The huge digital sign wrapping around Piccadilly Circus was blank. Eros was surrounded by scaffolding.
There was familiar graffiti sprayed on the boards. The Hidden’s symbols served a purpose—they’d paid off a bunch of young artists, banking on their misguided sense of social justice, and were using these kids to create the feel of territorial warfare, adding to the element of confusion and uncertainty amid the populace while The Hidden took control, adjusting the place.
Which made her a thorn in their side.
She knew them.
She knew how they communicated, the frequencies they used, and how they’d shielded their technology in preparation for the polar shift; she knew how they thought, how they’d planned, and, ultimately, what their endgame was. Control. These were men who were more interested in the ability to influence the world markets than they were in ephemeral things like greed or power. Both of those were transitory. They knew what was coming. It wasn’t just about systemic racism, it was about class warfare. It was about how the poor were held back simply because it suited these men to do so. Places like Ferguson, Missouri were going to be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice in the way that the Kent State shootings back in 1970 should have been, in the way that the Jackson State shootings ten days later should have been—but back then there had been no national outcry because the nation wasn’t mobilized. It wasn’t connected. Not like now. Now a simple tweet could summon forces to fight side-by-side in a full-scale riot. And it wasn’t just black oppression, it was Latino subjugation, it was the haves against the have-nots with all the economic influence to make sure those ghettos never cleaned up and those kids never had a chance at a better life. They didn’t want an educated populace, they wanted a frightened one, and they had their mouthpieces in place to make sure people were frightened, with the rabid right-wing press spouting hate and lies with an Ebola-level of infection that rippled through communities.
Fifty million Americans were poor.
Fifty million voters.
And yet the 1 percent kept their choke hold on the economy and the power that came with it, distracting those fifty million poor voters with hot-button issues like immigration and abortion and gun control. Manipulating the masses with television, feeding its drug to the nation.
And that was how The Hidden removed something as basic as reasonable choice from democracy—they had no intention of toning down the lies their networks vomited up. They served a cruder purpose. They weren’t meant to be believed. People
knew
the TV lied, but what they didn’t know was how they could make good decisions if the only thing telling them what was happening in their world was corrupt. And as long as they stood in line for 6,000-percent loans they couldn’t afford to pay back without taking another 60,000-percent one, things would never change.
They didn’t need to strip the poor of the right to vote. Tell enough lies, pump enough hate into their homes, and they’d do exactly what you wanted anyway.
There was no American Dream.
There hadn’t been one since the greed of the nineties turned into the cannibalism of the subprime mortgage collapse and the banking collapse and every other fiscal nightmare these people had brought upon themselves in their hunger to feed off the poor. Now there was inflation, now there were credit bubbles and fiscal black holes and honest-to-God poverty of the kind that should only exist in the third world.
That was their doing. That was what they wanted. That’s what it came down to. Eat the poor. All fifty million of them. Keep them in the ghettos with no hope of doing anything other than looking at the shiny hubcaps of the cars rolling by.
They didn’t need Viagra, these parasites, they’d got a permanent hard-on and were fucking each and every poor bastard out there, bent double over a barrel of oil and dollar bills.
One man couldn’t fight them. Fifty million, the people they were really frightened of,
they
could. But without a voice, without a way of communicating their truths, they were just as screwed as they had always been.
The real enemies, made up of politicians, legislators, and businessmen with power worth hoarding, hid in the shadows, drawn together. A secret society of movers and shakers that had the power to change the world beyond all recognition fed the fires of hatred while people laughed as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tried to highlight the idiocy of more white people believing in ghosts than they did in racism. An African American president hadn’t meant the end of hate, it just meant the rich and powerful had to be more devious with how they manipulated people.
The helicopter and two kill teams had been enough to convince her they were looking to solve the particular problem she posed with brute force. A bullet to the head.
Which was about the going rate for fucking up their plans at the stock exchange. She’d just cost them a not-so-small fortune, but worse than that, she’d made it obvious she’d tampered with stuff, creating a false paper trail that led right back to them. She’d told the entire world they were there. That was the only way to really hurt them; they hated exposure. They lived in the darkness for a reason.
It was all about pushback now.
And who was there to fight back? Who would stand in their way, assuming they’d succeeded in destroying Fort Hamilton and isolating Manhattan. That would give them all the time in the world to adjust the city, reshaping it in their image while the government scrambled to respond.
She’d tried to tell Jake, but had he understood her message?
She would have killed to know what was happening in New York, but international communication was pretty much dead with the satellites screwed up. It would take a long time before things returned to normal. They knew that, it was what they were banking on. That was why they’d acted now. Ever since they’d uncovered the second Mayan calendar and realized the implications of its prediction of a polar shift, and what that meant for the technological world that civilization had built itself on as the magnetic fields went haywire, everything these men had done was about preparing for the shift and how to best exploit it in terms of controlling the wealth of the world.
So, even if Jake had understood what she’d tried to tell him, how long could he last in the line of fire? Because he would, wouldn’t he? He’d put himself right in the line of fire without even thinking about it, even if he didn’t have a clue who or what he was up against in The Hidden.
They were ghosts.
Bogeymen.
They moved in the darkness.
Until twenty-four hours ago they’d been the silent power brokers, the kingmakers, more urban myth than monster under the stairs, like the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, and every other secret society imagined to be out there by the tinfoil-hat brigade—but that had all changed overnight.
She had to assume she was in this alone.
Which meant giving up on doing the impossible, focusing on what one woman could actually do.
Not that she was exactly normal. In some ways, maybe, but she could kill a man at forty paces in a dozen different ways, and that number increased as the distance between them diminished. That was why they’d recruited her in the first place—her combat training plus off-the-chart intelligence scores, her Vassar background. The whole package.
