Vanadium Dark Read online

  With no breaks in routine to engage his mind, his brain replayed past events. It often did that. There were damned few current events to engage his mind.

  He'd had a life outside prison, hard though that was to believe.

  * * *

  A third-generation immigrant from Georgia.

  Good grades at school. A reputation for being a bit of a “gunner,” always answering the teacher's question, whether he knew the answer or not.

  A career in law enforcement, the USMC, work in a private security firm, a still more prestigious private security firm, and finally, the DOD.

  He'd had a life, and he'd also had a death. It had happened ten years ago near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in a hail of gunfire.

  And it was not the sort of death where you could go safely underground and be mourned.

  It was the sort of death where you went right on living.

  Vanadium Dawn

  Summer, 2035. A very hot summer.

  Anzor watched the massive Sikorsky VH-60 touch down on the black bitumen. Clouds of dust spiraled skyward. Thanks to the Korean scientist on board, it blew invisible clouds of other things too.

  This day had been years in the making, and decades in preparation.

  The long-awaited Vanadocam network officially went live today.

  He was sweating beneath his ceremonial blue uniform, and not just because of the heat. He was working on the security detail, under the supervision of an old-school Secret Service functionary who had looked askance at his foreign-sounding name.

  There were three other members on the detail. He knew them all by call sign and name. Their tasks were to escort the Korean scientist Sun-Hi Shin to the Lincoln Memorial and wait in the wings while she delivered the keynote address.

  Next, the president and a radiation-scarred survivor of New York would speak. Really emotional moment. Break out the hankies.

  Then the Vanadocam network would go live. Or so everyone thought.

  “Yo, Stalin.” Corporal Mike Coleman's voice buzzed in his ear.

  “What's going on?”

  “Bad news. Another attack. Someone torched a Project Elephant-owned Hangar in Dallas. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery destroyed.”

  “Not an accidental fire?”

  “Unlikely, given that someone scraped 'GET YOUR EYES OFF ME' on the hangar wall.”

  “Any reason you're telling me this?”

  “The Chief of Detail wants me to pass it along. Says it could be part of an organized pro-privacy terror wave, the kind of thing that could make its way here.”

  “Gotcha.” Anzor looked over at the Sikorsky VH-60, where one of the detail was helping the guest of honor off the helicopter.

  There had been at least fifteen terrorist attacks against government property severe enough to make it to his attention in the past week. They were blurring together at this point.

  The outrage of New York had brought enormous populist support for a comprehensive surveillance program. For a while, everyone had wanted to be spied on, and they had three million reasons why.

  The death toll in New York cut the knees out of any counter-argument.

  But now that Project Elephant was on the verge of going live, the backlash had started. Protests occurred, millions strong, on a scale unheard of since the civil rights movement.

  Nobody got the picture. Almost a trillion dollars had been spent. There could be no going back. The blind leap had started, the nation's feet had left the ground, and it was a case of seeing where America landed.

  But the protests had increased in scale and volatility, and soon they turned into riots, and then into terrorism.

  Incidents melted together in Anzor's mind like twisted, heat-warped metal.

  The gangland-style executions of five senior Project Elephant technicians. Heads shot at point-blank range. Bodies dumped in the Potomac.

  The nasty thing that had happened to the daughter of a small-town mayor who had been vocal in his support.

  Again, nobody got the big picture.

  They thought that their actions could somehow thwart Project Elephant. What they didn't realize was that they were too late.

  This was not the launch of the Vanadocam network.

  The launch had happened a week previously, unannounced and unreported. Only personnel above a certain clearance level had been informed.

  The air was full of active Vanadocams, recording and transmitting data to the Project Elephant databases. A Handler now sat in a basement of the Pentagon, at liberty to spy on absolutely anyone.

  A new page in the book of history had turned, and nobody knew.

