Stealth Insurgence Read online

  Table of Contents

  Stealth Insurgence

  Prologue

  Part 1: Disturbance in the Atmosphere

  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

  Part 2: The Gathering Storm

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part 3: Stealth Insurgence

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Postscript

  Books by Vikki Kestell

  Laynie Portland

  A Prairie Heritage

  Girls from the Mountain

  Nanostealth

  References

  About the Author

  Stealth Insurgence

  Nanostealth | Book 5

  Vikki Kestell

  Also Available in Print Format

  Jayda and Zander leave Washington, DC, and return to Albuquerque, satisfied that they have completed their mission for President Jackson. They are bursting with joy for the unborn child Jayda carries and are keen to share the news of their blessing with those they love: Abe, Emilio, Zander’s parents, his sister, Izzie, and Dr. Bickel.

  The couple can finally let down their guard: No enemies stalk them and no plots to overthrow the nation peer at them from beyond the horizon. They relax into a normal life—as “normal” as life with the nanomites can be—finding work, making a home, renewing relationships with their church family at Downtown Christian Center, growing in their faith, spending time with family, and looking forward to the birth of their child around the first week of April.

  Their “normal” life doesn’t last long.

  The nanomites—ever vigilant and alert to the virtual world—become increasingly uneasy. They are unable to “put their fingers on” the source of their agitation, but whatever is happening?

  It is happening globally.

  And the nanomites repeatedly tell Jayda and Zander, Jesus has told us to protect you and the child. He says you have important work ahead of you. It is our job to watch over and safeguard your family.

  What is the “important work” Jesus wants of Jayda and Zander? Why has Jesus spoken to the nanomites about this work, but not to them? And why are the nanomites increasingly alarmed for their safety?

  Stealth Insurgence

  © 2021 Vikki Kestell

  All Rights Reserved

  Faith-Filled FictionTM

  http://www.faith-filledfiction.com/

  http://www.vikkikestell.com/

  Dedication

  To the persecuted church in Christ:

  “To him who overcomes

  I will grant to sit with Me on My throne,

  as I also overcame and sat down

  with My Father on His throne.”

  Revelation 3:21, NKJV

  Acknowledgements

  My most grateful thanks

  to my faithful team,

  Cheryl Adkins and Greg McCann.

  I am honored to call you

  my fellow ministers in Christ.

  I love and value both of you.

  Our gestalt is powerful!

  Cover Design

  Vikki Kestell

  Scripture Quotations

  The New International Version (NIV)

  The HOLY BIBLE,

  NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®.

  Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984

  International Bible Society.

  Used by permission of Zondervan.

  All rights reserved.

  New King James Version® (NKJV)

  Copyright ©1982 by Thomas Nelson.

  Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  The King James Version (KJV)

  Public Domain.

  Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT)

  Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015

  Tyndale House Foundation.

  Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  All Hail the Power

  of Jesus’ Name

  Lyrics, Edward Perronet, 1780

  Tune, “Coronation,”

  Oliver Holden, 1793

  Public Domain

  Prologue

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Say it aloud with me:

  “This book is a work of fiction.”

  Repeat the above statement often

  while reading this book.

  July was at its sweltering midpoint before Zander and I were convinced that the threat against the President (and us) was over and done. We had promised Emilio we would come home as soon as our mission was complete, so we figured two more weeks should do it. Two weeks to tie up loose ends, pack, and go.

  We assumed we’d hit the road before the end of the month. But, as plans often work out, packing up our lives in Maryland and heading for New Mexico took longer than we expected.

  Yes, we, the two nanoclouds, a number of short-term single-purpose nanobot “arrays,” plus indispensable help from Gamble, Trujillo, Malware, Inc., and two NSA contractor employees who, we discovered, were actually covert FBI agents, had accomplished the tasks the President had assigned to us: We uncovered the fate of President Jackson’s missing friend, Wayne Overman. Then we identified Mr. Overman’s killers, tricked them into moving his remains, and arranged for the FBI to catch them in the act—thus giving his family and their friends the justice and closure they needed.

  We unmasked the traitors behind the attempts to overthrow the Jackson administration—the individuals who had been behind former Vice President Harmon’s attempt to assassinate President Jackson and behind General Cushing’s relentless pursuit of the nanomites, ergo me.

  We finally comprehended how deep and broad had been the plot to steal Dr. Bickel’s work and how desperate the mastermind and her top collaborators had been to find me after Dr. Bickel sent the nanomites into me to hide them.

  Or had he sent them to hide me?

  That point had never been explained to my satisfaction.

