Authors: Michael Olson
Strange Flesh (2 page)
Even as Sodom and Gomorrah . . . giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
—J
UDE
1:7
T
he human mind is prone to infection.
I don’t mean the scorching fevers of meningitis or the insidious tunneling of parasites from unclean food. These days we tend to use the language of disease to discuss ideas: viral memes, contagious media. Vectors and payloads.
We’ve all seen things that take root and keep us up nights. Many of us harbor thoughts that gradually poison our souls. In my case, a single vision has plagued my dreams for the past year or more, and I’m sure it will haunt me for life:
The body of a pretty, pixieish brunette with spiky hair and huge brown eyes rests on a primitive wooden seat made of a few raw boards. Behind her is bolted the upper part of a large drill press tipped on its side. Its spindle extends into the back of the chair. From there, the bit plunges through her skull.
Blood has drenched the front of her white silk robe.
The entry point is right below the hairline of her neck. Her chin is pressed all the way down on her collarbone by the restraints. The drill bit thus protrudes from her mouth: a two-inch ring of high-speed steel with a row of razor teeth around the outside.
Her bonds are subtle, appearing almost innocent. A slender white nylon line at her chin, and one low on her neck.
But they’re part of the mechanism.
The cords run up through a series of pulleys set along the heavy oak
ceiling supports and finally down again to a large rusty-brown rock hanging in space. Below it are the charred remains of a thick cardboard tube. A trail of burnt flooring extends back to an orange disposable lighter lying inches below her left hand.
These remnants tell a brief, violent tale. The orange Bic lit a liquid fuse of accelerant. A line of flames began licking at the cardboard support holding up the rock. When the cardboard collapsed, the rock fell, jerking her head back into the whirring drill bit.
Clearly the product of a sick imagination.
I was first exposed by watching a short video. A record of the actual event, but only a narrow view. Just a tight head shot in which all you can see is the poor girl crying while she recites a cryptic verse. There’s a brief flicker of light . . .
And then carnage.
Finally, you’re left with the gore-stained drill spinning relentlessly where her mouth once was. Spraying blood until the camera runs out of memory.
That picture lodged itself in some dark part of my mind and began feeding on the information I placed next to it: police photographs, the forensics report, stories I heard from those close to her. It grew into a nightmarish scene, like one of those rare cysts surgeons sometimes find filled with hair, fingernails, unseeing eyes, and, of course, teeth. The image grew until that clip stood far above all the other things I wish I’d never seen.
But you can’t unsee something. There’s no cure for an experience.
Learning the story behind the video would radically alter the course of my life. Like an avalanche blocking the only viable pass through a forbidding mountain range.
Looking back, I see how swiftly the illness spread. How she infected me. How her story took over mine. And the strangest thing about the fever this otherworldly woman ignited in me?
I never even met her.
One Year Earlier
The Norn seeks you.
Eeyore, one of my friends at work, has marked the message “Urgent.”
What could she want?
The project I’ve toiled on for the past month remains far from finished. It should be weeks before I’m due an accounting with her.
I stumble into the bathroom to get functional, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. Not yet anyway. I take a deep breath and turn the shower on hot.
The Norn is my boss, Susan Mercer, one of the managing partners of Red Rook, a global network security company based in DC. She’s called the Norn—after the Norse pantheon’s Weavers of Fate—due to the degree of her control over the destinies of the firm’s employees. The name is made especially fitting by her habit of embroidering circuit schematics for signals intelligence equipment from the NSA’s Cold War glory days. She is not someone you keep waiting.
The elevator opens onto Mercer’s dimly lit corner suite at our New York office. She sits at an antique desk in her Shaker rocking chair. A bright lamp casts a circle of light on her hands, which move with preternatural authority over an ivory hoop. Her eyes are focused on me.
“James, good of you to come,” she says in a Brahmin drawl.
“No problem.” I take a small glass box out of my bag and set it on her
desk. It contains a rare “Bohemian Garnet” Venus flytrap for her terrarium. Mercer adores carnivorous plants, and she tolerates my gifts as sincere expressions of filial devotion. I know little about her domestic situation, but it’s hard to imagine a husband, and I like the idea that at least somebody gives her something. “I hope you don’t kill this one
quite
so quickly,” I say.
“This plant’s predecessor was a decadent vegetarian. No aptitude for hunting.”
“You probably froze it.”
“My office isn’t a South Carolina swamp. If a thing can’t adapt—”
Her look of delight fades into one of concern as she sees the scrapes on my wrist and then clocks my totally uncharacteristic turtleneck. The morning’s cleanup had required some improvisation. I was robbed last night. That’s how I’ve chosen to characterize it. Just the innocent victim of a simple theft. Happens every day.
“James . . . ?”
She lets the question hang there, but I just smile at her. Mercer is way too old-school to pry into an employee’s personal life, in conversation at least. She watches me for a while but only asks, “Can I offer you some tea?”
“No thanks.” I perch on one of the unstable chairs in front of her desk.
She sets down her project, the blueprint for some ancient mechanical encoding machine; pours herself a cup; and spends a moment regarding the steam as it spirals up into the shadows.
I notice her tea service rests on a set of black lace doilies that have Red Rook’s logo stitched into them. A logo that says a lot about our operation. Its black circle holds a little red symbol in the center that, while decorated with simple battlements and a drawbridge, conforms to the shape of an hourglass more than the outline of our eponymous chess piece. Close observers will see the image for a rendering of the underside of a black widow spider.
Unusual that a legitimate consultancy would use the color black in its trade dress, given that the hacker term “black hat” means “outlaw.” But we are by no means a normal company. Our clients are Fortune 1000 corporations and any American security-related acronym you care to name: FBI, DEA, ATF, CIA, NSA. While we ply our trade only against criminals, the means we use are often of questionable legality. In fact, we
maintain a vast array of unlawful botnets, undisclosed “zero day” software exploits, salaried moles in various black hat syndicates, and even a couple agents in foreign cyber-intel organizations. So the felt of our hat is a tasteful gray.
Just as her silence begins to make me nervous, Mercer asks, “The LinkDjinn affair?”
“Looks pretty standard, and I think we already have hooks into the network the attackers used.”
“One of our Ukrainian honeypots?”
