Death Cry, page 10
“Have there been any other developments?” he added a few moments later. “Over.”
“Nothing to speak of,” Brigid replied. “We’re out here, all alone in the mountains.” She looked around her. “It’s actually quite beautiful. The sky’s a glorious indigo with moonlight sprinkling over the mountains. Be a nice place for a vacation. Over.”
“We can talk about vacations when you get back,” Lakesh chastised her in a friendly manner after the usual pause. “Take care of yourselves. Over and out.”
“Over and out,” she repeated with a nod. It really was beautiful out there, Brigid thought as she made her way back into the bunker. The croaks and chirrups of nocturnal animals could be heard faintly, along with the occasional barking of a wolf from far off. It felt so empty, only the little sentry station, the abandoned military truck and the Mantas, sitting low to the ground, giving any indication that anyone might be about. In the moonlight, it was easy to pretend that those things weren’t there, that Brigid Baptiste was alone in the world.
“COULD SUCH A WEAPON really exist?” Cloud Singer asked timidly once she was certain that the communication broadcast had ended.
Bad Father shot a piercing glare at her. “Foolish girl,” he muttered. “Sixteen years of age and half as wise.”
She bowed her head, feeling ashamed as the other tribespeople in the cave looked at her. Besides Bad Father and herself, five other people were in the room. Good Father stood beside Bad Father, the bull roarer now tucked back inside the waistband of his loincloth. Rabbit in the Moon stood at his shoulder, his bare chest showing displays of tribal tattoos, combat pants slung low around his waist. Standing next to Rabbit in the Moon was the youngest member of the crew, the fifteen-year-old man-child currently known as Neverwalk but still waiting for confirmation of his adult title from Good Father. To the back of the cave, the assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently, listening to the discussion but distancing herself from it. The assassin scared and fascinated Cloud Singer, but the woman kept to herself, letting none of the tribe get close. Finally, crouching on his haunches beside the glowing laptop screen, Rock Streaming gazed at the others, waiting for everyone’s reactions. “Well?” he asked.
“A weapon that exists on a higher plane of consciousness is one that can be activated on a higher plane of consciousness, as well,” the assassin spoke from the shadows of the cave, her soft voice carrying eerily through the enclosed space.
“The assassin is right,” Bad Father said in his rumbling thunder voice. “With this and the Dreamslicer, we could establish the new territories and carve the world up for the original tribe.”
“But how would we take it?” Rabbit in the Moon asked.
“By force,” Neverwalk chirped, slapping a fist into his open palm.
“He’s right.” Good Father nodded. “Force is the surest way to gain this Death Cry that they speak of.”
Cloud Singer looked at the elders, feeling the nagging question still in her mind. “But I don’t understand,” she said finally, bringing all her courage to bear. “How can not-original man have made such a thing? You told us that they had no understanding of the Dreaming, they lived their lives only in Realworld.”
Good Father smiled benevolently as he favored the young woman with an explanation. Just one summer ago he had been her mentor, before she had taken the warrior vows and her final name. “Before the Little Bang That Changed Everything, the world was a confusing place. Other tribes, not original men but others, would explore things they did not understand in their quest to find new ways to hurt each other and hasten the destruction of the world about them. The Dreamslicer, you must recall, is their invention, not ours. They merely failed to understand its purest application, thinking that movement from one place to another was all important, not realizing that the true majesty was in the getting there—the stepping outside of worlds.”
“What did they call the Dreamslicer, Good Father?” Cloud Singer asked. “You told me once, but the name seemed so silly that I forget.”
Good Father nodded sagely. “They called it a man’s name—mat-trans,” he said quietly, before turning his attention to Rock Streaming at the laptop.
“Using the Dreamslicer,” Rock Streaming explained, “we could be to Georgia in the time it takes to think—”
“No.” Bad Father shook his head. “That’s a three-dream minimum, Rock Streaming. The Dreamslicer could not handle the full journey in one step.”
“Even so,” Rock Streaming urged, “this is an ideal chance to show our hand and take what we need.”
“Monitor the communiqués,” Bad Father said slowly. “Make sure that they have the item in question, this Death Cry, before we take action.”
“For the moment,” Good Father added, “the strike force is to remain on high alert in readiness.” He looked at every person in the cave with a fierce expression that brooked no questions.
With that, Good Father and Bad Father exited the cave, leaving the younger members of the strike team to ponder what would happen next.
Chapter 10
When Brigid returned to the Cheka-KGB office, Kane and Grant were on the floor, probing at the concrete and listening to the echoes as they rapped their knuckles against different sections of the room. Kane had rolled back the colorful Persian rug and wedged it by the filing cabinets. There was a patch of shiny, clean floor where it had lain.
“What’s going on?” Brigid asked as the two men searched the floor.
“Started wondering about a second level to the base,” Grant explained. “Thought there might be a trapdoor in here or something.”
“A basement,” Kane added. “Or maybe a subbasement.”
Brigid looked at the stacks of paperwork awaiting scrutiny. It seemed unlikely a second level had escaped their initial search, but she could understand Kane’s and Grant’s frustration and inherent need to be doing something.
