4

“Once we start down this road, there’s no turning back,” Ramses said. The computer setup in front of him was so advanced, it resembled the bridge of a starship. He spun around in his leather command chair and looked at each of them in turn. “We’re about to take a deep dive into a dark hole with no bottom.”

Mason fully understood the ramifications of what they were preparing to do. While he appreciated his old friend’s concern, he’d passed the point of no return long ago. The moment the Thirteen murdered his wife, they’d declared a war that couldn’t end without the complete annihilation of one side or the other.

“What choice do we have?” he asked. “We have no leads on the Thirteen and no way of knowing whether or not they were able to produce any quantity of Novichok A-234, a single drop of which would be enough to kill everyone in this room.”

“I’m still not convinced this is the right approach, though,” Gunnar said from his perch on the stool at the eating bar. The wavering blue reflections of the moonlight passing through the glass-bottomed swimming pool above him highlighted the scar running down his forehead, through his eyebrow, and over his cheekbone, a parting gift from the Hoyl. “This is like opening the Pandora’s box of crazy.”

Gunnar was brilliant in ways that defied comprehension. He possessed a preternatural understanding of high finance and the ability to bend technology to his will, skill sets he’d combined to re-create the secret website the Thirteen had used to both communicate and manipulate global financial events. Each of the nine monitors mounted to the wall above the computer displayed a different function, from stock indices and network feeds to satellite-positioning beacons and monitors upon which data and real-time conversations scrolled past so quickly that he’d been forced to write an NSA-style algorithm to pluck specific keywords and phrases out of the ether. Hidden somewhere within this torrent of information were the clues that would ultimately lead them to the members of the organization they were hunting.

“You know as well as I do that every conspiracy theory contains a seed of truth,” Ramses said.

“True, but you’re talking about cultivating the ones sown in fields of insanity.”

“Even potentially unreliable sources are better than no sources at all,” Mason said. “A single viable lead is all we need. We can’t just sit around waiting for something else to happen. We need to get our message out there and hope to God we find the Novichok in time.”

“Surely we are not the only ones who know of the Thirteen,” Alejandra said. She padded across the tiled floor in her bare feet and grabbed a six-pack from a refrigerator filled almost exclusively with beer. “Someone will reply to us. It is up to us to decide if they can be trusted.”

She offered a bottle to each of them, hopped up on the desk behind Ramses, and crossed her legs in front of her. He unconsciously stroked her calf with the back of his hand, an intimate display of affection Mason was unaccustomed to seeing from him.

“Then we need to agree right here and now that we don’t act on any information until we’re able to authenticate it,” Gunnar said. “I don’t like the idea of dealing with people who hide behind screen names.”

“Speaking of which,” Mason said, “are you sure none of this can be traced back to us? We don’t want the Thirteen to see us coming until we’re in a position to make our move. Considering they’ve infiltrated the FBI and however many other agencies, they have more than enough power to shut us down before we even get started.”

“Trust me, this beast is cloaked in multiple layers of invisibility,” Ramses said. Mason glanced at Gunnar, who confirmed as much with a nod. “Why’d you look at him? You think I don’t have extensive experience conducting business online with total anonymity?”

Mason pretended not to hear him. While Ramses considered himself a purveyor of vices for clients of discriminating taste, there were aspects of his professional life that Mason would rather not know, largely because if his old friend ever fell from the legal tightrope he’d chosen to walk, Mason would have no choice but to take him down himself.

“Try it out,” Gunnar said. “Let’s see if Ramses is as good as he thinks he is.”

“Prepare to have your minds blown,” Ramses said, and offered Mason a wireless headset with an attached microphone. He switched the feed to the central monitor and brought up a program featuring six color-coded horizontal graphs labeled with different units of measurement for amplitude, all set against a constant axis of time, in milliseconds. It was an audiovisual biometrics program. Voiceprint analysis. “Of course, I did have a little help with some of the more intricate aspects of the programming.”

“A little?” Gunnar said. He reached past Ramses and hit the mouse. The monitor beside the biometrics display showed Mason’s face, as recorded by a camera that tracked his movements and superimposed a digital template composed of hundreds of dots connected by straight lines. Another click and a black mask with bloodred Xs for eyes appeared over his face. He turned from side to side and watched the mask re-form as though it were made from liquid. “There’s no way of removing the mask. It combines with your existing features in such a way that the two become so hopelessly and inextricably entwined that even I couldn’t separate them again.”

“Testing,” Mason said. “One, two, three.”

A markedly different voice emerged from the speakers with a split-second delay, almost like the echo caused by a bad cell phone connection. Jagged colored lines slashed across the graphs, followed in rapid succession by second, modified versions. His words appeared on the screen to the left of it in several columns at once, each containing a translation in a different language.

“The audiovisual modulator utilizes a randomizer function that alters both your voice and its behavioral tract, the combination of your unique voiceprint, inflection, and accent,” Gunnar said. “It literally converts it into a completely different voice with a discrete spectrogram entirely distinct from your own.”

“So there’s no way anyone will be able to identify my voice?” Mason said.

“Not a chance.”

“This bad boy’s ready to go live over a dozen radio frequencies and Internet channels,” Ramses said. “I’ll set it to record and then repeat at irregular intervals. The words themselves will be posted on any number of message boards and inserted into virtual chats using the screen name XQtioner. We’ll reach the right people, for sure, but it remains to be seen if any of them will reach back.”

Mason nodded and looked from Ramses to Gunnar to Alejandra. The moment felt monumental, as though they stood at the precipice of a life-altering event. He could see it in their eyes. They recognized it, too.

He turned to face the whiteboard they’d mounted to the wall beside the monitors, the primitive predecessor of the photographic display he’d assembled down the hall, and focused on the stylized cross symbol drawn in the center.

And let the words flow.

“A shadow organization has insinuated itself into our midst. It has quietly infiltrated our governments and compromised our law-enforcement agencies in an effort to manipulate the course of world events from behind the scenes. This entity wields so much money and power that there’s nothing beyond its reach. No goal it can’t achieve. No group or individual it can’t co-opt. And it’s no longer content to sit back and allow its subtle machinations to run their course. The time has come for it to step out into the open and claim the entire world as its own, but to do so, it needs to cull the global population to a more manageable size, one that can be more effectively controlled, more efficiently ruled. One that views it as the savior of mankind, rather than its oppressor. One unwilling to rise in revolt against the agency of its enslavement, a cabal that calls itself the Thirteen.”

Mason paused. He suddenly understood Ramses’ concern. The conspiracy theorists they hoped to reach weren’t the only ones hiding in the dark web. The monsters they were hunting were out there, too. Waiting. Watching. And they wouldn’t take kindly to someone poking a stick into the shadows where they lurked.

“At this very moment,” he continued, “they’re preparing to unleash hell upon this Earth, to inflict widespread and indiscriminate suffering beyond our worst nightmares, and whether we like it or not, we’re the only ones standing in their way. We have to stop them, and the only way to do so is by pooling our resources, starting with information. We need to know everything you’ve heard about them, no matter how anecdotal or inconsequential it might seem, if we’re to have any chance of identifying them and drawing them out into the open. It’s high time someone exposed them for what they truly are and put an end to their genocidal agenda, once and for all.”