Strike Matrix

by Aiden L Bailey

  A crashing noise echoed down the corridor.

  “That’s Keser!” Simon exclaimed. Pistol drawn he sprinted down the corridor. Casey followed.

  Peri was on the floor, the IV ripped from her arm and the stand toppled over. Simon lifted her sweat-drenched body. Her breaths were short, fast and labored. She was shaking.

  “Her temperature has spiked again.”

  Soon the others were in the room. Simon lifted Peri back into her bed. Saanvi fixed the saline drip.

  “The anti-malarial isn’t working,” Szymanski offered. “If we don’t do something soon, like get her to a hospital, she’ll die.”

  “Let’s stay positive,” Simon countered. He turned to Szymanski. “Is there a chemist, a drugstore nearby? A medical clinic?”

  He nodded. “A clinic, yes. Two blocks away. It will be closed this time of night.”

  “Good. You come with me Paul, show me where it is.”

  “What are you doing?” Casey demanded. “It’s a risk going outside.”

  “Paul is right,” Simon answered. “Peri will die if we don’t try her on some other medication.”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” she said. Simon looked ready to argue so Casey countered with, “Shatterhand separated us twice, and each time it almost killed us. No, I’m not letting you go alone.”

  Simon hesitated only for a moment. “Fine, but we leave now. Paul, where do you keep your field kits?”

  “What are you after, specifically?”

  “Lock picks?”

  He nodded. “I have those, give me a minute.”

  Within five minutes they were outside in the dark hurrying towards the medical clinic only two blocks distant. Walking meant they were less likely to draw attention, and no one bothered them. It took Simon only a few minutes to pick the locks. Inside they went straight for the dispensary. Simon rummaged through the drugs.

  “You know what you’re looking for?” Casey asked.

  He nodded. Then shook his head. “I know the names of many anti-malarial drugs, but I don’t know what will work in Peri’s case. The wrong combination might kill her.” He looked to Szymanski, but he only shrugged. He didn’t know either. “Oh, wait a second.” Something he had seen suddenly excited Simon.

  “What did you find?” Casey asked.

  “This one,” he said pocketing several samples of one particular drug.

  They exited the medical clinic, left everything as they found it and the door locked behind them. Once back at the safe house, Simon went straight to the first aid room. Saanvi and Clementine were dabbing Peri with damp cloths. They had stripped her down to keep her cool.

  Simon found a sterile syringe, looked again at Peri to determine her bodyweight, then drew a sample of the anti-malarial drug. “Find a vein, please!”

  Saanvi complied. She tightened Peri’s arm until the veins grew visible. Simon injected the drug.

  They watched Peri hoping for a sign they had made the right choice. For many minutes nothing happened. Then her breath slowed to a more normal rate. Casey felt Peri’s forehead noticing her body temperature had dropped to a normal range. Her fever and shaking seemed to disappear as they watched. Before even five minutes had elapsed, Peri’s eyes were open and alert. She was soon conscious and sitting up.

  “What happened?” Peri asked, uncomfortable with everyone staring at her.

  Szymanski lent in and hugged her tight.

  “Okay, okay,” she said pushing him away, uncomfortable with Szymanski’s public show of affection. “What’s the problem?”

  “You almost died,” Simon answered.

  Her expression soured when she saw Simon. “You? What are you doing here?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  She looked away, confused and contemplative.

  “It’s okay,” Saanvi stepped towards Peri. “Your malaria flared up. You’ve been unconscious for most of the night. Much has happened. There is much we need to brief you on.”

  “I bet there is.” Peri massaged her head. “Can I have a glass of water, please?”

  Szymanski brought her one. She drank it without stopping for breath and then drunk two more glasses after that.

  Casey sensed Peri’s discomfort towards Simon, so she took Simon’s hand and led him outside. “What did you give her? That was like some kind of miracle drug. Not that I believe in that kind of thing.”

