Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (17 page)

In this case, atypically, the bloggers
were front and centre. Unfortunately, it was almost entirely to do with a number of them having made the catastrophic – if accidental – mistake of picking a fight the US Government.

See
...outside of the occasional smattering of experimental bullshit, the tabloid press knew better than to actually start gunning for the national authorities. There was a definite line, demarcating what and how much a journalist could – or, rather, should – be saying about The Government, and that line was usually respected. It really had a significant amount more to do with good taste and professionalism than it did with any sense that it might invite retribution.

T
hat said: if there’d been any actual evidence linking the US Government to The Disappearances, it would have been a
very
different ball game. From Al-Jazeera to the Washington Post, it was an open secret – and had been from day one – that the ‘big hitters’ all had dedicated divisions laying in wait – patient and eagle-eyed – for any real proof to surface on that front.

But the US Government, it seemed, despite their near
-universally acknowledged clean hands in the matter...were, for some reason, determined to play the role of the black-hats. To be realistic...it shouldn’t have been all that surprising to me, because it was an idiom in which they were singularly well versed. One that they defaulted to, on occasion, when unsure of how to proceed.

No doubt, though, their attitude had everything to do with wanting to solve the puzzle
themselves, away from prying eyes, for the sake of maintaining public calm. As such, they were willing to put a figurative – or not so figurative, as it turned out – gun to the temple of anyone stupid enough to even look like they were reaching for a soap-box, high-horse, or pedestal.

Enter Anonymous.

This particular segment of the overall drama reached its peak with alarming speed. First, one of the bloggers got their hands on – and published – a revised listing of Disappearances several days before it was publicly released. It shouldn’t have been an issue. And, in fairness...it initially wasn’t. No one really raised an eyebrow over the blog being shut down. Wordpress cited a violation of its service terms, which was probably a completely fair reaction...and that seemed to be the end of that. No one really gave it very much thought at all.

Until, that is, seemingly out of the blue, a group calling
themselves ‘Neo-non’ – a branch of Anonymous, ostensibly – hacked Netflix. For sixteen minutes and thirty seven seconds, every
single
piece of streaming content accessible to any Netflix subscriber redirected to a fifty-nine second announcement, where the ‘Anons’ of Neo-non summarised an important distinction between the leaked listing of Disappearances and every previous publicly
released listing. The distinction was as follows: the leaked listing contained twenty-three names that had been previously omitted. Names that were, no doubt, deliberately removed from the publicly disseminated document. Names of individuals with top level Government, Military, and Intelligence clearance. Names of people that the American Government would have almost certainly preferred dead, than on a list of the potentially kidnapped.

The retaliation was immediate and shocking.
Behind closed doors, a new list of names was drawn up. This one was put together by the NSA. I’d heard about the FBI raids that followed. Everyone had. I’d known that they had something to do with The Disappearances, but I’d never connected them with the additions to the data, even though the two things had occurred around the same time.

Of the FBI targets, around forty had been known participants in Anonymous activities. It was never specified how many of them
– if the NSA or FBI even knew – were specifically associated with Neo-non. The rest of the targets, save for one, were believed to have been involved in the leaking of the document that started it all. That ‘one’ – that final target – was the blogger who had published it.

In total,
forty-six people were detained; most of them Anonymous. In a press conference following the arrests, FBI representatives confirmed that the properties of a further eight ‘persons of interest’ had been raided, including the blogger in question, but that they had, and I quote: ‘not been able to locate these persons’. It was strongly implied that the FBI considered them to be among the growing list of Disappearances. The complication was that, as the FBI openly admitted, there had been signs of forced entry at each of these locations. This set off alarm bells for me. There had also been blood – and more than a little of it – confirmed to belong to the targets in question. In response to that little revelation, the alarm bells became air-raid sirens.

§§§

My eyes narrowed as I paused for a second to flick back through my revised list and make sure those names weren’t on it. It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened. It was, as warnings went, about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. And it had definitely been deliberate, so far as I was concerned...unless, of course, you wanted to try arguing that the FBI couldn’t make someone disappear without blood and forced entry if they wanted to.

