Black Jack (3 page)

The little boy was fair-haired like her and seemed unsurprised by Dakota’s appearance in the playroom. Dakota wanted to join him, but, feeling shy and tongue-tied, she hung back behind Schooner Klaus.

‘Go ahead,’ Schooner Klaus encouraged kindly. ‘I’ll be right here if you need me.’ He moved to a table nearby and sat down. Paying no more attention to the children he began to shuffle some papers on the table.

Tom had neither smiled nor spoken, but he was silently holding out a green and black train compartment toward her. With timid steps she went to sit in front of her new friend. But no sooner had she settled down, when the door burst open and a large man barged in. Dakota was instantly immobilized with fear. Everything about him reminded her of the coldly remote six that stood around the metal table. Worse, he appeared to be in an uncontrollable rage.

She scrambled up and tried to run to Schooner Klaus, but the man was lightning fast. His iron fist closed around her forearm tightly. He would have dragged her out of the room, too, if Schooner Klaus had not looked up from his papers and said in a calm, firm voice, ‘There must be some misunderstanding here. You must want some other child.’

But the man was adamant. She was a runaway and must return to the metal room with him. Dakota began to cower with abject terror.

‘Let’s discuss this outside,’ Schooner Klaus suggested reasonably.

They left the room. Dakota lay frozen on the floor, where the man had tossed her, for what seemed an interminable time. Finally, the door opened and Schooner Klaus walked through it. He seemed concerned. The man loomed at the door with crossed arms. Schooner Klaus knelt on one knee beside her so he could whisper into her ear. He told her that the man had orders to take her away and kill her, but that he had managed to convince him it was not important which child died, only that one did. And Dakota, well, Dakota could decide whether it was she or another child that did.

‘Perhaps Tom could take your place?’

Dakota went white.

Schooner Klaus shook his head regretfully. ‘I know,’ he soothed, ‘but it was the best I could do.’

Dakota looked at Tom. Unaffected and uncurious about what was going on he had quietly gone back to playing with his train set. In a daze it occurred to her that she had not yet heard him speak. Perhaps he could not. He seemed strangely solemn and unappreciative of his own good fortune, living in that brightly lit, colorful room full of toys. She had done nothing wrong, and yet she had to die. It seemed terribly unfair. She thought of the metal table and began to shake her head. She couldn’t, she simply couldn’t go back. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

‘Well?’ Schooner Klaus prompted.

She uttered her first word since being out of the cage.

‘Tom,’ she whispered.

Barely had the word left her lips when the man strode into the room, grabbed Tom by his head, and, with a knife that he pulled out of his pocket, slit the poor boy’s throat. From ear to ear. Blood gushed out of the gaping wound as he kicked and writhed. Dakota stared in shocked horror. When eventually Tom stopped jerking, the man calmly wiped his knife, put it away, and left. In the dead silence, Dakota thought she heard the sound of wet gurgling coming from the boy’s throat. She felt numb and cold and very frightened.

‘There, there… You did very well, my pretty, little butterfly,’ Schooner Klaus praised, gently patting her on her back. She turned her stunned gaze toward him, and found him smiling and approving. She had done well? She felt confused. Perhaps, the boy had not been ‘good’ in some way. He
must have
deserved it. And yet… Schooner Klaus held out his hand in front of her face and she bent forward and put her wretched lips to the big, black stone clawed within his ring.

He took her hand, and hand in hand they went out of the door, down a long corridor, up in a lift, and through a metal door into bright sunlight. She turned her face up to its warmth. She thought, it’s all right now. All is well.

A long, black car with tinted windows pulled up alongside them and they got into the back seat. The car pulled out of the front gates of what looked like an ordinary office building. Dakota realized tears were flowing down her cheeks. She felt horrible. Her small fist closed around Schooner Klaus’s index finger. Looking down at her he understood precisely her reaction. Symbolically she had lost her innocence. The distinction that one was the victim and the other the perpetrator had been erased. This was, in fact, the beginning of self-loathing. He allowed her to hold his finger.

