The Seraphim Sequence

Chapter 3-2

The meeting room was an old storage chamber, musty and populated with plastic chairs and fold-up tables. The place looked more like the activities room at a kids’ scout camp.

‘Council,’ Sophia greeted them as she entered.

They hardly nodded in return. She decided to take a seat at the least populated end of the room so she could survey everyone present, including the security personnel who were there in larger numbers than usual. DC and Benito flanked her, but only Benito sat down.

Dolph stirred a mug of coffee with a popsicle stick. He was an elegant man with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly brown hair. He sipped the coffee, then emptied three sachets of sugar into it. Sophia waited for him to speak, but he seemed more interested in his laptop. He was making her wait. Fine, she thought. While he tapped away, she planned her responses to his predictable line of questioning. She was halfway through her first sentence when he looked up.

‘Thank you for joining us, Dr Montoya, DC, Sophia,’ he said. ‘Should I ask how your operation went? The one that wasn’t sanctioned.’

‘Not exactly best-case scenario,’ Sophia said. ‘The target was killed before I—we could get to him.’

Dolph sniffed hard to clear his nostrils. He was trying his best to look disappointed. ‘I really don’t know what else to do. I’ve removed your command, your team. I don’t understand why you are persisting with this … obsession.’

One of the Council members, Camila, with silvering hair and bejeweled hands, leaned forward. ‘Sophia, if you could explain everything it would really help us understand.’ Her voice was almost annoyingly gentle.

‘Council,’ Benito said, ‘Sophia is at your disposal.’

‘Sophia is capable of speaking for herself,’ Dolph said. ‘As she has demonstrated many times.’

‘Dr Montoya is right,’ Sophia said. ‘I’m at the Council’s disposal. But one operative—’

‘Former operative,’ Dolph said.

Sophia exhaled. ‘Isn’t enough. I’m more valuable to the Council as part of a team. A team of former operatives.’

‘As was clearly the case with Desecheo Island.’ Dolph stood and leaned on the table’s edge. ‘Because we all know how that turned out. You cost us two bases—Belize and Manhattan.’

After Sophia’s escape from the Desecheo Island facility, she had returned to the Akhana’s Belize base with Benito and Nasira to meet defected Fifth Column scientist Cecilia McLoughlin. Cecilia had been instrumental in helping Sophia succeed in snatching the Chimera vectors from Desecheo Island, but Sophia was unaware that Cecilia was playing the Akhana and the Fifth Column against each other for her own purposes. She’d manipulated Sophia into releasing one of the Chimera vectors worldwide, supposedly to wipe out the psychopathic gene in humans by rendering sterile any woman who carried the dormant gene—women who would unknowingly give birth to monsters. The anti-psychopath Chimera vector did render women sterile as Cecilia had promised, but she had conveniently failed to mention the side effects. The vector had triggered multiple organ failure in more than four hundred million women. Over the following months, they had died slow, painful deaths. Sophia and the Akhana had become responsible for the greatest g******e in modern history. Not exactly Sophia’s finest moment.

But not content with mass murder, Cecilia had taken the helm of the Fifth Column and, using her insider knowledge of every Akhana base location, had begun to wipe them out, starting with Belize. Sophia had shot and killed her before she got any further, but that hadn’t stopped the infiltration. The Akhana were now under Fifth Column control; or would have been if Cecilia had known every Akhana base. Thankfully there was the Shadow Akhana.

Sophia launched to her feet. ‘Manhattan had nothing to do with that. It was the hurricane that wiped it out.’

‘Cause and effect, Sophia. Cause and effect.’

‘How about this for cause and effect? The Fifth Column is growing more and more powerful and your best plan so far is to harass their accounting department,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’re trembling in fear as we speak.’

‘We have an army of talented hackers that is being squandered.’

‘Some anonymous bunch of bulletin-board users is not your army.’ Sophia stepped forward and noticed the security—former Blue Berets—stiffen. That was interesting. ‘You have no idea who they are. They could be anyone.’

‘Therein lies their power,’ Dolph said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the Akhana are compromised. A dozen bases are all we have left.’

Sophia wondered how he knew that. The Shadow Akhana bases communicated remotely, via the Akhana’s darknet, and the only person in the world who knew their numbers and locations was the resistance’s leader, Owen Freeman. And no one knew where he was, not since Manhattan. His safety was paramount and integral to everyone else’s safety. Although Sophia suspected DC might have an idea.

