New York City
Avery Halsey was just starting to drift off to sleep when she heard the front door of the safehouse swing open. She opened one bleary eye and saw her boss, Tamara Broderick, walk in, followed by a man that she recognized immediately, even though they had never met.
“Thom Martiel,” she blurted, sitting up and suddenly wide-awake. If Tam had brought him here, it could only mean....
“Stone was right,” she muttered sarcastically. “Wonderful.”
She was glad that he was right, obviously because it meant they had not been wasting their time but did he always have to be right? About everything?
Gavin Stone, seated at the dining room table, did not look up to acknowledge Tam’s arrival or take credit for his predictive accuracy. He appeared to be wholly consumed with working out an expert difficulty Sudoku puzzle.
Tam was already launching into the introductions. “This is Dr. Halsey, my lead researcher. The fellow at the table is Mr. Stone. He’s the one who figured out that you were being targeted.”
Martiel gaped at Stone. “How?”
“Stone,” Tam said, “you want to fill him in?”
Stone raised a finger, signaling that her request would have to wait.
“He’s been doing that all night,” Avery supplied, rising and heading over to greet the new arrival. “Trying to beat his record.” She stuck out her hand to Martiel. “Hi. Call me Avery.”
Martiel looked at it warily for a moment, then took it and gave it a cautious squeeze. He was handsome enough but in a sort of artificial way; more style than substance. “Avery. I’m Thom.”
Tam faced Avery. “Any word from Greg and Kasey?”
“They called in about an hour ago to say that nothing is happening. Nichols is home in bed. They’re gonna keep an eye on him.” She glanced at Martiel again. “Unless you want me to call them back.”
“No. Better to keep them where they are until we can get a read on what’s happening.”
“Where’s Billy?”
“Car trouble. He’s all right. And I’m starving.” She turned away, headed for the kitchen.
Martiel threw up his hands. “Just hold on a minute. Who the hell are you people? You aren’t cops. If you were, you would have arrested that guy who tried to run me off the road.”
Avery took Martiel’s arm and turned him toward the table. “You’re right. We aren’t the police. What we are is a little more complicated. I can’t tell you everything, but the condensed version is that we’re a counter-terrorism task force. You remember the incidents at Key West and Norfolk a couple years back? We’re trying to stop another attack like that.”
“Attack? I thought those were just natural disasters. Undersea earthquakes.”
“Like I said, I can’t tell you everything, but I can tell you that those were most definitely not natural disasters.”
The Norfolk and Key West tsunamis, which had killed hundreds and done billions in property damage, had actually been engineered by an international quasi-religious conspiracy known collectively as the Dominion.
Even before those devastating attacks, Tamara Broderick, a former FBI special agent, with several years’ experience hunting the Dominion, had joined the Central Intelligence Agency to carry on the battle, both at home and abroad, which was no easy feat since the Dominion had infiltrated the upper echelons of government. To that end, she had formed the Myrmidons, a select group of government officers and civilian specialists, which had initially included Avery’s half-brother Dane Maddock and his team of underwater salvage experts.
Maddock had gone back to treasure hunting, and now, there were just six Myrmidons in their action team. Four were combat-tested veterans. Tam and her two most trusted agents, Greg Johns and Kasey Kim, had extensive experience in law enforcement, counter -intelligence and counter-terrorism. Billy Sievers was a former Special Forces soldier turned military contractor, and now again working for, as he put it, “the white hats.” Avery had survived a few scrapes, but her role was largely academic. She was a former community college history professor from Nova Scotia, and despite assurances from Tam to the contrary, she sometimes wondered if the only reason she was there at all was because of her relationship to Maddock.
Then there was Stone.
“Counter-terrorism,” Martiel said. “So I’m being hunted by terrorists?”
“It looks that way.”
“You mentioned Nichols. Is that Bob Nichols? At Goldman Sachs?”
Avery nodded. “You know him?”
“I know of him. We do the same job at different firms. Is he...” He trailed off as if unsure what to ask.
“He was the next name on the list,” Avery said. “You were at the top, but we had to cover our bets.”
Martiel shook his head. “I don’t understand. There’s a list?”
