Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

  “And you’re willing to stake your life on that?” Nick asked.

  Gillian ignored the question, plowed on. “The second reason is that the very deadliest of the assassins, the ones like Yiska, take a certain pride in going up against an enemy formidable enough to be considered their equal. The rules of honorable conflict will apply.”

  “Honorable conflict? What the hell have you been smoking? You’re crazy if you think this is going to go down like some romanticized Wild West gunfight.”

  “Yiska will accept the challenge. He’ll face the team head on without any backup or attempts at subterfuge.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  Nick regretted the question the instant he asked it. He glanced at Bel, saw her trying to hide a grimace. She’d realized his mistake too. In his haste to derail Gillian’s idea, he’d asked the sort of open-ended question that could push Gillian into dredging up memories that Weldon’s mnemonic surgeries had effectively buried.

  Gillian went quiet and lowered his gaze to his feet. It was obvious to Nick that he was attempting to access some distant and elusive recollection. Nick took solace in the idea, according to his son, that such efforts would likely be unsuccessful. Still, Weldon had made it clear that fate shouldn’t be tempted by asking such questions.

  Nick tried to cover his mistake by blurting out a series of less inflammatory queries.

  “For the sake of argument, how exactly would you go about challenging Yiska? How would you know if he accepted? Where would this big confrontation take place?”

  Gillian didn’t answer. He kept his gaze pinned to the floor. He seemed to be withdrawing deeper into himself.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Nick prodded.

  Gillian mumbled something under his breath.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I move – I am. I want – I take.”

  Nick tried to cloak his increasing anxiety. Had his screwup indeed awakened some aspect of Gillian’s true self?

  “I think it’s the beginning of a nursery rhyme,” Gillian said, finally looking up at them. “Those exact words come to me every so often. There’s more to the rhyme but I can never recall how the rest of it goes. The thing is, why does something like that pop into my head? Why does it seem important?”

  Nick’s concerns grew. Jannik Mutter had behaved in a similar odd manner just prior to Weldon’s mnemonic cursors experiencing catastrophic failure. Nick wished he had his gun on him. The Glock remained in its holster on the underside of the coffee table.

  Not that it would do me any good. Trying to outdraw an assassin wasn’t even close to making his bucket list.

  “Every four hours, I find myself thinking about… certain things,” Gillian said. “I used to get a headache from it. But now I get this weird flash of golden light inside my skull. Do you have any idea why?”

  “Not a clue,” Nick answered.

  Gillian stood up so swiftly that Nick and Bel were startled and nearly jumped out of their seats.

  “I should leave,” he said, placing his untouched drink on the coffee table.

  Without another word, he walked swiftly out the door. Nick and Bel waited with bated breath until they heard his footsteps retreating down the stairs.

  Sosoome slithered out from under the sofa. “Well, that was creepy.”

  “I’ll say,” Bel said. “And not just because of what happened when you asked that direct question. He’s usually weird but tonight it seemed worse. Do you think his real memories are starting to surface?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could his behavior be related to what’s going to happen tomorrow at the regents’ meeting?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to expose a tway of the Royal Caste. Maybe that’s affecting him subconsciously. After all, he and Codrus are of the same breed. Deep down, he might be experiencing a sense of guilt at the idea of doing harm to a binary that he may have once considered a brother.”

  “I doubt a member of the Royal Caste is that sentimental.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  Nick had to admit her theory made sense. It could explain Gillian’s behavior. Still, he had a hunch that the problem was rooted in a more ominous place.

  “Maybe it’s time to put an end to all of this,” Bel suggested. “Send Humanity’s Avenger off into retirement.”

  Nick had been considering the idea. He was certain he could convince the soldiers, who were close to burnout stage. But Gillian…?

  He won’t stop until someone stops him.

  Fifty-Three

  Bel arrived a few minutes early for the board meeting. Most of the regents had beaten her to the fifty-sixth floor conference room. The last two popped in as holos as she ambled to the snack table and selected a negative-calories lemon roll made of certified inorganic ingredients.

  She gazed longingly at the starbuckian, wanting coffee. But she knew she had to resist, having already consumed her daily quota of caffeine this morning. She was nervous enough. It wouldn’t be good to be sitting here with shaking hands as the plan unfolded.

  From the corner of her eye she watched the man in the uniform of Al-Harthi’s private security service finish panning the room with his scanner. The man didn’t recognize her but she knew him, although they’d never met. He was part of Humanity’s Avenger. His op name was Slag.

  The three soldiers had been kept in the dark about Bel, about the fact their efforts came with the covert blessing and support of E-Tech’s director. Conversely, the soldiers knew what Gillian didn’t, that he was an invented persona, his real self artificially repressed by Doctor Emanuel’s surgeries. And Nick kept things from all of them, Bel likely included.

  Secrets piled upon secrets, spies and traitors everywhere. Their entire crumbling society seemed constructed on layer upon layer of deceit. Yet even as the notion coursed through her, a fleeting gestalt of that distant horizon once again beckoned, an ideal of a better world.

