Phantom zero, p.2
Phantom Zero, page 2
Zero brightened a little. The one area where he showed significant competence at home was his cooking, and being reassured about that no doubt helped as he stumbled over more and more potholes in other aspects of family life.
“Grab a plate and dig in,” he said. “That goes for all of you. This is good stuff, don’t let it go to waste.”
The others got to their feet and grabbed a plate. Even Sara. She kept her face buried in her phone and didn’t engage with anyone, but not even she could resist the power of good food. Perhaps that was why so many treaties were signed over meals. It was difficult to remain angry when one’s belly was full.
Then again, if you were as committed to anger as Sara, perhaps it didn’t matter if food was on the table.
Maya squeezed Mischa’s shoulder. “It’s okay that you’re not into boys yet. You’ll get there when you get there.” She gave Trent a saccharine look that almost turned Mischa’s stomach again. “It’ll be worth the wait.”
Mischa couldn't for the life of her understand why her love life, or lack thereof, was so important to them. "Thank you."
The family joined each other around the table. “So Sara,” Zero began. “I heard you’re managing the library’s website now.”
“I mean, if I did anything else, I’d have to leave the cabin,” Sara replied. “God forbid I do that.”
“You understand why, right?” Maya said. “We can’t have people coming after you.”
Sara stared at her with wide eyes. “Really? Oh my God! I had no idea!”
Maya sighed heavily. “There’s no need for you to be an asshole.”
“I’m stuck in a cabin living like a teenager because the family decided to respond to a threat by hiding in a rabbit hole instead of facing it like we were, I don’t know, the Lawsons?”
“We’ve been over this,” Zero said patiently. “Alan and I are going to gain intelligence on Meridian and make a plan to deal with them before we take any action. The biggest problem with the way you and Mischa did things before was that you just attacked without planning.”
“That’s bullshit,” Sara snapped.
“Guys, can we please just eat breakfast and not fight?” Maya asked. “It’s done. We made a decision as a family—”
“Which means you and Dad made a decision, and the rest of us just had to go along with it,” Sara interrupted.
Mischa poked at her food while her father and sisters fought. Trent stared at his own plate, not wanting to get involved and make things worse. They met each other’s eyes, and Trent gave her a sympathetic smile. It was odd that he was now the one who understood Mischa the most, but maybe not so odd. They were both outsiders. He was Maya’s fiancé, a member of the family by invitation, not birth. She was adopted, and not even by Zero. Zero’s second wife, Maria Johansson, had adopted Mischa before marrying Zero. Mischa had no doubt that her family loved her like a daughter and a sister, but moments like these served to remind her that she would never truly be like them. She would never truly be like anyone.
The front door opened, bringing an end to the argument. Alan groaned as he kicked off his boots and pulled off his coat and work gloves. “Okay. That’s done. We’ve got three-hundred-sixty-degree radar, sonar, and infrared coverage, and I just put up four more CIWS emplacements.”
“CIWS?” Trent exclaimed. “Jesus.”
“Not real CIWS,” Alan said. “Just some M240s with optical, radar, and infrared targeting sensors and an automatic fire system. So they are Close-In Weapons Systems, but no, I didn’t just plant twenty-millimeter Gatling guns in my front yard.”
“Just your front yard?” Zero asked.
“The whole place. Three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage. God, you guys are so damned literal. Hey, is that bacon?”
The others laughed, and the tension, for now, was broken. Alan served himself some breakfast, and everyone carefully avoided any subject that might cause more argument.
Just like any happy family.
CHAPTER TWO
Dr. Adrian Keller took a deep breath and released it in a satisfied sigh. Phase One had gone off without a hitch. Air travel worldwide had ground to a halt. The world was in chaos.
And best of all, everyone was listening to him.
He lifted the microphone to his lips and said, “Hello, humanity. We are Lucifer’s Gift. By now, you’re aware that we are more than capable of getting what we want. You can consider this attempt at collaboration to be an olive branch. We’d like to work with you rather than against you, but we will get what we want regardless.”
He paused a moment to allow his words to sink in. Reflection was important. Necessary even. Had he taken the time to reflect before, he might never have found himself in this position.
But then, he’d had plenty of time to reflect after. Perhaps in his case, the mistakes of the past were necessary to usher in the success of the future.
He continued.
“The United States government will release all classified data within forty-eight hours of the conclusion of this transmission. All of it. Every byte of data. Everything the CIA and NSA are hiding. Everything the DoD is hiding. All of it. Turn it over to us, and we will do what you should have done from the start and make that information accessible to the general public. As Lucifer gave humankind the gift of knowledge in the garden, so we will give humankind the gift of transparency.
“The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. They hold onto this power in part because of the unwillingness of humanity to challenge their stranglehold on the narrative. To put it simply, they tell you all what to believe, and you believe it, regardless of evidence to the contrary.”
His hand tightened around the transmitter, and he took several deep breaths to calm himself before continuing. “This will change. They will no longer lie to the public. We have no control over whether or not you all continued to believe the lie or choose to accept the truth. But you will all have access to it.