“Lakesh is ecstatic at our progress,” she told them as she returned to the chair behind the wide desk stacked with manila folders.
Kane glanced up from the clean area of the floor. “That’s something,” he said amiably, before running his hands across the floor again. “There’s nothing here. I had hoped maybe the desk or the rug had been used to hide a trapdoor.”
“And we checked behind the cabinets for a hidden treasure trove of paperwork,” Grant explained, “but there’s no safe there or tucked away behind the shield on the wall.”
“It’s more esoteric than that,” Brigid assured them, scanning the untidy room, “but it pays to check.” She picked up the report before her and started skipping over the pages until she found the section about Krylograd, the mapped area of hidden human consciousness.
“Well,” Kane grunted as he brushed the dirt from his hands and stood up, “someone must have written down the mental wavelength, or whatever you want to call it, that gives access to this secret room.”
Brigid nodded, reaching in her pocket for her spectacles. She sighed as she pushed the glasses onto her nose, taking in Kane and the mess that they had all made of the office. Files were stacked on every surface now, and Kane had wedged the rolled-up Persian rug in the corner using an open drawer from a filing cabinet. As Brigid looked at the rolled-up rug for a moment, a smile suddenly crossed her lips and she almost laughed.
“What is it, Baptiste?” Kane asked, noticing her change of expression.
“The rug,” she said. “Gosh, but we’ve been dumb.”
She jumped out of her seat and walked across to the carpet, with Kane and Grant watching, perplexed. Carefully, Brigid unfolded a corner of the rug and examined it, her smile widening.
“What?” Grant asked. “Is there something written in the weave?”
“No,” Brigid answered. “The whole design of the rug is a mandala.”
Kane helped Brigid unfurl the carpet and lay it flat across the floor. Though the carpet was soiled, the vibrant design was still clear. A series of expanding golden circles and squares originated from the central point of the rug. The gold design rested on a blue background, which had probably been the color of the sky when it was weaved, though it had taken a darker color thanks to the mistreatment it had suffered over the intervening years. The design was phenomenally intricate, clearly the work of many long hours on the loom. There were smaller branches showing in different colors, and the main gold-and-blue design was highlighted in regular spots with different shades of green and red.
“Quite a work of art.” Grant nodded appreciably.
“Looks like one of those Julia things that Lakesh was looking at a while back,” Kane added thoughtfully.
“A Julia set,” Brigid confirmed. “A mathematical extrapolation interpreted as a regular, repeating pattern of shapes coming from a central core. You’re right, it’s very similar, though its origin is quite different.
“The mandala is an integrated structure organized around a unifying center,” she told them. “They exist in nature, as well as man-made, like this one. Generally, mandalas were a plan, a chart or geometric pattern that was supposed to represent the cosmos metaphysically, showing the universe from the perspective of man. A number of religions have used mandalas as a part of their practice for untold thousands of years.”
“What do they use them for?” Kane asked.
“Meditation,” Brigid told him. “Mandalas are a spiritual teaching tool, used as an aid to trance induction. Tibetan monks, for example, would concentrate on and memorize every intricate detail of the mandala over a period of weeks or months.”
Grant and Kane were both smiling now as they looked at the beautiful design on the Persian rug. “Have you just found our key?” Kane asked.
“I think so,” Brigid said. “In theory, meditation on a particular mandala could set up a specific mental resonance, like using a tuning fork, only one attuned to Buddha, Allah or God.”
“But the Russians have bastardized the concept,” Kane suggested, “and turned it into a superweapon. Or at least a way of storing a superweapon.”
“I guess the Communists weren’t real big on the whole religion thing,” Grant rumbled.
Kane leaned against the desk and admired the expanding pattern of squares and circles on the rug laid out before him. “You think they’d really just hide it here? In plain sight like this?”
“We walked right over it,” Grant noted.
“If you hadn’t moved it the way you did,” Brigid said, “I doubt I’d have given it a second thought. It was there as the structure of the room, but you don’t bother to look at things once you’ve seen them, you know?”
“So what do we do now?” Kane asked. “Concentrate on the mandala until we find enlightenment?”
“The way in which mandalas were used by the Tibetan monks,” Brigid considered, “was to commit the design to memory. If that’s the process required here, then we only need memorize the design to access this Krylograd region.”
“But didn’t you just say that took these monks weeks to do?” Grant said incredulously.
“Sometimes months.” Brigid smiled. “But not too many of them had an eidetic memory like mine.”
Kane laughed. “Oh, I knew we brought you along for something, Baptiste.”
“Let’s see if we can get the worst of the dirt and dust out of this thing before we start,” Brigid decided, folding the carpet up on itself and lifting it from the cold concrete floor.
“I THINK YOU SHOULD TAKE a look at this,” Donald Bry said as soon as Lakesh walked back into the Cerberus ops room.
Having worked through the night, Lakesh had just caught up on some sleep with a ninety-minute nap in his private quarters. He had reached a point where fatigue had set in and he promised himself a proper night’s rest the very second the field team returned from Georgia. “For goodness’ sake, Donald,” Lakesh chided in a friendly manner, “at least let me sit down first.”