  But that ideal is pure fantasy, she reminded herself. Reality is what is happening at this moment, in this room.

  “You’re looking well, Annabel.”

  Startled, Bel jerked around and took a step backward at the sight of Vok Shen, who was waiting to transfuse coffee from the starbuckian. She silently cursed herself for behaving as if he was a leper. The last thing she needed was to be putting one of their suspects on the alert.

  “You seem jittery,” he said.

  “I guess I am. Last minute busyness combined with one cup of coffee too many.”

  Across the room, Slag finished his sweep and nodded to Suzanna Al-Harthi that the room was free of bugs. It wasn’t, of course. The phony check was strictly to keep up appearances, make today’s meeting seem no different from any other. Slag’s scanner had been preset to ignore the presence of the special nanocams that Nick had planted throughout the room yesterday.

  Slag headed for the door. He would exit the building but would station himself out front in case the tway of Codrus had some escape plan they’d overlooked. Originally, Gillian was to perform those duties. But after last night’s weird behavior, Nick had reconsidered and assigned the task to Slag. Gillian hadn’t seemed upset about the last minute change. Then again, his real feelings were hard to gauge.

  R Jobs Headly ambled over to the snack table. Bel suddenly found herself sandwiched between the financier and Vok Shen. Maybe the third suspect, Lois Perlman, would like to join them as well?

  Her sarcasm was a defense mechanism to hide anxiety. A quick glance revealed that the science adviser remained ensconced in her chair, chatting with another regent.

  Thankfully, all three suspects were here today in person, which was one of the reasons the plan had been set for this annual meeting that wrapped up E-Tech’s fiscal year. It was the one gathering where tradition encouraged physical attendance. Only those last two arrivals, both relentless globetrotters who rarely came to Philadelphia, had elected holopresence.

 
“I hope today’s agenda has no hidden surprises,” Headly said.

  Bel froze. It sounded like the financier knew something. She stuffed the rest of the lemon roll in her mouth, chewed furiously to disguise a sudden bout of paranoia.

  “I have another meeting to scurry to after this one,” Headly explained. “Why does every organization feel it’s appropriate to cram their meetings into the last few days of the year?”

  “Tradition,” Vok Shen offered.

  “Or perhaps a devious plot by the pastry industry,” Headly said, smiling as he made obvious reference to Bel’s frantic chewing. “They know that Executive Directors are nervous about presenting annual fiscal reports and thus tend to consume more snacks.”

  The two men, who normally were at each other’s throats, broke into bright smiles. Bel didn’t think the remark was at all funny. Worse, she had the impression that their expressions of mirth were strangely synchronous. Her fears went into overdrive.

  What if Olinda got it wrong? What if both tways of Codrus are regents?

  Al-Harthi called the meeting to order, relieving Bel of having to respond to Vok Shen and Headly with anything more than a lame grin. She turned her back on the two men and walked toward her seat. Her muscles felt so tense that she had the impression she was lumbering along like one of those old cinematic Frankenstein monsters.

  Nick’s soothing voice filled her head through the micro earpiece he’d provided, helped rein in her paranoia.

  “All set for the big show?”

  Her silence meant yes. If there had been a problem, she would utter one of the code phrases they’d worked out, disguising her meaning by putting it in the form of a question or comment to one of the regents.

  As was now customary for a board meeting here at headquarters, Bull Idwicki had stationed a trio of Security personnel in the entry hallway just outside the door. One of Bel’s code phrases would prompt Nick to notify the Security Chief that there was trouble and that he should summon the guards. But if the threat was more immediate, Bel could simply hit the panic button on her wrist fob.

  Everything had been planned down to the tiniest detail. Still, she wished Nick was here with her in the flesh rather than just a voice in her head.

  “Before we get to the agenda,” Al-Harthi began, “I have a priority announcement. Some extraordinary information has just come into E-Tech’s possession.”

  “Let the games begin,” Nick said in Bel’s ear.

  Bel suddenly wished she’d opted for coffee. Clutching a mug would have given her something to do with her nervous hands.

  Stay calm, she urged herself. It will all be over soon.

  Fifty-Four

  Nick had taken a sick day so he could monitor the board meeting without any work-related interruptions. He sat on the floor in his apartment, his back against the bookcase, watching the faces of the three suspects. Their projections emanated from the trio of virtual amplifiers Sosoome had rigged in a line in the center of the living room. The holos were real-time transmissions from the special nanocams Nick had hidden in the conference room.

  Gillian was sprawled across the sofa, looking far too relaxed for such an occasion. Fortunately, last night’s weird attitude seemed to have passed. But Sosoome still kept a wary eye on him from his perch atop an end table.

  The holos were important, enabling Nick and Gillian to observe facial reactions as the cameras autotracked the countenances of Lois Perlman, Vok Shen and R Jobs Headly. Still, they represented only a minor part of Nick’s surveillance grid. The more important data, transmitted to the pad in his lap, would come from the extra instrumentation installed in the cameras. It was that data which hopefully would unveil the mole.

