Day 85 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 34 (2940 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 34

Agent Levy was back on the investigation and leading a team to suspected site for one of the Darwin events. They had got a tip through a a connected source, one that wanted anonymity but one that still carried some weight and it pushed through all the noise and found it's way to the deputy director's desk.

Levy was fairly sure that it had come to him from the Facts Alone team, though no one was confirming that. There had been a number of drops and information exchanges with the Dragon Ridge security team, that he knew of and there were bound to be more that he did not know about. He didn't suspect Hilliard or Edgerton of complicity in the Darwin affair, but it was obvious to him that they wanted to know or find out about Darwin as much as anyone, whether to clear their names or by sheer curiosity he didn't guess at, but the desire was plain to see.

A series of documents were routed via a senator's office and given a priority rush through the chain of command to be personally dropped in his lap by the deputy director himself, with a very specific remit to get on top of the lead, follow it to ground and take action as soon as humanly possible. They had warrants drawn up for a parcel of land in the middle of Montana and he had landed in Great Falls that morning, a contingent of boots on the ground coming from Montana's resident offices, coordinated and boosted by numbers from the field office in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The town was not used to so many men in black suits descending all at once, the usual influx of government workers came in a more camouflaged look, with the Air National Guard and Air Force operating regularly in the area. The Electric City saw it's fair share of secretive works run by shadowy organisations in it's time, so no one was particularly surprised to know that some kind of covert operation had its base out in the middle of nowhere, along with military exercises, ballistic missile silos and the occasional cadre of survivalists. If you wanted to isolate yourself, the big sky country was the place to go.

Levy had subpoenaed the records from Utilities companies, they would be sifting through the records with their forensic analysts looking for the kind of draw on the power grids that a complex like the one in episode 6 of the Game could have been causing, or the kind of draw that construction of such a place could have created. He had left two agents following that up and then the cars from the resident offices rolled in and they got on the road, targeting the area they suspected the site to be.

An aerial survey plane had been commandeered and was sweeping the area, but it was a huge and time consuming task. They had spent a day or so, on the trip to Great Falls, trying to refine the search area but with all the good intentions in the world there were thousands of square miles to cover and they just tasked, re-tasked and searched as much as they could. Levy had been here a few days now and the weekend was already upon them, so if Darwin stuck to schedule then the next episode was less than forty eight hours away. Levy wanted to get to the site, to interrupt the filming of the next instalment and here they were in the same state as the operation, but it was a needle in a haystack without something more definitive to go on.

The deputy director had requested access to satellite photography of the state from the NSA programme under the agency interoperation memorandums, but it would take some time they had said and the raw data that came back was bigger than anyone expected, unfiltered and as massive a job as going over the area with an aerial reconnaissance team. Levy had been coordinating the information flow from the aerial team, the satellite team and the forensic analysts combing through the utility records. So far nothing had been able to further refine the search area.

Then the breakthrough happened that he had been hoping for, the analysts found discrepancies in the utilities records completely by accident. From the power generation plants there were expected drains and leaks from the grid, it was always factored into the pricing and distribution models as no grid was ever efficient enough to not lose some along the way, even high percentages would happen and this was normal operating procedure. However in one power generation node the energy efficiency rating was stable for a few months in a row, and came in at exactly forty percent in April, May, June and September, which was extremely unlikely. Further digging showed that prior to those months the variation was in line with yearly norms affected by weather and work on the grid. To suddenly conform to a percentage that ran up to up did not exceed the trigger point of forty five percent, but stopped suddenly at a ceiling raised some eyebrows.

No one had noted the pattern before because the percentages were never in the danger area and they didn't raise any red flags, where previous months did on occasion. It drew closer attention to usage patterns in a specific area of the grid, where losses were steady and then ceased at the same time as the limit being reached. It was being managed, carefully and predictably to not allow that power generator to go over the limit that month. With a little more digging there was evidence that the draw on other plants would increase by the amount that the original plant decreased.