  He showed her the vial in his hand. The word N6 was prominent on the packaging.

  “N6? Who are they?”

  “I’m almost certain they are a group GhostKnife founded about six months ago. Global charity organization. Powerful and very altruistic.” He described his encounter with the N6 group in the Dharavi slums.

  “Wow. That is surreal.”

  Simon looked to Casey and held her stare. “I didn’t answer your question from before. I agree with you. We have to trust GhostKnife. We have to trust its end game is best for humanity. And we have to fight on its side and take down Shatterhand. That’s what we’ve been doing all along. We just didn’t know it.”

  She hugged him tight, glad he was on her side.

  “I only see one problem,” he jested.

  “What’s that?”

  “Working out exactly how we can achieve that.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Peri showered, changed into fresh clothes then joined the team in the briefing room. She couldn’t believe how healthy she felt. The fevers, head fog, shuddering and shaking, and the sensations of being both cold and burning hot in random waves had all but vanished. Whatever drug the Australian operative had given her, it had done its job.

  All eyes turned towards her as she entered. Some, like Paul and Saanvi looked at her with pity. The others, Simon Ashcroft, Casey and Clementine Irvine, and even Rashid Wilks looked at her with suspicion. She sensed much had changed. She sensed the power dynamics of the group had altered during the night.

  “Who’s been in charge while I was unconscious?”

  No one said a word, but all eyes turned to Ashcroft. This shocked Peri. Yesterday he was the enemy. Today everyone seemed to trust him more than they trusted her.

  “Well, I’m back now. So, brief me.”

  Rashid stood, flexed his muscles and approached. The bruised fingers at the end of his cast looked swollen. “Much has changed Ma’am. We know a lot more than we did yesterday.” He massaged his right fist in the palm of his left hand. “Willing or not, you’ve been reporting our every move to the enemy.”

  “What are you saying Wilks?”

  “I’m saying, things have changed.”

  “I’m still in charge.”

  “No. You’re not!”

  Rashid circled her. No one else said or did anything to challenge him. Peri sensed a mutiny brewing. She had to squash it.

  “We are all that’s left,” Saanvi offered waving her arm in a sweeping gesture towards the six other people in the room. Her tone suggested negotiation and practicality. “Ma’am, before you decide, you need to hear what Clementine, Casey and Simon have to say. It will change your perspective on… well, everything.”

  “I have to do no such thing.”

  “I think you do,” Rashid said from behind her. “You’re unfit for duty. After what happened to Pfündl, Dawson and the others, no one trusts you anymore.”

  She looked at each of them. No one was coming to her rescue. Szymanski only offered a weak smile, and he was the only one. Peri had to play this one carefully.

  “Clementine here will explain the situation,” Rashid instructed. “You will listen to everything she has to say. Then you will realize nothing is at all like you think it is. Nothing like any of us could have imagined.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve all been played, so we’ve gone dark. No contact with HQ. We’re on our own, because we’ve always been on our own. Everyone we’ve talked to outside this group since we left Camp Lemonnier, they’re not real.”

  He offered her a seat in t
he middle of the room. Central to the group, it felt like an interrogation chair. She sat without protest. She saw no alternatives.

  Clementine explained the situation. Told her about the AI programs and the ESBs they had created. Electronic sentient beings, she called them, or sentient artificial intelligences that caused all their misery. Two ESBs were loose on the information networks. The first was GhostKnife, which was on their side fighting for the survival of humanity. The second was Shatterhand, a SAI war program set on wiping out humanity. Casey Irvine was the key. Something about quantum observation — if they could bring her close to the core Shatterhand program, she could shut it down just by looking at it.

  “This is fantasy.”

