  But he was glad he'd done it. It had been cathartic.

  Soon he'd have no way at all of escaping after such an act. The Vanadocams saw all. He felt like the last man to jump off a sea cliff before the installation of a fence.

  Hours later, he’d looked at his injury in a mirror. His thrashing had flung streaks of blood all across his face, making it look like a cracked plate. At the epicenter was a red hole, filled with pulpy, soft tissue

  The injury had faded after a few weeks. It had become a point of pride, so he'd gone to a tattoo parlor and had it inked back on.

  By that point, he was making a name for himself as one of the fiercest opponents of the spycam network. He did everything he was allowed and a few things that weren't. The Y-fuzes weren't the end of it.

  They weren't even the worst of it.

  * * *

  Earlier that day, Dan had received an email from a man called Viktor Kertesz. The guy had made a sizable donation to OEK's coffers, which immediately got him on Dan's radar.

  There had been an escape from Fort Leavenworth.

  He was to receive a very nice surprise.

  Staring at Anzor Khujadze for the first time, Dan felt a smile creep across his face.

  The guy was a living legend, the first victim of Project Elephant's blind fuckery and contempt for justice. Dan thought they'd framed Anzor for the shooting spree as a test of the public's willingness to accept Vanadocam evidence. And unfortunately, Project Elephant had conclusively won out on that bet.

  Anzor was short, a compact ball of muscle. He was dressed in civvies, but his eyes were not civilian eyes. They looked calm, docile, and if you stared at them long enough, you thought you saw hints of something ugly.

  Something that belonged in a cage.

  Something that reminded him of his father.

  The hour was ripe for One-Eyed King to go to war.

  * * *

  “I have to say, man... ” The young Midwestern-sounding guy looked star stuck.

  “Yeah?” Anzor asked.

  “I really respect you for what you did to Sun Hi Shin. Really happy that you plugged that slant-eyed cunt.”

  “Uh, I'm sorry?”

  “Put a bullet through that fuckin' slope's head. Someone shoulda done that years earlier, man. Then we wouldn't be in this mess.”

  “I don't think we understand each other.”

  Dan Kolde glared at the man. “Sorry, Anzor. Half of us think you're innocent, and the other half wish you were guilty. God, there's so much I want to talk to you about. How much do you know about us?”

  Anzor laughed. “A little. There always seemed to be One-Eyed King alumni someplace or another in Leavenworth.”

  “Well, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Corporal Schlier, can you get this guy something to eat? He's had a rough journey.”

  “Thanks. Really. I'm glad of it.”

  Anzor took a seat, taking stock of the war room.

  There were other doors.

  “Just how big's this place?”

  “Goddamn big. There's thirty full-time personnel at our Indianapolis chapter, plus our secretary and the two window dressers.”

  “Window dressers?”

  “We pretend we're actually conducting business in the main foyer, so we've got guys answering the phone, making bullshit calls, printing nonsense papers, and generally acting like they're the real One-Eyed King. Whenever the government snoops on us with Vanadocams, that's what they see.” Dan gave a toothy smile. “The good stuff happens here, in the dark.”

  Dan was off and running. He talked constantly. “Funny how your call sign's Stalin. I actually got the idea for this place from Hitler.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Apparently, he built this whole underground metropolis in Sowie Forest in Poland. Thousands of Sonderkommando were used to build to dig tunnels and pipe concrete. What was he planning on using it for? Nobody knows. As Russian forces fought their way across Silesia, SS bomb squads blew up the entrances to the facility, burying them in tons of rubble. It's a mystery lost to time. That's the kinda thing I wanted to do here, build a mystery lost to Project Elephant.”

  “So... what kind of things do you do? What's the big mystery down here?”

  Dan leaned forward conspiratorially. “Want to see? Private Robertson, please show Mister Khujadze the product of our last five years of work. Our little miracle. Don't be too long. I want to clear out of here in five hours, and we've got lot of stuff to do.”

  A hatchet-faced woman rose and unlocked a door with a key. In this age of DNA scanners, the sound of a key turning physical tumblers was odd to Anzor.

  Odd, yet comforting.

  The room was dark. The woman switched on a light.

  “I don't get it. What is it?”

  The woman started to explain.


  It was a miracle.

  The Pentagon

  Secretary Wilson spoke terse sentences.

  "I'll be brief, Director. Project Elephant has a rat problem."

  Jack Duvall stared at Secretary Enoch Wilson, looking for familiar emotions and not finding as many of them as he would have liked.

  It wasn't his first day on the job. He'd been Director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency for nearly ten years. He'd seen state functionaries of all stripes come and go. The way they reacted to disaster was pretty predictable, a couple of scripts he'd memorized word for word, line for line.

  There was confused anger wildly laying blame, defending themselves against accusations nobody had made.

  There was a grim, professional PR smile, with ulcer-inducing anxiety shining through.

  He couldn't read Secretary Wilson's expression at all.

  The Secretary flipped the polypaper around with a white-gloved hand and put it in front of Jack.

  "This was an email that we intercepted a few hours ago. The sender thought it was encrypted, but it wasn't. Please read."

  Jack touched the part of the polypaper that asked READ AGAIN? The words scrambled and reformed as he went back to page 1.

  “Sirs,

  My name is Viktor Kertesz. I recently made a financial contribution to your organization, if that jogs your memory. Let me tell you a bit about myself.

  I work at the Pentagon as part of Project Elephant by way of the Department of Defense. My job title is Super-classified Signals Intelligence Analyst. This job is better known by the common-use term "Elephant Handler."

  My work is "SIG-INT convergence" and "intelligence analysis." Government euphemisms.

  I spy on people. That is what I do.

  I operate the Project Elephant mainframe, which receives and stores data from the Vanadocam network. I am, of course, forbidden to disclose my identity to anyone. Obviously, this is a rule I am now breaking.

  To be brief: recent alarming events at the Pentagon have made it so that I cannot perform my job any longer.

  I entrust you with the following piece of information. Earlier today, the legendary domestic terrorist Anzor Khujadze escaped from police custody while en-route to Indianapolis.