  The end of the age of privacy, the end of the age where you could close the door and dim the lights. From now on, every action conducted by anyone almost anywhere in the United States—from a man scratching his balls to a man building a bomb —was recorded.

  Probably not watched. Project Elephant's manpower was limited. In a single, lonely concession to the fears of the paranoid, the Amendment allowed only one person to access the Vanadocam database at a time. No doubt that would be overturned too, when the time was right.

  Let the people settle down. Let them know that there was nothing to fear.

  The foundations were laid for a new Tower of Babel.

  More surveillance footage viewers. Thousands or millions of them, analyzing and deconstructing events that were even the slightest bit suspicious.

  Upgraded and improved Vanadocams, ones that could zoom in further, that could penetrate lead-lined walls.

  The Holy Grail, of course, was Vanadocams that could record sound.

  Anzor had little to say on these things. They only concerned him insofar they provoked terrorism.

  He saw Sun-Hi Shin on the asphalt.

  She was short – about an inch below five feet. She wore a carefully tailored dress, blue and silver to match the New York mourning colors. Her eyes were hidden behind wraparound anti-flash shades. Beside her were several orbiters—press agents and personal assistants, he supposed.

  It was all planned. They'd escort her to the memorial building, where several representatives for major channel news would conduct a dress rehearsal. Anzor had heard that Shin was anxious around cameras and wanted a dry run at giving her address.

  “Hey, Zodiac” he said into his microphone.

  “Yeah?” Sergeant Kris Osterman replied.

  “Can you, Redzone, and Clusterfuck walk Shin inside? I'll check that the people in there are ready for her.”

  “We're on it.”

  Leaving the three other men, he set off toward the building’s entrance, weaving around stationary aircraft.

  The airport was quiet, although from a security perspective, things could never be quiet enough. Anzor looked around at the planes taking off and landing, the flight crews standing ready, and realized anew the importance of retaining full concentration. While the Nobel Prize-winning nanotechnologist was in his care, any random bystander could be a threat.

  His thoughts returned to the various acts of sabotage and murder that had dogged the project, even after it couldn't possibly be stopped.

  The cargo ship commandeered and scuppered in San Francisco Bay, an act of Golden-Age piracy, in the middle of the 21st century.

  The bomb threat that had held up installation of Nanoassemblers for weeks. It had turned out to be the work of a homeschooled twelve year old with too much free time.

  These were scary times.

  The Vanadocams would surely make them less scary.

  He didn't like the fact that Sun-Hi Shin had brought so many hangers-on with her. He viewed press people as cockroaches—unavoidable, but their lives seldom flowed in harmony with his own.

  Their job would be to get Sun-Hi Shin in front of cameras, dignitaries, the President. They were being paid to expose her to the world.

  His job was the complete opposite. He was paid to keep her away from people, especially people who might do her harm. As technical leader
of Project Elephant, she was a target a mile wide, and it was the ideal time for an attack. The resistance could not defeat Project Elephant, but the hour was right for a symbolic shot across the bow—a moment to bloody the project's eye, to sow discord, or to just remind the public that liberty hadn't gone down without a fight.

  He turned a corner. At the door to the airport, he was greeted by two men who could have been porters, or could have been Secret Service agents. He was not the only one trying to stop things going shitward. He was not the only one keeping a very important secret.

  “Hey... ” He started to say something, but didn't get a chance to finish..

  “HOLY SHIT!” Lance Corporal Smith Custerbeck, who they all called “Clusterfuck,” buzzed through his earpiece. “Stalin... get over here, we've got – oh fuck! FUCK!”

  Ka-blam! – Ka-blam!

  The sound of gunshots rolled over the tarmac like thunder.

  Time slowed. It felt as though someone had dumped a jaeger bomb of pure adrenaline into his bloodstream.

  Ka-blam! – Ka-blam!

  Screams. One of them a woman's.

  The two guys at the doorway took off at a run, either getting help or saving their asses.

