Freedom TM

always did on business calls….
    “Even if the U.S. markets crash, we’ll make money. Movement is all we need—positive or negative makes no difference….”
    It was definitely Hollis’s voice. Someone had tapped his phone calls. Another clip immediately followed….
    “What a company does is irrelevant. What a company makes is irrelevant. The market is a math problem we solve through value extraction.”
    Someone somewhere had intercepted his words. But why?
    Looking at the remorseless killing machine outside, he somehow couldn’t picture it being spawned by human rights activists. Whoever was behind it was decidedly more dangerous.
    His laughing voice came to him again over the speaker.
“We made it legal. Our people wrote the congressional bill.”
    On the security monitor a different type of bike entered the wardrobe room. This machine wasn’t covered in blades, but in piping and pressure tanks. As it came in, the other bike moved aside. The new arrival slammed down hydraulic jacks to plant it firmly just outside the panic room door. Then, instead of twin blade arms, it extended a single robotic nozzle arm, with hoses trailing back along its length to half a dozen pressure tanks. A spark flashed, and then a white-hot flame suddenly stabbed out from the nozzle—instantly turning the wood paneling in front of the panic room door into a solid wall of flame.
    Hollis stared at the machine on-screen, paralyzed in fear. He knew what it was. He’d owned stock in steel mills in the nineties. It was a plasma torch. Someone had mounted it on this terror machine, and it now stood before his safe room door, blasting aside the wooden millwork surrounding his bunker as though it were nothing more than ash. Already the scores of fine suits and leather shoes and carpeting in the wardrobe room were engulfed in flames as the twenty-five-thousand-degree cutting head on the machine penetrated the steel door like a knife through modeling clay.
    The sprinkler system leapt into action, spraying water over the outside room, but the fire’s intensity vaporized it. The surveillance camera showed the remorseless machines standing their ground, one cutting, the other waiting, but soon, even the camera started to fail—and melt. The screen turned grainy and then went black.
    Behind him, Hollis was suddenly deafened by a burst of pressure and a cracking sound as a white-hot jet of plasma burst through the steel doorway and began tracing a molten line along the length of the door. The sofa and wet bar beyond it burst into flames, and the glass cover of the flat-screen television shattered— the whole thing folding over itself like a big wax candle. Blue-hot sparks of molten steel scattered like marbles across the concretefloor. The safe room sprinklers popped and started raining over everything to no effect.
    Hollis’s recorded voice still spoke to him over the speakerphone as he sat in a catatonic state, while the sprinklers soaked him with freezing water.
    “Pure math frees us to create unlimited profit.”
    Already the torch had finished cutting through the vault-like door. In a moment a huge section of steel fell forward with a crash that shook the concrete floor. The door’s edges still glowed red. Hollis turned to watch with the detachment of someone on morphine.
    As he began to feel the heat of the flames outside and inside, even through all the water raining down on him, the killing machine entered his safe room and unfolded both sword blades with swift precision. The bike was stained with cooked blood and charred flesh. Steam rose from its metal frame.
    Hollis put the pistol against his head as the killing machine moved toward him. It raised its blades in the same way he’d seen it do with Metzer.
    There was no escape. Hollis pulled the trigger.
    Nothing happened. The safety was on.
    Hollis’s own words were the last thing he heard as he fumbled for the gun’s safety switch….
    “The beauty of it is: they can’t afford to let us fail.…”

Chapter 2: // Operation Exorcist
    Reuters.com
    High-profile Assassinations Stun Financial Community — Attacks that left scores of financial executives dead world-wide have rattled the reclusive billionaires’ club. Security services in the U.S. , Great Britain , Japan , and China have withheld details of sixty-one nearly simultaneous killings that appear to be part of a coordinated campaign reminiscent of last year’s spammer massacre .
    No one has claimed responsibility