‘I’ve spoken to your parents,’ he said, as he fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a grape-flavored sweet. He unwrapped it and put it directly into her mouth. ‘They love you very much, but they said that I should keep you for a bit.’

‘Don’t they want me back?’ she asked, but the sedative was quick-working and she laid her head back sleepily. He patted her on the top of her head and whispered, ‘Of course they do, but go to the safe place now, my little butterfly, over the rainbow. It’s time to forget everything.’

To induce retrograde amnesia before she actually fell asleep he extracted from his jacket pocket a stun gun that could have passed for a fountain pen, and electro-shocked her in the muscled area below the shoulder blades. Since human memories do not become coherent for about twenty-four hours after they are imprinted, shock-scrambling them while they are still stored in the short-term memory section of the brain destroys them. When she awakened she would remember nothing.

As she slid into his lap he stroked her hair and smiled. By the time he was finished with her she would be transformed into a biological robot, unschooled to read, write or execute simple math, but capable of performing any act, no matter how depraved or barbaric. Devoid of any moral or ethical standard, and stripped of all human compassion, she would be the force behind Project ABADDON.

January, 2012

National Security Agency (NSA)

If it moves, enslave it. If it doesn’t, steal it. If it resists, kill it.
If it is no longer useful, destroy it.

 - Steven J. Smith

Dakota lay sedated in her underground dorm, deep beneath the sprawling one hundred square mile confines of the NSA’s Marine Base Quantico. The complex had its official name, naturally, but she and the others like her knew it simply as ‘the Black Hole’. The name derived not only from its main multi-story, black glass building, but was also an allusion to the many who went in and never came out.

Although she recalled being taken to the ops room almost daily, she had no conscious memory of what she did there or how to access her own psychic powers, except the once, when she had dreamed that she had been to the roof of the black glass building and seen large satellite dishes, oversized cooling units, and, as far as the eye could see, in every direction - pitch black forests. Traveling through the building, she learned that the above-ground floors were mostly office space.

All above board; all legitimate.

In fact, there was absolutely nothing above ground to even remotely suggest the secret world underneath that only the initiate had access to. A complicated maze of underground hallways connecting hundreds of secure dormitories, all stacked one on top of another, and tied together with elevators that required a magnetic strip and an access code to operate and never traversed more than one level. Of ops rooms with state-of-the-art psychotronic computers and well-scrubbed, freight-sized elevators, down which came marine security teams with ‘shoot to kill’ instruction in the event of ‘incidents’ involving the psychics.

Aware of the risk she was taking, for it was lethal to be caught where one shouldn’t be, she had let her mind drift into walk-in freezers, large, well-stacked dry goods storage rooms, and the large central kitchen where all their food was prepared. But below the kitchens she instinctively understood she
must not
go. Her floor and above housed mostly other benign data collectors like her, but farther below lived the Delta teams  -  assassins. Some were considered so dangerous they lived in self-contained units and interacted with no one but their specially trained chaperones and handlers. They were killing machines.

She had lived in that place with its blast-proof doors, on-site crematorium, and uncarpeted floors (tiles were very forgiving of ‘wet work’) for two years now. Her transfer there had been accomplished under cover of night from a secret military/NASA installation at Offit Air Force Base, Nebraska. It had occurred to her that she could remember almost nothing of her many years in Nebraska, other than brief flashbacks of sitting with one eye taped shut while watching a reel of film run so fast it was almost a blur; working with puzzles and pulsing lights under the supervision of men in lab coats; a single, slide-like memory of floating in a sensory deprivation tank; and a disturbing one of a ‘blood trial’ - earning stripes - where she was in an octagonal cage in a forest. There were spectators outside the cage and she was facing a crouched, snarling wolf. She recognized the wolf. It recognized her. She must have killed it. Any attempt to remember more fetched only blinding headaches.