  Anzor retraced his steps around the corner, his mind working furiously. Gunshots at a steady cadence, one after another. Probably one man working alone.

  Goddamn it. He should have stayed!

  He drew his sidearm, a 9mm pistol, and stuck his head out past the enfilade.

  A single man with a gun in his hand.

  Oh Christ... he's wearing a uniform.

  He's one of us.

  There were bodies around his feet.

  Shit.

  People in civilian clothes ran from him.

  This can't be happening.

  Anzor noticed these things in a heartbeat, and his heart beat very fast. He propelled himself forward.

  The man drew a point on a running civilian and shot her in the back. She fell to the ground, a puppet with cut strings.

  He caught sight of Anzor.

  You've got one second, Stalin. Use your trigger finger to end his.

  Anzor dropped to the ground, minimizing the size of the target presented by his body. The asphalt bit into his ceremonial military dress. Gun out in front, he fired at the shithead's center of mass.

  As recoil kicked up his arm, as his finger went numb on the trigger, he saw the man's face.

  The shooter was Kris Osterman. Zodiac.

  The first two rounds were absorbed by the nano-teflon under his uniform.

  The last one ripped his head in half like an orange.

  Anzor saw Kris's face implode. Blood and brain matter glutted the air. The soldier's ruined head snapped back, and he twisted and fell, gun half-raised as if in parody of a Marine salute.

  Half deafened by the gunshots, Anzor walked over to the carnage under the VH-60.

  Five people were down. One of Shin's aides. Shin herself. Clusterfuck. Redzone. Zodiac.

  He went over to Kris, hearing klaxons screaming in the background.

  He felt shocked. Knocked sideways. He looked down at the man whose head he'd just blown off. A few weeks ago, they'd played blackjack together at the Hard Rock in Vegas.

  Why had Kris done such a thing?

  Standing in an airport takeoff zone strewn with bloodied bodies, Anzor felt cold and unwell. How could he have ever thought it was hot? He shivered, freezing. His hands shook. He doubted he'd ever be warm again.

  He was only dimly aware of people surrounding him.

  He just stared at Kris's head. His blond hair was slimed with blood and jellied brain matter. The skull had been blasted inward, leaving much of the skin intact, and it draped awkwardly over the cavity, the features of the human face stretched and distorted like a wrongly-projected map.

  Had he done the right thing?

  Against such a random and senseless act of violence, was there any right thing?

  A medic was at his shoulder, asking if he was hurt. He shoved her away and started toward the airport.

  Even now, the noose was being drawn.

  The Pentagon

  On Sunday, Viktor showed up for work.

  There would be no time in the next six months to get himself psychologically evaluated. He would have to hope that this was an acute episode that would pass on its own.

  Deep down, he didn't believe he was mad. But that's what everyone mad thinks.

  What was the alternative?

  That the Vanadocam computer was malfunctioning?

  He'd seen its errors before. Wrong colors. Cubes of voxel data transposed or duplicated. Failure to display anything. It had been worse at the beginning. The system he was working on was the product of many years of refinement.

  It shouldn't be possible for the machine to display a non-existent man in two places and then remove him when he went to investigate.

  The experience in the brothel was something he refused to analyse at all.

  Didn't most of these places spike the air with pure oxygen or worse, to put their clients in a more disposed mood?

  The elevator reached the basement. The light changed, and the pneumatic doors slid open.

  He went through the doorway to the zoo, touched the back of his palm to the DNA reader, and opened the door.

  He had been walking with a smooth, determined stride.

  What he saw inside the Zoo stopped him completely.

  The Secretary of Defense and two PFPA guards waited. The Secretary was talking to Joyce. He glanced once at Viktor, turned away, and resumed the thread of conversation.

  Another man was sitting at his desk. Another man wore the goggles. Another man.

  Viktor held his ground for a moment, feeling like an unscripted extra in someone else's movie.

  The night's sense of unreality returned.

  “Uh, what's going on?”