This was it, this was someone dipping into the power reserves, drawing off their needs and doing it under the guise of efficiency losses. Levy could sense that they were closer and the search area collapsed in on itself to become only a few hundred miles to cover, and only on certain lines and lengths before it became too far to transmit into the empty area in the middle of somewhere without a load of extra infrastructure.

Late on the Saturday night, thermo-imaging picked up a signature in a section of national park a long way north-east of Great Falls and it was barely registering on the map, but it was there. At dawn a fly over could see that there was a structure there that had been carefully recoloured to match the ground around the building, and it was big, big enough to house the town and obstacle course seen in the Game. They had it, they had the location and they had a full day and night to get to it before the next episode went out. Levy had to assume that the next episode had already been filmed, the delivery was going to be the next day so the recording, post-production, editing and whatever covert delivery mechanism was next all had to be planned and executed.

They would be in on the building before they went to air, which meant they could steal the thunder with an on air arrest and save the surviving players, or they could follow up the episodes début with an episode of their own, showing them taking down the operation, better late than never.

There were twenty fully armed agents coming in by helicopters and the only road to the complex was already being charged up in trucks by another ten or so resident agency staff with the task to set up a perimeter, as best as possible given the terrain and to check any and all egress points from the complex. An airstrip was visible from the aerial survey of the site but there was no sign of aircraft, hangars or even land vehicles from the sky view. Undoubtedly they were secreted away in the disguised buildings and they would be the priority to find and disable for the road crew, who were timed to arrive as the air assault was getting under way.

There was a river and a lake that were nearby, in local terms, but not so accessible by foot that any one could have got to them to effect a water-borne getaway without driving or flying some distance to get to it, but none the less there was boat on the lake and it was hanging back ready for the signal to secure the nearest potential port from the site.

Over the thudding blades of the choppers Agent Levy half imagined Ride of the Valkyries playing over his headphones and started nodding his head in time to the imagined soundtrack. This was one of those opportunities, it was exciting and odd, one out of the box to be sure and he could not contain the thrill he felt at being at the centre of the hunt to capture Darwin. He was still nodding and bopping a little along with the music in his head when he saw that one or two of the other agents were making similar movements from the neck up, or tapping the assault rifles on the flak jackets they were wearing, obviously making the same connection that Levy had. He blushed a little at the cliché of it and stopped moving, his face reddened and now setting a little harder.

The chopper came over the final ridge, up to the complex and it was even bigger than he had thought based on the overhead intelligence they had to hand. From the ground level as they flew up to it they could see that the height of the structure was now in perspective and they knew that it had to house something big, something tall like the town Darwin had shot the episode in, it was tall enough to contain several high buildings within it's walls and roof.

The four choppers had five armed agents on them, they took the four compass points as an approach and covered off the road in, the entry points that were visible to the building and had line of sight on the four faces of the giant square structure. It was camouflaged from above, but down at this level it was hard to see how a building this size could have been missed.

All four choppers were down and the twenty agents fanned out around the four sides and approached the entry points, they were aircraft hangar doors, and they covered themselves as one agent per side tested each door before reporting in to Levy, agent in command on site. None of the doors were locked, and there was no security to be seen.

Levy came into the north wall door, the one nearest the road, they had been on site for less than three minutes and he was casually, calmly entering the Darwin complex with no resistance. As he entered the north door, agents filing in behind him, each side taking for men in and leaving on the exterior looking for escapees, the road train arrived, five vehicles including a bus to take the unknown number of suspects and staff that may have been manning the site into custody. The road train agents filed in behind the air assault team and there were now over twenty five men inside the building and so far they had run into zero personnel, no visible security and no resistance at all.

Inside the building was a large box arrangement, a little smaller than the hangar sized building itself but like a box within a box, there were walkways, pipes and support beams all over the outside of it, heavy infrastructure and within that Levy surmised, was the prize they were looking for. There was a gateway obvious at the south side of the box within, and Levy was coming around to meet the agents who were checking all the visible parts of the box for booby traps or cameras or anything that would give away what was transpiring, but so far nothing was happening.

