Vanadium Dark Read online

  I was immediately tasked with his recapture. I disobeyed this order. I told my superiors that he'd escaped in a Vanadocam blind spot.

  ote that there has been no mention of this in the press. I assume that some layer in the US government is keeping it a secret, for unknown reasons.

  I have made contact with Anzor Khujadze and advised him to come to One-Eyed King. I presume the address at the back of Dan Kolde's newest book is still current. I ask that you receive him in whatever manner seems best to you.

  It is very likely that I will be caught. I only work on the Vanadocam computer half of the time because my superiors do not trust me. As soon as I am relieved, I expect the second Handler to search for Anzor himself. He will absolutely uncover my deception.

  In short, what you do in the next twelve hours is very important.

  I don't know what the future holds for anyone, least of all myself. But I think a great disaster is coming to the human race.

  At least now I can say it wasn't my fault.

  -- Viktor Kertesz”

  "Goddamn..." Jack whistled. "Just... fucking... goddamn...."

  Poker-faced, the Secretary of Defense said nothing.

  "This is sedition and treason of the first order,” Jack said. “With the Espionage Act dinged for good measure. A government employee aiding in the escape of a criminal... and it's an Elephant Handler?"

  "I know, and it was my decision to hire this guy. Send in the clowns."

  "Is there anything else I should know?"

  "No. I'm passing the matter over to you. Please keep him in custody within the Pentagon while we initiate proceedings against him."

  Jack waved at two PFPA agents. "Come on, you and you. Find this guy and bring him to the restraint room."

  “His door will be locked. Want us to requisition DNA keys from security?”

  “No. We force entry. I don't want to give him even another second to continue his fuckery.”

  Despite the Pentagon's imposing size, it took no more than seven minutes to travel from any one point to another.

  Jack Duvall's men were at Viktor's suite in three.

  * * *

  A fist hammered on the door.

  "Open up. Security."

  Viktor was lying in bed, sleeping in on his day off. His eyes snapped open as the first blow struck the door.

  Oh, fuck.

  Knowledge crashed in on him. It felt like he'd been standing on a solid floor, and it had caved in underneath him.

  He was caught.

  "This is Pentagon security, Mister Kertesz. Open the door!"

  He only had a few seconds.

  Bullshit. What could you do in a few seconds? What act of heroism could be consummated in such a length of time? You couldn't make a dramatic speech. You couldn't MacGyver a weapon.

  You could write an email.

  He lunged at this phone on the bedroom counter as the hammering fist grew louder and louder until it shook first the door, then the doorway, then the wall.

  He brought up Anzor's phone number. It was a stolen phone, and he'd probably already disposed of it. Couldn't be helped.

  He started typing a message, furiously composing words.

  I'm caught. They know everything, or they soon will. RUN.

  "Open this goddamn door, Kertesz!"

  He used his final few seconds to append a postscript in Georgian.

  ნახვამდის

  Goodbye.

  He hit send just as they took the door down.

  A booted foot struck it at the critical juncture around the doorknob, where the mortise lock went into the frame. The wood cracked. The foot kicked at it again and again.

  Finally, the mortise sheared away in a spray of splintering wood. A pair of uniformed men wearing PFPA uniforms shoved the remains aside, saw him lying on the bed, and advanced.

  Viktor tried to project calmness, tried to give the impression that this was a terrible misunderstanding.

  "Hey...guys... I was asleep."

  One of the men saw the phone on the bed and snatched it up. "This bag of shit just sent a message!"

  One of the men had the bearing of a leader. "Viktor Kertesz, I am Pentagon Force Protection Agency Sargent Leon Armbrust. As empowered by a verbal order, we are placing you under arrest. Here are your rights—"

  "I don't need to hear my rights."

  “In that case, we will escort you to the Pentagon holding room. If you resist, you will be handcuffed."