“Ha!” Stone slapped a hand down on the table. The sound startled Avery a little. “Four minutes and fifty-two seconds.” Then, without even a pause to signal a change of subject, he went on. “No, Mr. Martiel, there isn’t an actual list. There’s a pattern.”
“A pattern?”
“Patterns are his thing,” Avery explained.
That was putting it mildly. Gavin Stone was an old family friend of Tam’s, but the reason he had been recruited to the team—recruited was the wrong word. Technically, he was in Tam’s custody, which was a whole other story in itself—was his uncanny ability to detect patterns: patterns in the way information flowed across the world, in the behavior of complex systems, and even in human behavior.
Stone believed in a deterministic universe—that literally everything that had ever happened or would ever happen, was the result of an inevitable and entirely predictable series of cause and effect reactions. The domino effect writ large. He also believed that, if a person could grasp the underlying pattern controlling everything—what he called the universal source code—it might be possible to “hack” reality itself.
Avery wasn’t a believer, however, and even though Stone’s talent for finding patterns that no one else could had helped them thwart a Dominion plot to destroy the United States, she wasn’t so sure about his latest humdinger of a conspiracy theory.
But evidently, he had been right about the threat to Thom Martiel.
“Stone,” Tam said, sticking her head out from the kitchen and speaking firmly. “Break it down for him. In English. Then I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”
Stone raised an eyebrow, evidently intrigued by the promise of more information. “I’ll do my best.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” Avery asked Martiel as he took a seat across from Stone. “Coffee?”
“Got any Scotch?” Martiel asked.
“Trust me,” Avery said. “You’re going to want to keep your head clear to wrap it around this.”
Martiel let out a grunt and nodded his head toward the kitchen. “She...Agent...”
“Tam.”
“Yeah. Tam. She said something about suspicious deaths. Is that the pattern you’re talking about?”
“In a word,” Stone said. “Yes. In the last couple years, there have been over a hundred suspicious deaths in the financial sector. That’s just in the New York area. And by suspicious, I mean just those where the evidence doesn’t support the official COD on the death certificate. Accidents that make no sense. Muggings that ended in fatalities that happened in locations where the victim had no reason to be in the first place. Suicides from people who showed no indicators of being suicidal. Most were jumpers.”
“And that’s suspicious?”
“Throwing someone off a twenty-story building is the easiest way to cover up a murder. But the one I think was most suspicious was the man who shot himself with a nail gun.”
“Why is that?”
“He shot himself seven times.”
Martiel shook his head. “Like I told your...um, Tam... bad things happen. Accidents happen. Suicides happen. And don’t get me started on the lifestyle stuff. It’s a brutal job.”
“And yet somebody tried to kill you tonight,” Stone countered. “Let me guess. It was supposed to look like a car accident on a rural highway.”
Martiel registered surprise. “How did you know that? Tam didn’t call—”
“Actually, I told her it would happen that way.”
“I warned you,” Avery said to Martiel. “Patterns are his thing.”
“That part was easy,” Stone went on. “You have a long commute and a predictable routine, so a car accident was the obvious choice. Accidents are always going to attract less attention than suicides and street crime.”
“Okay, okay. So it’s all part of a pattern. There’s a conspiracy. Who’s behind it?”
Stone just blinked at him.
“We were hoping you could shed some light on that,” Avery admitted.
“If you see the pattern—”
“Have you ever done an IQ test?” Stone interrupted, seemingly changing the subject.
“I... Sure. Not an official one, but—”
“What those tests are really doing is equating the ability to predict patterns, purportedly testing your inherent intellectual potential. How you think, rather than what you know. As a measure of intellectual potential, it’s a complete crock. Like horoscopes and the Meyers-Briggs personality test.”
“He’s still sore because he couldn’t get into Mensa,” Avery said in a stage whisper.
Stone inexplicably burst out laughing. “Like I would ever try.” He grinned and resumed speaking though his tone was now a little less imperious. “But the thing is, you can look at those patterns and intuitively predict the next shape or number in the sequence, without completely understanding the underlying logic.”
Martiel nodded slowly. “You’re saying that you could predict that I was going to be the next...um, suspicious death...without actually knowing why?”
Tam called out from the kitchen. “He explained it better than you did, Stone.”