  The cams were set up to read unconscious physio-emotional reactions of the three suspects. Micro expressions would be analyzed. Thermal imagers would reveal slight skin temperature changes and microwave Doppler radar would read subtle heartbeat variations. Audio detectors would measure decibel, pitch and other vocal factors. All of those quantities would be instantaneously cross-referenced and compared with known baselines. The overall goal was the detection of escalating anxiety.

  But that alone wouldn’t constitute proof that one of the suspects was a tway of Codrus. The mole needed to be tricked into taking a specific action that he or she normally would avoid when in public.

  As the data streamed into Nick’s pad and was formulated into animated graphs and charts, the words of Al-Harthi’s opening gambit filled the room.

  Fifty-Five

  “Less than an hour ago,” Al-Harthi announced, “E-Tech took into protective custody a servitor. Her name is Olinda Shining and she is known to have a large bounty on her head, one of many such rewards the Royal Caste is offering for various individuals whom they consider their enemies. In Olinda Shining’s case, the bounty is for her alive or dead.”

  Bel swept her gaze across the room. She fought an urge to focus on the three suspects.

  “Olinda Shining came to us of her own volition,” Al-Harthi continued. “She is being kept in a secure location until she can be provided with a new identity. She has promised to pass on valuable intel to E-Tech in exchange for that new identity and additional considerations.”

  The range of the expressions around the table was notable. Several of the regents expressed surprise or excitement. Others appeared doubtful.

  Lois Perlman was one of the skeptics. “Additional considerations? May we presume that this servitor also seeks a financial reward for her information?”

  “That is the case, yes. The amount is being negotiated as we speak.”

  “How do we know she isn’t some kind of scammer?” Vok Shen quizzed. “Are you certain you’re dealing with the real Olinda Shining?”

  “More facts need to be verified,” Al-Harthi admitted, “but we don’t believe this is a deception. Preliminary analysis, based on verifiable data from Ms Shining’s years as a major in the DOD, indicates she’s genuine. And besides asking for money, she wants a guarantee that she will not be subject to any future prosecution for her involvement with the assassins. It wouldn’t seem likely that a con artist seeking a quick payout, and no doubt planning an equally fast disappearance, would be interested in such a consideration.”

  “Can E-Tech even make such a guarantee?” one of the holopresent regents asked.

  Al-Harthi hesitated. That was Bel’s cue to jump in.

  “We believe we can. It would have to be a joint effort with the DOD and civilian legal authorities, but a strong case could be made that she be granted a full pardon.”

  Fourteen faces that had been focused on Al-Harthi turned in unison to Bel’s end of the table. Surprisingly, she was no longer nervous. Now that the plan was unspooling, she felt confident, on top of the situation. She pushed on.

  “Naturally, we’ll require complete verification before promising Ms Shining anything. However, as a sign of her good faith, she has already passed on a sampling of her intel. If verified, it has the most extraordinary ramifications.”

  Bel paused, waiting to see if any of the suspects demanded further details about the nature of that intel, but no one spoke. She wasn’t surprised. The tway of Codrus was likely too shrewd to be the one to ask such a question. He’d wait for Bel or Al-Harthi to get to the revelation in their own good time.

  Nick whispered an update in Bel’s ear.

  “All three suspects are displaying elevated readings. But that’s probably true for everyone in the room. Nothing yet to pinpoint a suspect.”

  Al-Harthi took up the ball again, teased the gathering with further claims about the profound importance of Olinda Shining’s intel. She followed the script, though, and provided no fresh details.

  We need to stretch things out, maximize the tension, Nick had explained earlier. That way when Codrus finally makes his move, his telltales will be rendered even more noticeable.

  Al-Harthi spoke for a time until Bel jumped in again. Forcing the regents to pivot between opposite ends of the
long table was another aspect of the plan.

  A simple psychological ploy. It’ll keep them slightly off balance, ultimately produce stronger emotional reactions.

  Bel expanded on what they’d already revealed about the servitor without offering anything new.

  Tantalize and repeat. Escalate the anxiety. Give the mole more time to worry.

  Bel babbled on, speaking in the authoritative tones of a long-entrenched bureaucrat while offering no fresh information. It wasn’t a native skill. She’d always prided herself on clear communication. But she’d spent a good deal of time over the past few days practicing this indirect approach.

  She’d been concerned that by acting so out of character, the mole would become suspicious. But Nick had reminded her that at this juncture, the prompting of unconscious reactions was the only thing that was important. Turbulent emotions flowing beneath the strata of intellectual awareness would push Codrus into giving himself, or herself, away.

  A regent finally interrupted Bel’s repetitive discourse, urged her to get to the point. Lois Perlman seconded the request.

  “Please be more specific,” Perlman said. “What precisely is the nature of this intel that Ms Shining has promised?”

  “Now,” Nick whispered in her ear. “Hit them with the bombshell.”

  “Olinda Shining has promised to reveal the identity of a tway of the Royal Caste,” Bel said. “She’s been holding back on giving us the details until we can guarantee in writing her new identity, as well as the money and freedom from prosecution. I was told only moments before entering the room that the deal should be finalized shortly.