  We had not, however, been able to prevent a second assassination attempt on President Jackson. Although the President did survive, Zander and I take no credit for that, nor do the nanomites. How could we? The Lord himself had miraculously intervened to save the President from the lethal biotoxin cocktail Vice President Delancey had sprayed directly into President Jackson’s face.

  The best medical facilities, physicians, and treatments available could not have saved the President, but God could—and did—just as he miraculously rescued Zander and me from a most ingenious trap, one devised to force the nanomites out of us and into a healthy host.

  Despite the trap’s foolproof design, the nanomites were strongly averse to cooperating with its intended outcome. They hadn’t wanted to break the special bond we shared any more than we had. And as far as we knew (up until then) nothing could compel them to leave us—which was a good thing. Because if they were to detach themselves from our bodies’ cellular structures, Zander and I would die in the process.

  But, as I said, the trap was both ingenious and foolproof.

  It worked like this: Zander and I were coerced into a specially built cage. The nanomites explained the cage’s construction and how its cleverly fabricated walls allowed no electricity to pass in or out of it.

  Walls of electrostatic dissipative acrylic, Jayda Cruz, encasing a cage of electromagnetic shielding. A sophisticated Faraday cage.

  A Faraday cage protects people and equipment from electric discharge or current. Its conductive material diverts current around the outside of the enclosed space, allowing none of the electricity to enter or pass through the interior. However, the nanomites required regular electrical access to power their tribes and the nanocloud. “No electricity in” meant the nanomites were cut off from their usual sources of power.

  You’d think lasering through the cage would be a snap for the nanomites, right? Except our cage possessed a second layer, a field of fluctuating electrostatic discharge running around its acrylic exterior. According to the nanomites, many of their members had tried to penetrate the cage walls, had attempted to reach outside the cage and shut down its functions.

  None of those members returned.

  The nanomites could not escape the cage without being “zapped” by the electrostatic discharge surrounding its walls—zapped like when Colonel Greaves shot me with a Taser, destroying billions of nanomites and decimating the nanocloud.

  Bottom line? The nanomites were trapped with us inside the cage. They had no ready flow of electricity to feed them, yet their programming required them to survive. Only one source of power remained open to the nanomites.

  Zander and me.


  Well, that was the beauty of the trap’s design, because if the nanomites were denied “juice” for too long, their survival protocols kicked in, the primary one being survive—by any means necessary.

  To increase their odds of survival in a dire situation, the nanomites’ programming obliged them to reduce power consumption until an adequate, steady source was again available. With the exception of Alpha Tribe, mite by mite and tribe by tribe, our two nanoclouds entered a “dormant mode” akin to sleep, thus reducing both nanoclouds’ overall energy need.

  But, even in that low-consumption mode, the nanoclouds required energy to maintain Alpha Tribe. They could use us, Zander and me, and draw electricity from our bodies for a time, but not forever—that being precisely the trap’s aim.

  Because if, as more time passed, Alpha Tribe could no longer access the electricity they needed, the nanoclouds would devolve into a critical state: The quiescent mites would begin to expire in their sleep. The mites that were awake—those charged to safeguard the nanomites’ experiences and vast knowledge library and responsible to awaken the other tribes when electrical current became available—would function as long as they could. As long as they had power. Eventually, though, they too would begin to drain away, like a battery at the end of its life, until no charge remained and they expired.

  As I said, nothing could compel the nanomites to leave us of their own accord. They would not willingly comply with the trap’s intent. But what if Zander and I could no longer support their needs because we were fully drained?

  Say, if we were dead—or as good as?

  If we could not supply the nanomites’ power needs, then the nanoclouds, too, would die, and nothing in this world could bring them back.

  Unless.

  Unless, at that critical juncture, other power sources became available—for instance, two healthy individuals determined to possess the nanoclouds and their near-supernatural abilities.

  That was the trap. That was our adversary’s plan to steal the nanomites.

  And it had nearly worked.

  The mites had been obliged to draw power from us because they had no other source, and as the hours passed, Zander and I grew weaker. I think we were resigned to our fate—and it was okay. If we went to sleep here, we knew we would wake up with Jesus.

  But then the Lord. Supernaturally, miraculously, he intervened.

  He prompted us to sing his praises, so we sang. We sang our hearts out! And we discovered as we sang that we were growing stronger—not weaker.

  Then his hand—yes, God’s hand—shook the place we were in, shook it until the room around us quaked and the junction box feeding the cage’s fluctuating electrostatic discharge blew apart, until his fingers pulled the trap apart, and—up from the grave!

  We crawled from that death chamber, not fully restored but regaining our strength and vigor a little at a time, while the nanomites, too, slowly revived and came back online.

  Back into the fight to save the President—

  Oh, thank you, Father. I will never stop being amazed by your love, your mercy, and your power!