  The other man read the message and scowled. "Look at this, Leon. He's talking to Anzor and those One-Eyed King kooks. So much for being asleep."

  "I'll relay that to the Director. Sounds like Dan Kolde's holdout in Indianapolis is where the cops will find him. Anyway, get on your feet."

  Between the two suited guards, Viktor found himself pushed and prodded along a corridor. This was normally the way he went to the Zoo.

  As if reading his mind, one of the guards spoke up. "No Handling for you today, Kertesz. Where you're going, there's nothing to spy on except four walls.”

  Indianapolis, one hour earlier

  It was early morning in Indianapolis. Buildings emerged from the gloom, shining in the crystal-sharp edge of dawn.

  The SWAT team for the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Unit made a no-knock raid on the headquarters of organization calling itself the One-Eyed King.

  Their objective was the recapture of the fugitive Anzor Khujadze.

  Point men deactivated the lock on the door. There seemed no need for smoke or flash grenades. The entry team broke in, communicating a stream of data that grew less exciting with every second.

  There was absolutely nothing there.

  No people, let alone wanted-list fugitives.

  The offices were stacked high with paper, but the paper seemed curiously random and unconnected to anything a paramilitary group might do. One was an invoice for a thousand square feet of pine flooring. Another was a nightclub advertisement.

  A puzzling discovery was made in the storage closet.

  It concealed the entryway to a secret corridor lit by blue lights with a bank of immense fans at one end. No dust had settled on their blades. They had been used in the recent past.

  Beyond the fans was a network of rooms, all of them empty, except for cheap furniture. Data cables dangled out of walls. Little square footprints of discolored flooring revealed where tables and cabinets had rested. There were a few scraps of shredded paper.

  The detail leader was surprised when he radioed headquarters and was told that no Vanadocam data existed for these hidden rooms.

  There was video that showed a few dozen people vacating the premises, wheeling boxes and crates. They'd driven to the airport, where they’d boarded planes. Details on these flights were still being obtained. The Vanadocams could not see on board planes. No good data could be obtained at high altitudes, a technical flaw that Project Elephant was striving to correct.

  The men had all been wearing balaclavas. If one of them was Anzor Khujadze, it escaped the Pentagon's notice.

  Captain Lukarthur found the turn of events puzzling, but not too puzzling. It wasn't the first time he'd heard of these guys.

  It wasn't the first time he'd dealt with them.

  He'd been a bluesuit in Baltimore when he'd first heard of Dan Kolde. By professional reputation, he'd been a bit of a joke— but the kind of joke that kills people.

  Many explosions and dead bodies later, Kolde had gone away to prison. Five years later, he was out and heading a new paramilitary group. Many eyes were on this organization, but they'd never been involved in anything obviously seditious. Kolde, it seemed, had lost his lust for blood.

  Soon, One-Eyed King disappeared from the FBI's radar. There were too many real bad guys in the world to waste time on poseurs and keyboard warriors.

  The sweep of the building ended in a dark room near the back of the building. Like the others, it had been cleared and stripped.

  But there was something left behind:
a little cardboard box on the floor with a note on it.

  With six of his men ringing the box, Captain Lukarthur waved a private over to investigate. The kid kneeled down and picked up the note.

  'Y' FOR VICTORY!

  - DK

  The kid picked up the cardboard box.

  A blast of horror hit Lukarthur.

  “No! Don't touch that! It's—”

  The Y-fuze detonated in a savage wash of flame. Burned through the drywall and scorched the steel frames beyond. Incinerated everything in between.

  There were no survivors.

  The Pentagon

  They took Viktor to the restraint room and asked him to sit down.

  The restraint room was filled with shadows. There was only a single light bulb above his head, and there were plenty of places for shadows to hide.

  He was in anguish. It had all seemed so unreal before: computers and data and abstractions.

  Now, knowledge of what he'd done crushed him.

  He was the dog that had bitten his master, the double-edged sword on a backswing. And there was no undoing it. The consequences of this decision would last the rest of his life.