“Forty-eight hours. Fail to meet this deadline, and the consequences of that failure will be unimaginable.”
He ended the transmission, set the radio down, and took a deep breath. Through the window of his office, he could see the clouds parting. The blizzard had stopped, and sunshine now illuminated the world.
He smiled at that sunshine. It was God who had said let there be light, but when faced with the consequences of that light, God hid it from His creation and made them look away. It was Lucifer who had defied God’s fear and allowed humanity a chance to understand fully the truths of the universe.
Adrian would give humanity understanding again. A new dawn. A new Gift.
A new God.
His smile widened. He let the light bathe him in warmth and anticipated the day when the world would know him as he truly was and not how the false prophets had portrayed him years ago.
***
“Is this guy for real?” Yuri, the Deputy Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, asked.
Larry MacDowell—Yuri’s boss—had nightmares like this from time to time. Radars would shut down nationwide and throw air traffic into chaos. Midair collisions would kill hundreds, and grieving families would demand answers. Airports would be crowded with grounded aircraft, and the FAA’s public office would be flooded with phone calls and emails from angry idiots who just couldn’t understand why they couldn’t fly wherever they wanted regardless of safety concerns.
He would trade away ten years of his life to have one of those nightmares right now. Those nightmares never ended with a madman threatening “unimaginable consequences” if his utterly impossible demands weren’t met.
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Yuri said. “There’s been another crash.”
“Where?” Larry asked.
“O’Hare. There was a rainstorm, and a King Air pilot saw the nav lights of a CRJ and thought they were the signal lights for him to land. The CRJ managed to perform a belly landing and save the passengers, but everyone on the King Air’s dead. Is that? Christ, is that a thousand people already?”
“Not quite,” Wesley, the Chief of Commercial Operations, replied. “Nine hundred seventeen confirmed, ten more probable.”
Larry ran a shaking hand across his forehead. "How many flights are still airborne?"
“Three thousand, two hundred twenty-six, one thousand two hundred sixteen of those commercial.”
“Christ in Heaven,” he muttered. “How long until they’re all on the ground?”
“Well… They’ll all have to be on the ground within seven hours or so. They’ll be out of fuel by then.”
“And we have no idea who this guy is?”
“Sure we do,” Yuri quipped. “Didn’t you hear? He’s the Devil.”
“Why is that the most believable thing I’ve heard today?”
The answer to that was easy. Who but Satan himself could have caused this?
Since the LAX crash two hours ago, it had become clear that no air traffic control tower in the country was working, and no aircraft radio was working. A few pilots were carrying ham radios, technically illegal but who cared about that right now? Through the civilian grapevine, Larry had become aware that aircraft navigation systems were all scrambled along with ground-based systems. Any aircraft that had the range was sent to airports in other countries, but that still left, apparently, over three-damned-thousand in the United States.
It now fell to Larry to find a way out of this mess. “Okay. We still have cell phones, right?”
“Cell phones?” Yuri exclaimed. “That’ll just screw things up more!”
“They’re already screwed up,” Larry replied. “Cell phones won’t make anything worse. Have ATCs call pilots and direct flights that way. We can at least get people on the ground.”
“Good idea,” Wesley said. “I’ll put the word out.”
The door to the office poked open, and George poked his head in. “Sir? The President is on the line.”
He sighed. Oh, Jesus, please spare me.
Considering the chosen moniker of their new best friend, the involuntary cry to God was almost funny.
“Put her through. Yuri, Wesley, get those planes on the ground.”
The two of them nodded and left Larry alone to contend with the Commander-in-Chief. He waited until they were out of the room, then picked up the handset. “Madam President?”
“Do we have a way to get those flights down safely?”
President Gloria Klein, the first female head of state for the world’s most powerful nation, was not one for pleasantries. Not that there was anything pleasant to talk about right now.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve delegated to my deputies to contact air traffic controllers and have them use cell phones to direct air traffic.”
“Will that work?”
“Yes, it should. It will be slow and a little clumsy, but we shouldn’t have any more midair collisions.”
The President sighed. “Oh, thank God. Do we have a timeline?”
“Seven hours, possibly less.”
“Okay. Okay.” The President took a deep breath. “That means this can be over before nightfall.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Larry said.
“Good. Then I’ll let you get back to—”
The door burst open, and George rushed in, face white as snow. “Sir? It’s gone global.”
Larry knew what that meant, of course, but he really didn’t want to admit that he knew what that meant, so he blinked stupidly and hoped to God that the answer to his next question would tell him he hadn’t actually heard what he had just heard. “What?”
“The flights we diverted to Canada… Two of them just crashed over Ottawa. Their ATCs are down too. Same with Mexico, and…” He swallowed. “There’s been a midair collision over Heathrow and another over Moscow, sir.”
On the other end of Larry’s phone, President Klein whispered, “Oh God.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Hey, Sara, feel like helping your old man out with the dishes?” Zero asked.
Sara walked past him without a word.
“I’ll tell everyone you’re my favorite daughter if you do.”