She had no idea how she’d gotten here, making the transition from fiercely patriotic soldier to a corporate assassin. It would have been too easy to say it was all about the money. But something inside her was broken. They’d recognized that. They played on it when they brought her into the fold.
She’d been first approached by a woman much like herself, similar age, similar background, similar education and experience, who had sounded her out about the ills of society and her own belief system before leaving her with a business card with a number printed on it and urging her to call. That call had changed her life. Yes, the money had been good. Private security was always good. They had a job for someone with her particular skill set, demanding a degree of independence, they said, which made her laugh and translate to
Does not play well with others.
They didn’t argue with that. The job was in Kosovo, an in-and-out mission where the Army couldn’t go. Some rich diplomat’s kid had been kidnapped. They needed someone on the ground to run things and bring the kid home alive. There was nothing, they said, that they could do to help her, no resources they could offer to make her job easier. She brought the boy home. Next they sent her in to what had been Soviet Russia, again with no backup and no resources to call on, again seemingly chasing shadows. This time it was a computer outpost in the middle of a very grim landscape they needed taking down because, supposedly, the software engineers working there were on the brink of developing a dark net that would run beneath the Internet, a place where all sorts of illicit trade and trafficking could flourish. That wasn’t it, of course. They were hackers who’d found a way into the deepest darkest secrets of one of Switzerland’s most prestigious banks and there were some very rich men who wanted those secrets to remain buried deep. And on and on it went—Greece, Italy, back to the Hindu Kush, Israel, anywhere they needed her.
Somewhere along the line the jobs changed and it soon became obvious she was nothing more than a corporate assassin, killing for the Almighty Dollar. She told herself it was no different to being a mercenary and cashing a paycheck for fighting in Kabul. For a while she was even good at lying to herself.
But it couldn’t last.
There was a line.
There was always a line, a point where youthful ideals and grown-up bitterness met; the question was what happened then, because it was one thing to sign up to do their dirty work—it was exciting, it felt like she was doing some
good
—but quite another to actually take a step back and think about what you were being asked to do. And that was exactly what she’d done, realizing she’d hit the point of no return when they were asking her to kidnap kids in Eastern Europe and bring their blood home to feed on it.
She took a sip of coffee, still barely able to process what they’d asked her to do, and hating the fact that she’d done it.
They weren’t vampires. Not literally. They wanted the blood for transfusions. Desperate measures and unethical science had come together in a clinic in Bern where no questions were asked if your money was green enough. The young blood was meant to rejuvenate the aging process in their brain tissue and muscles. These people wanted to live forever. What was the point of wealth and power when you were pushing up daisies? The whole process was ghoulish. She didn’t know how it worked, but there was no denying the results. She’d seen them with her own eyes. Dementia in one of their number had been first stemmed then reversed. Now he was giving orders again. A new man. He called himself Alom. That wasn’t his real name. He was known, and beloved by millions, a face from the silver screen they trusted and had lined up to see on Sunday-morning matinees. If only they knew what he was really like. It had been his idea to use the names of Mayan gods and goddesses in their communications, a curious affectation, obviously intended to be some sort of tribute to the calendar that had opened this brave new world to them.
They couldn’t understand her qualms—and argued she’d done much worse for them, which of course she had. But these were children. The results, no matter how miraculous, didn’t justify the means.
They couldn’t. Ever.
They were asking her to steal kids, not just their blood.
She wasn’t giving them back, either. Done, they were discarded.
And that was her line. That was the thing she couldn’t do. Not if she wanted to keep her soul intact.
What they hadn’t expected was that she’d turn on them rather than cross it.
They’d made her.
She knew their secrets.
She was an enemy they’d trained.
And now she was hunting them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JAKE SHOULDERED HIS WAY DOWN THE STEPS leading into Penn Station.
With the power still out, he’d hoped the station would be empty, or at least near empty. He couldn’t have been more wrong—the place was a heaving mass of humanity, most of which smelled as though it hadn’t showered for a week.
It wasn’t pretty.
He pushed through the crowd.
There was no natural light once inside. Backup generators powered everything. Striplights that made everyone look like wraiths half draped in shadow.
The stairs were jammed even more than usual, and there was absolutely no order to the flow of bodies. No one was managing more than a few steps at a time with the rest of the herd. He didn’t have time for that.
He didn’t know what he was looking for. It wasn’t like they were going to have big neon signs over their heads that proclaimed:
Bad guys.
But the last two times he’d come across them, they’d been entering abandoned buildings. The only other time, they’d been tagging the station, and he wasn’t even sure that counted. That didn’t fit the pattern. That was too low-level. Like a distraction from the bigger picture. It didn’t feel right. Penn was far from abandoned; commuters waiting for the first train out of here and the homeless and dispossessed seeking shelter made it feel like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Penn was familiar. In times of crisis didn’t people look for the familiar? For known quantities? Things they could trust? Penn Station was a New York institution, not glitzy and touristy like Times Square. There was light, sure, and it was a practical place, a workhorse, solid and reliable—just like New Yorkers pictured themselves. It didn’t hurt that it had a lot of open space for people to congregate in, which made it a good focal point for meeting up. Most of the people here were taking refuge rather than waiting for a train, and that made it tough to spot the terrorist hiding in the mix somewhere.
He used his height and bulk to force his way through the crowd down the long hall, past the Duane Reade and other shops, trying to look everywhere at once, heading toward the ticket booths and platform entries. There was nothing to suggest he wasn’t just chasing shadows. There wasn’t a central computer system like at the stock exchange or the relay station.