  Simon explained away recent global events. The U.S. President replaced with an online simulation. How North Korea had fallen without a fight to American forces. Chaos in the Middle East with the U.S. occupying most nations there unopposed. Then the U.S. taking control of the global oil supply. The eradication of illicit narcotics. Humanitarian programs like N6 popping up everywhere and making real differences in the lives of the poor. Free healthcare, social wealth and housing for every person on the planet. Old people and the disabled dropping dead from a mysterious illness sweeping across Asia and in other highly populated regions of the planet. Miracle drugs like the one that had cured Peri, which would now eradicate deadly diseases and viruses across the planet. “How do you explain any of that?” Simon concluded, “If you have an alternative theory that fits the data, please share?”

  Peri shook her head. From a bizarre and surreal point of view, Ashcroft’s argument made perfect sense. The whole time she had been reporting to the U.S. President she had in fact been reporting to a computer simulation run by an artificial intelligence. She had been half right on that one.

  But an aspect of Ashcroft left her cold. He was too smooth, too convincing. She’d met con-artists like him in the past, with no souls, set on manipulating everyone to satisfy selfish needs. If she could just work out what his motivation was.

  “Where is this core program?” Peri asked putting on a show she was on board with what they were telling her.

  “We don’t know,” Szymanski answered.

  “Then we need to find it and shut it down.”

  “That sounds like an order?” Wilks grumbled. “You are no longer in charge, Ma’am. You don’t get to make those decisions anymore.”

  Peri nodded. Rage consumed Wilks. He wasn’t taking their losses well, especially the loss of his good friend Pfündl. “Who is in charge then?”

  Once again, all eyes turned to the Australian.

  “Ashcroft?” She couldn’t hide her contempt at the suggestion. “How do we know he’s up to it?”

  “He’s up to it,” Saanvi spoke up. “If we need a leader, he gets my vote. At least until we are in contact with the real U.S. Government again.”

  “He gets my vote too,” Casey echoed.

  Soon everyone in the room, including her most loyal and trusted peer, Paul Szymanski, voiced their support for Simon Ashcroft.

  Peri fumed. What did Ashcroft have she didn’t? Sure, he was good looking, and he was level-headed, but that was only surface detail. She doubted he had her strategic and tactical knowledge and expertise, or if he did, he was using it only for personal gain. Peri wouldn’t let this change in leadership remain in place for long.

  “Since when did this become a democracy?”

  “Since now,” growled Wilks.

  Ashcroft stepped forward, “I’ll tell you what, Peri. Why don’t I tell you what I have in mind? If you don’t like it, you are free to go and no one will stop you or think less of you. Just walk out of here and disappear. But if you like what I say, and you want to stay, then you respect I am in charge, and you follow my orders. Does that sound reasonable?”

  Peri didn’t think it sounded reasonable, but she nodded that she did. For now, the best strategy was to bide her time, learn as much as she could and develop her own strategies in secret.

  “Good,” he smiled. “This is the plan. There is a data center in Mumbai that Clementine told us about earlier. She believes she knows where it is. Paul here says you and he encountered a weird server room under the NSA’s Utah Data Center a couple of weeks back. When you damaged it, you altered the dynamics between the two AIs we are battling. Clementine tells me that Utah was where the AIs were first developed, on servers operating on quantum computing principles.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “What if GhostKnife built this Mumbai data center, or maybe it was Shatterhand, while pretending to be Alan Irvine as its principal architect? What if this data center runs on quantum computing, and that the AIs need more than just one quantum data center to maintain their growing core programming, their nervous system so to speak? If we shut it down, we might cripple one or both AIs. Think of it like inflicting nerve damage on a human body.”

  “How do you determine if it is a quantum data center? Or if it is the right center?”

  Simon smiled and turned to Szymanski.

  The NSA operative cleared his throat, “I viewed the programs in the Utah Data Center. If it is here, in this center, I’ll recognize it again.”

  Peri shook her head not sure she liked what she heard. “So, what is the plan? We break into the data center. Paul checks what kind of program it is running. If it’s running GhostKnife or Shatterhand, Casey Irvine here looks at it and hopes that the mere act of glancing causes it to collapse? Failing that, what do we do? Blow it up?”