Still no word. She headed to the backyard, closing the door behind her. She and Mischa were allowed in the backyard and the garage but not beyond. The cabin was ostensibly of wood plank construction, but really the wood was a façade. The actual structure was steel reinforced with graphene fibers, and the trees behind the backyard were carefully arranged to ensure that there was no shot on the house unless the attackers fought through multiple layers of traps, weapons emplacements, alarms, and the kids themselves, not an easy task, as Mischa’s recent defeat of three ex-Spetsnaz assassins proved.
“I’ll help with the dishes, Zero,” Trent volunteered. “Maya says I don’t do enough around here anyway.”
“I have literally never said that,” Maya retorted.
“Let the man wash some dishes,” Alan interjected. “It makes him feel like a good wife.”
Trent grinned at Alan and offered him a middle finger. Alan laughed and glanced at Zero, then glanced quickly away. Zero bristled slightly. He was still angry with Alan for helping Mischa and Sara sneak around and endanger themselves on this bullshit crusade against the largest criminal organization on planet Earth.
He was protecting them, yes, and he had given them a place to stay, but this whole damned problem wouldn’t have existed in the first place if he had just gone to Zero the moment he found out that Mischa was moonlighting.
Because you could have stopped her?
Yes, damn it!
Sure. You keep telling yourself that.
Maya noticed the look on Zero’s face and said, “Hey, Alan, why don’t you and I go over that project idea I was telling you about, the web thing.”
“Sure,” Alan said cheerfully. “I have some thoughts I wanted to run by you.”
He got to his feet, whistling. Like it was any other day. It was an obvious act, and the fact that it was a really bad act just made Zero angrier.
But it was better than moping around like Sara was. Alan at least understood that they had to move on. Zero understood that too. He was mad at Alan, but he wasn’t ignoring him the way Sara was ignoring him.
Say good luck to him, then. Say, “Good luck on the project, Alan.”
His lips thinned, and he stared at his coffee cup as though the cartoonish spy wearing a trench coat, fedora, and dark sunglasses was incredibly fascinating. He waited until he heard the hum of the elevator, then looked up at Mischa.
Who wasn’t there.
“She headed back down to the training room,” Trent informed him. “Took the stairs.”
Zero nodded. He forced a smile. “All right, son of mine. Let’s go wash some dishes.”
Trent returned a sympathetic look. “They’ll come around. This is hard for them, but they’ll come around.”
Zero appreciated the support, but hearing Trent reassure him about his relationship with his daughters was the absolute last thing he wanted right now. He ignored the well-wish and started unloading the dishwasher.
“Has Maya told you about the web?” Trent asked, starting the water to let the heat come up.
“No. That’s a real thing?”
“Yeah, it’s real. The idea is to formalize Alan’s network. Well, that’s part of it. She basically wants the EOT to have a worldwide network of assets and resources that don’t belong to the rest of the CIA. The Agency at this exact moment isn’t corrupt, but considering what we’ve dealt with in the past, she thought it would be a good idea to have options that don’t report to Operations. Corrupt or not, the larger Agency has to follow rules that the EOT can’t always follow. It’s better for us to have resources that we can use without restriction.”
“Huh,” Zero said, accepting the freshly scrubbed plate from Trent and setting it on the lower rack of the dishwasher. “That’s a good idea.”
“Yeah, Todd thought so. I think he’s been sitting on it for a while, but he didn’t say that. He wanted Maya to feel like it was her idea. I notice that he does that a lot, just like you.”
Zero looked over at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Zero,” Todd said, giving him a knowing smile. “I know you hold yourself back sometimes when you’re working with us.”
“No, I don’t. What the hell gave you that idea?”
Trent laughed. “I see the look on your face sometimes like you know the answer, but you’re not gonna say it because you want Maya and me to figure it out on our own. Todd does the same thing.”
Zero knew what Trent was talking about, but he wasn’t quite right about Zero’s motivation. Zero often had to bite his tongue in the field because he disagreed with Maya and Trent and wanted to jump in and correct them. He was trying not to do that because Maya was learning how to be a leader, and he didn’t want to get in her way, so Trent was sort of right. He just had a more positive understanding of it.
How nice of him to assume the best, he thought morosely.
“Hey, they really will get over it,” Trent said. “They love you, and they know you love them. They’re mostly just upset because of the women. You know, the ones who are being—”
“Yes, I know,” Zero said curtly.
Trent quieted for a moment, then tentatively asked, “So, uh… What are we going to do about it?”
Zero thought for a while before replying, “I’ll tell you when the plan’s fully fleshed out.”
Trent frowned, and Zero sighed inwardly. Here it comes.
“That’s part of the problem, man,” Trent said. “I know I’m stepping out of line a little bit, but this is why Mischa and Sara did this on their own in the first place. They knew that as soon as you and Maya found out, you guys were going to take over.”
“You think I should let the sixteen-year-old and the traumatized former trafficking victim run the show instead?”
“I think you should trust that they, and me, are mature enough to be included in the planning process.”
Zero stifled a chuckle. The fact that they had to plan for this fight was a direct result of Mischa, Sara, and even Alan proving that they weren’t mature enough for something like this.
