Deep State Read online

  Deep State

  A Nathaniel Cade Story

  Christopher Farnsworth

  Contents

  Also by Christopher Farnsworth

  Dedication

  This much is true....

  Quote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Farnsworth

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  Thank you.

  Cover Design and Interior format by The Killion Group

  http://thekilliongroupinc.com

  Also by Christopher Farnsworth

  Flashmob

  Killfile

  The Eternal World

  The Burning Men

  Red, White, And Blood

  The President’s Vampire

  Blood Oath

  Dedication

  To everyone who would not let Cade go quietly into the night.

  This much is true....

  In 1867, a young sailor was tried and convicted of murdering two of his crew mates and drinking their blood.

  The papers called him a vampire.

  President Andrew Johnson pardoned him, sparing his life. He spent the rest of his days in an asylum for the criminally insane.

  At least, that was the cover story.

  The truth was far stranger. The young man, named Nathaniel Cade, was actually a vampire. Bound by a special blood oath, he swore to follow the orders of the President of the United States and protect the nation from the forces of darkness that cannot ever be allowed to invade the daylight world of ordinary humans. For over 145 years, Cade has been a secret weapon in the war against the Other Side, both the first responder and the last line of defense.

  Zach Barrows was a young political operative with a bright future on his way to becoming the youngest chief of staff in White House history. Then he was called into the Oval Office and given a much different assignment. Zach became the latest in a long line of human handlers to work with Cade. Zach thought it was all a bad joke until he met the vampire in the flesh; then he wet his pants. Things have only slightly improved for him since then.

  The two may appear close in age, but Cade is an inhuman, blood-drinking monster. Zach is an ambitious political creature. They are worlds apart, but have managed to forge a grudging respect since Zach’s first mission. Zach now uses his intellect and resources to do the things in the daylight world that Cade cannot. He relays the president’s orders and deals with all the logistics necessary to keep Cade hidden in a world that’s increasingly hostile to secrets.

  And Cade kills the monsters.

  “We all know the Earth is in trouble. We have now entered into 6X — the sixth major extinction of life on this planet. I have often wondered if there was a United Organization of Organisms… and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet?”

  — Paul Stamets

  1

  PARKER, WYOMING. YESTERDAY.

  For some reason, Captain Richard Braden could not get the song out of his head.

  “We built this city on rock and roll...”

  It had come up randomly on the radio as he parked, just before he killed the car engine. That was a full day and over 2,000 miles away, but the song was still bouncing around madly inside his skull.

  It was driving him nuts. He’d been trained to endure torture, think clearly under enemy fire, and disarm a suitcase nuke, but the sheer idiocy of this one bad 80s hit was now thoroughly kicking his ass.

  For starters, why was Marconi playing the mamba? The mamba is a snake, not a song. Even if they meant the mambo, that was a dance, not a song. Just how stoned were they when they wrote this piece of crap anyway?

  He shook it off and focused on the task at hand.

  Braden was moving into the perimeter of the town, dark and as quiet as a shadow, his H&K MP7a1 off-safety and ready to fire.

  Braden was a member of SEAL Team Gold, one of the U.S government’s most secret warriors, ordinarily charged with hunting down international terrorists or rescuing hostages held in deep enemy territory.

  Right now, Braden was about to recon a 24-hour convenience store on the edge of Parker, Wyoming.

  Parker was a small town — so small, in fact, that the convenience store wasn’t even a 7-11 or a Circle K, but some local equivalent called a “Go-Fer Mart.” Population: 308. Local industry: ranching, with some oil money from active wells nearby. One church, one bar. Zero McDonalds. Parker seemed as innocuous as small-town America could get.

  Braden didn’t see anything to contradict that first impression. Instead, he saw a bored kid behind a counter, wearing a polyester vest and a nametag, waiting around on the off-chance that somebody wanted to buy beef jerky or beer at one in the morning.

  But Braden had also been trained to observe his own responses, to run constant self-diagnostics, while on a mission. And he recognized that the nagging repetition of the crappy pop song in his head was a signal from his subconscious. It told him that something was wrong.

  It wasn’t just that Gold wasn’t supposed to do domestic operations — this was hardly his first covert op on U.S. soil. Nor did he think he and the other team members had been called out for a false alarm. Braden had seen some seriously upfucked intel before, but this was a whole different flavor of weird.

  Everything looked normal, but it wasn’t. He couldn’t say why. That’s why the song was yammering in his head. It was like an alarm bell going off.

  But try as he might, Braden couldn’t see what he was missing.

  He clicked his mike once, letting his team leader know he was in position. He received two clicks back, telling him to stay put.

  Braden and the other five members of Gold had been mobilized early that morning. They flew across country in a troop transport, got loaded into a chopper at the Natrona County airport, then dropped at the edge of t
he highway, roughly three miles away from the town center. Nobody spotted them. The town was dead. There was zero traffic. Braden figured it wasn’t much of a tourist destination.

  Based on the mission briefing, Braden expected to deal with some militia retards. There were still a few McVeigh types out here, looking to make a bigger bang than Oklahoma City. He wasn’t worried about those morons. For all their talk about resistance and death before dishonor, he suspected it would be a race to see what they’d do first: drop their weapons or shit their pants.

  But it never hurt to be prepared. That was why he was spotting the Kwik-E-Mart here. There wasn’t much in the way of high ground in Parker, so Braden would set up a sniper post on the roof, ready to fill some graves if necessary.

  The team leader’s voice came over his earbud. “We’re in position. Braden, how’s it look?”

  He responded through his own throat-mike. “One civilian. Other than that, zero contacts.”

  “Let’s go,” the team leader said. “Quick and quiet.”

  Braden moved. He ran fast to the rear door of the convenience store. He used a pick gun to pop the lock, and was inside before the kid would have a chance to wonder about the slight noise.

  He passed the restroom and a small office, the layout of the place already fixed in his mind from his brief surveillance. With three long strides, he was at the counter, his arm around the kid’s throat, dragging him back, out of sight of the big glass windows.

  He put the kid down hard, one gloved hand over his mouth.

  “Quiet,” he ordered. “Bad news is, you make a sound, I’ll have to shoot you. Good news is, we’re the good guys.”

  The kid stared back at him, eyes only mildly curious.

  Braden took his hand away. The kid didn’t speak.

  “Hey. You all right?”

  Still nothing. Just the wide, placid eyes. Christ, Braden thought, the local pot must be something else.

  “Listen. We’re here to help. I’m not going to hurt you,” Braden said.

  That finally seemed to get through to the kid. He started to smile.

  “I know,” he said.

  The song was almost screaming in Braden’s head now.

  The kid opened his mouth in a full grin.

  Braden was up and on his feet and running out the back door before he even realized it. He blew radio silence right to shit. He had to warn the others.

  Jesus Christ, what was in that kid’s mouth?

  “Top, top!” he shouted into his mike. “We’ve got to run, we’ve got to get out of here — ”

  Gunfire. He knew the sound well. It was the suppressed report of another H&K MP7. The others were already under attack.

  There was the flat, hollow boom of a combat shotgun, a hundred yards in the other direction, followed by a scream.

  That was Turner. He recognized the voice, but just barely. He’d seen Turner break his arm during a training exercise, a compound fracture, the bone tearing up through the skin. Turner had only grunted then. Now he was screaming like a child.

  He kept running, checking over his shoulder. The convenience store glowed in the night. The kid wasn’t coming after him.

  Braden didn’t think that meant he was safe.

  “Top, call it in!” he shouted into his mike. The team leader had a sat-phone. He had to tell them. Had to warn someone.

  More gunfire, then abrupt silence in the distance. Not even a scream this time. His earbud was filled with nothing but static.

  They were dead. They were all dead.

  He kept running.

  Something came from behind and spun him about. There was a pain in his chest, but he could not feel his legs. He found himself on his back, looking at the stars.

  Then something blotted them out, and Braden felt nothing at all.

  2

  OMAHA, NEBRASKA. TODAY.

  Zach Barrows sat at his desk, listening to the man drone on.

  “So, you see, it all comes back to the Nordics. They made an agreement with the Greys after the crash at Roswell. That was the first time they had to really deal with humans. Of course, they were monitoring our nuclear program at Los Alamos, but they hadn’t counted on our primitive atomic testing to interfere with their ion drives. So they were forced to barter for new technology with the Nordics, who’d already compensated for that, because they’d given us the atomic bomb in the first place…”

  Zach had already forgotten the man’s name. He’d written it down, of course. It was somewhere on one of the many forms in front of him. He was required to record every detail of every one of these conversations. Every piece of paper he filled out was then checked by a whole team of bureaucrats, each one just itching for the chance to mark a misspelled word and send the whole mess back to him.

  Zach would not say this was Hell — he’d seen the real thing, and this was not even close — but it was definitely Purgatory. Hell, for all its faults, at least was not this boring.

  This was his job now. Any person who called the FBI or the Air Force or the post office with a story of seeing Bigfoot or a UFO or the Jersey Devil was shuffled along a chain of command that eventually reached Zach, and his tiny closet of an office in a gray federal building in Omaha. Zach was then required to take a detailed account of each case of body-cavity probing, ape-human hybridization, and/or Satanic conspiracy. He was the U.S. government’s sole public response to every case of paranormal activity in the country.

  So now he spent eight hours a day — he could be punished by an administrative letter in his file if he took unauthorized overtime — listening to lunatics who were convinced that they alone knew the true shape of the world, that they alone saw the monsters hidden in the shadows.

  They had no idea.

  He’d been assigned to Omaha after being bounced from his old job by President Lester Wyman himself, the 45th occupant of the Oval Office.

  Zach could kill him for this.

  Well. Among other reasons.

  He dragged his attention back to the man, who was really excited, almost hopping up and down in his chair.

  “And this is where it gets really interesting. In order to protect that trade agreement with the Galactic Senate — you understand, that’s just the human term for it, I’m approximating here, of course — they were forced to find another president who’d be more amenable to providing them with human children. That was why they recruited Lee Harvey Oswald, and cloned him. Now, this is where it gets tricky, so bear with me…”

  Zach restrained a yawn and sneaked a look at the time on his desktop monitor. 10:33. Unbelievable. It felt like time had stopped.

  “Why do you think they care?” Zach found himself asking.

  The man stopped. Blinked. He wasn’t used to people actually speaking to him, Zach could tell.

  “What?”

  “The aliens,” Zach said. “I just see one big problem in this whole story of yours. What makes you think they care what happens to us?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. He scowled, but there was a little satisfaction in his expression as well.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said. “That’s fine. I’m used to this kind of petty, narrow-minded bigotry from government functionaries like yourself — ”

  Zach cut him off. “No, no,” Zach said. “You’re right. There are aliens. You’re absolutely right about that.”

  The man stopped. Opened his mouth to speak. Closed it again.

  “Never thought you’d hear anyone admit it, did you?” Zach said. “Well. It’s true. Do you want me to let you in on another little secret?”

  He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice. The man leaned in too, eyes wide.

  “They do not give a shit about us,” Zach whispered. “They look at us the way we look at amoebas under a microscope. They barely register our sad little planet’s existence. And they’re content to let us keep killing each other until we go extinct.”

  The man blinked. Sat back.

  Zach nodded. “We’re
not alone. But we might as well be.”

  The man’s chin trembled, for just a second. Then the defiant look returned. “You’re lying,” he said.

  Zach shrugged. “I wish I was.”

  The man stood. Without another word, he gathered his stack of folders filled with evidence meticulously downloaded from the Internet, and left.

  Zach sighed. This one had looked so normal when he’d come in. Zach had allowed himself a brief moment of hope that he might have something authentic. He wore a suit, he’d showered recently, had no dandruff on his shoulders — but within five minutes of his spiel, Zach knew he was utterly delusional.

  For starters, there had never been a UFO crash at Roswell. It was at Dulce. Zach had seen the corpse himself.

  In a hidden basement of the Smithsonian. In his old job.

  When he’d been the keeper of the President’s Vampire.

  When he fought real demons. Killed monsters. Kept the people in the daylight safe from the things in the dark.

  But that was then.

  Now he had an empty coffee cup and a meeting scheduled in fifteen minutes with another delusional paranoid.

  He could fix one of those things. He got up for more coffee. And tried not to think about the time when he actually saved lives, and how it ended.

  3

  WASHINGTON, D.C. FOUR YEARS AGO.

  Zach and Cade were called to the Oval Office before President Samuel Curtis’ body was even buried.

  Lester Wyman had taken the oath of office while flying back to Washington D.C. Cade had felt it when the power transferred. It was part of his own oath. His loyalty switched to the new president. Just like that.

  But it didn’t change the fact that he and Zach both loathed the man.