  In helping a fugitive stay free of a cell, he'd now almost certainly taken his place in one.

  Even now, the chain of dominoes that started with the PFPA and ended with an indictment fell in merciless order. Phone calls were being made, evidence against him compiled.

  The US laws on treason were old, broad, and vicious.

  Viktor asked the guard at his side for a drink of water, and got one.

  As he sipped the tepid water, he reflected. He tried not to do all of his reflecting. Best to save some of it for prison.

  “So, how long have you been doing this?” he asked the guard.

  He didn't get an answer—didn't expect one. They were trained not to engage in dialogue with arrested suspects. They would give him no opening to claim he'd been bullied into a confession.

  “I can tell you how long I've been doing my job: too damn long.” It was nice, not having to worry about replies. Like talking to the air.

  Like talking to the Vanadocams.

  “I never had any illusions about this job. It was just a way to scratch a little itch I had. I guess here's the point where I've scratched myself bloody.”

  The guard wasn't just watching. He was staring.

  “The Vanadocams lie, you know. Once, they seemed pretty reliable. Now they hardly seem to care what the truth is. They just show me whatever they damned well feel like. It makes no sense. When a traditional camera puts red spots on someone's eyes, we edit it out, but whatever gets recorded by these bots is absolute truth, right? It could be you that gets framed next, you know. I'm completely serious.”

  The guard’s eyes held the avid curiosity reserved for large and unpleasant insects.

  “The Vanadocams will do to you what they did to Anzor. You'll be the hero at a crime scene, but instead of a citation or a medal, you'll get a prison sentence. The Vanadocams will prove that you were the one who committed the crime. Or it could be the President. Or some other country's President. Hey, that'd be fun. They could start a war.”

  The bug squashing was coming soon, but Viktor continued.

  “I wonder if Project Elephant could shut this whole mess down even if they wanted to? Gideon Heidelman reckons the Vanadocams are mutating, evolving a kind of sentience. It's not an accident. They designed them to be that way. By the way, have you met Gideon? Hell of a guy. He's in the Zoo right now. He might be the one who proves that you're a rapist or a child molester.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Airspace over Ohio

  Dan Kolde was mid-rant, or so Anzor judged. It was hard to tell where his tirades began and ended. They all sort of blended together.

  “What really pisses me off is that other people are in the hot seat, and I'm not. I've spent decades trying to be at the cutting edge of this thing, and then this Viktor asshole scoops me without even trying. Gets in there right under my nose. I think of him and think 'that should have been me.'”

  “Viktor's under arrest now. You want to be arrested?”

  They'd left Indianapolis a few hours ago in a private chartered Airbus bound for Washington.

  It was Anzor's first flight in a lot of years. For a few seconds, all of his various fears and anxieties—the dead guards in Missouri, the rapid evacuation of the One-Eyed King base, the steadily escalating chance of getting recaptured—were subsumed by a basic and more primal fear: the fear of flying.

  As the Airbus barreled down the runway, he’d dug his fingernails into the plush leather armrest. The fear passed soon, and he realized his stupidity.

  At least if the plane crashed, it probably wouldn't hurt.

  “Been there, done that.” Dan was derisive. “No, dumbass, of course I don't want to be arrested. It's just... fuck. If only Viktor had reached out to us earlier. The damage I could have done with a man on the inside... holy shit. What a lost opportunity.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “And anyway, we probably won't be arrested. This is very likely a suicide mission,” Dan said. “You know that, don't you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I give us about a coin's toss of not being shot out of the air while we're trying to land in Reagan International, another coin's toss at fighting our way into the Pentagon, and a third at destroying the Vanadocam computer. And after that, our goose is likely cooked anyway.” Dan's expression was invisible behind his black balaclava.

  Anzor understood the need to wear balaclavas when fleeing the building, when driving to the airport, and when boarding the plane. But did they still have to wear the fucking things in the air? Vanadocams couldn't see up here.