Two of the armed men slung their assault weapons and opened the gate, disengaging itself from the wall with a hydraulic hiss and sliding back along the outside revealing a doorway a truck could easily drive through. The door pulled back and inside was well lit, as if it were in sunshine and outdoors, like daylight belying the fact that they were inside a box, inside another box, cut off from the sun.

Levy walked into the town he had seen in the last instalment of Darwin's Game and turned to the nearest agent who was scanning the area for the benefit of the live camera feed that was being watched back in the deputy director's office at the bureau's field office in Salt Lake City.

“This is it, we've got him!” The agent exclaimed and rubbed his hands together with glee. The agents were dispersed to the key points of interest that they had ascertained from the video instalment seen less than a week before. Levy marched up the street and took in the view, staring up at the sky, and seeing where the light was coming in from. Agents in the shell of the box were getting up the catwalks and finding the electrical cables that were feeding eight giant lighting rigs that were embedded into the roof, high enough and diffuse enough to give the illusion of daylight for people not looking too closely inside the town. The camera angles shown never saw too much above the height of the walls, so the lighting infrastructure could have been guessed at, or assumed that the roof was open to real sunlight.

The first indication that something was wrong came in when the exploratory team looking for the the Somerset kill site reported that there was no sign of the incident there. They beamed back pictures to a tablet he was referring to, coordinating the search teams and their video feeds with. The glass walled apartment was intact, there was no shattered glass and no bullet holes anywhere to be seen. The apartment was empty of furniture and the bench top that had been violently scored and gauged by sniper fire was perfectly intact and untouched.

The agent reporting back from the highest building also said that there was no sign of the bullet damage to the air conditioning unit, there was no sign of any blood or indication that anyone had ever been on that roof. It did not make any sense at all, why would they wipe away all those marks but leave the town itself intact? If Darwin assumed the place would be found then it would make sense to remove those signs, but it would make more sense to remove the entire town and leave less to investigate.

After an hour they had come to the conclusion that they were alone on site, as best they could tell. They uncovered the obstacle course, but it was a framework only, there were no details or doors, locks or flying foxes installed, it was just the skeletal shape of the buildings contents they had seen on the video.

Levy stood in the alleyway where John Vargas had escaped the convenient hole in the wall left by the late Garth Parker, and there was nothing there, just a blank and unbroken wall. His initial elation had gone to replaced by frustration once again. Either they had known that they were coming but had left long ago, or they had found the staging area. A proof of concept or maybe a testing ground to work out the logistics of how and when to enact parts of the game itself. The place was bare, and the construction they had found tied up neatly with the documents they had receive. The powers spikes had ceased being noticeable six weeks before the first episode was delivered, so it was potentially possible that the players had been brought here, but the more he looked at the bare-bones representation of the complex the more Agent Levy thought they had found the copy, the one that they had been allowed to find.

They would pull this place apart and forensically analyse it all with a scrutiny that would take them weeks and months, not hours and days. He had been led here, this copy existed as a distraction, he was sure of it. Darwin had been to organised, too prepared and anal enough to have a contingency and a honey trap of his own to slow down and confound the people chasing him. He was not interested in showing off, in displaying his work, not really. He just wanted to get to the end of the series and provide the justice, the revenge, retribution that he thought he (or maybe the public) wanted to see done, and this would soak up even more resources and time to slow down any progress they would be making.

Levy left the building feeling so much heavier than he had going in, the agents exploring had found one of the control rooms and were busy examining camera placement and changing night to day inside the box, already being distracted by the depth of information and evidence right in front of them, evidence that Levy was already sure would lead then nowhere.

Agent Levy sat on the bonnet of the four wheel drive nearest the northern entry point and looked around. If this was the decoy, the staging or test ground, then were was the real one?