Assuming I was right on that
front...the raids had achieved precisely their desire effect. Regardless of what the general public had to say about The Bureau’s conduct in the privacy of their own homes...in the streets, citizen solidarity was palpable. The public seemed to have broadly accepted that The Government’s actions had been both in their best interests...and a necessary response, given the stakes, to the situation in general.

It was, however, the symbolic underpinning of the deafening
public silence that followed the raids that had journalists terrified. Anyone who knew anything about Americans would have assumed that there’d have been lynch-mobs heading for Quantico, and rioting in the streets of Washington DC. The near-universal public support of The Government and – more specifically – the FBI, sent a very clear message to the media; professionals and amateurs, alike: The Government wasn’t in the mood to tolerate bullshit...and the public were willing to trust The Government to keep them safe in whatever way that they saw fit. There hadn’t been such an obvious, implicit, and broad-based public mandate handed up to The Government from the streets since the invasion of Afghanistan, a little over twenty years prior.

The unspoken agreement arrived at by the journalists
amongst themselves seemed to have been that the only intelligent position to take on discussing The Disappearances was to continue investigating and reporting the play-by-play. Commenting on the larger structure of it was worthless until there was something more solid to say about it; the public would almost certainly respond badly to revelations of the scope and scale of The Disappearances...and, as I told Meg: ‘if nobody gives a shit; don’t write about it’.

Aside from which:
nobody wanted to provoke a follow-up ‘lesson’ from the Government. So, from there on out, everyone had toed the line. No more leaks. No more hacking. No more games.

Until a few days before the wedding, that would have been the end of it. But the most r
ecent development – the reports of fresh Disappearances outside the US – seemed to be changing the nature of the story. There were reports of vanishings in Canada and Mexico, as I mentioned...and, beyond that – potentially – Japan and Australia. When I tried to apply the previous formula to the new Disappearances – though, of course, it was still early days – it seemed to match, and reveal the beginnings of similarly geographical and chronological ‘staging’. Of course, again, when the single thread of definitive connectivity was ‘eerily sudden disappearances of high-profile individuals gradually spreading east-to-west’ it was hard to really define them as anything more than ‘possibly related’.

If the latest developments
were
connected, though...well, to start with, it meant that the list of potentially responsible groups had to be revisited. Whoever was doing this had to have massive international reach, and be organised enough to kidnap thousands of wealthy, powerful, and in some cases, brilliant people without ever slipping up or leaving any evidence behind. It didn’t seem to fit with the profile of any known organised criminal enterprise...or even with the kinds of objectives such a group might have.

A terrorist organisation with that sort of scope
– something like a global coalition of anti-western groups – was a terrifying idea...but one that, thankfully, didn’t make much sense. Even just for the simple reasons that, were they terrorists, they were either getting incredibly bad Public Relations advice, or they were plotting to change their image and become ‘tense-confusionists’. Because that was a much more accurate description of what they were spreading. And besides that: what kind of terrorists didn’t want their actions connected to a manifesto or statement of intent? Didn’t claim responsibility or issue demands? And, more to the point...how would such a diverse coalition of extremists operate so systematically? How would they have made so few mistakes? How would they not have – realistically – imploded by now, destroyed by fractious internal differences?

And
The Government? Any suspicion of a conspiracy on
that
front had basically evaporated from my mind. It would have made even less sense than it had before.

For a brief moment, the thought crossed my mind that...maybe...
the crackpot-kings of the conspiracy-frontier were actually
right
: maybe it
was
aliens. But putting aside the complete and utter stupidity of that theory for a second...even if it were true: why? And how would attracting so much attention be, in any way, helpful to any kind of long-term play that might be on the horizon?

What about the
other
major lunatic-fringe theory, then? The United Nations? This theory had posited a UN attempt to overthrow the nation-state system and establish a global government. But...again...how would The Disappearances
fit
?

Then there was the ‘Objectivist’ theorem –
my
theorem – that, of course, simply raised more questions than it answered. It was a hydra; there was no getting around that.

I sighed. It was hopeless to speculate.

The entire world seemed to be waiting. Waiting, and hoping that something would come to light to prove that it was all a big mistake.