“I looked at every one of the previous victims, the specific niche they occupied, what they might have known, what they had access to, who replaced them. And there was a pattern there. Based on my understanding of that pattern, I started looking for the person most likely to be next. You.”
Martiel raised his hands in a ‘slow down’ gesture. “Look, I deal with complex analytics every day in my job. I get the broad strokes, but you’re telling me that you looked at every single person working in the finance sector, and picked me?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s a quarter of a million people.”
“Closer to a third of a million, actually.”
“And you looked at them all. How exactly?”
Stone shot a glance in Tam’s direction. “I can’t tell you the particulars, but suffice it to say, it was a tall order. The pattern appears to focus more on the specific niche each victim occupied, rather than any unique personality factors, but at this stage, I can’t rule anything out.”
“But you still don’t know why? I mean the real reason.”
“We may have a lead,” Tam announced, joining them at the table with a steaming microwaved Lean Cuisine dinner. “The perp claimed to be working for someone he called ‘The Immortal.’ Ring any bells for you, Stone?”
Stone’s forehead wrinkled as if the revelation were not merely cryptic, but disappointing. He glanced at Martiel then shook his head.
“Immortal?” Avery asked. “Are we thinking that’s literal? Like that old show, Highlander.”
“I read that book,” Tam said. “Or listened to it. Who has time to read anymore?”
“I think you’re thinking of Outlander,” Martiel chimed in. “Highlander was a movie about a race of people who could only die if they got their heads cut off. The immortals went around fighting each other with swords and taking each other’s power. Sean Connery was in it. He played a Spaniard, and some French guy played the Highlander, which really doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. But then I guess it was all pretty nonsensical.”
“The TV series was pretty good,” Avery said, a little deflated.
Stone’s expression had grown even more perturbed. “It’s a red herring. Your perp didn’t know anything.”
“It’s a lead,” Tam insisted. “And we’re going to run it down.”
Avery took the cue and rose from the table to retrieve her laptop.
“It’s too general,” Stone insisted. “It’s just noise. Camouflage. If you Google ‘the Immortal’, you’re going to get millions of meaningless hits.”
“Says the man who picked one name out of three hundred thousand,” Avery shot back. “You do your thing, and I’ll do mine.”
She set the computer down and opened a search engine in the browser. Despite her retort, she knew Stone was right. “The Immortal” was too vague. A search would likely turn up a slew of entries about comic book characters and professional wrestlers before it provided anything useful. She would have to refine her search, and maybe even enlist the help of her brother’s friend, journalist and deep-web sleuth Jimmy Letson.
Still, who knew what doors a simple query might unlock?
She typed the words: “Who is the Immortal” into the search box.
7,580,000 results. No surprise there.
She scrolled down the first page, knowing that the answer, if it was there at all, would probably be far too obscure to show up in the top ten or even top one thousand results.
There were references to TV shows, video games, and comic books, religious discussions, definitions, and at the bottom of the page, a link to something called “The Immortal Mysteries Forum.” She read the description, expecting it to be something related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Highlander, but saw nothing that immediately linked it to entertainment media. Curious, she clicked on the link.
It was a typical Internet discussion forum, utilizing the mostly obsolete topic- and thread-indexing system that had been around since the early 2000s. Most of the people she knew and interacted with had long since graduated to more streamlined and user-friendly social media sites like Facebook and Reddit, but there were still a lot of people, particularly those on the fringes of society, who preferred the relative anonymity of the old school online forums. They were especially popular with conspiracy nuts.
A glance of topics—and there were several—suggested this might be more of the same. Avery immediately recognized several of the headings: Illuminati; New World Order; Council of Rome; Numbers Stations.
Others sounded vaguely familiar: Markovian Parallax Denigrate; A858; Cicada 3301; TINAG.
Avery was sure she’d heard of those somewhere before. She looked down the list, noting recent activity on all of them—within the hour, in some cases. That was also a surprise. A lot of forums languished and died from lack of participation, and just sat there in cyberspace like virtual ghost towns.
She looked back up to the top of the list. The topic header read: “Latest from the Immortal.”
The most recent post was just a couple hours old.
She clicked on it.
“Avery, honey?” Tam asked. “You find something?”
Avery looked up, gasping a little. She had been holding her breath without even realizing it. “Uh, I think so.”