  Simon grinned. “That is exactly what we will do.”

  “How? How do we even get hold of enough explosives to do that?”

  Simon’s grin grew wider as he held up a cell phone. “This belongs to a former arms dealer I used to know. Clementine here observed the owner keying in the passcode several times while they held her prisoner. Paul here took the phone to the safe house’s SCIF facility, hacked into it and tracked where it had been over the last few days. GPS coordinates identified a warehouse where I believe we’ll find small arms, assault rifles, rocket launchers and explosives. Weapons originally bound for South Sudan, but I think our need is more urgent.”

  Peri nodded. She was both furious and impressed. SCIF stood for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, an enclosed area where analysts processed sensitive data without risk of being hacked into by external surveillance, including the AIs. This safe house was state-of-the-art as Szymanski had promised.

  Despite Ashcroft’s cleverness and guile, Peri decided she would share none of her concerns until she determined Simon Ashcroft’s character and motives. She needed to witness if he could pull off a field operation like this one. If he failed, that would be the time to step up again, and take command of this group. Besides, she didn’t have a better plan of her own. Not yet, at least.

  “All right, you’ve convinced me. I’m in.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Al Kharj Outskirts, Saudi Arabia

  Conner and Nahla marched through the night, not daring to sleep or even rest while the cover of darkness was on their side. They skirted the limits of Riyadh’s neighboring city, Al Kharj. On the distant horizon lay a highway. Headlights from cars and trucks in their thousands fled ground zero, or at least attempted to because no vehicle moved all that fast. Choked highways would be the cause. Occasionally they heard distant gunfire or explosions lighting up parts of the city.

  Conner estimated they had covered fifteen kilometers, but it could have been twenty. Whatever the number they were making a good pace. As dawn crept over the horizon, they reached a field of crops grown to the edge of the desert, irrigated from water pumped in from far away or from deep underground.

  “We need a car,” Conner explained. With daylight approaching they would become easier to spot, “And different clothing.” He stood out like the westerner he was. Nahla with her hijab had a better disguise, but it was not sufficient. Her clothes weren’t conservative enough for Saudi Arabia. If they didn
’t find local garb soon, they wouldn’t last long.

  They found a deserted house which they entered. The doors were open and sand blew inside. Plates of rotting food rested on the table. Clothes lay scattered on the beds. Of the residents there were no signs.

  In the bedroom Nahla found an abaya and niqab, donning the long black cloak and headscarf until only her eyes, hands and feet showed. Conner slipped into a dark thobe robe and a white keffiyeh headscarf, wrapped it around his face so that only his eyes showed. He took a pair of sunglasses from the bedside table and put them on. Now they resembled Saudi locals.

  “Abu Dhabi is at least eight hours by highway,” Nahla explained. “But vehicles will choke the roads, and there will be checkpoints.”

  “We must cross the desert. If we head east and skirt Al Kharj, we can cross the highway to Abu Dhabi near Haradh. Then only a few hundred kilometers stands between us and the coordinates McIntyre provided.”

  “You still want to chase McIntyre’s dying wish?” she asked sounding exhausted. “What if there’s nothing there?”

  “Then we’ve lost nothing, and we’ll be back in the Emirates, anyway.”

  Nahla shook her head. “Why did McIntyre bring us here? It makes no sense.” She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.

  Conner lifted her up before she fell asleep. “I don’t know, but he trusted us with that location. We have one lead. We have to take it.”

  “Do we?”

  He nodded. “You know we do.”

  “Why was Riyadh destroyed?”

  Conner thought on this for a moment. He had no definitive answers, but he had a theory. “Remember the drones taking out insurgent operatives in Abu Dhabi? Maybe there were too many insurgents in Riyadh. Perhaps it was easier to take out the whole city.”

  “That’s a lot of innocent lives lost.”

  He looked away, not sure what to say.

  “Who did it? The Americans?”