Bry looked at him apologetically from his computer terminal. “I think this one’s important.”
Lakesh walked across the floor of the vast monitoring room until he stood before Bry’s bank of terminals. The main monitor showed a continuously updated feed from the Keyhole comsat, with a stream of data covering conditions in western Russia and the old European territories that bordered Georgia. Bry, however, was sitting before a secondary monitor that sat to the side of his desk. On it, a sequence of data was marching gradually up the screen, the basic mechanics of the computer system itself, Lakesh realized after a second’s look.
“Well,” Lakesh asked, “what is it? What have you found?”
“I think we have a snooper,” Bry explained, pointing to a section of code that was slowly working its way up the monitor. “See this here? That’s a subroutine that has nothing to do with the communications protocols I set up when I achieved full access to the Keyhole comsat. I know this program like the back of my hand, Dr. Singh—I had to write it pretty much from scratch.”
Lakesh nodded, reminded once more of how important every member of Cerberus had been to contributing to his vision.
“I had an inkling of suspicion about a week ago,” Bry told Lakesh as they watched the strange piece of code disappear. “Something not quite right, a little flash on the screen like a breakdown in the signal for a billionth of a second, so slight I almost didn’t see it. I put it down to tiredness. I was coming up to the end of my shift, and it had been an eventful day with the operation in North Dakota. But the more I tried to forget about it the more it nagged at me. Ultimately I decided to take the time to deconstruct and examine every line of operating code built into the system.”
“Lucky you did,” Lakesh assured him as the strange code reappeared as a suffix on one of the standard protocols at the bottom of the screen. “But what do you think it means?”
“Somebody else has tapped into the comsat,” Bry said assuredly, “that much is clear. Why they’re in our system, as well, I’m not sure, but we can probably assume it’s nothing good. We may need to start thinking about what we say over supposedly secure channels from now on.”
“That sounds like a wise precaution,” Lakesh mused. “Do you think you can trace back the code? Find out where it appeared from?”
Bry nodded slowly. “I can,” he said, “but it won’t be easy. This is a very subtle piece of programming, working as an adjunct to the main code.”
“Like a virus?” Lakesh suggested.
“Far less invasive than that,” Bry stated. “If I hadn’t written the program myself, I doubt I would have recognized that anything untoward had happened. And if our hacker is half as good at hiding himself as he is at hiding code, well, it could take a very long time to track him down.”
Lakesh nodded thoughtfully. “Assemble a team, work in shifts and make sure that you, Donald, get some sleep. I want a full report on this every two hours, either from you or your designated deputy.”
Bry nodded in agreement. “I’ll get myself some strong coffee and assemble a crew right away.”
BRIGID SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the floor of the little office and stared at the mandala pattern on the carpet before her. They had beaten as much of the dust from the rug as they could, then hung it from two climbing hooks Grant had hammered into the ceiling. Kane and Grant had pushed the desk back against the wall to give Brigid room to sit down on the floor before the rug, and they took up chairs at the side of the room, watching her as she steadied her breathing and prepared to go into the trance.
This was a risky exercise, they knew. To some extent, all three of them hoped that it proved to be a fruitless exercise. The alternative, accessing a previously unvisited region of the human subconscious and finding the Death Cry doomsday device waiting there, seemed dangerous and threatening in the silent and unfamiliar surroundings of the hidden bunker.
Brigid sat quietly, slowing her breathing as she studied the beautiful pattern of concentric circles and interlocking golden squares before her. She knew that there were a number of ways to engage in meditation. Stilling the mind was a part of it, but a heightened awareness of physicality played a part, as well. The kundalini—the life force—could be raised during meditation, giving the subject increased focus in everyday matters.
The rebus of squares and circles seemed to swim before her eyes, its details merging, adding a depth to the image as though it were a portal, a tunnel stretching past the filing cabinets through the wall beyond.
She felt movement then, a flower opening at the base of her spine, a glowing, organic red throbbing at the core of her body. The logical, scientific part of her mind, divorced from the experience, realized that the feeling was her base chakra opening, the first step to enlightened meditation. She let the feeling of well-being wash through her, blossoming from the red flower at the pit of her spine.
The chakra located in her lower abdomen would be next, the orange-petaled chakra associated with reproduction. She let it unveil itself, immersing her in a wave of sensual intensity. She felt, for a scant few seconds, the mothering instinct within her, the desperate urge to hold the fruit of all that she believed in and fought for, all that she dreamed of.
She continued to look at the mandala as it swirled before her eyes. If it had ever been a picture weaved onto a rug, she could no longer remember. Its image had encircled her, blotting and extending into her peripheral vision, becoming her entire visual world.
The yellow chakra felt like a tiny sun as it burned beneath her navel, blossoming into a bright flame of incandescence. The intensity of the yellow flame was almost too much to bear, pulling from her solar plexus, and it made her feel as though she would fold into herself for a protracted instant. The solar plexus chakra ruled willpower, and Brigid had trouble allowing it to open, letting it chart a course without her. But she continued to stare at the fascinating picture before her eyes, and she let the chakra flower inside, filling her with her own, enviably strong kundalini.