And for those of us who
saw the pattern...we were hoping – praying – even harder. Because, regardless of what the pattern meant, or who was behind
it...there was one thing that there didn’t seem to be any doubt about: it was
bad
.

X
– Yvonne

~ Yvonne ~

26/11/2023

Yvonne and Smoke stood side by side against the bench. In front of them, a carefully a
rranged wall full of firearms spread out to either side. Their hands moved fast, but their fingers slid and twisted around the parts almost faster than the eye could make out. With a slight exhalation, Yvonne jammed her palm up against the bottom of the magazine, forcing it into place. She smiled with satisfaction as she heard that rich, familiar ‘click’. Turning, she pointed the gun toward Smoke’s head. Smoke stopped reassembling her own handgun and rolled her eyes.

“Fuck
it. Fine. You’re faster.”

“Damn straight I am.” Yvonne nodded briskly.

“How did you get so good? You hit that gun like a fucking lightning bolt.” Yvonne was surprised to see Smoke smiling brightly – even playfully – in her direction. The Israeli had, from the start, had her pegged as a stone-cold bitch...but, apparently, a Browning 1911-22 in hand and she was like an American sorority girl braiding hair and talking about boys. Yvonne, considering that characterisation, quietly admitted to herself that she might have had something of an off-kilter perspective on American women.

She probably shouldn’t have been quite as surprised as she was. Over the last couple of days,
they hadn’t really talked much...but Yvonne had noticed Smoke slowly softening; letting down her guard, and, just generally, being less abrasive and hostile. The tension between them had been almost entirely diffused. Yvonne had put it down to the two of them being out of Palatine Hill. She was well aware that, the longer she stayed topside, the more her anxiety decreased. It was, more than likely, a similar situation for Smoke.

Smoke’s current, bizarre level of peppiness and enthusiasm, though, seemed like a new facet of her person
ality altogether. That morning, when she’d dragged Yvonne out of bed at four in the morning to drive out to ‘the compound’, as she called it, Yvonne hadn’t known quite what to expect. Smoke had promised ‘fun’; but Yvonne wasn’t sure exactly what that term, for the cold, mean little blonde, actually entailed. She’d been pleasantly surprised to find that Smoke’s idea of ‘fun’ seemed to closely resemble her own.

“I had a couple of years with YAMAM.” Yvonne explained. “That’s
Yehida Merkazit Meyuhedet; translates as – ”

“
– Special Central Unit.” Smoke nodded, slowly finishing the last of her own reassembly; in no hurry, now.

“You know Hebrew?”
Yvonne looked over at her: surprised. The blonde woman laughed.

“
I know Counterterrorism.”

“Right. Well, YAMAM likes a Browning. So do I.”

“It shows.” Smoke confirmed. “They’re gorgeous guns.”

“The weighting?” Yvonne held the gun up again, this time aiming it off into the non
-specific distance, bringing her shoulder up beside her cheek. “Can’t beat it.” Smoke nodded enthusiastically. “I think I was...twenty-four when I got pulled up and into the Patzan; Pikud Tzafon...that’s – ”

“
– Northern Command. You were in the Golani Brigade, right?”

“Right.” Yvonne met Smoke’s eyes, returning her coy smile. “Egoz
Reconaissance Unit, specifically.”

“
Yehidat Egoz.”

“I feel like I should be giving you
treats or something.” Smoke chuckled to herself, angling the muzzle of her handgun upwards and away from them, before slotting the magazine in until both women heard the click. Smoke sighed a happy little sigh. “Anticipating unconventional tactics, we had to be comfortable with any weapons we might have encountered in the field. But we all had our specialties.”

“And you were a Browning girl?” Yvonne nodded.

“Given the choice, I’d take a Browning over most anything. I just like them. I don’t know what it is, exactly. But they seem to like me, too: I never met anyone who could handle one like I could.”

“You
probably never will. Takes a lot to impress me, and...” Smoke rolled her eyes, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “Yeah. Colour me impressed.”

“Thank you.” Yvonne blushed. She’d never been good at taking compliments.

“I’m guessing you shoot as well as you field-strip?”

“I’m okay.” Yvonne shrugged, looking down with a small smile.