  “We don't know that for sure, Joe” Dan had said, meaning, Joe as in Joe Stalin. “Could be a trick, like those useless-ass Vanado-Bracelets. A government contractor invented them. No kidding, it's in my book. But anyway, while you're flying on an OEK chartered plane, you obey my rules. Balaclavas on.”

  Anzor bravely refrained from commenting on the accuracy of Dan's books. “You don't sound optimistic.”

  “Well, I've done my best to tamper with those coins. This is something I've been planning for a long time, and Viktor was the straw that broke the Elephant's back. Did you know that this plane is not actually registered as a private plane, but as a civilian airliner?”

  “And how does that help?”

  “They have no idea who's on this plane, not unless they've got an Elephant Handler on the case, which they probably don't. For all they know, this plane is packed with civilians.”

  “They still might fire at us if they know you're on board, especially after that surprise you left back at the office.”

  “You wanna go back to prison? I can arrange a stopover at the nearest penitentiary, Joe. That's the only alternative. And I won't be joining you.”

  “Get fucked. So what are we going to do when we get to Washington?”

  “It's like I said, get inside the Pentagon.”

  “With no guns.”

  “Oh, we'll have guns. I can't fly an arsenal across state lines, but we've got some friends in the area, and they'll be glad to help us out. They'll also deploy the thing you saw the plans for. Say, you got any experience with E-Bombs?”

  Anzor looked out the window through the ill-cut eyehole. He saw the landscape beneath them stilled to apparent motionlessness by the plane's great altitude. “I know the history of them. The military dabbled with them in the second Iraq War but never really bothered to exploit them further.”

  He imagined that Dan was smiling, but it was hard to be sure.

  “What would happen if that bomb blew up above Washington?”

  “It would... oh. I see.”

  “Yeah. Knew you'd catch on. The E-bomb explodes and generates a radial EMP. This pulse takes out anything electrical.”

  “On the ground but also in the air.”

  “That'
s right. The Vanadocams. They wouldn't be disrupted over a wide area—perhaps a couple of square kilometers, but we'd have created a blind spot. Shredded a hole in their security net. And if that spot was directly over the Pentagon... ”

  “We'd have a few hours where they can't watch or track us.”

  “If we make it inside, it'll be a twenty minute job. Get in there, destroy the Vanadocam computer, kill all the personnel we can, and try to get out alive.”

  Anzor was silent for a few seconds.

  “Utterly, absolutely insane.”

  “For a few moments, they'll be vulnerable, and we'll go right for the throat. I've spoken to quite a few ex-Pentagon security officers. You met Nolene Robertson? Her husband actually used to work as an Elephant Handler. I know the exact layout of the building as well as their security protocols. And it's laughable how dependent they are on the Vanadocams. For years, they've cut actual physical security.”

  “And why not? They've got the Vanadocams.”

  “Exactly. They've put all their money on this one hand, and they're about to draw a six high on the river.”

  Dan smacked his hand on the armrest, his balaclava convulsing and spasming as his mouth worked furiously.

  “It shouldn't be this hard. Or this bloody. If we'd had Viktor in OEK when he started work at the Pentagon, we might have found a way to sabotage the whole thing without a frontal attack. But hell, you work with what you're given.”

  Dan was charismatic. He was powerful when he spoke. Anzor found his head nodding along with the words, almost without awareness.

  But it was hard to forget something: Dan was not a soldier.

  He was a public speaker with a criminal record and perhaps a bit of training at a shooting range. With him were a couple dozen desperadoes from a similar background.

  He was fairly certain that Dan was a madman and would kill them all. The man had no idea what he was up against.

  Anzor had spent some time giving escorts through the Pentagon, and what he'd seen had impressed him. Even if the omnipresent Vanadocam security had scaled back the need for walls, guards, and guns, they were still overmatched for the task.