At fifteen, she was the youngest inhabitant of the maze. The rest she’d heard were between the ages of seventeen and thirty. She knew only a few by sight and a handful - those that had been involved in missions with her - she knew by name. Even then, no meaningful friendships had emerged from any of them. They were as aloof and disconnected toward her as she was toward them. At any rate, mingling and lingering were not encouraged. There was not even a communal dining room. All meals arrived on trolleys to their quarters, and everybody ate alone.

Dakota was pulled out of her chemical slumber by her chaperone, a tall, statuesque, mysterious woman in her mid twenties. Miss Monroe lived in, was on call 24/7 and seemed to have no discernible family or friends. She wore at all times an emergency alarm device that if activated would summon down an armed Marine killer team. In the two years that Dakota had known her she had never seen Miss Monroe smile or make eye contact with
anyone
.

Miss Monroe broke the top of a glass vial and pulled the clear liquid in it into a syringe. Her other hand reached below to pull the waistband of the girl’s pajama bottoms down a few inches. With practiced efficiency she swiped a cold disinfectant swab on the girl’s exposed skin and eased the needle into her flesh. The drug was a stimulant to counteract the sedative she had injected into the girl the night before Dakota shielded her eyes with one hand and turned groggily to her side.

A few minutes after Miss Monroe left Dakota sat up and stretched. Her bedside clock said 8.10 a.m. but it could have been midnight for all she knew. In the maze day began whenever your chaperone woke you. She padded into her spotless bathroom, where she used the toilet, brushed her teeth, and showered, all under the gaze of a surveillance camera. Wrapped in a towel she stood in front of the mirror. A ghost looked back. She undid her long, golden braid, combed it and re-plaited it. Then she dressed in a pink tracksuit that had been left neatly folded on a chair for her. It had a butterfly monogram on the left breast. Next she went into the kitchenette and helped herself to a glass of orange juice.

Wandering into her living area she switched on the TV. Without it she would have been intolerably bored, but, in fact, it was not there for her entertainment. All visual media in the maze was access controlled and functioned primarily as a conditioning/reinforcing tool. Each psychic had his or her programs expressly selected for their specialty. Hers was designed to keep her mentally infantile, compliant, and locked in a fantasy world of all things extra-dimensional and other-worldly, especially alien life forms. She was never allowed any movies or programs that portrayed rebels, world affairs, or dealt with any subject matter that could cause her to think or begin to question her strange and lonely existence.

That day she had been a given a Disney animated movie, a cartoon,
The Wizard of Oz
with Judy Garland, an episode of
Star Trek,
and a specifically adapted documentary about angels. She immediately selected
The Wizard of Oz
.  Like those of all trauma-trained slaves her brain stem had been scarred to develop a photographic memory, so she knew every frame of the film by heart, but for reasons incomprehensible to her she was unable to resist its lure even after hundreds of viewings.

She began to watch the movie and almost immediately her programming triggers kicked in and she lapsed into flat state - a non-thinking trance. It was only when the thick metal door opened and Miss Monroe walked in with her breakfast that she was brought around. Miss Monroe put the tray on the low table in front of Dakota and held out the morning’s medication, vitamins, minerals, and the cocktail of drugs necessary to counteract the long-term liver and kidney damage caused by the strong and often lethal doses of psychoactive drugs she was forced to consume daily.

Miss Monroe left when she had downed her pills. Dakota unwrapped the plastic utensils and ate. The food was hot, very good, and highly nutritional. Afterwards, she leaned back into her armchair and was soon lost in another trigger-induced stupor.

Again, it was the arrival of Miss Monroe, this time with lunch, that roused her from her hypnotized state. There were more pills to be taken. These were metabolic buffers designed to alleviate some of the debilitating physical side effects of the drugs that would be injected into her body during her afternoon mission. Dakota finished her entire meal knowing that it would be her last for the day - after her afternoon drugs she would be unable to hold down anything solid for six to twelve hours.

When the time arrived, Miss Monroe came for her.

PROJECT ABADDON

[The demons and workers from hell have] a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon.