Chapter 1

New York was on fire. Maybe it always had been. Maybe the only difference to this building screaming up in a whirling golden flame was that they couldn’t shut their eyes to it anymore. There it was, out in the open, set ablaze in the public eye.

This wasn’t your everyday kitchen fire. This was arson, no doubt about it. The fire plunged out from the inside and crawled down the surface of the Federal Records & Accounts building in a long arcing curve. The curve tracing a path from the top to its base, spelling out a giant letter ‘C.’

Heather Chase stood there basking in that blaze, mesmerized by its infinite power; she lent her face to the smoldering heat warming her like the rays of a violent and dangerous sun. She knew it had begun again, this fight that threatened to escalate to full-blown war. She didn’t waste time fighting the truth, because she knew that nothing from now on would be as obvious or easy as this. Someone had learned to control the fire in this town. The C had. And that made them capable of anything.

The C. That’s what they called themselves now, the organization wreaking crime across the city in a series of bizarre and senseless acts. Word on the street was they were the remnant elements of C-60, the terrorist group Chase herself had helped put away; the group that the Bureau and the NYPD had pulled out every stop to take down. That Chase had risked her life for. Yet not long after they’d taken down their leader, the crime wave started all over again.

After more than a month of seemingly random media-related crimes, they’d upped the ante. They’d started writing their name in fire.

As they finally damped down the blaze, Chase approached an exhausted firefighter in a charred yellow fire-retardant jacket sitting on the back of his truck.

“I’m Special Agent Chase, FBI. I need to enter that building.”

“Don’t bother,” the firefighter said, his face eclipsed by a layer of soot. He was breathing heavily and his extreme fatigue shone through his bloodshot eyes. “Nothing was preserved on the floor where the fire was set. They used some kind of petroleum jelly—the sprinklers couldn’t put it out.”

“I don’t understand,” Chase said. “Wouldn’t such important documents have been kept in fireproof storage units?”

“Right—the thing is, the units themselves malfunctioned.”

“They—malfunctioned? Is that normal?”

The firefighter shrugged absently and looked at her with yellowing eyes through a mask of ash. He’d just walked through fire; soon it would be Chase’s turn to do the same. But she couldn’t feel what lay ahead this time. Her mind felt fuzzy, clouded in the same smoke that wafted up from the broken husk of the Federal Records building. Everything was concealed behind that thick suffocating gauze. She couldn’t feel what this firefighter felt, couldn’t see what he saw. What she did feel was off her game. And she’d been that way for a while now.

She’d been that way since they went after Bucky, the leader of C-60. Although Bucky is dead now, his demise didn’t bring closure or conclusion—all it did was open more mysteries to contend with.

The first mystery was that of Bucky himself: Who was he? Everything had pointed to him being an ex-participant in a series of unethical clinical trials conducted by the now-deceased Professor Sherman of NYU. Except that upon scouring through all available records, there was no trace of Bucky ever having existed in the system. They hadn’t been able to get a lock on his prints or dental records. ‘Bucky’ had clearly been a fake name—short for Buckminster, the inventor of the compound C-60 which Bucky had figured out how to weaponize.

Back again in a circle to C-60. Who were they? In the mad dash to prevent Bucky’s plan to cause anarchy, Chase hadn’t really stopped to think about it: Who even were the others involved in C-60? How many of them existed? The Bureau had discovered two bases supposedly belonging to them— the abandoned camp of dome structures hidden in Wake Forest, and the single large dome situated outside Poughkeepsie. The domes created in the geodesic shape of the C-60 molecule: Bucky again. It all came back around, all seemed connected, yet nothing connected at all.

The fact of the matter was, there was no trace of anyone besides Bucky being in the ‘group’ that was C-60. Because Bucky had exploited various delivery services to launch his attacks, there had been no one actually connected to him. And as for the ‘evidence’ of other people living in his vicinity in the two bases—that could have been faked too. They hadn’t arrested a single other person. They hadn’t seen anyone else. The only other witness they had was a mental patient in Bellevue named Elliot who later was revealed to have a history of confabulation. Elliot himself confessed to having lied about everything.

At the time Chase had been glad for that—she thought if it all began and ended with Bucky then his death would be the end of it. It hadn’t been. This new group came out of the woodwork calling themselves the C, and they’d already managed to hijack two streaming services and one local TV station and made them play their propaganda message. And now they’d started this game of fire graffiti.

Finding no luck with the tired firefighter, Chase reluctantly hovered by the NYPD. No one she knew was around, which came as a relief. She wasn’t in the mood for their chit-chat.

“Agent Chase, FBI,” she said, holding her badge. The cops there barely glanced at it, just gave her a sour look. They were uniforms there to take the basic facts and get out of there. Helping the feds was above their pay grade. Cop think.

“What’s the situation?” She asked one of them—a short guy with his holster belt hanging a touch low. A round face and beady cop eyes peered back at her blankly. She elaborated. “Did everyone get out alright?” Blank face. “The building, Officer. Did everyone get out of the building?”

“Evacuation went uh—smoothly. On account of it being so early, not many were around. No serious injuries—we got one or two slight burns, ain’t that right Sarge?” He turned around to a flat, pale-faced cop in the back who barely grunted an affirmative.

“That’s good,” Chase said. “Then no one was in the room that went up either.”

“That blew up, you mean, agent.”

“It didn’t blow up—from what I understand, gasoline jelly was used to start the fire.”

“Potato, potahto,” said the cop. “The dumb scumbags still freakin’ ripped the place. A federal building no less. Must have some kinda death wish, eh?”

“You’d think,” Chase said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not too clear on their motives, Officer. Not yet.”

“Yeah. Course not. They’re crazy sons of bitches is why. Just want to burn everything to the freaking ground. I hope you feebs round them all up and lay ’em on the chopping block as an example. Then maybe this town will stop going so gaga.”

“I’ll keep your suggestion in mind. If you want to expedite our investigation, you could start by telling me something. Did your men find anything in the wreckage?”

“We don’t got diddle,” ‘Sarge’ said. “We’re canvassing the area now but as far as the building itself,” he gestured to the crumbling, smoking husk before them. “Zilcho.”

“Security tapes?”

“All fuzzed out,” the sarge said. “Some kinda malfunction.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around. What about the C?” Chase said.

“What about them? Sure they probably did it. It’s got their name written all over it.” The sarge grinned. He was being blasé about the whole affair—to him, it was just a necessary fact, another thing to write down before he went to Dunkin Donuts and ordered a box of a dozen glazed.

“Not the group,” Chase said, holding back her frustration. “I mean the letter itself. On the face of the building.”

“Ah, that. Yeah. They used a kind of flammable paint. Same MO as the other buildings, right?”

“Same MO,” Chase said.

An awkward silence passed between the three of them. Chase felt herself desperately trying to get a read on these cops—she generally didn’t have to try so hard to tell what someone was thinking. It wasn’t that she’d only just met them—she just felt trapped in thick brain fog. The smoke rushed into her airwaves and she could feel the toxic air enter her bloodstream. A pressure was forming in her head, the beginnings of a real doozy of a headache…

“I heard that the files up there weren’t protected properly,” Chase heard herself ask.

“Oh yeah,” the officer said. “It all went up. Whoosh. There’ll be hell to pay to some poor schmuck up the ladder. Probably didn’t close the cabinet properly or some such.” The cop scratched his face absently. He couldn’t give less of a shit if he tried.

“Didn’t close the cabinet. Right. What was the nature of those files, any idea?”

“Beats the hell outta me. Some official government crapola. You’re gonna have to talk to uh—the guys in charge or whateva… So, are we good here?”

“As you were, Officer.”

She pushed down the frustration and tried tapping another officer who seemed a bit more serious. He had a close-cropped crew cut, a dark mustache, and shaded wayfarers on.

“Anything you can tell me about the fire?” She asked him.

“Nothing so far, agent. Uh—we did check the security tapes.”

“Did you get anything?”

“You know it’s the strangest thing. They’ve all got this weird static on them.”

A flash sparked through Chase then, but instead of starting in her brain it came out in her gut and made her lurch. Screwing with camera equipment was also the C’s MO. They had control over the airwaves. They got to decide what was projected.

“So—no leads then?” Chase said, feeling dismal and sick.

“Not a one so far. Ah—but maybe we’ll find a way to clean up that security video and…”

They wouldn’t. Chase knew that much. Bucky had developed some kind of technology that could replace a video feed—she’d seen him use it in Times Square to replace every screen there with his own twisted hypno-garbage. But if the C had that technology—didn’t it just further point to them being legitimate successors of C-60?

The C was the next step. They were something new. Something fluid and fragmented and completely dangerous. She couldn’t figure out their motive yet, but she knew they couldn’t be ignored. If Bucky had been the initial blast, the C was the fire that followed.

And they’d targeted a federal building this time. It felt like they were picking a fight with the FBI. It almost felt like they were picking a fight with her, personally.

But the problem with bombs is that they tend to erase their own evidence if you make them right. Forensics had barely come up with anything useful. The fire inside had been propagated by gasoline jelly, but they had no clue what was used for the ignition. All they really had to go on was their calling card: At every fire so far they had left a letter C. In the first building, a local cable station, the wall of the lobby had been scorched. In the second building, the Herald News Group, a giant C had been burned into the front lawn. And now, finally, at the Federal Records & Accounts, they’d escalated to burning it into the entire outside of the wall. They’d grown more brazen over time.

They were painting with fire. Sending a burning message—playing God.

But Chase wouldn’t fall for their theatrics, not this time. Nor would she get sucked into a meandering trap. It was time to stop playing by their rules. Time to use the full extent of the Bureau’s power and get ahead of these punks. This time she would stop the C, and stop them for good.

 

Chapter 2

The C had been scurrying about town unimpeded for long enough. It was time to see about building a better mousetrap. A gust of air conditioner wind blew through the Data Analysis Team’s crusty office, knocking over ramen cups, candy wrappers, and half-eaten subway sandwiches… Chase stood in the doorway looking over a group of six special agents all of whom looked like they hadn’t slept in a month.

“Been cracking the whip again, Bookman?” Chase asked her former partner and current SSA of Data Analysis, Bob Fairfax. He didn’t seem like he’d had much sleep himself, his wrinkled but usually glossy face looking particularly dull and pale on this visit. He looked like a xeroxed version of himself.

“Good morning to you too, Chase,” he said sleepily, draining the cold dregs out of a vending machine coffee cup. If she didn’t know any better he seemed almost hung over. “And yes I’ve been ramping things up around here. If the C really are connected to C-60 then there’s no telling what they’re capable of. You remember what happened last time, after that pirate video broadcast they orchestrated. Half the city went haywire.”

“About that. The more I think about it, Bob, the more I’m convinced that ‘C-60’ was a hoax. The work of Bucky alone.”

He sighed. This wasn’t the first time they were having this discussion. “So, we’re back to the lone nut theory? I seem to recall you being against that. Now that Bucky’s dead and buried you want to bring it back into play?”

“The context is completely different, Bob. All we have of the supposed C-60 now are two empty locations. The findings of the forensic teams we sent out there are inconclusive. There’s no real evidence anyone but Bucky himself was ever involved.”

Bob smacked his lips and looked around his table in vain for a bottle of water. “Your theory before was—and correct me if I’m wrong on this, Chase—but you seemed to think that the scope of his operation was too big to have been carried out by just one man.”

“Certainly. It wasn’t carried out by just Bucky.”

“Wait, so—what?”

“That still doesn’t mean that C-60 was an actual organization. Think about it. How does he send the first bomb to the hotel? Courier, right? Same for the second bomb. And the third too. Each time Bucky went through some kind of service. It was like the gig economy of terrorism with him. Why even use a group? If you can manipulate people, even temporarily—” Bob flashed her a knowing look.”—then forming and maintaining a group is just a useless liability. More people to rat you out, more people to turn on you. It makes more sense to go it alone.”

“Okay, so Bucky uses gofers for the whole operation,” Bob said, hypothesizing. “Uses day laborers he picked up outside of Home Depot to build his big Whack-o-Dome, let’s say. Doesn’t that still leave a massive paper trail? We’ve been looking at the data for five or six weeks now—nothing of that sort is out there. If there was, we’d know about it.”

“From illegals? Bob, they don’t leave a paper trail. They don’t even pay taxes. It’s the perfect crime.”

“Maybe. It doesn’t explain how one individual actor was able to wreak so much havoc, however. We only caught him because he got greedy and gave away his location.”

“The problem is, we’ve been looking at Bucky as an everyday citizen,” Chase said. “Maybe that’s why we’re stuck on this. Think about it, Bob—he didn’t even exist. You think every day Joe America can live completely off the grid like that? No prints on file, no dental, no DNA. No medical history. Hell, we never even found out his real name.”

“Chase—” Bob sat halfway off his seat, leaned in, and whispered. “Surely you aren’t implying—you suspect Bucky was a government agent?”

Chase just returned the question with a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know what he was. All we can say for sure is that he was no amateur, that he wasn’t just some disgruntled loon off the street out for revenge. Our one lead was Elliot, and now he’s catatonic. I wouldn’t even discount that being intentional either.”

“Intentional as in—you think someone got to him? Fried his brain?”

Bob was giving her those eyes—the ones that said in so many words, here’s Chase going off the deep end again.

“There’s something else,” Chase said, almost as a means of diverting his attention. “Something’s been gnawing at me lately, something that wakes me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.”

“What is it?”

“What if the guy we caught in Times Square wasn’t even the right guy?”

Bob’s face fell so hard that it nearly hit the floor and went rolling around. His tired eyes hung wide open, his dry mouth. “I don’t, I don’t understand what you’re saying, Chase.”

“Think about it—why would Bucky let himself get caught like that? It makes zero sense. He went to all that trouble, kidnapped me, evaded and killed an entire tactical squad, and got away squat free. He could have disappeared right after that and we’d never have caught him. Yet he appears right in the middle of Times Square of all places.”

“But that was so he could use that weapon of his. To hijack the screens in the square. Not that we even know what that was all about.”

“Exactly, Bob, he used a weapon. But in all prior instances, we know that Bucky utilized third parties as a vector to send out his weapons.”

Bob cleared his throat, went over to the next desk, and nabbed another agent’s water—the agent looked pretty annoyed about it. Sucking down a mouthful, Bob sat back in his chair, pondering what Chase was saying. “But Chase, if this was just some third party then we’d have figured out who the hell he was.”

“I know that. That’s why. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Nothing seems to add up.”

“Anyway—you were kidnapped by the guy. You should know. You’re telling me you can’t recognize his face? Bucky wasn’t wearing a mask when he nabbed you, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Then you did see his face.”

“Sure.”

“Then why don’t you know if the unsub killed in Times Square was Bucky or not?”

She bit her lip. “It was him. The guy I found in the dome, that is. But if that was Bucky then why is the C still around?”

“Right. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Let’s move on,” Chase said. “What about the other media crimes this month? Get anything off them?”

“Nothing substantial,” said Bob. “The C Channel’s hijacking seemed like it would give us something—but we really don’t even know what happened. The problem is that whenever something like this happens we get no security footage. They have the ability to—”

“Scramble it out. I know. But someone at the cable station still had to have seen the suspect or suspects.”

“You’d think. But all reports on that are negative.”

“First Channel 60 then the C Channel. At this rate, any TV outlet with the letter C is going to consider changing their name.”

“We had the same kinda idea,” the other agent said, the one whose water Bob stole. “We actually set up a trap on the other networks, any station with C. CNN in Midtown, NBC over on Long Island, and uh, what were the other ones?”

“CBS, WABC…” Bob said; then added, “This is Agent Ray Kelly, by the way. He just made GS-8.”

Agent Kelly looked to be still in his 20s; he had a stiff brush of black hair atop a hard, flat forehead, long narrow knotted eyebrows that crossed under the brow above the long curve of his nose, a prominent chin, and slits on either side of his mouth that years from now were prime candidates for jowls. His ears poked out sharply on either side like a fox, and his eyes were also fox-like, tear-shaped and glistening, and gunmetal gray. On his narrow neck, a big blue vein stuck out visibly. There seemed to be a vague hunger in him, but in Chase’s muddled state, she couldn’t see much more than that.

“Welcome to the big leagues, Agent Kelly,” Chase said dryly. “So—by trap you mean?”

“You know, like hidden cameras, additional surveillance, this type of thing.”

“And no hits yet?”

“Nothing as of yet, Agent Chase.”

Chase sighed. “The problem is that there isn’t much of a pattern outside of the pattern they allow us to see. Until we grasp what they’re really up to, there’s no way to predict where they’ll strike next.”

“Generally Chase,” Bob said, “this is where your uh—intuition kicks in and points us in the right direction.”

“I know,” Chase said. “But it’s telling me nothing this time around. We’re just going to have to do things the hard way until we can get something more substantial. Agent Kelly, do you have any ideas?”

“I mean—we were hoping the trap would spring,” Kelly said. “The thing is their motives are too unclear. Without catching them in the act, how do you figure out what they’re up to? It’s a whatchamacallit—a Catch-22.”

“He’s right,” Bob said. “At least back in the Channel 60 hijacking, the video Bucky had them play explained his motive. It let us build a profile of where they were coming from. But the C doesn’t do that—when they perform a channel hijack they just play static or random AI-generated images in a meaningless sequence. It feels more like they’re aiming for pure chaos than Bucky ever was.”

“So, that’s that then,” Chase said. “A month later we’re still at square one.”

“Not precisely,” Bob said. “We do have one lead to follow up on.”

“Which is?”

“Chase, you really aren’t on the ball here.”

“I suppose not. Are you going to gloat or are you going to tell me?”

“The Federal Records & Accounts management. We still haven’t interviewed them. I scheduled a meeting tomorrow at nine.”

“Oh,” Chase said, feeling her head crushing down a little harder on her brain. “That’s good. Good work, Bob.”

“Until then, I think you should get some rest.”

“He’s right, agent,” Kelly said. “You look pale, like you could pass out at any second.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” Chase didn’t say anymore. She felt so fatigued she couldn’t even muster the strength to get annoyed by the comment. And the worst part was she had no idea why.

 

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