‘There’s no other way to say it,’ Dolph went on. ‘You contributed to the present conditions.’

Camila stood and turned to Dolph. ‘Sophia was manipulated into acting as she did. Anyone in her position with the intent of doing the right thing would have done the same.’

‘Do you want to know the reason why we only have a few bases left?’ Sophia said. ‘Because I made a horrible mistake. I trusted Cecilia McLoughlin, and she turned out to be a psychopath. I let her right in and she took everything. And I never saw it coming.’

She looked down to find her hands balled into fists. She released them.

‘If you trust these kid hackers of yours, you’re allowing wolves in sheep’s clothing to slip through. I’ve witnessed first-hand how psychopaths can worm their way into an organization and subvert it from the inside out. It’s how the Fifth Column was born, and it’s how the Akhana was destroyed. It’s why Freeman created the Shadow Akhana. Any resistance that doesn’t understand psychopaths is doomed to fail. It’s why every resistance in last few thousand years has been crushed, their existence struck from history. Do you want us to fall with them?’

‘We need to hit the Fifth Column where it hurts,’ Dolph said. ‘Their finances.’

‘That won’t work.’

‘I wasn’t asking for your opinion.’

‘Listen to me,’ Sophia said. ‘The Fifth Column is going to great lengths to conceal the fact that they’re busy constructing a whole bunch of new installations. They even have shocktroopers on guard duty. That never happens.’

Dolph shook his head. ‘And you know this because you’re an expert on the Fifth Column, I suppose.’

‘No,’ Sophia said. ‘But if your crack team of hackers checked out the satellites, we might have some idea of what we’re dealing with. Until then, I need operatives on the ground—’

‘What do you think the Fifth Column is building?’ Dolph cut in. ‘The Death Star perhaps?’

‘You’re messing with the wrong crowd,’ Sophia said, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘These hackers might have good intentions, but all it takes is one man without a conscience.’

‘I don’t want former operatives,’ Dolph said. ‘They don’t function, they don’t socialize appropriately, they don’t cooperate outside their skewed military hierarchy. They’re broken and they’re dangerous. I hereby call for a vote to suspend Sophia’s operational capabilities and ground her to the base indefinitely.’

‘I try to help you and your first reaction is to lock me up?’ Sophia yelled.

‘It’s not my first reaction, it’s my last. I’ve given you many chances. Every step of the way you betray us, you sabotage us,’ Dolph said. ‘All those in favor.’

Sophia watched all but three of the ten Council members raise their hands. People who had previously loathed Dolph were now ruling in his favor. Camila had raised her hand too. Sophia felt her own hands clench.

She spoke directly to Camila. ‘Why would you stand by and let him compromise the Shadow Akhana with a gang of bedroom hackers you can’t even trust?’

‘Because this gang of bedroom hackers didn’t commit mass g******e,’ Dolph said. He pointed his finger at her. ‘Why should I trust someone who left for dead the only person who trusted them?’

Sophia’s jaw clenched. Blood gushed to her cheeks. ‘And which person would that be?’

Dolph glared at her, then finally said, ‘Doctor Adamicz.’

Sophia went very still. Leoncjusz Adamicz had been part of her family too. For the few months they’d spent hiding in a dusty library in Italy, Adamicz had become like a father to her. He’d worked closely with Benito and Cecilia to extract her from the Fifth Column and was single-handedly responsible for deprogramming her. Sophia had slipped away from his protection to revisit her home. She knew her parents were dead, but she’d needed to see it, to make it real. When she’d returned, Adamicz was also dead, lying on the library floor in a pool of his own blood. There had been no one there to help him, no one to protect him. It wasn’t until much later that she’d learnt who had killed Adamicz. Cecilia McLoughlin. She’d sent operatives to kill him.

Nothing else existed in this moment except Sophia and Dolph. She drew her P99 pistol, pointed the barrel at his face. She felt the aim of the security personnel on her, their rifles c****d and ready to fire.

A ghost of a smile tugged the corner of Dolph’s mouth. ‘Don’t think they won’t shoot a woman.’

His eye twitched, but he wasn’t as scared as she’d hoped and that annoyed her.

‘Even for an operative like you, one bullet in the brain and it’s all over,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Sophia. Lower the weapon.’

Sophia breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. From the corner of her vision she could see DC had moved outward, his MP7 aimed at her head.

‘The Council has already made their decision,’ Dolph said. ‘Put down the weapon.’

Sophia placed her pistol on the floor and stepped back. The security team moved around and cuffed her.