“That good?” Yvonne shrugged again. “Well let’s see, shall we?” Smoke pushed the safety catch to ‘on’ and tucked her reassembled pistol into the back of her jeans. Yvonne did the same, before reaching for something a little more formidable off the wall. She’d always liked an AK-47...and they were definitely important to stay familiar with, given the sheer number of them in the hands of Islamists and other probable targets. She let her hand drift away from the assault rifle, remembering that she was, these days, a world away from the IDF...the Palestinians...the Syrians. Smoke grabbed her wrist. Looking over at her, confused; Yvonne’s hazelnut-and-chocolate-brown eyes meeting Smoke’s ice-and-steel-blue ones. Yvonne cocked her head. “Just these.” Smoke grinned; clearly meaning the handguns. Yvonne shrugged.

“Suits me.”

“I’ll bet it does...” Smoke laughed. Turning, moving to the door and pushing it open, Smoke led Yvonne outside. The two women strode confidently out into the light. Yvonne shielded her eyes: it was an incredibly bright, cloudless day in Colorado. She could already tell it was going to take awhile to get used to it. Her eyes stung as she tried to...but she was too glad to be out of eternal darkness of Palatine Hill to really care.

A good number of buzz
-cut sporting soldiers in camouflage-pants and a diverse array of T-shirts and wife-beater singlets were there to greet them. From the way they deferred to Smoke, Yvonne could tell – with not a shred of doubt – that everyone present answered to her.

“My new friend and I are going to do a little live
-fire sparring.” Smoke said loudly enough for them all to hear. In response, there were a few cheers and the odd whistle. “Hey. Liam. Gimme your sunglasses.” She singled out a tall, sinuous kid who couldn’t have been more than maybe nineteen. Taking them from him, Smoke passed them to Yvonne without a word. Yvonne took them, mouthing a ‘thanks’ to – apparently – Liam. Smoke looked around, her smile rapidly; reforming as a perturbed snarl: “What the fuck are you all waiting for?! Set us the fuck up!” She yelled. Yvonne raised an eyebrow as the group scattered.

“Is that your ‘drill sergeant’ voice?” Smoke smiled like a little girl whose doll collection had just received a compliment.

“You like?”

“That depends. Are you my C
-O?” Smoke shook her head. “Then I love it.”

“Come on. I’ve got a present for you.” Smoke grabbed for Yvonne’s hand, leading her up some rickety wooden stairs that were held in place with rusted iron supports. Glancing off to either side, Yvonne realised that the stairs were part of a much larger framework of sca
ffolding, running up and around the sides of a rickety perimeter wall. When they got to the top, there was a simple platform – about three metres wide, with an aluminium siding rising to just above head-height on each side – overlooking a pit. In the pit were stacks of rubble and scrap metal. Yvonne watched the soldiers scaling their way up to the top of the scaffolding on all sides, watching Smoke and herself expectantly.

“What is this?” Yvonne asked, half
-expecting to see Christians and lions emerge from behind the stacks of rubble.

“The guys call it ‘headshot alley’. It’s like
...a shooting range meets a Holodeck. Y’know?” Yvonne shook her head. “Okay. Basically...there’s a whole lot of sensors and micro-projectors hidden in the rubble and around the edges of the pit. We can simulate a range of targets...make them behave in certain ways...whatever we like.”

“Useful.”

“Really, really useful. Palatine has maybe fifty training camps like this up on the surface, and then more down below for the elites.”

“How do you stay off the radar?”

“Why would anyone be actively looking at what’s going on in a bunch of derelict farmhouses?” Smoke chuckled. “Cause that’s what these camps look like from the top down. America isn’t a small place. It’s really as simple as not giving anyone a reason to scrutinise. Beyond that, we’ve got enough people in high enough places that we’ll get wind of any issues well before they result in anything, and...” She banged on the light-weight aluminium panelling: “It only takes the better part of an hour to strip down anything we’d rather keep away from prying eyes and lug it back down to Palatine Hill. Or...y’know...” She shrugged suggestively. “...wherever.”

“Makes sense. So
...how does this work?” Yvonne looked curiously down into the pit before looking back up at the blonde woman beside her. Smoke winked.