  “Lots of things are going on, Kertesz,” Secretary Wilson said, his square jaw knocked askance by a sneer. “You don't have your phone switched on, or you might have found out about some of them.”

  Viktor took his phone out of his pocket and cursed as he saw the cracked screen. He must have landed on it when he fell outside Hypatia's. He reached into his pocket and felt splinters of glass.

  “Why is there someone performing my duties as Handler?”

  Secretary Wilson touched his shoulder and escorted him to a corner of the blue-lit Zoo. It was a fatherly gesture, albeit the fatherly duty that consists of admonishing an errant child.

  “What's happening, Viktor” —the first time he's called me by my first name— “is that we are concerned about your well-being.”

  “My well-being's fine.” Viktor felt like swatting back anything said to him like a tennis serve. “We went over this yesterday.”

  “I will not reinvent the wheel with you. You've given us reason to mistrust you, and we've felt it necessary to bring someone in to share your workload.”

  Viktor looked for the first time at the man in front of the desk.

  For a horrific moment, he thought it was the man with no nose.

  It wasn't, of course. A tall, creepy character. Curly black hair with a synthetic quality that suggested dye, and not expensive dye. He wore a buttoned-up shirt, but the sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms.

  He took off the goggles and turned to face them.

  He nodded. Or Viktor thought he did. The gesture happened so fast that Viktor barely even saw it.

  “This decision was made by me,” Secretary Wilson. “And we made every effort to notify you of this. You were out, and your phone was switched off.”

  “This is illegal,” spat Viktor. “You can't have multiple people using the computer. Only one Handler can work at a time, to be switched out every six months.”

  “Don't be a sea deck lawyer, Viktor.”

  “A sea deck lawyer? It's in the fucking Constitution!”

  “In any case, you are mistaken. Handlers must be switched out a
t the end of six months, but that is a maximum term of service, not a minimum one. There is nothing that says two Handlers cannot work together with only one of them accessing the computer at a time.”

  Viktor shrugged, feeling blindsided. He could not debate this issue. His legal knowledge covered criminal law fairly comprehensively, but the area beyond was a huge blind spot. “Okay, it's just... this has never been done before. Normally, there's only one Handler in the building.”

  “Things are changing. As of now, I've decided that we need more than one person. If your behavior was stable, we would not have to do this.”

  So... it begins.

  The man in the chair watched them like a kibitzer at a high-stakes game.

  Viktor hooked a finger. “He doesn't have much to say for himself, does he?”

  With a single movement, the man rose from his chair.

  His panther-like grace froze Viktor to the spot. Going from sitting to standing was normally an ungainly activity, but the man rose to his feet as fluidly as a Vinyasa Yoga movement.

  “Good day to you, Viktor.”

  “Um, hi.”

  “I'm Gideon. I just got the call yesterday asking if I'd like to help out on Project Elephant. I took the Maglevs all the way from Salt Lake City. I thought it'd just be in an analyst capacity, but, well... ” He gestured at the computer. “They set me up with the access keys and told me to knock myself out. It's a hell of a system.”

  He grinned, and Viktor saw a creepily perfect row of teeth. They reminded him of the noseless man's.

  Nothing else about Gideon did, though. The noseless man was an apotheosis of humanity, a strange erasure of anything warm and emotional and wet.

  Gideon did not seem unemotional. If anything, he seemed right at the opposite end of the scale. His grin was far too wide. His gestures carried far too much energy. He looked as hyped up as a kid on a sugar rush. Viktor thought he saw hints of instability in those big, green eyes.

  Maybe he's seeing instability in mine.

  “This actually does not affect things much, Viktor.” The Secretary continued, changing his posture to accommodate Gideon in the conversation. “You are still under contract to Project Elephant, and by proxy, the Department of Defense. You will still be paid your full stipend. You will still spend the next seventy years in prison if you leak any national secrets in any capacity other than we prescribe. You'll just have... help.”