  I had to stop and, once more, give thanks. Even today, the miracle of our deliverance rocks me to my core.

  Of most importance, as the Lord led us through the last of those dark early days of July, we did unmask the “head of the snake,” the leader of the network of traitors and conspirators who had attempted to overthrow the Jackson presidency, appropriate the nanomites, and seize the reins of government—planning to use the nanomites’ abilities to cement governmental control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives.

  The President and his administration being safe at present—or reasonably so, as far as we and the nanomites could tell—our mission was over, successfully concluded. Zander and I figured we were free to return to Albuquerque.

  Pack and go, right?

  Well, not quite.

  Immediately after the crisis ended and we stood down, the lead agent of President Jackson’s security detail, Axel Kennedy, requested that we debrief the President. President Jackson, Kennedy told us, wanted details—all of them. You know, the sort of behind-the-scenes details only we and the nanomites could provide. I say that Kennedy “requested,” but when the President asks, you say ‘yes.’

  Yes, sir.

  And since we were at the mercy of the President’s busy calendar, Kennedy scheduled our debrief in several sessions across multiple weeks—effectively delaying our departure from DC until the President was satisfied.

  Frankly, President Jackson couldn’t hear enough concerning the nanomites and what they had done to search out and end the conspiracy. And we discovered at our second meeting with him that the President tended to formulate follow-on questions for the next session based on what we had told him during our previous meeting.

  Gazillions of questions, and yes, the process and the wait were tedious.

  To keep our involvement (and our nanocloud-endowed powers) secret, we always met in the President’s private dining room in the White House residence during his regular lunch break. We would enter the Residence undetected, and while everyone else in the White House thought the President was having lunch alone with Mrs. Jackson, we would join the Jacksons and Axel Kennedy for a scant hour and a quarter.

  Lunch in the Residence dining room was the best way for President Jackson to allot time for our visits while also eliminating the possibility of “prying eyes and ears.” Supposedly, we’d taken care of those prying eyes and ears, the unsanctioned, illegal listening devices that the traitors had installed to spy on the President.

  They had planted those devices around the West Wing, including within the Oval Office itself. They had also hidden “bugs” inside the President’s official residence—in the dining room where we met to debrief the President. However, the nanomites had detected then deactivated the bugs, had identified the seditious Secret Service and White House personnel who had planted them, and sent them home with a debilitating case of “intestinal flu.” We left it to the President and Kennedy to further deal with those agents and staff workers via whatever judicious means they decided.

  I dunno. Each time we visited the White House for those debriefs, my nerves were on edge. I could tell the nanomites were extra vigilant, too.

  Why? Maybe because ending all threats against the President was a tall order that felt more like an exercise in zombie hunting straight off the reel of a B movie. I mean, are zombies ever categorically dead? Meaning, had we truly stopped America’s enemies, those who sought to “fundamentally transform” her by any means at their disposal?

  Not likely. Evil is always waiting in the wings, biding its time, looking for opportunities to strike. Well, we had done our part; we had accomplished what the President asked of us. We hadn’t agreed to stay near DC beyond that.

  From the Jacksons and Agent Kennedy’s perspectives, however, much of what happened during those fateful weeks in June and July was not completely clear to them. We confirmed, for example, that the diminutive wife of the recently deceased Vice President had been the brains and visionary behind the scheme to assassinate Jackson and take the presidency. We told them, but they, nonetheless, had further questions—like who was this Winnie Delancey, in actuality? And how had this evil, traitorous woman eluded detection for so long?

  Vice President Delancey, after dosing Jackson with the biotoxin and while waiting for the President to die, had revealed that his wife, Winnie Delancey, had been born in Vietnam. As the daughter of a British official and his Vietnamese wife, Winnie’s legal birth name was Winifred Marjorie Herrington, but she was also known under a Vietnamese name: Pham Quang Bi`nh. After some digging in the right places, a joint Secret Service, FBI, CIA, and MI6 task force confirmed Delancey’s tale.

  The CIA director and his leadership team were astounded (and justifiably mortified) to find that this woman, supposedly a valuable British spy prior to and during the Vietnam War, had actually been a Viet Cong double agent. She had regularly handed British intelligence over to the Communists and passed back Viet Cong disinformation to the British—staggering news for MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, aka the SIS.

  How many deaths could this single woman lay claim to by her treachery? And how had this woman, also a skilled Viet Cong interrogator of American POWs, never been identified as the traitor she was?

  How? As the war drew to a close, she and her handlers had ensured that no POW able to identify her survived to tell the tale. The sole exception, we discovered, had been war hero Simon Delancey.