“Hey! Guys!” she called out. “Run the ‘Sudo’ simulation.” A wave of laughter went up from around the edges of the pit. Yvonne was surprised to see the woman from her vision in the white room
– frumpy blouse, long skirt, clipboard and all – materialise by one of the piles of scrap, down in the pit below. “See? I told you I had a present for you.” Yvonne’s eyes narrowed.

“Kind of like a photograph on a dart
-board?” She asked, watching the woman – ‘Sudo’, apparently – wandering aimlessly around below.

“Mmhmm.” Smoke confirmed. “See
...I looked in on you and that kid you hung out with in the Esquiline Division while you were under. Or...well, I watched the recordings after the fact. Where she took you – and, more to the point, what she made you see – reminded me of when I went through intake. I figured that...y’know...maybe I misjudged you a little. So I wanted you to have this. It’s something that I would have liked, a few days after going through that fucking mind-fuck bullshit.”

“What’m I meant to do, here?” Yvonne thought she knew, but she wanted to hear it first. Smoke shrugged.

“Well, it’s really up to
you
, Yvonne,” She smirked with an air of challenging condescension. “But if I were you, I’d fucking shoot the bi – ”

“
– Done.” Yvonne muttered. As she grabbed for the 1911-22, Sudo looked up at them. For a split second, Yvonne paused. The hologram’s eyes were startling, glowing purple. They seemed to emit a kind of gravity; drawing her focus deeper...and deeper...and deeper still. Yvonne shook off what she was feeling with a sneer and a shrug of her shoulders, set her feet, smoothly flipped back the safety, prepped the hammer, and leaned into her shoulder. She squeezed down on the trigger: a single bullet winding its way down and into the space between the hologram’s startling, illusory eyes.

It had been
– admittedly – awhile since she’d had the chance to fire an actual gun. About a year. But, apparently: her skills were still almost exactly where she’d left them. Faux-Sudo flickered as the back of her holographic skull exploded outward, before falling to her knees and then pitching forward into the dirt. After a couple of seconds, the body – and associated gore – glimmered and then disappeared. Around the edge of the pit, the soldiers burst into applause. Yvonne felt a familiar wave of intensely satisfied calm.

“Hope you boys are paying attention!” Smoke called out to the soldiers. “That’s how a
real
soldier does it!” The applause intensified. “Want another go?” Smoke grinned.

“No,” Yvonne returned the smile. “Now I wanna see what
you’ve got.”

“Then lock and load, hot shot,” Smoke laughed, pulling out her gun, disabling the safety, and prepping the hammer. “Try and keep up.”

§§§

“Did you have
fun?” Smoke teased. “C’mon. That was fun, right?”

“Right.” Yvonne rolled her eyes, watching
herself smirk at Smoke in the mirror. They’d gone through the better part of ten full clips of ammunition each; a full clip being, in this case, ten rounds. Yvonne’s ears were ringing. From experience, she assumed it would last for the next day or so.

After that, Yvonne and Smoke had joined some of the ‘jarheads’, as Smoke seemed to enjoy calling them, for some random training exercises. Yvonne k
new how out of practice she was. She’d managed to stay in
some
kind of shape during her year in the bunker, but – as she was well aware – she was far
from being
‘
combat ready’. While she’d managed to keep up, for the most part...at her best – or so she suspected – she’d still have been a distant second to Smoke when it came to speed and reflexes, if not endurance. Even in her sub-optimal state, she’d run rings around Smokes’ men...though that wasn’t saying much: Smoke’s preferred nomenclature notwithstanding, professional soldiers they were not.

“
Say it.” Smoke pressed; bouncing up, turning, and hoisting herself up and onto the bathroom bench-top. Her back and the back of her head pressed up against the mirror...that tight ponytail of hers splaying out at the top, forcing her head to angle slightly downward. Glancing over at Smoke, Yvonne saw heavily lidded eyes – accentuated by the slight downward slant of Smoke’s face – and a broad, mischievous grin. Yvonne rocked back on her heels, looking appraisingly across at the bizarrely girlish version of Smoke now sitting in-front-and-to-the-right of her. “Say it.”