President York stepped away from the window and turned back to her desk. Her last images of a figure sprinting down the circular roadway in front of the main doors — George Tooze, her Secretary of Homeland Security. She sat down and tried to compose herself. Her head throbbed from two straight days without sleep. Her mind still reeled from continuous updates, each more alarming than the last, from every corner of the globe. And now Tooze racing over like a high school sprinter, his sixty-five year old body likely straining under the duress. This was not going to be good.
And yet, what had been? The latest report from the NSA couldn’t have been worse. The damned worm had begun to disrupt vital elements of the world’s infrastructure. Haphazardly, to be sure, but her advisors, and her own gut, spoke to the possibility that what they had seen so far had only been feints. Tests to optimize the monster running through the cortex of the modern world and yet which had, even on their own, produced planetary chaos.
Food and oil supply chains were disrupted from agribusiness farms to the international shipping systems on which a hungry world depended. Sea and air systems were scrambled, systems that transported the world’s goods, including the ever-critical supply of oil. Hospitals were running out of supplies. Telecoms were unreliable. The world was losing its collective mind.
She half-expected red lights to be flashing around her and sirens wailing. The National Terrorism Advisory System threat assessment was at "IMMINENT." All branches of the military were at DEFCON 2 or higher, the birds in international airspace with different flags buzzing around each other nearly an invitation to a catastrophic mistake. The Force Protection Condition was DELTA nearly everywhere. INFOCON was at 1 and might as well have just put up a white flag and shut down.
And here was Tooze.
The flushed face of her trusted adviser burst into the Oval Office. He held an envelope in one hand that he brandished before him like a radioactive substance.
“A number,” he gasped, resting a hand on the other side of her desk. He held up the letter again. “Limited lifespan. It’s from Bilderberg.”
Time seemed to stop and she felt her mind disengage. She remembered the first time that she had experienced death. Her mother had been braiding her hair one morning, and by afternoon she had been a seven-year-old raised by a single-parent father. The moment had been just as immediate as the rush of Tooze into the room. One minute, she could hear the sounds of her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen while she played in the living room. The next, a crash and house-jolting thud. She had run in to find her mother unconscious on the floor. She would never wake. A brain aneurysm, or a big balloon that popped in her head as one of the doctors had tried to explain it to her. She had feared balloons ever since. It could happen so fast. Pressure. Weakness. Then — pop.
She rose, turned away from Tooze, and walked back to the window to stare at the troops outside. So much firepower. Such an apparatus in the nation’s military. And, in the face of the forces that truly controlled the world, so powerless.
Had it come to this? This new land and new dream of not even three centuries, of miracle cures, trips to the moon, supercomputers in your pocket — had its time come so soon? All because of this terrorist and his devil worm?
Pop.
“Ms. President? Elaine?”
She turned back to Tooze and felt the room sway, barely keeping her balance. “Thank you, George,” she said, pulling the paper from his hand and trying to remove a tear discreetly. “I will need to be alone for this call.”
He nodded, his face telling her all she needed to know, that he too understood the significance of what she was about to do.
“I’ll be outside,” he said. “Don’t lose hope.”
He turned and walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Sighing, she approached the grand desk and pressed her thumb against a fingerprint-reader on a drawer, then entered a code into a keypad next to it. There was a clear click, and she pulled the drawer open. Inside was what looked to be a bulked up cellular phone from decades past. She knew it to be a special device, engineered to work through a covert collection of satellites, encrypting transmissions through means not even the worm could break. At least some things were beyond its reach. In the realm of monsters, the worm was just another fiend.
Bilderberg. So it had finally come to this. Like ghosts, powers that many felt but never saw, sometimes they became incarnate. Like the beginning of her presidency, they had come and impressed upon her their reality. Sometimes the phantoms moved objects around a haunted home. Or a nation. Sometimes they killed.
She read the number off the paper in the envelope and keyed it in. A series of strange sounds of static and digital processing harshly burbled from the speaker. Then a loud click.
She exhaled slowly.
“This is Elaine York calling from the White House.”
SAVAS Deposition 4
CBD: And it was at this point that you put your trap in motion?
MR. SAVAS: Yes.
[REDACTED]: Why did you trust this criminal?
MR. SAVAS: To be quite honest, I didn’t. Maybe the trap was going to be reversed and sprung on us. I was flying on instinct, and something resonated as truthful about her dislike of Fawkes and what he was doing. Anyway, I didn’t feel I had much of a choice. We had to act fast or things might get beyond the point of fixing. The disaster with Angel just confirmed how vulnerable we and the entire world were to this maniac.
[REDACTED]: The purported accident with your computers.
MR. SAVAS: Not accident, sabotage. It was a cyberattack.
[REDACTED]: Conveniently timed to cripple you at a moment, to use your words, where things were so serious that they might not be fixed.
MR. SAVAS: Which is exactly what Fawkes would have wanted. We’d shaken him. He responded to protect his plans.
[REDACTED]: But no one else was with agent Lightfoote when the alleged hacking attack occurred?
MR. SAVAS: Alleged?
CBD: Why don’t you tell us about Angel Lightfoote, Mr. Savas.
MR. SAVAS: Can you be a little more vague, please.
CBD: Why did you put her in charge of your cybercrimes unit? Her records do not indicate any experience in digital technology or training of any kind.
MR. SAVAS: She showed an aptitude. After we lost Manuel — agent Manuel Hernandez — we needed someone in the chaos of the time to handle the system he had set up, our operations room at Intel 1. Angel was one of those to step up. After a short time she was running things by herself.
CBD: Is it common practice at FBI to promote people into positions for which they clearly have no training, no experience?
MR. SAVAS: Of course not. But it wasn’t common occurrence to lose half your people to a vengeful tycoon plotting a global genocide. John Gunn and Mjolnir massacred half our division. The regs didn’t mean a hell of a lot in those moments. We were battered. We survived as a team. More than a team. As a family. Screw the fucking protocol.